Time Travel

Jane held the charm out at arm's length, and Cyril solemnly pronounced the word of power.

As he spoke it the charm grew tall and broad, and he saw that Jane was just holding on to the edge of a great arch of very curious shape. The opening of the arch was small, but Cyril saw that he could go through it. All around and beyond the arch were the faded trees and trampled grass of the Regent's Park...But through the opening of it shone a blaze of blue and yellow and red. Cyril drew a long breath and stiffened his legs so that the others should not see that his knees were trembling and almost knocking together. “Here goes!” he said, and, stepping up through the arch, disappeared.

E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet.

Cyril's knees were knocking because he was about to leave Edwardian London for Egypt 6000 BC, through a magic amulet. I went weak at the knees in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, standing before the very chair in which Lady Jane Franklin was carried (when the going wasn't too rough) on her overland trip to Macquarie Harbour. History is stranger than fiction, but both need strong characters. The feisty Jane and her husband John (midshipman at Trafalgar, governor of Van Diemen's Land and polar explorer) have inspired many works of art and literature. So it's a shock to be reminded that Jane Franklin was more than a fictional character - that she was once a living, breathing, sitting human being.

That shock of collapsing time, those moments of hesitation before Reason returns with the usual distinctions between past, present and future, are a form of time travel, according to Chris Wild of retronaut.co. His website is a collection of thousands of 'time capsules', images that could transport you back years, even centuries.

In this video Chris Wild starts off slowly, as if he has all the time in the world, but stick around for a handy tip on increasing your blog hits, a Victorian mechanical arm and, for those who remember the 80s, Nancy Reagan on Mr T’s knee.

Now you can call me nostalgic, but retronauts ain’t what they used to be. Thanks to the Internet Archive's WaybackMachine, you can still find the earlier website howtobearetronaut.com, and trace Chris's increasingly frantic attempts to classify his expanding collection. The category labels were colourful: 'Anachronisms/Future in the past/Aliens in vintage postcards', 'Duration/Exceptional survival/5000-year-old chewing gum', 'Time distortion/Method of wrapping carrier pigeons'. The repackaged website http://www.retronaut.co is way more sedate, ordered by date, place and format. My favourite 'ghosts of...' series, images merging old and recent photos of the same street, is buried deep. But my main gripe with the site is its scanty referencing - you have to take so much on trust.

So here's my own amply referenced time capsule: the only known photograph of Jane Franklin, visiting Yosemite, California, c.1861. Without her traveling chair: not being the nostalgic type, she'd left it behind in VDL.

References

Archive.Org (1996). Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. [online] Retrieved from: http://archive.org/web/web.php [Accessed: 21 Nov 2012].

The Lost Lectures (2012). Chris Wild: When is Now?. [video online] Available at: http://www.thelostlectures.com/864/chris-wild-when-is-now [Accessed: 21 Nov 2012].

Nesbit, E. (1979). Five children and it: The phoenix and the carpet; the story of the amulet. London: Octopus Books.

Potter, R. (2012). Only known photo of Lady Jane Franklin. [image online] Available at: http://visionsnorth.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/only-known-photo-of-lady-jane-franklin.html [Accessed: 21 Nov 2012].

Retronaut.Co (2012). Retronaut - Explore any time you like.. [online] Retrieved from: http://www.retronaut.co [Accessed: 21 Nov 2012].