It would be easy to leap to conclusions about what's going on in our black and white picture of an important-looking, suit-wearing European man in a kind of sedan chair. On this day in the early 1940s he is being carried by some heavily panting working-class locals down and along a precipitous stairway and pathway in China's wartime capital city Chungking.
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We assume, don't we, that he thinks he's too important to have to walk anywhere, and so is requiring the oppressed locals to move him from place to place. The picture is from a current Australian National University exhibition China & ANU – diplomats, adventurers, scholars.
But, readers, it's unworthy of you to have leapt to that unkind conclusion. You will feel a pang of shame when we tell you that this very important man, Sir FredericEggleston, from 1941-1945 our nation's first Minister to China, is suffering from gout and so perhaps cannot get about steep parts of Chungking under his own steam even if wants to. The Australian Legation premises were high on a hill. Those of you who have (with this columnist) first-hand experience of this affliction will wince even to see the g-word in print, and will think that Sir Frederic even in his chair is probably already in considerable pain.
"This chair was an extraordinary contrivance," he confided to his personal diary, recalling journeys like the one the picture is of.
"It was a basketware chair between two long bamboo poles but it was fixed – there was no play for the chair and when we went uphill I was leaning back almost parallel to the ground."
The exhibition is at the splendid new Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) Building. Readers, have you been to the ANU lately? It is more and more like a glittering little city, a prosperous metropolis in its own right, here within the otherwise rather average city of Canberra.
Dr Merrilyn Fitzpatrick, manager of the centre, advises that next weekend will be a special, open weekend for this ANU exhibition. There will be guided tours.
She explains: "The exhibition concentrates on the prehistory and early years of Chinese Studies at ANU. Former Australian diplomats to the Republic of China [like Eggleston] were crucial both in the creation of the new university and in emphasising the importance of China for Australia's future. And we think too that there are lots of ANU alumni out there who would find the exhibition fascinating".
Not that, in spite of what we've said above, the popular Eggleston (scholarly, accomplished, very well versed in Chinese culture and popular with locals and fellow diplomats) didn't routinely use a sedan chair in Chungking. He did. Diplomats were the only people allowed to use them, it wasn't an easy city to get around and the legation's one car wasn't always available because when it broke down spare parts had to be sought from far away India. But a reporter visiting Eggleston in 1944 reported that he, Eggleston, had been so "moved by the heavy panting" of the regulation three men carrying him in his chair that the kindly Australian had sought and obtained "a permit to use a fourth coolie".
However you are transported there, the CIW Building is at 181 Fellows Lane, ANU. Details of the exhibition are at http://ciw.anu.edu.au/events/gallery/anu_and_china/
There's nothing grisly in the China & ANU – diplomats, adventurers, scholars exhibition, which is more than can be said for this column. Here, as loyal readers know, we run an occasional series of readers' pictures of local wildlife engaging in sex and violence (usually the violence is to do with hunting).
Today's superb snap is by John Bundock. He was haunting the ornithological hot-spot of the Jerrabomberra Wetlands where he saw a Little Pied Cormorant devouring (having a little toy with it first) a Redfin Perch.
"It's nice to see a native bird removing an introduced species," he rejoices.
If we have been a bit slow to resume our R-rated occasional sex and violence series it's because some pictures we see are just too horrific, even for us. We are finding ourselves (it is rather fun and we get a sense of how enjoyable it must have been to be able to ban books like Lady Chatterley's Lover) engaging in acts of censorship.
The chat page of the Canberra Ornithologists Group recently ran (with a warning of what was to come if the faint-hearted wanted to avoid it) brilliantly-taken but nightmarish pictures of a Wedge-tailed Eagle carrying off a kangaroo joey. But we cannot give "Watch out! Look away for a moment!" warnings here, so be cautious.
Now local and international wasp expert Dr Philip Spradbery sends us, in an email, some ghastly (but educational) photographs.
"As I compile my Annual Report on the Insects of Canberra for 2015, I came across these photos of a dead cockatoo being quietly consumed by foraging European wasps. The wasps are well known scavengers and recycle corpses of everything from roadkill kangaroos to birds slaughtered by their kind, for this cockatoo was attacked by a Currawong at Yarralumla Primary School. Probably too gruesome for your Gang-gang column."
Yes, we think so, and so have banned it from this column so as to protect the very fabric of our society, (while wondering in our hearts if pictures of European wasps feasting on carrion could do the nation more moral damage than that done by TV news footage of Bronwyn Bishop defending her feasting on taxpayers' money).
