'tozza tozza' is an apt Neapolitan phrase to describe the experience of driving in the cities of Napoli and Palermo. It reflects the spurting flow of traffic in the city centres, moving bumper to bumper, or side by side like dodgem cars. Palermo adds an level of difficulty: cars moving four across, switching from one imaginary lane to another by swerving without indicators.
Driving in a Fiat Bambino is a compounding frisson of excitement - while it's a piccolo car which can fit into any space, it can also be overwhelmed by trucks and buses and even electric scooters. You will recognise your own form of demise before it hits you.
This is often followed by the frantic search for a car park, where a concierge will wait in the street and run ahead of your car to show you an available parking space which they then want to be paid for, even if they don't own the real estate. They are ready to throttle you if you don't pay them for something which is not theirs to sell.
In the city and the suburbs with narrow streets, cars are parked nose to nose or nose to the kerb, and sometimes with half the car on the footpath or three deep on a pedestrian crossing. (OK, the latter only happens in Roma.) It is a creative and effective use of limited space, unless you want to drive away.
It's important to take a deep breath, because sometimes 'tozza tozza' reflects the research experience too. In the chronically under-funded archives, museums and galleries everyone is very willing to provide advice, is usually interested in speaking to someone whose first language is not English and is occasionally willing to listen to the story you have to tell. But often there is only a referral, and as you move on to the next less-likely repository in increasing circles of frustration, no result.
The research conundrum being pursued, by car and on foot, was the exact location of a street in Palermo, Via Cavallacci. It was the home of many families which lived in SetteCannoli / Brancaccio for generations. It no longer exists but neither is there a map from the 1940s which shows where it might have been. Where is the concierge when you need him?
['tozza tozza' is from the verb scontarsi.]
Thursday, 7 July 2016
Tuesday, 22 March 2016
Whatever happened to Highfields?
Tweed Heads, Murwillumbah, Cudgen, and many other
country towns had one - a Progress Association. But it wasn’t until last year’s
discovery of a “recipe book” that the existence of the Highfields District
Progress Association was rediscovered.
The Highfield Progress Association was initially
established in 1918.[ii] There were immediate issues to contend with which,
in fact, had inspired the group to form. The first problem, the road to the
Bilambil-Cobaki ferry, was described in the Tweed
Daily on 8 January 1918.[iii] This
article also explains the intended operation of the group: residents were to
meet at a private home, a membership fee of two shillings per year is to be
imposed, and issues affecting all residents were to be discussed, but always
with the big picture in mind: “The
opening up of closer settlement is certain on these coastal slopes. There is a
big piece of country – scrub and lantana jungle – within easy reach of Tweed Heads that would make good homes with an assured
income, and the Highfield Progress Association is out in the interest of all to
assist in the development of their own and kindred areas.”
 |
Highfields District Progress Association
Minute book |
A simple school exercise book originally used to
record the Association’s meeting minutes was turned into a scrapbook for
recipes cut from newspapers and magazines, but thankfully, not all of them were
glued in completely and enough of a record remains to confirm the Association’s
activity.
Excerpts from the Minutes book are included in this article. They extend frm the years November 1937 to July 1940, although it is not known whether this was when the Association wound up. However, the national web service Trove provides some of the earliest information about this Association, as shown in the newspaper articles included here. [i]
Before the Second World War, a new advertisement appeared in the Daily News on Tuesday 12 October 1937.
The name Highfields was well established before the second Progress Association was convened. It was the recipient of spasmodic postal services in the 1920s [iv]. It appeared in NSW Electoral Rolls from 1930 onwards. It was provided as the address for representatives on the Banana Marketing Board [v]; Highfield women formed a sewing and knitting circle during the Second World War [vi], and even the local Council used the name well beyond the 1940s [vii]...
The full article is included in Issue 114 of The Log Book, the journal of the Tweed Heads Historical Society, and is available for purchase. The Society provided unstinting support in the publishing of this article.
[i] Trove is at http://trove.nla.gov.au.
It contains digitised historical newspapers including The Tweed Daily, trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/title/1007
[ii] 1918 'ROUND THE RIVERS.', Northern Star (Lismore,
NSW : 1876 - 1954), 12 January, p. 2,
[iii] HIGHFIELD. (1918, January 8). Tweed Daily (Murwillumbah, NSW : 1914 - 1949), p.2,
[iv] LOWER TWEED POSTAL SERVICES. (1920, April 17). Tweed Daily (Murwillumbah, NSW : 1914 -
1949), p. 4. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article191379847
[v] BANANA MARKETING Board. (1935, July 18). Tweed Daily (Murwillumbah, NSW : 1914 - 1949), p.5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article194223485
[vi] DONATIONS BY TWEED HEADS RED CROSS BRANCH. (1940, September 18). Tweed Daily (Murwillumbah, NSW : 1914 - 1949), p.5.
[vii] TWEED SHIRE COUNCIL'S WORKS PROGRAMME. (1948, April 15). Tweed Daily (Murwillumbah, NSW : 1914 - 1949), p. 3. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article195502491
Wednesday, 3 February 2016
Joined-up spending
In a previous post, The agency that will never forget you, I discussed the dilemma of closed or partially closed identity services. A year later in October 2015 one of those services, the Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, launched an open interface.
The new interface is seductive for two reasons. Firstly, unlike the old clunky website, the design is fresh, simple to use, expansive in its search options, and free. The latter then leads to the second point of seduction - it is easy to buy a B, D or M certificate and see it within minutes, sometimes seconds. That's joined-up spending - the ability to part with personal funds in a more streamlined and efficient end-to-end inquiry.
However, this interface doesn't stick purchasing obstacles in the way either. Paying for small numbers of credits, requesting credentials before a decision to buy is made, paying for a restricted number of pageviews - all of these are evidence of mean interfaces which discourage joined-up spending.
Although this new development has been delivered in the context of government initiatives to make doing business with government easier, it is an exemplar for genealogical services which think that throwing an overflowing content bucket over the hapless searcher is enough**.
"Joined-up" is a term that emerged early in the 21st century and spread across academic and library service delivery circles. It was and is the goal of government initiatives to make doing business with government easier. The words 'efficient and effective' have been bandied about for so long that they no longer mean much. It's exceedingly satisfying, even at the detriment of my wallet, to see a government department deliver on them regardless.
** with the possible exception of the Free___ services FreeBMD, FreeCEN, and FreeReg currently being compiled and deployed with generous interfaces.
The new interface is seductive for two reasons. Firstly, unlike the old clunky website, the design is fresh, simple to use, expansive in its search options, and free. The latter then leads to the second point of seduction - it is easy to buy a B, D or M certificate and see it within minutes, sometimes seconds. That's joined-up spending - the ability to part with personal funds in a more streamlined and efficient end-to-end inquiry.
However, this interface doesn't stick purchasing obstacles in the way either. Paying for small numbers of credits, requesting credentials before a decision to buy is made, paying for a restricted number of pageviews - all of these are evidence of mean interfaces which discourage joined-up spending.
Although this new development has been delivered in the context of government initiatives to make doing business with government easier, it is an exemplar for genealogical services which think that throwing an overflowing content bucket over the hapless searcher is enough**.
"Joined-up" is a term that emerged early in the 21st century and spread across academic and library service delivery circles. It was and is the goal of government initiatives to make doing business with government easier. The words 'efficient and effective' have been bandied about for so long that they no longer mean much. It's exceedingly satisfying, even at the detriment of my wallet, to see a government department deliver on them regardless.
** with the possible exception of the Free___ services FreeBMD, FreeCEN, and FreeReg currently being compiled and deployed with generous interfaces.
Sunday, 22 November 2015
What about Trove?
Lorcan Dempsey, who seems to divine library trends before they become so, recently synthesised a post about San Francisco start-ups.
The backstory, about moving from London to San Francisco, highlighted how living in two very different places influenced the design of many 21st applications:
That is, living here after living in London, it’s easier to see physical retail as the inefficient end-point to a logistics system, and harder to see it as a curation, discovery and demand generation system. I sometimes wonder how much that difference shapes ecommerce in the Bay Area versus New York and London.
Bay Area problems
One can also look at Amazon in this light - like Sears Roebuck before it, Amazon lets anyone anywhere buy things that you could previously only get in a big city. But that is not at all the same as letting people shop the way you do in a big city. Buying is not shopping.[http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/15/bay-area-problems]Buying is not shopping. Just as searching for a known item in a very large discovery service (buying) such as Trove is not the same as browsing for an item, which may appear in a results set serendipitously (shopping) but turns out to be a perfectly reasonable immediate answer to the question. The medium for that item might be a digitised newspaper or a link to a monograph, a journal, a piece of sheet music, a film, a map or an artwork. Trove does this effortlessly and well, crossing the boundary from traditional catalogues to pool information for a wide range of Australian sources.
This is the power of Trove, its design architecture reflects the need to approach research using one or other of those finding techniques. It expedites both, but with an extra fillip - collaboration. The National Library was and is able to work closely with its close cultural neighbours to experiment with and grow discovery services, curating an unparalleled virtual collection of Australiana. Since 2009, this has expanded from libraries, archives, galleries and museums to include historical societies and local government collections.
The virtual collection is created by sharing item descriptions, not monopolising them, and Trove supports this bi-directionally. That is, when one agency shares the descriptions (metadata) with Trove another agency can copy those descriptions, through the Trove Application Programming Interface (API), to create new virtual 'shopping' experiences.
However if technical support is not on hand to manage the terabytes of metadata available via the API, there are multiple ways to experience collaborative digital collection building through Trove:
⦁ a simple technical method to become a content partner, and in return, receive a persistent, unique label for every item identified
⦁ transforming existing item descriptions to help distinguish items in search results, while emphasising which agency has contributed them
⦁ supporting virtual repatriation to overcome territorial fuzziness, where cohesive collections have been split across geographically close boundaries
⦁ influencing digitisation choice, to feature previously unavailable items
⦁ alternative websites, working on behalf of collections managed elsewhere
⦁ volunteer mobilisation, to fill in description gaps or improve the legibility of local community newspapers
⦁ experimental platforms, built on Trove content, which help us to understand our language, our 19th and 20th century values, and our environment.
[Ref: 2015 Museums & Galleries Queensland conference].
The impact for the general public and researchers is immeasurable. Trove points to items held all over Australia, when the searcher didn't even know that they needed them. And the searcher is referred to an agency, large or small, which they may not have been aware of before. The shopping experience is fulfilling for both searcher and agency.
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| trove.nla.gov.au |
Tuesday, 10 November 2015
Farewell to a gracious lady
 |
| Still-life with self-portrait |
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| trove.nla.gov.au |
Trove collates a lot of detail from a range of cultural heritage services about Ms Cassab's contribution to the country which adopted her, it is easy to find her story there. Not only snapshots of her work, but her thoughts are also captured for posterity in an interview from the National Library's collection, and as part of a joint initiative with the National Gallery.
It is inspiring to hear the soft clear voice explaining the ineluctable force which motivated her painting.
In 1999, the National Library decided to develop a new web service, which became known as PictureAustralia. An aggregation of the digitised images from art and photographic collections around Australia, PictureAustralia exemplified the value of collaboration nationally. Using simple web technologies, the creation of virtual galleries from physically separated collections became possible.
Internal discussions then ensued to decide how best to promote and raise awareness of the service. The National Library already held some of the works of Judy Cassab including portraits. It was important to illustrate the breadth of Australia's old and new collections, and Ms Cassab's contribution was an easy choice to feature. In addition, her generosity was already well known.
So an approach to use her self-portrait as a postcard was made. The response was instant - "please go ahead and may I have several copies to send to friends?" The Library was only too happy to oblige, and this postcard was one of the reasons for the success which PictureAustralia became.
Monday, 5 October 2015
Buried in the vaults
An elegant old building stands at 120 Kent Street, very close to Barangaroo. It houses a vault with genealogical gems that capture the early history of Sydney's major cemeteries: Camperdown, Macquarie Park, Rookwood, Waverley and South Head.
This history is cared for by the Society of Australian Genealogists,
and its membership is open to everyone with a research interest in
local and family history across New South Wales as well as Sydney's 19th
century architecture.
Some of that architecture is immortalised in the design of memorials and headstones which reach for permanence.
There are also maps of New South Wales cemeteries and visites-de-carte supporting the life stories, tragedies in death, and moving tributes to Australians who migrated from many countries around the world captured in photographs. The range of stories is extraordinary - from Ben Hall the bushranger to Eliza Donnithorne, believed to have inspired Miss Haversham in Dickens' Great Expectations.
The Society has a long track record of service to historians and genealogists. While the stories of the cemeteries and their inhabitants are available by visiting either 120 or 379 Kent Street, a digitisation fund-raising project was recently launched to unlock the photographs of headstones and other unique content from the vault.
The record of existence of many people, once acknowledged in the now crumbling headstones and memorial vaults, will be brought back to life. It just needs your support.
 |
| Part of Ben Hall's headstone |
This history is cared for by the Society of Australian Genealogists,
and its membership is open to everyone with a research interest in
local and family history across New South Wales as well as Sydney's 19th
century architecture.Some of that architecture is immortalised in the design of memorials and headstones which reach for permanence.
 |
| Nambucca Heads Cemetery |
There are also maps of New South Wales cemeteries and visites-de-carte supporting the life stories, tragedies in death, and moving tributes to Australians who migrated from many countries around the world captured in photographs. The range of stories is extraordinary - from Ben Hall the bushranger to Eliza Donnithorne, believed to have inspired Miss Haversham in Dickens' Great Expectations.
The Society has a long track record of service to historians and genealogists. While the stories of the cemeteries and their inhabitants are available by visiting either 120 or 379 Kent Street, a digitisation fund-raising project was recently launched to unlock the photographs of headstones and other unique content from the vault.
The record of existence of many people, once acknowledged in the now crumbling headstones and memorial vaults, will be brought back to life. It just needs your support.
Thursday, 17 September 2015
Everyone's talking about Canning
Tomorrow there is an important event in Western Australia, a by-election in Canning. But this federal government seat is not named for the other place of challenge known as the Canning Stock Route.
Described as the most isolated four wheel drive (4WD) track in the southern hemisphere, the Canning Stock Route has inspired people from around the world to indulge in isolation, break time barriers and marvel at the sheer range of flora and fauna - some of it feral. It also instigated this blog.
But of course, it wasn't prepared for 4WD vehicles or bicycles. Originally cattle followed in the footsteps of men, horses and camels. Over 1,700km from Billiluna to Wiluna, water was sourced and made available through more than 50 wells. While that may have been enough to sustain cattle, as the wells have fallen gradually into disrepair, humans have had to become more self-sufficient.
Those who have the inclination can find other timeless features by searching the breakaways for indigenous rock art. More than once, I could sense a living presence in some of the caves nearby.
It is wonderful then to have this art wander out of the desert to places where more Australians can see it. Following on from its successful exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in 2010, Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, it is now possible to see Kaninjaku: Stories from the Canning Stock Route in the same place (as well as online).
And the exhibition We don't need a map, travelling much further than the CSR itself, is in the Gold Coast City Gallery at the moment. A rare opportunity to see a unique Martu experience.
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| The Australian Geographic Book of The Canning Stock Route, p.10 |
Described as the most isolated four wheel drive (4WD) track in the southern hemisphere, the Canning Stock Route has inspired people from around the world to indulge in isolation, break time barriers and marvel at the sheer range of flora and fauna - some of it feral. It also instigated this blog.
But of course, it wasn't prepared for 4WD vehicles or bicycles. Originally cattle followed in the footsteps of men, horses and camels. Over 1,700km from Billiluna to Wiluna, water was sourced and made available through more than 50 wells. While that may have been enough to sustain cattle, as the wells have fallen gradually into disrepair, humans have had to become more self-sufficient.
 |
| The Lost City of Termite Mounds, 16 September 2013 |
Those who have the inclination can find other timeless features by searching the breakaways for indigenous rock art. More than once, I could sense a living presence in some of the caves nearby.
 |
| Breakaways near Gravity Lakes, 17 September 2013 |
 |
| Ingebong Hills, 7 September 2013 |
And the exhibition We don't need a map, travelling much further than the CSR itself, is in the Gold Coast City Gallery at the moment. A rare opportunity to see a unique Martu experience.
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