Daylesford: a European health resort town in Australia

Daylesford was founded in 1852 after finding alluvial gold in areas now occupied by Lake Daylesford. In 1854 Government Surveyor Fraser laid out a town plan for the Wombat Flat area and called it Wombat. A later governor, Governor Hotham, changed its name in 1855 to Daylesford after an important home he knew in Worcester. In 1859, c3400 miners were on the local diggings, including recently arrived Italian, Swiss and Chinese digging together.

Communication was essential so the first two facilities to open were the post office, in 1858, and the telegraph office, the very next year. A flour mill was opened in 1863, reflecting the increasing importance of local agriculture.

Villa Parma

Italian immigrant Fabrizzio Crippa was attracted to the area in 1855. Crippa quickly established himself as a butcher, and then a viticulturalist. And by 1864 Crippa built his gracious residence on the coach road to Castlemaine, surrounded by vines. The two-storey rendered brick building with dark stone trim, Villa Parma, reminded the lucky emigrant of an Italian renaissance palazzo.

Lavandula is a piece of sandstone rustica, a group of farm buildings constructed by Italians from southern Switzerland who came to look for gold and stayed to farm. The farmhouse is open for viewing each afternoon and gives an immediate sense of Italian rural life in 1860s Victoria. The house and gardens were recently restored.

Lavandula

There was a building boom in Daylesford throughout the 1860s when many of the town’s most beautiful and enduring structures were built: the Post Office, courthouse and lockup, Gold Commissioner's residence and police barracks, and nearly as many churches as hotels. Dozens of hotels! For example The Daylesford Hotel had originally been built in the early gold rush days of the 1850s and was one of Daylesford’s first licensed establishments. The present building was rebuilt in 1913 and today this huge hotel retains many of its 1900s features. The very impressive primary school was built and opened in 1874, and the beautiful town hall was built in 1882.

Daylesford Hotel

When the surface gold ran out, the old sawmills that had been established to supply the mines suddenly created employment for the ex-miners who would have otherwise had to leave.

Not long after settlement, Daylesford became been noted for health giving mineral springs and fresh mountain air, and smart men realised the need for a bottling plant and a bathhouse. Once the railway from Carlsruhe reached the town in 1880, Daylesford became the centre of a major spa resort. Hepburn Springs, only 6 ks away, drew holiday-makers and health seekers, right up and into the Inter-War period. Daylesford and surrounds account for a very large proportion of Australia’s spas. Bathe, an Australian blog dedicated to the whole bathing experience, naturally has many posts that mention Daylesford.

The Catholic Church purchased the 1860s home of the Gold Commissioner in the 1880s for its presbytery, where it became home to the priest. Then in 1891 the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne wanted a major institution for Daylesford. In 1892, the Holy Cross Convent and boarding school for girls was opened, and staffed by nuns (Presentation Sisters). The new chapel and other facilities were added after the turn of the century, but today the old convent has become an art centre and hospitality facility.

Convent (now Convent Gallery)

Most of the Victorian buildings in Daylesford survive well until today and most have been restored to their former glory. Not so with Hepburn. Hepburn Springs has predominantly Edwardian architecture due to the devastating 1906 bushfire which destroyed most buildings in the settlement.

Hepburn Springs, Edwardian bath house and spas

Some developments in the area continued in the Inter-War period. Lake Daylesford had originally been part of the gold diggings and then was used as a Chinese Market Garden with their own village, Joss House and store. By the early In 1880s council was discussing a plan to turn the area into a man-made lake and construction began in 1927.

Recently revamped with the overflow area rebuilt, a bridge across it and a new rowing berth area, Lake Daylesford is part of the scenic, peaceful, health-giving atmosphere of a “European Spa” resort. Victoria in the Country blog specifically discussed the lake in his/her post on travel advertising. Bosco Parrasio has many fine photos of Daylesford’s gardens and architecture. Daylesford Makers' Market talks about the very beautiful craft work that is a core part of this modern health resort town.

Daylesford Lake

Cresta Run, St Moritz: a history

The Cresta Run is an ice run, 1.5 ks long, that winds its way from above the Leaning Tower in St Moritz, Switzerland. It follows a path down a steep gully and through 10 tricky corners, past the tiny village of Cresta, to the village of Celerina. But even races have a history, so how did The Cresta Run come about? And why am I, an Australian who becomes depressed whenever the temperature drops below 18c, interested in snow sports?

The Cresta Run, 1885

Apparently Johannes Badrutt, owner of the Engadiner Kulm hotel in St Moritz, made a bet with four English guests in September 1864. The hamlet was a popular summer destination for both sporty or sickly Britons, so Badrutt’s task was to convince his guests that winter in the Alps was just as attractive as summer. If they returned in December they could stay as long as they liked at his expense and if he were wrong he would reimburse their travel expenses. According to Johnny Scott in The Field, the Englishmen loved it and returned home to spread the word that winter in the Alps was an experience not to be missed. Thus the Alpine winter season was born, as was a warm Anglo-Swiss relationship.

In 1883, the English literary critic John Addington Symonds founded the Davos Toboggan Club and organised the first international races, along with a week of balls and dinners. Realising that Davos had stolen a march on St Moritz, the good burghers of St Moritz enlisted the help of Peter Badrutt, Johannes' son, who was now running the enlarged Hotel Kulm, to build a toboggan run.

The committee had their boots protected and arms linked, trudging time and again along the marked line, until the snow was trampled down for the frost to harden. They had marked out a course following the contours of the valley from the Hotel Kulm, past the hamlet of Cresta to the outskirts of Celerina, and when the snows arrived in November, they began on their mammoth task. The first run, which took over two months to build, was completed in January 1885. It dropped 157m in total.

The Run was a scary affair down which people careered down the slope, sitting upright on their sleds and steering with their wooden picks.  Fortunately improvements arrived quickly. One bloke astonished everyone by lying head-first on his toboggan to ride the 1887 Grand National, a position adopted only by men in 1888. In any case, women were completely banned from the race in 1929.

The Cresta Run committee and the winner's cup

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Open from Christmas until the end of February, the Run is still hand-built from scratch every year, actively supported by the St Moritz town council. It follows the original route and is largely the same as the 1885 construction, although the athletes travel faster now. In 2010, St Moritz Tobogganing Club will be celebrating the 125th anniversary of The Cresta Run with parties and dances. A 12-piece Bavarian oompah band will provide atmospheric music.

I am always delighted to read histories of the various Olympic Games and histories of the individual sports. But even more relevant to this month in Vancouver,  Winter Olympic Tickets blog and Miss 604 blog both say that modern sport of skeleton grew out of The Cresta Run.

Read: Roger Gibbs, The Cresta Run 1885-1985, Melland Publishing, 1985.

Australian national identity before Federation: Man From Snowy River

Andrew Banjo Paterson (1864–1941) was probably Australia’s best known bush poet. He wrote many ballads and poems about Australian life, focusing particularly on the Outback that he knew well from his own life. I learned the words to his works, Waltzing Matilda, The Man from Snowy River and Clancy of the Overflow off by heart in primary school in the 1950s. I wonder if children still do that today?

The major public outlet for Banjo Paterson in the 1880s was the newly established Bulletin magazine, published weekly in Sydney. The Bulletin was then a racist and right wing publication but it had two redeeming qualities: it supported trade unionism and it sought out quality Australian writing. When Paterson wrote The Man from Snowy River in 1890, its publication in The Bulletin ensured this poem would reflect and inspire the heart of the nation.

The terrible descent after the colt

The poem told of a horseback chase to recapture the valuable colt of a valuable racehorse. The colt had escaped from its paddock and was living wild with the brumbies of the mountain ranges. Eventually the brumbies descended a very steep and treacherous slope, at which point the assembled riders wisely gave up the chase. Only one young hero spurred his pony down the terrible descent to catch the mob. The first three stanzas of the poem will set the scene:

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around

That the colt from old Regret had got away,

And had joined the wild bush horses — he was worth a thousand pound,

So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.

All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far

Had mustered at the homestead overnight,

For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,

And the stock-horse snuffs the battle with delight.

There was Harrison, who made his pile when Pardon won the cup,

The old man with his hair as white as snow;

But few could ride beside him when his blood was fairly up

He would go wherever horse and man could go.

And Clancy of the Overflow came down to lend a hand,

No better horseman ever held the reins;

For never horse could throw him while the saddle-girths would stand

He learnt to ride while droving on the plains.

And one was there, a stripling on a small and weedy beast;

He was something like a racehorse undersized,

With a touch of Timor pony—three parts thoroughbred at least

And such as are by mountain horsemen prized.

He was hard and tough and wiry—just the sort that won't say die

There was courage in his quick impatient tread;

And he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye,

And the proud and lofty carriage of his head.

A bush hut that could provide shelter for the horsemen, if necessary

Paterson’s timing was perfect. Australia was still a cluster of colonies under the British crown, and would not achieve independent nationhood until the turn of the new century. Yet by the late 1880s and into the 1890s Australians were already seeking a distinctive national identity. The Man from Snowy River reminded urban Australians of the unique land they were part of and introduced them to the characters and animals of the hot, dry, unBritish countryside. Coffee With Allan Cockerill said although most of the population were and are still urban dwellers, there was still a strong link and identification with bush culture. I would add that Australians who had never in their lives seen a shearing shed or shod a horse, now saw in the Man from Snowy River qualities that would epitomise a brand new nation.

Most Australians have at least visited the Snowy River with its headwaters in the Snowy Mountains, beautifully described by Mike Down Under blog. Being in the Great Dividing Range in Victoria near the New South Wales border, it can be a very cold place in winter. And while the location of the ride in the poem is left unspecified, a number of towns claim to be the original site, including Corryong.

Paterson became a war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age during the Second Boer War, leaving for South Africa in late 1899. He was one of the first war correspondents to write from the actual war zone, sending off graphic accounts of the surrender of Bloemfontein and the capture of Pretoria. When WW1 started in 1914, he became an ambulance driver with the Australian Voluntary Hospital in France.

One of the great films made here when Australia had an impressive film industry was The Man from Snowy River, made in 1920. This silent black and white film was closely based on the Banjo Paterson poem. Today he is honoured in films and plays, as described by Exploded Views blog, but is best known by being the face of the Australian ten dollar note.

Paterson on the ten dollar note

Amazing botanical artist III - Berthe Hoola van Nooten

Here is another amazing female botanical artist in the tradition of Marianne North and Marian Ellis Rowan.

Berthe Hoola van Nooten (1817 - 1892) was the daughter of an Utrecht vicar. There is little on record about her young years, except that she was already fascinated by natural science and particularly skilled at flower painting.

In 1838 she married Dirk Hoola van Nooten. After their marriage, the couple travelled to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America, where Dirk Hoola van Nooten worked as a judge. Berthe often travelled between Suriname and Batavia (now Jakarta) with her husband, and it was during these travels that her interest in botanical plants and painting grew. The records show that she sent cultivated plants back to botanical gardens in the Netherlands. These specimens were collected on trips through Suriname and Java with her husband.

Only nine years after her marriage and with five young children, van Nooten’s husband suddenly died in 1847, leaving her with large debts and a large young family. Unable to pay for the family’s journey back to the Netherlands, the young widow decided to take advantage of her compulsory banishment. Aware of the great interest in Europe for lavish illustrations of exotic fruit and flowers, she decided to produce watercolour plates depicting interesting plant species from Java. Would she have bothered creating professional works, had she not been so pressed financially? Probably not.

Cynometra Cauliflora or Nam Nam

After returning home to the Netherlands, she tried to get her watercolours publish but failed. It was only through the intervention and eventual patronage of the Netherlandish Queen Sophie Mathilde, who strongly supported the arts, that Berthe was finally able to get a selection of her paintings published in 1864. Queen Sophie, wife of the Dutch King William III, was no intellectual slouch. She corresponded with several European scholars, protected and stimulated the arts and supported her favourite causes, including the construction of public parks. But the records don’t say how Berthe came to the Queen’s attention.

The forty large plates in the book "Fleurs fruits et feuillages choisis de l’ile de Java" were printed in Belgium from Van Nooten's original sketches by the Belgian lithographer Pieter Depannemaeker, using the new technique of chromolithography. The exquisite colour-plates, often finished by hand, depicted a range of Java’s tropical splendour; its indigenous and introduced flowering trees, shrubs, decorative flowers and plants with edible fruits. Each brilliantly coloured plate was accompanied by a description of the plants and their culinary, medical and other uses in French and English.

BibliOdyssey blog has beautiful versions of some of the fruit illustrations. Botany Photo of the Day blog has an exquisite flower I have never seen before: torch ginger which was native to Indonesia, Malaysia and southern Thailand. Visual Creative blog saw the arts works of famous Victorian women and dreamt of becoming a specialist in botanical illustration.

Van Nooten managed to accentuate the splendour of each species by adopting a style that combined great precision and clarity with a touch of neo-Baroque exuberance, revelling in the rich forms and colours of the tropics. Cynometra Cauliflora/Nam Nam for example, is native to South East Asia and is a small tree having a knotted trunk yielding edible light brown or greenish yellow flowered fruit.

Carica papaya

Despite three editions of the work being published during her lifetime, Berthe Hoola van Nooten died in poverty in Batavia in 1892. So how did copies of the original publication get into Australian libraries? Apparently the books were acquired from Daphne van Nooten whose late husband was the artist’s great great nephew. Published some 16 years after the first edition, the 1880 editions held by the 3 Australian libraries (National Library of Australia in Canberra, State Library of Victoria and University of Melbourne’s library) is regarded as an improved edition. In acquiring this publication, the libraries were aware of another C19th female artist whose work complemented those already held in Australia.

The Tropenmuseum is an anthropological museum located in Amsterdam and established in 1864 in order to show the Netherlands’ overseas possessions. The museum, operated by the Royal Tropical Institute, uses visual arts and photographic works for its exhibitions.  Its two beautiful portraits of our artist are in the permanent collection.

Two recent specialist exhibitions should be noted. In Washington DC, Illustrating Nature: Three Centuries of Botanical Prints showcased the tremendous contributions women artists made to the development of botanical art from the C17th onwards. The 2001 exhibition, organised by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, featured 50 prints and four books by British and European artists. The illustrations of artists who completed works while travelling abroad make up a significant part of the exhibition, including Berthe Hoola Van Nooten.

Map Batavia/Jakarta

Studio Botanika NY specialises in botanical and natural history prints from 1700 on. They are having a very special exhibit showing the work of women botanical illustrators, including Berthe Hoola van Nooten. They noted that it was typical for many women artists to sign their work only as: 'by a lady.' Victorian women were modest, reserved and not self-promoting; thus their contributions, however great, were rarely recognised. Those who did illustrate professionally were typically underpaid. However the time was right because, during the Victorian era, exploration became so common because the elite of society craved the most unusual plants. Plant breeding exploded, and vast conservatories were constructed to hold the plant oddities.

The Bluest Blue has a gorgeous botanical print by Augusta Innes Baker Withers (1792–1869). Now I must look for any published material about Ms Withers.

WW1 paintings in the Fine Arts Society, London, 2009

In 1917, The Fine Arts Society in London exhibited a series of works called The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals. Commissioned by the Bureau of Information, the exhibition used 9 headings: Making Soldiers, Making Sailors, Making Guns, Building Ships, Building Aircraft, Transport by Sea, Women’s Work, Work on the Land and Tending the Wounded. 12 artists made prints for the ‘Ideals’ and nine artists depicted the ‘Efforts’.

Nevinson, 

Paths of Glory, 1917

Christopher Nevinson (1889–1946), one of the important artists in the exhibition, studied alongside Paul Nash, Ben Nicolson and Stanley Spencer and became Britain’s foremost Futurist. But it is his pictures of the Great War, based on his experiences on the Western Front as an ambulance driver in the Army Medical Corps that Mike McKiernan focused on. Nevinson was the first artist to depict realistically what was happening at the Western Front and although not a confirmed pacifist, his antiwar sentiments led him to emphasise the appalling human cost of war. Paths of Glory, now in the Imperial War Museum, was censored during WW1.

This 1917 show did not include George Lambert,  Charles Jagger or Will Longstaff, so I have included them in previous posts.

Recently (2009) The Fine Arts Society in London once again held an exhibition called War. They wrote that wars were the catalyst for the best artists of their generation to produce some of their most modern, powerful and beautiful work, even more importantly because photographic images of the reality of war had been repressed. The show included two of the most stark and memorable works on paper of WW1, Returning to the Trenches by CRW Nevinson and The Void of War by Paul Nash. There is also a group of three horror-filled paintings by Nash done in the trenches in 1917, in which he vividly recorded a landscape transformed by high explosive.

Nevinson, 

French Troops Resting, 1916

Many of the artists (Charles Sargeant Jagger, Paul Nash, CRW Nevinson, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth) were on the battle fields themselves during WW1. This first-hand experience gave their work immediacy and brutal honesty. It took a message from the trenches to the firesides back at home. Nevinson's 1916 drypoints were his first prints of war subjects. He served with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver, stretcher-bearer and interpreter, and was faced with the wounded, many of whom died through lack of medical attention, in scenes of unspeakable horror.

Jagger’s The Driver, part of the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, is one of his greatest and most moving sculptures. Consider it alongside Wipers, a bronze of a rifleman standing with bayonet fixed. The large watercolour Gunners Pulling Cannons at Ypres by William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth’s woodcut Drydocked for Scaling and Painting were equally powerful.

The Fine Art Society put up a number of the paintings on their web page. So did Weimar with an excellent range of Allied and German WW1 paintings.

Spanish missions in California: architecture and industry

I asked my history students about Spanish (1697–1821) and Mexican (1821-34) mission architecture in California and no-one knew anything about it. Nor did they know about the Mexican ranchos (1834-49).

The Kingdom of Spain always sought to establish missions to convert to Roman Catholicism the pagans in New Spain i.e Caribbean, Mexico and most of what today is the SW USA. This was to save their souls, of course, but also to facilitate colonisation of these lands awarded to Spain by the Catholic Church. The Spanish Crown laid claim to Alta California in 1542, but the first permanent Jesuit mission, Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó, wasn’t established till 1697. Jesuit control over the peninsula was only very slowly extended.

The missions arose from the need to control Spain's ever-expanding holdings. The government and Church realised the colonies would require a literate population base that Spain could not supply. The c300,000 indigenous Americans had to learn Spanish, vocations and Christianity.

San Diego de Alcalá Mission, founded in 1769

Alta California was to be settled by Franciscan monks, protected by troops in the California Missions. The Franciscans hoped to convert the tribes to Christianity and to train them for life in colonial society. Converts were required to live in the walled mission enclosure or on rancherías, separate settlements sponsored by missions.

Loreto Mission had been running since 1697. But it wasn’t until the threat of incursion by Russian fur traders and potentially settlers, coming down from Alaska episodically in the 1760s, that Spain felt development and control of the northern colonies was necessary.

Father-Presidente was the head of the Catholic missions in Alta and Baja California, appointed by the College of San Fernando de Mexico. After King Carlos III ordered the Jesuits expelled from New Spain in 1768, the Franciscan Junípero Serra became Father Presidente. Serra founded the San Diego de Alcalá Mission in 1769. Later that year, Serra and his men moved up north. They reached Monterey in 1770, where Serra founded the next mission, San Carlos Borromeo Mission.

The road then was merely a horse and mule trail. To facilitate travel, new mission settlements were established about 50ks apart; they were separated by one day's long ride on horseback or 3 days on foot all the way along the 966ks el Camino Real. Heavy freight movement along the California Mission Trail was practical only via water. By 1821, there were 21 Franciscan Alta California missions.

Camino Real, 966ks long, completed by 1821

In 1798 the Spanish started to fill in the spaces along El Camino Real with 5 additional outposts. Sub-missions were small-scale missions that regularly conducted Mass but lacked a resident priest. Sub-missions were established in areas with high numbers of potential native converts and where travellers could take lodging.

Most missions were small, staffed by 2 Franciscans and 6-8 soldiers under an officer, who generally acted as steward of the mission's temporal affairs. Once empowered to erect a mission, the officers chose a site that had a good water and wood supplies, and good fields for herds and crops. The church, kitchen, living quarters, workshops and storerooms were grouped around a quadrangle. A baptised Indian was no longer free to move about the country, but had to labour and worship at the mission under their strict supervision.

The goal of the missions was, above all, to become self-sufficient in relatively short order. So crop farming was the most important industry of any mission. Grapes were also grown & fermented into wine for sacramental use and for trade. Mission Grape was first planted at Mission San Juan Capistrano in 1779; in 1783, the first wine produced in Alta California emerged from the mission's winery. Mission San Gabriel Arcángel introduced the California citrus industry with the planting of the region’s first significant orchard in 1804. Olives (first cultivated at Mission San Diego de Alcalá) were grown, both for use at the mission and to trade for other goods. As Gardens of a Golden Afternoon blog has shown,  gardens were a central part of mission productivity (and beauty).

Mission San Juan Capistrano, founded 1776

Carpenters made wooden structures and furniture. Bricks were fired in kilns, as were ceramic pots. We can call the mission system a giant training school that comprised agriculture, mechanical arts and the raising of live-stock.

Because I am more interested in the architecture, I relied on Native American Netroots to talk about conditions in the missions. "The Franciscan missions were basically slave plantations which required the Indian people to work for the Spanish under cruel conditions. Indians did not come freely to the missions and once there, they were held against their will. Many attempted to escape, and the soldiers stationed at the mission would attempt to recapture them. Escape attempts are severely punished by the Franciscans. Backed by a small number of soldiers stationed at the missions, the priests imposed a rigid system of coerced and disciplined labour, enforced by the use of corporal punishment and other forms of control".

California during the Mission Period was divided into four military districts. Each mission had its own soldiers, nonetheless the independent presidios/barracks , strategically placed along the coast, were built to protect the missions and other Spanish settlements in Upper California. Built from 1769-82, each of these garrisons functioned as a base of military operations for its region eg El Presidio Real de San Carlos de Monterey defended San Luis Obispo Mission. These presidios had guard houses, store rooms, living quarters and an observation tower, and became part of Spanish strategy to halt Russian incursions south. Later the Sonoma Presidio became the new Californian headquarters of the Mexican Army.

Each frontier station was forced to be self-supporting, so the missions were given the responsibility of providing the presidios with the necessary food and manufactured goods to sustain operations. At this stage Spanish influence was marked by the chain of missions reaching from Loreto, north to San Diego to just north of today's San Francisco Bay area, and extended inland c30-70ks from the missions. Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad 1791 was located farthest inland, but even this was only 48 ks from the coast.

By 1819, during the exhausting The Mexican War of Independence, Spain decided to limit its reach to Northern California due to the costs involved in sustaining these remote outposts. Only two missions were created north of San Francisco, San Rafael and the Mission San Francisco Solano, founded in Sonoma in 1823. Solano was the last mission opened in the chain; an attempt to found a 22nd mission in Santa Rosa in 1827 failed.

Since the beginning, mission development had been financed out of The Pious Fund of the Californias and consisted of voluntary donations made in Mexico to members of the Society of Jesus. With the onset of the Mexican War of Independence in 1810, this support largely disappeared, and the missions and their converts were left on their own.

Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, founded 1771

The first native Mexican to be elected Governor of Alta California issued a Proclamation of Emancipation in Jul 1826. All Indians within the military districts of San Diego, Santa Barbara and Monterey were freed from missionary rule. Under the General Law of Secularisation of 1827, all persons born in Spain were declared illegal immigrants and were expelled, including many of the Californian clergy. The Mexican Congress passed An Act for the Secularisation of the Missions of California in 1833. It provided for rancher colonisation of both Alta and Baja California, the expenses to come from the the sale of the mission property. In 1834, under the Decree of Confiscation, 9 other settlements soon closed, with 6 more in 1835; San Buenaventura and San Francisco de Asís were among the last to close, in 1836. Today all that remains of the original Mission San Buenaventura is the church and garden. Services are still held in the parish church, where the altar is intact. A small, on-site museum has displays of mission-era artefacts.
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St Luis Rey, founded 1798.

After secularisation, the Father Presidente transferred the missions' headquarters to Mission Santa Barbara, making it the repository of documents from all the scattered missions.

During the Mexican Rancho Period (1834–49), settlements with large land grants were turned into ranchos, where cattle and sheep were raised. The owners of these ranchos styled themselves after the landed gentry in Spain, and they dominated the ranching industry. At the peak of the missions’ functioning in 1832, the missions controlled perhaps a sixth of Alta California, but the missions faded in importance under Mexican control, while ranching and trade grew.

Although the territory of California was annexed in 1848 by the USA, after the Mexican-American War, a number of mission structures survived or were rebuilt, as noted by the California Beaches Blog and My Two Cents blog. The California Missions Travel Guide is very useful for details about the 21 missions, 5 sub-missions, 5 presidios and 4 ranches.

It is from this inspiration that modern Mission Revival Style architecture emerged.

Excessively Diverting Blog Award winners

The aim of the Excessively Diverting Blog Award is to acknowledge writing excellence in the spirit of Jane Austen’s genius in amusing and delighting readers with her irony, humour, wit and talent for keen observation. Recipients will uphold the highest standards in the art of the sparkling banter, witty repartee, and gentle reprove. This award was created by the blogging team of Jane Austen Today to ack­now­­ledge superior writing over the Internet and promote Jane Austen’s brilliance.

Here are my nominees:

1. At My Soiree. This blog is indeed sophisticated, intelligent and interesting. One of the few bloggers who write as if their readers were educated and thoughtful.

2. Emm in London. Fabulous text and images from modern and historical London, arguably the most exciting city on earth.

3. Your Brisbane: Past and Present. The foto fanatic has found historical material about Brisbane that I would have thought was lost for all time. Super duper blog.

4. ThinkShop. A surprise and pleasure - long, thoughtful articles on history, politics and literature, just about my favourite mixture of disciplines.

5. Edwardian Promenade. Evangeline is covering topics that are becoming more and more interesting to my reading. And she covers them in depth.

6. The Textile Blog. The posts are long, detailed and a total pleasure to read. If I was putting my favourites in order, I would put this one near the top.

7. The Victorian Era. Great topics and lots of informative text and images. Despite my years studying renaissance and early modern history, the Victorian and Edwards blogs I have nominated have changed my focus entirely. What joy!

7. History and traditions of England. I couldn't leave out a blog that finds _my_ all-time favourite historical questions and writes them up beautifully. And the images are always spot on.

Recipients, please claim your award by copying the HTML code of the Excessively Diverting Blog Award badge, posting it on your blog, listing the name of the person who nominated you, and linking to their blog. Then nominate seven (7) other blogs that you feel meet or exceed the standards set forth. Nominees may place the Excessively Diverting badge in their side bar and enjoy the appreciation of their fellow blogger for recognition of their talent.