emma_in_dream

First of all, dear Yuletide writer, thank you so much for joining in. Especially this year when we all need some extra joy.


Generally, things I like – people being competent, witty dialogue, happiness.


Things I am not looking for this year – death.


Billabong Books


I have had a lifelong crush on Wally Meadows. Anything with hurt/comfort and Wally being vulnerable would be great. The drop down menu only allows Jim and Wally to be chosen, but obviously Norah is an integral part of the team.


Agatha Raisin


I love the series more than the books, but basically my dream would be a threesome with James (for seriousness), Charles (for mirth) and Agatha (who requires a lot to keep her occupied).


If you are more a gen writer, a comic mystery focussing on her friendships would be super cool.


The A Team


My current obsession. Actually, my obsession since 2018. I would prefer Face/Murdock, with vulnerable Murdock and a caring Face.

Woohoo!

Koala - Adelaide Koala Rescue -$32.40
White Bellied Frog - $42
Baudin’s Cockatoo - $35.10

Thank you very much!

I cannot tell if I am in touch with reality regarding the state of the world and especially America or if I am going mad. Is America about to have a civil war? Is that just a paranoid perspective? Are we at a point in time that will mark the beginning of an inevitable decline that will last decades or is this just a normal fluctuation?

Hattie Burr, The Woman Suffrage Cook Book,1886.


So in 1886 the suffrage movement in the US pulled together a fundraising recipe book – The Woman Suffrage Cook Book. Hattie Burr edited it and compiled a list of recipes provided by various members of her network. I am not an expert on American suffragism but I could immediately see Lucy Stone and one of the Stantons.


The recipes themselves are bafflingly oblique. Take this recipe for bread. 'Two cups cooed oatmeal, or rice, salt to taste, two tablespoons sugar, one cup sweet milk, one third cup yeast, flour to make it stiff.'

They clearly assume a huge bundle of information that I don’t have. They just list a chunk of ingredients and give no instructions on how to combine them or how to cook them. Perhaps the point is to highlight that despite being suffragettes they are ‘feminine’ enough to just know these things and be naturally houseproud and wifely.


The book ends with a list of quotes from prominent 19th century Americans in support of the vote. I am reminded of a description of 19th century novel that a friend gave me – it was suffragette porn. In between each round of activity would be a discussion about how women should have the vote. This cook book falls into the same genre of obscure efforts to propagandize through every possible means.

I reread Mrs Musgrave's *A Little Hero* (1887). I own it because my grandfather won it a a Sunday school prize in 1933 at Kangaroo Gully.

It's a slight story. The hero leaves India as a child as the climate is not good for his health; he stays with relatives and is falsely believed to have broken his word not to go boating; the truth is discovered - it was really his cousin; his mother comes back and dies in his arms; as an adult he becomes a soldier.
It belongs to that school of children's literature that assumes that the sun will never set on the empire.
But about the author I can find nothing.

Mrs Musgrave has no wiki. A google search does not find her. She is not in the Oxford Companion to English Literature or the Feminist Companion to Literature. She is unknown to the Guide to Children's Literature. (I keep these readily to hand).

Even Amazon does her the disservice of having a review for a different novel attached to her work.

Aside from her initial (H) and the fact that she wrote some other novels. She was published by Blackie who imprinted in London. This was typical of Australian books until after the war. Even Australian authors sent the ms to the UK to be printed and sent back.

I was thinking how odd the fashions in the Harry Potter universe are. Like everything else in the magical world, they have basically frozen in time at the end of the late 18th century when they signed the Statute of Secrecy. Hence quill and ink rather than any of the successive inventions of pencils, type writers, word processors; candles and lanterns rather than anything later; hence transforming snuff boxes, objects no longer in regular use.

Hence the robes, which would have been kind of old fashioned even in the 18th century. Maybe like what older women would wear or the formal robes of doctors and scholars at that time.

And robes are a lovely form of fashion – so forgiving to a variety of body shapes. So useful for disguising it when you are kicking Ron under the table (as in the Order of the Phoenix).

And people can wear a variety of gear under their robes. People can wear increasingly modern clothes, like the Weasley kids in their jeans but have robes over the top to signal their primary identity as wizards and witches.

The robes themselves seem to offer relatively limited scope for personalisation. But clearly within the wizarding world there is scope – after all, there is a thriving fashion industry (Madam Malkins) and a second hand industry (Ron’s formal robes). And girls’ robes seem to be viewed as different to boys’ robes (hence Ron’s complaints about his looking like something for Ginny). Also, you can get super fancy robes (like Draco’s).

I have just reread Gene Stratton Porter's *Freckles* (1903). I wish that these turn of the century children's novels were not so persistently pro-eugenics. Less in this than in Jean Webster's *Daddy Long Legs* (1912), but still.

I just checked and both authors died before the 1940s eugenics nadir.

I am ambivalent about the statues being torn down across the world. On one hand, yes, it is infuriating to be constantly surrounded by public art celebrating problematic people. But for me the solution would be to adapt the art, not to remove it.

Take, for example, one of the many random statues of Jefferson Davis, the head of the South, put up during the 1960s as an act of intimidation aimed at non-white people. You could remove it, or you could add a plaque to the base adding that information. Or, my preferred option, you could place another statue next to it of Mary Bowser, the black woman who was the most effective spy of all time because she was so underestimated (beneath suspicion, as it were). She was undercover as a slave and infiltrated Jefferson Davis’ house (the centre of Southern Government, equivalent of the White House). They could be paired statues – the Confederacy and its conqueror.

There would be work for sculptors and artists to make new public art. Some people I would like to see celebrated in this State – Jandamarra (Pigeon) who fought against the colonisation of the north of the State, Sally Morgan, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Emily Kame Knygwarreye (one of my favourite ever painters), Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri (whose mother was killed in the Coniston massacre in 1928, the last major massacre of Aboriginal people and less than 100 years ago), Dooley Bin Bin, Clancy McKenna and Don McLeod who lead the longest Australian strike, asking to be paid in money rather than supplies of necessities in the 1940s, etc, etc, etc. This is the result of about five minutes of brainstorming great Western Australians who, as far as I know don’t have sculptures set up of them.

I get the need for the crowd to get a short term win, but I would rather see more art going up than statues going down.

Edited to add; There should also be those heroic Aboriginal people who were captured, fed salt beef and forced to show where the next watering hole on the Canning Stock Route was. They deliberately avoided sacred sites despite being tortured and kept thirsty.
Edited to add: Or if more traditionally ANZAC-y figures are more acceptable - Oodgeroo Noonuccal (WWII Women’s Army Service in Darwin).

I know nothing of sports but am well aware that Aboriginal people are massively over-represented as successful in that area. Surely another non-controversial area to celebrate, given the Australian obsession with sports.

Edited again to make it clear: I’m not saying these people deserve statues merely to make a counter-balance to the existing abundance of monuments to colonisers. I’m saying all their contributions are worth respecting.
I would like to be part of a society that publicly celebrated their contributions rather than just pulling down what previous generations thought was worth celebrating. This would be the most savage riposte. I see your coloniser/explorer and I raise you one hero.

I’ve been listening to the ABC podcast on the dismissal. If you thought it was impossible to hate the Governor General more, you would be wrong.

A song by Ruby...
Someone once told me
the year 2020
would be the worst year of my life.
Starting off with fires
and then corona virus.
It's the worst year of my life.