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Post by Admin on Feb 6, 2016 5:43:29 GMT
It has always been a perverse delight of mine that Sydney is the only major city that was founded as a purpose-designed penal settlement. Unlike New England, Sydney was not settled by the redeemed but by the fallen. These were minor hapless or habitual criminals—with a strong salting of political prisoners—sent from 1788 onward to this place, which was the length of a planet removed from Britain. At the start of 1788 the Eora-speaking Aboriginal inhabitants of what would become Sydney lived in an ancestral zone whose variations and landscape were ritually maintained. By the end of January, the Martians had arrived, and they were not the most elevated of Martians. The fact that Britain intended Sydney as its Siberia somehow runs in delightful counterpoint to the city I live in and considerably enjoy. The old face of the penal settlement is not immediately obvious here—except perhaps in a certain raffishness about the city, its liking for the outdoors, its hedonism. The narrow streets of the inner city are an echo of the penal town as well—by 1810 Gov. Lachlan Macquarie, a Scot gratefully remembered for preventing the growth of an underclass made up of convicts and their children, gave up on trying to widen the streets. But the penal era is here most overtly in the buildings in Macquarie Street designed by the convict architect Francis Greenway in the 1810s. Poor Greenway forged an architecture contract as a means of getting a loan out of a bank—a modest crime beside the largely unpunished ones of the global financial crisis. The Georgian clarity of his sandstone buildings is charming. He built the Convict Barracks, which became a clearing depot not only for convicts, but for famine orphans sent from Ireland in the late 1840s and for servant-girl immigrants. He designed the Colonial Mint, the old Supreme Court building, St. James’ Church, and an enormous lighthouse on Sydney South Head. His works are acts of grace in a city now largely populated by the standard modernist buildings found in any city on earth. But the glass and steel are often interrupted by sandstone buildings of the colonial period, sandstone having a chummier tone than the authoritative granite seen elsewhere on earth. A sense of heritage set in just in time for us Sydneysiders (as natives of the city are called) to save the old pubs, shops, and buildings of the Victorian era in the area always known as the Rocks. The Rocks were the site of the first convict camp and were slums when I was a child. Now they’ve become a little too commercial and colonial-twee. The Rocks and its great arched bridge face the Opera House across Sydney Cove like a Dickensian parish facing the modern sublime. The combination goes well. And in any case, the harbor is everything. It redeems the architecturally banal and enhances the adventurous and the beautiful. Sydney people are willing to let the blatant charm of the harbor distract the world from all their errors of taste.
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Post by Admin on Feb 24, 2016 1:17:26 GMT
Most every nation has its legends of founders and pioneers, of promising shores and liberating revolutions. Australia, on the other hand, is a penal colony. Dating from the 1770s to the 1840s, its first arrivals and eldest grandfathers were at best, larrikins (Aussie slang, for a bloke who is always enjoying himself), and at worse, serious skeletons in the national attic. And yet, out of the ironic combination of easygoing pride and chip-on-shoulder shame that is part of the Australian character, the sandstone buildings of the penal colony era have become relics of Sydney’s convict past, sprinkled throughout today’s city, hiding in plain sight, strange and beautiful. Cockatoo Island, sitting in the sparkling blue Sydney Harbour like some kind of stone boat, with some of the best uninterrupted views of the city and beyond, was once a penal settlement. Its flat dockyard, which had a reputation for the hard and strenuous labor that went on there, meets the steep vertical sandstone slope, which functioned as a bunker to the array of spaces immersed within, many once used as solitary confinement cells. Today, Cockatoo Island is a very different setting. Every morning, I pass by the former Darlinghurst Gaol (that is jail in my language) just a block from where I live, nestled in what is now considered a seedy-chic neighborhood just at the edge of the Central Business District (CBD) and bordering some of the priciest postcodes in Sydney (Hyde Park, Surry Hills, Paddington, Woolloomooloo). From above, the jail is radial in plan, buildings centered around what was a chapel. An imposing and impressive sandstone wall fortifies a collection of buildings. The entry gate, once the location of public hangings, sits across from ornate terrace houses, a new high-end residential development under construction, a fantastic café (Forbes and Burton) and is just a block from the bustling Oxford Street and Taylor Square, home to a variety of bars, shops and restaurants. The jail was turned over to the New South Wales Department of Education in the early 1920’s and today is open to the public operating as the National Art School. What an inspirational venue to study art! But even with the transformation of use, the ghost of Sydney’s convict past casts a shadow on the neighborhood.
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Post by Admin on Apr 24, 2017 20:04:05 GMT
Greek cohorts who may feel 'white' should be reminded that Greeks, Italians, Jews, and even Irish Catholics were not considered 'white' for a long time. From the mid 19th and early 20th centuries we were seen as 'semi-coloured' and were prohibited, later restricted, from entry to Australia. This was the same in the USA and Canada. The 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, or 'White Australia Policy', aimed mainly at Chinese, Asians and Pacific Islanders, considered those from the south east of Europe, Middle East, Levant, and Eurasia as 'undesirable'. Premier P. Collier, of Western Australia, wrote to the Prime Minister's Department in 1926 stating that "Southern Europeans, were arriving in the state in increasing numbers", "contrary" to the revised Act of 1905. Anti-Greek riots broke out in Perth in 1915 and in Kalgoorlie in 1916, and later in the 1930s again in Kalgoorlie, resulting in deaths. In the US, Greeks working in packinghouses and on the railroads in South Omaha, as The Omaha Daily News wrote: "They have insulted women ... Greeks are a menace to the American labouring man − just as the Japs, Italians, and other similar labourers are." The American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA) formed in the 1920s as a direct response to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), after the 1919 anti-Greek riots in Omaha. In 1918, thousands of Toronto citizens went "hunting Greeks" as they destroyed downtown Greek businesses, and by 1922 the Greek-language press routinely featured reports on Klan anti-Greek violence in the USA.
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Post by Admin on Nov 9, 2018 18:18:24 GMT
The strange and tragic death of a 29-year-old Australian man last week has underscored the seriousness of a rare parasitic infection called “rat lungworm disease.” Sam Ballard of Sydney was at a party in 2010 when he ate a slug on a dare. “We were sitting over here having a bit of a red wine appreciation night, trying to act as grown up and a slug came crawling across here,” Ballard’s friend Jimmy Galvin told Australian news. “The conversation came up, you know. ‘Should I eat it?’ And off Sam went. Bang. That’s how it happened.” Rat lungworm has spread to more than 30 countries including the US. There have been at least 2,800 cases of infection worldwide. It caused a panic in Hawaii last year when dozens of cases were documented statewide. (On average, the islands report one to nine infections each year, with two related deaths since 2007, according to the Hawaii Department of Health.)
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Post by Admin on Nov 15, 2018 18:20:46 GMT
A homeless man who intervened in a terror attack in the Australian city of Melbourne Friday has been hailed a hero, with over $80,000 (AUD 116,000) donated to a fund to thank him. Shaky cellphone images from the scene showed a man repeatedly shoving a shopping cart, known as a shopping trolley in Australia, at attacker Hassan Khalif Shire Ali who had just stabbed three people and was threatening police officers with a knife. Social media soon lit up with talk of the brave bystander who had tried to thwart the attack which unfolded within minutes during rush hour on a busy street in the city center. The man known as "trolley man" was soon identified by local media as Michael Rogers, a homeless man whose phone was destroyed in the incident. A GoFundMe page was soon set up in his honor.
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