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Which came first: pasta or noodles?
Plot spoiler. Its noodles. Lovers of Italy, doff your cap to China! … Well, at least that’s how I was going to start this article. That was before I started reading Jen Lin-Liu’s delightful book: On the Noodle Road. She’s not so sure the story is that simple. Like Marco Polo, she travels the Silk Road, but in reverse. She is on a 21st century quest to trace the journey of noodle from East to West. No one more determined could be imagined. And, her quest is personal. Travelling through cultures that straddled East and West, I figured, might reconcile what I’d felt were opposing forces in my life; maybe I’d find others…
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Effie Baker – Photographer of the Birth of a World Faith
What if photography had existed 2000 years ago and St Paul or St Peter had commissioned a woman to travel to Palestine to compile a photographic archive of all the sites associated with the birth of Christianity? What would our understanding of Jesus be like? In the 1930’s, a task very like this fell to a diminutive Australian woman: Effie Baker. Effie Baker was born in 1880. In her teenage years her aunt gave her a camera: a No 2A Folding Autographic Brownie. For Effie, as a student of the Ballarat East School of Arts, photography was an emerging art-form. An art which she practised together with other arts such…
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Oppression of Women: Gender Apartheid
Full equality of men and women has not been achieved anywhere in the world. What has been achieved has taken a century and a half. In some parts of the world, women’s rights are so comprehensively denied that comparisons with apartheid are inadequate to capture the depth of deprivation.
