The Australian Guide Promise and Law

Guide Promise
I promise that I will do my best:
to do my duty to God, to serve the Queen and my country;
to help other people; and
to keep the Guide Law.

The Guide Law

A Guide is loyal and can be trusted.
A Guide is helpful.
A Guide is polite and considerate.
A Guide is friendly and a sister to all Guides.
A Guide is kind to animals and respects all living things.
A Guide is obedient.
A Guide has courage and is cheerful in all difficulties.
A Guide makes good use of her time.
A Guide takes care of her own possessions and those of other people.
A Guide is self-controlled in all she thinks, says and does.

Evening Taps

Day is done, Gone the sun,
From the sea, from the hills, from the sky.
All is well, Safely rest.
God is nigh.

For Charly on her first guide camp. Harry Potter's birthday!

An End of Winter Mirage

Winter Time

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,
A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;
Blinks but an hour or two; and then,
A blood-red orange, sets again.

Before the stars have left the skies,
At morning in the dark I rise;
And shivering in my nakedness,
By the cold candle, bathe and dress.

Close by the jolly fire I sit,
To warm my frozen bones a bit;
Or with a reindeer-sled, explore
The colder countries round the door.

When to go out, my nurse doth wrap
Me in my comforter and cap,
The cold wind burns my face, and blows
Its frosty pepper up my nose.

Black are my steps on silver sod;
Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;
And tree and house, and hill and lake,
Are frosted like a wedding-cake.

.

Illustration by Nick, an Australian Expeditioner, Mawson Station, Australian Antarctic Division, October 2008.

Mawson is situated on an isolated outcrop of rock on the coast in MacRobertson Land, at the edge of the Antarctic plateau at 67'36'S 6252'E. It is Australia's first continental station and the longest continuously operating station south of the Antarctic Circle. The station is the most westerly of the three continental stations, lying about 5,200km south-west of Perth, Western Australia.

The Mawson region is one of the richest areas for seabirds in the Australian Antarctic Territory, and supports breeding colonies of emperor and Adelie penguins, snow petrels, Antarctic petrels (the largest colony in Antarctica with 158,000 breeding pairs), Wilson's storm petrels, cape petrels, southern giant petrels, Antarctic fulmars and skuas.

Cricket - How the Ashes got its name. Thank you Miss Morphy.

The Ashes is a biennial Test cricket contest played between England and Australia . The series is named after the trophy, which is a small terracotta urn said to contain the burnt bails from a game played in 1882 at The Oval . An Ashes series typically consists of five Test matches, and the host of the series alternates between the two countries.

England v Australia - The Oval Meeting

The August 1882 cricket match at the Oval cricket ground in Kennington, London, was recorded as the most exciting cricket match of all time. It was a match played between two great sides: the home side, lead by the Honourable Ivo Bligh, and the tourists by William Lloyd Murdoch.

The tourists started off badly - 63 all out in the first innings. After the tea break and regaining their composure, they secured a miraculous victory in just two days. The Aussies wrapped up their victory by just seven runs.

This was a blow to the English side - their country being the birthplace of the sport, and also being one of the best sides of their time, their defeat proved that they weren't invincible. The Australians saw it as a breakthrough. They were the side that stood a healthy chance of beating the English side in future meetings.

To rub it in, The Sporting Times published this on 2 September 1882:

In Affectionate Remembrance
of
E N G L I S H C R I C K E T,
which died at the Oval
on
29th A U G U S T, 1882,
Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances
RIP
NB - The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.

England v Australia - Down Under

The English media played up the subsequent tour to Australia in 1882/83 (which had been arranged before this defeat) as a quest to "regain the Ashes".

Before England's defeat at The Oval, by seven runs, arrangements had already been made for the Hon. Ivo Bligh, afterwards Lord Darnley, to lead a team to Australia. Three weeks later they set out, now with the popular objective of recovering the Ashes. In the event, Australia won the First Test by nine wickets, but with England winning the next two it became generally accepted that they had regained their pride.

A group of Victorian ladies headed by Lady Clarke burned what has variously been called a ball, bail or veil, and presented the resulting ashes to Bligh in an urn together with a velvet bag, which was made by Mrs Ann Fletcher, the daughter of Joseph Hines Clarke and Marion Wright, both of Dublin . She said, "What better way than to actually present the English captain with the very 'object' — albeit mythical — he had come to Australia to retrieve?"

Bligh later married another of these Melburnian ladies, Florence Morphy. When he died in 1927 his widow presented the urn to the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). It can be seen in the cricket museum at Lord's, together with the velvet bag, made specially for it, and the scorecard of the 1882 match. It is never physically awarded to either England or Australia, but is kept permanently in the MCC Cricket Museum at Lord's Cricket Ground

With assistance from the BBC and Learn English Online

Image: Robert Simpson Australian, 1955- ): Original artwork "Batsman and Keeper", crayon/gouache on paper

Back to School: Term 3

or playing Super Mario on the DS.

Back to the packed lunches, lost hats and hoodies, and brooding discontent over the state of public education.

Cartoon by Pat Bagley of the The Salt Lake Tribune

So close, so far

A walk, scooter and bike ride in Commonwealth Park, Canberra, on Saturday.

This poem is by Taufiq Ismail (born 1937), a student writer and activist in 1966.

Kita adalah pemilik syah republik ini

Tidak ada pilihan lain. Kita harus
Berjalan terus
Kita adalah manusia bermata sayu, yang di tepi jalan
Mengacungkan tangan untuk oplet dan bus yang penuh
Kita adalah berpuluh juta yang bertahun hidup sengsara
Dipukul banjir, gunung api, kutuk dan hama
Dan bertanya-tanya diam inikah yang namanya merdeka
Kita yang tak punya kepentingan dengan seribu slogan
Dan seribu pengeras suara yang hampa suara
Tidak ada pilihan lain. Kita harus
Berjalan terus

The Republic is Ours

There is no other choice. We must
Go on.
We are the people with sad eyes, at the edge of the road
Waving at vans and crowded buses.
We are the tens of millions who live in misery
Beaten about by flood, volcano, curses and pestilence,
Who silently ask for freedom
But are ignored in a thousand slogans
And meaningless loud-speaker voices.
There is no other choice. We must
Go on.

Translated by Harry Aveling,'Secrets need words: Indonesian poetry 1966-1998', Ohio University Press, 2001.

With sorrow for the lives lost. Jakarta, July 2009.

A Thumbnail Dipped in Tar.

Clancy Of The Overflow

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just `on spec', addressed as follows, `Clancy, of The Overflow'.

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)
'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
`Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are.'

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving `down the Cooper' where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the 'buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal --
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of `The Overflow'.

Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson (1864-1941). Poet, ballad writer, journalist and horseman.

'Banjo' Paterson, known as Barty to his family, was born Andrew Barton Paterson at Narrambla, near Orange, on 17 February 1864. His parents, Andrew Bogle and Rose Isabella Paterson were graziers on Illalong station in the Yass district (near Canberra).

Image: Office in a Small City, 1953
Edward Hopper (American, 1882–1967)
George A. Hearn Fund, 1953

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Submitted for my American poetry blogger friends who allow me to lift my head occasionally from 'the round eternal of the cash book and jounal' and enjoy 'the vision splendid'.

WAGs

Song in a Minor Key

There's a place I know where the birds swing low,
And wayward vines go roaming,
Where the lilacs nod, and a marble god
Is pale, in scented gloaming.
And at sunset there comes a lady fair
Whose eyes are deep with yearning.
By an old, old gate does the lady wait
Her own true love's returning.

But the days go by, and the lilacs die,
And trembling birds seek cover;
Yet the lady stands, with her long white hands
Held out to greet her lover.
And it's there she'll stay till the shadowy day
A monument they grave her.
She will always wait by the same old gate, --
The gate her true love gave her.

Dorothy Parker

Seagulls: First post homage to Distracted by Shiny Objects who introduced me to the wonder of it all.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune - without the words
And never stops at all.

- Emily Dickenson -

Photo: Sculpture by Susie Marwick, Winner of 2009 Castaways Sculpture Awards, Rockingham Beach, Western Australia.

Inspiration: A Tidings of Magpies