Orwell, baked beans and me

I never quite felt at home living in England. I could never put my finger on it – a longing for exoticism, a love of Chinese supermarkets and the wonderful and sometimes wierd packages therein, a fascination with other places.

Some of this lust was satisfied by travel and some of it was sublimated by submersing oneself in another language and culture, in my case Russian during Soviet times.

But I could never explain this non-belonging, but now I think I understand it a little better.

About 10 years ago I was in a taxi in Kuala Lumpur. Stupidly we’d arrived on Diwali, which is a public holiday and the taxi taking us to our hotel took a slightly roundabout route to avoid streets in the city centre that had been closed for a procession. The cab went up a hill, past some old colonial houses and then across Medan Pasar, which had been the old central square in colonial times.

Nothing unusual about that except I recognised the street from photographs in a family album from the 1930′s. Spine tingling. I’ve never been able to find the street again and for all I know I was mistaken, but it was an odd experience.

The same goes for Singapore. I actually know the names of places – again because we have pictures of houses and buildings in family albums. In Singapore it’s easier as places still retain their colonial names, but strangely I know where things are. I knew there used to be a railway halt at Bukit Timah before I ever went there. To my regret, it’s now closed and I never got a photograph of me in the train station. Why?

My father spent time in Singapore and the far east in the nineteen forties and his brother was a colonial official in Malaya and later Singapore, and lived in KL and in later a house off Bukit Timah Road in Singapore. My father’s brother died during the second world war and my father never went back after about 1949.

The consequence of this is that while I have never lived in south east Asia, I know these things, the names of places, even to the extent of a few words of Malay, but  the thing which I realise now is because I have heard stories about Malaysia and Singapore from a young age and that this has entered my subconsciousness.

My father and his brother  knew some basic Malay (my father’s brother was apparently quite fluent if ungrammatical)  and even now my father can still manage some very old fashioned Hindi.

And of course it’s not just language. Like all the British in Malaya they ate Ayam tinned food from time to time, and oddly still bought them after they came back to Britain, they knew a little about Asian food, would occasionally buy some (canned) exotic ingredients and create something like Malaysian food. More importantly, the experience of being somewhere radically different had changed them and made them more open to the exotic and the interesting.

And of course the people that they mixed with socially had much the same attitude and experience.

Now one has the image that colonial officials were narrow minded demagogues dedicated to keeping the natives in check. Doubtless some of them were, but equally some must have gone more than just a little native and develped an understanding and sympathy for the cultures they were surrounded by.

Some came back more worldly, less predjudiced, and with an understanding of cultures other than their own.

Now without wanting to make too much of this I now think some of this rubbed off on me – essentially with parents of a liberal ex colonial bent you absorb a taste for the exotic and end up chafing against the insularity and complacency you come up against.

Thinking about my own experience I suspect – it’s unprovabale – that Orwell must have had some sort of epiphany to turn him from a pukka sahib to someone with an empathy with the culture with which he is surrounded – never truly part of it yet out of sorts with his own.

I’ve previously said that in Burmese Days I thought that the character of Ellis was modelled in part on racist people he knew and in part on his former self. Thinking this through I equally feel that we could argue that Flory – out of sorts with the Poms at the club but not really integrated with Burmese society is modelled on his new, more culturally attuned self, but one that still goes shooting and still lives the life of a Pom, and find himself not really belonging.

Strangely, and I don’t know how much of this is just projection on my part I’ve always felt distant. Part of the reason I feel more comfortable in Australia is that everyone is from somewhere else – not strictly true, but the mix of cultures is invigorating, and yes, you can buy Ayam baked beans as well as Heinz and other brands.

Buried in this is another serious point. When people talk about the legacy of empire they talk about the institutions and buildings that the British left behind. The other legacy is the way it helped open Britain up to the influences of what used to be called ‘the orient’ and its languages and cultures.

And it is important that while these people went there to work, to run palm oil plantations and the like they never went there to settle – they were an alien governing and managerial class and not people who would settle – always aliens in a sea of vibrant cultures.

This different from the colonial experience in East Africa, Zimbabwe, or South Africa where white people wnt with the aim of putting down roots, of farming of settling permanently, but who were for ever a minority watchful in case the dispossesed would ever demand their land back.

And differnt again from Canada, Australia and to a lesser extent New Zealand where the dispossessed were so dominated by the alien incomers that they were permanently marginalised.

One thing I notice when I go back to England on a visit is how increasingly narrow and insular its becoming with a segregated society and among the middle and upper classes a remarkable ignorance of everything other than English culture and history (with the French and the Graeco Romans getting a look in).

And, perhaps as a consequence of this, this is not something that is dealt with much in contemporary literature – either by British authors or writers from what was once British India – Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Burma – or Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei – working in English.

And that’s a puzzle – aliens in their own land – I might have thought that would have inspired someone …

Myanmar Bibliography

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve started investigating the possibility of a trip to Myanmar.

One thing I’ve found is my own ignorance on the history of Myanmar – so I’ve started reading about the country. The first thing in researching the topic is the lack of information on the country and its history. To this end I’ve put together a mini bibliography of the material I’ve found.

It is of course an idiosyncratic and personal collection but hopefully it might save anyone else in the same position a little bit of time…

Orwell in Burma

Recently we’ve been thinking about extending our love affair with South East Asia by organising a trip to Myanmar next year, especially as things are opening up and seem now to be on the road to reform.

This isn’t the first time we’ve thought about this – we did vaguely think about a trip to Yangon on the back of our last trip to Thailand but decided that it would be too short and too rushed, in much the same way as we had thought about a similar trip in 2006.

So, as part of my background reading I reread George Orwell’s Burmese Days followed by Emma Larkin’s Finding George Orwell in Burma.

And that was quite an interesting combination. Orwell went out to Burma quite the young British officer with no sign of his later radicalism but came back radicalised. he also came back with some magic Burmese tattoos to guard against gunshot injury – not quite what you’d expect from a pukka sahib. It’s even more interesting given Emma Larkin’s account of meeting people who remembered Orwell in Burma – basically he doesn’t seem to have been a particularly nice man, hitting boys who got in his way on a station platform with his stick.

Now what writers don’t imagine, or steal from stories that other people tell them they base on their own lives – which of course begs the question of how much of Burmese Days is autobiographical and does it  give us a clue to Orwell’s later radicalism?

Burma in the 1920‘s was an interesting place – while it was governed as if it was part of India it of course wasn’t actually part of India culturally. From the mid nineteenth century the British had spread along the coast of Burma through Rangoon, Moulmein and Amherst, and trading with the Burmese interior, which they termed ‘Upper Burma’.

The British did not take over Upper Burma until 1885, and then in part to block French expansion via the north of Laos. (having been to the Golden Triangle, however briefly, it’s amazing both how close and how wild the borderlands are.)

Unlike the coastal strip it was never heavily colonised with no large British, Anglo-Indian or Anglo Burmese communities. When Burn-Murdoch visited in 1908, you get the feeling that it was still very much a traditional Burmese society and there is no reason to think it was much changed 20 years later when Orwell was stationed in Upper Burma.

And colonial society ? Not really, more a small, isolated,  group of British people, bound together only by their proximity to each other, ritually eating British style meals at the club, surrounded by a local population whose attitude was at best one of mild contempt.

Unlike East Africa or Rhodesia the colonists were not colonists trying to build a life, they were government officials stationed there or else managers for a forestry company – none with a stake in the country and all longing for escape to somewhere else, be it England or somewhere more congenial in colonial India or Malaya.

Thinking about the protagonists, my first thought was that Orwell had based Ellis, the unpleasant racist, on his former self given Larkin’s discovery of the stick beating story, but that is too pat – while the story of Ellis blinding a boy with his stick may be based on his past behaviour, just as his story ‘Shooting an Elephant’ may be based on his life in Moulmein, I tend to the view that his characters are syntheses of people he’d met, rather than actual individuals – but in as small a society as up country Burma, the syntheses probably would be uncomfortably close to recognisable individuals.

I suspect that radicalisation was the result of a growing awareness – through the discovery that he possibly had Anglo Burmese relatives in Moulmein, through behaving badly over beating boys with a stick, and through perhaps having a Burmese concubine – certainly his magic tattoos speak of an immersion in Burmese culture at some point in his career – and Orwell was said to be particularly fluent in Burmese.

The tattoos are particularly interesting. Tattoos hurt and take time to do, even simple ones. To have one was not something upper class Englishmen did in the nineteen-twenties, and having a ‘native’ one definitely not so, pointing to some close involvement with Burmese culture, and perhaps a change of allegiance.

One question is,  did Orwell have a Burmese mistress while stationed in Burma, and if so, did he treat her as badly as Flory treated his mistress in Burmese Days, and also, how much was the character of Elizabeth Lackersteen based on Jacintha Buddicom and Orwell’s bitterness over their relationship?

Volubilis

There’s a thread going round promoting visits to Morocco’s Roman ruins. Hardly surprising, Syria is out of bounds, Libya inaccessible, Tunisia possible, and Algeria not so, meaning that the Roman history geek wanting some warm climate ruins to visit in the northern summer is limited.

There is of course Turkey, though of course they tend to be hellenistic, and also Jordan and Lebanon. Otherwise  you are limited though at a pinch there’s Albania.

However, Morocco.

J and I went there about ten years ago and Volubilis was a wonderful sprawling weed grown ruin of a place, quiet and comparatively untouched where you could wander more or less at will, and as impressive as some of the sites in Turkey – definitely worth a visit, and not one you’ll come away from feeling short changed …

 

Sometimes life’s just complicated

At the start of February we went down to Tathra on the south coast for a few days and then on to Harrietville in Victoria for a couple of days with the intention of doing some walking, which in fact we did not do as it either rained, threatened rain, or was bright sunny and unpleasantly windy, so much so that we did not even manage to get a swim in.

Then, and it’s a big then, J went into hospital overnight to have a long standing shoulder injury fixed. The surgery went well and she is healing up well but as always these days they discharged her too early, armed only with a bottle of codeine and a phone number to call if anything went wrong.

As a consequence she wasn’t too bright the first few days but she is now well on the mend, although confined to the house as she can’t drive and has a special sling to support her arm at an angle out of the body which makes using the bus near impossible.

We also of course had the farce of trying to co-ordinate Medicare, our private health fund, the surgeon’s bill (prompt) the anaethetist’s (still waiting) the hospital (god alone knows). As a consequnce the credit card is looking distinctly well used while we wait for the various refunds and credits to come through…

Still on with the story…

The weekend before last rain fell in near biblical proportions, on the Saturday we had 83mm, or around five and half inches in the old money and almost the same on the Sunday and the preceding Friday.

All the rivers were flooding, the creek that runs through the university, which is normally a placid stream tured into a raging torrent, and it was impossible to go anywhere. Roads were closed, bridges were under water, treese were down and so on.

As a result J was a bit stir crazy so this weekend, which was a long weekend, we left the cat to look after the house – he has his own cat door – and went down to Bermagui on the coast for a couple of days.  (The cat was also stir crazy during the deluge – at one point he went and stole a sheet of paper from the waste paper bin in the study, ripped a corner off and started batting it about like a mouse – not quite tool use but close)

It should have been a two and a half hour drive, which with a lunch stop half way at Nimmitabel – a little village at the top of the escarpment – should have been easy for J to sit through with the sling, the worst thing being having to keep her arm rigid all the time without moving anything.

Unfortunately when we got to Nimmitabel we found that the road down Brown Mountain, from the top of the escarpment to the coast – a drop of around a thousand metres was washed out. However the road from Bombala to Wyndham was still open, but it meant at least an extra hour.

After a council of war over lunch we decided to press on. The road was in reasonable order, there had obviously been some trees down and a couple of minor landslips but the road was open, and actually quite a pleasant drive even if we did end up driving back up the coast through Tathra.

Bermagui was pleasant. Dinner out at an Italian restaurant above the fishing co-op both nights – due to the storms there was no fresh fish or oysters – and walks along the beach.

Rather than stay in a motel we stayed in a cottage in the bush at the edge of town surrounded by parrots and bellbirds. Like most holiday cottages it came with a visitor’s book, which included the comment  ’It’s not easy to stay a virgin here … ‘

(J was not up to more than a few gentle walks but it did her good to get out in the sea air after being cooped up at home)

The sea was still discoloured with washouts from farmer’s fields with long plumes of topsoil out to sea, and soil was even deposited on top of  the sand on the beaches along with lots of logs and branches from trees that had washed down in the rain and ended up on the beach.

Bermagui hosts an annual sculpture by the sea exhibition, which we’d cleverly timed our trip to coincide with, and even though the park was distinctly wet there was a fine set of nice modern bits of sculpture to admire including what looked like a set of leek heads just done with a mig welder and fencewire.

Driving back basically meant a return trip through Wyndham and Bombala, including a loo stop in the swimming pool – literally – in Bombala. For some reason the local council provided a big parking area beside the river and the swimming pool, but didn’t build any toilets, which means that you have to go and use the loos in the swimming pool.

After that it was home  to a waiting cat and a glass of wine before falling asleep while watching Stephen Fry on tv.

The wall of Genghis Khan

A few days ago I came across an article in the Irish Times about how a British researcher has argued that the wall of Genghis Khan is part of the Great Wall of China assemblage.

Fair enough.

Unfortunately some people have began garble this into a ‘new piece of the Great Wall has been found’.

Not so. The wall Genghis Khan has been known for yonks. Peter Fleming, while travelling with Ella Maillart in Manchuria in the 1930′s made a special trip to see it and it featured in the New York Times back in 2001.

What of course is being argued is that the wall of Genghis Khan is not a stand alone feature but part of the Great Wall complex, and being argued on the basis of some quite clever research using Google Maps and the like.

Sad to see such a use of new technology to make an interesting hypothesis totally garbled …

Ancient Greeks in New Zealand ??

Someone is claiming that some ancient greek seafarers made it to New Zealand.

Well it’s possible. Extremely unlikely but possible. We know that there were Roman settlements in India – not formal settlements but groups of merchants clustered together trading with Indian merchants and that the Romans sailed to the south of India  by sailing down the Red Sea to what is now Somalia  and then turning left, relying on the Monsoon to carry them across.

This of course means that they sometimes missed and could concievably ended up shipwrecked on one of the islands of what is now Indonesia, or even on the coast of WA.

The Romans of course acquired knowledge of the sea route from the Greco-Egyptians of Ptolemaic Egypt, so the idea of oral history in Irian Jaya preserving the memory of Greek or Egyptian sailors king of interesting. Of course the impact of Christianity, and mission schools could have confused matters with Egypt becoming a synonym for ‘far away over the sea’ but we could say it’s possible. Unlikely but possible.

However in terms of historical narrative it’s worth zilch. As I wrote  along time ago on a now dead blog server while discussing the impact of the discovery of Homo Floriensis and the thinness of the evidence:

Hobbits – or the Romans invade Broome …
posted Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:55:12 -0800

Suddenly we’ve another stoush about wether homo floriensis is a new species of human being or a cretin. And why are we having this argument?

Because the sample size is so bloody small.

And because the sample size is so small we have intense arguments about the meaning of the evidence that are based on supposition and precedent. Nothing more.

To put this into context consider the following:

We know the Romans (well probably Graeco-Egyptians living in the Roman period) sailed regularly to India, and that Roman ambassadors, or merchants masquerading as ambassadors got to China in 166 probably coming via South East Asia by boat.

So it’s possible, though there’s no evidence, that the Romans traded as far as Java in search of spices, just as European traders did 1500 years later.

And it’s equally just possible, in the same way as happened to Dutch and Portugese ships, that every now and then one would be caught in a storm, blown south, and end up wrecked on the coast of WA, probably somewhere around Broome, or possibly further south.

If we found eveidence of such a wreck it would be interesting. Just that, Interesting. We already know a lot about Roman commerce. We know pepper was prized. Finding such a wreck would confirm that Roman trading ships sailed as far as what is today Indonesia, rather than relying on goods sold on at ports in India.

It would be a footnote. Homo Floriensis is not a footnote, purely because we know so little. We need more finds, more evidence before we can say either way. For now we have to suffer the clash of egos and reputations

We know (or at least we think we’re reasonably certain) that Roman ships did not sail much further than India and that any Roman merchants who ventured further afield would have sailed on other ships, and that the numbers involved were very small, such that they have left little trace in the historical record.

Equally we can guess that there will be some outliers due to ships blown of course and ending up somewhere they didn’t expect to. This does not mean that the Romans or the Greeks have discovered Australia, or New Zealand. Like Pliny’s Eskimos on the Rhine they’re an intriguing story, a happenstance, but nothing more …