I posted the entry below on this blog, on 8 January 2015, and have now elevated it as there is further news about Bob in today's ABC News here in Australia.

Bob the Railway Dog, Australia's famous train hitchhiking pooch, immortalised in print

Bob the Railway Dog, an icon of Peterborough in South Australia's mid-north, is again being celebrated with a book detailing some of his many adventures.

The grey-haired Smithfield sheepdog hitchhiked across Australia on trains in the 1880s and 1890s accompanying both stationmasters and passengers.

A book titled Bob's Railway has been written by author John Wilson, who said not enough people knew the icon's true story.

​"Last year I wrote a book about the centenary of the railway to Clare called The Riesling Railway, and I mentioned Bob because he went to Clare," Mr Wilson said.

"I started digging around and I found that a lot which had been written about [Bob] was incorrect."

Read the full story here.

SOURCE:  Purchased

​I recently attended Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, an amazing exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, on show from 15 September 2017 to 28 February 2018.  Songlines took visitors on a journey across the Australian desert in an Aboriginal-led exhibition about the epic Seven Sisters Dreaming. The exhibition included stunning artworks, a state-of-the-art digital dome and a vibrant art centre.  My family and friends had glowingly raved about this exhibition and it most certainly did not disappoint!!!  I spent many hours in the exhibition, soaking up all the indigenous art, stories, culture and spirituality.  Truly glorious!

​In addition to the exhibition catalogue, (which had sold out, so I have it on back order), I purchased these beautiful bookmarks as a memento of the exhibition and of course, to add to my ever growing bookmark collection. 

NOTE:  The description underneath each bookmark is the actual back of the bookmark. Click on each description for a larger readable image.

ESPERANTO

Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language. It is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world.  The Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, Unua Libro, on 26 July 1887. The name of Esperanto derives from Doktoro Esperanto ("Esperanto" translates as "one who hopes"), the pseudonym under which Zamenhof published Unua Libro.

Zamenhof had three goals, as he wrote in Unua Libro:

1."To render the study of the language so easy as to make its acquisition mere play to the learner."
2."To enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with persons of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not; in other words, the language is to be directly a means of international communication."
3."To find some means of overcoming the natural indifference of mankind, and disposing them, in the quickest manner possible, and en masse, to learn and use the proposed language as a living one, and not only in last extremities, and with the key at hand."

The first World Congress of Esperanto was organized in France in 1905. Since then, congresses have been held in various countries every year, with the exceptions of years during the world wars.

Although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, “Esperantujo” is the name given to places where it is spoken worldwide. Esperanto was recommended by the French Academy of Sciences in 1921 and recognized by UNESCO in 1954, which recommended in 1985 that international non-governmental organizations use Esperanto. Esperanto was the 32nd language accepted as adhering to the "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages" in 2007.

Today, Up to 2,000,000 people worldwide, to varying degrees, speak Esperanto, including about 1,000 to 2,000 native speakers who learned Esperanto from birth. The World Esperanto Association has members in 120 countries. Its usage is highest in Europe, East Asia, and South America.




















ESPERANTO: GREEN STAR

Since the earliest days of Esperanto, the colour green has been used as a symbol of mutual recognition, and it appears prominently in all Esperanto symbols. The Verda Stelo (Esperanto: Green Star) was first proposed in an 1892 article in La Esperantisto for use as a symbol of mutual recognition among Esperantists.

In a letter to The British Esperantist in 1911, L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, wrote: "It seems to me, that my attention was drawn to the color green by Mr. [R. H.] Geoghegan and from that time I began to publish all of my works with green covers . . . Looking at one of my pamphlets that I had entirely by chance printed with a green cover, he pointed out that this was the color of his homeland, Ireland; at that time it came to me, that we could certainly look at that color as a symbol of HOPE. About the five-pointed star, it seems to me, that at first Mr. de Beaufront had it imprinted on his grammar [of Esperanto]. I liked that and I adopted it as a symbol. Afterward by association of ideas, the star appeared with a green color."

To this day, the green star is a prominent feature on the Esperanto flag.

LITTLE BLUE BOOKS

Little Blue Books were a series of small staple-bound books published in 1919-1978 by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas. They were extremely popular, and achieved a total of 300-500 million booklets sold over the series' lifetime. 

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, an atheist-Jew, socialist, and newspaper publisher, and his wife, Marcet, set out to publish small low price paperback pocketbooks that were intended to sweep the ranks of the working class as well as the "educated" class. Their goal was to get works of literature, a wide range of ideas, common sense knowledge and various points of view out to as large an audience as possible. These books, at approximately 3½ by 5 inches (8½ by 12¾ cm) easily fitted into a pocket. The inspiration for the series were cheap 10-cent paperback editions of various expired copyright classic works that Haldeman-Julius had purchased as a 15-year-old. 

The works covered were frequently classics of Western literature. Goethe and Shakespeare were well represented, as were the works of the Ancient Greeks, and more modern writers like Voltaire, Émile Zola, H. G. Wells. Some of the topics the Little Blue Books covered were on the cutting edge of societal norms. Shorter works from many popular authors such as Jack London and Henry David Thoreau were published, as were a number of anti-religious tracts written by Robert Ingersoll, ex-Catholic priest Joseph McCabe, and Haldeman-Julius himself. A young Will Durant wrote a series of Blue Books on philosophy which were republished in 1926 by Simon & Schuster as The Story of Philosophy.