Greetings from Gazipaşa

Hey folks! Greetings from Gazipaşa, Turkey.

I find myself here embarking on an adventure much dreamed about: an Indiana Jones-esque escapade digging up an ancient Roman city by the mediterranean coast in modern-day southern Turkey. It is pretty awesome.

I have managed to find a tenuous post link, you will all be happy to know. My first night in Turkey was spent in Antalya, where I visited Hadrian's Gate. And lo and behold, when I bought a stamp to send off my first postcard of the trip, it featured Hadrian's Gate. So here it is:

Now I am in Gazipaşa, a good three hour bus-ride from Antalya, where our dig-house is located. Our dig-house is normally a soccer club's football rooms, which have been transformed into dorms for our purposes. It is a pretty great set-up. Our site that we are digging up is about half an hour from here, and is the Roman city of "Antiochia ad Cragum," or "Antioch on the Cliffs."

The above photo is taken from the entry gates to the Roman city, overlooking the countryside with the Mediterranean sea beyond.  The Roman city is amazing. There is a temple that dates to the end of the 2nd Century AD; the remains of three bath-houses - one major one surrounded by an elaborate mosaic inside the city gates, one smaller bath-house outside the gates, and one down by the sea; there is the remains of the colonnaded street, which would have had shops lining it and a stunning view over the Sea.

Getting a site tour

Inside the outer bath-house

Part of the colonnaded street

A road sign in Latin

The focus of our excavations this season is on what we think is the city Agora, or marketplace. And after two days of glorified gardening - removing a thousand different types of prickle bushes - in order to reveal the ground surface, by Friday we were ready to get into it. I am in a trench with Mary Ann, and we are excavating on top of a mound that may be a temple. I am pretty excited to get into it next week.

Mary Ann and I standing in the middle of our trench pre-excavation

Anyhow, after our first week of work, our hard slog was rewarded with a swim in the "Pirate's Cove."

You can't really beat that, right? 

So, that is my first week in Turkey done... and I am very much looking forward to the second.

World Stamp Expo Fun Times!

 

So this blogging game has gotten away from me recently, and as a result there is a bit of catching up to do. About a month ago I was very excited to attend the World Stamp Expo, which was being held in my hometown of Melbourne. The WORLD STAMP EXPO!

The Expo was held at the Royal Exhibition Building, a beautiful UNESCO World Heritage listed building located in the Carlton Gardens. I dragged my dutiful boyfriend along, who patiently accompanied through the myriad stalls from various postal authorities from around the globe. I also dragged my friend Grant along - but he chose to lie in the sun for a couple of hours in the Gardens instead. Each to their own (but you missed out on some fun, Grant!).

As you could well imagine, I made a few purchases over the course of the day. My little bag was full (and my bank account empty) by the end of it. I got a souvenir minisheet to add to my royal kitsch collection, embossed with the Expo logo on it.  And I just couldn't help myself, also adding to my royal collection I got a Wills and Kate FDC.

Moving away from my tacky fascination with royals, I also indulged my love of maps, and found this amazingly beautiful minisheet from Greenland. What a find!

I also visited Deutsche Post, and purchased this lovely minisheet as it features both a map element and the Antarctic, and I love the Antarctic. The combinations of boats and ice always make for beautiful images. Would you agree?

I also found these awesome Indonesian stamps, which I saw when I visited there last year, but resisted buying at the time due to budgetary constraints.

The stamps depict traditional fabric designs from around Indonesia. They are quite lovely, in my opinion.

Anyhow that is a sample of my many purchases from the World Stamp Expo 2013.  It was a very fun day out for a big stamp nerd like me.

And now this stamp nerd is signing off for the time being. I am about to head to Turkey for six and a half weeks! I am very excited and will be working on a Roman archaeological site on the south coast. It is an absolute dream come true and I can't wait to be archaeologising on the other side of the world. So I will try and post to this blog (probably fairly irregularly) over the coming few weeks, but the posts will be archaeologic rather than philatelic in nature. But watch this space!

Street Art and Stamps

Check it out: Stamp street-art! How wonderful. I spotted this at the Laneway Music Festival in Footscray (Melbourne) on the weekend. The festival was great fun - Bat for Lashes headlined, but Alt-J ( ∆ ) were possibly the highlight for me... they sounded amazing and were great fun to dance to.

Anyhow it is not all that regularly that the worlds of rock'n'roll and stamp nerds collide, so I was pretty thrilled to see these paste-up images of an early and iconic Australian Stamp at a music festival.

I do actually have this stamp in my collection, courtesy of Grandma Nellie. Although the stamp I have is not in great condition.

The stamp was part of the George VI series of definitives released in 1950-51. The thing that makes me uneasy about the image is that it was released in that time well before the 1967 referendum which recognised  indigenous people as citizens. So this image smacks of paternalism to me - while it is depicting, and in a way celebrating, the nameless Aborigine on the stamp, the image seems to be loaded with the racist ethnocentric assumptions of the day.

It is an enduring image, even if it is a racist one. And in 2009 another version of the stamp was celebrated as one of "Australia's favourite stamps." I think the image reads slightly differently in the 2009 version than it did in the 1950/51 version. It is a bit more like, "Look! We love Aborigines! We always have: check out this old stamp!" And of course that is blatantly untrue.  But I see an attempt at reconciliation in the 2009 stamp, a more genuine respect that doesn't have the same patronising tone of the 1951 release.

And what of the 2013 paste-up on a brick wall in Footscray of the same image?  I love it.

2012: The Year that Was

As 2012 draws to a close it is very tempting to do a bit of reflection on the year that was. So please excuse me while I indulge in some trips down memory lane...

This year I:

• started a blog (this one!!) and rediscovered the joys of post;
• moved house;
• said goodbye to my lovely Grandpa;
• decided that I liked First Day Covers very much;
• hung out in Indonesia;

And in between I also:

• Had some very fun times at work with the gang;
• Danced like a teenager in a friend's loungeroom into the early hours, during a weekend escape to the beach;
• said goodbye to Glenholme;
• Saw the Shins do a fantastic gig at Festival Hall;
• Went to a couple of amazing music festivals (harvest and laneway) with the wonderful Jaz;

In 2012 I managed to visit some amazing places and do some amazing things:

• I started the year in Cambodia with my work friends doing some volunteering in a village;
• Went to Perth for a weekend for Em and Steve's beautiful wedding;
• Did a couple of sections of the Great Ocean Walk near Point Otway;
• Had a great time visiting friends in Adelaide;
• Went on a couple of little day trips - to Clunes (for a book fair) and to Steiglitz (a ghost town).

All in all 2012 had some sad times, some changes, but lots of really great highlights too.

So... who knows what 2013 will hold? Lots more fun times, I hope. And some more blogging. Thank- you to everyone for all the blog love. Thank-you for tuning in and for leaving comments, emailing and supporting.

Happy New Year Everyone! 

xx Helen

Postcards from the Past: Archaeology and Family

In my last blog post on Sunday I mentioned that I had a massive week last week. As it turns out the above postcard represents a synergy of all that massive week contained! Let me explain...

My working week was massive, because I was taking part in another fieldwork session out past Ballarat on an old gold-rush era site (I blogged about it back in July here). It was our very last week of fieldwork last week, and we all felt like we were the stars of 'Time Team', with Tony Robinson in voice over saying something  along the lines of

"with only five days before this site is bull-dozed to make way for a new freeway, the archaeologists are working against the clock to find out what they can of this fascinating microcosm of life on the road to the goldfields in the 1860s..." 

There is a little bit of dramatic-license in there, but you get the drift. We were on a schedule. A road is being built. We worked like maniacs. Tony Robinson may or may not have been there. Here are some happy snaps:

It was a very fun week, and the archaeology was pretty interesting. Will found a coin from 1835, a pocket knife and a jet earring. Rach found an ink well. Ben found a bottle of some magical ointment that was a cure-all for gout, rheumatism and sore breasts! And I found some broken ceramics. Oh, and a sewing pin, when it pricked me in the finger. Dang! But what a fun week we had. Massively exhausting, but great fun.

Then, on Saturday, I turned around and drove back from whence I came, to Ballarat, in order to trawl through my Grandparents possessions, as they have just sold the family home. That was a massive day for all sorts of reasons. It is so sad to see the house go, as it has been in the family for generations. I loved spending all my school holidays there as a kid, playing in the garden with my cousins and sisters. My sister Emily got married in that garden a couple of years ago, and so the house holds all sorts of special memories. Here are some happy snaps of the house and garden "Glenholme":

My Grandma gave me her stamp collection, but I also took another special item of 'post' from the house... Great-Great-Great Aunty Mabel's postcard collection. There will be many more blog posts about Mabel's postcards, because they are so wonderful. She collected her postcards are from such exotic places as Ceylon, Zimbabwe, Norway and Hong Kong. The lady knew how to travel.

But as I was reading through them last night, I was super delighted to find the postcard from much closer to home, which I began this blog post with. This is a postcard Mabel received in 1905 from a party taking a picnic in an old 'Cobb and Co' coach right near the archaeological site I had spent my week digging up. So past and present, archaeology and memory, work and family life all meld together in the image on the front of the postcard, and the message scrawled to Mrs Cuthbert of Glenholme on the back. How absolutely lovely, and how absolutely thrilled I am.

Archaeology / Gold Rush / Stamps / Yay!

On site at Burrumbeet. The big skies out there are amazing.

Howdy folks!
The past two weeks I have been away on fieldwork, hanging out with the archaeologists and digging up what was an old hotel on the busy road between two goldfields in the 1850s and 60s. It was a really great two weeks and we uncovered what is a really interesting site, which is indicative of a bustling little township in a place that is now the home to only a handful of people.

Text from my stamps presentation pack

Gold was officially discovered in 1851 - and then it was on like donkey kong. People poured into the colony. Men mostly, but from all corners of the globe. The gold-rush era transformed the fledgling colony of Victoria - only newly separated from New South Wales - and as a result of this new found wealth, roads were built; railways established; and not a few hotelkeepers made their fortunes rather cleverly, not by seeking gold, but by selling grog to those who were.

Of course, you will all be pleased to know, the gold rush, which had such a momentous and lasting impact on the colony and on the country, has been commemorated in a stamp issue (everything comes back to the stamps!)

The stamp designs are based on the drawings of artist ST Gill and depict life on the gold fields, which was a very hard slog that didn't necessarily result in a large payday.

The site that we were working on the past two weeks was about a days journey between two goldfields; and therefore a perfect resting place, so many hotels and grog shops sprung up. Judging by the misty mornings we encountered, it would have been damn cold on them goldfields sleeping under a canvas tent.

So, here are a few happy snaps from our time on site. It was such great fun.

Stringing up a new trench on a very misty morning.

Uncovering a bluestone wall: foundations of a pub?

Heads down, bums up: getting deeper into the trench

 Wendy & I on another very misty (cold) morning. We wouldn't have been able to see each other but for our hi-vis!

The hotel site is really intriguing, and we still have more work to do out there. The gold era catches my imagination and I love it! Yay for archaeology and history and post all coming together into my life! What a great couple of weeks!

Brunei and Tongariro; Envelopes and Scale bars

Last time I went back home to my parents house and slept in my old bedroom, I found four envelopes that I had once sorted stamps into, labelled, and tucked away in the bookshelf above my old cast-iron bed.

This afternoon (after I clocked off work of course), I sorted out some of the stamps and tried to take some photos of them on the photography table at work. That is why, in the above photo, for my own great amusement, I have included a scale bar (hello archaeologist friends!).

Anyhow, in the envelopes, as you would plainly expect, there are lots of treasures.

There are a whole heap of stamps from Brunei, all with the Sultan's head on them. These came from my cousins who lived in Brunei in what must have been the late-eighties/early-nineties. This was about the time, I think, that my Dad thought it was hilarious if he got us to do salaams and call him Master. I think he fancied himself a Sultan. We didn't fall for it for a second.

 Anyhow, the stamps are all very beautiful, and I am not sure what I am going to do with them. Put them in an album? Make gift tags out of them? Leave them in their envelopes, so that in another twenty years when I am rifling through my stuff, I find them and get great pleasure out of tipping out the contents and discovering the delightful treasures anew? Hmmm... I am not sure. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

So many pretty pictures, so many lovely lovely treasures... but just as I was putting away the stamps, I found this one:

It shows the Tongariro National Park and Chateau. I had no idea that I had this stamp, but I totally totally LOVE it. Last year, my Mum and I went to NZ and hiked the Tongariro Crossing... and the next day went and had high tea at the chateau. So this completely wonderful little stamp epitomises a really fantastic holiday! YAY for cool stamps! Big-ups to New Zealand Post!

Mount Tongariro

High tea at the chateau with Mum

And one of the view from the top.. below the snow level. It totally made the 19km hike worthwhile!