Vandals

Sometime in the fifth century an Eastern Germanic tribe with origins probably from Scandinavia fought for a foothold in Europe and even ventured onto North Africa finally sacking and looting Rome in 455, which is where the word ‘vandal’ originated.

Vandalism is something that reoccurs and there are spates of it, perhaps relating to the phases of the moon for vandalism is surely lunacy by another name.

But perhaps there is something in us all. After building a sand castle, even the most elaborate sand castle, what kid does not thrill at knocking it down? Most usually done with a smile. A tower of blocks, if not tipped over in the building process, is never standing for long – the builder or a sibling will see to it sooner than later. Patience, frustration and a steady hand are requisites for building a house of cards – maybe that’s a tower – but again someone will give it a puff, or slam a door and the tower will fall.

Any derelict building will have its windows smashed by stone-throwers. How is that different to the playful knocking down of a sand castle? The building is going to be demolished anyway, with the glass unlikely to be salvaged.

So were the stone-throwers testing their aim or were they angry at something and breaking the windows through some malice or other?

Throwing stones at electrical or telephone insulators up on poles is more   usually a test of stone-throwing accuracy and unlikely to be a result of malice but the cost of repairs cannot he sneezed at.

Recent reports of vandalism in a children’s cemetery caused considerable distress for the families concerned, it appears that the damage was carried out by a single individual for reasons that can only be found in his head.

Cemetery vandalism occurs from time to time, sometimes the offender gets a thrill at the toppling of the headstones while others desecrate through some form of hatred for whoever is interred there. Most obvious being Jewish graves, headstones tipped over and swastikas emblazoned. Who knows if the offenders really know what they are doing.

Similar vandalism has occurred to the grave of the unknown warrior which is simply a mindless act because what can you have against an unknown person?

Historical vandalism is nothing new, the first that comes to mind is when Henry VIII fell out with the Pope and decided to reform the church in England by the dissolution of the monasteries. He took the gold and silver [was it melted down or treasured?] and allowed the population to pilfer whatever they wanted. The Catholic church had been levying heavily for their services, so pilfering was a way of payback.

Stone and timber was removed for building and anything else of use was removed. Few would have seen this to wrong because it was sanctioned by the King, but today we see it as historical loss and vandalism.

Ancient writings and artefacts pose no danger, yet the perception of danger or affront gives excuse to carry out the destruction of them. Looking back, how the culture of Poland was dangerous to the Nazis is difficult to fathom but stemmed from a desire to wipe the nation off the face of the earth – as if it were a right. And why destroy the ancient archives of Angevin, Naples?

The burning of libraries has gone on and on, the loss of them has not changed history nor would they have changed history. The great works that have been lost, were records of history and ideas, not only for the people effected but the history of the world. The same way as Pandas are world treasures.

The latest losses, Buddhas of Bamiyan, the Mosul museum and the Assyrian artefacts are a loss to history and memory of the ancients. The world will not change because of the loss. Of course those losses pale in significance to the loss of life, and the atrocities committed; sometime in the future, the memory of what has occurred will be history and be judged.

The thing about this type vandalism, or murder and mayhem for that matter, is that goals can be achieved in different ways. We are all products of our upbringing and so have biases for what we personally accept to be true and correct – we only read articles in the newspaper that interest us, seldom do we read about what we don’t agree with.

So, take a pen and paper, then look around the room you are in and list in your head every item you see that is you favourite colour or shade of it. Then without looking around again list all the items that are your least favourite colour. It’s a demonstration of the natural bias we all have.

This is why resolving disputes through vandalism, murder [slaughter] and mayhem is carried out from a blinkered point of view and considering other options.

The issues are surely complicated, but sometime there has to be resolution, which can only come through compromise and awareness of other points of view.

Venison Stew

You couldn’t class Henry as a recreational hunter, controlling populations of deer, pigs, rabbits and other introduced mammals was part of his job description. Those animals were classified as noxious animals until a law change, driven by cost, lowered the Forest Service’s responsibility – moving the target.

Sure he regularly went out with his dogs in the evenings and during the weekend, but still his prime objective was to protect the forest he was responsible for.

A hunter is fairly luck to bag a deer close to a road or where access is good, in those cases the whole deer is usually taken home to be sold or to be butchered.

In remote areas the deer usually is skinned, all but the hind legs, the backbone is severed and the loose skin is wrapped around the hind quarters. This makes an easy load to carry out on the shoulders. The back steaks are always taken because they are choice cuts.

Meat is best hung for up to a week before being butchered but the back steaks are good eaten the same day as the deer is killed. Henry removes the sinew band from the steak the same way as skinning a fish – on the thin end push the knife down to the sinew strip, hold it there and with the other hand pull the sinew so it leaves the meat behind.

He then cuts the steak into three inch strips, rubs salt into the meat and fries it in a pan with a liberal amount of butter.

Venison back steak is best eaten with fresh bread. Henry used to bake his own in the bush, which was his favourite. With nobody around to chastise him, he used the bread to dip into the pan with the residual steak juice and butter!

Hanging the hindquarters in a tree so the outside dries in the sun preserves the meat well. The first couple of days Henry may wipe off fly eggs, but after a couple of days the flies lose interest in it and the outside becomes quite hard. Wasps sometimes steal meat!

Other than the shin muscle there are three muscles on the hind leg – they can be removed separately and roasted if there is an oven. In the bush Henry rarely made a roast because it tends to dry out. At home cutting slits to fill with pineapple and/or orange slices makes a difference.

Henry uses the middle muscle first, his favourite, and removes the thin layer of sinewy skin as well as any bits there are not steak, then cuts it into one inch cubes. He rubs in lemon juice or any other fruit he has – kiwifruit is good - and lets it sit for an hour or two.

Chopped up onion is browned in some butter, then the meat goes into the pot/camp-oven and is covered with water. This brew Henry simmers over embers that are not too hot for at least a couple of hours, adding water as it evaporates.

If an airdrop was recent there may be fresh vegetables, otherwise he used tinned stuff, which is always precooked, so goes into the stew at the last moment. Carrots take a while to cook and they go in first, then diced spuds. If the airdrop included cabbages and broccoli, Henry liked to include the stems and inner core of those – the crunchy bits.

Always partial to peas, Henry would always add a can - or beans, not baked or sliced beans, red kidney were good.

If he watched the brew carefully, and included spuds, there was no need to thicken the stew, but if it needed thickening, Fielder’s cornflower was the stuff, two teaspoons and about half a cup of water, stirred to a paste then stirred into the stew.

Henry’s stews lasted him a week, but he was always careful to bring it to a boil before each meal – bacteria love stews, especially if there is no refrigeration, so it was essential to ‘boil ‘er up before devouring’.

In the early days, Henry and his mates were supplied with cans of instant potato. Not the modern flakey stuff, this was ex WWII (or is that WWI?) a powder that was difficult to convert into anything remotely edible! They used to call it ‘plastic spud’ because that is exactly what it was like. Henry guessed that the Forest Service wanted to use it up – rice would have been a far better option.

Henry doesn’t miss the plastic spud, but given to opportunity will cook up a storm! Not necessarily with venison but with beef or even goat! And his bread making days are over, a compromise to a healthy diet.

Coalmine(s)

Henry had an aversion of being underground ever since the collapse of the underground hut he helped to build - Errol had nearly died! Then during a geology course he had to go underground into a coalmine ‘for the experience’. Experience alright! There was an earth tremor while they were down there! Later at Reefton he fell down a forty foot vertical shaft, probably the only dry one in the area - and they said he was lucky!

He knew there was a coalmine on Diamond Hill because there was an access track to the old hut that had served as an office. The piles of dross around, indicated that the coal was low grade lignite.

They needed to poke a road around the hill for access to facilitate land preparation and planting but Henry was a bit windy about traipsing through the gorse to survey the line in case he fell down another shaft.

The mines office were not much help because they were moving to another building so all their information was packed up in boxes. They were able to say there were thirty two shafts, but could not identify the location without the records!

Henry with Mick driving the dozer and sat on the armrest with his abney level to roughly scrape out the line. Half an hour in, whap, the right hand track flopped down a narrow mineshaft [probably wide enough to push a trolley down] and dozer reared like Jackie! This meant Henry and a team had to dig a dead man to anchor the winch. A dead man is a slit trench with a stout log wedged in the bottom. The dozer popped out like a cork but they had to do this three more times, luckily none being over-dangerous.

There was a swampy area where water seeped out of the main shaft and they knew to drive in there would be to risk the dozer becoming bogged. While Mick pushed up a heap of dry clay, Henry and his team dug a trench through the swamp and laid culvert pipes. They cut Manuka poles to lay down at the mouth of the pipe – so fill did not block it - and then they laid a thick layer of branches, slash and small logs – fascining it’s called. Mick then covered the scrub with the stockpiled clay - they completed the road with no further out-of-the-ordinary issues.

Henry knew about the other, more substantial shaft on the other side of the ridge, at times water from it flowed onto Rodman Road.

The forest had an open gate policy and 1% of its spending vote was allowed for ‘amenity’ work or plantings. The walking tracks and the picnic area down at forest HQ were already well utilised. Hooks, always interested in mines nagged at Henry to at least drain the Rodman Road mine to see what happened. Henry acquiesced, so they opened up the entrance and water gushed out causing considerable damage to Rodman Road!

With the road fixed, Hooks nagged again to enter the mine! The last manager from the Shag Point mine advised them that it was safest to take a candle and if it goes out – get out quick!

The bloody candle went out and they made a quick retreat! Safely out, Hooks claimed it was a drop of water that had extinguished the candle and he wanted to give it another try but Henry asserted it was too dangerous and he would have the entrance sealed up – no argument.

Fooling with sanity, Henry took a team to clear the scrub and make a walking track to the mine entrance and deciding not to give in to fear, told Hooks to bring his candle.

Henry made a holder out of a tin can to protect the candle from overhead drips.

The shaft went slightly upwards into the hill for about thirty metres and Henry kept looking back to that ever decreasing circle of daylight.

About thirty meters in, the shaft divided sharply, so they decided on the left fork, which circled into the hill for maybe twenty metres to where there had been a rock-fall and their way was blocked – the daylight circle had gone and Henry felt a strong urge run!

At the end of the right fork, someone was standing at the base of another rock-fall! Goose bumps covered Henry’s flesh and his hackles rose!

‘Shit’ gasped Hooks.

The last miner in there must have stood his shovel, and then fashioned a cross to hang an old coat, then he placed a dead man’s hat on top – in the half-light it looked for all the world to be a real person! Yes, someone had been lost in the rock-fall!

They decided to close off access into the mine.