Yesterday, tousled from the flight from Bangkok but full of anticipation, I found myself getting my first view of Europe from a train racing from Vienna up toward the Austrian Alps.
Europe didn't disappoint — or at least, not the steep valleys that flashed past as the train pelted along in a clean, calm, punctual manner foreign to the Australian rail system.
I gave up trying to take photos through the window, because I've seen it all before: the calendar photos of cattle grazing immaculate alpine pastures; cloud-wrapped mountains; the little villages, so inhumanly neat that they seem to have been transplanted from a model railway diorama; dappled forests; blooming geraniums in window boxes; windfall apples in wheelbarrows.
It was uncannily like having a giant tourist brochure unroll in front of the glass.
A few hours later I got off in the central Austrian city of Graz, my destination. I’m here for the 2008 Congress of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists, courtesy of NSW Farm Writers, which to my infinite gratitude has sponsored the trip.
Agriculture, especially Australian agriculture, is an international business. The opportunity to get first-hand insight into what's happening elsewhere in the world is hugely valuable in my trade: it joins the dots between the farm and that vast, multi-tongued entity that is Australia's farm produce market.
I staved off jetlag with a long walk around the old city of Graz, a humbling experience in just how little history there is in Australia’s European history. It is also a lesson in the pleasures of peace and prosperity.
The charming rustic scenes I'd seen from the train, and the enthusiastic shoppers wandering old Graz's cobbled streets and browsing high-end stores in beautiful Renaissance-era buildings, are built upon a history filled with blood and suffering.
On the southern wall of Graz's gloriously baroque cathedral, a fresco painted in 1485 tells of one particular year of horror, 1480, when the region was successively visted by locusts, the Black Death, and the Turks.
The Turks and their compatriots, the Hungarians, continued to raid Austria’s Styrian region for another 300 years. The men of Islam make a cluster bomb look benign. Illustrations from the time show turbanned men cutting open pregnant women and ripping out the unborn babies, and impaling infant boys anus-first on sharpened spikes.
Maybe these horrifying scenes were medieval propoganda. They certainly put the fear of God into me. But man's inhumanity to man has only been bounded by the limits of the imagination.
Graz's armoury museum, which shows about 30,000 items from those 300 years, is another lesson on war, and why it needs to be avoided. Prowling the aisles, wondering what it would have been like to have been wearing that suit of armour, wielding that sword, while being slashed at by howling Turks who, if I failed, would do horrific things to my family…I couldn’’t imagine the combination of fear, desperation and anger that must have once boiled within those cold suits of armour.
The Turks stopped raiding as their political systems fell into turmoil. Instead, Napoleon's troops hit Graz in the early 1800s, but failed to storm the Schlossberg, the fort overlooking the city, despite months of seige and eight attacks. Eventually the Austrian government surrendered to Napoleon, and the French had the pleasure of blowing up the Schlossberg fortifications, recorded as being the strongest in the world before the explosions rendered them to rubble.
On the north wall of Graz Cathedral, opposite the 1485 fresco, is a memorial to the 1914-1918 war. I counted nearly 800 men lost by Graz, then a city of 160,000 people, to that adventure. I haven't found a WWII memorial, but a Wikipedia entry mentions that 16pc of the city was destroyed by Allied bombing.
So much suffering, and yet today I sit under a great old tree in a cobbled courtyard, drinking beer and watching the leisurely movement of people. When will the next cycle of human madness sweep through Graz?
It will; just as modern Australians, living comfortable lives built on the ruins of another culture, are somewhere in the future likely to be tested in the same fire. Bloody human history on every other continent tells us so.
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