I started out reading my Tolstoy book, looked up 'kochevka', (a dome-shaped, semicircular tent in which Tolstoy at one time stayed, on the steppes 80 miles east of Samara), and discovered the above creature is a sea cucumber, and that people from Makassar (Sulawesi) were probably coming to drag them from the ocean floor in northern Australia in the 1400s!!!!!!! They brought Islam to the Aborigines and traded and intermarried with them!!!!! Now why has nobody ever mentioned this to me before???????????? (Gwynne, I'll bet your George knew!)
From Wikipedia:
Makassar contact with Aboriginal people had a significant effect on their cultures. The visits are remembered vividly today, through oral history, songs and dances, and rock and bark paintings, as well as the cultural legacy of transformations that resulted from the contact.
A Makassar pidgin became a lingua franca along the north coast, not just between Makassar and Aboriginal people, but also between different Aboriginal groups, who were brought into greater contact with each other by the seafaring Makassar culture. Words from the Makassar language (related to Javanese and Indonesian) can still be found in Aboriginal language varieties of the north coast; examples include rupiah (money), jama (work), and balanda (white person), which originally came to the Makassar language via the Malay 'orang belanda' meaning Dutch people from the root word for swamp.
Honestly, we are so darned eurocentric!!!
How did I get from kochevka to sea cucumber, you may well ask. Bashkirs (Sunni Muslims who live on the steppes near Samara), to Islam in India (I heard a discussion about Muslims in India on Radio National the other night and hopped in there for a quick look), to Muslims in Australia...and voila!
9:15pm I must have the attention span of a gnat - now look what I've found:
Moscow graffiti!!! Isn't it wonderful! Google Moscow graffiti images yourself if you have some spare time. I've given up watching TV - this is much better fun! First I found this when I was wandering round the map of Moscow, then spent ages tracking it down so I could save it and get it into the blog.
From Wikipedia:
Makassar contact with Aboriginal people had a significant effect on their cultures. The visits are remembered vividly today, through oral history, songs and dances, and rock and bark paintings, as well as the cultural legacy of transformations that resulted from the contact.
A Makassar pidgin became a lingua franca along the north coast, not just between Makassar and Aboriginal people, but also between different Aboriginal groups, who were brought into greater contact with each other by the seafaring Makassar culture. Words from the Makassar language (related to Javanese and Indonesian) can still be found in Aboriginal language varieties of the north coast; examples include rupiah (money), jama (work), and balanda (white person), which originally came to the Makassar language via the Malay 'orang belanda' meaning Dutch people from the root word for swamp.
Honestly, we are so darned eurocentric!!!
How did I get from kochevka to sea cucumber, you may well ask. Bashkirs (Sunni Muslims who live on the steppes near Samara), to Islam in India (I heard a discussion about Muslims in India on Radio National the other night and hopped in there for a quick look), to Muslims in Australia...and voila!
9:15pm I must have the attention span of a gnat - now look what I've found:
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