Portland, Victoria

Dawn, main street, Monday,
Macs Hotel on the right
(blogger's room not visible).
My ancestor landed here in 1853 from Manchester,
and this is his bluestone house built then, and it is still right there, in the main street.

Got the clap

I love reading The Guardian.
Today they got my attention with that old photo of a 

shirtless Mick Jagger doing Jumpin Jack Flash
(yes kiddies there was a golden age of those wizened old millionaires)
...   then (David McNamee) tells me that clapping ...

  started with CHOLERA in 1473!

"Slapping your hands together was a signal to those around that you were infected. 

(so now I understand how Winy Amehouse and Pete Drugerty get applause)

"Eventually it became a token of applause, a way of keeping time, and then, by the 1800s, 

a musical device in its own right.
How does it work? In disco and funk, group handclaps would reinforce the snare drum, usually on the second or fourth beat of a bar.
With the advent in the early 1980s of handclap-emulating
devices like the Simmonds Clap-Trap,

claps in hip-hop replaced the snare entirely.
The playground rhyme catchiness of handclaps in 60s girl-group hits, meanwhile, lives on in retro-loving, faux-naive indie-pop."

My Sixties Time-Warp mind immediately conjures up a 1965 Melbourne hit-single 
'The Loved One' ...  "Two things marked that landmark recording - the unique double rhythm, a complex musical achievement made accessible by a clever use of handclapping; and Gerry Humphries’ sometimes bluesy, sometimes soaring voice. ‘The Loved One’ was like nothing we’d ever heard before, from Australia or from anywhere else in the world".

Clapping Games: Larrikin Warren Fahey managed to videotape schoolgirls 

without causing a Henson-type-ruckus, and this dear little site starts with a cute Blinky Bill koala image,  and ends with a Year 6 game called Dick Flop.

That causes me to try working in a reference to that AC/DC composition 'She's Got The Jack', bringing this whole story back to the cholera connection.

goes off singing the Playschool song:

"If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!

  If you've got a deadly illness clap your hands!" ...

Portland

Last week I spent some time with the the helpful people (thanks Darren)

 at Portland Family History House, and 

they showed me a list of houses built by 

my ancestor George Sedgwick.
(He also built the original Town Hall in 1863, which now houses the History Group, and they told me he wrote his name on the inside of the front doors).

These are my own pics of his earliest Portland project:

 5-7 Tyers Street, now a B&B called
Victoria House
(that link has better photos than mine)

Old Sedgwicks 14" skirting boards and beautiful door frames are 

just as immaculate as in 1853 when he hammered them in. What a guy.