9 December 2024

Glenbrook Tunnel

Last year Victoria and I took a trip to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A reason for our trip was to view Arthur Streeton’s painting, Fire’s On, which depicts a scene from the building of the Glenbrook railway tunnel, not far from where we live. In it, a young man is carried on a stretcher out of the tunnel either injured or dead. He’s only a small figure in this large painting, achieved with a few deft brushstrokes. We were interested in the painting because I was reviewing Michael Duffy’s book about the Blue Mountains, Tall Stories, and Duffy devotes a chapter to the tunnel and Streeton’s painting. Here’s Victoria during our visit, in front of the painting holding Duffy’s book, and a detail from the painting showing the impressionistic representation of the young man being stretchered out of the tunnel:

The tunnel has been closed and barred from the public for many years. Huge metal gates prevent access to the tunnel. It was closed in 1913 due to several problems. The gradient of the tunnel was steep, it could only accommodate one train at a time because it was single track, its dampness caused trains to slip on the rails and it was poorly ventilated for steam trains. The railway line eventually bypassed the tunnel by running along the edge of Glenbrook Gorge.

After its closure it was used for growing mushrooms, and during World War II it was used for storing mustard gas in case of a Japanese chemical weapons attack.

But over the last couple of years the council has been renovating the tunnel and making access to it suitable for the public. There is bush either end of the tunnel and the plan is that the tunnel will be a part of a walking and cycling track.

Over this last weekend the tunnel was opened to the public, ahead of its permanent opening about eighteen months from now when all works are due for completion. Here are some photos we took outside and inside the tunnel yesterday:

The tunnel is approximately 660 metres in length. It has bends, but also a long straight section. We walked from the western end of the tunnel to the eastern end, took some photos in the area Streeton chose to paint, and then walked back through the tunnel again. Below is Streeton’s painting, as well as a photo I took from as close to the same vantage point as I could (Streeton appears to have been on on cliffs to the left and behind where I took the photo) After nearly 135 years, the rock cutting is recognisable from the painting when you are there, but the scene in my photograph looks very different to the denuded scene Streeton painted as works were in progress.

If you would like to read my review of Michael Duffy’s Tall Stories you can do so by clicking here. If you are interested in obtaining Michael Duffy’s book to read, it can be purchased from Michael Duffy’s website which you can visit by clicking here.

- bikerbuddy

4 December 2024

Books by Women

I’ve written in the past about representation on this website: about the number of reviews by authors of different nationalities, as well books we’ve reviewed written by women. Not that we represent the broader population of readers, nor can we extrapolate broader social indicators based on a bunch of books three people read. But it’s a small snapshot and I thought I’d talk briefly about it. Because, while we like to think we have broad interests, what we review on the website does represent our interests, nevertheless.

This morning Victoria sent me a link to one of those interminable best-of lists that appear on the net, where you can tick off books you’ve read and find yourself in some kind of ranking. In this case, the link was for ‘500 Great Books by Women’. If you want to check out the list, or even tick them off yourself, you can view the list by clicking here. It would be an interesting exercise for you to try if you have cause to wonder about biases on this website, or even your own. You can even question how valid the list is, if you want. It’s all just sandbox thinking. As to our own biases, here are some stats:

As of today, I have written 353 reviews for this website (not including projects). 121 of those reviews have been about books by female authors (34%).

Victoria has written 199 reviews. 92 are by female authors (46%).

Jenny has written 66 reviews. 24 are by female authors (36%). This last is an interesting statistic. Whenever I made comment about this earlier in the life of the Reading Project, Jenny was the only one of us with a majority of books reviewed written by female authors.

If we are in any way representative of a reading population, these are not good statistics for female writers. If you do a search on Google, asking for the breakdown of male and female readers, you’ll get different stats depending on the source, but the breakdown seems to be a 2:1 split between women and men. One could argue that Jenny and Victoria’s interests skew their reading material away from a more typical female reader – I can only guess – but words like ‘typical’ and ‘normal’ are rightly questioned. In the end, the numbers represent our interests and this website.

When I reviewed the 500 Great Books by Women, I discovered I had read only 20 from the list (4%). Two that I hadn’t read are on my to-read list: Middlemarch by George Eliot (for the Eliot project) and Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (for the Booker Project). I had a couple of other books on my shelves from the list, unread, but bought with good intentions.

Victoria had read 14 from the list (3%).

One question to raise about the list is its selection. I noted that there were a number of books by authors I had read, represented by books which would not usually be chosen from their oeuvre as representative of their work. For instance, the Australian writer, Miles Franklin: her most famous book, My Brilliant Career, was not on the list, but its lesser-known sequel, My Career Goes Bung, was. Another point is that many of the books would be fairly obscure for modern readers, and 500 books is a lot of books. I was rather sceptical of the individual ranked first on the survey results who claims to have read all 500 books!

Of course, another point to make about the list is that it is just click bait designed to deliver advertising. I’m happy to say I don’t remember any of the ads.

For those interested in what Victoria and I had read from the list of 500, here are our two lists, below:

My list (in the order they appear on the list of 500)

(Links are to reviews we have posted for these books)

• Aids and Illness as a Metaphor Susan Sontag
• The Awakening Kate Chopin
• Beloved Toni Morrison
• The Bone People Keri Holme
• Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbon
• The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey
• Emma Jane Austen
• Frankenstein Mary Shelley
• Hotel du Lac Anita Brookner
• Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë
• The Mists of Avalon Marion Zimmer Bradley
• Murder of the Orient Express Agatha Christie
• My Place Sally Morgan
• Possession A.S. Byatt
• Three Guineas Virginia Woolf
• Tirra Lirra by the River Jessica Anderson
• To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Wuthering Heights Emile Brontë
• The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Victoria’s List

• Circle of Friends by Maeve Binchy
• The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey
• Emma Jane Austen
• Frankenstein Mary Shelley
• Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë
• Little Women Louisa May Alcott
• Lives of Girls and Women Alice Munro
• Murder of the Orient Express Agatha Christie
• Possession A.S. Byatt
• The Potter’s Field Ellis Peters
• To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Wuthering Heights Emile Brontë
• The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Of course, if anyone else cares to make a comment on any of this we’d be interested: about women’s fiction in the marketplace, or even just how you went on the 500 list.

- bikerbuddy

2 December 2024

End of Year Resolution

As the year draws to a close, I’m aware there was much I had wanted to do this year and I am no where near my goals. There have been a lot of unexpected interruptions, and life in general has contributed to some delays. There have also been major changes to the website this year that have taken up a lot of my available time.

One goal I wanted to achieve – that was started far too long ago to keep on putting it off – is my reading of Homer’s Iliad. Despite my having started it at least as early as last year, I’m still only halfway through. I’ve decided I am going to finish it before the year is over. Given that it takes about a whole day to read, research, write and construct each of those pages, it is a tall order, especially since I am starting the month in the middle of a rather long book, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. But I feel I have more of a chance to finish it if I state it publicly. And if I don’t finish it, I’ll at least be a lot closer to completion.

As usual, I’ve bought some new books, even though I said I didn’t want to. Of course, they were hardbacks and of course, they were too special to ignore. I might write about those tomorrow or later in the week, depending on how my time is going.

- bikerbuddy

P.S. Of course, reality strikes. I’ve taken a look at the calendar today. With Christmas coming and the New Year, many of my days are already taken. I’ll definitely make progress on The Iliad this month. But finishing may have to wait until sometime in January.