Tag Archives: Western Australia

Sausages and Australian Elections

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After casting their ballots voters around Australia were greeted by cheery volunteers raising funds for their local school.

After casting their ballots voters around Australia were greeted by cheery volunteers raising funds for their local school.

Sausages and elections go hand in hand in Australia.  The schools and community centres which are used throughout the country as polling booths take advantage of elections to do some much-needed fundraising.  The most popular fundraising event is the sausage sizzle.

DSCN9935 White BreadAll that is needed is a barbeque, sliced white bread and tomato sauce to make a sausage sandwich.  Often fried onions are included.  I have no idea why manning the barbeque is traditionally a male thing.  In my family it isn’t.

But I digress.

Stumbling Through the Past was born a little over three years ago on the day of the last Federal election in 2010.  I was writing up my thesis which included discussion of the Federal election of 1910.  Writing about the Federal election of one hundred years ago was an obvious topic to launch my new blog. You can read that post here.

So I had to write an election day post today to celebrate the third anniversary of Stumbling Through the Past and pay homage to the event that helped me start my blog.  But what to write about?  I had planned to write a serious post about technology and elections, but it has been an intense week this week.  I was in no mood to write a serious post.

It came to me when I saw that “#sausage” was trending world-wide today on Twitter:

Continue reading →

East of India: Forgotten Trade with Australia

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East of India logoMany Australians would be unaware of how much Indians have contributed to this country.  Indians have traded with Australia since the first European settlement; they have lived and worked here for over two hundred years.  Yet we don’t often hear about this aspect of Australian history.  The exhibition, ‘East of India: Forgotten trade with Australia’ currently being held at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney is a welcome opportunity to learn more about this.

Understanding historical context is vital in good histories and this exhibition provides plenty of that.  The items shown in ‘East of India’ weave a story of power, wealth, violence, culture and everyday life.  The visitor is first immersed in the history of colonial India starting from the time when the Portuguese adventurer, Vasco da Gama, became the first European to find a sea route to India, to the Indian Rebellion in 1857.  During the age of empire it was the sea, not the land which provided the transportation through which European nations dominated the globe.

‘East of India’ has some stunning exhibits, among which is a map on a parchment from 1599 with a section of the northern coast of Australia labelled as ‘beach’. I couldn’t help thinking how appropriate that label is! I was also attracted to a tiny locket commemorating the wedding in 1662 between Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza, Portugal.  What struck me as remarkable about the locket was not its form, but the enormity of what it represented.  Catherine’s dowry included the Portuguese territory of Bombay (now Mumbai).  I found it staggering that the wedding between two people could have such great repercussions for people who lived in a place that required months of arduous travel to reach. Continue reading →

Glimpses of an Extraordinary Life

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Cover of the book, The Lone Protestor

‘The Lone Protestor: A M Fernando in Australia and Europe’ by Fiona Paisley, (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012).

Warning: This post contains references to Aboriginal people who are now deceased.

The Lone Protestor is the story of a remarkable Aboriginal man who lived in Europe during the interwar years.  Anthony Martin Fernando’s protest about the terrible treatment of Aborigines in Australia was featured on the front page of the highly regarded Der Bund newspaper in Switzerland in 1921.  Fernando handed out hundreds of flyers decrying the behaviour of British towards Aborigines to Catholic pilgrims in the vicinity of St Peter’s in Rome.  He used his court appearances at the Old Bailey to bring attention to the injustice received by Aborigines in Australia.

Creative, intelligent and audacious are some of the words that came to my mind when reading about A M Fernando.  His protests were bold and very public, reaching to institutions that were at the heart of European civilisation. Yet few Australians knew about him at the time. His name has never been mentioned in history books… until now. Continue reading →