Keith
The best camera is one that still works!
Following on from roll #7 (Banff-prequel) posted in this thread.
First of all some of the interesting information I’ve managed to gather since the last roll was posted:
The photographer was Bettina Mendl … an Austrian heiress who was born in 1909 in Vienna and died in Queensland, Australia in 1999.
She’s had a book written about her by her daughter Phyllis McDuff called ‘A Story Dreamt Long Ago.’ I read the book and now have a greater understanding of the person who took most of these photographs.
She fled from Austria in the late thirties to escape from Hitler’s SS and lived in the outback of Australia where she married a sheep station manager by the name of Joe McDuff to whom she had two daughters … Phyllis and Dawn.
In 1950 she returned to her homeland to organise her very large inheritance and re-establish a future life in Austria for herself, her husband and her two children. In the following years they travelled back and forth between the two countries depending on her business commitments and the desire to partly educate her girls in Austria.
Very little mention is made in the book of her extensive world travels in the mid thirties and from what I can see none of the photographs in the book have anything in common with the photographs I’m posting here. The only real information given is about New Zealand where she visited her sister Lucie who emigrated there with her husband in the early thirties … Lucie is the woman sitting on the small horse in the NZ thread. The woman we see now and then, who takes the occasional photo of Bettina, is a long time companion and friend from her youth called Maria … her nickname was ‘Baby.’ She was a countess apparently and almost always travelled with Bettina on her adventures.
As a child she was formally and privately tutored in the arts by a well-known classical Austrian painter.
She was an expert horsewoman and was selected for the Austrian dressage team to compete at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin but refused to go based on her political beliefs … this was one of many public actions that put her firmly out of favour with the Nazi regime and led to her subsequent last minute escape from the SS who were apparently pursuing her at the time she left Austria. There is an inference in the final chapter of the book that she was possibly involved in some form of espionage during this period. She refused to discuss the events surrounding this sudden ‘flight’ from Austria with her family or any one else for that matter and took this information with her to her end in 1999. She was cremated and her ashes returned to her beloved homeland by her daughter in 2002.
Phyllis’s final paragraph in the book reads …
The next day I am on my way home to Australia somewhere suspended in the sky between two worlds – between waking and sleeping. Somewhere in the dark, having lost all sense of time, I say ‘thank you’ to my mother. Thank you for laying out the treasure hunt. Thank you for secrets and for revelations. Thank you for hiding the things I need not know.
Most importantly to me, she was a talented photographer and I feel very lucky to have crossed paths with these stored rolls of film.
I really like these ‘India’ photos and have posted twenty of the thirty four that were on the roll … the film by the way is Perutz Perpantic.
I hope you’re enjoying this trip back in time as much as I am.
First of all some of the interesting information I’ve managed to gather since the last roll was posted:
The photographer was Bettina Mendl … an Austrian heiress who was born in 1909 in Vienna and died in Queensland, Australia in 1999.
She’s had a book written about her by her daughter Phyllis McDuff called ‘A Story Dreamt Long Ago.’ I read the book and now have a greater understanding of the person who took most of these photographs.
She fled from Austria in the late thirties to escape from Hitler’s SS and lived in the outback of Australia where she married a sheep station manager by the name of Joe McDuff to whom she had two daughters … Phyllis and Dawn.
In 1950 she returned to her homeland to organise her very large inheritance and re-establish a future life in Austria for herself, her husband and her two children. In the following years they travelled back and forth between the two countries depending on her business commitments and the desire to partly educate her girls in Austria.
Very little mention is made in the book of her extensive world travels in the mid thirties and from what I can see none of the photographs in the book have anything in common with the photographs I’m posting here. The only real information given is about New Zealand where she visited her sister Lucie who emigrated there with her husband in the early thirties … Lucie is the woman sitting on the small horse in the NZ thread. The woman we see now and then, who takes the occasional photo of Bettina, is a long time companion and friend from her youth called Maria … her nickname was ‘Baby.’ She was a countess apparently and almost always travelled with Bettina on her adventures.
As a child she was formally and privately tutored in the arts by a well-known classical Austrian painter.
She was an expert horsewoman and was selected for the Austrian dressage team to compete at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin but refused to go based on her political beliefs … this was one of many public actions that put her firmly out of favour with the Nazi regime and led to her subsequent last minute escape from the SS who were apparently pursuing her at the time she left Austria. There is an inference in the final chapter of the book that she was possibly involved in some form of espionage during this period. She refused to discuss the events surrounding this sudden ‘flight’ from Austria with her family or any one else for that matter and took this information with her to her end in 1999. She was cremated and her ashes returned to her beloved homeland by her daughter in 2002.
Phyllis’s final paragraph in the book reads …
The next day I am on my way home to Australia somewhere suspended in the sky between two worlds – between waking and sleeping. Somewhere in the dark, having lost all sense of time, I say ‘thank you’ to my mother. Thank you for laying out the treasure hunt. Thank you for secrets and for revelations. Thank you for hiding the things I need not know.
Most importantly to me, she was a talented photographer and I feel very lucky to have crossed paths with these stored rolls of film.
I really like these ‘India’ photos and have posted twenty of the thirty four that were on the roll … the film by the way is Perutz Perpantic.
I hope you’re enjoying this trip back in time as much as I am.
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