Another update on my Brisbane antics...

[highlyeccentric]

Yesterday I wandered in circles around Brisbane trying to find either breakfast or the Anglican cathedral. I had two doughnuts for breakfast and did half an hour's solid thesis work, and then eventually found St John's. My full and complete account of the awesomeness of St John's can be found here. It is a LOVELY building. Also, it was determined that I may not believe in God anymore but I do believe in cathedrals. Bloody religious architecture makin' me cry.

Having done that I wandered back to the river- checking out many other pretty churches along the way, including All Saints Anglican, the oldest church in Brisbane, and two very pretty Uniting Churches (St Andrew's looked like it had once been the Methodist cathedral, but don't quote me on that), and a cute whitewashed Presby. church.

Over the other side of the river I tried to go to the Southbank Markets but got kind of lost and then ran out of time. I think I was only about five minutes away when I gave up, but I had a nice lunch in a Greek taverna at the end of the Southbank Parklands, which looked out over the swimming pools and was perfectly lovely. And then I managed to catch a train back to Roma St, and a train to the airport with plenty of time, only to find that my plane was delayed by two and a bit hours due to half the air traffic controllers in Sydney calling in sick. Jetstar had sent me a text saying 'you don't have to check in until 4.30' but I didn't *get* the text because I had my phone off to conserve battery power. So I bought a book called 'I, Nigel Dorking', which is about Sir Nigel the Notorious, an eleven year old with an over-active vocabulary, a tin foil suit of armour, and no friends at all.

Comments

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

I think this is why my brother wants me to be an air traffic controller :P

The Nigel Dorking book - is that at all like the Adrian Mole books, by any chance?

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

Hey, we need 'em!

Er, dunno, haven't read Adrian Mole?

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I heard some small airports are being closed down because of the lack of ATCs. They make good money too.

And you haven't read the Adrian Mole books??? 0_0
Fair enough I suppose - they're a bit before your time (I was reading them when I was a teenager). They're worth a read though, IMO. (Interesting, I see his name in the original radio play iteration was Nigel Mole).

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

There are giant black holes across australian airspace for lack of ATCs...

No, I haven't- I saw them a few times in the library and then when I wanted them they were gone.

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

They're worth the read, I reckon. Probably a bit dated now but still funny (and cringe-inducing - Adrian Mole is not an endearing character).

Maybe I should consider a change of career after all.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

The problem is, whoever it is that trains ATCs swears they have a full complement of ATCs in training now, but it takes two years to have an ATC ready for duty. Why they didn't see the problem coming two years AGO, I don't know. And why they don't cast their employment net wider and contract foreign ATCs for the long or short term. Offer relocation bonuses and help with finding housing or somesuch; I doubt the current ATCs are going to complain if it means they can take sick leave without buggering up the biggest airport in the country.

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

I dunno, presumably they'd have to train up any foreign ATCs to get them up to speed with the Australian airspace, but I doubt that would take too long. Language isn't a problem since English is used for all ATC work. Meh. Silly of them not to have planned ahead, as you say.

[daiskmeliadorn.livejournal.com]

YOU HAVEN'T READ ADRIAN MOLE??!!!

its not at all what its cracked up to be, but for some reason this shocks me. maybe because i never expect to have read anything that someone like you hasn't.

[tarimanveri.livejournal.com]

I may not believe in God anymore but I do believe in cathedrals.

I think this is my religion too.

Anyway, I highly enjoyed your comparative cathedral picspam in your blog post. I love it when people get their medievalism right... yay.

Edit: By "getting their medievalism right" I mean "making convincing replicas of medieval stuff," with specific reference to St. John's, of course.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

If there are two of us, it's a legitimate belief system!

I didn't realise I knew so much about gothic architecture, until I was wandering around thinking that the windows were wrong and the columns were interesting and the verticality was striking!

I'm glad you liked it :D

Aha, I did wonder what you meant. I thought you might have been plagued by poor commentary on cathedrals, or something :P.
I'm not sure that they DID get it right... see my rant about the windows! And the pink and grey facade! But it's less 'medievalism' than a final development in gothic/neo-gothic architecture and so can be appreciated both in historical context and modern :D (apparently each type of stone came from a different place in Australia- I can't remember anything but that the inside sandstone is from Pyrmont, a couple of suburbs over from my university).

[tarimanveri.livejournal.com]

Wow, it never occurred to me to think about modern versions of medieval architecture as a continuation rather than a knock-off. It makes sense, though - less "we must reproduce the middle ages" than "we're in a new part of the world but this is what a church looks like, so this is what we'll build." When was your cathedral built?

There are definitely a couple of nineteenth-century medieval-fantasy-romanesque churches in Boston that I think probably say pretty interesting things about the people who built them and what they thought about the middle ages.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the neo-gothic DOES contain a lot of wishful medievalism. But, speaking as a happy student of the most neo-gothic of Australian universities, I'm not sure what sparked European neo-gothic, but here it has been about situation our foundations in the context of the very best of English tradition, and yet making it distinctly Australian. Consider the motto and logo of the University of Sydney (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/62/University_of_Sydney.svg/200px-University_of_Sydney.svg.png). Or our clock tower (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Usyd_Clock_Tower.jpg/250px-Usyd_Clock_Tower.jpg). The second gargoyle from the right, at the top there, is a kangaroo. Scattered around the uni's oldest buildings there are kookaburras, wombats and platypi as gargoyles. We have liked to think, since the late 1800s, that we're part of the Great Intellectual Tradition, and the desire to distinguish ourselves as uniquely Australian varies with time and situation.

As far as St John's goes, there's that sort of motivation at work, but the relationships between past and future run deeper and more complicated in religious foundations. (St Johns was designed around 1895 and still isn't quite finished, btw.) The Anglican church believes in the apostolic succession, so all the business with St Augustine and St Alban and St Oswald and St Patrick and so on is about asserting Australia's connection with the English church and through it with the Christian tradition. Same with the cathedral design, I guess- the artworks in the windows are modern designs placed into a traditional setting. It... well, it's only poor theology which blindly imitates the past. Good religion and good religious architecture grounds itself in the past and creates the best for the future. Thus the modernised pictures in the Lady Chapel, I assume.

[tarimanveri.livejournal.com]

Again, this is very interesting. I think you get some of the same in Canada - the parliament buildings in Ottawa, I think have the same kind of mixture of neo-Gothic tradition and Canadian symbolism (beavers! and moose...). I suppose there are some Canadian universities (colleges at the University of Toronto, maybe McGill) that do the same, but you don't get so much of that in western Canada, where most universities were founded in the twentieth century (like Simon Fraser, for instance, which doubles as New Caprica and various other places on sci-fi shows). I know the provincial capital of British Columbia, Victoria, is pretty serious about its British roots, but I haven't really visited it since I was about five so I have no details.

As far as I can tell, in the US, there's as much a tendency to symbolically separate public architecture from English tradition as to emulate it, and understandably so. Hence, I suppose, all the neo-Classical architecture. And of course Massachusetts was founded by non-Anglicans, so there are elements of very different traditions. I suppose that makes those two super-ornate-medieval-fantasy Anglican churches even more interesting in context... they were designed by British architects, too.

[kishnevi.livejournal.com]

somehow, it doesn't seem right to call that a clock tower. Tower with clock attached seems much more appropriate.
Here in the States, there's a whole set of traditions for church building Polish/Lithuanian Catholic parishes in the major Northern cities built huge churches in neomedieval style. The Washington National Cathedral (Episcopal/Anglican) in DC was completed in the early 1990s--Helen Keller and Woodrow Wilson are buried there, and Martin Luther King gave his last Sunday sermon there, and is home bas both for the Bishop of Washington and the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church; the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, which is neoByzantine, and the largest Catholic church in the country (but not a cathedral and not attached to anything monastic or parish), and in New York City there is the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which apparently will be finished (at least one tower remains incomplete) and claims to be the largest Anglican church and fourth largest church in the world, and sounds like it was built in a true hodge podge of medieval styles, plus of course St. Patrick's, the Catholic cathedral, and most other cathedrals built before WWII are also medievalist in look. The Catholic cathedral in Boston is definitely of that ilk.
But if St. John the Divine ever starts being worked on again, it may end up being the "last cathedral".
And then of course there's a big synagogue in Boston which was built in a sort of Byzantine-Romanesque design. We Jews can get our medieval down when we want to.

[ineptshieldmaid.livejournal.com]

There are definitely a couple of nineteenth-century medieval-fantasy-romanesque churches in Boston that I think probably say pretty interesting things about the people who built them and what they thought about the middle ages.

I dunno, I think said churches probably say a lot of interesting things about what the builders think about the PRESENT. What we call 'popular medievalism' (and academic medievalism, for that matter, but in slightly different ways) has a lot to tell us about the way people relate to their present. It can be escapist, it can be celebratory, it can be about declaring yourself and your time to be as good as the past. It can be all of these things mixed up together.

[ineptshieldmaid.livejournal.com]

ed- oh, and that second comment (and this one) is me. *Highly.

[phrasemuffin.livejournal.com]

Oooh! Oooooooh! Pick me, pick me! I want to be Nigel's friend! Can I please?

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

SURE!