The Australian Grand Prix is our annual whizzy car ceremony, as Formula One cars go round and round the lake a few hundred metres away from me, and the politicians hope the noise drowns out the muttering about the way the state pays Bernie Ecclestone $40m+ per year to run the damn thing. Even though the trees and blocks of flats in between fire the sound clear over our heads and out to unsuspecting suburban families beyond, I still feel a bit crazed this weekend. Hence this post, as you will see…

It is also the first weekend of the footy season, and the town goes weirdly tribal. Last night, I was asked what team I followed. When I said I didn’t really, some people looked at me as if I had turned purple and voted for the Liberal Party. The truth is, the game bores me stupid, but I love the cultural politics.

I came home to find a puddle in my bed, along with ikky evidence that a bone had been chewed by my pillow. I suspect my wretch of a pooch had been scrunching away when the RAAF jets roared over and she pissed herself in fear. She was all trembly on the couch that evening.

$40m is a lot of lettuce. The State government, for instance, put that amount of cash into building the Docklands studio complex to keep Victorian filmmakers and tecchies gainful in comfy circumstances. Where The Wild Things Are was made there, for which the first trailer is a corker. Now both government and industry must feel like they are dipped in itchy powder and dumped in a vat of tarantulas as they struggle to keep it working. At the moment, the huge sheds and their lighting rigs are dark as the dream makers stay away.

Every now and again, Monty Python has an astral car wreck with Lewis Carroll, and the metaphorical debris whacks people who are as literal-minded as they are obsessive.

A lot of these folk are breathing heavily and walking in silent herds towards the Grand Prix as I write. Others are swept into the extreme fringes of politics and religion, where their harm can at least be identified and confronted, but many peddle their schemes almost unnoticed. This can be fun for the rest of us, but must be a heap of work for their own families.

Google micro-nations, ephemeral states and imaginary countries, and you will find many wonderful examples. Here and here are just the beginning. Hence, Cabinet Magazine:

“In 1948, the Principality of Outer Baldonia was founded on a four-acre rocky island 16 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia by Russell Arundel, self-proclaimed “Prince of Princes” and president of the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company. With its governmental charter and sixty-nine admirals of the Baldonian Navy (fishermen who harvested tuna in the surrounding ocean), Outer Baldonia bore all the hallmarks of what would become an increasingly common type of micro-nation—the whimsical state. Its governmental charter insisted that citizens swear, drink, and lie about the size of fish they had caught, yet Outer Baldonia showed that even a joke country could punch above its weight when Arundel declared war on the Soviet Union.

So far so jolly. But then the aforementioned astral car wreck began to take over..

:”It took some time for this news to reach the USSR—diplomatic channels had yet to be formed between the two nations—but when it did, a coruscating article in a state-controlled Soviet publication condemned Baldonia’s war-mad “fuehrer” and declared that Outer Baldonia’s constitution had the aim of “turning his subjects into savages.”

Can you imagine the meetings at which that Soviet article was crafted? The disputes about terminology? The atmosphere at home after work, as Aleksander Aleksandreyovic worked himself into a frenzy over the replacement of “barbarians” by “savages”?

These half-formed meditations between the shopping and the laudromat are just to point to a pair of wonderful posts. Crooked Timber calls our attention to the British Government’s Department of Sensitive Words. The thing itself is perfectly logical, and most commenters pick their way along an edge in which words are words, and not the thing thereof, and recognise the sense in which government genuinely should regulate language.

In this case, Dame Smack performs an important service, to protect us from titles that claim an authority and imprimatur they don’t deserve. The words “Royal” and “Bank”, are protected by law. In Australia, we add “Anzac”, “Bradman”, and “Starr Bowket”.

To me, journalisticallly wrestling with crooks, fantasists and deceivers, deploying weasel words like “alleged” and inferences derived from lists of facts, this all seems like a rare example of a solution we usually avoid. Here lying is a crime in itself, apart from its consequences.

In a comment to that article from a person called Pete is a enchanting link to the story of Richard Williams, who made bureaucratic war on the British government on behalf of his native Wales, using as weapons his own private currency, a sound of knowledge of banking, and the civilised literal-mindedness of Whitehall.

“In 1968 there was some debate in Wales concerning the possibility of establishing a Bank of Wales, which would be used to promote trade and industry in the principality. While the debate carried on around him, Mr. Williams wrote to the Prime Minister of Britain asking that the name ‘Bank of Wales’ should only be used for a company that promoted the best interests of Wales. His letter passed through official channels and he received several replies. One of the replies was a letter from the Board of Trade, which stated that no company would be permitted to use the title ‘Bank of Wales’ unless they really deserved the name.

Richard Williams, as will become apparent, was not overly impressed with the bureaucratic government of his day and so he immediately devised a response to the letter from the Board of Trade. His response was to register a company with the name ‘Prif Trysorfa Cymru Limited’, with shares of £100 split between himself and his wife. The Board of Trade duly registered the company, apparently unaware that the Welsh name of the company was translated as ‘Chief Treasury of Wales Limited’.

Having embarrassed the Board of Trade, Mr. Williams then wrote to the Secretary of State for Wales, stating that it was unnecessary for the debate on the formation of the Bank of Wales to continue, as he had taken the necessary steps in establishing his company, which would look after the interests of Wales. Having taken his enterprise to this point, the next logical step was to produce some form of currency. Aware of the law and the restrictions placed on him, Mr. Williams decided to print and issue bills of exchange.

Within several months the ‘Prif Trysorfa Cymru Limited’ was issuing ‘payment orders’, which looked and worked in a manner similar to cheques…”

As the article burrows into the detail of the various notes he produced, which do sound like they were inspired by elephant stamps, (and can be seen at the head of this post) you may come to wonder about the writer.

“p j symes (Peter Symes) is a publisher of books and articles on world paper money. Researching various aspects of world paper money, the results are published in books and articles. Many articles, including those listed on the pages below, have been published in the International Bank Note Society Journal.”

He is an Australian who cares deeply about his chosen subject. If you want to know more, there is a wealth of further detail which can be revealed by some ingenuity with the URL, or by working through the Articles frame on the homepage.

However, p j symes, fascinated by bank notes, is not the most lucid writer on the career of an iconoclastic Welshman. Far better to turn to a Welsh website called HPANWO, which stands for Hospital Porters Against the New World Order. I can only recommend you read the whole story of a man who ended up

“suing the international banking system for infringement of copyright. He was claiming over 20 billion pounds in lost royalties, 2 pence for every cheque ever deposited since the font and strip was introduced. The reason: He’d invented them! The case was doomed to failure, but it gave some publicity to a remarkable man who a few years earlier had given the Banks of England many sleepless nights when he began circulating perfectly legal Welsh banknotes.”

Mr Emlyn-Jones is fascinated by the notion of currency, and willing to go beyond mere armchair speculation. Describing himself as a ” Hospital Porter, Novelist, Conspiracy Theorist, Dischordian Pope, Urban Shaman”, I reckon he could be a fine person to work with in the wee small hours of a public hospital. Someone has to cart the dead away.

——–

I love fast cars, by the way. It is just that I let my nostalgia overwhelm my attachment for the modern ones, and I do think we should boot the F1 mob out. Why don’t we spend the money organising an international Dragon Boat competition in Port Phillip Bay?

For $40m, we could race triremes.. now that would really be something.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 12:24 pm and is filed under strangely compelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.