The first people I encountered on the day was Contact Front, the Vietnam re-enactment group, walking through around the site in skirmish line in silence and communicating only by hand signals. This was actually quite confronting and I know there’s some debate over whether it’s too soon after the event for such a group.

Members of the Ludi Gladiatorii Romani were practicing knife fighting, under instructions and with dummy weapons, in their camp enclosure. This was interesting and I would have liked to have chatted with these guys to find out more about them but there was no one available who was not fighting.

In the main arena, any number of supposedly medieval groups in period costume flailed away at each other with swords in a thoroughly pointless display of stupidity. These guys know nothing of period fencing and many cannot even hold their weapons effectively. They are nothing more than drinking clubs who wear funny clothes.

Once this dross was cleared away, the Australian Napoleonic Association and similar groups gave a demonstration of fire and movement early nineteenth century style. The were using black powder muskets and, even though there was less than a dozen soldiers per side, the field was soon obscured by smoke as they by turns advanced or retreated in line and good order. Surprisingly, the French lost.

They were followed by Prima Spada School of Fence performing a skit about dueling in the Renaissance, starting with a insult given (almost) unintentionally in the street and proceeding to naked blades at dawn. Then they got silly and it dissolved into an all-out brawl.

The question I kept asking myself as I toured the site, the groups and watched the various events is what do these people want visitors to get out of their display. For the most part, I had trouble understanding or discovering what the lesson each group or display intended to me to learn.

There seems to be no value proposition presented to the audience other than “oh, look at the pretty costumes and the people acting silly.” There is nothing to draw people in and get them interested in history. The whole event is entire passive and a spectator sport. It’s just too easy to change channels and do something else. In short, everyone seemed happy just to say “we’re re-enactors and we’re here to stay” – like a pride march for history nerds.

And there’s the rub. From the apparent age of the re-enactors, they’re not here to stay for very long. Unless something is done to introduce new people into the fold, the entire re-enactment movement is liable to die a slow, withering death.

In order to avoid this fate, something needs to be done to, for instance, convert the public who attend History Alive and other events into paid up members of all groups which take their historical fancies. There needs to be more engagement with the public. There needs to be a program of getting the public involved, of teaching them about history, and of explaining to them what we find so cool about the past. We need to turn them into us.

Zombie Myths of Australian Military History

Title: Zombie Myths of Australian Military History
Author: Craig Stockings (editor)
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press (2010)
Language: English

A fascinating look at the difference between received ideas and facts. It covers ten major historical myths across 200 years from the original settlement of the country by Europeans to our recent involvements in Southeast Asia and East Timor. It strives to show the reasons or circumstances which created and have sustained each zombie myth until it gained a life of it own and needs no more prompting. In many cases, the purpose for which the myth was created had to do with legal or propaganda value at the time.

Without giving too much away, here’s some highlights to whet your appetites:

The first chapter debunks the idea that there was no organised or violent resistance to colonisation from the indigenous peoples. There was. According to these accounts from the early days of Sydney, they were quite effective at instigating such a campaign of terror and resistance that significant military resources were devoted to ‘the problem.’ The issue for the government was that in admitting they were fighting a war, they admitted that the Aboriginal people held sovereignty over their land – denying the legal fiction of ‘terra nullius’ which allowed for colonisation in the first place.

The conversion of Breaker Morant from a criminal who murdered his prisoners in the Boer War to a hero and Australian legend paralleling Ned Kelly is largely the result of the actions of one disgruntled ex-Digger.

Several popular stories about World War One and Two are discussed including the the campaigns in Gallipoli and the Hindenberg Line, the sinking of the Sydney and Australian success in the Western Desert.

One of the best chapters looks at the propaganda campaign centring the imminent invasion of the country by Japan in 1942-3. Put simply, it was a fear campaign to galvanise the country into action and into a war economy. Japan had no plans to invade and the Australian (and US) governments knew this from about May 1942. This chapter is perhaps the best in the book and draws extensively on the Australian parliamentary record and captured Japanese documents to make its case. It details an amazing story from the initial fear of invasion through the intelligence and evidence collection operations until the realisation that the fear was unfounded and subsequent propaganda campaign.

The post world war chapters are fascinating and are bound to be controversial as they track our involvement in Southeast Asia in Vietnam and more recently in East Timor. Among the points of note are that as a country we fight wars for our own ends and to satisfy the demands of internal politics rather than being pushed into them by any perceived duty to external powers, that Vietnam was a war no different to any others we’ve fought and that our returning soldiers were treated no differently to those of previous wars.

Only in one chapter did I catch the faint sound of an axe grinding in the background and that did little to spoil my enjoyment of the book as a whole. This is a fascinating and well-research work which should be on the bookshelf of everyone with an interest in Australian history. (All citizens of this wide brown land, I’m looking at you.)

Gone was the dual English/French repetition of every statement by the the hosts (although the scoring remains bilingual). Most countries sang in English and those who did not sang in their native lingo. The only real clanger was Latvia whose entry only served to prove that Google translator is not foolproof:

“What for how we live? Only Mr God knows why.”

However, there was a visible difference between those who spoke English comfortably and those for whom it is definitely a secondary – as opposed to a second – language. In general, the further west the competitor’s country, the greater their command of the language and consequently the further east the country the less comfortable the competitor appeared to be with the language.

I suspect that the degree of facility with English displayed by a country’s entrants reflects the amount of trade the country maintains with the anglophone world – by which I mean the United States. Perhaps it is the influence of NATO membership.

Cultural Imperialism at Work

One feature of the colloquial English spoken was that it is very American. The expressions used, while common everywhere, have their origins in the US and, more to the point, on US television. As disturbing as this is in itself, it shows the degree to which that which passes for culture in the US has penetrated the continent of true western culture. I know from personal experience that I can always find topics of conversation with foreign language speakers in foreign languages by talking about ER, Supernatural and CSI.

To achieve this position of prominence, all it took was the gun-boat diplomacy of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, two world wars and 50 years if the threat of nuclear annihilation. So simple, anyone could do it.

I’m also not quite sure why I’m complaining about this. To my mind, as an overly educated yobbo, English is without doubt the greatest and best language in the universe and represents the highest of humanity’s achievement since the invention of fire. I guess I fear the loss of diversity. Learning other languages opens up whole new vistas on reality, different ways of looking at the world, and alternative point of view on both the common and the extraordinary. Living in a world of one language or even of a single predominant language is a terrifyingly shallow prospect.

Previous linguae francae include:

• French for diplomacy in the seventeenth century and in the realms of literature and culture off and on since the 1400s;
• Italian and German vied for dominance in the political sphere during the Holy Roman Empire (say AD 1200-1600);
• French, or more accurately Frankish (the original lingua franca) from about AD 700-1100;
• Medieval or Neo-Latin complicates this picture by remaining the language of the Church, science and education from the end of the Roman Empire until even Hungary dropped it as an official language in 1867;
• Greek and after it Latin from about the fifth century BC until the fifth century AD.

Alternative linguae francae of today include:

• Russian throughout much of Central Asia;
• Spanish in the Americas;
• Arabic is the common language of the Middle East;
• Portuguese, Italian and French in different parts of Africa;
• Italian is in the process of replacing Latin as the official language of the Vatican.

Only recently has Mandarin Chinese replaced Cantonese as the language of modern China and the Chinese ex-pat communities due to that country’s continued economic rise to power. Mandarin or Standard Chinese is my pick for the next lingua franca after the eventual demise from this position of English sometime in the far, far future.

Linda M Paterson - The World of the Troubadours

Title: The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c.1100-c.1300
Author: Linda M Paterson
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1995
Language: English

This is a book of lists which concentrates on the topics of:

• the nature of feudalism and vasslage in Languedoc and Provence
• medieval medicine and surgery and their Arabic influences
• the place and role of women in society which contrasts sharply to the north of France
• religion and heresy, especially the reasonably well-known Albigensian Crusade and the Gregorian Reforms

Scholarship in English on the south of France in the high medieval period has been until fairly recently rather poor. It is one of the forgotten areas of history. A book like this is required reading in order to give one a sense of the south and the manner in which the Langedoc and Provence, collectively known as Occitania, is both the same as and different to the more well-known north of the country. Each chapter is a prose list which provides bountiful evidence to either confirm or refute the received ideas about the region. It is not a book about the Troubadours as such but an explanation of the world which created them.

Feudalism in Occitania is cast in an entirely different mold to that of the more famous north. Until recently, most historians have linked the weak ties of vassalage in the south to their particular scheme of inheritance. Rather than willing the entirety of the lord’s estate to the eldest son and the rest of their children, if they’re lucky, getting some measure of stipend, the Occitanian divided the estate between the inheritors. This destroys the the northern conception of land in return for military service. How can a lord expect a vassal to maintain all the accoutrements of war when all he owns is a title, the land which may have supported this being divided between his other siblings? This creates a very different type of fuedalism, one not based on land ownership but personal ties. The focus becomes the court and court life. Nobles without land or without enough land to sustain themselves congregated in the towns and made them larger and more important to the life of the south than they would be for 300 years and more in the north. Urban, intellectual and social pursuits rose to prominence. But which came first, the inheritance scheme or the concentration on the court?

Medieval medicine is a subject close to Paterson’s heart if the text provides any evidence. The south of France was as famous for the number and quality of its doctors as was Italy, Sicily or the Arab world. Indeed, the fact that the region was a crossroads for knowledge from Italy and from both Arabic and Christian Spain means that medical knowledge could be collected and synthesised into a body of knowledge which was lauded throughout north west Europe. Montpellier at this time had a medical school that was the equal of its better known contemporary in Salerno. Because Papal rule was not as complete in the south as it was in the north, the restriction on autopsies and other invasive mechanical investigations of the body was not strictly followed. As a result, Occitanian texts on surgery and anatomy were highly prized.

There’s a rather large chapter on the social roles and place of women in Occitanian society. The recived notion is that women were freer in Occitania than in the north because of the weakness of the political structure. Paterson cites a great deal of evidence to suggest that while some noblewomen enjoyed freedoms and a level of control of their world similar to men, these women are the standout exceptions. It is interesting to note, however, that the northern literary motif of the young girl rescued by the knight who has his way with her is almost entirely absent in the literature of the south. Also, until the rise of the universities, women and girls seemed to have had the same opportunities in education as their male counterparts. While in general women in the south had a greater degree of freedom than in the north, they were still subjected to a level of control which could not be tolerated today.

It’s impossible to talk of the south of France without discussing the Albigensian Crusade where, under Papal orders, the King of France destroyed Occitania and incorporated the territory into his realm. However, Paterson spends little time of the Crusade itself, preferring to outline a different view of its causes. Many have written that the Church in Occitania was a languishing in a forgotten backwater. The evidence, however, suggests that there was an ecclesiastical vitiality and independance quite unlike anything found where the Church followed a morefuedal structure. The priests in parish churches was frequently lay, local men rather than ordained priests. Dioceses elected their own bishops from among themselves rather than appealing to Rome for an appointment. The changes instituted by the so-called Gregorian Reforms (Gregorian Crisis?) overturned these traditions and imposed on the churches of the region foreign bishops, who believed they had the right to rule both the spiritual and temporal worlds and who appointed their lackeys to local churches. In response to this invasion, it is no wonder that the Occitanians turned to less orthodox religious practises.

This is a fascinating book and should be on the “must read” list of anyone interested in the region and the period.

Now to television and the best sci-fi show you’ll never see: Defying Gravity. This show is just plain awesome, not least for being targetted at adults rather than teens, but also for not being a Star Trek clone. This last point is both it’s greatest strength and the reason, I believe, it was cancelled after one season. (Of course, in the US, the cultural Great Satan, they didn’t even play the whole 13 episode season.) The series follow an international group of astronauts as they embark on a six-year “tour of the solar system,” with plenty of flashbacks to their training days into which to explore changes of character. Apparently, the show was pitched to the studio as “Grey’s Anatomy in space.” Yes, the science is wonky but it’s a great ensemble cast drama about relationships and social interaction under pressure.

(As you all know, Star Trek is a pox on science fiction. While the original series was fun the first time, it’s lingering and scabrous after effects repeat themselves over and over, literally, ad nauseum and condemn to death any chance of future pleasure.)

As for audio drama, there’s a few good things on BBC Radio 7 at the moment which I am thoroughly enjoying.

First cab off the rank is Rumpole of the Bailey. I know that many consider this a tired old show, especially after being subjected to endless re-runs of the TV series on ABC TV. In it’s radio incarnation, Maurice Denham makes the character his own rather than basing him on the TV series’ lead actor, Leo McKern. This alone makes the series fascinating.

Next is a wonderful detective series called A Confidential Agent which, to continue with the bad studio pitches, could be described as “Shirley Valentine, PI.” It’s set in Birmingham and follows a 40-something woman who has left the glittering high-life of London to come home to care for her ol’ da and somehow lands herself a job as lead investigator at Ace Confidential Investigations. One of the magical aspects to the series is that she often fantasises herself as the main character in a Chandler-esque private eye novel complex with a slow Chicago jazz soundtrack until something jars her back into the real world of tenament housing, factory closures and loan sharks operating out of the back room of the local pub.

Next on the list is an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem‘s Solaris and another in the endless dramatisations of Ellis Peters‘ Cadfael series of novels.

Paranormal Activity: This is a standout. Shot for US$15,000 and somehow managing to get a cinema release, this film is scary as hell, despite suffering from too much Blair Witch handycam camera work, precisely because of the low budget. Apparently, the filmmakers decided that because they had such a small budget they had to suggest the horror rather than spend their cash on special effects and such to show the horror. The film has nothing new to say but it is very, very creepy. I expect big things from these people in the future.

Legend of the Seeker: A thoroughly conventional and still enjoyable made for television fantasy based on the books of Terry Goodkind. Apart from the notable exception of Bruce Spence, you can tell all major characters in all episodes because they’re the ones without New Zealand or Australian accents. Inoffensive and largely unoriginal but it has lots oof pretty cool ideas which will work well in a roleplaying campaign. Is Goodkind a gamer? Don’t know but I reckon the answer must be yes from what I’ve seen so far.

Babylon AD: I caught this movie on Foxtel and it could have been good. Set in a kind of  Bladerunner eastern europe (without the style), Vin Diesel prances about murdering everyone in sight to protect the innocent girl from the horrors of the world. There are so many things about the film which track really well and are dead interesting until they reach the 80% complete mark. At that point, each and every one of them nose-dives into the toilet. I can’t even remember what the premise or plot of the movie might have been. About the only saving grace this film has is that Vin has a tatto of an Elder Sign from the Necronomicon (I always thought that this versions was actually written by Lin Cater. Apparently, I’m wrong.) )on his neck.

These are the highlights of my watching. The rest has been trash.

I have a couple of fixed ideas on what makes a movie, novel or short story good. These have developed out of a cloud of different inputs such as:

• four years of studying film and literature at university,
• a strong interest in learning other languaes and reading foreign literature,
• a strong interest in history,
• a memory of what has gone before in literature in general and in certain genres (say, sci-fi) in particular,
• struggling with writing technique as wannabe/failed writer.

My approach to story – let’s use that as a general term for all these media – can be summarised as:

Subject: There is something significant at risk for a character I can feel something for.

Presentation: The story is presented in a way which is consistent, engaging for me and adds in some way another dimension the character’s struggle.

That’s it. See, it’s pretty simple. I’m actually very easy to please. As long as you can make me care what happens to the character, I’m happy and I think the author – again, let’s take this as a general term for the entire production team – has done his or her job. The character doesn’t have to be sympathetic as I like seeing people get their come-uppance. I wish it would happen much more frequently in real life as well.

On the flip side, I’ve developed a list of things that annoy me – and this is where the debate generally resides. These include:

Lying to me: Nothing makes me angrier than when a story sets up the parameters of its world and then breaks them for no apparent reason. A great example of this is the truly woeful 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives. At the end of the film, we find out that the wives aren’t robots after all but ordinary people who have had a chip implanted in their brains. OK, if that’s so, why don’t they burn like people do? Why do they continue making dinner oblivious to being knifed in the stomach? How can one character use his wife as a frickin’ ATM?

Cop outs: This is largely the category for the just plain dumb. It signifies things that have to happen to make the story work regardless of how they defy common sense. For example, … well, pretty much all of Independence Day.

It is also the category in which we are asked to ignore the consequences of the characters’ actions just because they’re the good guys. Steven Seagal pretty much sums this one up in On Deadly Ground. In order to protect the local Inuit population and Alaskan wilderness from a perfectly legal oil drilling operation, Seagal murders dozens of innocent workers. Why isn’t he arrested?

The next two categories are solely related to films although author Matthew Reilly makes a good case for inclusion in at least one of them.

Remakes: This category has some kind of split-personality syndrome. Remakes can be good if the production team has something to say. I’m dead keen on seeing The Taking of Pelham 123 to see what this version does with the story that’s different to either the original 1974 film or the 1998 telemovie. Unfortunately, almost all remakes, such as Starksy and Hutch, are parodies of the original for no other purpose than to convince the consumerist audience that anything more than 20 minutes old cannot have value.

Explosions: Any film which substitutes explosions for worthwhile characters, explosions for story development, explosions for logic, etc. Yes, Michael Bay. I’m looking at you.

I refuse to accept any argument which starts “it’s only a movie…” or “it’s only a book …” While I am overjoyed to debate the merits or otherwise of my position in general or my opinion of any particular work, I will punch in the face anyone who tries to convince me that a pre-requisite to enjoying a piece of modern cultural production is “switching my brain off at the door.”  Pretend to be stupid? Why the hell would I want to do that?

First, I liked the film. I liked it very much and expect to see great things from this director. Second, it has only gathered such marvellous reviews because all the other current offerings, especially any other recent sci-fi, are sooooo bad. The vast fields of crap to which we (particularly sci-fi) fans have become accustomed to putting up with means that anything will be praised highly and much more than it would otherwise deserve simply by being not crap.

On to the review:

District 9 is two movies in one. The first half is done in documentary style looking at how the aliens interned in the camp outside Johannesburg (did someone say Soweto?) are treated by the government bureaucracy charged with their welfare. The second is a very standard action-adventure films seeking to defeat the corporate conspiracy, blah, blah, blah, seen it all before. Only one of these films is worth watching.

Using aliens to examine issues of (paternalistic) racism, the white man’s burden and post-colonial politics is nothing new and in many ways this film is nothing more than an update Alien Nation for the new generation. The documentary style and the enthusiasm with which the bureaucrats go about their duties in the alien camp make you cringe in your seat. There is simply no way to avoid the comparison between the humans’ treatment of the aliens and current politics, whether it be the black townships in South Africa (the obvious parallel), various situations in the Middle East  or recent Australian government initatives in the Northern Territory. The fact that it’s aliens rather than people makes it a little more palatable and allows for the polemic to be delivered with so much more force.

This first part of the film is really very well done. The cinematography is beautiful. The director has a good eye for detail and is quite skilful at selecting shots to best capture the scene. The actors create for their characters an uncomfortable mix of trepidation and “for the greater good” which is quite infectious.

Then the film nosedives into the mire and morphs itself into nothing more than a bog-standard break-into-the-secure-lab-and-steal-the-McGuffin story which makes irrelevant all the good work of the first half either by drowning it in brass shell casings or by, at the end, showing that no one actually had to struggle for anything during the film as the answer was there all along. Yes, I’m looking at you, sparkly tractor beam.

It’s only the lead actor’s ability which makes the second half watchable. Yet even he cannot make you feel anything for his character in the action-adventure second half. After the documentary style of the first half of the film distances the audience from the characters in order to concentrate on what they do and why they do it, it is impossible to then want the audience to feel any kind of connection with a man who wants to take an alien’s kid away as punishment for not signing a bureacratic form. That the kid in question in the second half turns into nothing more than the main character’s monkey sidekick shows just how far the film has fallen from the moral high ground.

All-in-all, a well-crafted and entertaining film that disappointed only because I could see the gem shining at its heart regardless of all the shit the production tried to pile on top of it.