tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54429094247754338192024-03-08T13:31:36.294+10:00sbegmeisterK.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.comBlogger81125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-35246473305494404212013-01-17T07:29:00.002+10:002013-01-17T07:30:39.657+10:00LS Lowry – painter of working-class life<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Tate to pay homage to matchstalk master</span></h1>
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Hopes that retrospective will persuade art world to take Lowry seriously at last</h2>
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<span class="art-object art-mainimage" id="artObjectWrap" ndrole="img" style="display: block; height: 322px; margin: 1.6em 0px; position: relative;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5442909424775433819" style="color: #003399;"><img id="artObject" src="http://thumbnails1.pressdisplay.com.ezproxy.slq.qld.gov.au/pressdisplay/docserver/getimage.aspx?regionguid=322aacab-539d-4c73-bdb0-f33f72fb5905&scale=92&file=15452013011600000000001001&regionKey=JCMgfHzxRTH6ZeQUdCYnfg%3d%3d" style="border: 0px; width: 370.7250061035156px;" /></a></span><span class="art-imagetext" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 0.1em; display: block; font-weight: bold; margin: -1.6em 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0.5em;">The exhibition at Tate Britain will compare works such as The Fever Van (1935, above), Industrial Landscape (1955, below) and Piccadilly Circus (1960, left) with works by Pissarro and Seurat. Anne Wagner said of Lowry (below, right): ‘To have represented the lives of the working class and not become a propagandist is an astonishing achievement’</span><br />
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Lowry was most celebrated, Clark said, in the immediate postwar era up to the end of the 1960s – “in socialdemocratic, postwar Britain” when, he argued, Lowry’s work was more in tune with the times.</div>
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The exhibition, say its curators, will explode the myth that Lowry – who, in 1939, turned down an offer to become the Manchester Guardian’s art critic – was a primitive, barely competent painter. His strong links with French realism and post-impressionism will be drawn on, and comparisons with painters such as Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat established – “though Lowry is tougher and cruder and deliberately so,” said Clark.</div>
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His teacher at the Municipal College of Art, Manchester, where he took evening classes, was the French late impressionist painter Adolphe Valette and, according to Clark, Lowry “chose to show consistently in Paris from the 1920s and 30s.” He was, said Clark, “truly immersed in French impressionism”.</div>
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The exhibition will also show how Lowry, a rent collector with the same firm from 1916 until his retirement in 1952, recorded the “grimness and melancholia of urban life”, said Clark.</div>
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“He thought hard and worked hard to find a way of doing industrial landscapes that was honest and faced up to the fact that industrialisation was, in some senses, disastrous. But he did not wallow in its misery – which is the stock charge against Lowry. He tried for an art that struck a balance between recognising the beauties of the world and what was awful in it.”</div>
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Wagner paid tribute to his handling of paint and use of colour: in his picture Excavations in Manchester (1932), which shows workmen digging out the foundations of a new building, she said “he looked into the belly of modern life... building up his painting in a way analogous to the building going on apace in the scene he was depicting.”</div>
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Wagner also said that Lowry should be placed in an international context, and his work assessed alongside that of peers working in the 1930s in Germany or in the postwar Soviet Union.</div>
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“Part of Lowry is that he’s not kitsch. Kitsch is doing your thinking for you, telling you how to thin think and feel. Lowry never tells you how to feel... to have represented the lives of the working class and not become a propagandist is an astonishing as achievement.” Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life is at Tate Britain, London, from 26 June to 20 October 2013 LS Lowry – the quintessential painter of northern, working-class life – is among the most divisive of British artists. A household name, beloved of the public and commanding huge prices at auction, he is at the same time wildly unfashionable in the art world, derided for his apparently naive images of “matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs” set among the industrial landscapes of Salford, Pendlebury and Manchester.</div>
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But this June Tate Britain, in London, is to mount the first major retrospective devoted to Lowry since the artist’s death in 1976. The show is co-curated by one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars of French impressionism, TJ Clark.</div>
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According to Clark, Lowry is “an artist who is taken for granted and condescended to. The reaction from London art world friends over the last year and a half, when I have said I am working on Lowry, has been of deadpan incomprehension and disappointment.”</div>
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There has, said Clark, been a “metropolitan resistance to taking the north seriously as a subject for art”. He added: “It may now be possible to look beyond that condescension at a time ... when the limits of the London art world’s view of art are pretty obvious.”</div>
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Lowry has long been a contentious subject for the Tate, which has come under fire from figures including the actor Sir Ian McKellen for only rarely putting its seven Lowry paintings and 16 works on paper on display. In a 2011 TV documentary, McKellen said it was “a shame verging on the iniquitous that foreign visitors to London shouldn’t have access to the painter English people like more than most others”.</div>
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Penelope Curtis, Tate Britain’s director, said the exhibition – about half of whose 80 works have never before been seen in public – will take an artist “people thought they knew and reveal that they didn’t know him. At the same time Lowry needs to take his place in British art history – alongside such artists as Ben Nicholson”.</div>
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Curtis acknowledged that Lowry “has been an issue for Tate: many people love his work and would like to have seen it dealt with more seriously”. She was delighted when Clark and co-curator Anne Wagner had proposed an exhibition. “Whatever we did, it was important that we did it in a way that wasn’t cynical but was authentic and serious,” she said.</div>
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Responding to the suggestion that the work was sentimental, Clark said: “There is a difference between sentimentality <span style="font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 22.399999618530273px;">and social awareness … though in the post-neoliberal era the very idea of social awareness is supposed to be wrong. I see nothing sentimental in the pictures.”</span></div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-8123838303574228742013-01-16T06:45:00.002+10:002013-01-16T06:45:30.473+10:00Indigenous Indian Ancestors<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: -1px; line-height: 1.1em;">Ancient Indian arrivals spark rethink on birth of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: -1px; line-height: 35.1875px;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif; font-size: large;">Gondwanaland</span></span></h1>
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LONG before Australia and India faced off on the cricket pitch, people from the subcontinent arrived on our shores and bred with Aborigines, scientists report.</div>
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A genetic study has found ancestors of modern Indians may have come to Australia about 4000 years before Europeans colonised the continent.</div>
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Modern humans are thought to have arrived down under about 40,000 years ago, having made their way out of Africa around the coast of the Arabian Peninsula and India to Australia.</div>
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Most scientists believed these ancestors of modern Aborigines remained isolated from other populations until Europeans appeared in the late 18th century.</div>
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But a genetic analysis of more than 300 Aborigines, Indians and people from Papua New Guinea and island south-east Asia has found a ‘‘significant gene flow’’ from India to Australia about 4230 years, or 141 generations, ago.</div>
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The study’s lead researcher, Irina Pugach, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said the arrival of these people during the period known as the Holocene coincided with many changes in Australia’s archaeological record.</div>
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‘‘[ There was] a sudden change in plant processing and stone tool technologies, with microliths appearing for the first time, and the first appearance of the dingo in the fossil record,’’ Dr Pugach said.</div>
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‘‘Since we detect inflow of genes from India into Australia at around the same time, it is likely that these changes were related to this migration.’’</div>
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Alan Cooper, the director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, said this early Indian movement was a ‘‘complete mystery’’.</div>
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The Aboriginal DNA used in the study comprised more than 10 per cent Indian genetic markers, which suggested there had been substantial interbreeding between the groups. ‘‘[ The Indians] could have been sea traders,’’ said Professor Cooper, who was not involved in the study.</div>
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The researchers said it was possible Indian ancestry came to Australia indirectly, through south-east Asian populations that had trade links with northern Australia and Indonesia. But the analysis found no evidence of this in the genes of the island south-east Asian populations.</div>
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The study also found a common origin between Aboriginal Australians, New Guinea populations and the Mamanwa – a Negrito group from the Philippines. The researchers estimate these groups split from each other about 36,000 years ago.</div>
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A study co-author, Mark Stoneking, said this finding, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, supported the view that these populations were the descendants of an early southern route migration out of Africa.</div>
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Professor Cooper said the study highlighted how little scientists knew about Australia’s human legacy.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-87299270548920937342013-01-15T06:39:00.003+10:002013-01-15T06:39:26.493+10:00Kumbh Mela Festival of Ritual bathing<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Millions hope pilgrimage will make light of their sins</span></h1>
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<span class="art-object art-mainimage" id="artObjectWrap" ndrole="img" style="display: block; height: 500px; margin: 1.6em 0px; position: relative;"><a href="" style="color: #003399;"><img id="artObject" src="http://thumbnails1.pressdisplay.com.ezproxy.slq.qld.gov.au/pressdisplay/docserver/getimage.aspx?regionguid=dd097d01-879f-487e-b085-c380ed3e4698&scale=109&file=14292013011500000000001001&regionKey=KawNW7o6ArrMVNckwpMiIQ%3d%3d" style="border: 0px; width: 764.4000244140625px;" /><em style="color: #bbbbbb; display: block; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; left: 0px; line-height: 15px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: -15px; white-space: nowrap; width: 764.4000244140625px;">Phot</em><em style="color: #bbbbbb; display: block; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; left: 0px; line-height: 15px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: -15px; white-space: nowrap; width: 764.4000244140625px;">o: Afp/roberto Schmidt</em></a></span><span class="art-imagetext" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 0.1em; display: block; font-weight: bold; margin: -1.6em 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0.5em;">Workers fix a light pole in Allahabad, in northern India, which hosts millions of Hindu devotees over the next couple of months to celebrate the Kumbh Mela. Worshippers believe a dip in the holy waters cleanses them of their sins. The Kumbh Mela, which started on Monday, stretches over 55 days and attracts ash-covered holy men, who run into the frigid waters, and millions of ordinary Indians to Allahabad.</span></div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-18559231198532548462013-01-10T07:42:00.001+10:002013-01-10T07:42:27.276+10:00Dinosaurs on tippy-toes<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Scientists put brakes on dinosaur stampede</span></h1>
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Queensland paleontologists have discovered the world’s only recorded dinosaur stampede is largely made up of the tracks of swimming, not running, animals.</div>
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A University of Queensland PhD candidate, Anthony Romilio, led the study of thousands of small dinosaur tracks at Lark Quarry Conservation Park in Queensland’s central west.</div>
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The tracks, which are 95 million to 98 million years old, are preserved in beds of siltstone and sandstone deposited in a shallow river when the area was part of a vast, forested floodplain.</div>
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‘‘Many of the tracks are nothing more than elongated grooves, and probably formed when the claws of swimming dinosaurs scratched the river bottom,’’ Mr Romilio said on Wednesday.</div>
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‘‘Some of the more unusual tracks include ‘tippy-toe’ traces – this is where fully buoyed dinosaurs made deep, near vertical scratch marks with their toes as they propelled themselves through the water.</div>
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‘‘It’s difficult to see how tracks such as these could have been made by running or walking animals. If that was the case we would expect to see a much flatter impression of the foot.’’</div>
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Mr Romilio said the swimming dinosaur tracks at Lark Quarry belonged to small, two-legged herbivorous dinosaurs known as ornithopods.</div>
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Previous research had identified two types of small dinosaur tracks at Lark Quarry: long-toed tracks, called Skartopus, and short-toed tracks, called Wintonopus.</div>
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The new research about the nature of the Lark Quarry tracks was published in this month’s <i>Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology</i>.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-1371555532578896022013-01-08T19:53:00.003+10:002013-01-08T19:53:59.489+10:00Portrait of a Pox Doctor by Titian<br />
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<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">The Guardian</li>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Titian painting buried for decades in depths of National Gallery</span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.067em;">Clever detective work leads scholars to attribute portrait to great Italian artist</span></h2>
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Tiziano Vecellio – or Titian as he is called in English – is a painter’s painter, and a lover’s painter too. His exquisite eye is charged with sensuality. Time after time he portrayed the beauties of Venice, in the long-ago days when the city was famous for its courtesans rather than its tourists (of course there were sex tourists, like the English traveller Thomas Coryate who raves about the courtesans in his 1611 book Coryate’s Crudities).</div>
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A visitor to Titian’s studio by the Grand Canal in the 1520s claimed the painter was exhausted from sleeping with his models – a claim that seems to fit the sheer enthusiasm of his paintings of women. But now his name can be linked with another, more painful aspect of sexuality in Renaissance Italy.</div>
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Glaring back proudly from a portrait newly attributed to Titian stands a famous doctor who gave the most terrifying sexually transmitted disease of those times the name “syphilis”.</div>
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Girolamo Fracastoro analysed the pox in an epic poem. The searing infection that he was one of the first to study probably came to Europe from the Americas soon after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the New World in 1492. Italians also called it the French disease, because French soldiers carried it into Italy in 1494.</div>
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Is it just possible that Titian paid for a syphilis cure with a portrait? If so, it would not be the only astonishing thing about this painting, which has just been rediscovered in the basement of the National Gallery.</div>
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As Nicholas Penny, the gallery’s director, asked himself when we met to look at it: “How can it be that buried in the bowels of the National Gallery there is a Titian?”</div>
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The National Gallery has owned this portrait of Fracastoro (his name used to be written on it) since 1924, but only this month, in an article in the Burlington Magazine, do its curators and leading scholars claim once and for all that its painting is a true Titian.</div>
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It hung for years in a remote lower room, forgotten, but now it has been brought into the light of the main collection. There, for now, the placard says “attributed to Titian”, but as Penny wonders in his frank way, “‘attributed to’ – what does that mean?”</div>
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It is a style of scholarly waffle he would like to eliminate from the National Gallery. Under the cautious language they have no doubt this portrait really is by Titian, making it the third painting by him added to the National Gallery collection since 2009.</div>
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The other two, Diana and Actaeon, and Diana and Callisto, were bought for millions of pounds. Titian’s portrait of Fracastoro has been recognised in a dusty corner of the museum at no expense at all, thanks to clever detective work and the restoration workshops hidden high in the building above Trafalgar Square.</div>
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This must mean the National Gallery now has the finest collection of Titians in the world – it already owned (among others) the elegantly frenzied Bacchus and Ariadne, the heartbreaking Easter landscape Noli me Tangere, and his portrait of a man with a mesmerising blue sleeve. But Penny, who is not given to hype, points out that the Museo del Prado in Madrid also has a few Titians. I think he is being modest.</div>
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How was this painting misrecognised for so long? When a painting is regarded as not by anyone famous and put in a museum’s dark corners, Penny suggests, a self-fulfilling process starts: curators are less likely to examine it, or clean it, or even properly frame it. But in this case fresh eyes, including those of the art historian Paul Joannides, were cast on a forgotten painting and it was taken to the lab to be restored. Discoveries there about the canvas and technique blaze the name Titian.</div>
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Fracastoro’s portrait has been damaged over the centuries, although the new cleaning by the National Gallery has revealed a very characterful face. The background is more problematic and Penny admits its clumsy architecture remains a puzzle.</div>
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But Titian’s genius flares in one fantastic detail that makes this painting – warts and all – truly captivating. “It’s not the head that is so amazing in this picture”, as Penny puts it, “but the fur.”</div>
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We are feasting our eyes on a flecked mist of white, gold, brown and black, a virtuoso, nearly abstract performance that has all the magic of Titian. With joyous freedom and a casual command of fluffy gossamer colours, the master sensualist has recreated the richness of a lynx fur on Fracastoro’s shoulders. “The great thing about the lynx is that it has got this brown smudge as well as black and white,” enthuses Penny about the fur Titian so convincingly copied.</div>
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Fracostoro worked in Verona, in the empire of the Venetian republic. As well as naming syphilis, he came up with a modern theory of contagion, saying diseases were transmitted by tiny “spores”. This was a big advance on the orthodoxy of the time that sicknesses such as plague were caused by bad air.</div>
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The lynx is an appropriate animal for such a man to sport on his shoulders, for this cat was famous for its eyesight. Italian scientific pioneers including Galileo belonged to the Academy of Lynxes, which associated the creature’s eyesight with the pursuit of empirical truth.</div>
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Now at last the scientific hero Girolamo Fracastoro takes his place among the gods and goddesses, patricians and prostitutes painted by one of the most beguiling magicians ever to wield a brush in what I believe is the greatest collection on earth of Titian’s paintings.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-88609202325882526822013-01-04T07:31:00.000+10:002013-01-04T07:31:17.097+10:00Pin-up Duce<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The fashionable fascist: Il Duce on the rebound</span></h1>
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Many in modern Italy see no shame in venerating Benito Mussolini, writes Tom Kington in Rome.</h2>
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Pasquale Moretti pulls the latest Benito Mussolini calendar off the shelf at his Rome cafe and flips it open to a photo of the pouting, strutting dictator taking part in a grain harvest.</div>
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‘‘I was born in that era and he put bread on the table,’’ the 78-year-old said. ‘‘I cannot betray my culture.’’</div>
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At the turn of each year, Mussolini calendars appear in newspaper kiosks up and down Italy. They are often tucked away with the specialist magazines, but they are much in demand, according to the manager of one firm that prints them.</div>
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‘‘We are selling more than we did 10 years ago,’’ said Renato Circi, the head of the Rome printer Gamma 3000. ‘‘I didn’t think it was still a phenomenon but young people are now buying them too.’’</div>
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Sixty-eight years after the fascist dictator was strung up with piano wire from a petrol station in Milan, Mussolini has quietly taken his place as an icon for many Italians.</div>
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Among his adherents are the masked, neo-fascist youths who mounted raids on Rome schools last year to protest against education cuts, lobbing smoke bombs in corridors and yelling ‘‘Viva Il Duce’’.</div>
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A mob that ambushed British football fans drinking in a Rome pub in November was also suspected of neo-fascist sympathies.</div>
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But the cult of Il Duce has also slipped into the mainstream. Last year’s decision by a town south of Rome to spend A127,000 of public funds on a tomb for Rodolfo Graziani, one of Mussolini’s most bloodthirsty generals, was met with widespread indifference.</div>
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One leading businessman has proposed renaming Forli Airport in Emilia Romagna, the region of northern Italy, where the dictator was born – Mussolini Airport.</div>
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The man who gets some credit for dusting off Mussolini’s reputation is Silvio Berlusconi, who described the dictator’s exiling of his foes to remote villages as sending them on holiday.</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 1.8em;">Berlusconi brought Italy’s post-fascists, led by Gianfranco Fini, into his governing coalition in 1994 and 2001.</span></div>
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‘‘Today, Mussolini’s racial laws against Jews remain an embarrassment but people don’t care about his hunting down antifascists,’’ says Maria Grazia Rodota, a journalist at Corriere della Sera. ‘‘That became one of Berlusconi’s jokes.’’</div>
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Admiration for Mussolini is common in Berlusconi’s circle. The showbusiness agent Lele Mora, now on trial for allegedly pimping for the former prime minister, downloaded a fascist song as his mobile ringtone. Berlusconi’s long-time friend Senator Marcello Dell’Utri has described Mussolini as an ‘‘extraordinary man of great culture’’.</div>
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After Mussolini’s murder by partisans in 1945 as the Allies pushed up through Italy, the country did not exorcise the ghosts of fascism, as Germany sought to. A 1952 law forbidding fascist parties or the veneration of fascism has never been seriously enforced.</div>
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‘‘It was not used partly because banning parties was potentially anti-constitutional, and also due to a sneaking admiration for fascism,’’ says James Walston, professor of politics at the American University of Rome.</div>
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Decades on, the memory of Mussolini has been decoupled from the ideology of fascism, says the writer Angelo Meloni.</div>
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‘‘He is now a pop icon, an archItalian, a personality whose legend is linked to the years of consensus in Italy,’’ he says.</div>
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But for Italy’s neo-fascist groups, Il Duce is still very much about ideology.</div>
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‘‘Whoever buys the calendar admires his work – the two things cannot be separated,’’ says the vice-president of a group called CasaPound, Simone di Stefano. ‘‘There is a need today for his politics, for someone who will put the banks and finance at the service of Italy. Youngsters who come to us already see Mussolini as the father of this country.’’</div>
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The well-to-do streets around Piazza Ponte Milvio are plastered with posters and graffiti by neofascist groups, including CasaPound, and the local bars have become a hangout for gangs of right wing lads in regulation Fred Perry shirts and Ray-Ban Wayfarers.</div>
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Further down the road, the entrance to the Olympic stadium, shared by Rome’s two dominant football clubs, Roma and Lazio, is marked by a massive fascist-era obelisk with ‘‘Mussolini’’ written in huge letters down the front.</div>
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Nearby, the bar run by Pasquale Moretti, where Lazio fans meet before games, contains a minisupermarket of fascist memorabilia, from bottles of wine with Mussolini’s portrait on the label, to fascist flags and T-shirts, and oil portraits of Il Duce.</div>
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‘‘He built housing for workers, something no Roman emperor did,’’ Moretti says. ‘‘How can I not respect that?’’</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-73931634353721289562012-12-29T07:12:00.001+10:002012-12-29T07:12:31.280+10:00Ancient Viking Troop Carrier<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Rebirth of the Viking warship that terrorised Europe</span></h1>
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Ancient troop carrier rises from depths of history and heads for British Museum</h2>
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<span style="text-indent: 1.8em;">When the sleek, beautiful silhouette of Roskilde 6 appeared on the horizon, 1,000 years ago, it was very bad news. The ship was part of a fleet carrying an army of hungry, thirsty warriors, muscles toned by rowing and sailing across the North Sea; a war machine like nothing else in 11th-century Europe, its arrival meant disaster was imminent.</span></div>
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Now the ship’s timbers are slowly drying out in giant steel tanks at the Danish national museum’s conservation centre at Brede outside Copenhagen, and will soon again head across the North Sea – to be a star attraction at an exhibition in the British Museum.</div>
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The largest Viking warship ever found, it was discovered by chance in 1996 at Roskilde. It is estimated that building it would have taken up to 30,000 hours of skilled work, plus the labour of felling trees and hauling materials. At just over 36 metres, it was four metres longer than Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose built 500 years later, and six metres longer than the Viking ship spectacularly recreated as Sea Stallion, which sailed from Scandinavia around Scotland to Dublin in 2007.</div>
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“This ship was a troop carrier,” said Gareth Williams of the British Museum. It was built some time after 1025 when the oak trees were felled, and held 100 warriors taking turns on 39 pairs of oars if there was not enough wind to fill the square woollen sail. They would have been packed in tightly, with little room for supplies except a minimal amount of fresh water – or ale or mead, which would not have gone stale as fast – and dried salt mutton.</div>
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It would have been an uncomfortable journey, but short: they did not need to carry much as their ship could move startlingly fast – Sea Stallion managed an average speed of 5.5 knots, and a top speed of 20 knots. Once they landed, the warriors could forage with ruthless efficiency, as many a coastal community or wealthy monastery discovered.</div>
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The ship would probably not have come alone. “There are records in the annals of fleets of hundreds of ships,” Williams said. “So you could be talking about … up to 10,000 men suddenly landing on your coast, highly trained, fit, capable of moving very fast on water or land.” Such luxury ships were fabulously expensive to build and a devastating display of power, Williams said.</div>
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The dates suggest Roskilde 6 may have been built for King Canute, who according to legend set his throne in the path of the incoming tide, to prove to his courtiers that even a monarch could not control the force of nature. At the time the Vikings were consolidating their power from temporary raiders to permanent invaders.</div>
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With all the original timbers fitted into a steel frame that will recreate its full length and form, the ship will be the centrepiece of Viking, an exhibition opening at the Danish national museum in June, before being transported to London to launch the British Museum’s new exhibition space in 2014. It will travel in two containers, by freighter and lorry.</div>
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The vessel was found by accident when an extension was being built to the Roskilde ship museum in Denmark, itself built to hold an earlier find of Viking ships that had been deliberately sunk to narrow the fjord and protect the approach to the town, the old royal capital of Denmark.</div>
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In 1996 archaeologists watching the construction work discovered huge timbers in the new foundations, some chopped in half by the piling. It proved to be a treasure trove of nine ships, of which Roskilde 6, almost half of which was recovered, was the most spectacular. The timbers stayed in storage while the museum worked out what to do, until the exhibition provided the opportunity for full conservation.</div>
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The original Roskilde ships are displayed in a purpose-built ship hall, but could never travel: the timbers look solid but might shatter like glass. When excavated, the sodden timbers of Roskilde 6 would have disintegrated into a heap of dust if left exposed to air. National museum conservator Kristiane Straetkvern managed the project, which has been drying timbers up to 10 metres long far more slowly than the older techniques, then replacing the lost moisture with synthetic resin, leaving them lighter but stable.</div>
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The exhibition will display finds from across Scandinavia and from deep into the countries they penetrated wherever a river could carry their shallow draft ships – as far inland as Lichfield in England, deep into Russia, to Byzantium in the east, where Vikings fought as mercenaries on both sides, and beyond. Objects from 12 countries will demonstrate that Vikings were traders, farmers, fishermen, and superb craft workers in timber, bone and metal.</div>
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The Roskilde team are now experts on recreating ancient ships, regularly commissioned to build them. One day they hope to recreate a full-size, ocean-going replica Roskilde 6, and send it across the sea to awe rather than to terrorise the coasts of the British Isles.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-27461136764062817592012-12-18T17:00:00.002+10:002012-12-18T17:01:10.473+10:00Mayan Calendar <br />
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<b>Mayan calendar is only part of rich legacy</b></h2>
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The most precise and sophisticated calendar ever created is only one of the legacies of the ancient Maya, who also left their mark on the arts, architecture and cooking, experts say.</div>
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The Mayan "Long Count" calendar says an era of more than 5,000 years ends on December 21 -- doomsday for some but a reason to rejoice for many others in Mexico and central America, where the civilization once flourished.</div>
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Millions of tourists are expected in the region on Friday to celebrate with fireworks, concerts and other spectacles held at more than three dozen archeological sites.</div>
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"The Mayan calendar is not just a matter of counting seconds, minutes and hours," Guatemalan anthropologist Alvaro Pop, a member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, told AFP.</div>
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Students learn about the Maya at the Museum of National Identity in Tegucigalpa on December 14, 2012. The beginning of a new Mayan era on December 21 will be marked with celebrations throughout southern Mexico and Central America.</div>
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The calendar also represents a model showing "the movements of celestial bodies and the way it affects human life in a cyclical manner," Pop explained.</div>
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That expertise enabled the ancient civilization to detect the influence of celestial bodies on tides, births and plants, he noted.</div>
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But the contributions of the ancient civilization -- which reached its peak between the years 250 and 900 -- far transcend their understanding of the stars, touching on everything from architecture to textiles to food.</div>
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The Mayas were the first to grow corn, some 3,000 years ago. Today, it remains the main staple in cuisines across the region.</div>
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The Mayas were also among the first to use and grow cocoa and, according to some, they came up with the idea of chewing chicle, a natural gum from a regional tropical evergreen tree and the precursor to chewing gum.</div>
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The Mayas and their descendants, notably in Guatemala, are also known for their multi-colored fabrics, which "represent the most beautiful and explosive expression of life on the continent and in the world," according to Pop.</div>
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Their civilization is also noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas.</div>
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In total, the Mayas spoke 36 languages throughout their history and in different regions. Many of these, which feature very elaborate grammatical structures, are still spoken in indigenous communities.</div>
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The Popol Vuh, the Mayan holy book, is the most concrete example of that rich linguistic heritage. The mythological book explains the creation of the world, particularly of the Quiche people, one of the many Mayan ethnic groups.</div>
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According to Costa Rican anthropologist Ana Cecilia Arias, Mayan architects, who built imposing pyramids, and their descendants also made significant contributions, notably by helping design churches in the region.</div>
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Today the ruins of major urban and religious centers such as Chichen Itza in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, Tikal in Guatemala, Copan in Honduras and Tazumal in El Salvador stand as shining examples of Mayan architectural knowhow.</div>
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Perhaps the more important legacy of the Mayas is human -- millions of ethnic Mayan descendants today live in central America, mainly in Guatemala and Mexico.</div>
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Most try to maintain the customs and traditions inherited from their illustrious ancestors even though they are often mired in poverty and face social exclusion.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-81732182425108682562012-12-18T16:44:00.001+10:002012-12-29T07:13:09.227+10:00The "Pompeii" of Japan<br />
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Remains of man in armour found at 'Pompeii of Japan'</h2>
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The remains of a high-caste man wearing armour who was buried by hot ash -- possibly as he tried to calm the wrath of an erupting volcano -- have been found in an area known as the "Pompeii of Japan".</div>
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Archaeologists say they have unearthed the well-preserved body of a sixth-century man who had apparently turned to face a flow of molten rock as it gushed through his settlement.</div>
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"Under normal circumstances, you would flee if pyroclastic flows are rushing toward you and bringing waves of heat. But this person died facing it," said Shinichiro Ohki, of Gunma Archaeological Research Foundation.</div>
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"Maybe, if he were someone of a high position, he might have been praying, or doing something in the direction of the volcano and attempting to appease its anger," Ohki told AFP on Monday.</div>
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The remains, along with a part of an infant's skull, were found in the Kanai Higashiura dig in Gunma prefecture, roughly 110 kilometres (70 miles) northwest of Tokyo, at the site of the volcanic Mount Haruna.</div>
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The find comes from an area known to enthusiasts as the "Pompeii of Japan" a reference to the Roman city near modern-day Naples buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.</div>
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The body is clad in a relatively sophisticated kind of armour made by craftsmen who bound small iron plates with thin leather strips, which would have represented the latest technological import from the Korean Peninsula.</div>
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It may have been brought to Japan after the practice of horse riding was introduced in the late fifth century, Ohki said, adding that the armour was much more sophisticated than the single-plate type common in the period.</div>
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"It indicates the person wearing it was someone of a high position, like a regional leader," Ohki told AFP, adding studies would be carried out to see if the man was related to occupants of ancient tombs dotting the region.</div>
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Archaeologists will also examine the bones to determine whether the man and the child were related.</div>
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"If possible, we would like to study their DNA. Were they related? Why and how did they die there?" Ohki said.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-32801373775804116342012-12-18T16:40:00.002+10:002012-12-18T16:40:52.201+10:00Pharaonic Whodunit<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">A papyrus representation of the reign of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses III</span></span></td></tr>
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Scientists solve 3,000-year-old pharaonic whodunit</div>
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By Mariette le Roux (AFP) </div>
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PARIS — An assassin slit the throat of Egypt's last great pharaoh at the climax of a bitter succession battle, scientists said in a report on a 3,000-year-old royal murder.</div>
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Forensic technology suggests Ramses III, a king revered as a god, met his death at the hand of a killer, or killers, sent by his conniving wife and ambitious son, they said.</div>
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And a cadaver known as the "Screaming Mummy" could be that of the son himself, possibly forced to commit suicide after the plot, they added.</div>
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Computed tomography (CT) imaging of the mummy of Ramses III shows that the pharaoh's windpipe and major arteries were slashed, inflicting a wound 70 millimetres (2.75 inches) wide and reaching almost to the spine, the investigators said.</div>
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The cut severed all the soft tissue on the front of the neck.</div>
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"I have almost no doubt about the fact that Ramses III was killed by this cut in his throat," palaeopathologist Albert Zink of the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Italy told AFP.</div>
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"The cut is so very deep and quite large, it really goes down almost down to the bone (spine) -- it must have been a lethal injury."</div>
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Ramses III, who ruled from about 1188 to 1155 BC, is described in ancient documents as the "Great God" and a military leader who defended Egypt, then the richest prize in the Mediterranean, from repeated invasion.</div>
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He was about 65 when he died, but the cause of his death has never been clear.</div>
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Sketchy evidence lies in the Judicial Papyrus of Turin, which recorded four trials held for alleged conspirators in the king's death, among them one of his junior wives, Tiy, and her son Prince Pentawere.</div>
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In a year-long appraisal of the mummy, Zink and experts from Egypt, Italy and Germany found that the wound on Ramses III's neck had been hidden by mummified bandages.</div>
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"This was a big mystery that remained, what really happened to the king," said Zink of the study, published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).</div>
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"We were very surprised and happy because we did not really expect to find something. Other people had inspected the mummy, at least from outside, and it was always described (as) 'there are no signs of any trauma or any injuries.'"</div>
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It is possible that Ramses's throat was cut after death, but this is highly unlikely as such a practice was never recorded as an ancient Egyptian embalming technique, the researchers said.</div>
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In addition, an amulet believed to contain magical healing powers was found in the cut.</div>
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"For me it is quite obvious that they inserted the amulet to let him heal for the after-life," said Zink.</div>
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"For the ancient Egyptians it was very important to have an almost complete body for the after-life," and embalmers often replaced body parts with sticks and other materials, he said.</div>
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The authors of the study also examined the mummy of an unknown man between the ages of 18 and 20 found with Ramses III in the royal burial chamber.</div>
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They found genetic evidence that the corpse, known as the Screaming Mummy for its open mouth and contorted face, was related to Ramses and may very well have been Prince Pentawere.</div>
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"What was special with him, he was embalmed in a very strange way.... They did not remove the organs, did not remove the brain," said Zink.</div>
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"He had a very strange, reddish colour and a very strange smell. And he was also covered with a goat skin and this is something that was considered as impure in ancient Egyptian times" -- possibly a post-mortem punishment.</div>
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If it was Pentawere, it appears he may have been forced to hang himself, a punishment deemed at the time as sufficient to purge one's sins for the after-life, the researchers said.</div>
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History shows, though, that the plotters failed to derail the line of succession. Ramses was succeeded by his chosen heir, his son Amonhirkhopshef.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-43366310765604692802012-12-18T06:34:00.001+10:002012-12-18T06:34:25.444+10:00Turner Exhibition<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Masterpieces from an artist who knew his worth</span></h1>
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Turner’s art was revolutionary and he ensured it would be remembered, writes Sonia Harford.</h2>
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‘He was very strategic as an artist. From very early on he was conscious of constructing his identity in the public realm.’<br />Jane Messenger, curator</div>
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Turner lashed to a ship’s mast witnessing a mighty storm is one of art’s enduring and epic tales. Legend has it the artist conceived his masterpiece Snowstorm amid the swirling chaos of snow and sea – a genius suffering for his art. However, the art curator Jane Messenger sets us straight.</div>
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‘‘It didn’t actually happen – but it goes to the myth of the artist and his passion, in capturing the fierce energies and the wrath of nature.’’</div>
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With his grand romantic vision, Joseph Mallord William Turner boldly revolutionised 19th-century British art. He is quintessentially British, and London’s Tate Gallery is synonymous with Turner’s legacy.</div>
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So distinctive is his style, most of us think we can spot a typical Turner several galleries away. Yet a major exhibition coming to Adelaide and Canberra next year, Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master, reveals there’s much more to the Turner myth than snowstorms and Britain’s maritime might. (In fact, we won’t see the monumental Fighting Temeraire or The Slave Ship in Australia – those belong to other collections.)</div>
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Messenger, co-curator of the Adelaide show and curator of European and North American art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, says Turner went to great lengths to create a complete picture of his work. Wealthy and successful towards the end of his life, he bought back paintings from patrons or refused to part with them, bequeathing them to the nation.</div>
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‘‘He was very strategic as an artist,’’ she says. ‘‘From very early on he was conscious of constructing his identity in the public realm, and how he would be written into history.’’</div>
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Given the value of the bequest, London’s Tate Gallery is revered as the custodian of Turner’s work, and it also shapes the narrative of the artist’s life. We’ve had the legend – the Australian exhibition charts the man in full.</div>
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‘‘What distinguishes this show is that it’s only through the Turner Bequest that this comprehensive story can be told, of his development from precocious young man to the visions of a dying old man,’’ Messenger says. ‘‘We return to his time and follow him as he paints and sketches his way through life.’’</div>
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The Turner exhibition, a centrepiece of the Adelaide Festival and a winter blockbuster at the National Gallery of Australia, will have more than 100 oils, watercolours and sketches, some never exhibited. They will soon be on their way to Australia, including Peace – Burial at Sea, with its bright flame slashing the dark shadows; and a favourite of Messenger’s, Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons, in which the work of man – embodied in a tiny cottage – is threatened by the crushing forces of nature, snow plummeting and exploding in the landscape.</div>
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While Turner’s style seems overly familiar – elemental, heroic sweeps of light and air – his subjects vary widely from sublime natural scenes to gloomy, backlit castles. Sea monsters haunt Turner’s oceans and historical stories glow from the canvas. The exhibitions will emphasise the breadth of a life’s work, the extraordinary arc from the tranquil to the turbulent.</div>
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From the start, a young and brilliant Turner, awarded a Royal Academy fellowship at just 26, emerged with lyrical landscapes – described by the art historian Simon Schama as places ‘‘of almost narcotic serenity’’. This, he says, was the ‘‘pleasureseeking, public-pleasing Turner that gently stroked the selfsatisfaction of Regency England’’ and became a wealthy man.</div>
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Turner had modest origins – the son of a barber in Cockney London – but the early promise he showed flourished at the Royal Academy and commissions flowed in. The Australian shows have a large collection of Turner’s later works, with their intense atmospheric charge.</div>
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Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master will be at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, from February 8 to May 19 and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from June 1 to September 8.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-65346292920620495322012-12-14T06:24:00.002+10:002012-12-14T06:24:49.808+10:00Tunnels beneath Roman Baths<br />
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Glimpse of manic Roman perfection – and cleanliness</span></h1>
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Restored tunnels beneath the baths at Caracalla give insights into ancient skills</h2>
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In the middle of a patch of grass amid the ruins of the Caracalla baths in Rome, there is a staircase that takes visitors deep into the ground to a world resembling the lair of a James Bond villain.</div>
<span class="art-object art-mainimage" id="artObjectWrap" ndrole="img" style="display: block; height: 260px; margin: 1.6em 0px; position: relative;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5442909424775433819" style="color: #003399;"><img id="artObject" src="http://thumbnails1.pressdisplay.com.ezproxy.slq.qld.gov.au/pressdisplay/docserver/getimage.aspx?regionguid=b21ca43b-620e-44b3-93c0-8fb87e78d08d&scale=123&file=15452012121200000000001001&regionKey=j9t05ML4Y53jeJhPQ7pT4Q%3d%3d" style="border: 0px; width: 370.7066650390625px;" /><em style="color: #bbbbbb; display: block; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; left: 0px; line-height: 15px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: -15px; white-space: nowrap; width: 370.7200012207031px;">Photograph: Chris Warde-Jones</em></a></span><span class="art-imagetext" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 0.1em; display: block; font-weight: bold; margin: -1.6em 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0.5em;">The excavated network of underground passageways under the baths of Caracalla was also home to a separate ancient structure, a pagan temple, the largest Mithraeum in the Roman Empire, dating to 212 AD</span><br />
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“This is our glimpse at maniacal Roman perfection, at incredible hydraulic technology,” said archaeologist Marina Piranomonte, as she descended and waved her arms at a network of tunnels, each measuring six metres (20ft) high and wide.<br />
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The baths, on a sprawling site off the beaten track in a city crowded by monumental attractions, hold their own against the nearby Circus Maximus, its shattered walls standing 37 metres high, recalling its second century heyday when it pulled in 5,000 bathers a day.<br />
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But for Piranomonte, it is the three kilometre, triple-tiered grid of tunnels that lies under the site – the first tract of which will open for visits this month – which really shows off how seriously the Romans took their sauna time.<br />
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An army of hundreds of slaves kept firmly out of sight of bathers scurried along the tunnels feeding 50 ovens with tonnes of wood a day to heat water surging through a network of underground channels that arrived via aqueduct from a source 60 miles away. Below that, massive sewers, which are now being explored by speleologists, flowed towards the Tiber.<br />
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“It’s the dimension and the organisation that amazes – there is no spa as big as this anywhere in the world today,” said Piranomonte.<br />
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Upstairs, Romans would kick off a visit with a session in one of two gyms, then enjoy a sauna and a spell in a hot tub in the 36 metre (120ft) wide, domed caldarium – slightly smaller than Rome’s Pantheon. The tepidarium then beckoned, before a cool down in the frigidarium, a space so elegant its design and dimensions were copied at Union station in Chicago.<br />
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To complete the experience, a pool 50 metres long and a garden complete with lending library flanked the baths. “The emperor Caracalla was cruel, but he built beautiful things,” said Piranomonte, who is charged with the site’s upkeep.<br />
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A thousand years after it was built, the ghostly ruins of the massive buildings were overgrown and abandoned. “Because it was on the outskirts of Rome, no one built on top of it and the tunnels were simply forgotten, probably sealed by undergrowth,” she added.<br />
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Following their rediscovery at the end of the 19th century, Mussolini strengthened the tunnels when he decided to stage operas amid the ruins overhead, but Piranomonte was less than impressed with his handiwork.<br />
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“Look at the rain water trickling through; that’s Mussolini’s bricks leaking while ours are fine,” she said, pointing to the perfect Roman brick arches disappearing into the gloom.<br />
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The reopening of a short stretch of the tunnels on 21 December caps a clean-up of the baths. The opera, which used the remains of the caldarium for a stage and kept a stage-set workshop in one of the saunas, has been shunted back into the gardens.<br />
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A €450,000 (£360,000) restoration also resulted in the reopening this month of an underground temple at the baths, linked to the tunnel network and dedicated to Mithras, the deity whose popularity soared just before Christianity took hold in the Roman empire. Entering the temple, which boasts black-and-white floor mosaic and is the biggest of its kind in the Roman empire, Piranomonte points to a frieze of Mithras holding a globe but missing his head. “Probably taken off by the Christians,” she said.<br />
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A chamber flanked by space for spreading out on during banquets centres on a large pit where a drugged bull was placed on a metal grill and butchered. Below the grill is a small niche where an initiate to the cult would crawl to be drenched with litres of bull’s blood. “It was a cruel cult, for men only, so you understand why Christianity got the upper hand,” said Piranomonte.<br />
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Emerging from the temple, the archaeologist pauses before what she describes as her favourite part – an authentic Roman roundabout. A large arch leads to the entrance of the tunnel network, where carts carrying tonnes of logs would queue to feed the ovens. Now fully restored, the tunnel starts with a roundabout that circles a guard’s kiosk to stop traffic jam.</div>
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“A Roman spa with a roundabout,” said Piranamonte, “That I find really fascinating.”</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-83520186343485440792012-12-10T17:44:00.000+10:002012-12-10T17:44:29.512+10:00William Henry Fox Talbot Archive<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">£2.2m bid to stop Britain losing archive of father of photography</span></h1>
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In 1839, a country gentleman stood up to address the Royal Society about some experiments he’d been conducting at home – and ended up capturing the world. William Henry Fox Talbot, an amateur scientist who had been pottering about with lenses, wooden boxes and chemicals had found a way to capture photographic images on paper.</div>
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“So much that we now take for granted in the 21st-century world came from that night,” said Richard Ovenden, the deputy director of Oxford’s Bodleian Library which launches a £2.25m bid this week to acquire an archive of Fox Talbot’s life and work – including some of the first photographs ever taken, and the first taken by a woman.</div>
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The bid, which the Bodleian an hopes will attract a National Heritage ge Memorial Fund grant for just under half f the cost, is supported by photographers, rawith including Martin Parr, and historians.</div>
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“We are now bombarded with images, we carry whole libraries rle of images around in mobile phones, but all of that, the internet, ternet, Flickr, YouTube, goes back to o Fox Talbot,” said Ovenden.</div>
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The archive tracks how within a few years of that talk at the Royal Society, the craze for photography spread across the world, and Punch was full of cartoons toons of people be being held in clamps for long enough to have their portraits taken. Fox Talbot p published the first book illustrated with w photographs, The Pencil of Nature, including many taken in Oxford, just five years later.</div>
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Recently bought bo from the family by a New York Yor dealer, the archive holds Fox Talbot’s Ta earliest records, as well as family papers such as a letter le he wrote to his mo mother when he was six in which he wrote sadly ““come to me, you have been away three weeks and six days”. There are records from Lacock Abbey, his Wiltshire home, now owned by the National Trust, records of his time as an MP, his own photographs, and hundreds of images he acquired from other pioneers.</div>
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There is also a rather dull image of four lines of verse by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, a family friend. It was made by shining sunlight through the original manuscript on to a piece of treated paper. Ovenden believes it was made by Fox Talbot’s wife, Constance, and so is the first photograph by a woman.</div>
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“The archive shows that she was caught up in the excitement of the discovery as early as 1839, and was virtually elbowing him away from the developing table, making her own experiments,” he said.</div>
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Parr was shocked to hear there was any question of the archive leaving the UK permanently. “The very notion of this leaving the UK, just defies belief, and the only possible explanation is that the underappreciation of photography in the UK, is still here in a very disturbing way,” he said. Colin Ford, the first director of the National Media Museum in Bradford, said there could be no doubt about the archive’s importance. “There is still much research to be done on all this – perhaps particularly in the non-photographic areas.”</div>
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Fox Talbot spent the rest of his life defending his claim to be the father of modern photography. His images, fixed as negatives on chemically treated paper, and capable of multiple reproduction as positives on paper, vied with a rival process perfected by Louis Daguerre, the French artist and physicist who had announced his own unique images fixed on silvered copper plates only a few weeks earlier.</div>
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“The arguments are as old as photography itself,” Ovenden said, “but undoubtedly Fox Talbot was the inventor of the negative, and it was his process which won out and led to the development of all modern photography on film. It is hard to overestimate his importance.”</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-90237894545573148702012-12-10T17:31:00.001+10:002012-12-10T17:31:28.387+10:00Mughal Masterpieces<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The emperors strike back</span></h1>
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Indian art began to flourish 500 years ago when East met West. Adrian Hamilton marvels at the masterpieces of the Muslim Moghul dynasty in a wonderful new show at the British Museum</h2>
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The British have always had special regard for the Mughal Emperors, who ruled India from 1526 t o 1858. They were intelligent, cultured and tough – all virtues in the eyes of Westerners who came to India, awestruck by the luxury of the imperial court and the extent of its conquests.</div>
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It’s not an admiration, it should be said, shared by most modern Indians, who tend to dismiss their rule as just one more foreign incursion in a history of many millennia. Nor did British respect last a moment longer than the Mughal’s failure to support the British in the uprising of the Indian Mutiny. Tried, condemned and exposed to public gaze, the last Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, was sent to a pathetic exile in Burma in 1858, where he died four years later.</div>
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In the meantime, the British amassed a host of visual and literary treasures, not least from the imperial library itself, to be shipped back to England for study and display. The British Library has more than its fair share, a great deal more indeed than I’d ever suspected. They are as good as anything in India itself and, if sometimes reading the origin of these works, one feels it a qualm of conscience, it is arguable whether the Indians themselves would treat them any better in view of their disregard for Islamic culture.</div>
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The Mughals were emphatically Muslims, with varying degrees of abstemiousness. They were of Turkish origin, powerfully influenced by Persian culture and, at least in the reign of Akbar the Great, tolerant and interested in other cultures. All these strands are on show here, most spectacularly in the miniatures and manuscript of the first century of their rule. Although the British Library tries to make this a story of a dynasty as much as show of art, and puts the case for the late flowering of Mughal culture in verse as in painting in the 18th and early 19th century, there is no doubting where the masterpieces lie.</div>
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Akbar, third in line of the rulers, gathered together in his court artists and craftsmen from Persia, Central Asia and the Hindu kingdoms of India. Painting was his passion. Dismissing the strictures of Islam against representation and display, he commissioned illustrated works of poetry, epic and family history as well as translations of the Hindu classics from an imperial studio of the finest artists of his time.</div>
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The resulting output was a style, Persian in source and expression, but broader, earthier than its models. It’s fascinating to see in the illustrated manuscripts how Hindu colouring and naturalism begin to make their mark on royal patronage, and how too the arrival of Christian missionaries and merchants, bringing with them the prints of Western masters, introduced new ideas of perspective and figuration.</div>
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The portrait in profile was an Indian tradition. But the Mughal artist made it their own with an exquisite concentration on detail and mood. To the Persian taste for decorative detail and jewel-like colours, they added the deep greens and browns of India’s jungles and forests. Against the hierarchical compositions of traditional court art, they now introduced Western imagery and composition.</div>
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The curators would try and herd you into themes and subjects – Christian subjects, family histories, science and medicine and religion. It works in a didactic sense but the real pleasure is to see how the younger artists coming into the imperial studios began to break free of conventions, loosen their</div>
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apace. The Library has a touching brush drawing of Akbar with eyes concentrating downwards, and a series of pictures of his nobles commissioned by the Emperor towards the end of his reign.</div>
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With Shah Jahan and his eldest daughter and son, Princess Jahanara and Prince Dara Shikoh, arts reached their most confident peak. Dara Shikoh, one of the most cultured and sympathetic figures in Mughal history, is represented by pages from a beautiful album of pictures he collected and presented to his beloved wife. His name was blotted from the book when he was usurped and executed by his brother, Aurangzeb, in 1659.</div>
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Aurangzeb was an enemy not only to his brothers but to the artists whose work he no longer commissioned and to Hindus whose temples he destroyed. Ascetic, orthodox and intent on expanding the frontiers of his empire, he spent most of his half-century reign (1658-1707) fighting the Muslim sultanates on the Deccan and died still in the field in 1707. He was buried, according to his wishes, in an open grave paid for out of the income from caps sewn by himself and sold anonymously in the bazaar.</div>
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Thereafter, Mughal power and wealth declined as the Europeans extended their hold. The 19th century certainly saw a revival of energy in painting and the arts, but it was not in the studios of a bankrupt court but in works commissioned by the Maratha princes and the British East India figures such as James Skinner of Skinner’s Horse fame.</div>
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The Western influence is stronger, the perspective and scale more pronounced and the colours more forceful. A splendidly boisterous long</div>
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picture, The Procession of the Mughal Emperor Akbar II Through Delhi to the</div>
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Idgah, from around 1815-1825 shows a scene more realistic but a good deal less disciplined than similar public occasions a couple of centuries before. Topography makes its appearance as do street scenes, in answer to a Western market. The skill is still there, but the sense of an art bent on excellence has gone in a market now dominated by Western demand.</div>
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The British played no small part in that decline. But they also, as this exhibition attests, played a large part in the preservation of the glorious culture that once was. A wonderful exhibition, if at the end a melancholic one.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-33524856733588822982012-12-05T06:55:00.001+10:002012-12-05T06:55:40.282+10:00Mystery of the Missing Island<br />
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<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">The Sydney Morning Herald</li>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Librarian’s search finds sighting of the i</span><span style="font-size: large; line-height: 1.1em;">sland that is not there</span></h1>
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THE mystery of when and how a phantom island in the Pacific came to be first marked on a map may have been solved by a New Zealand librarian.</div>
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On November 22, Fairfax Media reported that an island known as ‘‘Sandy Island’’ on Google Earth and navigational charts did not exist, after a team of University of Sydney scientists found nothing but open water where the land mass should be.</div>
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After reading a story about the ‘‘undiscovered’’ island, Shaun Higgins, a pictorial librarian at the Auckland Museum, trawled through ancient maps and charts at his workplace for clues on the origin of the mystery island.</div>
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On an admiralty chart dated 1908, Mr Higgins found what he was looking for: a dotted circle labelled Sandy Island.</div>
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‘‘It has the same shape as [on] Google Earth, but it’s dotted,’’ said Mr Higgins. ‘‘It could have been dotted because it was an unidentified hazard.’’</div>
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The chart names a ship called Velocity as discovering the island in 1876.</div>
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When museum staff wrote about the chart on their blog, a member of the public posted a comment saying the Velocity was a whaling ship that had been captained by J.W. Robinson and which sailed from Hobart on April 12, 1876 and returned on March 20, 1877.</div>
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The post, which cited an article in the Hobart Mercury from 1877, went on to say: ‘‘Captain Robinson reported that he left [Hobart] on the 15th April, 1876 and proceeded to Cato’s Bank, where whales were seen once during a gale of wind.</div>
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‘‘Shortly after this, the vessel sprang a leak, which kept on increasing, and a course was shaped for the Chesterfield group, where an anchorage being obtained, the leak was partially stopped.</div>
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‘‘While there, an anchor and chain were lost in a heavy gale, and the brig then went to Solomon Islands, anchoring in Mackira Bay, San Christoval [San Cristobal]. This gives the Velocity in the area of ‘Sandy Island’ in 1876,’’ it said.</div>
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An 1879 edition of the Australia directory produced by the admiralty hydrographic department also refers to the island: ‘‘In 1876, the master of the whaler Velocity reported that while cruising on the eastern side of the Chesterfield and Bampton reefs, he observed heavy breakers in lat 19’ 50’ S long, 158’ 50’ E.</div>
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‘‘The master of Velocity also reported a line of sandy islets as extending about north and south along the meridian of 159’ 57 E, between lat 19’7 S and 19’20 S,’’ it said.</div>
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As the whaler would have mapped its positions using a sextant and compass, the ship’s co-ordinates could have been wrong, Mr Higgins said.</div>
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‘‘They could have been further west, where there are reefs,’’ he said.</div>
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Given the type of ship that claimed to have sighted the island, it was unlikely the marking was a deliberate mistake introduced by a cartographer to catch out copyright infringements, Mr Higgins said.</div>
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‘‘The primary function of whalers was to look for whales. I think any responsible captain when they spot something would mark it down, particularly at this time in the Pacific where whalers were often first explorers in an area,’’ he said.</div>
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Mr Higgins said it was possible the Velocity may not be the original source of the Sandy Island error, but it would take an exhaustive search to review every ancient map.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-49759381959153683922012-12-04T07:50:00.002+10:002012-12-04T07:50:45.635+10:00Fairfax Photographic Archive<br />
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<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">The Sydney Morning Herald</li>
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<span style="font-size: large;">History etched in glass: priceless images go to National Library</span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 22.399999618530273px; text-indent: 1.8em;">IN AN AGE when photographs are shot, finessed and circulated to millions of people within seconds, Australia’s rarest collection of photojournalism is an evocative insight into another time.</span></div>
<span class="art-object art-mainimage" id="artObjectWrap" ndrole="img" style="display: block; height: 230px; margin: 1.6em 0px; position: relative;"><a href="" style="color: #003399;"><img id="artObject" src="http://thumbnails1.pressdisplay.com.ezproxy.slq.qld.gov.au/pressdisplay/docserver/getimage.aspx?regionguid=b3c3fa7b-b56b-4f0b-9dc6-c8fa1666d61f&scale=118&file=14292012120400000000001001&regionKey=9PplP0MywDU3lS5xvxNS%2fA%3d%3d" style="border: 0px; width: 370.7066650390625px;" /><em style="color: #bbbbbb; display: block; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; left: 0px; line-height: 15px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: -15px; white-space: nowrap; width: 370.7200012207031px;">Photos: Wolter Peeters; Marco Del Grande; Fairfax Archives</em></a></span><span class="art-imagetext" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 0.1em; display: block; font-weight: bold; margin: -1.6em 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0.5em;">Another age . . . librarian Ellen Fitzgerald packs glass plate negatives at the Fairfax archives in Alexandria, top left; Martin Place, 1911, above; billy cart races and street children, below.</span><div style="font-size: 14.399999618530273px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 1.8em;">
Not just into the events of that time – Depression-era dole queues, the first Anzac Day march, bustling life on Sydney’s streets – but also into the intricate art of glass plate photography that was common a century ago.</div>
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More than 13,000 glass negatives forming the Fairfax Archives Glass Plate Collection were donated to the National Library of Australia on Monday.</div>
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The photographs, taken by Fairfax photographers between 1908 and the mid-1930s, will be restored and put into digital form in a partnership between Fairfax Media, the National Library and the government’s National Cultural Heritage Foundation, which contributed $425,000.</div>
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The library’s director-general, Anne-Marie Schwirtlich, said the collection was particularly significant for Australians’ understanding of the early 20th century.</div>
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‘‘These images are special because they provide a complete archive of photojournalism during the era . . . There are no comparable newspaper photo archives,’’ Ms Schwirtlich said.</div>
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The director of information services at Fairfax Media, Chris Berry, who has led the project over the past three years, said the goal was to preserve the images for all Australians.</div>
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‘‘A lot of the stories are familiar ones, but the vivid nature of the glass plates brings them to life,’’ Mr Berry said. ‘‘In the chase for tomorrow’s news, sometimes the history and cultural value of things is not always apparent.’’</div>
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Mr Berry said the cataloguing process would provide an opportunity to properly appreciate the collection. The collection is expected to be available online from mid next year.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-19628739966375343502012-12-01T06:45:00.003+10:002012-12-01T06:45:45.832+10:00Beachside History<br />
<ul class="art-meta" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; font-style: italic; line-height: 22.399999618530273px; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.4em; overflow: hidden; padding-left: 0px; zoom: 1;">
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<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">The Sydney Morning Herald</li>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Treasure trove of pictures casts a new light on beachside history</span></h1>
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Sydneysiders black and white have long cherished the sea, writes Rick Feneley.</h2>
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WHILE their coachman waits in a horse-drawn cart, the Allen children build sandcastles with their mother, Ethel . . . on Bondi Beach. It is Bondi as we don’t recognise it: pristine dunes but no hoons, no cafes, no G-stringed promenaders and not a real estate agent within cooee.</div>
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<span class="art-object art-mainimage" id="artObjectWrap" ndrole="img" style="display: block; height: 207px; margin: 1.6em 0px; position: relative;"><a href="" style="color: #003399;"><img id="artObject" src="http://thumbnails1.pressdisplay.com.ezproxy.slq.qld.gov.au/pressdisplay/docserver/getimage.aspx?regionguid=d16b3b19-8dc5-4d20-816d-6501b7cec662&scale=164&file=14292012120100000000001001&regionKey=pP8ml59BK%2f4pzz7eLPsrow%3d%3d" style="border: 0px; width: 370.7066650390625px;" /><em style="color: #bbbbbb; display: block; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; left: 0px; line-height: 15px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: -15px; white-space: nowrap; width: 370.7200012207031px;">Photo: Photo Arthur Wignam Allen/ State Library of NSW</em></a></span><span class="art-imagetext" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 0.1em; display: block; font-weight: bold; margin: -1.6em 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0.5em;">Dressed for winter . . . the Allen children, wearing stockings, shoes, hats and coats, in July 1901.</span><div style="font-size: 14.399999618530273px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 1.8em;">
The only hint, in the distance, is the chimney from the North Bondi sewage outfall. It is 1901, the year of Federation.</div>
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Arthur Wigram Allen’s picture of his family is among a treasure trove of old and new photographs in a book that presents Sydney’s southside beaches in a whole new light – through the sands of time.</div>
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The actor Jack Thompson and the Aboriginal MP Linda Burney will launch Saltwater People of the Fatal Shore – Sydney’s Southern Beaches, by John Ogden and Cyclops Press, at Hazelhurst Gallery at Gymea on Saturday.</div>
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While the book is rich with the post-colonial evolution of beach life – the neck-to-toe bathers of the 1880s, the Beach Belles and the Mermaids of the early 1900s, the cliffside cave dwellers near Kurnell in the Depression years – its persistent thread is the indigenous history of the coast.</div>
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Ogden, in his companion book last year on the northern beaches, hails the ‘‘true saltwater people’’ of the Eora, Dharug and Dharawal nations. </div>
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Challenging misconceptions that Aborigines feared the sea, he writes: ‘‘Theirs was a canoe culture. It is estimated that the fruits of the sea and estuaries provided up to 80 per cent of the Eora and Dharawal diet. They . . . were known to dive off rock ledges into the surf and emerge with lobster and abalone.’’</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-1261937243076738412012-11-30T07:52:00.001+10:002012-11-30T07:52:13.824+10:00Colonial Shipwrecks<br />
<ul class="art-meta" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.4em; overflow: hidden; padding-left: 0px; zoom: 1;">
<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">30 Nov 2012</li>
<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">The Sydney Morning Herald</li>
<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">Tim Barlass</li>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Museum scours seabed for sunken treasures of colonial history</span></h1>
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IN JANUARY this year marine archaeologists from the Australian National Maritime Museum located the remains of the Royal Charlotte, wrecked in 1825. The ship had brought convicts to Sydney, and was en route to India with a contingent of British troops and their families when it ran on to a reef during a gale approximately 450 kilometres off the Queensland coast.</div>
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Now the team is attempting to repeat their success, with a search in March due to try to locate a similar vessel, the 555-tonne ship Fergusson, also bound from Sydney to India and in convoy with two other ships when it was wrecked in 1841 near the Sir Charles Hardy Islands on the Great Barrier Reef.</div>
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The passengers – 170 rankand-file of the 50th Regiment of Foot – and crew were subsequently rescued and the Fergusson remained on the reef as a warning of the peril of approaching the reef about 60 nautical miles from Fair Cape.</div>
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Maritime archaeologist Kieran Hosty said they had ‘‘a cross on the chart’’ of the possible location of the Fergusson. ‘‘Where we were looking for the Charlotte there were only two known wrecks but this area was a notorious wreck trap with over 30 vessels known to have been wrecked in the vicinity,’’ he said. ‘‘We may find something but whether we can then say it is the Fergusson is another matter.’’</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-86215372819143065182012-11-26T17:02:00.000+10:002012-11-26T17:02:28.245+10:00Dead Man Innocent?<br />
<ul class="art-meta" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.4em; overflow: hidden; padding-left: 0px; zoom: 1;">
<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">26 Nov 2012</li>
<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">The Sydney Morning Herald</li>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Grave injustice: fight to clear a dead man goes to unusual appeal</span></h1>
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For the first time in Australia, a dead person could be acquitted of a crime in a very belated day in court, writes Jonathan Swan.</h2>
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He was old, sick and holed up in a men’s home, but two weeks before he died, Fred McDermott was still getting hassled about the murder.</div>
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‘‘People still believe I did it,’’ McDermott told a television journalist. ‘‘They said ‘He got out on a royal commission, but that’s the bloke who knocked over Lavers’.’’</div>
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In that last interview, the old shearer looked like a hunting trophy. Leukaemia, two heart attacks and years of living rough had left him a skeleton with a pale coat of skin. When he died, in 1977, McDermott had been out of prison for 25 years. But he had never been acquitted of the murder experts say he could not have committed.</div>
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‘‘Employers all over the place know my name and I didn’t stand a chance anywhere,’’ he said.</div>
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Betty Sheelah heard about her cousin’s death on the news. ‘‘He ended up a real broken man,’’ she said. ‘‘He still had that murder thing hanging over his head.’’</div>
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If you had told Ms Sheelah then that decades later she would be in a Sydney court watching a barrister fight to make her cousin the first dead person ever to be acquitted in Australia, she would never have believed you.</div>
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‘‘It’s all because Ted Markham found that skeleton,’’ she said.</div>
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In November 2004, a Grenfell farmer, Ted Markham, spotted something white in the grass on his property. ‘‘I picked it up and turned it round and saw two open eye sockets looking at me,’’ he told ABC News.</div>
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Police found other bones in a nearby cave. DNA tests confirmed they belonged to Harry Lavers, who owned a Grenfell petrol station in the 1930s.</div>
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The last time Lavers had been seen was the morning of September 5, 1936. He woke before dawn and told his wife he was going out to feed the horses. She rose an hour later, and thinking it odd that her husband had not lit the fire, she checked out the front of their petrol station.</div>
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The hose of one of the bowsers lay on the ground. Blood and hair mingled at its base.</div>
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Tyre tracks ran across the soil in front of the bowsers and kept running along the unmade road north from Grenfell to Forbes. Residents said they had seen a noisy touring car headed north. Essie May King, who worked the show circuit as a phrenologist and psychologist, told police she had seen two men in a touring car on that road the day before Lavers disappeared. But police found nothing.</div>
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The case lay dormant until 1944, when detectives in Sydney heard that a shearer in Griffith had confessed to Lavers’s murder. This led police to McDermott, who had told his girlfriend years before that police had interviewed him about Lavers’s disappearance. When she got drunk she would sometimes accuse McDermott of killing Lavers. To shut her up he would say: ‘‘Yeah, I did it.’’</div>
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Now they had a suspect, police called Essie May King and asked her to look at some photos. They showed her a portrait of McDermott standing in the sun with his eyes closed. King identified him as one of the men she had seen in the car nine years earlier.</div>
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‘‘That identification would never be allowed in a court today,’’ said Tom Molomby, SC, who as well as defending McDermott, has written a book about the saga.</div>
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On Wednesday, Mr Molomby will tell the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal that McDermott’s conviction was based on shaky evidence, which collapsed with the discovery of the skeleton.</div>
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A state coroner called McDermott’s conviction a ‘‘gross miscarriage of justice’’. A royal commission freed him from jail in 1952 because there were too many doubts about the evidence. But he was never acquitted, because common law denies dead people the right to an appeal. Mr Molomby has found a loophole – under the Crimes (Appeal and Review) Act 2001, a relative of the accused is allowed to petition the Attorney-General.</div>
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Ms Sheelah, now 74, says she has petitioned because ‘‘it’s time Fred’s name was cleared’’.</div>
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‘‘I know it’s probably too late for Fred, but it’s not too late for the rest of the McDermotts, and it’s not too late to have it erased off our family history.’’</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-76603439965175944492012-11-24T07:52:00.002+10:002012-11-24T07:52:40.254+10:00Toulouse-lautrec Collection<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Bohemian rhapsody</span></h1>
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An extraordinary collection of Toulouse-lautrec’s work exposes the real Paris, writes ANDREW STEPHENS.</h2>
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Montmartre bristles with the pride of having once been an edgy place. Seedy, and a haven for avant- garde artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, it retains some rustic traces – a 1622 windmill here, a lovely vineyard on the hill over there – but it little resembles the bawdy, rough village it once was. In the late 19th century, though, Lautrec was well known amid this neighbourhood’s underbelly of cafes, cabarets and bordellos. The ‘‘Dwarf of Montmartre’’, as he was known, loved to court notoriety.</div>
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He achieved that. One reviewer, Felix Feneon, wrote in 1893 that Lautrec had ‘‘a hell of a lot of guts and nerve’’ and was unrivalled in ‘‘painting pictures of rich old buggers getting sloshed with tarts who slobber kisses all over them to get their money’’.</div>
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Lautrec was only 36 when, true to his bohemian world, he died from a confluence of alcoholism and venereal disease. Had he lived longer, it is hard to imagine how his innovative, boldcoloured work could have improved on its unusual cropping, silhouettes, blocks of colour and pareddown composition inspired by Japanese prints. It is here in Montmartre that we discover, though, why that work was, and is, so captivating: he did much more than just observe the people he saw in clubs and brothels.</div>
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According to the director of Albi’s Musee ToulouseLautrec, Daniele Devynck, this artist was more a journalist than anything else. He reported on life in Montmartre, she says, but tried to see deeper links and motivations, without contempt for his human subjects. ‘‘Lautrec, in fact, is interested in psychology and not by the artificial appearance of people,’’ Devynck says. ‘‘It is his way to want to show the reality of each personality. This is true for each thing he makes; whether it is his mother or a prostitute, it is exactly the same approach. He does not moralise.</div>
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‘‘Prostitutes were part of the entertainment in Montmartre. Yet you can tell he really respects these women.’’</div>
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The painting In Bed (1894) is set in one of Montmartre’s ‘‘houses of tolerance’’ – brothels that operated without intervention as long as their inmates did not ply their trade outside the property.</div>
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Lautrec rendered all sorts of intimate scenes from these places – women gathering for venereal disease inspections, lesbian lovers in bed together, women lounging amiably on sofas waiting for clients – and there are excellent examples of these in Devynck’s museum, which houses the world’s largest public collection of the artist’s work.</div>
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It is one of 31 institutions and private collectors sending work to the show at the National Gallery of Australia. While the Lautrec museum has the most extensive collection of the artist’s posters in the world, the NGA has been avidly collecting in the past few years and now has an excellent array of posters and lithographs, many of which were printed in small editions.</div>
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While many visitors to the Canberra exhibition might have in mind the Lautrec characters from Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge! (2001) or Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), they could be surprised to discover Lautrec was from an aristocratic family: he was born only streets away from Albi’s Musee Toulouse-Lautrec at the Hotel du Bosc in the old town. The artist’s lineage, though, was more a hindrance than a privilege: while his good breeding meant he had the benefits of education, wealth and cultural nous, that same heritage of interbreeding (his parents were first cousins) is most likely responsible for his congenital health difficulties. Those problems included his famously stunted limbs, part of the rare genetic condition known as pycnodysostosisos (nicknamed ToulouseLautrec syndrome).</div>
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Growing up as a noble near the towns of Toulouse and Lautrec, from whence the family name derives, meant little when his family tried to bequest his work to the Luxembourg Museum (later absorbed by the Louvre) after Lautrec died. The work was rejected; the Albi museum took it in 1922, and it filled the building.</div>
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When the NGA’s senior curator of international art, Jane Kinsman, visited the museum to research the NGA show, she was struck deeply by the power of Lautrec’s work when standing in front of it. Again, it is his attention to the character of his sitters that caught her. ‘‘I saw his absolute facility for both drawing and for characterisation,’’ she says. ‘‘ When you see it in the flesh, in the lines of a poster, it really astonishes.</div>
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‘‘He had such an ability to scrutinise character that, in the end, even though he was a young and emerging artist, the society ladies avoided having him commissioned to do their portraits. The few examples that he did do of such women were very uncomplimentary, which caused a bit of friction.’’</div>
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Kinsman says Lautrec was not much interested in these types of commissions anyway; his favourite models were lessfortunate Parisians. He was interested in their personalities, she writes in the catalogue for Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris & the Moulin Rouge, ‘‘whether a laundress, a ballet dancer or a circus performer’’, and this subtle exploration of their characters was a significant contribution to the evolution of 19th-century art. Likewise in the brothels where – because of his physical disabilities – he chose to go for sex, Lautrec thrived on the lack of self-consciousness of women.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-600963652138006202012-11-19T06:13:00.000+10:002012-11-19T06:13:07.734+10:00Alexander the Great: 2000 Years of Treasures <br />
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<li style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; float: left; left: -6px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 6px; position: relative;">Spectrum</li>
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Hundreds of treasures, one ancient-world superstar. RICHARD JINMAN looks on as St Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum prepares an exhibition for Sydney.</h2>
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‘It was hard to distinguish between man and god . . . this young man – a boy, really – became the f irst global person . . . ’</div>
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<span class="art-object art-mainimage" id="artObjectWrap" ndrole="img" style="display: block; height: 300px; margin: 1.6em 0px; position: relative;"><a href="" style="color: #003399;"><img id="artObject" src="http://thumbnails1.pressdisplay.com.ezproxy.slq.qld.gov.au/pressdisplay/docserver/getimage.aspx?regionguid=25c39877-55f4-4917-8590-6147102cd4eb&scale=126&file=14382012111700000000001001&regionKey=L3y%2bzVLGD7G2pGgv9jRJdw%3d%3d" style="border: 0px; width: 370.7066650390625px;" /></a></span><span class="art-imagetext" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 0.1em; display: block; font-weight: bold; margin: -1.6em 0px 1em; padding: 0px 0px 0.5em;">From Russia with love . . . Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Alexander and Diogenes, part of the State Hermitage Museum’s collection.</span><div style="padding: 0px; text-indent: 1.8em;">
Any reservations the Hermitage might have about sending three aircraft- loads of its fragile treasures to the other side of the world are masked by Russian stoicism. The stance is bolstered by state-of-the-art transport technology, an eye-watering insurance policy and an unshakeable belief that the Hermitage has a duty to act as a global museum.</div>
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As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, says: ‘‘Art must travel. We must share our collections with the nna Trofimova has five figurines on her desk in a library deep inside the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. One of them is Alexander the Great, a man who seized her imagination more than 30 years ago. Next to him is Napoleon, another great warrior. There’s a Buddha, a Greek idol and, rather incongruously, a replica Oscar.</div>
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‘‘Alexander, he is like a Hollywood star,’’ the museum’s head of classical antiquities says. ‘‘Like, ah, Michael Jackson. No, not Michael Jackson . . . like Marilyn Monroe!’’</div>
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The idea of Alexander, the Macedonian king who conquered the world in the 4th century BC, as the antecedent of today’s celebrity culture seems audacious. But it’s the kind of fresh perspective Trofimova, as curator, hopes the Australian Museum exhibition will inspire. </div>
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Alexander the Great: 2000 Years of Treasures, contains more than 400 artefacts from the Hermitage’s vast collection – everything from coins and jewellery to weapons and armour, frescos and statues.</div>
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Underpinning this extraordinary display is a thesis or, rather, several. It seeks to explain how Alexander transformed the world through military conquest, spreading Greek culture and art – Hellenism – from the shores of the Mediterranean to the deserts of central Asia and the borders of India. In the process, Alexander the man became Alexander the myth: a deity to some, a tyrant to others. His image, real, imagined and invented, was stamped on coins and in the faces of statues and idols, pervading cultures and creeds. He was, to bring things up to date, the first person to go viral.</div>
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‘‘ We [the curators] ask what was before Alexander and what was after,’’ Trofimova says. ‘‘It’s not just his story, but his impact on the world. For the first time the civilisations of the East and the West met. He brought civilisation; he founded cities, new cults and brought Greek language, art and administration. This is globalisation and it is the point of origin of our civilisation.’’</div>
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With just more than a month before the Australian exhibition’s opening on November 24, activity in the Hermitage’s labyrinthine corridors is frantic. Workers are sealing a two-metre Roman statue of Dionysus into a wooden crate. Nearby, a technician sits hunched over The world. It’s a good socialist term, but art belongs to the people.’’</div>
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Trofimova says the Australian Museum secured the show against fierce competition from museums in Greece, Italy and Canada. The Sydney institution lobbied hard and won.</div>
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‘‘ We had to choose,’’ she says. ‘‘For me, Australia is exciting because it’s a new world. And the theme of the spread of civilisation is very close to this country [Australia]. It’s why we decided to concentrate on this project.’’</div>
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Trofimova was a student at St Petersburg State University when her public’s imagination: sex appeal. Cleanshaven, unlike his hirsute forebears, he had a leonine mane, a penetrating gaze and the athleticism of a professional warrior. He was 22 when he began conquering the world and 32 when he died in Babylon in 323BC from fever. The ancient world’s most famous face would remain forever young. Such a potent blend of youth, good looks and all-conquering success is something the great men who followed have struggled to match.</div>
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‘‘Louis XIV, for example – old, ugly, fat,’’ Trofimova says. ‘‘Caesar and Stalin tutor handed her a book containing portraits of Alexander. She was intrigued and began to delve deeper. As her fascination grew, she began visiting some of the sites of Alexander’s great battles, which was no easy feat given the travel restrictions imposed on its citizens by Soviet Russia.</div>
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‘‘I was struck by this phenomenon in which it was hard to distinguish between man and god,’’ she says. ‘‘And why this young man – a boy, really – became the first global person. He thought he was the first political leader and he thought in terms of the planet. And that was the first time that had happened in history.’’</div>
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Besides history and geopolitics, there is another reason Alexander fires the were old. Napoleon was not sexy. But Alexander was very sexy. He was brave, died young and believed in his glory.’’</div>
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The real Alexander is as fascinating as the myth. A master tactician whose military strategies are still studied today, he displayed great humanity to the people he conquered. But he had a dark side, too: an incandescent temper and a love of drink. The combination proved deadly for his friend Cleitus, whom he killed during a drunken brawl.</div>
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No discussion of Alexander can ignore the question of his sexuality. His lifelong companion was Hephaestion, a childhood friend and lieutenant. Some scholars believe they were lovers, while others demur. The debate is complicated by the sexual and social mores of the era, but contemporary portrayals usually err on the side of platonicism. In Oliver Stone’s 2004 movie Alexander, for example, the king exchanges manly hugs and meaningful glances with Hephaestion, but the one torrid sex scene involves Alexander and his wife, Roxane.</div>
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The issue of the king’s sexuality was not part of the Alexander the Great exhibition when it was first staged at the Hermitage in 2007. Piotrovsky says: ‘‘Russian tradition is that things like this [homosexuality] do exist but it’s not to be discussed . . . That’s why it’s so important to make exhibitions in different places – there’s a different reaction to this and that.’’</div>
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What can modern people learn from Alexander the Great?</div>
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For Piotrovsky, the list starts with the difficult idea – by contemporary standards, at least – that war was once an important way of exchanging culture.</div>
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‘‘ Today it is not,’’ he says. ‘‘But we have to think how we can do this [exchange cultures] today and we don’t think about it. Also we can learn the respect for and interest in other cultures – he wasn’t just plundering. And Alexander teaches us that we need some ideal . . . some example with which we can compare ourselves. We need something better than us, a cultural hero. Alexander was this way.’’</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-88740263164928313732012-11-10T17:50:00.003+10:002012-11-10T17:50:59.657+10:00English Edition of Leichhardt’s Diaries <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Historian to migrate to study explorer diaries</span></h1>
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AN amateur German historian of Ludwig Leichhardt has won the right to migrate to Australia so he can work on a landmark edition of the Prussian explorer’s diaries, which have been largely lost to the English-speaking world.</div>
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Hans Finger, 82, little known here but acclaimed as Germany’s leading historian of Leichhardt, has won a two-year battle with immigration authorities who had refused him a ‘‘distinguished talent’’ visa.</div>
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Mr Finger will arrive in time for Leichhardt’s 200th birthday celebrations next year if he and his wife pass medical tests.</div>
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For the anniversary year, Mr Finger’s biography, Ludwig Leichhardt: Lost in the Outback, will appear in English, and the Queensland Museum is to bring out a first instalment of Leichhardt’s unpublished diaries painstakingly transcribed from old German script.</div>
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As well, the NSW State Library, home to 1.2 linear metres of Leichhardt’s papers, hopes to finish digitising his notebooks, diaries and field books before the October anniversary.</div>
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The fascination with Leichhardt, who disappeared from inland Queensland in 1848, has spread overseas, partly because of his melodramatic portrayal in the 1957 novel Voss by the Nobel prize-winner Patrick White.</div>
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Yet an enormous trove of Leichhardt’s diaries and other writings in German had been left untranslated and neglected by most English-speaking scholars since they were handed over to Sydney’s Mitchell Library in 1910.</div>
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These cover his early years in Europe, arrival in Australia and preparations for his 1844 expedition to Port Essington in the Northern Territory, when Leichhardt began to keep his journals in English.</div>
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Mr Finger, a retired economic consultant in Munich, first encountered Leichhardt during a 1992 visit to the State Library in Sydney’s Macquarie Street.</div>
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‘‘There I read some of Leichhardt’s diary and I was fascinated by this man — the deeper I went into it, the more I was fascinated,’’ he said.</div>
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The value to Leichhardt scholars of transcribing this material, translating it and putting it in its German context, was a key issue in Mr Finger’s conflict with immigration authorities.</div>
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Intertwined with this was the question of Mr Finger’s reputation, which was a closed book to researchers unable to read German.</div>
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‘‘I think part of the problem was that he’s not well known in Australia and he’s not attached to a university,’’ said Tom Darragh, an emeritus curator at Museum Victoria who laboured for two years on sections of Leichhardt’s German diaries.</div>
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Distinguished talent visas are reserved for artists, sportspeople or researchers ‘‘who have an internationally recognised record of exceptional and outstanding achievement’’.</div>
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Mr Finger lacks formal training as a historian but when he challenged the immigration authorities in a federal tribunal last year, he had no trouble finding academics willing to testify to his achievements.</div>
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Angus Nicholls, a lecturer in German and expert on 19thcentury natural science at Queen Mary University of London, said there was ‘‘probably no living scholar — and certainly no nonAustralian living scholar — who has contributed more to our knowledge of Ludwig Leichhardt’s life and deeds’’.</div>
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Dr Nicholls said publication of Mr Finger’s proposed GermanEnglish bilingual edition of Leichhardt’s diaries ‘‘will be a landmark event not only in the field of Leichhardt studies but also more generally in the discipline of 19th-century Australian history’’.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-75288770988339097712012-11-03T06:32:00.000+10:002012-11-03T06:32:15.625+10:00Digitised Indian Archive<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Rescued from obscurity, India’s history enters the digital age</span></h1>
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Two academics have created a south Asia archive, writes Amrit Dhillon in New Delhi.</h2>
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‘In India, there is little appreciation of the need to preserve history. No one cares that the tropical climate and humidity can ruin paper. We had to dry sodden documents.’<br />Professor Boria Majumdar</div>
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A group of old India hands were sitting in a cafe in Oxford in 2005, across from the university, marvelling at the news they had just heard. </div>
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China had marshalled 4000 pages of digital archives on its past, chronicling important events and trends. Anyone working on Chinese studies now had instant access to a treasure trove of rare documents sitting at home or in the office anywhere in the world.</div>
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‘‘Wow,’’ all the academics exclaimed in unison. ‘‘Why can’t India do the same thing on its colonial and post-colonial history.’’ Any academic or researcher on India or South Asia who wants to ferret out documents, magazines or rare books has to arrange funding, fly thousands of miles to India, pay for a hotel and then navigate their way through archives, often located in remote places.</div>
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‘‘The process is slow and expensive. That’s why we decided to create a unique digital South Asia Archive,’’ said Professor Boria Majumdar, one of the academics in the group, currently Adjunct Professor at Monash University and Principal Trustee of the South Asia Research Foundation.</div>
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With his wife, Dr Sharmistha Gooptu, also an academic, the two got down to work. ‘‘Frankly, when we started, we had no idea what material we were looking for,’’ says Majumdar. ‘‘All we knew was that we had to revolutionise the study of India.’’ They groped around blindly at first, raiding the homes of private collectors and scouring rare book shops. </div>
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Their first purchases, for around $4000, were from a rare book dealer in Calcutta who instructed his ‘‘peon’’ (office boy) to show them around his shop and ‘‘take them to the bathroom’’.</div>
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‘‘In the bathroom, brick shelves reached up to the ceiling, packed with documents, magazines and pamphlets. In the Calcutta heat, with no fans, we sat for days sifting through the fantastic information,’’ said Majumdar.</div>
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Over seven years, they discovered and collected a wealth of literary material. British publisher Routledge funded the digitisation of all the pages. The Routledge South Asia Archive, to be launched next week, comprises five million pages of journals, books, census reports, laws and regulations, travelogues and reports from the mid-18th century to 1950.</div>
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Theirs was also an act of rescue. In the monsoons, the couple used to wade through flooded streets to reach a place someone had suggested only to find, when they got there, that the documents were also wet.</div>
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‘‘In India, there is little appreciation of the need to preserve history. No one cares that the tropical climate and humidity can ruin paper. We had to dry sodden documents. Some needed pest control treatment,’’ he said.</div>
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The same lack of a sense of history can be seen all over India. Centuries-old monuments are in ruins. Or used as rubbish dumps or cattle sheds. No attempt is made to preserve them for future generations.</div>
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Space in India is also at a premium. The wives of private collectors, sick of cluttered homes, used to welcome Majumdar and Gooptu with delight. ‘‘Please come in and take it all away!’’ they used to say.</div>
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The couple, aided by researchers and archivists, soon realised they were building an intellectual legacy for future generations of Indians. Bit by bit the archive assumed a distinct shape in their minds. They knew what they were looking for. And they were stunned at the range and quantity of the material they found.</div>
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Reports by civil servants minutely detailed everything under the British: population figures, cholera deaths, how many public latrines were to be found in Bombay, and how much fish rotted in Calcutta on a given day.</div>
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Former Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University Professor Brian Stoddart said the archive gave access to ‘‘a huge array of important materials’’. ‘‘The benefits will be enormous and will grow even more over time,’’ he said.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-53390813939574713842012-10-07T09:17:00.000+10:002012-10-07T09:17:15.429+10:00Boy finds mammoth<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Boy, 11, finds mammoth in frozen mud</span></h1>
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A well- preserved mammoth that may have been killed by ice age humans has been found in the permafrost of northern Siberia.</div>
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Prof Alexei Tikhonov, of the Zoology Institute in St Petersburg, announced the discovery of the mammoth, which was excavated late last month near the Sopochnaya Karga cape, 2,200 miles north-east of Moscow.</div>
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The 16-year- old mammoth has been named Jenya, after the 11-year-old Russian boy who found the animal’s limbs sticking out of the frozen mud. The animal was two metres (6ft 6in) tall and weighed 500kg (1,100lb). “He was pretty small for his age,” Tikhonov said.</div>
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Jenya had a missing left tusk that made him unfit for fights with other mammoths or human hunters who were settling the Siberian marshes and swamps some 20,000-30,000 years ago, Tikhonov said. The splits on Jenya’s remaining tusk show a “possible human touch”, he said.</div>
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Examination of the body has already proved that the massive humps on mammoths seen in ice age cave paintings from Spain and France were not extended bones but huge chunks of fat that helped them survive the long, cold winters, Tikhonov said.</div>
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Jenya’s carcass is the best-preserved since a 1901 discovery near the Beryozovka river in Russia’s north- eastern Yakutia region, he added.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5442909424775433819.post-80135541367397967692012-10-05T06:37:00.002+10:002012-10-05T06:37:32.737+10:00Vale Eric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Eric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012</span></h1>
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By <span class="ht-vtag"><a href="http://www.historytoday.com/taxonomy/term/31" style="color: #c0272d; text-decoration: none;">Paul Lay</a></span> | Posted 1st October 2012, 11:08</div>
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<i>History Today</i></div>
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<img align="" alt="Eric Hobsbawm" class="caption " height="344" src="http://www.historytoday.com/sites/default/files/hobsbawm_0.jpg" style="border: 0px; line-height: 1.6em;" title="Eric Hobsbawm" width="612" /></div>
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<span class="image-caption-container image-caption-container-" style="display: block; margin: 10px 0px; width: 612px;"><span class="image-caption" style="display: block; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5em; margin-top: -5px; padding: 3px; text-align: center;">Eric Hobsbawm</span></span>The distinguished Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm died this week at the age of 95.</div>
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He was a controversial figure, not least because he maintained his membership of the Communist party despite the Soviet Union's crushing of the Hungarian rising in 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968. As recently as April of this year I wrote a post for this blog, <a href="http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2012/04/defence-eric-hobsbawm" style="color: #c0272d; text-decoration: none;">In Defence of Eric Hobsbawm</a>, that confronted some of the more recent accusations thrown his way. </div>
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Unusually for a historian, Hobsbawm’s passing made the front page of the broadsheets and was widely reported on television and radio. He was, after all, an Establishment man, who, fashionably, turned down a knighthood only to accept the considerably more prestigious and exclusive title of Companion of Honour. His commitment to Marxist politics was extraordinarily passive and abstract, fundamental to him as a historical method yet all but bankrupt as a means of deciding the future of humanity. His major political achievement was as a pathfinder for New Labour, whose current leader, Ed Miliband, is born of the same North London intellectual milieu.</div>
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Hobsbawm’s main achievement as a historian was to marry the European commitment to social science and the vast canvas of the French Annales school with the British narrative tradition. The marriage was most fruitful in his trilogy: <em>The Age of Revolution</em> (1962), <em>The Age of Capital</em> (1975) and <em>The Age of Empire</em> (1987). For me, like so many, it was one of the first serious works of history I ever read and I had no hesitation in passing it on to my son, who read it over the summer holidays. It is probably the best introduction available to Europe post-1789 and, though essentially a synthesis, will continue to be read, even as the continent it describes becomes ever more familiar and ever more marginal.</div>
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Richard Vinen once compared Hobsbawm’s evocation of a then exotic Europe to the writings of Elizabeth David, a mischievous analogy, but an accurate one.<br />Hobsbawm’s best writing is marked by its clarity, a skill he honed while presenting the 8pm lecture at Birkbeck, University of London to students tired after a day’s work in the real world. ‘Could I keep them interested?’ He could and all historians should seek such clarity when writing for the public that pays their wages. Hobsbawm was vocal in his dislikes: he was contemptuous of oral history and deeply suspicious of identity politics, one of the main motors of historical study today. He described himself as ‘militant against mythologisation’ and thought scepticism a key weapon in the historian’s armoury. He was eager, too, to expand history’s remit. At the Anglo-American Conference of 2000 he expressed his regret that he was too old to delve into the ‘Deep History’ pioneered by Daniel Lord Smail’s team at Harvard.</div>
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But Hobsbawm’s primary concern was economics, with all the strengths and weaknesses that implies. He neglected religion and morality as a motivator of men and women, ignoring the maxim that ‘man cannot live by bread alone’, perhaps because he had embraced so completely the political religion of Marxism. It seems a significant omission today, especially from the man who told Daniel Snowman, when interviewed for <em>History Today</em> in 1999, that ‘the business of the historian is to remember what others forget’. </div>
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Hobsbawm was rated highly in our <a href="http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2011/11/historians-historians" style="color: #c0272d; text-decoration: none;">survey of the historians' historian</a> last year -- he was cited on several occasions by his peers as the most influential historian of the past 60 years, and in our <a href="http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2011/11/top-historians-results" style="color: #c0272d; text-decoration: none;">public vote</a> he finished third, after Fernand Braudel and EP Thompson.</div>
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K.C.Sbeghenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06579359508706713981noreply@blogger.com0