Castles in the air and on the ground
Alison Lloyd's newsletter #30
If you’re stuck in the everyday just now, here’s a newsletter on escaping into other realms. Scroll down for
more gorgeous Gilded Age Melbourne
chocolate for the brain
a poem about playing in the bush (did you do that as a kid?)
First — a quick bit of writing news! Remember the short story ‘Starbound’, which I sent out in the Scroll last Christmas? I made a few changes, and the story won an honourable mention in the ‘inspirational’ section of the Writer’s Digest competition. This is a big US comp that got thousands of entries, from 47 countries, so I am chuffed :)
You can read or listen to ‘Starbound’ here if you missed out earlier.
An Englishman’s Home is His Castle
In July’s Scroll, I took you into the gilded interior of a Victorian bank. This month, we knock on the door of a grand mansion. ‘Earlsbrae’ was also built in the late Victorian boom, for a brewer with the rollicking name of Coiler McCracken. The cost was as monumental as its pillars, at £11,000.
For Australian football fans, Coiler was the second captain of Essendon, in 1878. (And this is all the acknowledgement you’ll find here that it’s finals season down-under.
As a later owner of Earlsbrae said,
‘Although I think innocent games a great blessing to most people as a recreation if used in reason, in my case I have thought it a waste of time and seemed to have other work to do.’1
Hear, hear. Let this newsletter be an antidote to sports-saturated media.)
Above are a few snapshots of elegant Earlsbrae. The three leadlight windows in the middle screened off a servants passageway. They’re Victorian illustrations — of Chaucer’s medieval translation — of Homer’s Odyssey. A lot of cultural layers! I guess modern historians might say the colonial elite was using European classics to boost their status and thereby legitimise their appropriation of indigenous land. Yes, OK. Personally I think it’s a lovely space. I’m in sympathy with the decorators’ intention to fill it with the richness of myth.
A World of Whimsy
The fairy tale jewelled windows are probably one of the features that appealed to EW Cole, who bought the mansion in 1911. (After the McCrackens fell foul of the 1890s depression. Cole paid only £6000, barely more than half its original cost.) Cole made his money from his famous Book Arcade, visited by the likes of Mark Twain. Cole was a tad eccentric and very shy — so shy he advertised in the paper to find a wife. Successfully.
She must be a spinster of 35 or 36 years of age. Good tempered, intelligent, honest, truthful, sober, chaste, cleanly, neat but not extravagantly or absurdly dressy; industrious, frugal, moderately educated and a lover of home.
EW Cole’s matrimonial ad, 1875.
More practical than romantic. But Cole was also a man of imagination, and marketing flair. By all accounts the Arcade he created was a wondrous place. It featured a fernery, an aviary, a wall of funny mirrors, a live band, mechanical toys and real monkeys. And a million books. Including Cole’s Funny Picture Books, or ‘Family Amuser and Instructor’, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies. A ‘best of’ version is still in print.
His ‘Alliterative Alphabet’ is one long ad for the shop:
Zenobian Zoziman, the Zonave Zemindaress of Zululand, was no Zany, but rode on a Zanzibar Zebra, resided in a Zig-Zag Zenana, and Zealously studied Zanyism, Zealotism, Zoology, Zoonomy, Zoophytology, Zoolatry, Zymology, Zincography
And many other ’isms, ’ologies, ’olatries, ’ographies etc, out of the works she bought at Cole’s Book Arcade.
Cole’s Funny Picture Book #1, ‘Alliterative Alphabet’ p20, 1882 edition.
Cole’s Melbourne CBD space is now occupied by a major department store, selling all the usual consumer lines. For those who know Melbourne, it’s Myers on Bourke Street. *SIGH*. I’d rather have the original arcade. Earlsbrae is now Lowther Hall, a private girls school. Many thanks to the students who escorted us on the tour, and to staff member Lauren McKendry for her assistance.
Castles in the Air
While we’re being playful, guess what’s the most popular equipment in a playground? Apparently, not the swings, the seesaw or the slide.2 The most played on ‘equipment’, if it’s provided, is a fallen tree trunk. The tree doesn’t do anything, but it can become anything — a spaceship, a castle, a bridge to anywhere.
It seems to me that imagination is chocolate for the brain. It’s stimulating and even addictive. We want to go back for more. We’ve got this inbuilt drive to transform things, even if it’s just in our heads. From what is, to something more. Our imaginations are a bit like the magic bag of Hermione Granger’s that expands on the inside to fit all kinds of things. I hope you don’t mind me going on here . This seems to me like a conversation worth having.
I rediscovered a poem of mine recently that’s right on topic — a memory of how playing felt as a kid. (For US/European readers, ‘the bush’ is the Australian word for forest.)
Bush Arch
Unbeknown to our mums
The bush behind our backyards
Has a space-warp
— a hole in the continuum —
Where a current of late sun
Travels between an arc of trees;
We duck the branches
(Schoolwork, siblings, mums’ instructions)
And cross to other worlds;
Wading in molten grass
We breast a magic sea
Of rippled gold, surging over
The force-field of imagination.
(Joanne R — that one’s for you.)
I think, somehow, inside ourselves, via imagination, we see the unseen. That is wonderful and it matters. It feels like something spiritual, reaching beyond ourselves for castles in the air.
If you’d rather read fiction than philosophising, hold out for next month! I have a new short story coming. I look forward to sharing it. Wishing you wondrous, transportative thoughts until then. I’d love to hear if this newsletter has stirred anything in you.
EW Cole, Hobbies, 1902, p29. Cited on ewcole.com
According to studies mentioned on our local radio. Sorry I can’t authenticate the scientific source.