DT & Graffiti, Australia

Hello subscribers!

As announced in the previous Newsletter I’ve composed a new themed Blog post, this time on the theme “Dark Tourism & Graffiti”, as that had come a close second in the most recent poll and would have been my personal favourite too. I’ve just uploaded this new post – do go and take a look!

But again, it comes with a warning: some of the featured graffiti involve strong language, in particular the “F-word”. However, I banished all those images to the bottom of the post, so if you get easily offended by this word don’t look at photos 20 to 25. But you could still go through the post until photo 19 and then stop there.

The photo above was obviously taken from that new Blog post. It shows a crude image of the Australian national flag and the word “Australia” explicitly daubed over it. This was done by the so-called “Balibo Five”, a group of journalists who were working for an Australian television network and who were about to report from the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975. Except they didn’t, because they were murdered (for more background info check the new Blog post itself).
  

The other reason I picked this particular image is of course my upcoming big trip to Australia itself (plus Rabaul and Nauru). Only ten days to my departure! It’s slowly beginning to feel real!

Meanwhile we’ve also been granted our Nauru visas (cheers!), so bureaucratically there should be nothing left standing in the way of that particular adventure. Flight connections are still a little precarious, though, so fingers crossed there won’t be any disastrous delays or cancellations!
  

The new Blog post will also have to be the last one before that big trip. I doubt I’d find time for another one before then. So the next one will probably be a post with a brief summary and first photo impressions from the DT elements of that trip.

Nor is there another theme poll for now. I’ll leave resuming that too until after my return – or rather until the autumn. But it will come back!
  

On my main website I have in the meantime managed to upload most of the new and/or expanded and updated chapters for Taiwan. Only the block for Kinmen still needs doing. But since that will consist of over a dozen short stand-alone chapters I decided to leave that until after my summer trip too, so I can do them in one big effort all in a row. But do go and take a look at the twenty new chapters that are already there. Taiwan had been such a fantastic trip that I greatly enjoyed writing up these chapters as well.

Technically, some problems remain with the website and new ones had cropped up too. Some have been cleared up. But what remains an issue is the fact that because of a change in URL structures/generation, links in older Blog posts and Newsletters to specific destination chapters currently don’t work, also some particular links within the website. Hopefully that can all be resolved in due course, but whether that will be possible before my departure to Australia remains to be seen (my gut feeling says probably not, so I will have to return to this when I’m back).
  

But with this I’m signing off until … well probably not until the second half of September, realistically (since I will surely come back with tons of photo material that will need sorting before I can turn to the Blog again).
  

Meanwhile, all the best,

and have a good summer too!
  

Peter