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.

Flickr is the perfect vehicle for resurrecting and sharing history from the depths of visual memory and old boxes of slides and photographs. The Flickrverse is currently being encouraged to share memories (via text and images) in the group Experience History: Berlin 1961-1989. See also Das geteilte Berlin 1945-1990.

Several of my Berlin Wall images have been added to galleries curated by other Flickr users, a new concept in Flickr which I haven’t yet explored, but should: Berlin Wall in Color, The Berlin Wall / Die Berliner Mauer, and the intriguing Smoke Screens & Mirrors.

What constitutes a good memento of travel?

Kate Holden recently reflected on this in The Age (A2, 20 October 2007, p.3), noting that you can buy Vegemite and Tim Tams in London (so no point bearing these as gifts) and you can get most things in Australia, so what then is worth bringing home as a souvenir?

Photographs and vintage postcards she concludes. On her recent travels she happened upon ‘a cache of correspondence’ at a market in Rome, among a lot of vintage postcards. This series, written on standard issue postal stationery, represented a long correspondence in the life of an early twentieth century Italian family. What a find! Archivists and historians will immediately appreciate the significance.

And what did she do?

With regret, I chose five. Signore Mazza, I am very sorry to have broken up your correspondence. Perhaps I was wrong – but I also didn’t want to be selfish and take them all. The five are enough. Someone else will find the rest one day and never know what’s missing.

Aaaghh! The written life of everyday people is so much harder to find than that of the well-to-do. The archives of the everyday do not as commonly end up in archival and manuscript collections. They may be tossed out with the inevitable moves and clean outs that follow death. In this case, someone has realised the value to philatelists and postcard collectors and sold the lot to a dealer.

Holden continues, ‘I have mixed feelings about removing these photos and cards from their native lands – are they trophies or detritus, or have I saved them?’ Good question. If she hadn’t broken up the collection someone else would have, but perhaps not. Perhaps somebody might have bought the whole collection and offered it to a public collection in Italy where it would gain immeasurably in significance in its local context. Removed from their context and fractured like this they have become mere trophies. They haven’t been saved. That she cherishes them isn’t enough.

However, wince as I might about this story, I’m of a mind to agree with her about the value of the vintage postcard. Wandering the aisles of the Paris stamp bourse in 2003, I hunted for old postcards of Bordeaux, where I’d recently been researching for Blue Mauritius. I found several in pristine condition, never postally used. Propped up on my desk at home in Australia, they helped me to write (I hope) in a more evocative way about Bordeaux’s past.

I had no qualms (price paid excepted) in removing these from their homeland, because they had, almost a hundred years later, fulfilled their original purpose.

The only real writing I’ve managed all year is this article on the National Library of Australia’s Mauritius Collection, for the monthly journal National Library of Australia News. It’s wonderful to see the Library’s beautiful painting of a dodo gracing the July issue’s cover, highlighting the rich holdings relating to Mauritius in their collection. I used the collection during research for Blue Mauritius.

Download a pdf of the article from the Library’s website here. A slightly extended version, fully footnoted and with an appendix documenting all the rare book holdings in the Collection will appear later this year in the Journal of Mauritian Studies. The article begins:

‘Mauritius is but a name to most people in England unless they collect stamps’. Thus begins a treatise on colonial cooking published in the then British colony in 1954. This book, in ‘English and in French with a glossary in Hindustani’, is one of some 4500 items that make up the National Library of Australia’s Mauritius Collection – an outstanding resource revealing the Indian Ocean island to be much more than the sum of the philatelic, tropical and ornithological parts on which its fame rests.

I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing this. I must find the time to get writing again…