Detail from Breughel the Elder’s “Triumph of Death”, painted in 1562.

“When you say four thousand dead, that doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just a number. You can dismiss it. But if you start getting into names and faces and you see the mom and you eat pot roast with her, and you drink beer with their friends, and you listen to the guys who carried him back talking about the blood on their uniforms — you can’t dismiss it. And that’s just one. That’s just one.”

Canadian journalist Chris Jones is talking about his Esquire article which documents the journey made by the body of Sergeant Joe Montgomery from an explosion in an Iraqi paddock to his grave in Indiana.

When I studied drama at university, I was hammered with some basic lessons about nomenclature - a kind of naming of parts ritual which would be obsolete within five years. Along with expressionism and surrealism, we learnt about the formal distinction between naturalism and realism. Following Zola, we figured that naturalism used the accidents of life, the exactness and detail, to articulate the human condition as configured by external conditions. Realism, on the other hand, used detail to suggest interior states. I can feel my brain creak as I bring this back to the surface, nearly forty years later.
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Last Saturday, Radio National broadcast the last ever episode of John Cargher’s Singers of Renown, after 43 years and 2143 episodes.

We have heard his voice move from the confidence of a man in his prime clear through to old age, as mortality took hold of his larynx,but not his spirit.

Saturday’s episode was a rebroadcast of the commemorative edition he made to celebrate 2000 programs. It ends with a scene from Mephistopheles, where Margharita repudiates Faustus and enters the gates of heaven. This time, he did not speak at all, and his farewell message was delivered by someone else. I imagine him in bed, listening to his own finale, hearing himself two years ago as he spoke of his own life through music.

He died today.

On the radio, he told us how he was a Jewish orphan who started work in a factory at the age of twelve, and spent fourpence a week on the cheapest entertainment he could find - the Sadler’s Wells Opera. When the war came, he was a trained toolmaker, too short-sighted for violence. In the Blitz, he combed the ruins for records, kept the important ones, and took the rest to be crushed for their shellac.

After the war, he became an agent and musical entrepeneur, who sent many an up-and-coming talent to Australian productions, until he came here himself in 1951. He developed the retail music trade for classical music, using old warehouse stock he bought in bulk and shipped out here. He reminded us the musical theatre scene in Melbourne was lively and joyful.

By 1966 he was putting his huge collection and encyclopaedic knowledge on the airwaves, and we are the better for his coming.

I’ve never been a regular radio listener, but I love it in the car. It turns out I am often travelling at 4 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, in a floating pause between busy stuff. As my life moved between joy and travail over decades, he took me into an art that spoke of such human depth and immensity it bound me back into the great human journey, to the collective search for serenity and acceptance.

I am sure he died as we all want to die, no matter what happened to his body. I know he was loved until the end, and he was a man of great emotional wisdom.

You might like to play this in his memory.

It is sung by Kathleen Ferrier, who I first learnt about on his program. The song is Um Mitternacht, in Mahler’s version, which is translated here. And here is the kind of detail that Cargher always knew how to fit into the story - she was probably dying when she recorded that song.

There are a heap of comments from his listeners on the ABC website.

And you can hear the last episode here. I hope the ABC leaves it up for a long time.

Age journalist Steve Butcher (heh) makes a strong bid for the “the story gave me the perfect opportunity and I stepped up to the crease with nothing short of brilliance” award for this story, which starts:

“After he begged unsuccessfully for his life on a remote hill in Gippsland’s Strzelecki Ranges, Stephen John Witham made two final requests.

Once he stopped crying and screaming and realised he was going to be murdered, Mr Witham first asked his executioner, Michael Patrick Flaherty, for a beer.”

As we sidle into Autumn, our bloggy friends in the north are moving to summer.

To see what that means, have a gander at these pictures. So sensual, in such a different way.

Meanwhile, the Australian countryside is moving through its cycles of life and death, use and ease like this.

Both great sets of photos, I reckon.

While we were eradicating the dream of an Inland Sea, some folks in rural America were entertained by the notion that the Australian wilderness was populated by cannibalistic pinheads wearing kilts. This photograph says so much about the pathetic reality behind that carny trick.

I found it via a post at a fine Australian history blog I’ve only just found…

The Vapour Trail.

Hmm.. Victorian theatre.. hmm… ectoplasm…. hmmm

What I didn’t realise when I became interested in The Lost Explorer (1890) and other novels was that the idea of a lost race in the Australian interior had roots in a mid-nineteenth century freak show. Indeed, from about the mid-1860s, two unfortunate kiddies from Circleville, Ohio, were billed as ‘the Wild Australian Children’ in a travelling American exhibit of freaks and ’scientific’ curios. In the cruel argot of the business, these children were ‘pinheads’: that is, they were microcephalic, and had severe intellectual disabilities. Promotional pamphlets accompanying their exhibit described them as the members of a near-extinct cannibal tribe, plucked from the desert wilds of Australia by an explorer-adventurer, Captain Reid.

The same show seems to have been advertised in this poster for S. Watson’s American Museum of Living Curiosities, appearing at 28 Oxford St, London, in 1885. Here is the relevant bit, which has a weird charm for us Antipodeans -

Maybe the similarity is just a standardised bit of carnival costume, or the photograph was used to inspire a London printing job, but the picture suggests the “kiddies from Circleville, Ohio” were exhibited thus for over twenty years. I shudder to think of their journey.

All ultimately via Air-minded.

Family Home — suburban exterior 1993, by Howard Arkley.

An interesting thread about Rudd’s approach to culture and idealism on larvyprod led to some remarks about rent and price control.

Rather than derail the post, I am going to take up the discussion here.

“.. as a Socialist I just wish Rudd would bring in strong price control forcing the price of rent, food and petrol way down”, said Paul Burns.

I am on both sides of this rent question, as an inadvertent landlord for family reasons of a joint deep in the bush, and a tenant hanging on by the skin of my teeth in inner city Melbourne.

I am about to sell the house, because I can’t cover the difference between the mortgage and the rent, and I understand the pressure to put it up. But I am just as constrained by competition as I would be by government rent control.

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The consequences of war reach out to everyone, and reverberate down the generations. It is an obvious idea, but it gives me the shivers. This is why.

My partner Susie’s mother, Noreen, was in the Women’s Land Army when she met Tom by accident late in what my family always calls The War. She married him, her parents didn’t like him much, and she ended up isolated in Adelaide, his home town, rather than Sydney, where she came from.

She had a life with some joy and a deal of hardship, as she raised nine children, and Tom turned out to be mercurial, and a gambler, and a loving man. After his stroke, he took nearly twenty years to die. From that meeting flowed her children, and their children, and their lives, and their meetings and their connections, and accidents, and joys and tragedies.

It brought her to Susie, and Susie to me, and our life together, with its share of love and joy and unexpected pain. Ripples upon ripples, love on love, sorrow to sorrow.

But Tom was not the first man in Noreen’s life. She met someone else earlier, and fell in love, and they were engaged to be married.

He was killed on the Kokoda Track.

Looking for ANZAC images, I found this moment of history. I was surprised - the idea that Aboriginal women were allowed to join up had simply never occurred to me.

It shows “Informal portrait of Aboriginal serviceman, VX35999 Private Samuel Alexandra Peacock (Sam) Lovatt, 6th Reinforcements, 2/5th Battalion, and his neice, 95994 Aircraftwoman (ACW) Alice Lovett, an Aboriginal servicewoman, standing on a Melbourne street. ACW Lovett is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF) and is wearing 1942 pattern WAAAF overalls.”
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As my friends know, I have a hearing impairment, and relate pretty well to the world with the help of two Phonak hearing aids.

This post is the first of several about a boring topic - the price of hearing aids. It should concern you, because you have a fair chance of needing a set yourself, as you advance into a merry and sociable old age. Then you too will be told they cost more than a decent laptop each, and you really need two.
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This is surely one of the great trench coat images - Bogey in Deadline USA, being the romantic hero all editors secretly dream of.

The truth, of course, is a lot more mundane. Here are two current media stories which touch on the tangles of reporting environmental matters, the perils of a crusading editor, and the dangers of thuggery to solve an image problem. The old fashioned models don’t work any more.

Fairfax Media is having trouble in Melbourne with The Age. The staff are at loggerheads with the editor-in-chief, Andrew Jaspan, who is allegedly enraging all possible parties by a) defending the paper against cuts and b) pushing sponsored editorial of a pro-Green nature in the news section.
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