I always listen to your posts at the end of a long day--pacing up and down my driveway. There’s always so much to think about and ruminate on after each listen. You’re doing wonderful work. Keep it going!
Also, fun fact-- One of my aunts is an Australian citizen but her son is a Kiwi. My Kiwi cousin married a Spaniard with German ancestry and they’re living in Hong Kong.
I’ve lived in India, the UK, the US, and now in Canada. Each place I’ve seen the good and the bad. Almost always, the spirit of goodness and kindness wins.
due to my background of South Asian background this subject is one of my deep interest and curiosity. Account and extract having lot of informative stuff .I am looking forward to read the book
Wonderful, thank you for sharing this, Ryan! And I look forward to reading about what you've learned about staying financially comfortable with your creativity without being in the business world.
Ryan, I look at your name and I think Irish Italian. Just riffing on the shape of the given/family names. With time in Argentina (and Brazil - or was it in beautiful Portugal)? I did indeed get your intent re Abdul's life and times - you succeeded brilliantly. I only wish I could write with your polished poetic and slyly humorous air! When my Dad was killed in in late June, 1951 I was just 2 (May 29) he was just 24 (May 13) my mother just 21 (June 16) - little brother 10 months (August 31). I can't really begin to understand how it was for my mother (she's now 92 - in Tamworth) - my clear memories only begin from about two months later. She was then, with a sister, working in a textile knitting factory in Hornsby. The owner couple - Leo and Florence Hertzberg/Hirschberg (Sp.?) were Holocaust survivors out of BudaPest (and, I suspect, former employees of the famous Goldberger Textile Co. of that city - having visited it just three years ago). Before my mother moved to Tamworth in September - they not only made sure they employed her, they even sent me along with their own children to a little Jewish school in that area (Waitara?) for about a fortnight my mother recalls. My clear memories are of that time and of a line of numbers on the inner side of Mrs H's left arm. They gave my mother the name of Jewish brothers - both in business - one a pharmacist - in Tamworth - and I think via that connection she was able to gain some office cleaning work (having been taken from school by her father - aged 14/15 - to be sent to work). In Tamworth our first landlords were an elderly Chinese couple married in Hong Kong (or was it in Guangzhou - which we used to call Canton) and arrived in New South Wales in 1900 - before Federation. Their kindness to my mother - to both of us boys - like from the couple in Sydney - has never faded from our memories. My mother purchased a little house with part of the tiny sum awarded her as compensation for the accident in which her husband died - and with the support of a terminating building society mortgage. Our neighbours were Italian, English, Scottish (he was a first cousin to the British PM of 1960-61 Sir Alec Douglas-Home), of German and Chinese ancestries - two Dutch families - Catholic, Protestant (Anglican and various others) and Communist (especially men who rode push-bikes were particularly suspect, - not that I had any real idea what it meant exactly) a Mason. They owned the New England Network of radio stations, had timber mills on the coat or farms up country - or were retired farmers - they were builders, technicians, workers on Keepit Dam, gardener/groundsman, a teacher - the Town Planner, an accountant. Years later I realised the road with an upper side and a lower side was a kind of social marker - much as railway lines through some towns can create barriers - but as children we were ignorant of such things - keeping an eye on the traffic - easily able to cross it - both ways. As children we were in and out of each other's houses - seeing neither religion nor class as particularly important in our games and bonfire night activities. But it was culturally rich. We relished the saltiness of "Drop" - or Dutch liquorice and what we thought of as Dutch friend rice but was really a Dutch adopted/adapted "nasi goreng" dish. Or reading Tin-Tin in Dutch (well, reading the pictures, at any rate), and envying the children when they appeared on December 5th with their Christmas presents - almost three weeks before received ours. And my mother became the positive model of how to get along with people. I suffered a bullying step-father (from age six) - a drunkard (WWII - PTSD we know now) and a racist (but only inside the house) outside he was the proverbial street angel. School was my escape - and so out of my Seventh-day Adventist membership (a sect - not quite as bad as the Pentecultists, mind - but headed in that superior kind of blessèd way) a scholarship to Sydney U - and the chance to find my way out of it (eventually) and to go teaching and to life and adventures thereon. This is not a confessional space, I realise - there is no need for you to offer a blessing and the need to tell my beads! Just this afternoon I had a little back-and-forth with a friend who is head of an important car parts firm across Japan. The mutual friend who introduced us in the final year or so of my many years in Japan - around 2008 - passed away last year Christmas Day. He was a Shintō priest - he and his wife became good friends over my final five years - not only motivating and stimulating my progress in Japanese language - but also involving me deeply in Japanese festivals and The Way of the Gods spiritual expression/social and festival events. I've been writing a tribute to send his wife since early early January. I write - then I lay it aside - I come back to it - re-read - (fresh eyes) add more or rer-arrange - leave it again - for travels, other matters - then return to it edit again - move it forward. From being something I thought I would write within the first month after his death - it has sprawled into something else - a memoir of my final years in Japan and the significant moments as a kind of rosary of connective matters tethered to the Shrine of which he was the priest. I used to think and was so encouraged by friends in Japan to think that once returned to Australia I would write my take on Japan (as have many others) until I realised that I haven't really got the talent to do so in a way which would make the effort worthwhile to those who might want to read the book! But this tribute might just be it. The Tokyo friend will be visiting the widow next week - and will convey my best wishes to her and her two sons (one now the priest of that Shrine)! As an aside - the Tokyo friend's father 20+ years ago founded a movement in Japan to encourage humility - even amongst the top executives and so forth in the country. It was the cleaning of public toilets - or of the toilets within the company. Think about it - the lowest of the jobs - done by those who might never be expected to perform so menial a task. Some friends in the city where I was living pointed out a national newspaper reference to a high school principal in the centre of the island of Kyushu who had encouraged his senior high school students to engage in the movement - cleaning the public toilets in their little high country rural town (8,000 people). I wrote to him and went one week-end to visit him. We had a good day together - scenic parts - a museum to the Japanese chap who was the first (disputed)to identify the plague virus (an 1890s outbreak in Hong Kong) - his school, a temple - and an onsen/hot springs bathing place (I think it was called "Unryū" [Dragon Clouds?] and unknown to tourists - lots of other onsen rresort hotels scattereed about in the region - an honesty system operating to enter - and some good local food - before I headed the three, four hour road-trip back "home". Ryan - it seems you and your wife live somewhere in the Hunter. My wife and I are in Caves Beach - she grew up in Swansea and before I returned from Japan we purchased a little place nearby to her mother who was becoming increasingly frail in those years (passed away 2013). Should you be in the vicinity - and have time - please make contact and call in. <shoin@me.com> Jim
Ryan: I responded to a call-out to review your book from IndependentAustralia - and it went up last Sunday. As I mention in my review my interest in the cameleers was piqued over 30 years ago when a student in one of my classes at Nelson Bay HS mentioned he had family connections of that background in Alice Springs. While a decade earlier I had come across the writing of Mena Kashmiri Abdullah (with Ray Mathew) The Time of the Peacock - growing up in rural Bundarra. Some years earlier I had taught at Macintyre HS in Inverell. And graduate studies at Armidale through the early 1980s in Multicultural and then "Aboriginal" Education. My wife and I spent time in Madrid and in München in the year 1977 where I taught English and picked up some conversational español y Deutsch - as one does - priming me for my studies just a few years later. I agree totally with all you write about the execrable Waddell and the Edward Millen character and learned for the first time that NSW had an immigration restriction act - and not simply policies aimed at the Chinese - which morphed into refinements of the exclusiomnary elements with the new Federation in 1901 - the infamous White Australia Policy with its Dictation Test (used against moral and political colour too - the story of Egon Kisch and his visit here in 1934 particularly known to me - a poem (rondeau) by Timoshenko ASLANIDES and his book "Australian Landfall" and the book written about it all by Heidi ZOGBAUM - "Kisch in Australia". A long ago writer friend - Hansi Foks (Melbourne) was a friend of Kisch's in paris in the 1930s where she was writing for cabaret. With WWII's end while living precariously in Switzerland - she wrote a play (I think, it was) about EE Kisch which gave her the money for her son and herself to make it to Australia to start a new life - a relative able to sponsor her. Anyway that's beside the point (or peripheral, anyway) to responding to your work. A couple more things. When we returned from Europe my wife took up an appointment at Mudgee HS. I had resigned in early 1976 in order to take my "super" in order for us to travel the world! I had no job to return to - there was a teacher glut. I fought for a job clearing willows from the Cudgegong R (failed - over-qualified) and then packed gherkins on the Muller Farm at Eurunderee for the season - which were sent to Masterfoods or some such company in Sydney. You'll see where I am going...One farm removed from where I was in the shed with Jim and Barbara Muller was where Henry Lawson (Larsen) grew up. That of course intrigued me and I thank for spinning me into a passion for Australian writing - first sparked a score of years earlier by my primary school teacher Joe Shanahan. From the year in Mudgee, though, a cool climate wet burn - not out of control - measured and intense, albeit. Ted Noffs was out of that location too (his German forebears the Roth and Wurth families - and he wrote of it in a book published in 1983 "Childhood Memories of Henry Lawson Country and Henry Lawson's Mudgee Poems". Brian James was the author of "The Advancement of Spencer Button" (real name John Tierney - had something to do with my father a schoolboy in 1941 in Sydney) was also from Mudgee - his father was the teacher at the little school in Eurunderee - and taught Henry Lawson. Connections - connecting the pieces, the people - as you did in terms of the ugly ways in which Edward Millen pursued Abdul Wade. So it was more intriguing to learn that Millen accompanied Billy Hughes to Versailles - abandoning the guidelines already prepared as talking points for Australia to further pursue his racist thinking - this time against the Japanese and their hopes for securing a clause guaranteeing racial equality. Several years ago a friend now in Sydney nearing 94 years of age - Paul GLYNN SM - gave me two books - one in English and one in its Japanese version: "The Turning Point in US-Japan Relations" 2016 palgrave macmillan - written by Misuzu Hanihara CHOW (former head of the Japanese language Dept at Macquarie U) and Kiyofuku CHUMA (of the Asahi Shinbun newspaper). In which it points out clearly that (while E. Millen gets no guernsey) Billy HUGHES was the front man allowed to be as racist and distasteful as he was - by Lloyd GEORGE and Woodrow WILSON - who if publicly tut-tutting - were quietly from behind the scenes as it were - encouraging and applauding their little attack dog. (It all - as you say - sounds depressingly very contemporary!) So Ryan - as rusty as is my minimal Spanish - Estoy muy agradable de conocerlo y leer una parte de la historia de Australia tan importante como eso libro. Bravo! Bravísimo! I've not been to La Argentina pero hace muchos años en Sydney enseñando al grupo de abuelos (y abuelas) de Uruguay y La Argentina - they literally could almost have been my grand-parents - barbecues and shared stories - my Spanish swung back into gear! Jim
Hi Jim, thanks for reading and thanks for your comment. Amazing how many twists and turns there are in life and how they somehow all manage to come together. I saw the generous review you wrote for The Ballad and wanted to thank you for it. I felt like you got what I was trying to say through the retelling of Abdul's life. Best regards, Ryan
I always listen to your posts at the end of a long day--pacing up and down my driveway. There’s always so much to think about and ruminate on after each listen. You’re doing wonderful work. Keep it going!
Also, fun fact-- One of my aunts is an Australian citizen but her son is a Kiwi. My Kiwi cousin married a Spaniard with German ancestry and they’re living in Hong Kong.
I’ve lived in India, the UK, the US, and now in Canada. Each place I’ve seen the good and the bad. Almost always, the spirit of goodness and kindness wins.
Thanks Nikhil. It does often win but only if we all support it.
That photo of the camel with the pianola - brilliant. Loved this piece
Can you imagine the socialising around that piano on some outback station in 1890?
So wonderfully written, Ryan. That last paragraph….so good!
Thanks for reading and leaving a comment, Amy! Glad you enjoyed this piece!
due to my background of South Asian background this subject is one of my deep interest and curiosity. Account and extract having lot of informative stuff .I am looking forward to read the book
Hi Safdar, thanks for your comment. I hope you enjoy the book!
Wonderful, thank you for sharing this, Ryan! And I look forward to reading about what you've learned about staying financially comfortable with your creativity without being in the business world.
I didn't say anything about being comfortable! :) But I am definitely learning a lot! Thanks for reading!
Ryan, I look at your name and I think Irish Italian. Just riffing on the shape of the given/family names. With time in Argentina (and Brazil - or was it in beautiful Portugal)? I did indeed get your intent re Abdul's life and times - you succeeded brilliantly. I only wish I could write with your polished poetic and slyly humorous air! When my Dad was killed in in late June, 1951 I was just 2 (May 29) he was just 24 (May 13) my mother just 21 (June 16) - little brother 10 months (August 31). I can't really begin to understand how it was for my mother (she's now 92 - in Tamworth) - my clear memories only begin from about two months later. She was then, with a sister, working in a textile knitting factory in Hornsby. The owner couple - Leo and Florence Hertzberg/Hirschberg (Sp.?) were Holocaust survivors out of BudaPest (and, I suspect, former employees of the famous Goldberger Textile Co. of that city - having visited it just three years ago). Before my mother moved to Tamworth in September - they not only made sure they employed her, they even sent me along with their own children to a little Jewish school in that area (Waitara?) for about a fortnight my mother recalls. My clear memories are of that time and of a line of numbers on the inner side of Mrs H's left arm. They gave my mother the name of Jewish brothers - both in business - one a pharmacist - in Tamworth - and I think via that connection she was able to gain some office cleaning work (having been taken from school by her father - aged 14/15 - to be sent to work). In Tamworth our first landlords were an elderly Chinese couple married in Hong Kong (or was it in Guangzhou - which we used to call Canton) and arrived in New South Wales in 1900 - before Federation. Their kindness to my mother - to both of us boys - like from the couple in Sydney - has never faded from our memories. My mother purchased a little house with part of the tiny sum awarded her as compensation for the accident in which her husband died - and with the support of a terminating building society mortgage. Our neighbours were Italian, English, Scottish (he was a first cousin to the British PM of 1960-61 Sir Alec Douglas-Home), of German and Chinese ancestries - two Dutch families - Catholic, Protestant (Anglican and various others) and Communist (especially men who rode push-bikes were particularly suspect, - not that I had any real idea what it meant exactly) a Mason. They owned the New England Network of radio stations, had timber mills on the coat or farms up country - or were retired farmers - they were builders, technicians, workers on Keepit Dam, gardener/groundsman, a teacher - the Town Planner, an accountant. Years later I realised the road with an upper side and a lower side was a kind of social marker - much as railway lines through some towns can create barriers - but as children we were ignorant of such things - keeping an eye on the traffic - easily able to cross it - both ways. As children we were in and out of each other's houses - seeing neither religion nor class as particularly important in our games and bonfire night activities. But it was culturally rich. We relished the saltiness of "Drop" - or Dutch liquorice and what we thought of as Dutch friend rice but was really a Dutch adopted/adapted "nasi goreng" dish. Or reading Tin-Tin in Dutch (well, reading the pictures, at any rate), and envying the children when they appeared on December 5th with their Christmas presents - almost three weeks before received ours. And my mother became the positive model of how to get along with people. I suffered a bullying step-father (from age six) - a drunkard (WWII - PTSD we know now) and a racist (but only inside the house) outside he was the proverbial street angel. School was my escape - and so out of my Seventh-day Adventist membership (a sect - not quite as bad as the Pentecultists, mind - but headed in that superior kind of blessèd way) a scholarship to Sydney U - and the chance to find my way out of it (eventually) and to go teaching and to life and adventures thereon. This is not a confessional space, I realise - there is no need for you to offer a blessing and the need to tell my beads! Just this afternoon I had a little back-and-forth with a friend who is head of an important car parts firm across Japan. The mutual friend who introduced us in the final year or so of my many years in Japan - around 2008 - passed away last year Christmas Day. He was a Shintō priest - he and his wife became good friends over my final five years - not only motivating and stimulating my progress in Japanese language - but also involving me deeply in Japanese festivals and The Way of the Gods spiritual expression/social and festival events. I've been writing a tribute to send his wife since early early January. I write - then I lay it aside - I come back to it - re-read - (fresh eyes) add more or rer-arrange - leave it again - for travels, other matters - then return to it edit again - move it forward. From being something I thought I would write within the first month after his death - it has sprawled into something else - a memoir of my final years in Japan and the significant moments as a kind of rosary of connective matters tethered to the Shrine of which he was the priest. I used to think and was so encouraged by friends in Japan to think that once returned to Australia I would write my take on Japan (as have many others) until I realised that I haven't really got the talent to do so in a way which would make the effort worthwhile to those who might want to read the book! But this tribute might just be it. The Tokyo friend will be visiting the widow next week - and will convey my best wishes to her and her two sons (one now the priest of that Shrine)! As an aside - the Tokyo friend's father 20+ years ago founded a movement in Japan to encourage humility - even amongst the top executives and so forth in the country. It was the cleaning of public toilets - or of the toilets within the company. Think about it - the lowest of the jobs - done by those who might never be expected to perform so menial a task. Some friends in the city where I was living pointed out a national newspaper reference to a high school principal in the centre of the island of Kyushu who had encouraged his senior high school students to engage in the movement - cleaning the public toilets in their little high country rural town (8,000 people). I wrote to him and went one week-end to visit him. We had a good day together - scenic parts - a museum to the Japanese chap who was the first (disputed)to identify the plague virus (an 1890s outbreak in Hong Kong) - his school, a temple - and an onsen/hot springs bathing place (I think it was called "Unryū" [Dragon Clouds?] and unknown to tourists - lots of other onsen rresort hotels scattereed about in the region - an honesty system operating to enter - and some good local food - before I headed the three, four hour road-trip back "home". Ryan - it seems you and your wife live somewhere in the Hunter. My wife and I are in Caves Beach - she grew up in Swansea and before I returned from Japan we purchased a little place nearby to her mother who was becoming increasingly frail in those years (passed away 2013). Should you be in the vicinity - and have time - please make contact and call in. <shoin@me.com> Jim
If we don't write about it, do we really know about it? Obviously just another example of ignorance and acceptance.
Another great piece Butts
Thanks mate.
Ryan: I responded to a call-out to review your book from IndependentAustralia - and it went up last Sunday. As I mention in my review my interest in the cameleers was piqued over 30 years ago when a student in one of my classes at Nelson Bay HS mentioned he had family connections of that background in Alice Springs. While a decade earlier I had come across the writing of Mena Kashmiri Abdullah (with Ray Mathew) The Time of the Peacock - growing up in rural Bundarra. Some years earlier I had taught at Macintyre HS in Inverell. And graduate studies at Armidale through the early 1980s in Multicultural and then "Aboriginal" Education. My wife and I spent time in Madrid and in München in the year 1977 where I taught English and picked up some conversational español y Deutsch - as one does - priming me for my studies just a few years later. I agree totally with all you write about the execrable Waddell and the Edward Millen character and learned for the first time that NSW had an immigration restriction act - and not simply policies aimed at the Chinese - which morphed into refinements of the exclusiomnary elements with the new Federation in 1901 - the infamous White Australia Policy with its Dictation Test (used against moral and political colour too - the story of Egon Kisch and his visit here in 1934 particularly known to me - a poem (rondeau) by Timoshenko ASLANIDES and his book "Australian Landfall" and the book written about it all by Heidi ZOGBAUM - "Kisch in Australia". A long ago writer friend - Hansi Foks (Melbourne) was a friend of Kisch's in paris in the 1930s where she was writing for cabaret. With WWII's end while living precariously in Switzerland - she wrote a play (I think, it was) about EE Kisch which gave her the money for her son and herself to make it to Australia to start a new life - a relative able to sponsor her. Anyway that's beside the point (or peripheral, anyway) to responding to your work. A couple more things. When we returned from Europe my wife took up an appointment at Mudgee HS. I had resigned in early 1976 in order to take my "super" in order for us to travel the world! I had no job to return to - there was a teacher glut. I fought for a job clearing willows from the Cudgegong R (failed - over-qualified) and then packed gherkins on the Muller Farm at Eurunderee for the season - which were sent to Masterfoods or some such company in Sydney. You'll see where I am going...One farm removed from where I was in the shed with Jim and Barbara Muller was where Henry Lawson (Larsen) grew up. That of course intrigued me and I thank for spinning me into a passion for Australian writing - first sparked a score of years earlier by my primary school teacher Joe Shanahan. From the year in Mudgee, though, a cool climate wet burn - not out of control - measured and intense, albeit. Ted Noffs was out of that location too (his German forebears the Roth and Wurth families - and he wrote of it in a book published in 1983 "Childhood Memories of Henry Lawson Country and Henry Lawson's Mudgee Poems". Brian James was the author of "The Advancement of Spencer Button" (real name John Tierney - had something to do with my father a schoolboy in 1941 in Sydney) was also from Mudgee - his father was the teacher at the little school in Eurunderee - and taught Henry Lawson. Connections - connecting the pieces, the people - as you did in terms of the ugly ways in which Edward Millen pursued Abdul Wade. So it was more intriguing to learn that Millen accompanied Billy Hughes to Versailles - abandoning the guidelines already prepared as talking points for Australia to further pursue his racist thinking - this time against the Japanese and their hopes for securing a clause guaranteeing racial equality. Several years ago a friend now in Sydney nearing 94 years of age - Paul GLYNN SM - gave me two books - one in English and one in its Japanese version: "The Turning Point in US-Japan Relations" 2016 palgrave macmillan - written by Misuzu Hanihara CHOW (former head of the Japanese language Dept at Macquarie U) and Kiyofuku CHUMA (of the Asahi Shinbun newspaper). In which it points out clearly that (while E. Millen gets no guernsey) Billy HUGHES was the front man allowed to be as racist and distasteful as he was - by Lloyd GEORGE and Woodrow WILSON - who if publicly tut-tutting - were quietly from behind the scenes as it were - encouraging and applauding their little attack dog. (It all - as you say - sounds depressingly very contemporary!) So Ryan - as rusty as is my minimal Spanish - Estoy muy agradable de conocerlo y leer una parte de la historia de Australia tan importante como eso libro. Bravo! Bravísimo! I've not been to La Argentina pero hace muchos años en Sydney enseñando al grupo de abuelos (y abuelas) de Uruguay y La Argentina - they literally could almost have been my grand-parents - barbecues and shared stories - my Spanish swung back into gear! Jim
Hi Jim, thanks for reading and thanks for your comment. Amazing how many twists and turns there are in life and how they somehow all manage to come together. I saw the generous review you wrote for The Ballad and wanted to thank you for it. I felt like you got what I was trying to say through the retelling of Abdul's life. Best regards, Ryan