A Report from the National Library, and Then Some

Back again, and I've got some more pictures from around town. I'll start out with this shot, taken just down the road from my apartment, which features both the leafy broad streets of Canberra and (in the background) the Testra Tower, one of the most notable features of the city. I suspect it's the tallest structure in town, and it looks over the city from a perch high on Mount Black. Because it's omnipresent, it's a great orienting device when you get lost on the twisty roads. (Telstra, incidentally, used to be the national, government-run telephone service, but was privatized during the 1990s. Australia has been on something of a privatization binge during the past decade.) Anyway, Telstra operates the tower, which you can climb up (I haven't yet). Telstra also runs nationalistic TV ads attacking their rival, Optus, for being a predatory Singaporean company. I bought my Optus sim card before I learned of their nefariousness, though my week-long ordeal getting my phone credits up and running suggests that there may be some truth to the ad.

I took the rest of these pictures on my way home from the National Library of Australia. Honestly, the Library is pretty much amazing. It has the most user-friendly (and comprehensive) electronic catalog I've ever had the pleasure of using. It has the largest collection in the Southern Hemisphere, as I learned today. It also has some amazingly gregarious patrons, including one 60ish lady who invited me to a Salvation Army party at the end of October, which you better believe I am going to attend. Even the architecture is, by Canberra standards, very stylish:

The inside is even nicer, with stained glass in the lobby and a sleek glass-enclosed cafe.

I've been spending most of my time this week at the Library digging up old government documents, obscure conference reports, and the like. The real find so far has been a 1969, state-issued book of Scripture readings for primary students (a.k.a. elementary schoolchildren) replete with chapter and verse. It's nothing out of the ordinary--nothing you wouldn't expect to see at a Sunday School, for instance--except for the government imprint. Such is my lot these days: getting excited over children's books from 40 years ago.

The other neat thing I found was a collection of New South Wales primary curriculum guides from 1925, 1952, 1959, 1970, and 1975. (There's one from 1941 that I'll need to get in Sydney when I travel there one of these weekends.) Unlike the U.S., where curriculum decisions are made at the local level, here curriculum standards are determined at the state level, so you get a uniformity that is unheard of in America. (It makes the research job much easier, too!) Anyway--though this has nothing directly to do with my research--the difference between the 1970 and the 1975 guides is pretty outstanding. It's as if the Department of Education suddenly got taken over by a hostile band of developmental psychologists. All of the curricula through 1970 were very structured, subject-focused (English, mathematics, social studies, etc.), and full of recommended readings for each grade level. In 1975, the entire syllabus is almost pure theory: filled with very broad statements about the goals of education, child psychology, and almost entirely content-free. It's an amazing, and amazingly abrupt, shift. The funniest part is that, in 1977, the New South Wales Department of Education also issued a booklet entitled Aims of Elementary Education, which, upon opening, is essentially written in the style of a children's book, with lots of pictures of smiling kids, about twenty words of text per page, and really big pages. Yet this is presumably aimed at an adult audience. It's entirely bizarre.

The walk back to my place is long: around 45 minutes. Normally I take the bus, but today was not too cold and I was feeling like the exercise. The Library is on the south side of Lake Burley Griffin, which divides the northern, commercial, center of Canberra from the southern, governmental, center. The lake was created by damming a muddy creek, so swimming is "not recommended" according to the guidebooks. When I asked roomies K. and A. about the idea, they laughed in shock and said, "Are you crazy?" Which I guess means the guidebook authors were being polite. In any event, to get home I have to cross the long bridge across the lake, which gave me the chance to take a set of shots of the lake just before sundown:

(I'm experimenting with composite, panoramic shots this week. If you like them, I'll try to do more now that I've figured out how to do them on my primitive photo software.)

In the shot, the inescapable Telstra Tower is on Mount Black to the right. Center, the arch is part of the National Museum, which is just below ANU, and which is supposed to be terrific. I'm hoping to get there this weekend. My house would be somewhere at the very far right of the picture.

On the way into town, here is a view of Canberra's central business district as you approach it from the national capitol:

I think I told someone that Canberra is kind of like if you took downtown Madison and plopped it in the middle of the suburbs, and I think this picture captures that pretty well. The downtown is decidedly low-rise. There is a big circular, essentially decorative roundabout at the end of the bridge, around which downtown Canberra wraps, which makes the city feel yet further spread out. So, downtown is what it is, which is, alas, far less exciting than government-issued Scripture readers from 1969.

Well, that's almost enough for now, but I'll leave you with this: I learned, last night, as K. threw an impromptu dinner party (A. is at a training in Kuala Lumpur for two weeks), that Canberra is apparently renowned for its pornography. According to the dinner party guests, the Australian Capital Territory's biggest export for years was pine trees. When the city was being built, they planted huge pine forests all around it to serve as a commodity. Most of those forests burned a couple of years ago (apparently, pine needles don't decompose well in Australia) during bush fire season. So now, I am told, Canberra's biggest export is now porn. I am further told that, if I go to the Fyshwick neighborhood, I can see all manner of strip clubs and brothels (prostitution is legal here, too) and "studios." I fear K. now has it in his head to take me to Fyshwick to see the sex shows. Stay tuned...

First Pictures from Canberra

I've finally gotten around to taking some pictures of my daily routine in Canberra, so here they are for your enjoyment:

This picture is of the O'Connor Shops, hard by my apartment (you can see the apartment complex immediately behind the shopping complex if you squint really hard). Canberra is an exceedingly spread-out city (thank you, Garden City movement) made up of dozens of "suburbs," each with a little commercial district at its center. Apart from the commercial district, the rest of the suburb is, well, suburban: lots of large lots and lawns and parks and absolutely nothing to do. I suppose I'm fortunate in that the O'Connor Shops contain All Bar Nun, one of the best bars in town, plus a little overpriced grocery store, a great fish-and-chips shop, and a decent Vietnamese restaurant. But it would be nice if there were more to do at close range. Well, maybe once things warm up in a month or so I'll be able to venture further on my new used bike.

The rest of these pictures are pictures of the Australian National University Campus, about a 15 minute walk/ 5 minute bike ride from my apartment. (Sorry, I took them all at dusk on my way to a lecture, so they're a bit dark.) This is the main entrance to the campus that I pass by every day on my way into campus. The university (or, as the perpetually-abbreviating Australians say, "Uni") is actually a hybrid of two colleges, one a research-only campus and the other an undergraduate teaching college. This means that an appointment in the research school means no teaching responsibilities. Sweet deal, eh? The Social and Political Theory Program resides in the research school, which means that the faculty are available pretty much all the time, and make regular appearances at morning and afternoon teas (an innovation that American universities could certainly stand to import).

Much like UC-Berkeley, ANU has a creek running through the center of it. Much unlike Berkeley, the creek is not surrounded by beautiful redwood groves, but rather by large willow trees and grassy lawns. (If you've noticed a strong British influence on the university so far, you win!) When I first arrived, everything was pretty much dead and brown, but it's greening up bit by bit as spring approaches. If this picture is any indication, I'm sure it will be quite lovely and pastoral come October. Like the rest of Canberra, the campus is spread out and garden-like to a ridiculous degree, which means that it's a good ten minutes from the main gate to my office (see below).

This picture shows the Student Union, which contains a number of restaurants, shops, and a bar. The bookstore (not pictured) is across the street. Earlier in the week, this plaza was mobbed with students handing out pamphlets for the elections for student government. I got a kick out of telling them I wasn't eligible to vote, and watching them look confused. One of the shops on the ground floor is a bakery which sells an astounding array of meat pies. At A$3 a pie, they're one of the only bargain lunches around, incredible delicious, and extremely unhealthy. So I eat there pretty much all the time.

This is Chifley Library, the main library for the campus. It's a fairly small library compared to Berkeley's Doe Library, but they apparently keep a remarkable amount of stuff from before 1990 in reserve storage someplace in New South Wales. This can be frustrating for the researcher trying to track down back issues of Melbourne Studies in Education or Victorian Historical Review, but it gives the library a nice -- surprise! -- spaciousness. The librarians are very friendly, by the way. One of them invited me to join her film club after I asked her whether it was possible to view tables of contents of journals otherwise on reserve storage in the bowels of the Outback. (The answer was no.)

This lovely building is the Coombs Building, home of the Research School of Social Sciences, and home to me when I'm working on campus. The building is designed -- I'm not kidding about this -- in the shape of an organic molecule, with three interlocking hexagonal sections. Offices are numbered, as a result, based on section of the building, floor, and office number. As you might imagine, this is incredibly confusing. To make matters worse, the architects decided to design it so that the floors in the various sections don't align with one another. So the entire building is a patchwork of half-staircases and blind turns and irrational numbering. Oh, and it's also under construction so as to make it accessible to the disabled, which as you might imagine means essentially tearing the whole building apart; this only adds to the chaos of trying to find your way around.

I was feeling awful that I kept getting lost until last Monday, when I went to a meeting with a professor. He took me downstairs to introduce me to some colleagues in economics, and even he got lost along the way. And he's been here for upwards of twenty years! Really, what can I say: modernist architecture 1, humans 0. On the plus side, there's an awful lot of money sloshing around in this building, and I've got a fantastic office with two pretty cool European philosophy students (one studying political philosophy, the other the philosophy of mind), so it's all good once I find my way to my office...

Finally, we come to one of the newer (and cooler) buildings on campus: the Medical Research Building. For some reason, the lecture I went to see on religion, tolerance, and terrorism was held in the lecture hall in this building. The lecture wasn't so hot, but the building was pretty great. (And the lecture room was very nice, too.)

So, there, in a nutshell, is a guided tour of my daily walk to work. Now that I've finally finished up those American hangover papers, I'll be around here more frequently, at least for the next couple weeks before I shift over to the National Archives and National Library during the week. I biked over to the government section of town this afternoon, but didn't take any pictures. But never fear, once I do, I'll post them here for you to admire. Until then!

Sunday's Fun Religious News from Australia

One of the fun things about being over here is that, despite Australia's secular image and self-identity, there is still an awful lot of religion in the local news. Today, while waiting for fish and chips at the shop across the road, I happened across four fun religion stories in the Sunday Telegraph:

ITEM!!!

Labor Leader Kevin Rudd spoke last week to religious leaders, burnishing his Christian credentials:

Last week, Rudd addressed the Australian Christian Lobby, and he was a prominent member of the Federal Parliamentary prayer group.

He has previously declared the Christian faith, along with a commitment to social justice, to be one of the guiding principles of his life.

"For me the Christian faith is an undergirding (sic) principle,'' he said.

Today, he is being accused of hypocrisy after admitting to getting plastered and hitting up strip clubs in New York.

ITEM!!!

Assemblies of God to begin advertising during Australian Idol (link not available).

ITEM!!!

Australia's friendly skies are not so friendly, if you're Jewish:

Sydney executive David Moses has lodged a complaint with [QANTAS], alleging the [flight attendant] repeatedly made derogatory comments about Jews, even after discovering that Mr Moses was Jewish.

[...]

He said the steward had complained to him about an elderly French passenger who had become agitated over the provision of a wheelchair for her husband on arrival.

Mr Moses said the attendant had turned to him and said "Jews''.

When he asked what she meant, she had replied: "That's what you get when you deal with Jews.''

[...]

After he told the steward "I am Jewish'', Mr Moses said she responded: "Well, you better go and tell her that she's letting your team down.''

But, of course, I've saved the best for last:

ITEM!!!

University of Western Sydney cafeteria defines "halal" inclusively, to include bacon:

A CATERING company has apologised to Muslim university students after trying to sell them "halal bacon and egg rolls".

University of Western Sydney students had been suspicious for months about the authenticity of food labelled "halal'' at campus canteens.

Their concerns were unexpectedly proved correct when in-house catering company UWSConnect offered "halal bacon and egg rolls'' at the Bankstown campus.

Down Under

I arrived in Australia yesterday, and am slowly getting myself up and running. A few notes:

• You apparently don't get contemporary in-flight entertainment on United flights to Australia. The fare for my trip included some movie with Richard Gere as a 20-something; Wall Street; Shrek (the original); and some movie with Sandra Bullock crying a lot and hugging two young girls. Fortunately, I chose to read Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country and was enormously entertained instead.
  
• Australian customs and immigration is far more assertive and aggressive even than American customs. Dogs running up and down the waiting lines, really intense questioning about fruits, veggies, etc. It was not a speedy process.
• The flight attendant on the short hop from Sydney to Canberra was 6'5" and named Kylie. Somehow, this seemed appropriate.
• Apparently, Australian magpies will play the role of the American rooster in this adventure. They sing at 6AM, with a call that sounds not unlike R2D2 short-circuiting.
• Regrettably, the housing stock in Australia appears to have been designed by the same folks who designed California's--that is, under the impression that it never gets cold here. So my room loses heat at an incredible rate at night. And it is not warm here either; temps top out around 50-55 degrees during the bright sunny day, but dip below freezing at night. I'm going to have to buy some additional blankets this evening, I think.

It's been a good trip so far. I've got a bank account, internet access, and I've set up my spacious though partially magenta room. Roomies K. and A. seem very congenial and outgoing. Today, I'm off to acquire a cell phone and to introduce myself to the fine folks at Australian National University. I'll post more about Canberra and those adventures later.

San Millan de la Cogolla -- June 2, 2007

Here are a few pictures from around San Millan de la Cogolla, in the Rioja region. San Millan is famous as the "birthplace of the Spanish language," if memory serves because one of the first monks in Spain to write in the vernacular lived in one of the area's two monasteries, in around the eleventh century or so.

The first pictures were taken at Yuso, one of the two monasteries (the other, Suso, was closed). The latter were taken on the way back to our hotel in Haro, when we stopped off at a berm of wild poppies, which are everywhere in Spain in early June.

Burgos Cathedral -- June 1, 2007

I learned a thing or two about my patron saint today...

This picture shows the main entrance to Burgos Cathedral, one of the greatest in Spain. We hit it on the first day of our trip, some three hours after I arrived in Madrid from New York on an overnight flight. Mercifully, L. did all of the driving up from Madrid (two hours) so I was able to sleep in the car and actually enjoy the cathedral. Even on a trip that included the grand Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, this cathedral was a high point, especially its exquisite treasury of medieval art.

Much as you can't get very far around Florence without running into all kinds of statues of Saint Sebastian getting shot full of arrows, you can't get far around Burgos without running into paintings of Saint Jerome (a.k.a. San Jeronimo). Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), Saint Jerome didn't meet with a grisly death, so instead he's usually depicted looking tormented, reading and/or translating the Bible, in the vicinity of a skull (symbol of meditation). For his labors, he is now patron saint of archivists, librarians, and students. So it's somewhat appropriate, given my impending journey, to devote this post to the many terrific depictions of Saint Jerome that fill Burgos Cathedral:


As cool as St. Jerome is, however, he can't hold a candle to the best piece of art in the treasury. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am proud to present...

Disco Jesus!


I mean, is there really any doubt that this version of Jesus is not just bringing light and truth, but bringing it?

Santillana del Mar -- June 3, 2007

Santillana del Mar is a small town in the north of Spain which is, its name to the contrary, not located on the ocean. It's an extremely well preserved medeival town, near the famous (and closed to the public) Altamira Caves, which means it gets quite a bit of tourist traffic during the day. It empties out at night, however, which is when we experimented with night photography:

For some reason, the black and white ones always turn out the best at night. I think it's because they capture the two-headed nightwalkers that the color shots just can't...