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.

Blue Mauritius was launched in Mauritius during my recent visit, and it was a lot of fun. The launch was organised by and held at the Blue Penny Museum in Port Louis (the capital city of Mauritius) on Friday 20 October – a lot of hard work to get it done so quickly by Alain Huron and his staff, our main worry being that the books would not arrive in time from England, but they did!

A press conference was held in the morning. Nerve wracking but perfectly fine. There have subsequently been articles in Le Mauricien, L’express and Le Matinal. It was a good article (with the right emphasis), and if you can read French you might enjoy it. Over a cup of tea later I learnt that one of the journalists is on Flickr, so I told her about the meeting I had organised and she did come – but we passed like ships in the night and didn’t find each other! Ah well.

It was a curious launch in that if it had been held in Australia the audience would most likely have comprised my friends, family, colleagues and of course Mike. That was not the case. I had some of Mike’s family there (very pleased to see them – my sister-in-law Sunita looked outstanding in a white and gold sari) and other people known to me, but there were people I didn’t know, and was most pleased to meet, from the Mauritius Society of History, the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Mauritius, the Alliance Francaise, the Mauritius Post and so on. I was too busy chatting afterwards and signing a few copies of my book to enjoy the hospitality, but what I had of the food was very good!

I have put a copy of my speech online.