Did that get yer attention?Where's yer anorak?No picture today, mere verbiage..Tonight I attended the opening of a stamp collection! http://www.joburg.org.za/culture/calendar/view/3708/54It was totally unintentional, the last time I saw stamps was when some relative of elderly female persuasion gave me an 'album' and a 'starter pack' of stamps when I was knee-high to the letter box, but the missus works at the museum and had a hand in putting a few things together for this and I had to pick her up at work, sooooo... However, this JH Curle collection got me thinking, and got me despondent on local 'culture' and modern 'lifestyle' all over again... Here is a collection of stuff, totally bloody unique, a collection of stamps from the beginnings of the Transvaal Republic, things I wouldn't look twice at, but the one fella who worked to put this together introduced it, was damnably passionate about it. Some fella came all the way from the U.K. to say a bit - to all of 15 folk that was there. 15....most of them connected to the museum in some way, how may folk would attend such an exhibition in the first world? I was more interested in the occasional stuff around the stamps..photos, a post stone, a map of the Transvaal from 1877...detailed down the the tiniest hill, Johannesburg wasn't on it! The detailed map of Pretoria involved, perhaps 7X 9 blocks.... These stamps connected people before Johannesburg was even a thought. it was farms and sparkling tumbling streams... In the introduction, the chap told how, in 'those' days, sending a letter involved a huge amount of effort. Finding out the postage, where and when and how..crikey, today we send an e-mail and think nothing of it...nothing! People went the extra mile to stay in touch, keep informed and inform others, something we take so much for granted now.I think I read gawdknows how many news stories, articles, blogs and numerous blather on Facebook and Twitter today, something that would have involved weeks and months back then. The chap who collected these stamps-JH Curle, would take a round trip of near two months to sail SA/ England to get one stamp..... I think the exhibition could've had a lot more in it, could've had better lighting, more stuff related to the main subject (its all there, sealed away in storerooms), a better setting than some partitioned off back area of the museum. I'm damnably sure a professional collector would cringe at the presentation of, what are purportedly very rare items, stuck up on boards underneath tacky plastic sheets. But that's all we can do, in Africa's biggest city, in its major museum - no budget, one or two curators yet sitting on a wealth of artifacts and documents that no-one will ever see..or really wants to..... I don't know, stuff like this gets me thinking. It puts where we are now in such sharp perspective, we take it for granted and we abuse it in so many ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment