ANZAC Day

Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, 1915, sent to capture Gallipoli to secure a sea route to the Black Sea.  Gallipoli was in what was still the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany.  The Gallipoli campaign lasted eight months, 44,000 British, French, Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops died.  It is clear, even from this little map, that the terrain is a rocky spine on one side of the gap, and more mountains on the other, a terrible military disadvantage for anyone landing on the shoreline. 

Gallipoli is to Australia as Vimy is to Canada: the alleged formation of a national consciousness separate from Britain.  In both the casualties were enormous, and to only minor military advantage in the whole war.  It was, I suppose, the moment of postcolonial consciousness, subsequently more fierce in Australia than Canada.

Is it fair, through the longer lens of subsequent history and analysis, to think it was such a waste?  Here, we are lectured that to question anything military means we are not supporting our troops, or our countries – does this divide have anything to do with national consciousness?  Protest defines a people, complicity rarely does – the Arab Spring has taught us that much. 

The phrase 'Never again' comes around every November, and must be reverberating though Australia and New Zealand today. What is it we are remembering on November 11th, or 25th of April, or July 1st, the day of the Battle of Beaumont Hamel which annhilated the Newfoundland Regiment?  There is always more war, more matériel, more lost generations.

oxbows

John Macoun. Manitoba and the Great North-West : the Field for Investment; the Home of the Emigrant, Being a Full and Complete History of the Country. Guelph: World Publishing Company, 1882

In St Boniface, above, one can see the remains of an oxbow from the Red River. Detached from the main flow, it would have become, as indicated in this 1882 map, a slough perhaps flooding each spring.  Not to worry, the street grid has been drawn over it anyway, good flat land for development.  Just to the west (the map has west at the top) of the oxbow one can see the old seigneurial land divisions: thin narrow lots fronting on the river.
In the google satellite view, below, the edge of the oxbow is Enfield Crescent, the eccentric in the grid.  The seigneurial pattern is gone, but the road that skirted the swamp (also long gone) remains, permanently embedded in the street layout.

St. Boniface, Winnipeg: from Google Maps, rotated 90° clockwise to match the 1882 map.

meanders

Harold N. Fisk, Ancient Courses. Mississippi River Meander Belt, 1944

The greek key pattern is sometimes called the meander, after the Maeander River, now called the Büyük Menderes River that flows from central Turkey to the Aegean.  It winds through the Maeandrian plain in the manner of most prairie rivers, cutting into soft banks and creating oxbows.  

rivers and borders

International Joint Commission map of the Souris River Basin

The Souris River is flooding Minot, North Dakota.  On the CBC news a Minot resident blames Saskatchewan for this, 'they should have done something'.  The Souris eventually joins the Assiniboine, after it crosses the border again, back into Manitoba.  The Assiniboine flooded earlier this spring and will perhaps flood again.  Winnipeg also keeps its eye on Fargo, North Dakota, on the Red River.  The Assiniboine joins the Red in downtown Winnipeg.  In the 1996 Red River flood Winnipegers blamed Fargo for not better controlling the river flow. 

BC Treaty Commission. Statement of Intent. Traditional Territory Boundary, Sliammon Indian Band.The 49th parallel is an abstract political division that serenely ignores topography: global mathematics trumps geophysical realities.  Before the US Survey, before the Dominion Grid, before enlightened Europeans started to delineate territory in this seemingly empty-ish land, there were aboriginal territories: precise, negotiated at their borders by treaty, surveyed orally in a metes and bounds system.  
Sliammon First Nation territory clearly is topographically based: it controls the watershed on the western slopes of the Coast range, the waterway and fishing beds of the inland passage and the opposite beach, securing the whole width of the strait.  Fresh water systems, food, sea borne transportation capacity, security: these are the things that boundaries delineate. 

 Arid Region of the United States, showing drainage districts. Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, The University of Montana-MissoulaThis 1891 map of watersheds in what was called the arid regions of the western United States shows a division of land that could have been a series of small states, with control over their own water resources and all the potential agricultural and animal resources a watershed contains.

Pre-contact North American cultural areasOr, looking at a map of pre-contact cultural zones in North America, one can see how there is a huge territory that controls the Great Lakes.  Another has the whole western watershed of the Mississipi, another group the eastern side.  The Great Divide separates the peoples of the watersheds that go to the Pacific from those of the plains: the north to Hudson's Bay, south to the Gulf of Mexico.  The boreal forest is one huge cultural group, as is the high Arctic. 

Topological environmental divisions as political territories: what a novel idea.  One could only blame oneself for mismanaging one's resources.

Rouleau, Saskatchewan

George Hunter. Rouleau, Saskatchewan 1954. CCA Archives.

Rouleau, Saskatchewan (1903), photographed from the air by George Hunter in 1954.  This is the classic image of a prairie town, located within the Dominion Grid (laid down between 1879 and 1884), wood grain elevators lining the tracks, the world of Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), a train stop on the SOO Line (to Chicago) built during the wheat boom that ended sharply in 1910.  Lots of dates, but all within the space of fifty years.

Rouleau, Saskatchewan. Google Maps, 2011Rouleau on GoogleMaps.  Not a lot has changed.  Rouleau is in the infamous Palliser Triangle, an area (officially a semi-arid nutrient-rich steppe) deemed by John Palliser, who surveyed it in 1858, to be uninhabitable because it didn't support trees.  The whole area suffered greatly during the droughts of the 1930s, but nearby is Claybank Brick Plant, now a historic site.  The clay was particularly suited to firebrick, used to line fire boxes in train and ship engines: CPR, CNR and RCN all in expansion mode up to WWII  – voracious clients for firebrick.

From 2003 to 2008  Corner Gas was filmed in Rouleau.  The iconic Saskatchewan rural wheat town was the physical fabric that supported a vision of Canada as a friendly but sometimes sharp-edged community, funny, pathetic, brave, funny, ridiculous, heroic, funny, everyday.  Corner Gas was the Canada that we like to carry about within us, without actually living there.  

Rouleau's slogan is 'Saskatchewan's First 1 Million Bushel Town!'  Does this mean much to any of us not from a farming background? No.  Does Rouleau care?  No.  Is this a brand?  No.  Does this say a lot about Rouleau?  Yes.

a handful of drives

Polly Hill. Driving map of Santa Cruz, 1912

There is a nice write up of this hand map on Strange Maps.  It reminds me that there was a time when people got into cars and drove around, looking at things, usually on Sunday afternoons.  Let's go out for a drive!  Who today in their right mind would think this was a treat?  but it used to be.

Driving has become such a chore: too fast, too much road surface, too noisy, an A to B experience, preferrably without incident.  No time to look at scenery, no stopping for gas and finding a courteous attendant, in fact little courtesy on the road itself.  It is all such a struggle. 

Sohei Nishino

© Sohei Nishino. Paris, May 2007 - November 2008. Light jet print. 1558×1348 mmThis work by Sohei Nishino comes to us by way of Tim Atherton who alerted us to the wonderfully named Hippolyte Bayard's photography site.

Sohei Nishino walks cities, photographs them and assembles the photos into vast cognitive maps.  He states that this is 'the re-imagined city from my memory as layered icons of the city'.

Spectacularly unsuited to looking at on the screen, they are large, black and white pieces, 4 x 4' more or less.  Knowing the process, one can imagine what they might look like, as unbalanced and as true as all cognitive maps, studded with fragments of startling detail.  

The detail of Istanbul, below,  shows something of the method: like small narratives in the topography of memory complete with sky and ground, some buildings and spaces are made special by their disconnection from the logic of a conventional map.  This is what google maps has liberated us from: the misleading veracity of the aerial view.

© Sohei Nishino. Detail, Istanbul Diorama

Andrew Piper on lists

Dimitri Nabokov, note included in The Original of Laura (Knopf 2008)Andrew Piper's essay 'Media and Metamorphosis: on notes and books' in the new everyday, a media commons project  talks about the notes made by writers as they organise a novel, or a poem cycle – anything complex that moves from idea to what is eventually published.  The fact that marginalia is a genre, that the notes themselves are a significant narrative, changes the way one thinks of the book.  It isn't just the narrative between two covers, but a book is just one piece of a much larger story that occurs in many forms, not least the act of writing itself.

Nabokov's list, above, of synonyms for removing something has one phrase completely scribbled out as if it offended him.  This isn't a list of possibles, a to-do list, rather it is a list of rejections.  Above all, it takes the words that moil around in the brain and makes them visual.  And once they are visual, they can be considered.

Goethe's list of keywords, the framework for Novella, is a map, with each country crossed off as he passed through it.

Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, collection number 25, signature W 1990

small countries

strangemaps: January 17 2010

This postcard from Australia, posted on strangemaps:  If Canadians worry that they are never mentioned in the news, or acknowledged that we are in Afghanistan, or have oil reserves the size of Iran's, or are the second largest country in the world after Russia, think how Australia feels.  All I've heard recently is the problem with tourists climbing Uluru and Kevin Rudd's apologies to Aborigines and the child labourers sent from Britain between 1920 and 1970.  They were sent to Canada too, but we haven't apologised yet.

Australia clearly is very large, yet looms small in the global imagination.  As Patrick Brown said once when someone complained that Canada was never in the news: 'Get down on your knees and thank God that Canada is not in the news.  Places in the news are inevitably about disasters, wars and corruption.'  I paraphrase.  When Canada was proud to be a middle power, we were not particularly well-known for our mediative, behind-the-scenes role between the large powers.  Now we are in the news for our four Fossil Awards. 
It is hard being a large country with a small reputation.

Paul Sahre

Paul Sahre. cover, Couplings, for Farrer Strauss & Giroux, 1996

Peter Schneider.  Couplings. translated by Philip Boehm.  Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996
Originally published in German as Paarungen, 1992.

I think I bought this book for its cover; amazingly the designer of the cover appears to have read the book– a discursion on divided Berlin written a couple of years after unification.  Nominally about affairs of the heart and the heart's inconstancy, it is also a Bildungsroman, the narrative the metaphor for Berlin's partition, separate development and clumsy re-acquaintance.

Twins: one brother all black leather and jeans, believes in western science (nature), the other in socialist society (nurture).  Everyone in the city is as internally conflicted and divided as the city itself.  The east has all the privacy of a refuge, the west is racked with profligate self-exposure.  Relationships founder on convention; are deflected by desire.  Yes, it's all about love, circumstantial and determined, love in a city and how Berlin maps relationships that crash into walls both physical and emotional. 

If all the characters in the book were merely ciphers for East and West Germany it couldn't sustain itself the way it does, with side conversations about buildings, the city, the compromises made by the aging '68 generation, the omnipresence of surveillance with the Stazi and a kind of inadvertant stazi of the mind.
Paul Sahre did the cover — a NY graphic designer who is often brilliant.  None of the sentimentality of Schneider: a different generation – Schneider born in 1940, Sahre probably in the late 60s.  Where Schneider can be bathetic, Sahre is funny. 

I liked this book when I read it, I kept it for the cover. 

British Columbia

This map is from Derek Hayes' 2002 Historical Atlas of Canada, the most beautiful of all the historical atlas projects. The image is linked to Google books where one can see just how beautiful.

One of the conditions of the colony of British Columbia joining Canada in 1871 was the building of an overland link from BC to the rest of Canada.  This was the commission given to the CPR and completed in 1884.  Is BC a different world than the rest of Canada?  They certainly think so.

This map, drawn in the 1870s when much of BC was simply unknown to surveyors and engineers, shows just how much of a conundrum this territory must have seemed. After sailing breezily through the flat land of the prairies where nothing can be hidden from view suddenly there is the wall of the Rockies. Even today, on the much improved Trans-Canada, one cannot get through BC quickly, and the older Highway 3 through the Crows Nest is very convoluted. However, such roads keep one more alert than driving through southern Saskatchewan in a 500 mile straight line.

I like this map for the dismay it seems to exude.  BC was going to be a hard project.