Oh dear, oh dear. I have twice this week been asked (at my gym and another weekly activity I participate in) to keep my tea bag labels/tags for a research project which will, upon receipt of certain (undefined) numbers of tea bag tags, donate wheelchairs to people who need them.
Is it because I am a slightly bitter cynic that I don’t believe this? Would a slightly bitter cynic actually keep four tags before deciding to put on her research hat?
It struck a chord with me, because during the research for my book on stamps, Blue Mauritius, I came across similar stories dating back to the nineteenth century, which promised to build a hospital/ward for sick children if the [insert your local hospital here] could get a million stamps (or variations of this theme). Just search the wonderful Trove database of digitised Australian newspapers on million stamps hospital and you’ll see ample evidence of this, back to at least the 1890s.
This current tea bag thing sounds similar. Sure enough, a Google search on tea bag label tag wheelchair turns up a scan in Google News from the Connecticut Sunday Herald, dated 15 October 1972, ‘Tea Bag Mystery’, reading:
Can’t get any confirmation on those reports concerning a drive to collect tea bag tags for wheelchairs. Readers tell us many in town collecting the tags with the understanding it will help the handicapped. Rehabilitation Center knows nothing about it nor do the local hospitals. Sounds like the old cigarette package drive that fooled so many people a few years back.
So that’s almost forty years ago, referring to another even older scam, with antecedents pre-1900.
The only other thing of note I found was a comment on an article about raising funds for wheelchairs through Rotary, dated 15 May 2011, asking ‘Our Croquet Club is collecting tea bag labels for the purpose of buying wheelchairs, how does this work, where do the labels go, and how many are needed to buy a chair. Our contact says they are collect at Dandenong hospital, more info please.’ It seems a few other people/groups have collected tea bag tags over the years, but right now there is nothing concrete on the web to verify this collecting drive in Melbourne, Australia.
A song performed and filmed at the National Folk Festival, Canberra, April 2010. My boss, Gavan McCarthy, plays the double bass in it, and sent the link around at work. It moved me, ergo, I share.
You can read more about Fanny Cochrane Smith here and listen to her singing, recorded in 1903 here – “the first and last recordings of Tasmanian Aboriginal songs and language”.
Dr Phillip Law died yesterday, at the age of 97, in Melbourne. I had known him since 1999, when I first started working on the arrangement and description of his records at his home in Canterbury. I should write more about this, but right now I’d just like to remember him.
When he moved from Canterbury to Balwyn Manor, we kept in touch, and a few times we went out together for morning tea – we both absolutely loved the passionfruit kisses (sponge, real cream and passionfruit icing) at the cafe close by.
I went to visit him regarding further work on his papers in March 2008 and took Iris, my then 11 month old daughter. She was in to everything of course, knocking over wine bottles and curious about it all. I thought that perhaps Dr Law, not having had children of his own, might find her annoying. But he didn’t. He thought she was wonderful and loved her curiousity. He held her for this photograph, and said it had been the first time he’d held a baby in a very long time, and I know it gave us all pleasure. If she grows up to be half as curious as Phillip Law, she’ll be lucky, like him.
My photographs of the Berlin Wall, taken in 1989, are amongst the most regularly viewed in my Flickr photostream. Understandable in the lead up to the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall on 9 November this year.
Some of them are mine and a few are a fellow traveller’s, collected by me at the time of my visit (and later) in January 1989. Walking some of the perimeter of the Wall, looking at that stark sign, ‘Sie verlassen jetzt West-Berlin’, was sobering and I wanted to remember it from all angles.
I wrote about it in my travel diary. All year I’ve been meaning to go back and revisit those memories, which I was sure would be fresh, vivid, insightful – but that is not quite the case. I am as happy for my twenty year’s younger self to stay buried between those pages as Harry Potter would have been for the owner of Tom Riddle’s diary to do the same. My observations are indeed very much of the moment and seem, to me now, shallow – real, true, but shallow. Perhaps that was the value of committing them to paper – instant thoughts without the value of reflection, time bound in context (fleeting, youthful, passing through).
The strongest memory wasn’t committed to paper. My friend and I spent a day in East Berlin, passing through Checkpoint Charlie first thing in the morning, converting the requisite amount of Deutsch Marks into the East German currency. We went to one of the museums, walked around and generally marvelled at the difference a wall can make, wondered what we could buy with the money the East Germans so desperately wanted us to spend. The answer to that was books – my friend and I were both students of German at Melbourne University.
We found a book shop. There was a queue to get in – the number inside at any one time was strictly regulated. We stood in the queue with the locals and I, in English, unquietly, said to my friend how ridiculous I found it. The East German man in front turned to me solemnly, “We think so too”.
It was humbling. That’s what I remember.
Berlin Wall on Flickr
I uploaded my scanned images of the Berlin Wall to Flickr more than three years ago. My tags included “Berlin Wall”, Berlin, “Berliner Mauer”, mauer, “1988-89 trip”, Germany, scanned, and have ensured that my images are found, shared and appreciated.
