Hull

Gandhi in Mandela Gardens

WISE: Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation

Wilberforce House

early Priestman ditch digger

Hong Kong

We break our flight north at Hong Kong

We have our evening meal at Yung Kee in Wellington Street... it's always full but we get there early enough to beat the evening queue! Beautifully subtle bbq pork, great won ton soup and braised scallop with vegetables. We also have a taste of the signature dish roast goose!

Sunday morning get up early and arrive for breakfast at the 75 year old Luk Yu Tea House in Stanley Street. A yum cha feast of pork bun, fish ball and gow gee! Then a long walk up the hill (the escalators are all going down in the morning) to the still quiet Hollywood Road and then down via Upper Laska and Cat Street markets and back along Hollywood to our hotel to ick up bags and head for the station to catch the airport express

Aboriginal rock art discovery

Daryl Guse, from the Australian National University, with the long-hidden rock art at Djulirri in the Wellington Range, Arnhem Land.

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Sydney: Cockatoo Island

Le Blond Lathe

like ancient Mayan statues

Read Tribune

dazzled by sound

ancient tracks

Zadarske: morske orgulje

Sea Organ - musical instrument played by the sea

The musical Sea Organ (morske orgulje) is located on the shores of Zadar, Croatia, and is the world’s first musical pipe organs that is played by the sea. Simple and elegant steps, carved in white stone, were built on the quayside. Underneath, there are 35 musically tuned tubes with whistle openings on the sidewalk. The movement of the sea pushes air through, and – depending on the size and velocity of the wave – musical chords are played. The waves create random harmonic sounds.

This masterpiece of acoustics and architecture was created by expert Dalmatian stone carvers and architect Nikola Basic in 2005, who recently received the European Prize for Urban Public Space for this project. Many tourists come to listen to this unique aerophone, and enjoy unforgettable sunsets with a view of nearby islands.

The Sea Organ was designed to reflect a local urban musical tradition. In this part of Croatia the prevailing musical tradition is the spontaneous four-voice male singing, with melodies and chords conformed to the Europe's autochthonous diatonic major scale. As noted, the instalation's 35 flue pipes are grouped into 7 successive sections. The 5 pipes of each section are arranged with ca 1.5 m spacings. One listener, standing or sitting on a chosen point on the scalinade, should be able to hear well 5 to 7 nearest pipes i.e. mainly those housed inside the relevant section. Thus a logical choice is to tune a whole five-pipe-section to one chord. This chord shall contain tones out of the said diatonic major scale.

Further, it seemed appropriate to alternate along the whole scalinade two different but the harmonically cognate chords. The sequence of chords g - c6 - g - c6 - g - c6 - g was chosen to tune 7 sections from NW to SE. This combination of tones sounds pleasingly even under extreme circumstances of perpendicular waves when all the 35 pipes may sound simultaneously, in cluster. In all other circumstances, Sea Organ will perform monophonic, biphonic and/or polyphonic tone series, much in the way that mouth-organ players perform.

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