Travel blog – Page 2 – Scholar Gipsy

The Shipwreck Coast

By Scholar Gipsy | April 5, 2020 | Comments 2 comments

Why are shipwrecks so attractive?

I don’t mean a shipwreck unfolding before our eyes – I’m sure that would be a horrific thing to witness. Yet many people are fascinated by the legacies of shipwrecks – the stories they generate and the physical evidence they leave behind.

From the beautiful 16^thcentury sailing ship Mary Rose to the magnificent 20^thcentury steamer Titanic, wrecked ships have been objects of widespread interest, speculation and downright obsession. We love to hear their tales of heroism, tragedy, miraculous escapes and sunken treasure.

*Loch Ard Gorge, along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road*, *is associated with a famous nineteenth-century shipwreck.*

A few weeks ago, my husband and I visited the area of southwestern Victoria known as the Shipwreck Coast. This section of coastline, which runs for about 130km from Cape Otway to Port Fairy, is part of the Great Ocean Road, one of Australia’s most popular national and international tourist destinations. The Great Ocean Road is famed for its spectacular views of jagged shoreline hugging the mighty Southern Ocean. The Shipwreck Coast commemorates the ships that foundered on that same combination of rugged rocks and whirling waters.

*The rock formations known as the Twelve Apostles are the scenic jewel in the crown of the Great Ocean Road*

Over 200 wrecked ships have been discovered along this section of coast, and the number lost is believed to be much higher – probably more than 600. Many of these ships were heading for the city of Melbourne. To reach it, they had to ‘thread the needle’ between Cape Otway and King Island. (An 80 km gap might sound wide enough to us, but using the navigational instruments of the time it could be difficult to locate accurately.) Ships headed to Sydney also used this route, taking advantage of the strong westerly winds known as the ‘Roaring Forties’ to speed past the southern edge of the continent before turning northwards along the coast of New South Wales.

*A simple but effective display at the Shipwreck Museum in Warrnambool conveys the sheer numbers of ships lost.*

Failure to ‘thread the needle’ was one notorious cause of shipwrecks along this coast. Others were the high winds and huge seas that built up over the thousands of kilometres of unbroken ocean between here and Antarctica, poor visibility due to frequent fogs, and the treacherous nature of a stretch of sea studded with submerged reefs.

The geology of the seabed has a lot to do with the difficulty of safely navigating this shoreline. The same kinds of limestone protuberances that create the dramatic, tourist-pleasing scenery of the Great Ocean Road also caused hundreds of shipwrecks. We realized this while looking at the famous Twelve Apostles – those iconic limestone stacks emerging from the water between Princetown and Port Campbell – but we received an even stronger sense of maritime danger at a lesser-known site further along the road, the Bay of Martyrs.

This is a truly weird seascape, which I urge visitors to the Great Ocean Road not to miss. It may not lend itself to the perfect Instagram shot in the way that the Twelve Apostles do, but it shows even more clearly how crowded the ocean here is with submerged reefs and islets, which are intriguing to the imagination but deadly to shipping. A beautiful four-masted iron barque, the Falls of Halladale, was wrecked here in 1908, almost at the end of its voyage from New York to Melbourne. The wreck lies in only ten metres of water, and now hosts a wide variety of marine plants and creatures.

The ill-fated voyage of the Falls of Halladale is one of the later shipwreck stories told at the excellent museum in the Flagstaff Hill maritime heritage complex at Warrnambool. Mostly, the museum is concerned with wrecks from about 1840 to 1880, and in particular with one of the most famous shipwrecks in Australian history, that of the clipper Loch Ard in 1878.

*Wreck of the Loch Ard, oil painting by William Short, dated 21 June 1878; this photographic reproduction was sold as a postcard, also in 1878. State Library of Victoria.*

In storm and fog, in the early hours of the morning of 1 June, 1878, the Loch Ard ran into a reef off Mutton Bird Island, near Port Campbell. Having left London three months before, the ship was less than a day’s sail from its destination, Melbourne. Of the 54 passengers and crew on board, only two survived: midshipman Tom Pearce, and a young Irish girl called Eva Carmichael, who was immigrating to Australia with her parents and five siblings, all of whom lost their lives.

*Engraving in The Australasian Sketcher, 3 August 1878. State Library of Victoria.*

The Australian press lapped up the story of the Loch Ard and a quick search of the newspaper archive Trove uncovers many contemporary accounts of the disaster. The two survivors, who were both eighteen years old, became instant celebrities, and there was a general feeling that the perfect ending of the story would be for them to get married – after all, they had spent part of a night together in a cave after reaching the shore! (It’s said that Tom politely proposed to Eva and she politely declined.)

*The survivors, Tom Pearce and Eva Carmichael*

Another layer of the story is that the ship’s captain, 29-year-old George Gibbs, had himself been married only six weeks before the voyage began. His wife remained in Scotland, and never saw her husband again. No blame seems to be attached to Captain Gibbs for the disaster – in fact, the survivors praised his courage and seamanship.

The tale of the Loch Ard has everything we appreciate in great shipwreck stories. It’s a story of luck, both bad and good; of romance, or the possibility of it; and of heroism (Tom Pearce was awarded a medal for his actions in rescuing Eva from the surf). Above all the story has a kind of cosmic irony, a sense of ‘so near and yet so far’.

There’s something ironic, too, in the display that is the centerpiece of the Shipwreck Museum at Warrnambool: the improbable, beautiful ‘Loch Ard Peacock’. This much larger-than-life-sized ceramic statue of a peacock, a magnificent example of majolica ware from the Minton pottery in Staffordshire, was on its way to Melbourne to be shown at the Great Exhibition in 1880. Incredibly, it came through the shipwreck unscathed.

The almost insolent beauty of the Loch Ard Peacock seems to mock our human scale of value. On the night of the wreck, the sea claimed 52 lives, yet threw this fragile, human-sized art object safely onto the beach.

Peacocks traditionally symbolize pride, and many shipwreck stories have an element of ‘pride going before a fall’. (The Titanic exemplifies this.) Nothing has the power to humble human pride like the ‘brute’ or ‘impersonal’ forces of nature. Whether it’s an iceberg, a mighty storm, a deceiving fog, or a microscopic virus, nature has a way of turning our best-laid plans upside-down and revealing how illusory our sense of control over life really is.

Do not Travel – A Short History

By Scholar Gipsy | March 23, 2020 | Comments 2 comments

Five years ago, I became acquainted with the website SmartTraveller, hosted by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT. I’d received a last-minute invitation to join a group travelling to Borneo. My immediate response was to consult our big World Atlas (I’m old school with maps), because I didn’t even know where Borneo was. My next move was to look at the SmartTraveller site for safety advice. It was my first encounter with the four-tier system of safety ratings by which the Australian government ranks destinations around the world.

Green means ‘exercise normal precautions, as you would at home’. Yellow means ‘exercise a heightened degree of caution’. Orange means ‘reconsider your need to travel’. And red means simply ‘do not travel’. When I went to the website in February 2015 the island of Borneo was coloured a mixture of green, yellow and orange, but our whole itinerary fell within the green and yellow parts. I was good to go!

Back then, red was reserved for a few places so terrible and tragic that an ordinary traveller wouldn’t even consider going there – places like Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan. Now, SmartTraveller has painted the whole world outside Australia red.

To use a word we now hear constantly, it is unprecedented for the government to declare the whole world outside our borders a no-go area. But are there any precedents we can turn to for a sense of what this kind of shutdown might mean for the travel industry and for us as travellers?

The clearest precedent I can think of is the closure of continental Europe to British travellers during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Britain was at war with France almost continuously from 1792 to 1815, and during that time it was virtually impossible for members of the public to visit ‘the Continent’. Except for a brief respite during the Peace of Amiens in 1802-3, Europe was effectively off-limits for a whole generation of British travellers.

That didn’t mean that the British didn’t travel at all. When they couldn’t go overseas, they started to travel more at home, finding beauty and interest in natural and cultural environments right on their doorstep.

As historian Rosemary Sweet writes on the British Library website:

‘The closure of much of continental Europe during the Napoleonic Wars forced a generation of travellers to discover their own country: domestic tourism, already well established, enjoyed an unprecedented boom, as the outpouring of tour guides, works of topography and topographical prints from this period suggest.’

*George Barret, Sr, Lake Ullswater: a party of tourists gathering to enjoy the prospects at the head of the lake 1781*. *Image in public domain.*

It wasn’t that no one had ever travelled for pleasure within Britain before; rather, the inaccessibility of Europe heightened and concentrated an interest that already existed. Domestic travel itself wasn’t entirely new, but the boom in domestic travel was ‘unprecedented’. (There’s that word again!)

The destinations that really took off in this domestic tourism boom were the Wye Valley on the English-Welsh border, Derbyshire, the Lake District and Scotland. Can you see what they have in common? They are – or at least they were – wild places, far from big cities, offering beautiful scenery as well as glimpses into deeply non-metropolitan ways of life, which were often savoured with a dash of Celtic exoticism.

*‘Wye Valley’ by Stefan Jürgensen, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0*

Whereas visitors to Europe on the Grand Tour wanted to see ancient ruins and great works of art, the domestic travel boom precipitated by Britain’s long-running war with France was more concerned with discovering picturesque scenes and scenery. Whereas the Grand Tour was essentially educational in orientation, the new domestic tourism focused on the search for sentimental experiences – for new feelings rather than new knowledge. Romantic art and literature had a lot to do with this, as they provided travellers with a new vocabulary for talking about the emotional effects of landscapes and remote places.

Jane Austen was well aware of that when, in chapter 27 of Pride and Prejudice (1813), she framed Elizabeth Bennet’s ecstatic response when invited by her aunt and uncle to accompany them on a ‘northern tour’.

‘We have not determined how far it shall carry us,” said Mrs. Gardiner, “but, perhaps, to the Lakes.’

No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth, and her acceptance of the invitation was most ready and grateful. ‘Oh, my dear, dear aunt,’ she rapturously cried, ‘what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour.’

Lizzie imagines that their trip will be all about seeing ‘lakes, mountains, and rivers’, a response typical of the new domestic tourism and very different from the focus on history and cultural monuments that characterised the European Grand Tour.

*View in Dovedale, Derbyshire. Etching after* George Cuitt, c.1797-1820
*© The Trustees of the British Museum*
*This is the kind of scenery Elizabeth Bennet hoped to see on her ‘northern tour’.*

The travel restrictions caused by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had two lasting effects on the history of tourism. The generation-long ‘closure’ of Europe to British travellers led to a complete redrawing of the domestic tourist map, with new destinations being discovered and popularized that are still at the forefront of British tourism today. (Scotland and the Lake District are perfect examples.) And when the wars finally ended in 1815 and British travellers rushed back to the Continent in greater numbers than ever before, the terms of the overseas travel experience had changed forever. The exclusively male, aristocratic Grand Tour was dead. Now, travel was for all – for women, for families, for the middle class and even, increasingly, for the working class. Within a few decades the era of mass tourism had begun.

So, what can we look forward to when the world map on the SmartTraveller website eventually returns to being a collage of green, yellow and orange instead of its current red? I don’t think we can imagine yet what the structural shift in the travel industry will look like, but I believe there will be one, just as there was in the early nineteenth century.

View of Chatsworth. Etching after Edward Dayes, 1794
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Lizzie Bennet would have seen views like this at Mr Darcy’s property, Pemberley, in Derbyshire.

In the mean time, domestic travel will be the winner. Although as I write this new internal border closures are being announced in Australia, as they have been in many other countries, once the worst of this crisis eases, it will be domestic destinations that reopen first. When that happens, let’s join Elizabeth Bennett in her rapturous response to the possibility of experiencing new scenes and say with her, ‘What delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour.’

Where the bodies are buried.

By Scholar Gipsy | March 1, 2020 | Comments 2 comments

A few weeks ago I visited the Dead Central exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales. Billed as an exhibition ‘In Memory of a Lost Cemetery’, it tells the story of one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, the Devonshire Street Cemetery, which in 1901 was partly moved and partly overbuilt to create Central Railway Station.

Cemeteries fascinate me, especially if they’re old. I think they can be among the most interesting landmarks to visit in any location, whether at home or away. Highgate Cemetery in London, Père Lachaise in Paris, the ancient Jewish burial ground in Prague, the Protestant Cemetery in Rome and the community graveyard on Norfolk Island (Australia) have provided some of my most memorable travel experiences. Cemeteries can tell you so much about a society and its history, as well as being full of individual stories that are often gripping, tragic or just strange.

I first learnt of the existence of the Devonshire Street burial ground when I reviewed Lisa Murray’s Sydney Cemeteries: A Field Guide for the Sydney Review of Books. Before that I had no idea that the bones of thousands of Sydney’s nineteenth-century citizens once lay beneath the concourses of Central Station, or that even older bones remain in the earth on which Sydney Town Hall stands, the site of the city’s original Burial Ground (used from 1792-1820). I wonder how many people do know that our city is literally built on the graves of our ancestors?

*Painting of Central Railway station by William Young, 1923. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.*

Dead Central aims to bring this knowledge, which has been forgotten or repressed, to light, and it does it very well. This is a beautifully curated exhibition, well supported by technology. There’s an app, which visitors download to their own devices and through which they can listen to a 35-minute audio recording that adds a lot of emotion and personality to the visual exhibits. If after this you still want to find out more, the library has produced a six-episode podcast called The Burial Files, which delves further into the interlocking histories of the cemetery and the railway.

The exhibits at Dead Central include a couple of names that most Sydneysiders will recognize. One is Mary Reibey, the legendary convict turned successful businesswoman, whom most of us learn about in primary school – or at least we did back in the 1970s. You’ll remember her face from the Australian $20 note. The other is First Fleeter James Squire, who established the colony’s first successful brewing business, and whose name is still stamped on craft beers we enjoy today. Both were buried in the Devonshire Street Cemetery, Squire in 1822 and the longer-lived Reibey in 1855.

*Portrait of Mary Reibey, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.*

Having opened in 1820, Devonshire Street was closed to new burials in 1867; thereafter the site became increasingly rundown and neglected, and some voices called for its complete closure. It wasn’t until 1901, though, that the New South Wales parliament decided to resume the land and use it to build Central Station. The other option, apparently, was to build the new station on Hyde Park – so thank goodness they made the choice they did, rather than taking away our largest green space in the city centre!

The problem of what to do with the graves was, of course, immense. According to Lisa Murray, ‘[a]pproximately 8500 remains were claimed by descendants and removed with their associated monumentation to other cemeteries’ (Sydney Cemeteries, p.53). Around 30,000 more were exhumed and moved to Bunnerong Cemetery in the Eastern Suburbs, a grisly task according to eyewitnesses. Other human remains were inadvertently left behind, because no one really knew how many people had been buried at Devonshire Street.

The fact that we have as many records as we do of the old cemetery is thanks to the heroes of this story, a married couple named Josephine Ethel Foster and Arthur George Foster. He worked in retail at Anthony Hordern’s department store. She, as far as I can tell, wasn’t employeds outside the home, but was a keen photographer. They both loved history. The Fosters decided that someone needed to record as much information as possible about the Devonshire Street graves before they were moved or destroyed.

*A. G. Foster’s meticulous record book, in which he not only transcribed epitaphs but carefully drew the shape of each headstone.*

With this aim, they spent every weekend for two years at the derelict site. She photographed the headstones and memorials, while he transcribed the epitaphs. Unpaid, working on their own initiative, these two private citizens performed an invaluable service to the city they loved and to the cause of history in general. They went on to become very active founding members of the Royal Australian Historical Society.

So, what remains of the Devonshire Street Cemetery? 746 headstones and memorials – those that remained in reasonably good condition – were moved from Bunnerong Cemetery in the 1970s to the Botany Pioneer Memorial Park at Matraville, where they can be visited today. For the rest, we have only the Fosters’ images and texts to remind us of what once was.

*One of Josephine Ethel Foster’s photographs of the old Devonshire Street Cemetery.*

Seeing this exhibition has altered my perception of Central Station. To me, it was always ‘just there’, part of my world since childhood. It’s good to have this glimpse into its hidden history and to know that, beneath its everyday surface, lies a complex human past.

Did you know?

Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market and New York’s Central Park are two other examples of prominent urban landmarks that were established over the top of disused burial grounds.

Sir Francis Bacon’s Advice to Travellers

By Scholar Gipsy | February 16, 2020 | Comments 2 comments

*Portrait of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) by an unknown artist*.

The other day, I came across the essay ‘Of Travel’ by the English Renaissance polymath Sir Francis Bacon. Published in 1601, the short (two-page) composition is a statement of advice to young men preparing to travel out of their own country. Setting aside the gender-exclusive character of the writing – it would have been unthinkable then for a young woman to go travelling for her own interest and pleasure – I found myself wondering how much of Bacon’s essay might still be relevant today. Here are three pieces of advice that caught my eye.

‘That young men travel under some tutor, or grave servant … such a one that hath the language, and hath been in the country before; whereby he may be able to tell them what things are worthy to be seen, in the country where they go …’

Personal tutors and servants – grave or otherwise – being in short supply these days, how can we now obtain this kind of personalized guidance for our travels? Well, one possibility is that genie in a bottle called Google, who lives inside our phones and devices, just waiting to do our beck and call. Google can tutor us on any subject, speaks countless languages and can instantly translate anything we need to say or understand. And there’s that other genie, Siri, who magically answers all questions and tells us how to find our way to where we’re going.

Yet I feel that these virtual tutors and servants don’t quite cover what Bacon had in mind, and this is where we need to think about the benefits of using real-life guides, actual people who speak the local language and know all the inside tips on where to go and what to see.

*Carl Spitzweg, c.1835, painting of English tourists with their guide near Rome. Creditline: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Fotograf: Jörg P. Anders*

I used to shy away from tours and tour guides, preferring to discover new places on my own. Recently, for one reason or another, I’ve been on more tours, ranging in length from one hour to nine days, and now I understand the value of a really good guide.

Five years ago, on my very first travel-writing gig, I toured King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, as a side trip from a luxury rail journey between Edinburgh and London. It was my third time there, and I felt sure that I’d already seen it all. Ten minutes into the tour with one of the excellent local guides, I was seeing details I’d never noticed before, and hearing stories that added layers of meaning to the architectural spectacle. I came away with a much fuller understanding of the building and its significance – and a huge respect for the learning of the guide who’d been my ‘tutor’ for the hour.

*The intricate interior of King’s College Chapel (here painted by Joseph Murray Ince in the 1840s) is best interpreted by a well-prepared guide.*

More recently, I did my first – and so far, only – multi-day tour with a single guide. For nine days, on Beyond Travel’s Sri Lanka Uncovered tour, my friend and I had the exclusive services of a licensed ‘chauffeur-guide’. The improbably named Milinda, a toweringly strong Sri Lankan man, not only drove us everywhere and explained the history and geography of everything, but also imparted a finer kind of local knowledge. How to open and eat a mangosteen, for example, and why all the drivers tooted their horns so often.

He also added something extra to the itinerary, for which I’ll always be grateful: a visit to the Buduruwagala rock temple near Wellawaya, in the south of the island. Far from the main road, in a forest clearing where butterflies flitted across beams of light filtered through the tree branches, we stood in awed silence before seven giant figures carved into a cliff face, the largest being a 16-metre high representation of Buddha himself. There were no other tourists, and only two local people there. It was one of the most eerie, mysterious, but also serene and uplifting experiences I’ve ever had. And we never would have found it without our ‘grave servant’ – and now friend – Milinda.

*Buddhist rock carvings at Buduruwagala, Sri Lanka. Picture credit: Angela Brooks.*

‘Let him sequester himself, from the company of his countrymen, and diet in such places, where there is good company of the nation where he travelleth.’

This piece of advice definitely rings as true today as it did 400 years ago. If you find an eating establishment on your travels that is full of English speakers, don’t go in. Find one that’s full of people speaking the language of the country you’re visiting. That way, you’ll not only encounter more authentic cuisine, you’ll also have a chance to observe local manners.

I have two standout memories of eating in local establishments with ‘good company of the nation’ where I was travelling. One was in Sicily, in the hilltop town of Monreale, 12km from Palermo. My husband and I had just visited the famous cathedral with its extraordinary Byzantine-style mosaic decorations. We stopped at a nearby restaurant for lunch, attracted by the sound of Italian voices within. As we were tucking into our delicious meal, we were astonished to see a troop of about thirty Italian schoolchildren enter and climb the stairs to an upper level, where they were served the same cuisine as us. They were on a school excursion and this was their lunch break – no McDonalds or packed lunches for them! It was a wonderful illustration of how Italians of all ages enjoy ‘la dolce vita’ as a kind of national birthright.

My other most vivid recollection of eating with locals was having breakfast at the Bar El Comercio in central Seville. Its incredible ambience was created partly by the original Belle Epoque décor – chandeliers and painted tiles and marble-topped tables – and partly by the buzz of conversation as city workers fortified themselves for the day with strong coffee and decadent chocolate churros. To us it was a once-off treat, but to them it was an ordinary start to the day. What a culture!

‘When he stayeth in one city or town, let him change his lodging from one end and part of the town, to another.’

This third piece of advice from Sir Francis Bacon intrigues me. I can’t say that I’ve ever done it, at least not voluntarily, but I can see the point and I might try it next time I have more than a couple of nights in one city. To stay some of the time in the West End and some of the time on the South Bank or at Greenwich would certainly bring some variety to a London holiday, as would dividing a week in Paris between the Île-Saint-Louis and Montmartre. Have you ever done something like this? Would you recommend it?

Category: Travel blog