Sydney is a country

I was recently looking at an advertisement for an art installation by an Estonian artist who is comparing her experience between the "lands" of Estonia and Sydney.

Being a pedantic so-and-so, my first instinct was to day "Sydney is a city", but then I suddenly realised, with absolutely clarity, that it really is a country.

The thing about Australia is that we're under the illusion that the entire continent is one country, simply because it is governed by one federal government. But the truth is, this giant chunk of land of ours used to be hundreds of countries, and each one had it's own particular and peculiar features.

Sydney is a completely different country to, say, Townsville. Both are entirely different to Stanley in NW Tasmania, and even that is different to Cockle Creek, in SE Tasmania. Tasmania isn't terribly big (by Australian terms), but even it was once considered to be multiple lands with multiple "nations" living there.

I was looking at a map of Indigenous Australia, and the area where I live used to be three separate "countries" - and when I think about it, each of those areas is quite distinct from each other. You can tell when you've moved from Bindal into Gugu-Badun - the landscape changes completely.

Which got me thinking about the difference between what we (Westerners) think of when we say "country" and what the First Nations/Indigenous people think of when they say "country". It's the same word, but there is a world of difference in the meaning.

I've been reading a bit about the traditional folk life and history of Estonia lately, and they note distinct differences in the cultural life, farming practices and landscape between one area and another - even though Estonia is about half the size of Tasmania.

The land shapes the people and the people shape the land.

At least, that's how it used to be.

Cabbage and Mince (Eesti toit)

I've been hankering for cabbage and mince for a while now.

It's hard to explain it, but I have some sort of deep memory of this dish - like I ate it once a long time ago and can no longer remember where, when or under what circumstances.

I expect my grandmother probably made it once.  She made cabbage rolls on more than one occasion.  My grandmother left Estonia when she was a child, and the only part of her culture she really kept was the food she made on special occasions.  Sauerkraut and skumbria, mainly, but occasionally cabbage rolls and brawn (we never called it "head cheese", and I refuse to).

My mother was never keen on cabbage rolls, so actively avoided encouraging the combination of cabbage and mince.  I made them once, under my grandmother's guidance, and realised that the amount of work involved wasn't worth it just for the delicious goodness of combining cabbage and mince.

Some time ago I bought a dual-language Estonian cookbook, and one of the recipes was for cabbage and mince.  I filed it away in the "I must try to make this" compartment of my brain.

Well, recently I've just been craving the dish.  I have no idea why, but something deep inside me has been saying "do you know what would be awesome?  Cabbage and mince."

So I rustled up a couple of different recipes, and sort of weaved a path between them that struck a balance between "tasty" and "lazy".

The results?  Good, wholesome food.  It really is awesome.  Plain, simple, yet tasty, and with a goodness that warms you from the inside out.  It honestly seemed like I've been eating this stuff my whole life.

And I fed it to my mother and she didn't hate it.  That's a success in anyone's books.

I think my grandmother would have enjoyed it, and it's a shame I didn't try making this years ago.

The recipe I cobbled together from a few different ones was as follows:

400g lean mince
1 onion, cut in half and thinly sliced
2 carrots, coarsely grated
1/2 a large head of cabbage, thinly sliced
beef stock (I used a heaped teaspoon of Bonox, but a crumbed stock cube would work)
Salt and pepper to taste
Cup of hot water
Bit of oil for browning the meat 

I also added about 100g of diced bacon, because one of the recipes I'd seen in the past had asked for a mixture of pork and beef mince, and my mother seemed more likely to eat it if the bacon was involved. 

Cook the cabbage in a pot with the cup of hot water, being careful not to overcook it. 

Meanwhile, in a deep frying pan, fry the onions and meat until the onions are soft and the meat is completely browned, then add the carrots and seasoning with a little bit of water to dissolve the stock.  Stir through, then add the cooked cabbage to the meat (including the water in the pot) and stir through.  

Cook for another ten minutes until the cabbage has infused with the flavours of the pan and the liquid has reduced. 

Serve with boiled potatoes and rye bread.

Vikings, part 2

So, I've been corrected: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_pirates

Apparently Estonians were quite the piratical villains. This makes me not only very happy, but now perfectly comfortable with the idea of buying Viking themed stuff.



Not that people would actually make such stuff in women's wear*. That would be far too, I don't know, non-gender-stereotyped. We must confirm to standard expectations, mustn't we? Boys can be interested in Vikings, girls can be interested in flowers.

If girls want to be interested in Vikings we will have to make them suitably girly. Maybe make them pink and put flowers in their hair, or something. If boys want to be interested in flowers, they can just go over and sit in the gay corner, thank you, and remove themselves from the regular male spectrum. It might otherwise damage the balance of the universe, if people don't sit neatly in their prescribed gender boxes.

Having said that, though, I like their flower design, too:



*Mind you, I still maintain that T-Shirts are, and always have been unisex. Except for women's specific T-Shirts which are terribly uncomfortable for anyone who has shoulders and likes moving his or her arms.

Vikings

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm reasonably sure Estonians were invaded by Vikings, rather than being one of the origins of everyone's favourite invading hoards...

http://www.estowear.com/shop/collections/viking-collection/mens-crew-neck-sweatshirt-estonian-viking-ship-white#

This is why I love Estonia

Folk Society Seeks Dance Festival Grounds

"We need a whole stadium built specifically for a dance festival"

"Sounds fair enough."

A thing of beauty...

On a bus trip between Pärnu and Tallinn, I found myself sitting next to a young Estonian woman who was busily crocheting a bag of some description.

I didn't know what she was crocheting originally but, in the time-honoured tradition of librarians, I asked her and was rewarded with an answer. From enquiring about her own käsitöö project, we went on to discuss the Estonian obsession with woolen crafts and ended up discussing various other aspects of the Estonian culture and landscape.

It was a very interesting conversation, and I'm sure it will provide fodder for a number of future posts.

Among the things discussed, we got around to talking about ugly apartment buildings. Now, I have previously mentioned the proliferation of ugly apartment buildings in Estonia, as well as my opinion that it was some sort of plot by the Soviets to crush the souls of the occupied peoples. Either that, or provide cheap accommodation. Either way, they're really ugly - and not in a good way.

I mentioned this to my crocheting companion, and she confirmed the "affordable housing" theory, and agreed that the buildings were unnecessarily horrible. There was no good purpose for making a building look that much like soulless slab of concrete, but the Soviets just didn't bother making things pretty.

In the course of the conversation, we came to the conclusion that this was their biggest mistake - they never improved anything. They never made a place better for having them there.

Now, it must be stressed that I'm talking about the Soviets, not the Russians. When you see the buildings created by the "old believers" and the Russians fleeing Soviet Russia, they're quite nice. Heck, their churches are absolutely amazing - I didn't see a single Russian Orthodox church that wasn't fabulous.

No, it's the Soviets who, for some reason, decided that the only way all citizens of the USSR could be equal was for them all to be equally miserable.

The Russians still like to think their "occupation" was something else - something nice. They didn't replace one undesirable regime with another one, they "liberated" these vulnerable countries from the Nazis. The countries they took under their wing were better off - being members of the Soviet Union was good for them, and they should be grateful...

Let's not go into the politics for why the Soviets didn't actually liberate the Estonians from anyone - let's instead look at the ugly apartment buildings:







(These aren't the worst apartment buildings I saw in Estonia, just the worst ones I could find on KV.EE when I was only going to spend less than five minutes looking.)

Now, seriously, who could possibly be grateful for having those things shoved into your previously nice, pretty town? And that's not all. While the Soviets were in town, they also burnt down the nice buildings and knocked over the statues and public works of art - then replaced them with new buildings and monuments that were... *ahem*... "functional" and "workmanlike", and were specifically designed to inspire people to remember they were all comrades under the Soviet government.

I'm sorry, Mr Stalin, but workmen are allowed to have some beauty in their lives as well - and things can be "functional" without being devoid of any pleasing qualities.

If the Soviets had only let people keep their own art and culture and create their own beautiful things, instead of pushing them all through the "miserable and ugly" Soviet cookie-cutter, they might have been tolerated quite happily. Instead, they moved into town and made things worse - not better.

That's (one of the reasons) why the occupied countries will probably never see the Soviets as a kind and benevolent people who were only trying to make the world a better place.

So, if anyone else out there is thinking of starting up a totalitarian regime and calling it a "benevolent" power, I have a piece of advice for you: make sure everything you do is beautiful in some way. People may take a lot longer to notice you're squeezing them dry if you aren't also crushing their souls.

Celebrated in Stone and Street

I think this is one of the things I loved most about Estonia:



Yep, that's a sculpture of a sculptor. I found this gem nestled in a park in Tallinn - just outside of Kadriorg Palace - on my last morning in the country. It was one of the last things I saw before flying out of Estonia, and I found it strangely appropriate. You see, by the time I found this sculpture, I actually recognised its subject (in name, at least)... from other sculptures.

Quite often, in my rambles, I would come across a monument or sculpture that was originally created by an Estonian sculptor, before being destroyed by the Soviets and rebuilt after Estonia reclaimed its independence, and quite a few times the original "author" was none other than Jaan Koort. Heck, my accommodation when I first got to Estonia was right next to his deer sculpture in Tallin's Old Town.

The thing is, there are stacks of statues and sculptures in Estonia. They're all over the place. Walk through any given park in any given town and you're bound to come across a monument of some sort. Most of them are statues of people who contributed to Estonia's scientific knowledge, literary heritage or culture.

Like these two:




That guy at the top, Ferdinand Veiki, was a puppeteer (the founder of a puppet theater). Raymond Valgre was a composer of "pop" music. You would never get sculptures of people like that in Australia. We just don't think of our cultural history that way.

Did you carry the sick and wounded through battle fields on the back of a donkey? Well, then we'll give you a statue. Were you a monarch nominally in charge of the country? Then I suppose you should also get a statue. Were you some public figure who could afford to donate important things to the city? Okay, you can have a statue, too. You were really good at cricket? Well, of course you can have a statue! You discovered a breakthrough in the genetic coding of sea sponges that could potentially save thousands of lives? That's really nice, but no statue, sorry. You were what? The founder of the most influential theater company in Australian history? Pffft! No statue for you.

Not so Estonia. They happily and willingly celebrate every citizen who contributed, well, anything. Scientists, poets, playwrights, newspaper editors, athletes... sculptors.

Then there are the "big guns". Like this guy:



Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald - the son of a shoemaker who wrote a poem and went on to have a street named after him in almost every second town in Estonia. I saw about three or four statues dedicated to him during my two weeks in that "Great Little Country", and his name just kept popping up on maps all over the place - along with the names of Lydia Koidula (I saw her statue in Pärnu), Johann Köler (Viljandi), Carl Robert Jackobson (I'm pretty sure he was in Viljandi, too), August Weizenberg (I didn't actually see his statue, but I saw some of the statues he "authored")...

Who were these people? Writers, artists and scholars, mostly. Sure, they were also political activists, in one way or another, but it was their cultural output that earnt them the streets and statues. Their works became vitally important to the Estonian people during the cultural revolution/National Awakening. When the country needed to say "Look, this is us, this is ours, we have a vibrant culture all of our own", these writers and artists gave them works to hold up, like a mirror, to their budding nation to see a reflection that wasn't German, Swedish or Russian - it was Estonian.

When you think about, that's something worth celebrating in stone and street.

Having grown up in Australia, where we're only proud of Australian things if they involve a ball or a battle of some description, it was strangely refreshing to see a country so thoroughly in love with it's own culture and the people who contributed towards it. Maybe, one day, when Australia grows up and has it's own "National Awakening", we'll have statues of Ray Lawler and streets named after Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Hey, a girl can dream, can't she?