Mayday! Mayday!

Fiona Uncategorized

Friday 1st May . . . all sorts of things to think about, starting with

(Image Credit: Melbourne Protests)

If you see a history of May Day in the newspapers this year, it is most likely to recount the mystical, medieval origins of a pagan fertility festival. And though you may never have seen a maypole in your life, you will be assured that a ribboned piece of birchwood is the sign and sanction of May Day.

Yet this has little to do with the reason that 1 May is celebrated in Britain, or why it is an international holiday . . . . May Day is international workers day. As such, it is – in the words of Eric Hobsbawm – “the only unquestionable dent made by a secular movement in the Christian or any other official calendar”. And its past is more rowdy than is suggested by the imagery of Morris dancers serenely waving hankies and bells around.

The origin of our present holiday lies in the fight for an eight-hour working day, in which cause the leaders of the socialist Second International called for an international day of protest to be held at the beginning of May 1890. They did so just as the American Federation of Labour was planning its own demonstration on the same date. The UK protest actually took place on a Sunday, and in London alone attracted 300,000 protesters to Hyde Park.

Initially, May Day was intended to be a one-off protest, and in some ways quite a solemn affair. But it persisted amid a flourishing of trade unionism. The symbolism of the workers’ Easter, of rebirth and renewal, dramatised this experience of revival. And it developed a carnivalesque aspect. May Day did not merely enact internationalism and working class solidarity; it celebrated these things with the familiar paraphernalia of badges, flags, art, sporting events and heavy drinking.

This is the beginning of a fine article: I commend it to Pubsters.

So, let’s recreate some of that carnival atmosphere – but with moderate consumption of alcohol, of course.

We will also have our Friday raffle, lots of good music, and even though the article’s author quite rightly says May Day is much more than maypoles, let’s get those paws a-twitching and the ribbons a-winding!

(Image Credit: Life With Cats)

537 thoughts on “Mayday! Mayday!”

  1. joe6pack,

    I did not have that upbringing nor would I say that to anyone. It was a play on words.

  2. QF 163 17/06 /05 will have a charming witty person on-board.

    Am I going somewhere?

  9. BK,

    I am sure that if I went back to the earlier thread I’d have the answer, but as I’m feeling lazy, could you please tell me whether you and your son have a shared birthday?

  10. Ct1
    Am I going somewhere?

    Want to come along and act as a legal representative?
    Fiona and yourself together may scare the others away and then we can depart to a congenial establishment and get some unpleasant business behind Ned and Syd.

  15. 6Pack

    Want to come along and act as a legal representative?

    First time I went to NZ it was closed on Saturday afternoons and Sundays.

    Not entertaining but I guess times have changed.

  16. . . . he looked me straight in the eye and said I cannot change that was how I raised.

    Bullshit.

    I was raised to hate Catholics, ‘reffos’, Asians and anyone else who was not 100% Anglo white protestant. I was also raised in a Liberal voting family and taught ‘nice girls don’t vote Labor’

    I think I’ve changed.

  17. Most of my close friends vote National, and yet they are the kindest, nicest friends you could wish for. My family mostly live in the Sutherland Shire and most of them vote for Scrott. And yet I love the lot of them

    Sometimes politics just has to take a back seat.

  18. leonetwo

    Not Bullshit,
    How you are brought up and raised is hard to change.
    Inner Melbourne in the 50,s was pretty hard apparently

  19. Leone & Joe6pack,

    On the whole, I think women are better able to manage change (and difference) than men.

    That said, I’ve also observed that the one cause of change in male opinions on various issues (and also in those of more intransigent women) is having one of their own family members – a child, a grandchild – “coming out”, or partnering with a wog, a darkie, a chink (delib. offence).

    If it’s a child / grandchild they really love, suddenly things seem to change.

    A bit different from the dark days of the Catholic/Protestant divide.

  20. A bit different from the dark days of the Catholic/Protestant divide.

    And that survived through the 70’s before it faded.

  22. CTar1

    First time I went to NZ it was closed on Saturday afternoons and Sundays.

    An accurate recall. Was why every good kiwi bloke kept a crate of beer in the car boot. If during a weekend it (always unexpectedly) looked like there would be 4 hours of fine weather and a BBQ organised a chap was prepared…………. and popular for being so.

    Crate wooden, Bottles 750ml glass.

  23. Two four-wheel-drives entered water across Beerburrum Road at Caboolture, north of Brisbane, about 5.30pm on Friday.

    Earlier reports said Dances Road, which is the other side of the tracks. That probably puts it south of Emu Road – it’s Hamilton Road north of there. I’m sure the first reports of trouble were earlier than 5:30pm too.

    The Urban Country Music Festival was scheduled for this weekend at QSEC – roughly where the fatalities occurred. Interstate visitors would have had no idea what they were in for:
    https://www.facebook.com/UrbanCountry

    From the Weatherzone forums:

    If I can just add without being shot down, yesterday was an extreme event and there is a “lot” of stupidity around and many risk takers and it does result in loss of live or putting the emergency crews into risking their lives to safe lives.

    But listening to ABC and hearing some of the people phoning in and the panic in their voices was quiet disheartening. They were caught in traffic and stuck with nowhere to go and they were watching the water rising up over the roads, as said it was a very bad time for this system to go into full swing. Hind sight is a great thing, and not everyone at work listens to the radio or looks on WZ etc. An interesting thing I heard yesterday from people I know and friends on FB who used to follow the boy who cried wolf all the time with capital letters had given up on listening to him and didn’t really expect what unfolded, they thought he was an expert and had gone from BoM to him and now given up on the unfolding weather which is not the right thing to do, but they just got sick of hearing all the catastrophic events that were going to happen but never did. A lot can be said about that. I have said to them to follow BoM or have a look on here.

    Not all the fatalities can be put down to stupidity in situations such as yesterday, we don’t know the full story of each case.
    Their was a lot flash flooding around, and my mates wife who was on a home school excursion up the north coast, which was hardly affected with this system besides some rain, gusty wind and large swells, (check the river and rainfall data and you will see what I mean.) She started to head home when she was almost caught in a flash flood on or near the Steve Irwirn Way. She got herself into a safe place and phoned her husband, he told to head back to Caloundra as quickly and safely as possible and stay there for the night. What she said was there appeared to be a little bit water on the road thinking it was just the run off from the heavy rain, but the 4WD that was ahead of her had water rise quickly up near the top of the vehicles wheels, the 4WD stopped and quickly reversed out and also headed back up the coast.

    A very difficult situation with bad timing and not everyone is a weather enthusiast. I love severe weather but as I have said so many times I hate the loss of life,limb or property damage. I just sit here and think what if I got a knock on the door last night and there was 2 blue uniforms telling me a family member has drowned or been killed.

    http://forum.weatherzone.com.au/ubbthreads.php/topics/1327594/Re_SE_QLD_NE_NSW_East_Coast_Lo#Post1327594

  25. CTar,

    And that survived through the 70’s before it faded.

    I do know.

    My dad was raised a Catholic, became a Commonwealth public servant in 1950 and ran the whole Catholic/Prot gauntlet that had existed forever and was still flourishing in the 1970s.

    Invalided out in 1979 – maybe partly because of the stress it caused.

  26. He was born and raised in inner city Melbourne in the 50’s /60’s.

    …sounds awfully like “working-class catholic” to me. I say that because the catholic church was the main promoter of absolutes in those days and Melb’ was the centre of that ideologue.

  27. Frank Hardy…”Power Without Glory”…My ex was from “inner-city Melb”…her family is still deeply involved in “deep Catholicism”.. and, I suspect..; Political Catholicism.

  30. Jaycee
    yep working class catholic.
    In 50 odd years when they are all dead and buried maybe no more racism.
    Good luck with that.

  31. Fiona

    Catholics could get a job in CSIRO or Customs but Attorney-Generals and the like was unlikely in the late 70’s.

  33. Fiona
    Our birthdays are not shared. The choice of this weekend was based on logistics and around my son’s work travel overseas.
    However my daughter and my number 3 son share the day before my own birthday.

  34. My mother was racist..in her own benign way…even after telling me this story from her youth.

    Proverb : “What the eye doesn’t see,
    The heart doesn’t grieve.”

    Parable : ” I laugh now when I think of it”. The old lady chuckled, “But I was young then, about fourteen..or sixteen..but I was a ‘young’ sixteen….you know?..and I had gone to the millinery store in the town and bought a dress for the fair. The dress was pink floral with a blouse all in one and it had two pieces of material, like braces, with big buttons on the waistline and those two braces went over the shoulders down the back.”
    “Ahh..I was young then….anyway at the fair there was the excitement of a merry-go-round and bucking horses and shearing contests and….and tug-of-war..an…an..horse races..you know, that sort of thing and everybody from the district and from beyond the bend of the river..and they’re dressed up to the nines, oh dear,ha!…the big day of the year for us then, ha!”
    “Well, there was this aboriginal girl there and she had on EXACTLY the same dress that I had..exactly!…and we ran up to each other and laughed and became great friends that day…she worked, like me, at another station on the Murray….cooking, cleaning, looking after the children that sort of thing…..anyway, we were great friends that day an’ we walked all around that fair together arm in arm, laughing and having great fun and we’d tell everyone we met that we were twins!..ha! ha!…TWINS!….you’d laugh now, but we didn’t even think of her being black and me white then..some people smiled and others threw their heads back and laughed and we just thought they were as happy as we were, ha!”
    “Oh, a jolly good time we had that day…..I can’t even remember her name now….ha!….Ah well….twins..twins!”

  36. Let’s not blame everything on the Catholic church. I was raised in my grandparents Methodist home, with some Salvation Army overtones in Sydney – working class – in the post-war 1940’s and early 1950’s. Blind, hatred for Catholics permeated everything around me.

    A similar up-bringing to the one John Howard experienced, I think. Which is probably the only thing I have in common with Howard, except failing General Maths in the Leaving Certificate, being raised to think Menzies was a god, being told to always vote Liberal …….oh geez………

  37. CTar1

    In those days one could not buy a Steinlager in NZ. It had won world awards it was acclaimed all over the place but in the people’s republic of NZ one could not buy it. Why ? Because it was “export strength”. That meant min. 5% alcohol and so could not be sold in NZ.

    Eventually in the early 1980s they introduced a local version , Steinlager Blue, with lower alcohol. So UnZudders could at last try for the first time a Steiny.

  39. Leone,

    I was raised in my grandparents Methodist home . . .

    Not from direct experience, but lots of personal observation, including some quite recent: the Methodists and Catholics ain’t got nuttin’ on the Presbuttons.

    John Knox has a hell (and I mean a hell) of a lot to answer for.

  40. the Methodists and Catholics ain’t got nuttin’ on the Presbuttons.

    …are you kidding, Fiona??…those other sects only have a franchise!…the Micks hold the copyright!…they been writing the script for fifteen hundred years before those others even kicked off the ground!

  41. Jaycee,

    No, I am not kidding.

    Knox authored this:

    and, like Calvin (and Augustine of Hippo), was a predestinationist. A seriously silly doctrine in a “faith” which is supposed to allow the forgiveness of sins, and sinners, and their eventual redemption.

  42. Also responsible – along with Calvin and that usurper, Saul (aka Paul of Tarsus) – for the whole headship thinggy, which the happy clappers here and in America so much delight in.

  43. Fiona

    Moi has very strong Methylated Sprits and Press Button B heritage. Even worse the Press Button was the West Scotland version.Praise be that in the generation or two before me heathenism crept in . GG G’father was a lay Methodist preacher. A blacksmith by trade he looks in the photos like someone you would be too scared not to become a believer .

    As the old kiwi saying goes. Catholics banned dances because you know what that leads to but Methodists banned music because that leads to dances.

  44. Well..Clarence Darrow, the great advocate for the Defence, once commented that given a choice between a Presbyterian and a Baptist, you’s move closer to the Baptist for warmth.

  45. I heard that the Methodists banned “knee-trembler” sex because it could lead to dancing!

  46. Kaffeeklatscher,

    The cross-over between the various “faiths” about dancing and you know what is delightful.

    Jaycee,

    Clarence Darrow was right.

    One of these days I might reveal the last serious encounter I had with a Presbyterian.

  47. But the difference between the proddos’ and the micks, is that the prods’ wear their religion on their sleeves..but the micks have had theirs buried deep into their psyche by that bloody jesuit cunning!…and it only appears as a sleeper at the most vulnerable moments.

  48. Jaycee,

    . . . the micks have had theirs buried deep into their psyche

    Likewise for the Presbyters and Baptists and Methodists. And many Lutherans. The Anglicans are somewhat more laissez-faire . . . well, many of them, and most of the time.

  49. Ah the Westie Scottish Presbyterian types . In the early 2000s there was an uproar in the western isles when a flight service started to operate return trips to the mainland on Sundays. The really !!!!! that came out at the time was that the local councils at the had someone go around and chain up swings and see saws in playgrounds so that children could not play on the Sabbath.

  50. Kaffeeklatscher,

    My maternal grandfather was Presbyterian (Glasgow), and he and his siblings loved playing cards during the weekend.

    Midnight on Saturday – the cards were instantly put away, and my grandpapa, who was fond of more than a few wee drams, was “sober” until Monday.

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