The Ties that Bind.             

              “Wanderer above a sea of fog.”

 Where I live.

I have opened a new blogger account specifically for this area where I live so as to promote stories and history placed in this locale.. https://underthemalleebough.blogspot.com/ for it is imperative to preserve what I call the “Historical watermark” that has been “impressed” upon a locale…it is such a thing that fixes and holds a place in time and allows the people living there to feel..and that is the correct emotion..”to feel” a part of that history and so identify with confidence to a place where they are living their lives…to destroy the in-situ history of a place is to debase one’s own life..It is why I feel a strange comfort whenever I descent off the higher land down into the Barossa Valley. it is because the old Germanic families and their Lutheran faith still hold control of the administration of the district and they are mostly containing any post-modern, ugliness that raises its developement head be it architectural or social, and the towns sited within that valley all have a deeply settled, rooted life of their own..You go into these towns and you can still read the Germanic names on the shops and businesses there….more power to those Germans!

The Murray Flats have a similar historical footprint, except here there is a solid mix of the original Anglo ancestry and development along the Murray River, with the Riverboat traffic and system in situ and the more Anglo-centric governance of the towns here, though the farming areas have the unmistakable influence of those hardy Germanic families still in remnant pockets….also, I have to make point of my own Italian connection to these Flats in that my Father, along with many other Italians coming earlier to the region than the post-war migration waves, were interned during the war years to cut / burn charcoal in the Blanchetown region to contribute to the war effort..and it was here that my father met my mother; of Anglo/Irish descent, a servant girl in both Punyelroo and Portee stations before/during the war…so I too have a solid connection and emotional tie to the history of the district..

As a consequence, I feel more at home here in the Murray Mallee than I did where I was born and grew up, THOSE locales now suffering from a dismantling of any recognisable cultural tie to both myself and those neighbours and friends I grew up with..the history has been lost..whereas here, there remains that emotional recognition of “where it all began” on both sides of the family..; the Italian and the Anglo heritage, plus the Aunties that married into the Germanic connections in the district…THAT is the “Historical watermark”..THAT is “the tie that binds”.