workingclasshistory: On this day, 28 January 1942, Australian…

workingclasshistory:

On this day, 28 January 1942, Australian troops armed with machine guns, rifles and bayonets attacked striking Chinese sailors in Fremantle.
Around 500 Chinese sailors on six ships had gone on strike and sat down on deck, demanding equal pay with white Australians, as well as better conditions and a guarantee that they would not be sent back to Japanese-occupied China.
On January 28, the 5th Garrison Battalion attacked the workers, killing Tong Youn Tong, 44, with a bayonet and shooting Ping Sang Hsu, 22, in the back. One of the workers managed to grab a rifle and shoot back, injuring one of the sailors, before eventually the workers surrendered. The strikers were then arrested, sent to a concentration camp and then most were drafted to the Chinese Labour Corps and used as forced labour for the Allies fighting against Japan in northern China. The Australian press described the workers as “of a cunning, ruthless type never before seen in Australia”.
Around the same time, a Chinese crew aboard a Norwegian ship tried to disembark, and several were then shot by Norwegian guards. Elsewhere, after a Chinese ship fireman complained that an Australian had kicked him in the mouth, the whole crew walked off the ship in sympathy.
Chinese sailors’ struggles continued and in 1944 a new agreement was reached in which Chinese workers’ wages were increased to be 80% of whites’.
Pictured: Two of the workers, one of them aged just 12 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1639950002856810/?type=3

Mermaid Romances

laurasimonsdaughter:

Now the story of @thefishermansfavour
is getting good and Flirty TM, I wanted to dive (no) into the folklore
that led me to write a chaotic bi fisherman and a gay merrow: mermaid
romances

Spoiler alert, most of them aren’t really romantic.

They
basically all begin the same way: a young fisherman is out fishing and
finds a mermaid in his net. What he chooses to do next determines what
kind of story it’s going to be:

  • In most Dutch and Flemish
    stories the mermaid gets dragged ashore, to be kept as a wife, maid or
    even just a curiosity, sometimes magically acquiring legs in the
    process. But she almost always curses the people who took her from the sea by warning
    them that the waves will roll inland as far as they take her. Soon enough a
    storm comes and the sea rises to reclaim the mermaid, flooding
    the fisherman’s village and destroying the mermaid’s new ‘home’.

  • Sometimes
    the man is kinder. One tale tells how a Dutch captain catches a mermaid and
    takes her home, but sees that she wilts on land, so when he sets off on
    his next journey he brings her back to the sea. In return she swims along with his
    ship and calls out to him whenever there is a whale nearby for him to
    catch.

  • In many stories of Celtic origin the fisherman bargains with the
    mermaid and she exchanges her freedom for some sort of gift. My
    favourite Scottish story of this kind is one where the mermaid gives the
    fisherman a ring that she promises him will help him “win his true
    love” (The Fisherlad and the Mermaid’s Ring) and it does just that, except not at all how he expected it to.

Then there
are of course all the stories that follow the “siren” theme, where the
mermaid is a beautiful creature that lures a fisherman or sailor into
the waves with her. A nice mix of these themes is “Lutey and the Mermaid”
from Cornwall:

Keep reading

A Folk Song A Day

A Folk Song A Day:

thiswaitingheart:

Speaking of resources for learning about folk songs’ historical context: May I introduce you to Jon Boden’s 2010-11 ‘A Folk Song A Day’ project? 

As the title suggests, the blog has 365 folk songs recorded by Jon Boden & supplied with introductions by Simon Holland. The comments are also excellent. 

And if you’re wondering what ‘Mudcat’ and ‘Mainly Norfolk’ are – they’re two more excellent resources to start researching (British/English-language) folk music. Both record variations, artists who recorded the song in question, print editions of songs, and whether the song in question appears in one of the major song indexes (Roud, Child Ballads, etc.). Then there’s Oxford Broadside Ballads Online, and Wikipedia isn’t the worst place to start to look up individual songs, either. 

A Folk Song A Day

A Folk Song A Day:

thiswaitingheart:

Speaking of resources for learning about folk songs’ historical context: May I introduce you to Jon Boden’s 2010-11 ‘A Folk Song A Day’ project? 

As the title suggests, the blog has 365 folk songs recorded by Jon Boden & supplied with introductions by Simon Holland. The comments are also excellent. 

And if you’re wondering what ‘Mudcat’ and ‘Mainly Norfolk’ are – they’re two more excellent resources to start researching (British/English-language) folk music. Both record variations, artists who recorded the song in question, print editions of songs, and whether the song in question appears in one of the major song indexes (Roud, Child Ballads, etc.). Then there’s Oxford Broadside Ballads Online, and Wikipedia isn’t the worst place to start to look up individual songs, either. 

In the category of ‘people who should be better known’ I’d really like to nominate Dorothy Bonarjee,…

In the category of ‘people who should be better known’ I’d really like to nominate Dorothy Bonarjee, an Indian student at Aberystwyth University who won the poetry prize at the college’s annual Eisteddfod in 1914. She sounds like such a remarkable woman, and I’m fascinated that she continued to contribute to Welsh culture through magazines like Welsh
Outlook even after she left Wales. Read the article – if anyone deserves a biopic, she does!

“So I must give thee up – not with the glow Of those who losing much yet rather gain. But losing all….”

“So I must give thee up – not with the glow
Of those who losing much yet rather gain.
But losing all. Did never martyr go
Along the bleeding road of useless pain?
Did never one held prisoner by a creed,
Obsessed by stern heroic ghosts, made dumb
By those who answered duty to his need,
With faithless loathing feet to his fate come?”

– Dorothy Bonarjee, from Renunciation.