A crusading Agence France-Presse correspondent who enjoyed a storied profession masking wars and different ancient activities has been honored on an Australian stamp.
Kate Webb, who died in 2007 at sixty-four, earned recognition as a fearless reporter during the Vietnam War, overlaying different momentous testimonies in Asia throughout a profession spanning a long time.
She has featured on one of all five new stamps unveiled Wednesday to mark Remembrance Day on November eleven, while a minute’s silence is held to honor those who have fought and died for their United States of America. The stamps might be issued on October 6.
“This stamp problem, the fourth in a series commemorating a century because of World War I, acknowledges women’s critical roles in conflict and conflict,” said Michael Zsolt of Australia Post.
Webb, born in New Zealand but moved to Australia with her own family as a baby, is shown on a stamp marking the Korea and Vietnam wars and Red Cross employee Rosemary Griggs.
In 1971, while masking the Vietnam War, Webb was reportedly killed after being ambushed and taken prisoner by North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, who marched her and five others via the jungle for a 23-day ordeal.
The front-web page obituary was published in the New York Times; the body of another lady was wrongly recognized as hers — but simply as her own family held a memorial carrier for her in Sydney. Webb and the opposite captives were freed tickets for the Australian Open 2016 World War I, World War II, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Australia’s position in peacekeeping operations also function within the Stamp series.
Before and including World War I, the involvement of Australian girls in warfare zones became nearly entirely constrained to nursing.
By the Vietnam War, they held many jobs as contributors to civilian clinical groups, Red Cross helpers, entertainers, and reporters. Today, girls are employed all through the military.
AFP 2008 launched the once-a-year Kate Webb Prize to realize great Asian newshounds doing tough and perilous paintings across the location.
The 2017 version is presently welcoming programs, with the winner receiving 3,000 euros (about $three 575) in cash if you want to be offered at a prize-giving ceremony.
The contest is open to locally hired Asian photograph, video, and text journalists for paintings posted at some stage in 2016.
Applications close on November 1
In the Red Engine Press January 2006 newsletter, “Yarnspinners and Wordweavers,” Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of Tracings, writes:
“Auden thought the purpose of poetry is to disenchant. That may be why I am not much for rhyme or pretty, though I do like food images, especially sweets. I prefer melancholy and reflective; if a song is sung, let it discord to keep the reader alert and make him reconsider. Nursery rhymes are for nurseries and sunsets to be viewed firsthand from a bluff, preferably while holding hands with someone handsome. The tendons of the best poetry are politics, introspection, and the abominable snowmen among us tempered–occasionally–by a look back at where we’ve been. Oh, and irony. That’s better than tiramisu and latté for keeping people talking late into the night.”
In the preface to One Hundred and One Famous Poems, published in 1929, editor Roy W. Cook discusses the great need for poetry in the modern industrial age.
While the modern age, with podcasting and blogs, has made poetry more accessible, poetry is also considered frivolous and not lucrative. It’s a shame because Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s poetry can create an air raid sound still and calm. She can let us stand beside an uncle who smells Barbasol and is on his way to war. The subtle message is clear: Stop. Pay attention. Listen.
Most of us wrote poetry in high school, including protests against parents, petitions to teenage crushes, or the usual “my life stinks, what’s the meaning of it all” poems. As adults, we may dribble our wine-and-cappuccino-soaked angst onto the page. Poetry often can’t be beaten as private therapy, and it helped poet Dessa Byrd Reed heal after a car accident. But Reed turned her recovery writings into a passion for poetry that took her to China recently.
Poetry is relevant in today’s text-messaging high-tech world, as evidenced by all the poetry Web sites. It speaks of love, as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets. It relates to eternal epic truths, as in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It captures the cry of a generation, as in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” It reflects, as in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It makes a cinematic statement about freedom behind bars, as in the movie “Slam.” It speaks of the Divine, as in the poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh. I agree with Carolyn Howard-Johnson that poetry moves us–or it must if we want to move others. Howard-Johnson’s poetry moved Compulsive Reader editor Magdalena Ball to name Tracings to The Compulsive Reader’s list of “Top Ten Reads of 2005.”
Howard-Johnson journalist pokes stamp fun at portraits of Australian poets in poetry magazines, but clearly, loves poetry:
“So long before you took up a pen and wrote pictures, you imagined them in liquid blue, the stories of others, your own.”
It’s easy to get caught up in our stories without understanding them. Howard-Johnson peppers her poetry with images of travel, not just global but time travel. She remarks in “Poetry, Quantum Mechanics, and Other Trifles” that her critique group warns her she complicates her poems with too many layers:
“my ingredients, they say, are concealed behind an opaque pottery bowl; their matrices misunderstood. Children we are. No one tells us the truth of such a grand dessert.”
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke pointed out the truths of existence in Sonnets to Orpheus, showing us that a young ballet dancer, dead, is not forever gone but is not visible. That’s “the truth of such a grand/dessert.” That’s what poetry is about–revealing, evoking, describing, and thought-provoking. Poetry connects the past with the present and future. Howard-Johnson can visit the historic war museum in Oslo and reflect on war as it affected the world:
“Norway’s fjords shed salty droplets on faces like my father’s. Round faces. Eyes dilute-blue
like the pale skies above them. Men who fought as Churchill’s voice crackled through smuggled vacuum tubes.”
Howard-Johnson considers war as it now affects her family:
“Only days before I reached this spur, I saw my grandson off to war alone. A sacrifice. A trade. For my father, who never marched.”
