'ROSES CAPTURE MELBOURNE'S ESSENCE'

On a street like many others in the Melbourne, Australia area, the red, yellow, and apricot shades of roses cascade from the yards. They bloom in violet and pink from the tops of fences and behind wrought iron railings. Sometimes they squeeze together in front yards only five feet wide.
On this particular street, Lyndhurst Crescent in suburban Hawthorn, one rose garden grows in homage to the late postman. As Hawthorn resident Felix Carrady tells the story, the old postman adored his roses, and his daughter keeps them blooming in his memory (photo above). The rose gardens photographed here are a small sampling on a few blocks of just one suburban street.
Melbournites view more formal rose arrangements in Melbourne’s more than 100 parks during spring. For one, the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne boasts more than 200 different species and varieties of roses. The flowers appear against a backdrop of buildings (photo, right).
Some roses have foreign origins; others, Australian bred, have Aussie names, such as Onkaparinga. According to the website, Burke’s Backyard, the roses withstand the country’s climate extremes, including summer days when temperatures climb to 40 degrees centigrade (104 Fahrenheit ).
Last Australian spring (November) followed years of drought so severe that just “a teaspoon of water is left at the bottom of what was a river,” exaggerates Hawthorn resident Zieta Carrady, Felix‘s wife.
The rosy panorama survived the droughts, and Nancy Bekhor continues to mediate on roses. Nancy, who describes herself as a metaphysical Melbournite, says she recalls their scent during meditation. She affirms the roses “capture the essence of Melbourne."
Photos and story by Carola C. Reuben
Copyright 2011, Carola C. Reuben, Earthy Reporter
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Croc Shows & Shooting Roos: Random Encounters in Wynnum, Australia

Story and photos by Carola C. Reuben, Earthy Reporter

Wayne Crotty speaks matter-of-factly about shooting kangaroos and conducting barroom trials in St. George in Queensland’s bush. Wayne was born 63 years ago in St. George, where his mother, who was being “bashed” by his father, gave him up for adoption to another woman on the post office stairs. Since then, the population of St. George has mushroomed to 3,800.

“I was a bush kid,“ said Wayne, currently a Brisbane area resident (see photo). He grew up among aborigines and the missionaries who were hell bent on saving their souls. Also, there were the solitary “coppers” (police) sent to his neck of the bush, who were sometimes shot to death by bushmen, then tossed in the river. After all, there were no other police to protect the lone coppers from bushmen.

To make a living, Wayne shot “roos” ( kangaroos ), meat for export to Germany. He also played trumpet in a band, and for entertainment, he would drink beer in the pub, where a “kangaroo court” might sentence a fellow drinker who stole $20 from a bar top. As Wayne told it, he once watched as “the court” meted out a sentence of 25 lashes with a shoelace on the penis.

When Wayne appeared at my friends’ Wynnum home, he struck me as a colorful character; I could not resist engaging him in a  conversation. Now a furniture craftsman, he came to deliver a desk made from Tasmanian oak to my friends, Manuel Benito Sainz, and his wife, Glenda.

Manuel and Glenda were moved from the U.S. ( North Carolina ) to Australia by Manuel’s company, Syngenta. Manuel, a microbiologist, was known as Benny when he was my close friend in junior high and high school at the American school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He and his wife have enjoyed living for 2.5 years in Wynnum, Queensland, half a block from a bay (see photo below) and a short walk from a mangrove forest.

In that suburb of Brisbane, populated mostly by whites ( 11,719, according to the 2006 census), I would walk past the yellows of sponge-like flowers and the brilliant red of poinsettias in neat yards filled with the green of palm trees, fir trees, eucalyptus and jacaranda trees.

Getting lost was great fun in that multi-colored town (see photo). Somewhere near Perry's Fruit Barn, an aborigine college student helped me find my way. With his Aussie accent, he told me he found a cheap rental in Wynnum, about $1,200 per month. “Cheap enough for a college student ?” I asked. But then he said he makes $21 (Australian dollars ) an hour bagging groceries; it seems that menial jobs fetch a living wage in Australia.

Another time, a man walking at a quick pace went out of his way to point me in the right direction. I thanked him, and he declared, “You ( the U.S. ) took care of us during World War II, so now we should take care of you.”

Then there was Leigh, a retired lawyer, born in nearby Toowoomba, whose son is a lawyer he described as “a rogue.” He is “either going to become prime minister or go to jail,” Leigh affirmed.

Meanwhile at the Wynnum Library Book Chat Group, Noreen might be chatting about a book she just read, “Landfall” by Neville Shute. A British naval officer was having a relationship with a barmaid. The class difference between the two “is not up to scratch,“ but she hastened to add, “it is all very proper.” One lesson gleaned from the book was “you don’t gossip before the barmaid because she is a woman and has big ears.”

Keith also indulges his love of books at weekly meetings of the book chat group. Apparently, the “book supermarket,” Borders, is his idea of paradise.

The closest Borders is far away from Wynnum, but “no worries.“ If you seek excitement, just drive 40 minutes to the Village of Tamborine. The Bearded Tavern Country Lodge appears like a mirage among the foliage beneath a mountain. There, you might watch “Nick’s Cranky & Nasty Reptile & Croc Show, " or, better yet, a race of poisonous cane toads. “Face your Fear,” goads a sign announcing the shows, appropriate entertainment in a country crawling with Earth’s most poisonous creatures.
Copyright, 2010, Carola C. Reuben, Earthy Reporter

Helen Bekhor records it all: From Iraq to India to Japan to Internment Camp in China to Australia

Story by Carola C. Reuben, Earthy Reporter

The first member of my extended family who found a home in Australia is the keeper of family records that date back for centuries in Iraq.

Australia became home some 60 years ago to Helen Bekhor ( bottom photo), born Habiba Helen Reuben in Bombay, India to Iraqi Jewish parents in 1925. She picks stories to tell from the meticulous records she keeps in her Melbourne home.

For instance, she might tell you about a relative, Reuben Battat, who froze to death in 1950 when he tried to escape from Iraq to Iran, hidden inside a freezer on a truck. That was during the mass exodus of relatives from Iraq after Israel became a nation (1948) when the Muslims in Iraq persecuted Jews.

Meanwhile for Helen the post World War II years were good. She drank Coca-Cola and sang, “drinking rum and Coca-Cola, working for the Yankee dollar.” It was a time of celebration for her in Shanghai, China. Helen and her sister, Florence, (now Florence Ovadia of Chicago, USA ), were working as mail sorters in a U.S. army base.

They had just been freed from a Japanese Civilian Internment Center in China along with their sister, Grace, brother, Felix, and mother, Naima. World War II was over (top photo, Helen, after the war). During the war, the Japanese had imprisoned Helen and her family as “enemy subjects” because they were British. They had become British citizens while living in India under British rule.

When Helen first became a prisoner, she went to work clearing rubble with her long, manicured nails. Before camp she had been living in a Shanghai she called “a shopper’s paradise” with an elegant social life among foreigners.

Asia became home to the Reubens since before her birth when her father, Sassoon Reuben (my great-uncle), opened an office in Bombay to export textiles and other goods to Iraq. Then, in 1932, my grandfather, Salim Reuben, left Baghdad with his wife and children to open a Reuben Import Export Company office in Kobe, Japan.

Political upheaval then blew Reubens to other lands. In 1939, Japan became Germany‘s ally; all foreign schools closed down in Japan, and the Reubens sailed to Shanghai.

However, the war followed them; Japan took over Shanghai after its attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Sassoon was in Bangkok; Salim was in Bombay on a business trip. The war prevented the family patriarchs from returning to Shanghai. Soon after the war, communists took over China, and the Reubens fled to Hong Kong.

Helen meticulously kept records as both sides of her family scattered all over the U.S., Canada, Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia. She also compiled family trees of ancestors as well as their descendants.

High tech Helen’s work became easier with the advent of computers; she also contributed to a genealogy website about Iraqi Jews. See www.farhi.org.

Helen gathered the genealogy data because she said, “I wanted to know who my relatives were in Baghdad or wherever.“ Referring to her memoir material, she simply said, “I guess I wanted to keep a record of my life.”
Copyright, 2010, Carola C. Reuben, Earthy Reporter