An island in time

Have just come across my first book with a QR code on its front cover.(http://www.jeremyrobinsononline.com/books/island-qr-code.html) It links to this blurb on 'Island 731' by Jeremy Robinson.

"The high adventure of James Rollins meets the gripping suspense of Matthew Reilly in Jeremy Robinson's explosive new thriller

Mark Hawkins, former park ranger and expert tracker, is out of his element, working on board the Magellan, a research vessel studying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But his work is interrupted when, surrounded by thirty miles of refuse, the ship and its high tech systems are plagued by a series of strange malfunctions and the crew is battered by a raging storm.

When the storm fades and the sun rises, the beaten crew awakens to find themselves anchored in the protective cove of a tropical island...and no one knows how they got there. Even worse, the ship has been sabotaged, two crewman are dead and a third is missing. Hawkins spots signs of the missing man on shore and leads a small team to bring him back. But they quickly discover evidence of a brutal history left behind by the Island’s former occupants: Unit 731, Japan’s ruthless World War II human experimentation program. Mass graves and military fortifications dot the island, along with a decades old laboratory housing the remains of hideous experiments.

As crew members start to disappear, Hawkins realizes that they are not alone. In fact, they were brought to this strange and horrible island. The crew is taken one-by-one and while Hawkins fights to save his friends, he learns the horrible truth: Island 731 was never decommissioned and the person taking his crewmates may not be a person at all—not anymore."
And this YouTube clip

I hope it is a bit more Matthew Reilly than James Rollins' formula, and not a splatter pulp fiction.

For the really ancient (who may recognise what I'm on about) the mention of - deserted tropical island; decades old military fortifications - immediately brought to mind an episode from the tv series 'The adventures of the Seaspray'.  Loved that theme music, so the YouTube opening credits are below. Also I wanted to live on that boat and sail around the Pacific - didn't happen strangely.

Author haunts

50 Places Every Literary Fan Should Visit

For any excuse to travel - if you’re in an area that is home to a place that has some literary historical significance, you have to go and visit it. Well, Favorwire compiled this list of literary places all over the world that you should visit if you happen to be in the neighbourhood.

Mark Twain's house with Tiffany-designed walls & ceilings and a Twain made from Lego!

1. Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT
2. Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace & Museum, Oak Park, IL
3. Herman Melville’s grave, Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NY
4. Willa Cather’s childhood home, Red Cloud, Nebraska
5. Oscar Wilde’s childhood home, Dublin, Ireland
6. Baruch Spinoza’s house, The Hague, Netherlands
7. Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA
8. Yasnaya Polyana (Leo Tolstoy’s home), Russia
9. The Mount (Edith Wharton’s home), Lenox, MA
10. William Faulkner’s ‘Rowan Oak’, Oxford, MS

    

    Love the look of 'Rowan Oak'

11. Scribner Building and Charles Scribner’s Sons Building, New York, NY
12. Tennessee Williams lived in the windmill at the Stony Brook campus, Southampton, NY
13. O. Henry house and museum, Austin, TX
14. Friedrich Nietzsche-Haus, Sils-Maria, Switzerland
15. Jorge Luis Borges’s Buenos Aires, Argentina
16. Margaret Mitchell House & Museum, Atlanta, GA
17. Bronte Parsonage Museum, West Yorkshire, England 
18. Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, Savannah, GA
19. Charles Dickens Museum, London, England
20. Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Indianapolis, Indiana
21. Truman Capote’s apartment, Brooklyn, NY
22. Nikolai’s ‘Gogol House’, Moscow, Russia
23. Dorothy Parker’s birthplace, Long Branch, NJ
24. H.P. Lovecraft’s Providence, Rhode Island
25. Honoré de Balzac’s residence Maison de Balzac, Paris, France
26. Karl Marx House, Trier, Germany
27. Mark Twain’s boyhood home and museum, Hannibal, MO
28. Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk created the Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, Turkey
29. Henry Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Concord, MA
30. City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA
31. Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Richmond, VA
32. Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Monk’s House for Bloomsbury Group in East Sussex, England
33. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthplace, St. Paul, MN
34. Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France (final resting place of Oscar Wilde, Honoré de Balzac, and many great authors)

    

    Joyce, still on the streets of Dublin

35. Walking around James Joyce’s Dublin, Ireland
36. Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX
37. Franz Kafka’s grave, The New Jewish Cemetery, Prague
38. Les Deux Magots, Paris, France (Parisian café where Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and many others hung out)
39. Edward Gorey House, Yarmouth Port, MA

    

    The surely inspirational Williams windmill
40. John Updike’s home, Shillington, PA
41. Vladimir’s Nabokov House, Saint Petersburg, Russia
42. L.M. Montgomery’s Green Gables, Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, Canada
43. Chekhov Library, Taganrog, Russia
44. Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur, CA
45. Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, Baltimore, MD
46. Jane Austen’s House & Museum, Hampshire, England
47. Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL
48. Arthur Rimbaud’s House, Harar, Ethiopia
49. Washington Irving’s grave, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, NY
50. The Algonquin Hotel, New York, NY meeting place of a group of New York writers, critics, actors and wits including Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx and Harold Ross.

OK, it is extremely American (which would be an excuse to fly to the U.S.), so we need to compile the definitive Australian one. I'll make a start -  number one has to be Nutcote the home of May Gibbs.

'Nutcote' on the shores of Sydney Harbour

Re graves, it would be Waverley Cemetery now home to Henry Lawson, Dorothea MacKellar and Henry Kendall...

The white marble forest of Waverley Cemetery, Sydney

The Shaw Neilson's cottage

Locally - that's John Shaw Neilson's home originally near Penola, S.A., now at Nhill.
Then there's Chauncyvale in Tasmania, the whole town of Gulgong (Henry Lawson's hometown), the Durack's Lake Argyle homestead in W.A. Kylie Tennant's Hut above Kylie's Beach at Diamond Head, N.S.W. Dingley Dell Cottage & Museum to Adam Linsday Gordon. The Colin Thiele sculpture (with Mr Percival) at Eudunda, S.A., the Norman Lindsay Gallery & Museum in Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains. That's ten, I could go on & on

So who else would you add?

Worlds will collide

A bit excited about the film version of City of Bones. The film is based on the first book of the Mortal Instruments series: City of Bones.

Set in contemporary New York City, a seemingly ordinary 15 year old teenager, Clary Fray (Lily Collins), heads out to the Pandemonium Club, she hardly expects to witness a murder—much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Clary knows she should call the police, but it’s hard to explain a murder when the body disappears into thin air and the murderers are invisible to everyone but Clary.

Equally startled by her ability to see them, the murderers describe themselves as Shadowhunters: a secret tribe of half-angel warriors locked in an ancient battle to protect our world from demons.

After the disappearance of her mother (Lena Headey) - and Clary herself is almost killed by a grotesque demon - Clary must join forces with a group of Shadowhunters, who introduce her to a dangerous alternate New York called Downworld, filled with demons, warlocks, vampires, werewolves and other deadly creatures.

The movie was filmed in Toronto and New York and is due for worldwide release on August 21, 2013. (Australia 22^nd). The movie has its own site where you can check out the trailer. There is also a Mortal Instruments Facebook page, and the Shadowhunters website.

The author of the Mortal Instruments series - Cassandra Clare was born to American parents in Teheran in Iran, and spent much of her childhood travelling the world with her family. She lived in France, England and Switzerland before she was ten years old.

Since her family moved around so much she found familiarity in books and went everywhere with a book. She spent her high school years in Los Angeles where she used to write stories to amuse her classmates.

After college, Cassie lived in Los Angeles and New York where she worked at various entertainment magazines before writing City of Bones in 2004 and becoming a full-time writer.

Don’t miss your opportunity to read the books, listen to the books on CD or electronically, and then explore the Shadowhunters world with the Mortal Instruments reader before the movie is released in August.

Wanted: Royal Librarian

The Royal Collection is advertising for a librarian to operate the Royal Library at Winsdor Castle for £53,00 a year.

Windsor Castle mharrsch on Flickr

According to The Telegraph, it is a bookworm's dream job to look after the Queen's 125,000 titles. 

They are seeking an exceptional scholar and bibliophile to run the Royal Library which contains one of the world's finest collections of Old Master drawings (including the largest group of Leonardo da Vinci drawings); a unique collection of over 4,500 military maps & documents spanning the 4 centuries from Agincourt to Waterloo; coins, medals & insignia; and of course books & manuscripts.

The Librarian would work with the Royal Collection Trust curating exhibitions & displays for State Visits & themed receptions, and with the Royal Archives researching & interpreting material on the history of the monarchy.

The requirements are
- a strong scholarly background
- in depth knowledge of history (especially British)
- bibliography and a record of publishing, lecturing & academic research 
- possess advanced IT skills with an understanding of & experience in digitisation

The real Tom Kruse

The Birdsville Track is one of the best known, and loneliest, tracks in Australia, and for twenty years Tom Kruse was the mailman, battling the searing heat, floods and mechanical breakdowns. He made the run every fortnight, and was a lifeline to the isolated settlements and stations along the way, delivering everything from letters to essential supplies.  He made running repairs of his truck, he loaded and unloaded tons of stores to ferry his cargo across flooded creeks. He kept people in touch with the outside world, and was sometimes caught up in the grief of a lonely death.

'Tom the Outback mailman' by Kristin Weidenbach  is a children's version of Kristin Weidenbach's bestselling 'Mailman of the Birdsville Track' and is illustrated by Timothy Idle who has a feel for the beauty and hardship of life in the Outback. And he also has a touch of whimsy as showcased with the double-page spread of Tom's efforts to conquer the sandhills by building up speed doing circle work on a claypan then gunning the truck up the sand slope.

The book  is a reconstruction of life on the Birdsville Track in the early 1950s.  Parts of the book are a faithful recreation of the original story complete with the armchair and dressmakers dummy.
It has been shortlisted for the Children's Book Council of Australia's Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. The winners will be announced on Friday 16th August, the eve of this year's Book Week (Saturday 17th to Friday 23rd August 2013). The theme this year is "Read across the universe".
 Tom Kruse was the Birdsville Track mail-man from the 1930's to the 50's, he was born in Waterloo in the Clare Valley in 1914 as Esmond Gerald Kruse and died in Adelaide in 2011. His Leyland Badger truck was reconstructed and driven from Sturts Stony Desert near Birdsville to the Birdwood motor museum in 1999.
 

Tom's story was first chronicled in the iconic John Heyer film 'The back of beyond' - the film won the Absolute Grand Prize in the Venice Film Festival in 1954 and was nominated for the1955 BAFA for Best Documentary Film.

The film encompasses a period between the exploration and opening up of the country and the contemporary -  the Afghan Bejah in the film was the cameleer on the Madigan Expedition into the Simpson Desert in 1939.

Of the stories within the film, the most moving has to be the re-telling of the two young sisters Sally & Roberta who left their home on the Track to walk to the nearest neighbour with only their spaniel dog and billy-cart with a demi-jar of water. The sequence when they come across their own tracks, dreamily accompanied by Roberta playing a flute, is made all the more wrenching by Sally concealing the significance of their disorientation as they continue into unending dunes. Later their father returns and searches for them till their tracks disappear under the windblown sand.

Urban time-lapse

Nathan's Banyule Flats, Heidelberg

Here on the last day of Google Reader, comes a fascinating Vimeo video


Miniature Melbourne from Nathan Kaso on Vimeo.

It captures a day in Melbourne during Moomba - the Birdman Rally and the parade down St Kilda Road, from dawn to dusk (with the Spirit leaving Station Pier).
The photos/video was shot by Nathan Kaso of Melbourne, you can see more of his time-lapse at his Vimeo site, check out his storm pics of the Yarra Valley (when people use the term roiling clouds this must be what they envisage!), or the 'Toy boats' I always love the Sydney Ferries. Then there's his website with still photos of New Zealand, the High Country (Vic & NSW), and mist in the Dandenongs.

Milford Sound NZ - Nathan Kaso

Castaway theory

I was alerted to this snippet via ALIA Weekly, the online newsletter that my annual membership helps pay for. The headline read - 'Photos found by NZ archivist could solve Earhart mystery' (the key word here was obviously archivist). 
As the world knows it, Amelia Earhart was attempting to circumnavigate the planet in 1937, when she went missing on the 4,000km leg from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island in the Pacific. Radio contact with the plane was lost after she reported running low on fuel, and the massive sea-and-air search that followed proved unsuccessful. 
Heaps of theories have been advanced as to what truly transpired. The best one was that she was secretly an agent for the CIA, on a mission to overfly Saipan to check out Japanese military expansion into the Pacific area - and that they shot down her twin-engine Lockheed Electra plane, captured her and wounded navigator Fred Noonan, and that she died years later in a Japanese prison on the island.

The area under investigation

Satellite image of Nukimaroro Island

Back to the archivist story though, photos unearthed by a Christchurch archivist  Matthew O'Sullivan, could prove Earhart spent her final days as a castaway on a remote island north of New Zealand, and that she didn't, as some believe, die in a plane crash. 
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) has long theorised that after Earhart's plane went off course while en-route to Howland Island, the pair made a safe landing on a reef near Nikumaroro Island in Kiribati, previously Gardner Island, and made it safely to shore, living out the rest of their days as castaways.

THE photo, Nikumaroro Island, apparently showing the wreckage

O'Sullivan was rifling through his collection of aerial films and came across one with an entry saying 'unnamed atoll'. He notified Tighar of his find, and the group responded, telling O'Sullivan he had discovered the ''complete set of aerial obliques taken on December 1, 1938'' by an aircraft of the New Zealand Pacific Aviation Survey. They believe the photos, taken two years after she went missing, show where Earhart's plane went down. A representative from Tighar was now organising a trip to New Zealand with a forensic imaging specialist to conduct further research.
It should be relatively easy to ascertain whether or not if the splodge on the photo is the wreckage, we await further developments.

Here & There photos

Having explored ‘Now & Then’ photos I’ve now been confronted by some ‘Here & There’ images, courtesy of my old friend WebUrbanist in Urban Hybrid: Double-Exposure Photos Fuse London & NYC. 
 

Architect by training and photographer by profession, Daniella Zalcman decided to document her old home town of New York using her iPhone. When she arrived at her new home in Great Britain, she spent time photographing London in the same way. Then…she overlaid the secondary exposures over the first - a Here & There.
 

Daniella created the double exposures from the New York and London images with a little help from photo-editing apps like Instagram.

The results are predictably unpredictable – a mix of juxtapositions ranging from smooth transitional gradients to sharp spatial contrasts, capturing street art and sidewalk scenes as well as broader cityscapes and edge conditions.

In the end, many of the most jarring compositions defy the brain’s desire to organise a coherent narrative, an effect reinforced by the gritty texture and grainy quality of the images themselves.

Daniella Zalcman was born in Washington, DC, she graduated from Columbia with a degree in architecture in 2009. As a freelance photographer, her clients include The New York Times, the New York Daily News, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Saatchi & Saatchi, National Geographic, Wired, and The Nation. Daniella has also since launched a Kickstarter project (Kickstart Project creators set a funding goal and deadline. If people like a project, they can pledge money to make it happen) to create a book of these images.

Following the abandoned links

Knowing of my fascination for abandoned places, the other day I was encouraged to follow a link from ABC Western Victoria's Facebook site, 
 

plus love their cover photo

to an article from the Daily Mail's online edition titled "Family life frozen in time" showcasing Dutch photographer Niki Feijen's book "Disciple of decay" a series featuring decaying family homes where the furniture, ornaments and clothes are still in place amidst the peeling plaster and rotting chairs.
This in turn led me to his Facebook site, and finally to his website.

Niki on the beautiful staircase in the Chateau de Loup

Born in the Netherlands Niki Feijen discovered Urbex - Urban Exploring - photography. The examination of the normally unseen or off limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities.

As he says basically visiting and photographing abandoned buildings, tunnels, industry, castles, etc. He also admits to a crazy stairs addiction, spending hours beneath a staircase to capture one awesome shot.

In November 2010 Niki and his girlfriend decided to live the urban explorers dream and journey into the Chernobyl exclusion zone (obviously he hadn't seen the 'Chernobyl diaries' film). He found it "like a movie set, a ghost town. The emptiness is overwhelming. Unsuitable for living due to the radioactive contamination it's a nightmare for its former inhabitants, a dream for urban explorers."

Here are just some of his photos shared from his site. One thing I appreciated was that at his site he had a variety of share options - embeddable links, social bookmarking, feeds, etc., made adding these photos so much easier.

Pripyay classroom, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

'Disco inferno' - a burned-out disco

A grand staircase in an abandoned castle

'Shattered fairytales' - the ruined Chateau de Noisy