Chloe is the most famous painting in ‘Australian Pubs’, although there are more famous pubs like, perhaps for Queensland, the National Hotel in Brisbane
The photos I have linked to were all taken by Bruce Howard, the book’s photographer and mate of the writer, Melbourne journo, John Larkins. A little research discovered the photos in the book are held by the National Library of Australia and available for viewing on the internet. You can link to other views by Bruce Howard if you are interested in following up on this photographer here – a page of links found by google search using the words ‘bruce howard image National Library of Australia’. National Library of Australia btw is the largest reference library in Australia and says you have to tell them if you want to publish anything they hold other than for study and research.
C’est la vie. This is a study.
Chloe hangs in Melbourne, Victoria in a pub called Young and Jackson that is opposite Flinders Street Station, as famous as you betcha. Here’s the Station in 2010.
Flinders St Station, Melbourne
I recall happy times in that locale for the first time in 1969, 19 years old and meeting a friend there (at the station) who gave me directions he would be standing under the clock reading a newspaper (look out for a trench coat). I couldn’t have been more enchanted and wonder where Max is to catch up for old times’ sake.
You can imagine travellers walking across the road to Young and Jackson that started in 1861 as the Princes Bridge Hotel – – that was renamed in 1875 after the persons who took it on, Henry Young and Thomas Jackson. Max and I did (walk across the road) to put our heads in for an historic glimpse of Chloe. The model for Chloe, whose real name was Marie, was said to be 19. As recorded in ‘Australian Pubs’, Chloe was painted in Paris in 1875 by Jules Lefebvre and won the ‘Grand Medal at the Paris Salon‘. If you see on wikipedia a photo of a portrait of a woman with a revealing cleavage and caption claiming it caused a stir at the Salon in 1884, I cannot imagine what the showing of Chloe created.
The painting was purchased by one Melbourne Doctor, Thomas Fitzgerald and bought for the Hotel in 1908 for 800 pounds. Anybody interested to read more about the painting, can find a history here.
‘Australian Pubs’ was published in 1973. I picked it up for a dollar at a Friends of the Library book sale recently in Adelaide. The significance of the painting on the cover could only be in my thinking – apart from the excellent quality of the photograph – evidence of the Australia-wide resistance in the 1960s and 1970s by artists against a pernicious conservatism, but corruption that publicised gatherings of artists and philosophers in Australia as anti-social and dangerous although especially if grouped around the peace movement. Attempts using the least evidence of nudity or implication in art to bring ‘persons of interest’ into law courts on charges of moral offence allegedly caused by works of art was a standard ploy. Be that maybe motivation of editorial choice, the first sentence is ‘This has been thirsty work’. The flyleaf of the front cover describes the book as ‘the result of a 25,000-mile pub crawl’. The text is very well written and the photos excellent that illustrate 86 hotels in all – if my counting is right as the index is not numbered.
Beautifully edited. ’Australian Pubs’ – text by John Larkins – photographs by Bruce Howard – published by Rigby – First edition 1973 and reprinted each year to this edition 1976.
FOOTNOTE:
Published. orig. at Blipfoto by Kangaroo Friday 21 February, 2014
Sandshoe has been Kangaroo at the social media photography site, Blipfoto, since May of 2013 a.k.a. Kanga, Roo, Kay, K, and as Christina, sometimes by her full name. She says:-
I have a Blipland friend who is “Shoe”. I restrict my handle to Kangaroo as a social courtesy, but have made it known I am also Sandshoe a.k.a.”Shoe” at the Pigs Arms. I have written about Blipfoto before for the Pigs Arms when I was far less experienced a photographer and commenter.
The principle is upload a photo a day. 170 countries are represented to date on blipfoto and there have been 22 milion shared comments, those increasing as we think about it.
I have uploaded 280 images and comment on a round of photographers’ ‘blips’ most days. My own network extends across the countries of Scotland, England, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, America, Canada, New Zealand; at least 6 blippers I know of since I joined Blipfoto have embarked on strenuous travel through Europe, Italy, France, Greece and Asia while some travel between countries every day in the course of their employment.
I am currently following a blipper’s journey through Russia. Australian blippers are all over, including who live on the same railway line and surrounding districts. I write some poetry as reply to poetry, especially sometimes write prose. Some blippers write very lengthy diaries based on their personal interests, sometimes their research and professional interests, some DJ and others only upload a photo. Some blippers meet socially, others team up for photographic projects. Professional photographers and amateurs alike meet at Blipfoto.
We played beamey at “little lunch” which was morning recess and at “big lunch” at midday underneath the raised school rooms on posts. The regular spacing of the posts black with creosote described the width of our courts and shallow grooves that were lines in the concrete floor made by its being laid in squares became serving lines-two equidistant from either side of the position of the central joist beam supporting the floor of the school rooms above. Players stood behind the second line that was the furtherest from the overhead central beam.
The wing of the school consisted of three rooms. The potential underneath it was two beamey courts under each room according to the spacing of the posts ie six games could be played at one time (12 players).
One player of an opposed pair standing at the serving line with a tennis ball in their hand raised their arm and bent their elbow to throw the ball from the level of their shoulder with an expert thrust. The object was to bounce the ball off the central joist beam so the ball returned to the player and could be caught.
If instead of it connecting with the central joist beam it flew off into the court of the player on the other (opposing) side (delineated by the central joist beam), or if the player failed to catch the ball on its return, the ‘turn’ faulted to the opposing player.
Each game was comprised of a set of throws by the player.
First set was ten throws that connected with the beam and full-catch with two hands each time the ball returned to the player as accomplishment of its bouncing off the beam.
Second was ten throws and full-catch with one hand.
Third was ten throws and clap-catch on the ball’s return (catch with two hands). Fourth was ten throws and two claps-catch and so on up to five claps for senior players who might also challenge a champion to execute six and so on.
Each set of ten throws had to be completed and if not were begun again when the ball faulted back to the player who had not accomplished their full set. Each set of ten that was accomplished by a player signalled that the players change sides and the players walked to the other end of the court – swapped ends – before resuming play.
Players held their own creatively, challenged to more complex tasks by each other including catching the ball behind their back and/or throwing the ball under a raised leg and alternate legs. The more experienced the players, yet more complex the challenges issued. The skill of the game included its self regulation that if a player was unable to progress to ten throws and consecutive catches or clap-catches within a reasonable time, they graciously conceded and the ball passed to a new player. The excitement generated keen contenders and audience that grew the longer the champion player held their ground as happens in any sport. The bystanders lined up between the courts in closely packed lines and exclaimed, clapped and jeered. For one set players threw the ball so it bounced off the beam and fell to bounce within the court before it was caught. The ball at the point of being caught had to have had enough spin originally incorporated into its trajectory to fall graciously into position as it lost momentum. The game slowed, but room for error caused a fluster of excitement among bystanders such was the level of skill required that was understood and appreciated.
The area was not uniformly or well lit at the best of times. The inner wall had a series of windows set in it high off the ground, but threw awkward shadow in dark blocks. Sunshine in changing striations cast angles of light into the eyes of the player facing the outer end of the court that was open to a quadrangle of bitumen. The sun’s glare generated a momentary illusion that the ball disappeared when it was thrown at the beam.
I had taken this game for granted until I read as a University student the volume by Iona and Peter Opie, pub.1959, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford University Press).
I recognised school yard games and rhymes I had half-forgotten. Oranges and Lemons as a well known example and its variations recalled our chanting in the school ground the names of these places and bells that in North Queensland in Australia we had little or no familiarity with. Yet, like ducks to water we chanted as if we knew what we were singing about.
Such was our enjoyment in the play we organised ourselves, I had never wondered how we knew the language of rhyme and play. Iona and Peter describe games they had collected from geographically far-flung contributors of knowledge of children’s activity, pastimes and social alliances through which games were reformed, child to child, generation to generation. Children moving to different schools in a neighbourhood took their rhymes to the next, making up variations on original games, but changing words and meanings depending on the interests of the day or the bright spark’s who made up a new joke on a refrain.
The random thought occurred that I might be unlikely to encounter in literature a description of the game of beamey. Might it be eccentric to my hometown and school. Since, I know from canvassing Facebook users on a local interest page that beamey was widely and fiercely played in other schools in the area in the same way we played it at my school, bouncing a ball off a central joist beam under the floorboards of an overhead school room…and dependent on a complex set of rules and challenges.
The Opies’ central thesis as I read it is that children live in a creative playscape (my word, I think) of skill and inventiveness that nevertheless has a common heritage, a childish built-play environment, schoolyard to schoolyard and across seas. Migrants bring their play and other travellers carry it back with variations in a never-ending criss-cross of fertilisation. Parents’ play with their children perpetuates the heritage.
The game of ‘tag’, as another example I can think of, is played the world over that a group of children forms into a circle a child runs around inside until they suddenly swoop to touch one of the children in the circle on the upper arm. A variation of it I played with my friends was the child ran around the outside of the circle. The children in the circle could not second guess who the next person ‘tagged’ would be. In either game, the resultant excitement was a whoop and a mix of exclamations and shouting, “You’re it”. The game is one of empathy and collusion. The collusion is designed to develop group skills and reflex judgment. A variation involves a melee of children darting and confusing in a good humoured manner the person who is ‘it’. The skill is to not get immediately tagged back when tagging.
The wonder of it all is that these games do not degenerate into bad feelings and wounded pride. ‘Tag’ proceeds apace so the huffing and puffing of the individual runners red in their face from exertion, but never anticipating serious harm turns into serious exercise. The attention paid concentration and focus, but particularly preparedness to maintain ‘tag’ and not generate a biff-up is evidence alone of the children’s creative intention. Readers will recall a host of variations of this simple game.
Although as far as I am aware entirely organised by children for children, beamey may be different in that it is shaped by the built environment itself, which is its limiter.
Let’s have a bit of a look at the status of women in Australia.
As of the 2008 Census 50.3% of the population was female. In all states except West Australia and the Northern Territory there were more women than men. Home in on the single and ageing population, as if the 54.5% of Australia’s singles who were counted as females does not have a passle of work enough to accomplish to maintain that household…over the age of 65 there were 2.4 women for every single person male household.
Women will experience more resentment than they do now not less and neglect as they age. (I didn’t say men are or aren’t/don’t… whatever! This article, putting it simply, is not about men!)
My instinct rang an alert in regard of a statistic referencing education…that while women marginally outnumbered men at all qualification levels, they did not for Certificates III or IV and Post-Graduate qualifications. The difference between the numbers of women and men attaining Certificates III or IV is so large in favour of the male gender I beg that discrimination is the reason.
The deficit in this particular for women is significant, importantly because of National Training Authority imposed and legislated standards, considering the status of women’s employment in positions that exclude applicants who have not attained Certificates III or IV. Educators at certain levels must have those.
Discrimination ought to turn victims into beggars. Instead I posit …and don’t waste time in your head on the sidelines, anybody, giving yourself dry rot that you store up and remember for years about the way I write or words I employ … Australian women are captives of a host of cultural reasons why they will neither beg or expect men to organise to compensate women for the insidious position women occupy, however well-educated otherwise women are.
Women are among the worst offenders who harangue and bully women…who cheat, lie, steal and thieve from women (so we understand this isn’t intended to place you at the centre of the evil empire, men).
The permutations and combinations that make up men who identify as male and women who identify themselves comfortably as female is so complex, too, can we possibly pole vault the rubbish about what women and men are best suited for at any one moment or other? Equally get over citing ourselves as not like everyone else in this important regard?
I feel very sorry, but we are locked in it (together) with all its consequences.
Females are so few who undertake Engineering compared with men it is no surprise to me female engineers are paid more than men (as are female earth sciences graduates … and, curiously, social work graduates where there is no deficit in the numbers compared with men). Yet twice as many women as men completed Society and Culture courses and three times as many completed Health and Education courses. Some might suggest the under-representation of women in Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Cabinet looks distinctly discriminatory viewed alongside this insight.
Surely the principle is easily understood that a government needs a hefty complement of participants who understand the fiscal and education system in the context of society and culture. Who it works for is essential knowledge. Speaking from the collective viewpoint called social, societal or society depending on which language tool someone uses to present or talk about this stuff, not for our wives, daughters and our sisters is as good as remaindered knowledge for all the insight that is shone on what this is doing to our present and future. Particularly regarding how this affects social discourse.
85% of male graduates from Bachelor degree courses and 85% of female graduates were employed at the time of the survey…however women with post graduate qualifications were most likely to be only available for part time or casual work and not seeking full-time employment. One reason will continue to be the abominable behaviour a woman may be subject to in any societal environment in which men are promoted over women on the sole basis of prejudice against women. The discrepancy is considerable however comparing male and female ordinary graduates and more significant again comparing Graduate Diploma and Certificate Level graduands. The second of those statistics is disturbing viewed in the light as it is that the overall number of women accomplishing Certificate III/IV courses is so far behind the sheer numbers of men.
Apprenticeship and traineeship numbers tell a story of blatant prejudice (I am not saying who is demonstrating prejudice in this reference or either in what direction!)
Women made up 33% of apprentices and trainees in 2007 (telling it like it factually was). More than 61% of all apprentices and trainees were male in trades persons and related workers occupations and 16.5% were women. Women made up more than twice the number of men in Intermediate clerical, sales and service groups. Women made up just over 13% of Intermediate production and transport workers in 2007.
The concept of discrimination based on gender (this is me talking now and not a statistician; neither the statistician) will not mean a thing to anybody who hasn’t got the swing. The size of the differences between these categories is a wrecking ball. A society in which an economic landscape is differentiated so distinctly by differences in gender has a workplace communication problem. The problem in domestic environments goes without saying when we know next to nothing about the others’ work places.
No?
Funny are the naysayers. They cause me to remember being singled out for consultation that because I was “a doctor’s wife” I would know such-and-such about a medical condition. Even my reputation won for being a femme who holds strong viewpoints backed by some knowledge was discriminated against ie took on the chin a lesser status purely on the basis of my marriage and gender. Forget about my qualifications and status in society and culture. Do a mob if they thought about it honestly suppose that a non-medical man (say, a plumber) married to a female medical practitioner would be swept up at a party and manipulated ostensibly to account for their specific knowledge about medical practice?
No because our societal consequences do not run on songlines of knowledge and appreciation of human need and comfort, but on what societal tendency is in vogue or entrenched. We accept until we are challenged…and even after…things we believe on the basis of nothing but systemic manipulation and discrimination according to race, colour, culture, status and creed. Add gender.
People like to get a leg over others and get as much as others if not more of the social pie.
There is not enough of everybody (speaking statistically) employed in enough of the same or similar environments to practically disseminate information and educate each other regards what’s going on. No society needs the discrimination and penury women are subject to, but it sure as hell does not need the emotional and cultural deprivation Australia is suffering as result of the absence of a common language and roadmap based on an understanding of gender, of how to choose the tools needed for each common task and allocate basic resources.
Leaving it to hit and miss or ‘Strike!’ from the sidelines and side-lined is an abysmal method of governance. If it is not clear and if we cannot take for granted there are many shades of love and many descriptive differences between men and women … and proscriptive…and that we have to understand this language (Gender) and accept dialogue about it and its fallacies, we cannot heal the consequences of this loss and waste of the talent of both men and women that is affecting our country and economy so badly. Ask women if you have not already ….who try to tell you and you and you … how it makes them feel. Refer to your brothers, husbands and sons who are turned on to issues of gender discrimination and its saddest consequences. Think about how you feel challenged.
Who am I addressing? All of us. Does anyone honestly think I am proposing myself at a centre of a universe after the breadth of experience I have clearly had? Sitting on a sideline, come out and reveal yourself as gender challenged, but willing to concede the waste of time you and you and you apportion argument about it; argument particularly that it doesn’t happen in our place of residence, workplace and affect our very own children who are now independent and having their children.
Look at the government we’ve got. The satirical line of The Year Of Three sung by The Axis of Awesome at the end of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s programme last night, Q & A, lays it on as thick as a layer of nothing but spreadable butter in reference to gender and the current Prime Minister: [he] put a whole woman in his Cabinet and lots of other splendid shit. SEE LINK: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3878650.htm
I may write some more if anybody shows interest that I do in reference to gender. How I came to this week was in light of current circumstance and looking out some .pdf files I saved down a while back. I cannot see from where I derived them individually . Nevertheless their contents are displayed on this website as follows:
No other reason why I titled this satirical line drawing ‘Ciccente’ than liking the name when I heard it. A friend who was a traveller, a singer-composer-songwriter, jack-of-all-trades really told me about his impressions on meeting Ciccente, a co-worker in New York who washed dishes to contribute to the support of his wife and extended family. We exchanged stories.
In a patisserie where I worked in Auckland, a giant of a man who was a Pacific Islander immigrant and sole support of his family washed dishes with water running off his giant arms and giant elbows making the floor slippery (although no-one said). I didn’t know his name. He didn’t speak. I started work at 6 a.m. without question.
In the same year I lived at an address behind a rambling wooden boarding house of lodgers and my visitors were street people. I converted the walls of the shed into a display of art and writing-Primus. Audience genuinely enjoyed their viewing. I served hot tea and a steaming bowl of whole oat porridge at any time of the day when I was home. The rent I paid was a pittance. The unit was a converted claptrap of a shed formerly used for garaging a household car.
Sometimes I visited premises up along the ridge of a decaying High Street where a coterie of youthful designers and musicians lived in vacant warehouses. They worked in menial occupations. A close friend was waiting to hear about an application for admission into an Art College. I had never thought of that. One shop front vendor I identified with because he too had worked at premises in the city where I did. I saw style reflected and recognised my own.
Meanwhile, the cost of living was soaring, yet these were heady days, made so by glimpsed roses in inner city straggling gardens and the rush of the traffic even on the overpass over Newton Gully. These are places in the city to-from where we do not usually stop a car and can barely look. I was one with knowing the city around me and sense of rush under me, walking with abandonment and abandoning a preconception given me I could not survive without support. We do generally survive arduous emotional events that we experience when we are parents. I had separated from my family to survive. We have to survive and find a way back.
I wrote and contributed this experiential essay then although not immediate to the 17th. What definition I wonder did we choose, the ed. and me … to move on to something else instead.
The hubbub of children oscillated like a drone in the hall. Fashionable ladies with smiling grey-haired, white-headed and bald men gathered near the vinyl/leather lounge where I was sitting. Hardly an individual voice could be heard. I was lost on the second/third floor of –perhaps – an outlier of a department of the NGV for all the sense I could make of foyer areas of bare walls and stretches of carpet with scrambles of schoolchildren pets accompanied by their teacher-owners walking them. Wherever I walked. Some carrying chairs and so far I hadn’t seen any art much. It is a big place to feel adrift. Feeling very much a loose cannon, might I cut and run. Escape the noise setting up its one all mighty gig in my head. As if off the end of a water slide whooshed. Barely treading water was I considering the carpet a stretch of a hard sea. I had decided to walk to meet with the thrill of discovery of a random piece that would transport me to heaven. An intrigue of an oil painting by an abstract artist. The solid of a sculpture by a realist. I began wending my way across a loch inside a castle on the island in its moat. I could not be far. I reached a lift door hidden in a blank wall. Art was in the air as a bespectacled youth with another bespectacled youth met the lift when I stepped out. The young people spoke to the silent lift as they stepped in. Their words whisked into the drone of words, laughter, giggling, sneezing, coughing, talking, whispering, rustling, but no footsteps. A spy could get a spy with polonium-210 in that place. People maintained their distances, walked singly and flitted with chairs.
Collage
Harrall Fletcher’s exhibition appealed to me for its title: The sound we make together (Melbourne). I did not attach to it thoughts about the initial cacophony of nothing and everything going on in my head and space as I defined it in the interior’s conclusions of edges of blocks of shadow and light and unlit corners. “Soundscapes” (an assumption) had lept out of a flame of interest to the forefront of my narrowing mind and I turned to looking for locational plans, a wall directory, signs. A sign after choosing the traffic of attendees going somewhere to trail after was obscure that appeared in a dark (I am sure) wallplate: ‘Harrall Fletcher’ I discerned and details. I chose the modest door and felt blocked by a screen with hanging on it a dark (I swear it) photograph that didn’t appeal as I wondered if it was lit or I unlit. ‘Collaboration and Participation’ was not what I was after and yet I chose a community-based project. I was more and more engaged in interest in the individual.
When I walked around the screen and saw the sea of floor, felt an immense separation of feelings I noticed stirring in instinct to bond them, from where I stood thus I undertook an honorary inspection of the room empty other than for its exhibits and decided…to leave the NGV for another visit to Melbourne. Outside, I saw a couple of enterprising men using the synthetic grass space next to the gallery to stretch and discuss the dynamics of their musculature. They waved their hands at each other. I thought that looked interesting. A thin young man in an ill-fitting suit sat on one of the clustered bales provided on the lawn. He lifted a pamphlet to read it and discretely scratched his top lip with his free hand. I recognized a Movember moustache as I did another and another inclusive of the same self-conscious gesture wherever I had walked through the streets of Melbourne that day. Art abounds in Melbourne city in the street, that seeming to be wherever it can be fitted and adorning its architecture.
Somewhere alongside the Yarra River I sat at a bus stop, changed into the Crocs I unpacked out of my possessions in my rucksack off my back and found a rubbish bin for my sneakers. I had over the course of two days walked my sneakers to ribbons and as well I needed to repack my belongings ready to catch my plane in the early morning.
Emmjay and I met at First Dog on the Moon’s book launch of FDotMs Christmas Book of totally scratchy (hilariously funny) text and cartooning, which is why I was in Melbourne and on that day we both were on invitation to attend. We had a delightful meeting. Emmjay (he mistook me for the woman in the grey dress) I learned was holed up somewhere earlier enjoying a pre-launch vino. I was sorting myself at my digs at the backpackers across the way from where the early evening event was held at the Trades Hall.
Although Emm had to leave to catch a plane home I could stay on for an evening of side splitting comedy of one after another stand-ups who followed the launch on a separate billing. The talent of the performers every one particularly the lack of pointless profanity I recall as a breeze on a summer’s day. I explored the corridors of the Trades Hall after the show.
Victorian workers won the first 8 hour day in the world in 1856. An original address for the Victorian Trades Hall was built in 1859 and the present building is result of upgrades between 1874 and 1925 (Wikipedia). The structure is magnificent from an architectural viewpoint of a monolith. The commodious space where the launch was held was comfortably filled later by the large audience that enjoyed the evening’s performance comedy and when I had arrived before the launch, I took a wrong turn and found myself in a series of meeting rooms.
I photographed the display of the image of Gough Whitlam on the landing of the magnificent Trades Hall staircase that has accommodated the tramping up and down its sweep of who can imagine how many workers.
When Experience in a Limbo Haze* appeared in this august blog, some of the flattering words used in comments were “rambling” “layered” “amble” “frolic” and “amusing”. I referred at its end to the numerologist. Big M commented he looked forward to another instalment so where we pick up the story…
The numerologist was at the bus stop with his worldly shopping bags and bags of books, but not so laden to not seem freer in his concerns and with his replies than might be expected on a hot day. He seems to swing with the bags as if his fragile torso cannot resist the motion once that has begun. He is a repatriate who lived in India he has told me and wishes to translate and publish the Adelaide telephone directories as volumes of numerological significance and similarly, a key of a town street map and its addresses where he lived in India. We part at the street corner after a short walk of ritual when we disembark from our bus journey to the outer suburbs.
I did become dangerously involved. That seemed inevitable with great clutched handfuls of sentences tugging it appeared in his breast as well as mine (overlooking numbers). We shared the newspaper and documents when we met at the stop and rode the bus together like the aged social gypsy renegades we knew we appeared in our mis-shapen skins weathered by lives lived in the open. One thing was neither of us had the tell-tale evidence of excessive alcohol use so many did we greeted in that poor place and we trudged with our distinctive canvas bags and our exposed feet in sandals to catch the bus with the regularity of children going to school
When we walked together past the pub one day, patrons pointed as well as waved kindly acknowledgment. A cascade of the results of spiritual abuse showed in our eyes. Yet nobody could look keener about destination. Our eyes stayed averted from the entrance platform’s quashed blackened blobs of chewing gum extruded and spat out of the mouths of travellers and passers-by in some year past and added to, some of the originators I reckoned likely statistically missing from official summations about suburban population and housing growth. Deceased. Moved away. No longer travelling by public transport through the Transit Station.
He, Amin, travelled into the city where he would sit in ‘the cafe’ with the people who went into the city to sit with him there and I to ‘the centre’ where I could sit with the local people who came to that place to sit with me there so here was common interest. People heard us. People travelled to hear us.
Whenever I recall he bought me a pen I remember I hate it that Parker changed their pens to a universal filler and the pen is redundant. That’s the sort of thing the modern world does.
He began to give me photocopies then of articles about women writers like Kate Chopin.
“Here” he said with the greatest of urgency reaching into a calico bag of the many slung in one hand for the purpose of setting the other hand free, “I got this for you.”
Wads of sheaves of paper perfectly marked according to their page numbers and with a bibliographic reference on the final page were thrust into my hands with the expressionistic gesture of a friend. I barely knew him. I gave him a copy of Wordsworths text on the imagination. He mildly scampered on the spot in the process of transfer to me in return of one by Frances Power Cobbe and that was possibly frustration looking back with the hindsight of my own ageing at myself and the tableau we made. There was about him a contradiction posed by a sense of tranquility overlaid on urgency much was to be done. The planes juxtaposed uncomfortably. My movements were rapid and patience I knew I had in bucketfuls. Closer scutiny showed our detail
Page borders of newspapers he picked up from bus and train seats were filled with finely written numbers from which lines were drawn to circled words.
He may have thought he found an ally. He said he needed one and smiled a non-threatening smile of peaceful unity, however shocking whatever he had to say. He was converting every text as far as every text could be into numerological translation and rather like I imagine a one-person Gutenberg Project volunteer who believes without them we cannot convert to digital translation all the books in the English language and lives bent on seclusion to the purpose hurried. Nobody would casually know a sideways stoic’s shuffle to catch a bus laden with the weights of bags filled with books and documents on one hand and groceries on the other as languorous pendulum (sometimes to the ground) could be hury.
Numerological translation cannot seem on inspection like anybody bearing its responsibilities can be hurried. Ahmin to the eye of a passer-by performed every life movement with the same grace and at the same pace. I knew him just that much more.
In his residential unit’s living room Ahmin stacked freshly bought books higher in numerically marked and ordered cardboard boxes. Newspapers made a raised border around the empty inner floor of the one private room of the flat whereas he slept on the floor of his kitchen on a mat alongside a modest collection of personal survival items. Random numbers apparently were signifiers he searched for and between different pages in different books by different authors he understood their universal meaning.
He was a teacher. Being one grew out of circumstance that embarrassed Ahmin. Where he lived in India people came to ask for his teachings even though he declared he had none. He humbly waved his hand towards himself in slight reference and said because of the way he looked. Numerology was a by-product. He was informed by the philosophical search for the numbers of the universe. His face suffused with a tender-pink flush. All that was left was for someone to copy the key he had written on the cover of each newspaper and book and do the calculations.
He gathered the universe. The work would require a scribe to complete when he was gone. He uttered ‘gone’ as if the inevitability was an ascension of no return
I knew he believed he had been a presence for years before his choosing his place of maternity and birth.
I knew the contradiction. Tears and years before when I was a neighbour in a community where I shared mugs of tea and coffee at kitchen tables with visitors and vice versa I might otherwise have forgotten in some part were ever equally part of my life with its own different signifiers (however many since proven false) I was informed by a woman her unborn had searched for her and chose her. She was special and her picky child was an old soul.
He was moody and agitated over a cup of tea he had made, having made one for me with apologies he had no milk, but that you didn’t rightfully drink tea with milk and slumped. He sat on the floor in the way of someone long accustomed to living on linoleum and others sat in chairs that in his home he had especially collected for them from the sides of roads, outside houses, from friends’ verandahs and their rubbish collections.
We shared an understanding of rubbish collection. Collecting useful rubbish suited our mutual ends I can see in the retrospect of continuing experience (of rubbish) and acknowledging the expensive garnishee of philosophy behind our non-contributory gestures to economic pedals we did not want to push for them to go round and drive the industrial Big Wheel. Our educations had cost us dearly, mine in the corridors of uncertain power where the work was mundane in a position as an middle manager and his in the slums of India he had been discarded out of eventually and sent home. We ought to have developed into the greatest of friends. We were equally marginalised. We equally claimed we had no answers. We were searchers
We equally stood to gain from having an ally.
He bought me a cup. I could write he brought me a cup or gave me, but that would take from the meaning of the stated relationship between the cup handed to me and a cup he bought for himself I assume out of sentiment from the same shop display and batch order. I see the cups in an aisle. Two for $2.00. Two for four. Two, anyway, selected together.
“I bought a cup and I bought one for you too. They’re the same.”
The cup, a slender mug, had the word ‘COFFEE’ stencilled into its decoration and did not match in my thinking the persona of the gift giver. I understood the pen. My response to the cup remains an awkward misfit to the meaning of gift. I said pragmatically ‘Thank you’ and stood up from the round table in the living room end of the unit’s kitchen utility and living area where I eventually hosted meetings shared with a select group of aged writers and walked with it past the overhang of kitchen display joinery to the sink at the kitchen utility end where I washed it and returned with it. I filled it with coffee from the freshly assembled pyrex jug of the brew that inspired when I had placed it on the table the transfer to me of the gift. I continued backwards and forwards for the relief of movement it gave me as I had begun getting cups from the collection I had previously assembled from where I could buy them for little expenditure. I poured an allocation of coffee into each. The writers sat uncharacteristically silent and watched me.
I think they were admiring not critical. They had the giving to me of the gift to reflect on and maybe, as I had adopted for focus, its design and decoration. I wonder can compressing so much information show what happened detail by detail and result of the later experience of time
Thinking on the gift I remembered in a reflective moment I had an ageing ghetto blaster with an adequate radio that could replace a radio Ahmin had announced in a tone of despair was broken. The radio plays on ABC Radio National were his greatest source of solace and the classical music programs. We were able to talk a little about classical music. I carried the machine up the hill to where he lived and we transferred the wire aerial he had attached to the defunct and abandoned radio he had listened to for the previous 15 years since his return from India he told me as we set up the replacement. He felt the loss of the radio keenly. He converted the sense of loss to an adoration of joy at the first utterance of sound when we had completed the installation. We sat round the ghetto blaster (as much as any two people can sit round anything on a chair and linoleum) and lent forward in silent appreciation of radio. We unusually were able to listen to a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor played by Rachmaninoff himself. He made at its end tea as he often did on a spirit stove.
Ahmin held his head and grimaced in the middle of one meeting. He insisted he felt no pain, but that the sensation was terrible and he rocked holding his head. I gestured to the other writers they stand and each took their coffee and gathered on the lawn at the back door. I imagined the residents of the neighbouring units alarmed by an aged coven of strangers. I was able to move the table out of the range of the rocking man whose appearance was ashen
Nothing would pacify him. Nothing would alleviate the symptoms other than he would be better for the company. He stroked his lobes with his lengthy bony fingers. No, he refused an ambulance. I reconvened the meeting. Would it be better I asked if he saw a conventional doctor. He vouchsafed he saw a Chinese herbalist and the compound he was taking had little effect on the condition he exposed for the first time. For months he suffered these sensations in his head and he craned his neck with his eyes closed indicative of anxiety and now a sense of betrayal. I was reminded how deeply he had appeared hurt when he reflected he was deported from India as an overstayer after residence there for approaching 40 years.
Is the viewpoint a glimpse of the vivid complexity of a wildflower placed under a book for preservation? How can we understand something anew we did not ever completely know. I may have been collecting perfect specimens. I believed I had damaged one if not more than Ahmin. Ahmin was distraught. I suggested strongly he attend at the hospital. He was more like a wilted hothouse bloom that ought to have shed pure light for its adoration. He finally told me. He had a problem once with a doctor that was one of the main reasons he had gone to India when he was a young man to escape the society of who he was raised and where he was raised, certainly from his transfer to a position as a clerk (yet he hadn’t minded his job as a clerk, he had said). His delivery of his compelling news was simple and directed. He had vowed he would die never having attended at another office of a doctor trained in Western medicine. I was only silent considering the issue insofar as it affected my vulnerable status as hostess and responsible for the group first. He never meant to stay in India. That was what happened. He returned once and left feelings of discomfort again.
He subsided meekly with his hands with their long fingernails clasped in his lap. I knew the pose and saw it more and more frequently as the weeks went on alternating with head shaking and declamation against his needing the attention of a doctor if anybody shared their inevitable thought. His slender frame seemed to have shrunk inside his simple cotton trousers and the shirts he wore with plain collarless round necks hung loose, crumpled where their opening was buttoned in an attempt when the air was chill to stave off that influence. We met on the bus. He wore a light cardigan now that was grey and hung neatly on his bowed shoulders. I asked him his destination. He had a small calico bag slung over one shoulder and none of the usual paraphenalia of books and documents he travelled with to my knowledge in any direction.
Ahmin had a sister. He was on his way to stay with her. I knew of her and met her one summer on a train journey between the suburb I was staying at for a holiday and another I was visiting. The University where Ahmin was sometimes a guest speaker was closed on a holiday break that time and he was taking his sister with him to a celebratory meeting of the Society for Krishna Consciousness. She was a surprising woman with an open charm and countenance. We are only people when the day moves its round for wherever we seek our knowledge and our ambitions, pretensions. I was pleased he was in family charge and ill at ease and uncomfortable seeing him this time, alone on his journey and frailer than he had ever looked. I said I was pleased he was welcomed into the home of his loving sister for his soujourn. Would he stay long.
He had sold and given away all his belongings. He looked downcast. He was going to live with her and her husband. I felt the sense of betrayal again and as I had so many times in associations with confidantes who I disappointed. I knew that my urging Ahmin to go to the hospital to seek medical advice was the undoing of his trust. He had told me he would never be released and shrunk from me in fear. Here when we met again he looked at me with the caution of a man who supposed I would betray him eventually. We greeted each other, mutually cautious and both curious and farewelled each other with a sense of gentle wistfulness. Where was the other going we had both asked. I was visiting my daughter. Her garden was thriving and she and I had long agreed I would visit her and select some cuttings for my newly struck herb garden.
I fulfilled long anticipated travel plans the next spring and left my unit in the care of my daughter with instructions for her knowledge of who might visit me, who was friend and our relationship. Ahmin did not visit and he had not left a forwarding address so that when I returned in the middle of the intense heat of summer when the Adelaide plains turn harsh and brown I felt among a listed review of my contacts and friends a strong pang of loss to consider he was gone from the place he lived and where for my part was pleasure in the simple experience we had shared cups of tea. I hoped we might meet at a central point of engagement or on a journey on a bus or a train, but we never have.
I was visiting within clear sight of Mt Taranaki and the closest township to there is Inglewood, the regional centre Mt Plymouth.
One version of Maori history claims Te Maunga o Taranaki (Mount Taranaki) once lived in the centre of New Zealand’s North Island with the mountain gods: Tongariro, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe.
Pihanga, another mountain, is incriminated at this other location, called ‘a lovely maid’ who was desirable to all the mountain gods.
A great conflict arose with geophysical consequences.
The face of the earth was pretty well re-arranged and changed.
There be dragons. Watch a dynamic skyline day and night and the centricity to culture of mythological creatures that appear in transitional forms. I knew of the taniwha from previous experience living in New Zealand where its importance as a powerful element to maintain order is paramount in children’s literature and written in the history of the British invaders who were told of of places of its alleged presence by Maoris exploiting superstition.
I became childish and disingenuous intellectual texts had ever been published in my excitement observing these beasts and faces of leering gods as if they were entirely a matter of my new discovery.
Pihanga gathers her mists and veils around her and I observed that occurs in many forms. Taranaki is veiled and weeps.
Taranaki is cast as masculine gender.
Taranaki seems all things rather than an imagined monotheme and masculine.
Taranaki, a living god but the mountain as a natural phenomenon of geoscience has been made by subsequent explosions each separated by many years, but a great upheaval that fell into itself and caused a depression before it rose again on its momentum. I looked out to the saucer-like rim caused at its surround when I walked across farmland made available to my use and to not be conscious of the living god, Taranaki, is to be unaware.
The story of the mountain is displayed in the museum in New Plymouth, Puke Ariki, where nothing else was I found other than the local dilemma of the Occupation. The attempt by the British to degrade the Maori and Maori history is its story.
Around this corner of Marsland Hill once a British garrison I have walked to by a bitumen road, now descending in the footsteps of the redcoats I eerily recognise, I find Charles Brown, mentor and friend of Keats laid to rest in this perfect place.
New Plymouth was once gated. The view of the White Hart Hotel is taken from the base of the New Plymouth clock tower.
I visit places, see sculptures New Plymouth seems practised at installing as if possessed of infinite will to display sculpture or perhaps the environment with its blue sea not far from any point is ideal.
The façade of the City Council is magnificent stainless steel.
I return to where I was living to reach again to the mountain. It was hard to concentrate on anything in its vicinity, but the interrelationship of clouds and light through them and on the peak of the cone that begs the story of a dramatic yearning for unity and rejection. The lyrical balletic dancing of clouds that scud and their shade come from the mountain; it governs weather.
A blue sky and a hot day and I went walking to the mountain.
This dinner trout seems fierce, menacing. It was fished from the stream that sourced in Mount Taranaki flowed through the property where I stayed.
I photographed on a day Taranaki was crying creeks with dark places I could look into over their bridges and coils of the great fern, the cyathea dealbata, the ponga; it is the silver fern in pockets of sunshine and its full shine that causes a characteristic shimmer of silver in roadside verges and fields it has hold over. Everywhere I look I see Taranaki, the living god of an ancient regime of story telling.
I saw the foregoing image through the window on my way from New Plymouth to Auckland on an early morning bus. The bus slowed to accommodate traffic and the corridor of the mist – as I saw it – was Pihanga whose presence between the mountains of Taranaki and Tongariro is still said to dissuade people from the locale lest the rumble start up between these jealous and aggrieved suitors.
I supposed conflict between the environment and dairy farming.
The image (above) is a photo of the wire of an iron frame wire gate, modified by intensifying the colours, by cloning and re-pasteing onto it selected areas of the view through the wire to highlight the wire and converting the resultant image into interpretive forms using Photoshop.
In other words, folks who don’t know, I altered the original photo until I stopped on an image that ‘pleased’ me insofar as it illustrates the meaning (for me) in an abstract form that I derive out of the photo I started with.
Only short of the conversion of it into a kaleidoscopic form, I posted the photo of the gate wire this morning on a social network site I recently began to contribute to, blipfoto. For those who do not know about ‘blipping’, blipfoto allows a subscriber one photo a day. ‘Blippers’ sift through a daily diet of individual’s photos as they choose and comment in return. Try to upload a photo that was not taken within a recent time frame and the blipfoto programme will deny it entry. Assume a photograph from a few days ago will ‘do’ for today and the programme allocates it a position if you have one available on the calendar day the photo was taken, if you hadn’t already uploaded one that day, and labels it ‘backdated’.
You cannot on any given day qualify for that day if you did not take a photo and you are asked to not fudge it.
Instructions are easy enough to follow, uploading a photo takes no time, the level of my subscription attracts no charge and some people write text to go with their photo.
Not very different from the pub really in some ways, blipfoto, except emphasis on the Pig’s here is not exclusively photography, does not ask for anything that is an identifier other than an email address, lacks some discipline as any self respecting pub does in Australia packed with writers and artists, the inspiration of causal and casual cooks and chefs and totally, talk.
Sometimes we turn up and sometimes we do not, who knows turn tail for a while or forever, barrack for the proprietor.
Writing and posting contributions on the wall of the front bar, the Pigs Arms, The Window Dresser’s Arms, Pig & Whistle does best. This ever changing exhibition happens according to how fast the next person’s expression of their eccentric inner self gets posted and the list of contributors cycles. That’s valuable work alongside, leastwise, housing Granny and her dubious brewing equipment, Foodge, Merv the Barman and the twins and their mother, the characters all who have developed within the walls – and allegedly leasing commercial space that is at present always available in the vacant rooms of the pub, its outlier buildings for more characters if they are thought of, more mythology such as has grown around the carpark and when the plumbing blocks ,the emergency long drop left over from when the night truck collected the excreta and council workers clanged cans on purpose underneath the guest wing.
The Hell’s Angles keep an eye on security, although Foodge is a Private Dick.
The older the history of the Pig’s Arms the more layers of the story are told,.
The contributions of the barflies and casual contributors are inside the folders on the RHS of the page. A commenter can jump in anywhere but if they want and comment and contribute to the story of the bar itself without following the trail. Gosh, it doesn’t take Einstein to understand the premise keeping these premises open 24/7 is home spun, feet on the ground brawlin’ and fightin’ and spittin’ and… wrong story line, sorry, I was reading the wrong instructions. I’m a copywriter. They paid me to…
They didn’t!
Sorry. I maintain a dedicated loose grip on the truth. No-one gets paid.
Truth, honest, Mike Jones regardless hasn’t been awarded the Order of Australia yet for the Pig’s Arms even though he made it to the cover of Rolling Stone …
He didn’t! That was Seniors magazine!
… sent me an email a while back and suggested I send in a piece for the birthday party. I’m onto it.
Happy Fourth Birthday, Pig’s Arms at The Window Dresser’s Arms, Pig & Whistle.
Dog most nights slept in the front room with Isobella facing an open doorway onto a verandah and beside the internal doorway that had no door against the Castle’s central room even though Dog was not Isobella’s, Isobella in trust asleep on a divan, Dog slung low on the giant sandstone blocks that made the floor interesting. Between the blocks had not been filled with grouting and sometimes one of Dog’s paws dropped into a chasm in her sleep. Dog re-accommodated herself with a deft twist of her leg.
Dog sidled in like a comma into Isobella’s room in the evening. She had a way as if worried what would happen to her tail if she stopped watching it. She was a break in a sentence, but the opening announcement of a trial by jury, fearful and hopeful. She was a squat dog and showed her hard life by her habits, devoted and pessimistic, intelligent and naive.
The owl native to New Zealand, Ruru, the Morepork, Ninox novaeseelandiae, a Bobuk was out all night long almost entirely silent. Ruru has special feathers.
Etia anō āku mata me te mata-ā-ruru e tīwai ana
Me te mata kāhu e paro noa rā kai te tahora!
My eyes are like morepork eyes turning from side to side,
Like the eyes of a hawk who soars over the plain! 1
Margaret Orbell, Birds of Aotearoa. Auckland: Reed, 2003, p101.
Editors Note: Many moons ago, ‘Shoe and I discussed the story behind the story of the making of a now famous (some might say infamous) shaggy frog joke about a frog going into a bank and asking for a loan. I first heard the joke told on radio by none other than Kerry O’Keefe as an alternative to commentating on a major cricket match played at the Gabba.
By way of introduction to this major work, proudly published by the Pig’s Arms, here is Kerry O’Keefe’s retelling of the joke – the joke that was written by Christina Binning Wilson (Sandshoe to the interweb tubalists or ‘Shoe to her mates at th Pig’s Arms).
So get yourself some pleasing refreshments and a comfortable chair, settle back and begin our odyssey …
Part 1 –Owning (up)
Story and photo by Sandshoe
Acknowledgements
It is not easy being pink. Yet fortune itself I threw in my lot with the Pigs Arms and became a piglet. Thank you,Mike Jones, proprietor and editor-blogger for your kind encouragement responding to my enquiry you are happy to publish this Special Feature at the Arms.
To Astyages, the troubadour who posted the shaggy dog ‘Herbal T for Two’ at the Pigs’ Arms.1
That was a while ago. I was living in Adelaide. I said I wrote one of those. I said I would post it. This is its story.
I do really get the joke
The half-a-dozen perhaps people who I originally read my joke to laughed. I had supposed they thought I gave it my best shot.
Now, when I find a version of it again to send it off to the Pigs Arms, I get it. My friend, Wojciech, comes by. Now, convulsed with laughter I read it to Wojciech.
Wojciech laughed and laughed, possibly at my laughing.
I rewrote and wrote it again, teased at it to make it topical and meander, wrote an introductory reference given it was address to astyages, his “shaggy dog” and I chortled. The pseudo-truth tickling my funny bone no end was that soon it would be revealed “a shaggy frog”.
Before mailing finished copy to Mike Jones, illustrations, and a link to information about the natural history of a local frog I chose to promote, I settled to search online might anyone by an incident of synchronicity have spun a yarn like it and I supposed–surely–I would find “a shaggy frog”.
I grouped and googled key words out of the text:
frog
bank
loan
My blood ran cold. I added:
shaggy frog
rolling stone
It is an extreme sensation feeling mortified.
When I found its original replicated near faithful word for word online, bloody icicles instantly formed in my veins I swear and began to counteract immediately–somewhere in the pit of my stomach– an inferno of heat I felt drain from my brain. Blood coursed the extent of my body from my head to my toes and back again. A WHOOOOOSHHHHHHH.
I read it first on Page 9 of Charismatics, Articles of Spiritual Enlightenment for Christians, Charismatics, the Halo on the Internet, at http://www.sfSpirit.com, San Francisco, Volume 9, Number 6 June 2002
The Golden Gate Breakfast Club newsletter in San Francisco – ‘the nicest people in the world meeting each week for breakfast, friendship and enlightenment. Since 1946!’ –reported (link archived):
‘Marty Mijalski was able to deliver his joke postponed from last week this morning. It was the frog applies for a loan joke. The punch line: knick-knack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man’s a rolling stone. Alan Garber told that joke five years ago.’
FIVE YEARS AGO!
My stomach knotted.
Self conscious anxiety is a debilitating condition.
Three failed and abandoned computers with files I hauled around until I could afford to no longer are scattered. I saw in the bowels of the world’s computer parts dumps or reassembled into recycled metal toys for small and larger boys and girls. I do have Apple floppy disks that might have on them a file of the original text. I have the rudiments only of the vintage Apple computer and software in unsealed packaging I bought on eBay in the last year attempting to put together another system.
I have not got in my possession any of the original email or files–and no original hard copy.
I did write one comment only on a website, Author Culture, and not hearing a word from that site I felt embarrassed at my naivety and little did I know how naïve, not even half. I shelved all thought about it as best as I could and didn’t search it in detail any further beyond recognising it was feral. I felt overwhelmed with a sense of loss. Astyages asked once how I was doing with it and when would I present it. I think I mumbled ‘Tell you soon’. I confided in no-one other than Wojciech.
Having moved from Adelaide to accommodation in Bordertown last year, I was ill from overwork and circumstances previous to my deciding to move from Adelaide to housing I could afford, from the hardship of moving house and home and having to abandon possessions to do that. In retrospect I can see a complex set of circumstances not overlooking I dealt with a struggle to rebuild an existence in Bordertown on my own. I was in hospital for a while and recovering and I took a case to the Tenancy Tribunal as the piglets will recall. I was busy as people get. I eventually confided over a shared meal with a newly-met local friend I had written a joke. I was flattered yes, but acutely self conscious and I showed her online.
Christine was empathetic. In a matter of days, I heard the news from her I would, she said, never believe, but she “heard thejoke on the radio” and that she yelped in recognition, “That’s Christina’s joke!”
RADIO!
Over my head.
I missed who exactly the fellow was, although I was entreated he is famous. Something something you know the cricket. He travels all over the world doing his thing, she said, looking a little disconcerted I did not seem to understand her meaning.
I was–instead–in shock again. I begin feeling excruciated. Isolated, particularly isolated.
I do not have ABC Radio National reception, neither local ABC radio reception that is reliable, but neither can I use my online download internet quota playing radio all day and meanwhile, not a hint even of the NBN. No SBS reception. Media is a sensitive issue for me out of all life’s niceties I do not have living in Bordertown and I’ve a list.
Fancy excruciated. I have never used the word, but I vacillated between the healthy stirring of curiosity, feeling tickled pink and miserable.
Jim came down to potter around the cottage doing odd jobs and I referred the matter to Jim. Jim is my landlord. Jim knows about stuff. He might know about cricket. I braced myself.
“I wrote a joke a few years ago.”
“U…huh.”
I describe the gist…a frog…um…he goes for a loan and that I am ridden with guilt…because I owe the joke to the Pigs Arms…but…online…multiplying…like rabbits. I hang my head on the inside.
Jim and I had never exchanged an opinion about joke telling. Neither had ever told the other a joke.
“Oh,” says Jim, as he worked, “I know that one. Is that the one…
THE ONE!
…about a frog who goes into… I start to feel hysterical… a bank and wants a loan?”
“Yes.”
“My son has it on his phone.”
PHONE!
“He’s been carrying it around for a while now–PAUSE–That’s an old joke.”
I have an ear for nuance. I sat up out of the mud of embarrassment.
“It’s a fair age now,” I agree to showI appreciate a duty of care.
“O, yes, it is” Jim says, glad we agree on that.
“I wrote it,” I say as calmly as possible. I saw consideration I wrote it dawn.
I mumble and dash off, “I remember the day I wrote it… formula… can’t find the original… sigh… never mind… I wrote it.”
I did ask Jim who ‘the cricket chap’ is. I find a recording of Kerry O’Keefe, broadcaster and the commenter lisabella’s reference added at 10PM AEST on March 12, 2006 on the whirlpool forum online where she posts a link to a recording–
‘When Kerry first told it, the joke took nearly 3 overs of cricket before he finally got to the punchline!!!’
If lisabella is right, putting to the universe a month earlier, on 19 Feb 2006 at 11AM she was hoping for ‘an audio link or does some one have it on their hard disk’ to provide her for her brother, the broadcast by Kerry was at the Brisbane Cricket Ground at Woolloongabba (the gabba) during the ABC’s cricket coverage Tuesday 14 February 2006 at approx. 2pm on the 3rd One Day final between Australia & Sri Lanka.
Of all the versions, Kerry O’Keefe’s meticulous reading is as close to the original as any. The ironies are out of sight. No irony as mind bending that it was not unlike from my viewpoint as a former facilitator of a writers’ group listening to a writer read to an audience in a community centre (cfThe Making of that Joke. Part 6 – Creative Writers) except they’re reading my stuff.
fstx posts on the same forum as lisabella at 11AM on Feb 20 AEST, before saying ‘Not that it makes the joke any better!’:
‘I’ve heard a version where it’s a chocolate bar and the banker’s name is Caddyshack, so the punchline is…
“It’s a Kit-Kat, Caddyshack…” ‘
It was kicking around as it turns out well before Kerry’s choice to broadcast the joke at the cricket in 2006, not intending to detract from Kerry’s choice or performance of it–to the contrary.
On the forum of DFWStangs.net selling Mustang Fords, where the page loading near rolls over from the weight of flickering animation and advertisements reckoned to disappear out of sight were I to become a registered user, it is called ‘The Frog and the Elephant’ uploaded 05-30-2002, 03:58 PM by the contributor whose location is listed as Las Colinas (Texas I assume). A commenter, lilgeezy, at Irving in New Brunswick, Canada writes 07-06-2002, 02:11 AM–in reply to a query ‘were its origins Sesame Street’:
‘that WAS on the disney channel when those lil kids go out and tell their favorite jokes… not that i was watching it or nething, i just … heard….
The Independent Daily is the English language newspaper of the Island of Mauritius. The joke is published in Vol. 1, No.250, Port Louis, Thursday September 2, 2010, Section 4>‘Listings’ viewable through the website of Stanford University, headed with the caption ‘J USTINJEST BY HILAMA’ and illustrated with a cartoon frog.
I feel substantially queasy about my impoverished status when I view in a bottom left hand quadrant the glossy colour ad for ‘LM Live Jokes in your Daily Life’ in which a beautiful young woman naturally laughs at her mobile phone in hand. The contrast between the status of her clothing and the implied delight the lovely lass is provided by her subscription is in marked contrast to my own circumstances when I imagine a customer’s laughter may conceivably be at my feral.
I wonder, I cannot help but, that the $50,000 amount the frog asks for, and not the original $30,000, might inspire enhanced donation to the church building fund where, for the pastor at Willingham Church, Cambridgeshire, UK it fits illustration of ‘a case of mistaken identity’.
Harry Mooring of Leeds submitted it to The Parishioner magazine of the Kiltarlity Church and Kirkhill Church where it is published on P 17 of The Parishioner Newsletter Issue 57 – November 2012 alongside The Moosie’s Prayer’ described, ironically, as ‘This anonymous, humorous poem…clearly aimed at children …lends yet another twist to the story of the “poor church mouse” –
Greg Jones, a pastor at the Church of Brethren, at Bunkertown, McAlisterville, in Pennsylvania, USA published the joke and the comment Dialegomai (see below) in the Bunkertown COB newsletter. The analytical method of Dialegomai interested me considered from the viewpoint of the method I used to construct the joke (cf. The Making of That Joke. Part 2 –Building the Joke)
Dialegomai
By Pastor Greg
1 Corinthians 7:1-11 April 11, 2010 Bunkertown COB
Chances are that your mind was racing ahead trying to figure out how all the things in that story would fit together. Why a frog? Is Patty’s name significant?
What’s up with the little pink elephant? The answer came when we viewed the whole story, not just the little bits and pieces along the way. I want you to keep this in mind as we turn once again to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian Church.
My best advice to you continues Pastor Greg, is to keep your eyes focused on the whole story. Look at the big picture. Don’t get hung up on the individual events that are happening in your life right now. Think and reason.
The Pope features alongside in the adjoining column on P 4 of The Knight Register of the Newsletter of Knights of Columbus Council No. 13072, St. Mary Parish, Vancouver, BC, Canada
The member pladecalvo in Valencia, Spain posted the joke on the July 2007 at 09:31 AM in the City Data-Com Religion and Spirituality Forum that demands Let’s Hear Some Nice Clean Jokes!
Received by the MoonlightBlue blogger from Ricky in Salò in the Province of Brescia, Lombardy in Italy and so they seem to know it in in Pembroke Dock in Pembrokeshire in the UK in 2007.
Recreation and hobby clubs have adopted it including have called it their own from hunting and fishing to flying and service clubs among which is Probus in Deloraine in Tasmania and from Rotarians in America to Kent in the UK to ‘Snippets’ (from club bulletins) at the Rotary Club at Diamond Creek (Melbourne, Victoria) where its contribution is attributed December 5th 2012 to the Rotary Club of Rosanna (Melbourne).
Just to give you the idea: the Tourist Information Centre website of Yea, ‘situated at the junction of the Melba Highway and Goulburn Valley highways approximately 100 kms from Melbourne’. includes the joke in The Humour File.
How did I not guess it would be recounted by the Queensland Frog Society. O course I had supposed it would appeal to environmentalists who love frogs. They were my main target group. It is introduced by the editor as follows: Oldies are the best.. I think we have had this before but for anyone who has not heard it here it is again. Thanks Trish (I love it).
Tombro at Lake Macquarie, New South Wales said on the Glasgow (Scotland, UK) Guide Board on 31st Aug 2009, 10:03am thank you to Brian of Maitland, New South Wales for posting it (the day before) because [Tombro] ‘had a bloody great laugh and…sang it out loud. Whoops, he said, now the neighbours know I’m an absolute nutcase ! http://discuss.glasgowguide.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=17189
Bozo in Perth who was met with enthusiasm by GSX in Shed has uploaded it rightly or wrongly on a site called ‘a Dad joke’ on January 3 last, claiming the frog hopped into the new HSBC Bank Branch in Subiaco
September 2005 in Darwin it was enjoyed by a commenter who thought it was very funny when it was posted on the Gold Coast and Milano in Kiev, Ukraine, said ‘Witty, witty stuff’.
Oldershaw and Co Chartered Accountants Newsletter in NZ March 2005 published it on Page 3 under the title ‘Smiley Bit’ above an article on ‘Spicers Wealth Management’ promoting the availability of a review report generated on reccommending finance company debentures.
I couldn’t resist this lesson in choosing character names. I’m serious here. Really. Use care when naming the folks who populate your stories or your masterpiece may become just a bad joke . . .
Linda Yezak May 28, 2010 11:55 AM
I got a kick out of it myself. Of course, I had to stretch to make it fit into a writing site!
Why did someone make up ‘nick nak patty whack, give the frog a loan, his old mans a rolling stone’? don’t ask me why I want to know, I have no clue. But, if anyone has any Ideas, just type them here please
LiveJournal Inc denounces it as an an unwanted house guest under ‘punnybusiness’:
Please don’t post the story that ends in “It’s a knick-knack, Patti Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man’s a Rolling Stone.” – we’ve seen it way too many times. If you post it, I’ll delete it.
If it is published in the volume quoted (please see link below) using the language represented on the webpage, I would be plain disappointed. I know beyond any question of doubt the mother of the frog did not ‘croak’ as is suggested. My research of variations so far of the joke shows this one is unique that extraneous information has been written into it couched in language generally considered by English language speakers sensitive to the language of death and dying across the board of different cultures to be unsafe language to use, disrespectful, rough. The context is made sad. I think a child will identify it is not a joke made happy by introducing the death of the frog’s mother and will fix that.
You cannot believe everything anyway. Neither did the bank manager ‘scowl’ at the teller. Neither does Patty roll her eyes in any version I had read. Elaborating details of body language as well robs the audience of their individual interpretation which is an element of the humour and the strength of the writing.
Christine on 7 November 2011 on the BB Fans (Big Brother) forum says: This is a joke, which was on one of my Birthday cards. It’s a bit corny though I’m afraid:-
The joke is #7 of 7 chosen for publication by the columnist, Greg Heberlein for the Seattle Times article ‘Who’s Standing Next to Bubba’ Sunday, December 19, 1999 under Wall Street Recap. Consider it [the column] suggests the journalist a holiday gift for putting up with the conventional ramblings. This intro is already too long – our joke cup runneth over. But we must thank all the sources: Steve Leuthold’s clients, who submit jokes for his monthly investment newsletter; Eric Miller of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, who collects witty stuff for the company’s semi-monthly publication; Don Gher of Bellevue’s Coldstream Capital, who missed his calling as a comic; and, your loyal scribe’s firstborn son Tom, who scoured the Web for every funny story it had.
Sent in an email it seems originally by Personal Growth Concepts which included the following disclaimer:
The information provided in this email is presented for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for the advice and treatment of a licensed professional clinician, doctor, coach or pastoral counselor.
…and uploaded by blogger mom at frog parenting blogspot who posted the joke on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 under ‘Frog Humour and today’s stuff…Not for Profit but for JOY!’ and her baby born on April 29, 2009 ‘at about 8Amish’.
Earliest References
While one earlier may still be found, the earliest reference I have found is on the website of ‘Silicon Investor’ where it was uploaded on 6/24/1998 8:12:00 AM by Henry Volquardsen. Note the date reads 24 June, 1998 because the date sequence is m/d/y. No, I do not know Henry as far as I am aware, regardless Henry may have known my name at one moment in history in 1987 and I his by sheerest chance just by it passing in front of his or my eyes in a fax or other document, but lucky I am to have a beautifully written text online on Silicon Investor that recalls a Henry Volquardsen from the memory of a colleague.
His friend writing in 2008 says of Henry:
‘And then, of course Henry Volquardsen, was a very dear friend who was on the long dated FX desk in NY. He was a big guy (like me) who started out as a file clerk and was on Citibank NY’s long dated FX desk at 55 Water street I believe. He would hang around in the New York evening to watch our currency and interest rate markets open, some days it was slow and he would talk to the bond dealers the AUD dealer and me as he was trying to get indications in to local market sentiment. Henry and I talked for hours on end about history, he was then studying the 100 year war in Europe, mass psychology, Ownership of central banks…. etc.’
Unmistakeable I am sure, the same. And I might as well have known Henry given insight and experience of the finance industry I have when I based my own methodology as an accounts executive on my training in History and Politics, primarily choosing to telephone dealers and traders I could engage in conversation to appreciate different points of view, and always an AUD dealer. I trained and listened intently and learned and understood the market in this window of time watching trading lights skipping across and up and down in heart stopping patterns on a Reuters screen. Thus far remarkable enough.
The joke was, remarkably, posted on the site Roots Web Ancestry on Tue, 3 Nov 1998 22:51:04 EST
As follows without prejudice the discussion ‘Donna Richoux’ provides her associates in apparent good faith (please see the link below).
‘Donna Richoux:
[nq:2]”It’s a knick-knack, Patty Black, give the frog a loan.”(snip)[/nq]
[nq:1]It’s a knick-knack, Patty Black, give the frog a loan; His old man’s a Rolling Stone![/nq]
That’s lovely but the version I learned didn’t have it. Now I’m wondering whether it was part of a strain that lost the Rolling Stone line, or whether it never had it, and Rolling Stone was added later.
A Google on “give the frog a loan” plus “rolling stone” gives 553. The same phrase with a minus -stone gives 291. So it’s not just me that stops at “loan.”
Okay, here we go. The Google Groups archives show the “Rolling Stone” version only back 1998, with several references to it having been on the Muppets with Kermit the Frog (long before?). I can’t call up the entire posts because of a technical glitch. But the version minus “stone” shows up in posts each year from 1982 to 1986. So I think the very appropriate addition of “Rolling Stone” was a professional addition from the Muppet crew.
Patty Black sure gets a lot of variation.
I appreciate the energy and attention given the frog goes to a bank for a loan joke by Donna Richoux and her associates (please see link above).
The content of the text written by Donna is speculative and based on then incomplete research result of a failed internet connection – as can be derived as was clearly intended by its author, but the speculation is inaccurate that the Rolling Stone addition online is a professional addition by the Muppets team and the content is inaccurate ‘that it shows up in posts between 1982 and 1986’.
Only researching what Donna advises concerning the Muppets did I know the Muppets had a story line in one of their early films that refers to a bank, which might be the source of confusion. I have not seen the films.
I am sure however the Muppets research facility may accord me, as I do the Muppets equal respect if question arises by referring to their archival record of published material to identify the frog goes to a bank for a loan joke is not in their archives as a published article of theirs.
Patty Black I knew nothing of until my recent discovery of the reference only as result of researching the frog goes to a bank for a loan joke; ‘Patty Black’ as a play on ‘Paddy Whack’ is not as far as I can determine in popular ascendance over my original adaptation of ‘Paddy Whack’ that was ‘Patricia Whack’ aka ‘Ms Whack’ and ‘Patti Whack’. I do have a fictional character whose name is ‘Black’ which is coincidence.
Again remarkably posted in rj-jokers Teresa’s Jokers RJ List on Sep 15, 1998 at 1:51 pm
As a source of interest, I note amiright.com makes no claims to copyright of jokes permitted, only their presentation. All jokes are assumed [by amiright] to be public domain.
Preben Ormen telling the joke on Thursday, September 8th, 2011 at 14:14 under the heading ‘Give the Frog a Loan’ prefaced it as follows:
Apropos nothing, I just remembered a cute joke that riffed on a nursery rhyme. What made it all the more funny at the time, was the fact it was told by a biker on the run from the California cops that we met while swinging at anchor in our 32 foot Westsail cutter “Ibis” in Mazatlan, Mexico. He arrived late one afternoon in a terrific downpour in a beat up old Columbia 29 sloop. I watched him anchor and silently reassured myself he had just the right scope out so he wouldn’t swing into us when the tide or weather changed.
When done, he sat under the main hatch and lit up a smoke. We exchanged hand waves in greeting and a short hello and welcome, but the rain was so heavy and noisy we couldn’t really have a conversation. You got to see a tropical downpour to believe it.
We got to know each other better and one day the story rolled around.
…please see the heart these children invest in the acting including a fabulous frog costume and support actors. This is such a lovely video and I hope the children and their responsible adults are happy I post this link here:
Small variations occur telling the joke from only recall, but the adherent loyalty shown the story line is indication of the genuine fondness people feel for the joke.
Variations include the delightful and delightfully satirical and fans have made changes to the name of the teller and frog by way of personal preference and innovation.
The frog has been variously named by his fans Kermit the Frog, Kermit Jagger, Wally… while the inclination seems obvious I had no intention to name the frog Kermit which was to avoid potential copyright infraction although in an edited version I do have the teller, Patricia Whack, refer to the frog with a note of derision as follows, once, when she addresses the bank manager that the frog wants a loan.
‘Kermitt out here…”
The frog has been overly called Kermit, and he truly did not ever say to the teller his surname was Jagger as occurs in the re-telling, but there you are, and that’s I suppose society too, running along on assumptions and getting stuck on earworms, but in this case a fond one. However, just because a frog can talk and goes to a bank to raise a loan is no reason to assume his name is Kermit. Neither because he claims falsely his identity is Mick Jagger’s son is it a logical conclusion he will claim his name is Kermit Jagger.
A frog is neither automatically a Muppet. Frog mothers have been around. They know the score. The kid probably won’t like the attention.
Anyone whose work uploading and adapting the joke as a genuine contribution to joke sites is not included by a link I regret in almost all cases that has to have been the case and I apologise I cannot individually acknowledge it.
I could not include every link to the friends and included a representation of the foes of the frog who goes to a bank for a loan joke.
In one case I did not link very purposefully because the material that is revealed is not suitable for a general audience and younger children supervised by their parents.
I admire the odds have fallen very much in favour in this regard of the frog who goes to the bank for a loan joke that it seems the frog somehow speaks to beused for ends that are good; leastwise has been treated kindly, whimsically and generously. The popular, regardless flawed frog is a phenomenon and the philosophers of all sorts who got and get the joke and have run with it have paid the frog – and the teller and the bank manager– a great compliment.
The trinity is in the wings as I write. When we create with a healthy perspective we invest magic and our creations become themselves. Take a bow: the frog, the teller and the bank manager.
To the people who don’t yet and might never know or understand or even accept this is true that the pleasure they have found in this joke and the frustration of its detractors are directly proportional to the affection I feel for the fans, the kind loyalty and controversy shown the frog goes to a bank for a loan joke, sincerely, thank you.
(Continued Part 2 –Building The Joke)
FOOTNOTE:
1. the wildly wonderful shaggy dog written by astyages that sent me in 2011 on this journey finding my frog.
– that was renamed in 1875 after the persons who took it on, Henry Young and Thomas Jackson. Max and I did (walk across the road) to put our heads in for an historic glimpse of Chloe.
The model for Chloe, whose real name was Marie, was said to be 19.
As recorded in ‘Australian Pubs’, Chloe was painted in Paris in 1875 by Jules Lefebvre and won the ‘Grand Medal at the Paris Salon‘. If you see on wikipedia a photo of a portrait of a woman with a revealing cleavage and caption claiming it caused a stir at the Salon in 1884, I cannot imagine what the showing of Chloe created.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 