Portrait of Queen Victoria

From time to time, I continue to investigate (just for fun) the mysterious portrait of a young Queen Victoria, inherited by my friend Sheridan. When I last visited England, a year and a half ago, I dropped in at an arts school in the London suburb of Hampstead, known today as the Institute, which I mistook for the Hampstead Garden Suburb School of Arts and Crafts, whose former principal was Ernest Heath [1867-1945]. The director of the Institute told me that the two schools had nothing in common, and he suggested that I contact the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington concerning Sheridan's plaque. Before I could do so, I needed to set down clearly, in the form of a website, my speculations concerning the plaque. And that's what I've been doing over the last few days.

[Click the image to visit my new website.]

Before building this website and contacting the museum (which I intend to do immediately), I had to get over an amusing obstacle, in the form of a legend that arose in Sheridan's family context in Australia. According to this legend, one of Sheridan's female ancestors was an adolescent friend of Victoria, and the ceramic plaque was a personal gift to her from the queen, maybe at the time of the marriage of Victoria and Albert. To evaluate this legend, which is surely false, I was helped greatly (in a negative sense) by an excellent study of Victoria's adolescence written recently by a US professor of English from Texas, Lynne Vallone.

It's a fascinating detective exercise to examine a certain situation, constructed around a legend, in order to separate the factual wheat from the mythical chaff. In the case of Sheridan's legend about a friendship between two adolescent girls, one of whom was a commoner and the other a princess, the emerging truth would appear to be far more gratifying. My conclusions are outlined in the new website. I'm convinced that Sheridan's ancestors in London were related to a celebrated line of creators who were appointed engravers and painters to British monarchs, including Victoria. That's more interesting than having an ancestor who was merely a teenage friend or bridesmaid of the queen...

Leafies

Aussies like to refer to tradesmen as tradies, firemen as firies, etc. To designate individuals who desire to lead an existence surrounded by trees, leaves, bark, etc... I've invented the word leafies. In a typical leafie home, leaves are literally part of the decor.

In polite Aussie terms, leafies might be designated as environmentalist militants, greenies, who've created lobbies against protective burning. Leafies are romantic citizens who like to sit on the balconies of their homes in the wilderness, guzzling beer and admiring the sunset, while the bushfires advance.

Today, we must designate these naive ideological leafies as murderers. Leaves or lives? That is the question...

A lord and his lady

The name Shaftesbury might not ring a bell with many people. It's a small town on a hill in the southern English county of Dorset.

In 1973, Shaftesbury's steep street was made famous by a TV ad for a brand of bread named Hovis:

Curiously, the commentator speaks with a North Country rather than a Dorset accent. This publicity was followed by several funny spoofs. Here's one of them:

In my articles written in August 2007 entitled End of English excursion [display] and Dorset ancestral anecdotes [display], I described my genealogical pilgrimage to Blandford, which is not far away from Shaftesbury.

I've often been intrigued by the fact that the names Skeffington and Shaftesbury have almost identical etymologies. Let me explain. The remote ancestors from whom I acquired my Skyvington surname were Normans who sailed across the English Channel with William and usurped a Saxon settlement (tun) in Leicestershire whose patriarch was called Sceaft, meaning shaft. Maybe this Saxon elder had earned this name through his skills in spear-throwing. In any case, this fellow was not an ancestor of the Norman invaders who chased the Saxons away. The Anglicized name of the place where my Norman ancestors settled down, Skeffington, was simply a reminder of the original Saxon name. I have no reason to imagine that any of the original Saxons mated with the Normans invaders, giving rise to offspring with genuine Sceaft genes... because I'm a lousy spear-thrower. In the case of Shaftesbury, too, the Norman invaders appear to have usurped a Saxon stronghold (burg) created by a patriarch called Sceaft.

Apart from that, whenever Shaftesbury and Dorset are mentioned, I think immediately of the beautiful face of Nastassja Kinski in the film Tess [1979] by Roman Polanski. In fact, although the novelist Thomas Hardy [1840-1928] located Tess of the d'Urbervilles in Dorset, Polanski's movie was actually shot in the north of France. Now, I'm letting myself get led astray...







In the 17th century, a Dorset fellow named Anthony Cooper, with no outstanding qualities or world-shaking talents, nevertheless persuaded the king to name him the Earl of Shaftesbury. Later, his descendants left the town with the steep hill and moved to a tiny place in Dorset named Wimborne St Giles, where they erected a red-brick mansion, and transformed themselves into posh aristocrats.


The Shaftesbury earldom still exists. As in all old families, some peers were fine men, whereas others were nincompoops. [Young readers might need to look that word up in an old English dictionary.]

In France today, we're hearing a lot about the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, Lord Anthony Ashley-Cooper, whose decomposed body was found in April 2005 at the bottom of a rubbish-strewn ravine on the French Riviera. He had been strangled in November 2004 by his brother-in-law, Mohamed M'Barek, now serving a 25-year jail sentence.



Last night, at the end of an appeals trial in the splendid Provençal city of Aix, the late lord's third wife, Jamila [shown in the above photo with her barrister, at her first court appearance, in May 2007], was sentenced to 20 years for complicity in this crime.

Getting back to etymology, we might say that the outcome of the appeals process in Aix-en-Provence confirms that Shaftesbury—as they say in the classics—got shafted. The ingredients of this sordid affair [wealth, sex, cupidity, stupidity, crime... themes that you can look up on the web] form a more dramatic cocktail than anything the Dorset novelist Hardy would have ever imagined. Polanski, on the other hand, would surely be capable of tackling such powerful stuff.

LOOKING BACK UPON THIS BLOG POST [notes written in January 2016] : Back at the time I wrote this post, some seven years ago, I was interested primarily in the name of the village, Shaftesbury, because I had heard that this word had a similar etymology to my own surname, Skyvington. Both names evoke settlements of tribes of ancient people designated by a term that stands for the shaft of a spear or arrow. I used to be intrigued by the fact that Shaftesbury is close to the territory of my Dorset ancestors named Skivington, but I now believe that any Shaftesbury/Skivington similarity is purely a coincidence. While writing the blog post, I became intrigued by the character of the celebrated politician Anthony Ashley Cooper [1801-1885], 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. Then, of course, I was intrigued by the unhappy ending of a recent head of the family, murdered by a brother and sister who are now in prison... no doubt for years to come. But I had no reason to suspect that my humble blog post would lead to so many enthusiastic reactions from individuals, apparently Americans, who seem to look upon themselves as members of the same noble family as Lord Shaftesbury.

Microsoft decides to open stores

Microsoft has just announced plans to set up a chain of stores to sell their products directly to consumers, in the same way as their competitors Apple and Sony. It goes without saying that Microsoft will strive to imagine a unique style for its future stores, reflecting the specific character of the company and its products. It would be, not only a pity, but a marketing error, if a Microsoft store were to resemble any old Apple boutique or Sony shop.

So, the guessing game is now on, to imagine what a future Microsoft store will look like...

Death of Gavroche

My dear billy-goat Gavroche has finally met his death... maybe yesterday, on Darwin Day, but probably a few days earlier. I've just discovered the remainder of his carcass on the snow-covered grass under the walnut trees. Last night, I became aware that something was wrong when my flashlight revealed that Sophia was racing around madly and barking in the vicinity of the donkey hut, on the edge of my property. I'll never know what killed my little friend, but chances are he got kicked in the head or crushed by the donkey Moshé.

Over the years, I had become extremely fond of that smelly little beast, who was truly part of the Gamone landscape. Often, I felt bad about not finding him a female goat, but I didn't want to bring about a situation in which the property would be transformed into the home of a herd of goats. Meanwhile, Gavroche had developed the habit of visiting the feral sheep whenever he was moved by a sexual urge. All in all, I think that Gavroche lived well here at Gamone, where he roamed in liberty across the slopes. But I was aware that, in wandering around constantly with his temperamental and massive mate Moshé, and often jostling the donkey as if they were equals, Gavroche was living dangerously.

Je suis tombé par terre,
C'est la faute à Voltaire,
Le nez dans le ruisseau,
C'est la faute à...

Announcements in genetics

Over the last 24 hours, the Creator seems to have joined in the Darwin Day celebrations by performing a neat little act of synchronicity, in the form of two interesting announcements in the genetics domain.

First, an official French report states that, according to recent research, genetically-modified corn can be consumed with no risks by humans.

Second, scientists in Germany reveal that they have fully reconstructed the genome of Neanderthals.

This good news suggests that if—as I hope—we end up cloning a new community of Neanderthal citizens, we should have no trouble in feeding them.

Darwin Day

A few evenings ago, I saw an extraordinary 50-minute French-language TV documentary entitled Espèces d'espèces (Kinds of species), explaining how humans are cousins of countless creatures, organisms, plants, bacteria, etc. We have in common the undeniable fact (unknown, of course, to Charles Darwin) that we're all built out of strands of stuff called DNA.

An ingenious underlying element of the movie, which exploits superb graphics, was a novel representation of the "tree" of species in the form of a kind of big spherical cauliflower, which could have been mistaken for the fat brain of some mysterious giant creature. In fact, this "tree" might indeed be imagined, metaphorically, as the brain of a primordial virtual species that we can call DNA. The root of the tree has a lovely name: LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of the myriad DNA-based species that have existed on the planet Earth.

Although this has nothing to do with Darwin Day, that name reminds me, of course, of one of my favorite songs. So let me use that association as a pretext to celebrate Darwin Day by including in this post the famous song of Suzanne Vega... who is certainly one of the loveliest specimens of Homo sapiens I've ever admired.



Getting back to the "tree", we're obliged to admit that Homo sapiens is nothing more than a tiny blob on the outer surface of the cauliflower "cortex". We are neither more nor less important (whatever that might mean) than countless other blobs representing everything from whales, elephants and giant oak trees down to tiny insects and unicellular organisms such as bacteria.

Today, we can't evoke Darwin without thinking of one of his most brilliant offspring (metaphorically speaking): Richard Dawkins.

The TV documentary described an excursion that consisted of moving back from our Homo sapiens blob, down into the heart of the cauliflower, in pursuit of encounters with the ancestors of our various cousins. This is the same fabulous journey imagined by Dawkins in his book The Ancestor's Tale, mentioned in my article of August 13, 2008 entitled Exotic pilgrimage [display].

If you click on the portrait of Dawkins, you can see a delightful talk on atheism... which is so closely associated with Darwinism and the DNA species "tree" that I tend to think of them as part and parcel of a unique philosophy of enlightenment. And here's another nice Dawkins video:



To end this birthday post, here are links to an imaginary interview with Darwin [access] and a Scientific American article on the legacy of Darwin [access].

Hillbilly

I've always been aware that, here at Gamone, I'm basically a lawless hillbilly. And if I don't respect many laws, it's often because I ignore whether the laws really exist, and how they're formulated and enforced. If there were an old-fashioned sheriff in charge, he would surely arrest me and hang me from a tree.

Take the case of my former flock of sheep, for example. When I arrived at Gamone, there was an unwritten law (which I learned from local folk, including the veterinarian) according to which a neo-rural resident such as me, who wasn't a professional grazier, could maintain a flock of up to a dozen or so sheep, to keep the weeds down, and to provide him with lamb meat. But this tolerance ended in the aftermath of a European outbreak, in 2001, of foot and mouth disease. So, before I left for a short vacation in Australia in 2006, I called upon a butcher friend to slaughter most of my sheep. However we left a young ewe and three tiny lambs. Well, to cut a long story short, these animals were frightened by a dog, and they escaped from my place and finally set up a new home on the slopes of a neighbor's mountain property, where they have proliferated in a feral state. Recently, the veterinarian confirmed that, if I were intent upon eliminating these sheep (which is not exactly the case), the only plausible solution would consist of organizing a posse of friends armed with rifles. Unfortunately, I don't have enough armed friends to carry out such an operation.

Meanwhile, there's another subtly different approach. At the annual luncheon of the senior citizens of Choranche and Chatelus, I found myself seated alongside a neighbor who, with his sons, is one of the last surviving hunters. (My children and I have always referred to his property, strewn with decrepit vehicles and rusty machinery, as Tortilla Flat.) He seemed to suggest that, if I felt that these sheep were capable of provoking accidents by wandering onto the road (which has always appeared most unlikely), then I should simply write a letter to the president of the local hunting association informing him that I would refrain from reacting in any way whatsoever if ever stray bullets happened to hit the sheep. The general idea is that such a letter would normally have no visible existence, and the president wouldn't even reply in any way whatsoever. But I could expect the sheep to start to disappear quietly and mysteriously. In these circumstances, my letter would only reappear publicly if ever I decided to take the hunters to court (a theoretical possibility) because I had the impression that they were shooting my sheep. As you can see, it's a murky approach to problem-solving.

Another example of my hillbilly behavior concerns the burning-off of dead grass and weeds in spring. At Gamone, I decide personally to perform these operations at appropriate moments of the year, and I operate section by section, in such a way that there's never a wide wall of flames. By "appropriate", I mean that I judge that there's not enough wind to cause the flames to escape, and there's still enough dampness in the vegetation to prevent it from reacting like explosive tinder.

The reason I'm talking about rural laws in France, written and unwritten, is that I've been learning a lot, over the last few days, about astonishing rural laws in Australia. More precisely, in the wake of the sickening fire tragedies that are still unfolding in my native land, I've been trying to comprehend what went so terribly wrong, and why. Obviously, for countless reasons, there's little in common between my tiny property on the slopes at Gamone and the vast bushlands of Australia. But I've been making an effort to grasp the nature of the situation in Australia.

If I understand correctly, hillbilly behavior such as mine would be unthinkable in modern Australia, where rural laws of all kinds are abundant and rigorously enforced. On the other hand, I've discovered that not everybody in Australia considers that all these laws are "good".

In rural Australia, the vegetation that could be consumed by fire in a particular zone is referred to technically as fuel. And the process of eliminating excess fuel is referred to as prescribed burning, shown in this photo:

One of Australia's leading specialists in the domain of bushfires is David Packham, of Monash University. In one of his websites, he shows an Australian country property in which excess trees and other fuel have been removed in such a way that the house would be almost 100% survivable, as he puts it, in the case of a bushfire.

In the following photo, on the other hand, there's a house, hidden behind the vegetation, which would have a survivability near zero in the case of a bushfire:

In my eyes, the first photo looks like any old property that could be found in France, whereas the second photo is that of a strictly Australian situation, unthinkable here in France.

Packham is particularly outspoken concerning the bushfire tragedies that have just hit Victoria: "Absolute irresponsible mismanagement has been the environment in which a lot of Australia has been operating for the last thirty or forty years, and we just cannot go along like this unless we're happy to accept the sorts of disasters we've had." He has accused environmentalists of behaving like "eco-terrorists waging a jihad" against prescribed burning. It's a fact that future legislation will stigmatize controlled burning as a key national threat to biodiversity. If this draconian legislation were to go into action, as planned for 2010, then controlled burning would be considered henceforth, from an ecological and environmental viewpoint, as a "key threatening process" whose nasty effects are to be likened to those of global warming, land clearing and feral cats, pigs and foxes.

In fuel-filled landscapes where Australia's indigenous flora and fauna are encouraged to thrive in luxurious liberty, we have seen that homes and their human occupants can be wiped out by flames in less time than it takes to race outside and get into the family automobile. It will take me some time to acquire an informed opinion on this weird situation in Australia. Meanwhile, even if I were capable of uprooting myself and moving to the Antipodes, I must admit that I'm quite happy to remain a Gamone hillbilly.

Light and darkness

I'm employing this pair of words metaphorically to designate clarity and obscurity. And the theme of my post is a petition that has just been launched in favor of the German theologian Joseph Ratzinger, now known to Christendom as Pope Benedict XVI.

Readers of my Antipodes blog are probably aware that one of the only things in common between Joe/Benny and me (please call me Billy) is the fact that we have both recently acquired dual nationalities. Joe was German, while Benny now has a Vatican passport. Similarly, Billy was Australian, while William now has a French passport. I've looked hard for other links and common features between us, but this domain remains murky. The Holy Ghost has refrained from inspiring me and enlightening my quest. [Notice the subtle way in which I've started to insert the light and darkness metaphors into my discourse.]

You've realized, no doubt, that my profound sense of Christian charity has prompted me to publicize the above-mentioned petition by papal defenders. But there was method in my madness. At the bottom of the petition website, there's a fabulous set of web banners: a colorful collection of links to everything that's Byzantine and medieval in the way of today's distinguished Catholic sheep... or should I say goats, in honor of my genetically-engineered friend Jeanie [display]?

Those interested in holy rocket science could spend an entire afternoon browsing through all those lovely links. With a bit of chance, you might even learn how to make fire by rubbing sacred wafers together... but I advise you to keep a flagon or two of the blood of Jesus on hand to quench the flames if ever they attained Aussie bushfire proportions.

Seriously, what some of these folk would appear to crave for is obscurity. The neat thing about Latin, particularly if you're not a Latinist, is that you have no idea whatsoever about the sense of what's being said. This is a truly great solution for those who consider that the ways of God must necessarily remain mysterious. And lots of fuddled old-timers think that way. Ignorance has always been bliss. And there's no better way of installing a shroud of profound ignorance than to chant about existence in a mysterious language.

Meanwhile, there are those who would like to see the light... for example, concerning the exact way in which the Nazis exterminated Jews. Years ago, a Californian literary agent pleaded with me to sit in on the trials of Robert Faurisson in the law courts of Paris. I did so, for professional reasons (you might say), and soon became most confused, because vain attempts to cast light upon Nazi darkness gave rise rapidly to more murkiness than ever. The Nazi barbarians concluded their exterminations by putting out the lights, as it were, so that no meaningul traces would remain of their unspeakable acts. Blinded by ignorance and confusion, we would-be observers have no other choice than to accept the shroud of obscurity. And society condemns those—like Faurisson and his ecclesiastic adept Richard Williamson—who would dare to lift theoretically a corner of this terrible shroud by vain and painful promises of dubious assertions of facts, and false enlightenment. This is neither more nor less than the law of civilized society, designed justly to attenuate the pain of victims.

Fortunately, in ancient history, the light is falling at last upon scenes and situations that were once obscure. We now know, for example, that Jesus was essentially a Jew, and that Christianity was preceded by a lengthy and rich epoch of Judeo-Christianism, of which the Apocalypse of John is the purest expression. The apostle Paul then stepped into the picture to develop early Christianity as we commonly imagine it, incorporating Gentiles. Retrospectively, it goes without saying that the idea that Jews might have perpetrated deicide, through the Crucifixion, is mindless bullshit. So, many naive Catholic traditionalists whose web banners are displayed in the context of the above-mentioned petition concerning our quaint but curious German pope might take a more serious look at their Christian culture.

Seriously, I've always considered that all Christians who can do so should spend at least a few weeks in Israel, which is truly a land of light, capable of dispelling archaic Christian darkness. Many things, in the Holy Land, become clear. Other things, alas, are doomed to remain forever in darkness. But, since time immemorial, this pilgrimage to where it all happened has been obligatory. It teaches you to open your eyes and see. To discard darkness, and place yourself in the light.

Admittedly, it's not yet, exactly, the light of Science. But the Holy Land is an excellent beginning. Judaism is an ancient system, and we all know that Jews didn't drop down in the last shower of rain. Modern Israel, too, is an exceptionally smart nation, accustomed to facing and solving life-and-death problems. I can't think of a better place to start one's quest (as I once did) for enlightenment.

Vision of a city

This extraordinary but frightening photo (which I've modified slightly) of the great Victorian city of Melbourne, taken from burnt-out Kinglake by David Geraghty and published today in The Australian, is truly apocalyptic. We reasonable human citizens, residing in nice suburban sites or resolutely rural places (such as me at Gamone), would appear to be moving into a terrible era (global warming?) in which Hollywood horrors will be enacted, de facto, before our unbelieving eyes.

In what words would you describe this apocalyptic vision to a child? Maybe your own offspring...

Marvelous creatures

There's a popular saying in French: "Tell me what you read, and I'll tell you who you are." In fact, it's an entire family of sayings, generated by replacing "read" by any other verb that enters your imagination. For example, a widespread variant: "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." The general idea is that such-and-such an aspect of your behavior is immensely revealing in a global sense.

I would be happy if the following subtle variation on this saying were to be applied, by friends, to me: "William, tell me what you admire in such-and-such a creature, and I'll tell you who you are." If friends were to address me in this manner, and they were to listen to what I had to say, their analyses of my trivial statements would have the sanctity of a prayer. They would be spot on. Take this splendid American goat, for example:

This female animal—whom I shall name Jeanie (with a single "n", please; see my PS), evoking genes—was created by means of genetic engineering. In other words, she's a kind of visitor from outer space. She looks like a goat, and she probably behaves like a goat. Humans who are so hungry that they're prepared to eat goat meat might even decide to kill this animal, cut up her carcass, cook the fragments and eat them... and they would surely conclude that the dear departed creature actually tasted like a goat. But Jeanie is no ordinary goat, for her DNA incorporates a human gene! And it wouldn't be wise to serve Jeanie up on a plate and eat her. Because your delicately-engineered asshole (not to mention more distinguished elements of your anatomy) might suddenly start to glow in a phosphorescent green, or send out Technicolor sparks, or anything whatsoever... because we simply do not know how genetically-engineered creatures such as Jeanie might fit into our archaic world. Consequently, it would be wise, at least for the moment, to prevent Jeanie from going out on the town of a Saturday evening, and screwing around with any old billy-goat at all.

Meanwhile, Jeanie provides us with huge quantities of a precious protein called antithrombin, capable of preventing fatal blood clots in certain sick humans. Jeanie might be obliged to remain forever cloistered in a convent, like a saint with genetic stigmata, but the benefits of her existence impinge upon countless humans.

So, there you are. I've told you what I admire about the marvelous goat Jeanie. But frankly, even though you might have certain ideas on the subject, I don't think it's all that important to talk, now, about who I might be. Because everybody knows...

POST SCRIPTUM: Why have I christened this fine goat Jeanie? In 1952, a Hollywood musical incorporated a catching soft song with the refrain: "I dream of Jeanie with her light brown hair."

The tender female in question was a pale-skinned romantic Old World lass, initially portrayed by an ethereal Andrea Leeds in Swanee. Well, by chance, at that time (when I was starting high school in Grafton), my paternal grandparents, Pop and Ma, happened to employ an Aboriginal girl named Jeanie in their house at 12 Robinson Avenue. Now, lovely Jeanie (whom I remember so well) was uniformly ebony from top to bottom, including her thick black hair. In a dimly-lit bedroom, you would catch no more than the glimmer in her eyes and a flash of her pearl-white teeth. The refined sense of humor of my grandfather (whose manners remained forever strictly Victorian) extended often to mentioning with a grin, but ever so politely, their dear "Jeanie with her light brown hair".

Wrong equation

It's understandable that Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd should be disgusted, like any ordinary observer, to think that bushfires might have been lit deliberately by arsonists. But it's too early to accuse potential culprits, if indeed they exist, and it's unfortunate that Rudd's use of the expression "mass murder" has been quoted everywhere in the international press.

In evoking the notion of evil Australians in a desperate attempt to explain this tragedy, Rudd is trying to solve the wrong equation.

He's also tackling the wrong equation when he talks about rebuilding homes and towns by means of financial resources allocated towards the planetary economic crisis. Instead of reacting to the bushfire tragedy in the style of a clear-thinking statesman, the prime minister has let himself be carried away by his emotions... in a style reminiscent of that of his predecessor, John Howard, who once suggested that Steve Irwin should be given a state funeral. Clearly, our Aussie leaders are most emotional chaps, swayed by the force of chance happenings.

The true equation is well known. Its main variables concern the Australian habit of residing in the vicinity of trees and shrubs that are transformed into tinder by stretches of dry weather. Visitors to Australia are struck by the way in which suburban and rural houses are often integrated into magnificent landscapes of native vegetation. Personally, I've always envisaged such splendid environments as a wonderful reaction to the stupid behavior of agricultural pioneers, once upon a time, for whom trees were enemies, to be destroyed, because they consumed the nourishment in the soil that might be used to grow grass to feed sheep and cattle. It would be sad, of course, to see Australian houses located in bare fields, like outback bungalows on the stark slopes of dusty hills. But maybe there's a midway solution to the landscape equation that would consist of being surrounded by just enough low vegetation to avoid the rugby field effect, but not enough to create a suicidal Joan of Arc setting whenever the weather happens to be exceptionally dry. Meanwhile, the naive idea of attempting to find and neutralize arsonists, branded as home-grown terrorists, reminds me of the regrettable Dubya and his alleged "axis of evil".

BREAKING NEWS: Queen Elizabeth has just donated an unspecified sum of money to the Victorian Bushfire Fund, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy has offered material assistance that could be flown into Australia from New Caledonia. Meanwhile, various observers (including BBC journalists and a Queensland university expert) persist in evoking the existence of arsonists, and even rambling on about their psychology and motivations... although little evidence has been made public yet to support this hypothesis. There's an obvious danger that all this talk about the "enemy within" could end up generating a national psychosis, causing people to become suspicious of certain neighbors... particularly if the neighbors' property happened to escape destruction by the flames. I simply cannot understand the logic (?) of spreading rumors about arson prior to the actual capture of a significant number of suspects.

RELEVANT ARTICLE: Concerning the obvious fire danger of houses surrounded by trees, an informative article by Asa Wahlquist in today's The Australian is entitled Council ignored warning over trees before Victoria bushfires [display].

NOT ARSON: The Sydney Morning Herald has just revealed that the deadly Kinglake fire was not caused by arsonists [access].

Squirrel's-eye view of Gamone

Back in the days when electricity was brought to outlying farms such as Gamone, nobody worried much about environmental and aesthetic issues. Consequently, I've got an ugly medium-voltage line running a few dozen meters in front of the house.

I've noticed—from my bathroom window—that this lovely little squirrel has the dangerous habit of climbing up to the summit of the wooden poles to get a good global view of the Gamone countryside. Does he imagine he's in a tree with strange branches and high-voltage fruit? Is he trying to determine where there might be vegetation in the vicinity, with tasty stuff to eat? Or is he simply taking time off from his regular walnut-gathering in order to do a little sightseeing?

Bushfires in Australia

In the south-eastern state of Victoria, bushfires have just taken the lives of 65 people and destroyed hundreds of houses and countless thousands of hectares of vegetation.

I've just listened to an amazing radio report from an on-the-spot journalist. He describes the plight of members of a rural family who were awoken in the early hours of the morning by a phone call from a neighbor, informing them that a fire was approaching their property. They immediately darted down to a creek, accompanied by their dogs, and jumped in. Their heads, above water, were protected by wet blankets, while the fire charged over them.

On Saturday, the temperature in Melbourne had risen to over 46 degrees Celsius. In Sydney, it's a few degrees less. In that kind of heat, without air conditioning (which wasn't widespread in Australia when I was a young man), it becomes almost impossible to lead a normal working existence. [In my university office in Perth, in 1986, I remember aiming an electric fan at my Macintosh computer, to cool it down.] The other ingredients in a recipe for disaster are oil-saturated eucalyptus trees in residential yards, high winds and crazy arsonists.

Yesterday, a mindless Sydney newspaper (which shall go unnamed in my blog, as they've been operating on a shoestring budget since the boss kicked out their top journalists) dared to print a nice beach photo alongside a silly story about people flocking to the ocean to combat the heat, as if this were a solution. Sadly, the sunny outdoor Australian lifestyle is no guarantee against the devastation of heat and fire.

BREAKING NEWS: The murderous fires in Australia are the top item on TV news in France. The death count could be higher than 100. This extraordinary photo of a retreating firetruck was taken near Pakenham, east of Melbourne:

There's an obvious question in the minds of everybody: Is it thinkable that the extreme climatic conditions being experienced at present in Australia (drought, heat and bushfires, with floods in Queensland) might be advance signs of the consequences of global warming?

Future Citroën goddess

Did I really say goddess? The little mongrel reminds me of country mates I used to see in South Grafton, when I was a kid, who suffered from what adults referred to as "stunted growth". This simply meant that such children didn't seem to blossom into healthy-looking youngsters. They remained stubby, as if their bodies didn't wish to expand. We were told that this was brought about by the fact that these kids had the secret habit of smoking cigarettes...

The new Citroën looks to me like a plump little teenage girl in the suburbs who eats fast food and drinks beer. She dresses in a trashy punk Gothic style, and communicates in monosyllables. She probably smokes, too. In fact, she's quite cute. But not exactly Aphrodite, nor even Athena.

Screwup

When Barack Obama realized that Tom Daschle, the man he had nominated for the job of health secretary, was in a delicate and finally unacceptable taxation situation, the president made a frank mea culpa: "I screwed up." It would be nice if other world leaders could be equally candid about their faulty choices.

Incidentally, I'm curious to know the etymology of the verb "to screw up", meaning to botch something. Am I right in thinking that this verb might be a colloquial metaphor with sexual connotations? I seem to recall that it was common, in Australia, to tell a fellow to "go and get screwed", evoking Woody Allen's delightful: "I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words." In that case, Obama's language might not be papally correct. Before making a judgment on that Byzantine question, we would need to hear it in Latin.

Exceptional individuals

A few days ago, in my article entitled Dark excursion [display], I referred to tragic events on the Vercors plateau in July 1944, culminating in a massacre at Vassieux. I might have pointed out that I went on that excursion for practical reasons: namely, that I've been working on a movie script concerning the martyrs of the Vercors, and that I needed to examine various aspects of the Vassieux environment.

Although my movie project will be essentially a fictional thing, there are constant allusions to real people from that terrible epoch. Consequently, I'm researching various local heroes of the Résistance. Among them, Pierre Dalloz was an architect and mountaineering enthusiast. He's the individual who first imagined that the vast Vercors mountain range might be transformed into a natural fortress and a haven for maquisards. The basic idea of his so-called Plan Montagnards was that armed French fighters stationed in concealed camps on the seemingly invulnerable Vercors plateau could be brought into action after an Allied invasion of Provence (likely to take place shortly after the Normandy landings) with a view to encircling all the Nazis in the south of France. The project of Dalloz was brought to the attention of "Max", which was pseudonym of Jean Moulin, the courageous French prefect who had been placed by Charles de Gaulle at the head of the Résistance movement inside France. And "Max" was in total agreement with the Plan Montagnards.

Yesterday afternoon, I had the privilege of meeting up with Guillaume Dalloz, Pierre's only son (about my age)... who authorized me to take photos in the house where the Plan Montagnards was conceived by his father. [It also goes without saying—but I'll say it nevertheless—that information and images in the present blog article are being presented with the explicit assent of Guillaume Dalloz... who even invited me spontaneously to carry out future filming, if need be, at their estate.]

After I told him about my movie project, Guillaume spoke to me at length about two exceptional individuals in his father's entourage.

The writer Jean Prévost, who visited Grenoble regularly because of his ongoing research concerning the great novelist Stendhal, had become one of the closest friends of Pierre Dalloz. When the resistance movements swung into action in the Vercors, Prévost set aside his literary research and became a combatant. On 1 August 1944, as Jean Prévost was strolling down from the Vercors towards the Dalloz estate in Sassenage, he was mortally wounded by a Nazi sniper.

No doubt the closest family friend of Pierre Dalloz was the great aviator and writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

On the eve of his mysterious disappearance in the Mediterranean on 31 July 1944, Saint-Exupéry sent his final letter to Pierre Dalloz. Here is my translation of the final paragraph of this moving document:

Here I'm far removed from the swamps of hatred [reference to the Allied headquarters in Algiers], but in spite of the kindness of the squadron, it remains somewhat a place of human misery. There's never anybody with whom I can talk. It's already quite something to have people with whom I can live. But what spiritual solitude!

If I'm shot down, I'll regret absolutely nothing. The future termites' mound horrifies me. And I hate their robot-like virtue. As for me, I was made to be a gardener.

Wow, what a promising gardener: the man who wrote The Little Prince. It's weird to observe that the two great friends of Pierre Dalloz—Saint Exupéry and Prévost—were killed within a span of 24 hours.

Apparently Saint-Exupéry was an admirer of the wife of Pierre Dalloz: the painter Henriette Gröll. Guillaume Dalloz—who has published a book describing his mother's works of art—showed me a painting of a Camargues bull that Saint-Exupéry bought in a market and offered to Henriette Gröll while they were visiting Aigues-Mortes.





Sipping whiskey with Guillaume Dalloz in his magnificent house, and enchanted by trivial anecdotes of this kind, I felt light years away from the horrors of the events of 1944 in the Vercors. In fact, the writers and artists of the generation of Pierre Dalloz had fought, alongside the rural folk of the Vercors, to preserve a splendid lifestyle of traditions, culture and adventure that the Nazis were intent upon destroying. It might be said that the barbarians actually succeeded in devastating this generation, to a large extent, through the elimination of exceptional individuals such as Jean Prévost, Antoine de Saint Exupéry and countless courageous maquisards of the Vercors. But their sacrifice has made this corner of the world a wiser, more profound and sacred place.

When the world was wonderful

This publicity photo for the Citroën model DS was taken in Italy in 1961. What a nice clean image! It's hard to believe that we're looking at a scene that's almost half a century old. The heroine of the idyll is, of course, the shiny automobile, with a Milano license plate. Its chocolate gleam echoes the tones of the windows of the contemporary office block in the background, while the three elegant gentlemen on the sidewalk wear suits of the same hue... at a time when males in the English-speaking business world (I was employed by IBM in Sydney at that time) were clothed in gray or navy blue. Then there's the presence in the background of a slim blond secretary, clothed in a pale shade of reinforced concrete. Notice how she's positioned on the outskirts of the man's world, ready to dash off a letter in shorthand if ever one of the males were to call upon her services. But the men aren't really interested in this poor female outsider. Their true goddess is parked alongside, waiting to be caressed. [The letters DS are pronounced déesse in French, which means goddess.]

Apparently Citroën plans to bring out a new version of the DS. I wonder how they'll update their publicity photo...

French Eurovision contestant

On May 16, Patricia Kaas will be representing France at the Eurovision song contest in Moscow. Behind this surprising announcement, I detect an intervention by Nicolas Sarkozy. "Listen guys, France can't carry on like it's been doing for years now, proposing shit at Eurovision. We gotta pick ourselves up. Understand my point of view, guys. My wife's a popular singer, and it's so embarrassing for both of us to listen to the crap that our great nation has been offering at Eurovision in recent years. In international circles, whenever people start talking about Eurovision, I get the impression that everybody's laughing behind my back. We simply gotta do something. That's a presidential order!" Now, I don't claim that the president actually spoke those exact words... but I bet he thinks like that, and I'm convinced he got the message across that it's time for France to pull her finger out, as they say in the classics.

Click the photo to access the Kabaret website of Patricia Kaas.

Wow, Patricia Kaas! What a fabulous Eurovision contestant! A real heavyweight... If she doesn't win us the grand prize, I promise to eat the fan poster of Patricia (naked, of course) that's hanging on the wall above my bed. For that matter, I would be prepared to eat almost anything associated with Miss Kass.

Millennium

My blog editor indicates that this is my thousandth Antipodes post. So, I take this opportunity of thanking everybody who has been reading my Antipodean stuff.

The more I write, the more I'm convinced that I do indeed live in a world turned upside-down. I don't know why, but this idea pleases me immensely. If it weren't bad biology, I would conclude that it must be my Aussie genes...

Dark excursion

It doesn't seem right to describe my drive up onto the Vercors plateau yesterday afternoon as "dark", because the landscape was covered in a thick blanket of snow, making the trees stand out as a throng of black skeletons, and the sky was filled with eerie blue light.

But my excursion was metaphorically gloomy, because I would be revisiting the village of Vassieux, associated with the Vercors martyrs.

As I often do when I visit Vassieux, I halted for a few minutes in the war cemetery, in front of the simple white cross of 12-year-old Arlette Blanc (whose surname means "white" in French), who symbolizes the tragedy that took place on this lunar landscape in July 1944.

When the Nazi occupation started to make life difficult and dangerous in Grenoble, André Blanc sent his wife and their four children up to his aunt's home alongside Vassieux: an isolated place in the mountain wilderness, which appeared to be perfectly safe. Alas, everybody in the family was slaughtered. In the ruins of the farmhouse, Arlette survived in agony for a week, alongside the corpses of her sisters Jacqueline, 7, and Danielle, 4, and their 18-month-old brother Maurice. She was found by Fernand Gagnol, the young village priest. Today, in the war cemetery at Vassieux, there are white crosses for every member of the Blanc family.

On 13 November 1943, Allied aircraft had dropped a small quantity of metal cylinders containing weapons for the Vercors maquisards. Less than a fortnight later, the Gestapo decided to take steps to annihilate the maquisards. In the spring of 1944, the brave maquisards were filled with hope and optimism. As Bastille Day approached, they even proclaimed, pompously and naively, the restoration of the French Republic in the Vercors. Meanwhile, they had started to prepare a landing field alongside Vassieux, to receive the Allied aircraft and supplies they were expecting. But on 21 July 1944, aircraft of a quite different kind landed quietly and unexpectedly at Vassieux: flimsy Nazi gliders crammed with armed storm troopers.

They rapidly slaughtered everybody in the vicinity, and burned down the village of Vassieux.

Today, Vassieux has been rebuilt, and young families—untroubled by the presence of ghosts—are delighted to live in such a calm and starkly splendid rural environment. Be that as it may, the owner of a cozy café where I dropped in yesterday for a beer told me that 95% of her clients, in the summer season, visit Vassieux to reflect upon the martyrs of the Vercors. Every pilgrimage to this place remains, to a large extent, a dark excursion...