TRAVEL FACES: GROETHE's LAST STAND - a photographer extraordinaire

Bill Groethe considers his most important work the series of photos he took in 1948 of the Native American survivors of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, better known as Custer’s Last Stand.

These portraits were taken at an event at Custer State Park in South Dakota, a place I stayed at in September, 2014 just before the annual Buffalo Roundup.

(On June 25 and 26, 1876 the 7^th Cavalry led by Lt Col George A Custer was defeated in Montana at what Indian tribes called the Battle of the Greasy Grass. I understand the people in the photo are Little Warrior, Pemmican, Little Soldier, Dewey Beard, High Eagle, Iron Hawk, Comes Again, Nicholas Black Elk and John Sitting Bull, who although not a survivor, represented his adoptive father, Sitting Bull.)

Later I visit the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and while talking to archivist Tawa Ducheneaux at the Woksape Tipi Library at the Oglala Lakota College, my eye is drawn to the prints of these photos on the wall. I try to do the maths and work out what Groethe later tells me – these men were between 85 and 90 years old when he took their pictures.

Ducheneaux tells me Groethe is not only alive (he’s 91) but still working as hard as ever. I call him at his shop when I get to Rapid City and he says to come quickly as he and his wife are getting ready to do another trip to the battle site in Montana, where a frieze is being made of his photos, sandblasted into granite – part of a memorial to the Oglala Sioux area tribes, who fought there.

“They’ve had a memorial from day one almost of the troops; the battlefield used to be called Custer Battlefield but now it’s Little Big Horn Battlefield (national monument).  It took many years to get it changed,” Groethe tells me.

As for the background to the famous portraits: “I took the photos all in the one day. The youngest was 13 at the battle, 85 when I took him.”

So how did it come about? Well, as he says, they all knew this pesky, teenage photographer, who’d been hanging round taking photos of them for months.

“I grew up here,” he explains. “I used to follow them around. They called me ‘the kid’. I was always going to their dances and stuff and photographing them.

“They were disappearing fast. In ‘51, the 75th anniversary, there were only three of them left.”

I ask Groethe if he asked his subjects about their experiences at this famous almost-end to the Indian wars.

“I never talked to them…the battle’s over. They were trying to live and assimilate into the community, make a little money when they dressed up for a powwow.

“I concentrate on my job. I want to get the images right and (it) takes a little more time. Talk to and learn from the people so I didn’t have to take a lot of pictures because I couldn’t afford to buy so much film.”                                 

One of his subjects, Dewey Beard, also survived Wounded Knee, 14 years later.

 “He lost his wife and daughter and he and his brother escaped. He was the last to die. He has a double survival record. He died November 2, 1955 and that happens to be South Dakota Day.

 “It’s the most important work I’ve done,” he says explaining he started as an apprentice with  Bert Bell,  when he was 12.

 What have your learnt from the Lakota and other Oglala Sioux, I ask?

 "I thought I had compassion but they’ve got more than the average white man to put up with us, I tell you.  When you’re all in the same boat in the Depression you’re all poor. I had no problems. Today we have more problems all the time because disparity is increasing all the time.

 “I learnt a lot, these people are very gentle really, considering they’re the warrior bunch. After the war was over and they were made to settle down and so many of them are all over that. They don’t want to talk about that. I never ask them either.”

 One major regret he has is that a writer, David Humphreys Miller, who asked to use his colour slides of the Battle of the Little Big Horn survivors, never returned them.

 “I shot 5 x 7 black and white of each one and then I shot 5 x 7 transparencies in colour the same time, so the images are almost exactly the same but I was young, I trusted this man and he was going to write a story for National Geographic and I foolishly gave him the transparencies and he never returned them.

 “He’s gone, his wife’s gone, I know the family has them someplace because 20 years ago he tried to sell those to the battlefield and of course they recognised immediately that they were the same poses as mine. They refused him and they called me right away and I still haven’t been able to run him down and now he’s gone.”

 One of his projects is to shoot all the phases of what is known as the Lakota Moon, so laborious a task that he’s so far only taken eight shots in 25 years.  The moons represent the different seasons, based on information from the famous book, Black Elk Speaks.

 “The scarlet moon is September and that’s when the wild plums are scarlet in the reservation. The moon of ripe cherries, that’s when the wild cherries are a deep plum colour.

 “I’ve still got four to get. You only get a minute or two to shoot. The foreground and moon have to be at the same density. You can teach chemistry and how to fix a machine, but a natural view is God-given.

 “I sit there and wait and then I shoot. Otherwise I pack up and go home.  I’ve set up and packed up 100 times.”

 "You’ve had a very interesting life,” I say in awe of this modest and fascinating photographer, who never uses a digital camera for his own work, as he shows me his room full of cameras and lenses. (He also once owned production labs in seven states – all since closed.)

 “Well, it’ not past,” he answers. “I work every day. I work four days in the lab and I take Friday to get ready to do a shoot. I went to (Mount) Rushmore every Saturday all summer.

 "I’m a commercial photographer. I’ve done portraits. I no longer do that… I do a lot of the tough jobs, photographing murals, things that nobody else wants to spend the time to do.”

 *        A longer version of this interview/story is available at request.

Photos: Diana Plater. Apologies to Bill Groethe for the quality!

TRAVEL FACES: Fighting cocks, Bali starlings and fried chicken

Ollie Smith and I wrote Raging Partners back in 2000 and we are in the midst of turning it into an e-book.

Our new chapter will be about our love affairs with Bali and the Balinese. Here's an excerpt from the work-in-progress:

To the Birds: Fighting cocks, Bali starlings and fried chicken.

Ollie’s little house in Dalung was filled with Balinese men partying every night, and cleaning up each morning. Cigarette butts were swept away and all traces of alcohol – beer and arak, the sickly sweet palm brandy that Balinese love. They’d sit in a circle and pass a cup around, sometimes mixed with orange juice, gradually getting drunker and more sentimental as the night wore on. Music would blare from a tinny tape recorder. Their favourite at the time was James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful. I’ll never get that damned song out of my head.

In the morning one of the men would make us kopi bali – thick, black and sweet – and we’d sit on little timber stools on Ollie’s verandah and survey the comings and goings of the street. Ollie had met Nyoman the year before – a sexy, silver-jewellery-wearing Balinese 20 years her junior – which led to her buying this house.

Nyoman’s father had had 18 children to two wives. He was actually married three times, but his first wife died childless. So Nyoman had a string of brothers and sisters and cousins who would come to the house on their motorbikes.

One night I was sitting inside on one of the benches under a fan to try and cool off from the steamy heat when one of these half brothers turned up. Budi was wearing a white sarong and udung as he’d just come from a ceremony, which matched his shiny teeth. He sat on one side of the window with the men, flirting through the wooden slats with me like a priest hearing confession.

Budi was a breath of fresh air after what I’d just been through: dad’s death six months before and a divorce.

I guess I should have seen it as a warning sign though that his job was helping his cousin look after his fighting cocks.  These fights are held as part of temple ceremonies as blood sacrifice is entwined in Balinese Hindu culture. According to renowned writer Fred B Eiseman Caru is blood sacrifice to the demons, bhutas and kalas, or more philosophically to the negative aspects of the universe.  Killing an animal in this way is not considered a cruelty – it actually acquires Karma and they are treated with reverence.  The cockfight, tajen, also appeases the bhutas with the spilling of blood.

But illegal competitions where thousands of dollars are bet and lost are also held all over the island.

The day after we met I had to go to Ubud to stay at a traditional five star hotel to write a story. Ollie thought it would be fun to come up and meet me and bring some of the boys. We went to the Jazz Club and danced to salsa music but they dropped me alone at the hotel on the way back – despite almost getting lost. Who said Balinese know their island? And as for reading a map. Forget it.

The next day Budi rode for more than an hour to visit me – at my villa with my own huge swimming pool. I had been trying to get an interview with Kadek Wiranatha, a local Mr Big, and only minutes after he arrived I got the call. Come down now to Legian for the interview.

“Budi, can you give me a lift?”  And we took off on his motorbike. He seemed to understand my job which was a great plus to me and I felt very comfortable and happy in his company.

The following January I returned to Bali and Budi and we decided to go to Lombok, via his village at Tianyar, in Karangnasem on the north-east coast.

We stayed the night at Budi's father's house, and everybody seemed to be worried that he was going on such a long trip.

I thought this was a bit of an over-reaction; it was only a five-hour ferry ride and perhaps a few more hours by road up the west coast of Lombok.

The only problem I could see were the afternoon downpours of the wet season.

The next morning we had coffee with Budi's father's second wife.

After changing her blouse and putting a sash around her sarong she said prayers at the compound temple to give us luck for the journey.

"Is it holiday or work that you are going to Lombok for?" she called out.

 "Holiday," he answered.

  "You must pray in the village temple," she told him.

 While I waited on the back of the motor bike  he also put on a sash, put rice on his forehead, lit incense, tossed bougainvillea around and prayed.

 As he climbed back on the bike he still had crimson petals in his thick, black hair.

We drove the bike onto the ferry at Padangbai and watched as food sellers crowded on to sell rice, noodles, water and bananas before it headed off.

 Budi remained sitting most of the time while I looked out across the sea to the island of Lombok.

 It was almost dark when we arrived. We rode again in the rain through the capital, Mataram, and then onto Senggigi, where we found a room in an almost empty hotel.

 The next day we headed north, avoiding chickens, ducks and goats on the road to the little port from where we jumped on a tiny fishing boat taking furniture to Gili Trawangan.

 When we returned to Dalung, Budi's family and friends were keen to know how the trip went.

 "Fantastic," I said, "It was one of the best holidays ever."

 "That's OK for her," Budi joked. "She was on the back. I was the one doing all the hard work."

 Then one night just before I left to fly back to Sydney, Budi asked me something:

 "Did you notice I looked a bit worried on the boat trips?"

 "Oh no," I said sunnily, thinking he'd loved the trip too.

 "Well I was actually very scared," he said. "Did you know I almost drowned a few years ago?"

 "No!" I was shocked, although I did know that like many Balinese he couldn't swim.

 "It was when I was working on a Thai fishing boat, out near Maluku," he continued. "I was hanging out my washing on a rope and I lost my footing and fell into the sea. One of the fishermen - a Thai man - threw me a rope.

 "I was so traumatised, I flew back to Bali and hadn't been on a boat since."

 "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked, remembering then that he had clung tightly to the small boat's mast and didn't seem to want to look over the edge of the ferry. "We didn't have to go."

 "It would have ruined your holiday," he answered.

Much to my surprise, and I really mean this, I was getting involved with a Balinese guy – 20 years younger than me. Was that what I really wanted? Was that what I needed? Well I knew I needed fun more than anything else. 

I’ll admit it, I didn’t really know that much about Balinese culture. I was interested to the extent of spirituality and its meaning in people’s lives. But being a cynic about religion and in particular religious hierarchy I could never get into it. I didn’t want to become one of those Australian women who marry or live with Balinese men and take on the whole mantle – wearing sarongs and kebayas as if they were born in them, making offerings, attending ceremonies. Even having their teeth filed as part of the wedding ceremony, to get rid of the ‘animal’ in you. Nuh, I have a good dentist and he thinks my teeth are fine just as they are.

I did ask him lots of questions about his religion and beliefs but he found it almost impossible to describe the reasoning behind it all. “Please explain,” I’d say. “Sorry I can’t explain it,” he’d answer.

 Budi was determined to come to Australia. There was nothing he wanted more. Was I just a vessel to get him here? Would he have gone with any other woman who was mad enough to sponsor him to come and live here? He denies that. He says he still loves me. He just couldn’t handle the gambling temptations in every pub and club here.

So after more than six good years in Sydney, Budi’s back in Bali, working for a big businessman who breeds fighting cocks. He’s their “security” making sure people don’t climb the barbed wire to steal these incredibly valuable animals that are sold on the international market.

Rather than fighting cocks, I spent part of this last trip searching for the endangered Bali Starling. Way up in the national park in the north west of Bali, we bumped along a rough track, as monkeys tried to climb into the car. Across the sea was Java. Finally we reached a temple in the jungle and a sign, “Save the Birds, Save The Trees, Save the Earths”. A ranger came out and took me by the hand and another gave me a pair of binoculars. There in the trees coming out of her little wooden nesting box was a white-crested blue-eyed starling and her baby. The ranger told me there were only 25 now in the national park area after years of poaching for the caged bird trade.

Back in Legian we went to eat fried chicken sitting cross-legged  at a warung as the rain teemed down.

 I told Budi about my trip and the starlings and he said, “I call them Jalak.”

Then I asked him if he was lonely without me and he said: “No, I have my family and friends. My nephews always smile when they see me and say, Hi Uncle.”

I said: “I hope we will stay friends.”

“Close friends,” he said as he bit into the chicken.

TRAVEL FACES: Greetings from Bali

We went to see my friend Erin Gampar's widow, Endah, in her little home in Denpasar last week.

It was a stinking hot day and it took us ages to find her neat house down a gang or alleyway.

She welcomed us in and we - my friend, Ollie, and I - all wept together, over the death of wonderful Erin.

She served us chilled water as she told us one of the saddest stories I've ever heard...of how she took him to hospital, where he died a month later from complications of diabetes.

Here is some sound of him singing about Bali:

http://fandalism.com/kutabeachband/bC92


She played us clips of Erin singing Eric Clapton's Wonderful Tonight and another song he wrote for her. He was about to record an album and his career was really taking off.

"He always sang with his heart," she said.

"We were happy together. We worked hard together. We bought this house together."

Sometimes you see a relationship where two people were truly meant for each other. And that seemed to be Erin and Endah. Both Christians - he was from West Timor and she from Java - they were married in the Catholic cathedral in Denpasar. Their wedding photos are framed on the wall of their lounge room.

"I'm all alone now.  Don't forget me," she said as we left, climbing back into the air conditioned car heading back to the beach.

Travel Faces: To Erin

My beautiful friend, Erin (left).

This has been a particularly sad week, topped off for me by the news of the death of my friend, Erin Gampar.

I’m writing about him in my new blog, Travel Faces, because you could say we met while I was travelling.

He was a musician from Flores, an Indonesian island east of Bali. His family moved to Kupang in West Timor when he was young.

And later he moved to Bali, which is where I met him one hot July night in 2004.

My friend, Ollie, and I were walking home after a night out bar-hopping in Seminyak when we heard beautiful music coming from a bar across the road.  It was salsa or the Gypsy Kings I seem to remember. We went over to investigate and listened to a few songs, then met the band and chatted to them. Erin was one of them. He was a superb guitarist and singer but could play most instruments - as shown by the above photo - and anything from reggae to ballads. I loved his rendition of Redemption Song.

He also had a cheeky smile and laugh and could see the humour in anything.

He should have been a journalist - he always made sure he was at the height of the action, telling me later how he’d been in the courtroom for Schapelle Corby’s sentencing.

I’ll never forget one story he told me. It was about 2am and we were sitting in another Seminyak bar.

It was about the night of the first Bali bombing, just after 11pm on Saturday, October 22, 2002.

He and his fellow musicians had finished their gig and were having a late dinner in a restaurant nearby. They heard a loud bang and saw flames and raced to the site to help people.

He focused on one man, making sure he got him to hospital to be treated for his burns, and visited him daily until he was able to leave.

We were engrossed while he told the story. It was fascinating - and terrifying - to be reminded of that fateful night from an eyewitness, especially a great storyteller like Erin.

Whenever I went to Bali I’d call or text him to find out where he was playing and go down and see him. If it was a Saturday night, he’d laughingly tell us he had to get up early for church the next day but he'd still stay up for hours.  He had been brought up a Christian.  He was so happy to meet his wife, Endah, and get married.

I still don’t know the full circumstances of his death but believe he had an illness he was being treated for in hospital.

Erin, I can’t tell you how much we’re missing you.

TRAVEL FACES: Germany's Wandering Carpenters

Meet some of the fascinating people I've met travelling - the first of a series.

Max and Robin

We’re in a Dusseldorf brewery eating dinner and enjoying a local beer when in wander two strangely-dressed young men.

They are wearing black corduroy suits with flared pants, and matching blue ties with gold pins. One sports a black top hat while the other favours a battered floppy version. Both wear waistcoats and carry curled, wooden hiking poles, known  as Stenz, and old-fashioned knapsacks tied with handkerchiefs to wrap up their belongings.

They are wandering carpenters, also known as journeymen or craftsmen or “Wandergesellen”, who travel door to door, in a Mediaeval tradition, known as “Wanderjahre”.

They set out for travel for at least three years and one day after completing their apprenticeships, and rather than accepting pay are fed and bedded by those they work for.

They have come into the brewery to ask for a meal in return for doing jobs here.  

Their names are Max and Robin; they have left off their last names, adopting the name of their organisation as their surname, in this case, Rolandschact, or a knight in Medieval times.

 “We are joiners or furniture makers, in a tradition that is about 900 years old,” Robin says. “After your apprenticeship you do this for at least three years and one day. We both have been doing it for one and a half years now.”

It’s said to be one of the oldest traditions in Europe and two seats on the European Union are kept for such journeymen. It’s also alive in France, where it’s known as the Compagnons du Tour de France.

But in Britain the tradition has died, with only the title, journeymen, still remaining as a reference to young men travelling throughout the country.

In Germany, the journeyman must be unmarried, childless and debt-free - so that they don’t use this as an opportunity to run away from social obligations. In modern times the brotherhoods they join often require a police clearance.

They must present themselves in a clean and friendly manner in public, which helps them find a bed for the night and a lift to the next town. These two both wear earrings in their left ears and I discover later that in the Middle Ages gold bracelets were also worn which could be sold to pay the gravedigger if a journeyman died on his journey.

Some say the song, Waltzing Matilda (Banjo Patterson’s poem about the swagman), comes from the tradition of the journeyman's Walz (or song).

While the Nazis banned the tradition, it came back into vogue in the late 1980s, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall with economic changes and renewed interest in tradition.

We go outside to take photos and Max says he has just returned from South Africa while Robin has spent his time in Germany, learning the traditional craftsmanship. Max is the first in his family to follow the tradition but his father wasn’t that keen on the idea. Still he says that didn’t stop his own journey.

 “You used to have to do it 100 years ago. I met quite a few journeymen and it was clear to me I should do it too,” Robin says. “I don’t think it will die out that easily.”

They are an incredible reminder of the ancient traditions of Europe that have not been forgotten.

Dusseldorf, Germany: houses

Spring vegetables and fruit in Dusseldorf

AN ODE TO BERLIN

 To celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall here is a blog about music's influence during those years.

Thilo Schmied  was only 14 in March, 1988 when his heroes, Depeche Mode, were invited to play in his hometown, East Berlin.

More and more people were managing to escape from East Germany at this time, so as Schmied, a former sound engineer, says the authorities tried to appease those still there by holding concerts of popular western bands.

Only a few kilometers away from the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing, the British band had recorded four albums in the vast former ballroom of the Hansa Studios in West Berlin. 

 “I was at school,” he explains. “They said they would give us tickets. I said, ‘What?’ I still have the ticket. Six thousand people were there. I thought I’d die.”

In the last days before 1989, acts that went over ranged from

Shakin’ Stevens to Bruce Springsteen, while the Stasi fearfully watched on as young people swarmed near the Wall to catch concerts in the West by Michael Jackson , David Bowie and Pink Floyd.

“Music is not completely responsible for the Wall coming down,” Schmied  says. “But it’s connected politically.”

In November, it will be 25 years since the fall of the Wall (155 km of barbed wire and concrete watched over by towers), and Berlin is celebrating with special events and exhibitions that recognise the division of the city, the Cold War and the events leading up to peaceful reunification in 1989-1990.

To get a feel for those times we meet Schmied, a former sound engineer who has exclusive access to the famous Hansa Studios, outside the building, known as the Meistersaal, just down the road from the now reconstructed train station of  Potzdammer Platz.

Köthener Strasse 38, in Kreuzberg is a hallowed address for musicians and music fans. This is where many ground-breaking albums were recorded, particularly in the mid 70s to early 90s. Musicians say there’s a kind of magic in the place, to do with the acoustics of the oak-panelled Studio 2.

Past the foyer filled with old photos of rock stars and producers is a sweeping staircase which leads to the first floor Studio 2. With 15m-high coffered ceilings, wooden patterned floorboards, heavy red curtains and chandeliers, the “Great Hall by the Wall” started as a ceremony location for the Berlin builders society, where Master certificates were handed out. Later it was open to the public, and was also used as a chamber music hall, a venue for Gestapo parties and in the 1950s a ballroom. Musicians speak of the magic of its acoustics.

When the Wall went up only metres away in 1961 the building was relegated to the fringes of no man’s land, surrounded by fields, rubbish and gypsy camps. But in 1964 it was bought by the German record label Ariola and then in 1976 by Meisel Music Publishers, with Hansa being one of their subsidiaries.

Not only were the studios a lot cheaper than ones like Abbey Road in London, artists loved the freedom of Studio 2, with only a remote TV camera linking them to the control room down the hallway.

Close your eyes and you can start to imagine its most famous artist, David Bowie, in his elegant style, singing here during the three years in the late 70s he spent in Berlin.

Inspired by German Expressionism, the art movement that exploded there in the early 20^th century, writer Christopher Isherwood and the Weimar Republic as well as the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, he has since admitted some of his obsessions were “infantile” in the context of the brutality he soon learnt of.

But at the Hansa studios he did some of his most creative work, recording the albums known as the Berlin Trilogy  here – Low and Heroes, while Lodger was completed in Montreux and New York. He also produced The Idiot and Lust for Life for his friend and sometime flatmate, Iggy Pop (the godfather of punk).

On his 66^th birthday - January 8, 2013 - he came out with his ode to Berlin, Where Are We Now, the wistful single of his first album in 10 years, The Next Day.

We’re in what has become the studio’s café or green room but was once the control room, where the Wall and watchtowers could once be seen through the window, now blocked by a brick wall of a neighbouring building. And Schmied tells a story about  how one of the sound engineers, Eduard Meyer, flashed one of the lamps at the border guards, as if to say: “We’re here.”

“Iggy and David yelled, ‘Stop, stop they will shoot on us’,” he says.

Privacy was part of the appeal of the studios, and while there might have been deals going on outside, no drugs were allowed inside.

U2’s Achtung Baby with the song they composed here, One, was the last big Studio 2 recording in 1990 and 1991. In a salute to Germany they gave it the facetious title, possibly inspired by Mel Brooks’ The Producers.

Renovated in the 80s, Hansa Studio has had a renaissance and is now an active space with musicians from chamber music groups to the bands, R.E.M, Snow Patrol and The Hives recording here. 

We climb the stairs to the digitized Studios 1 and 3, try out the brown leather couch, check out the instruments and listen to Schmied’s choice of music as he operates the control panel, including Bowie’s last recording here, a 1979 rendition of Brecht’s BAAL.

Just before hopping into Schmied’s bright yellow van to further the tour, he tells a story about how in the early 80s Andrew Fletcher, the keyboard player from Depeche Mode, loved to sit in the street-level restaurant and eat pineapple and cheese on toast. When he established his own label he called it Toast Hawaii, the same name as his solo album.

With his rapid-fire monologue interspersed with videos of producers and others speaking about those heady days, Schmied takes us past Bowie and Iggy’s old flat, Hauptstrasse 155 in the borough of Schoneberg.

Two doors down is Neues Ufer, the legendary gay café, which opened in 1977, where the pair used to hang out along with Nina Hagen, the East Berliner who recorded at the Hansa Studios and today is still performing Brecht-inspired cabaret internationally.

I’m particularly excited to stop in front of Isherwood’s old home also in Schoneberg, where he may have worked on Goodbye to Berlin, which the film, Cabaret, was based on.

Another favourite Bowie haunt was the Paris Bar, an expensive French cafe in upscale Charlottenburg, where we later go for lunch and choose the omelet with lots of bread.

We pass what was the legendary Dschungel Club (with a similar reputation to New York’s Studio 54), where now there is an upmarket hotel and a florist.

The still-functioning SO36 club on Oranienstrasse near Heinrichplatz in the district of Kreuzberg, which took its name from its postcode, was home to the punk rock movement. The Sex Pistols had a rare Berlin gig here and it was also where the Dead Kennedys and Toten Hosen cut their teeth.

The historic Goya club and former theatre near the famous KaDaWe department store (Bowie sings of being “a man lost in time” near here) is where U2 and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds had their first Berlin shows. Cave was one of the longest foreign muso residents of Berlin, living here from 1983 to the early 90s, and also recording at Hansa Studios, including the title song for the Wim Wenders film, Until the End of the World.

However, Schmied says talk of Lou Reed being one of Hansa’s artists is not true. His Berlin album was recorded in New York.

Five cool ways to get a feel for how much Berlin has changed since the Wall came down:

• On the plane read John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold set in East Berlin or Stasiland by Anna Funder.
•   Forego Checkpoint Charlie and the adjacent Berlin Wall Museum, which though fascinating is crowded, overwhelming and touristy and visit the incredibly moving Wall memorials at Bernauer Strasse to see what division meant for the city. See: http://www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/
• Travel back in time from there by catching the M10 tram arriving at the Stalinist-style Karl-Marx-Allee.
• Then walk up it and across to the East Side Gallery, a segment of the Wall, which has been turned into the longest open air gallery in the world. See: http://www.visitberlin.de/en/spot/east-side-gallery
• Have a drink at Yaam, a reggae club on the River Spree, and one of the 200 or so music venues that still exist in a scene dominated by techno and electronic music.

Sami Scenes

My latest story in Australian House and Garden, December issue, just out. See below. They have published it as a Christmas story. I was most interested in the Sami people's own traditions.
Check out the photos in the magazine when next you're in a newsagent....for some reason I can't copy them.....but they are beautiful. I'll add some of mine here.

High above the Arctic Circle, the Sami people preserve a unique ancient culture and lifestyle as they follow their reindeer herds across a mesmerising landscape, writes Diana Plater.
The temperature is a freezing -5C but I’m warm in my boots, woolly hat, thermal overalls and huge leather gloves. I am watching as our guides  lasso four reindeer, one for each of our group, and  the animals take their places, ready to pull our  sleds through the snow. We’re soon flying over frozen creeks, past lakes and forest. For anyone from Australia, this is a Christmas fantasy come true, and it’s  possible to imagine Santa’s workshop is coming up just around the corner. We’re a few kilometres from the town of Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden’s Lapland, bound for a lake near the village of Jukkasjärvi. For about 150,000 indigenous Sami people, this stretch is a small part of the huge area that makes up their ancestral homeland, known to them as Sápmi. It covers the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland as well as the Kola Peninsula of Russia. Our guide, Nils Torbjörn Nutti, explains it’s been Sami territory “since the ice started to melt about 15,000 years ago… when they followed the reindeer up from what is now northern Europe”. Unlike Rudolph and friends, these reindeer don’t fly, but they can withstand temperatures even lower than  minus 40oC. They’re the lifeblood of the Sami people, providing them with transport, food, milk, warmth and clothing. The Sami way of life is intimately intertwined with these animals. “We’re still working with the reindeer, but also with a lot of help from technical things,” says Nils, referring to the use of snowmobiles to round up the herds as they follow a time-honoured seasonal path along the Norwegian coast, through northern Scandinavia and Russia and down to the Baltic Sea. Later, in Jukkasjärvi, we are invited to climb inside a Sami tent, a lavvu, where a fire of bark and birch is burning. Here we eat a typical herder’s lunch of smoked reindeer meat with flat bread, and drink coffee from wooden cups. Bar the caffeine, this is the way many Sami lived for millennia. In more recent times, there were dark years when the Sami’s languages and traditions were officially suppressed, and many of them were moved into modern housing. Yet their unique culture and spirit has survived. These days, an elected Sami Parliament sits in Kiruna, working for increased self-determination and the protection of Sami languages and land. Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden, is being gradually relocated because of damage from a huge
underground iron ore mine, so there’s a palpable sense of change in the air. I meet up with Laila Spik, a Sami cultural guide and the author of several cookbooks and guides to native plants. In this region, the latter include  båsskå ( Angelica archangelica ) , better known to us as garden angelica or wild celery. Its stem is eaten, the leaves are dried for tea and the roots can be used for medicinal purposes. As the eldest daughter of the family, Laila was taught about Sami ways by her reindeer-herder father, to ensure their cultural identity wouldn’t be lost to future generations. Core tenets include shamanism, which is a belief in animism and spirits, Laila tells me. Goddesses also feature prominently, including the fire goddess, who must always be fed first each morning. “She was the goddess who helped the child be born and who protected the people, and we should never forget her,” says Laila. The Sami are also exponents of one of Europe’s oldest song traditions, known as yoik, said to go back several thousand years. Relying on melodic and haunting vocal sounds instead of instruments, it’s a form of musical expression that’s winning fans and popularity beyond the Sami people, especially since a yoik performer won a talent show on Swedish TV. It’s the landscape that has me mesmerised. The day before my reindeer sled adventure, I’d spent some time at the ski resort area at Bjorkliden, which is about a 90-minute drive north of Kiruna. Our guide, Amanda Malis, took me on the back of a snowmobile up to Låktatjåkko, Sweden’s highest mountain lodge, which offers a spectacular view of Lake Tornetrask and Abisko National Park in the distance. We warmed up next to a roaring fire and ate waffles smothered in cloudberry jam. That afternoon, I took a train from Bjorkliden, whooshing past historical railway stations and scenes of people ice-fishing from camp chairs, before pulling into Kiruna. I feel I can’t leave Sápmi without trying another local activity: dog-sledding. One evening I squeeze into a sled behind a mother and her two daughters. As we take off, the huskies stop barking, intent on running, and silence descends as we scoot across the snow. Whizzing through the forest of white-capped birch trees, spirits are high and we stop at a collection of lavvu , to find a piano perched in the snow. When our guide invites us to sit down and play a tune, the first song I think of  is, naturally, Jingle Bells.                     #
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