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Here I am in Melbourne, gaily escorting around my mother and sister. Since we don't share many interests, this process has been challenging, but we're getting there. If my mother could only shut up with her bloody stupid racist remarks - you know, that all the woes of NZ (fuck all, if you ask me) are all due to the Maaaaries. She should fucking live here in Oz if she doesn't want to be bothered by uppity natives (so long as she stays in the nicely homogonised areas, like, say, Canberra).
'Scuse my rant, my patience is wearing thin.
But we had an interesting time visiting the old Melbourne Gaol, where Ned Kelly was executed. Interesting that even so early on in the piece, the scaffolding was (and indeed, still is) indoors. They'd certainly got hanging down to a fine art by that stage. No cumbersome knots, a brass loop to thread the rope through to make a noose, and leather sheathing on the rope near the action end, to facilitate it slipping through the loop, and so as not to bruise the neck of the condemned. Bizarre, that.
There were death masks of some of the more notable prisoners. Fascinating. And some momentos relating to some of the prisoners. One guy, who had apparently murdered several people, wrote a final letter to his parents in the most impeccable copperplate writing. Completely legible and perfectly spelled, each immaculately horizonal line as if it had been aligned on a ruler. Amazing.
Women had been housed there as well, the majority of them for prostitution, baby-farming (not the baby-farming per se, but the hastened deaths of babies so farmed) and illegal abortions. One woman had been imprisoned for the latter dozens of times, but there was a huge reluctance to actually try her for murder, so she kept being released. Thank god we're not in those days still.
They didn't show the instruments used to carry out abortions in that era, but they are utterly vile (as were many of the ones used by surgeons for childbirth) -- I cannot contemplate the desperation that women must have had to resort to those procedures then, with not just the risk of infection to be borne, but also the horror of the procedure itself. Which is, of course, why there was such a thing as baby-farming, for all those women who could not face the operation, but who could not be a parent to a child. What it must have been like, to give up your child to such a woman as those? There were murderous and neglectful baby-farmers everywhere in the 19th Century - there were significant baby-farmer murder cases during those times here, the US, NZ and England. So, for all those people who bitch about social welfare in this day and age, there's your alternative.
All in all, it was a sobering and fascinating visit. While our modern era isn't perfect, the idea of being a woman in any other era frankly horrifies me.
One minor frustration was ascertaining what internet access is available here. I'm staying in a hotel on the edge of the CBD in Melbourne (the corner of Spencer and La Trobe Streets). I asked the reception here whether there was any access available and they said no. So I twiddled my thumbs the last couple of days before actually plugging in my wireless card on the off chance. Lo and behold, I got Telstra 802.11G at 11Mbps, with a signal strength of 54%. After a bit of fumbling about trying to locate a sign-on page, and then opening up Internet Exploder (pain in the butt, since my default browser is Firefox. Lucky I tried IE before giving up, I couldn't even get to the Telstra site via FF), I was promptly directed to their payment page, and, upon plonking $14 on my Visa, here I am for an hour.
Thanks so much for the info, hotel reception!
'Scuse my rant, my patience is wearing thin.
But we had an interesting time visiting the old Melbourne Gaol, where Ned Kelly was executed. Interesting that even so early on in the piece, the scaffolding was (and indeed, still is) indoors. They'd certainly got hanging down to a fine art by that stage. No cumbersome knots, a brass loop to thread the rope through to make a noose, and leather sheathing on the rope near the action end, to facilitate it slipping through the loop, and so as not to bruise the neck of the condemned. Bizarre, that.
There were death masks of some of the more notable prisoners. Fascinating. And some momentos relating to some of the prisoners. One guy, who had apparently murdered several people, wrote a final letter to his parents in the most impeccable copperplate writing. Completely legible and perfectly spelled, each immaculately horizonal line as if it had been aligned on a ruler. Amazing.
Women had been housed there as well, the majority of them for prostitution, baby-farming (not the baby-farming per se, but the hastened deaths of babies so farmed) and illegal abortions. One woman had been imprisoned for the latter dozens of times, but there was a huge reluctance to actually try her for murder, so she kept being released. Thank god we're not in those days still.
They didn't show the instruments used to carry out abortions in that era, but they are utterly vile (as were many of the ones used by surgeons for childbirth) -- I cannot contemplate the desperation that women must have had to resort to those procedures then, with not just the risk of infection to be borne, but also the horror of the procedure itself. Which is, of course, why there was such a thing as baby-farming, for all those women who could not face the operation, but who could not be a parent to a child. What it must have been like, to give up your child to such a woman as those? There were murderous and neglectful baby-farmers everywhere in the 19th Century - there were significant baby-farmer murder cases during those times here, the US, NZ and England. So, for all those people who bitch about social welfare in this day and age, there's your alternative.
All in all, it was a sobering and fascinating visit. While our modern era isn't perfect, the idea of being a woman in any other era frankly horrifies me.
One minor frustration was ascertaining what internet access is available here. I'm staying in a hotel on the edge of the CBD in Melbourne (the corner of Spencer and La Trobe Streets). I asked the reception here whether there was any access available and they said no. So I twiddled my thumbs the last couple of days before actually plugging in my wireless card on the off chance. Lo and behold, I got Telstra 802.11G at 11Mbps, with a signal strength of 54%. After a bit of fumbling about trying to locate a sign-on page, and then opening up Internet Exploder (pain in the butt, since my default browser is Firefox. Lucky I tried IE before giving up, I couldn't even get to the Telstra site via FF), I was promptly directed to their payment page, and, upon plonking $14 on my Visa, here I am for an hour.
Thanks so much for the info, hotel reception!