sandr020

After thwarting the Turkish attack at Romani in Aug 1916 the Australian Light Horse brigades advanced with victories at Rafa, but were twice beaten at Gaza. There followed plans to capture Beer­sheba, which would allow for another attempt at Gaza. Today (31st October) the  Australian Light Horse and New Zealand Mounted Rif­les  were engaged in a battle that was the ANZACs' greatest charge ever.  The Auckland Mounted Rifles captured Tel el Saba from the Turks, a key to taking the outpost township of Beersheba. And today was the last great mount­ed charge by the 12th Light Horse Regiment of the Aust­ralian Imperial Force. Capturing Beersheba in 1917 was the turning point in the British campaign to ex­p­el the remnants of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The Light Horse troopers horses were the famous Walers, mostly bred in the Hunter Valley. And most of the men were farming lads from the country, including from the Boorowa area of NSW. Australian Light Horse brigades Now f...

The Arts Club was founded in 1863 to provide a haven for people who had professional or non-professional links to the Arts, Literature or Sciences. According to the club’s own home page, a small group of friends including Dickens and Trollope got together and drew in new members like Tennyson, Monet, Manet, Rodin and Winston Churchill soon after. In 1896, the Club relocated from its original home on Hanover Square to its present elegant C18th townhouse at 40 Dover St, offering its members a comfortable, arty and impressive base in Mayfair. In the basement, there is a live music club room and there is a contemporary art collection that looks like a professional gallery. Since then, the Club gave membership to many outstanding figures in the history of art, literature and science: writers like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins; mus­icians like Franz Liszt; and artists Frederic Leighton, Walter Sick­ert, John Everett Millais, Auguste Rodin and James Mc­Neill Whistler , as well as fam...

I have never been to Romchamp and didn't know that Le Corbusier designed a 1950s chapel. But I was eavedropping on two Francophiles in a Melbourne espresso bar, and after buying them a cheesecake each, got the following brilliant blog post. Many thanks sisters, for your passion and for your European Traveler article by Henk Bekker . Ronchamp (pop 3000) is in the French region Franche-Comté, 418 ks SE from Paris, on the Swiss border near Belmont. In 1950, Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was comm­is­s­ioned to design a new Catholic church in 1950. He initially declined the invitation, but apparently became inspired by the site on a hill top that offered views in all four directions. Like the orig­in­al stone C4th pilgrimage chapel that was bombed during WW2, Chap­el­le Notre Dame du Haut de Ron­champ was to sit among a wooded terr­ain, 150m above the rest of the village. Chap­el­le Notre Dame du Haut de Ron­champ  consecrated 1955 When Corbusier agreed to design R...

Michael Barclay invited us to share his sensitive obituary. Gordon Downie (1964-2017) was born near Kingston Ont, to Lorna & Edgar. He was the 4th of 5 children, the one who played goalie for Amherst­view’s successful hockey team. Downie moved to Kingston to attend Kingston Collegiate Vocat­ional Institute . Coming from a rural area, his out­sider status became part of his public identity: the poet in the bar band; the rock star slumming it with indie kids while cosying up to intel­ligent­sia; the artist with a commer­cially successful cushion who thrived on chall­enging himself with new collab­orators and varied disciplines like dance, painting and act­ing. The rest of the Tragically Hip were scions of the King­ston elite. Downie could at least boast that he was connected to hockey royalty. He joined a punk band called The Slinks; their friendly rivals at the school were a Grade 13 group The Rodents, featuring bassist Gord Sinclair and guitarist Robbie Baker . A young drummer...

Coal was essential for military production during WW2; somehow Britain had to match the quotas needed to keep fact­ories churn­ing out the munitions required at the front. And as Britain was unable to import coal in wartime, the production of coal from local mines had to be increased. But how? 36,000 miners were already cons­crip­t­ed for army duty and had left their collieries. Ernest Bevin , wartime Minister of Labour and National Service and a former Trade Unionist, believed the short­age could be remedied by using conscripted men to fill the vacancies in the mines, keeping production at the rates requir­ed. In Dec 1943 he announced a scheme in Parliament. A ballot would take place to put a fixed perc­ent­age of cons­cript­ed men into the underground collieries rather than into the armed services. “We need 720,000 men continuously employed in this industry. This is where you boys come in. Our fighting men will not be able to achieve their purpose unless we get an adequate supply of ...

Dr Henry Lew wrote Smitten by Cath­er­ine , the story of Catherine Rachel Mendes da Costa (1678-1756). Lew was stroll­ing through an auction house looking at furniture, and noticed a sp­ec­ial C18th watercolour copy of a Rubens oil painting, att­rib­uted to Catherine da Costa. Since I am particularly interested in the era when Jews were permitted to return to England in mid C17th, my question became: who was this little known artist? Lew started the story back in Spain and Portugal, from where the Jews were expelled in the 1490s.  The author focused on the strength of Manasseh Ben Israel whose family had fled to Amsterdam from Madeira in Por­t­ugal. In his 1652 book, The Hope of Israel , Manasseh noted that countries tol­er­ant of Jews were also those that flourish­ed economically. Man­asseh had tried to find a solution to counteract the Chris­tian concept of the oppressed homeless Jew; he reminded Whitehall that Jews always displayed civic loyal­ty. Manasseh was a man of grand ...

We were often told that Eugene von Guerard (1811–1901)’s Australian landscapes of the 1860s and 70s were indebted to the romantic art of Caspar David Friedrich, two generations earlier, or that there was an affinity between­ his work and that of Amer­ic­an landscape painters like Frederic Church . But Christopher Allen (The Australian 8th Oct 2017) wrote that if von Guerard’s style was dist­inct­ive, the sociocultural milieu within which he worked in Australia was also significantly differen­t from that of the Americans to whom he was sometimes comp­ar­ed. The USA established the core of its identity as a nation around the Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776. The found­ing fath­ers of the new nation were men of the Enlightenment. A century later, America was a great modern industrial nation that had absorbe­d many more influences, including romantic sensib­ility and religious re­vivalism. So by the time Church and his colleagues painted their luminous, sublime landscapes...

I’ll soon be seeing Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story , directed by Alexandra Dean, at the Jewish Film Festival. The festival programme says: Known for her striking looks and electric onscreen persona, Lamarr’s fans never knew she possessed such a beautiful mind. An Aust­rian Jewish émigré who acted by day and drew mechanical and electronic inventions by night, Lam­arr came up with a secret communication system to help the Allies to beat the Naz­is. Bomb­shell is for lovers of history, film and science. But locating the truth about her life was tricky - thanks,  Encyclopaedia of World Biography . Hedwig Kiesler (1913–2000) was born in Vienna. Her parents were Jewish and cultivated; her father Emil Kiesler was a Bank of Vienna director and her mother Gertrud Lichtwitz a concert pianist from Budapest. Hedwig attended schools in Vienna then was sent to a Swiss finishing school. After an unsuccessful audition with her acting teacher and stage director, Max Rein­hardt , Hedwig moved i...

The 1889–1890 Flu Pandemic was similar to the great Spanish Flu pandemic and might have prepared doctors and armies in WW1. It was first noted in different countries: China (1888); Athabasca in Canada (May 1889); Greenland (summer 1889), Tomsk in Siberia and Bukhara in Uzbek­istan (Oct 1889), St Peter­sburg in late Oct 1889, and expanded rapidly via railway across Europe. In Paris, the first cases were recorded on 17th Nov; in Berlin and Vienna on 30th Nov; in London in mid Dec, and in southern European countries in late Dec. The flu spread overseas to Boston and New York in Jan 1890. And then throughout North and South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania by mid 1890. The most tragic period was between Dec 1889 and Jan 1890; the majority of the million deaths were older than 50. So how different was the Spanish Flu Epidemic of WW1 ? Even before the arrival of air travel, Spanish flu swept around the world in just 3 catastrophic months from Oct 1918 to Jan 1919 - and killed more people t...