Climb every mountain

It's 152 years (to the day) since Sir Paweł Edmund Strzelecki died, in the fullness of his years, in London. He'd come a long way. He has been claimed as a Hero of Poland. In this case, quite literally as his remains were repatriated to Poznan in 1997 from Kensal Green Cemetery. Polish Wikipedia describes him as "geograf, podróżnik, badacz Australii" i.e. geographer, traveller [not tourist!] and Australian bad-ass. Poland surely vies with Ireland as being MOPE = Most Oppressed People Ever. We moan on about the six-counties, the border-poll, Lloyd-George's finesse of Collins & Griffiths in 1921. 100 years later, Drumcree reminds us that we-the-collective are polarized, intransigent and self-righteous.

The irony is that Strzelecki was born just outside of Poznań two years after the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had >!Poof!< ceased to exist in the final chapter of The Partitions of Poland (1772 -1795). Before I became a scientist, I had a year at school pretending to study history. I was much more fully engaged being disengaged: sitting in the lee of a hedge writing mopey love-letters and pretentious poetry. But in History we spent a while considering the rapacious acquisition of Polish castles & whole provinces by Prussia, Russia and the Hapsburgs. If 'one' was more awake, parallels could have been drawn between late 18thC Poland and the 1930s [Rhineland, Anschluß, Sudetenland, Czecho-remains . . . Poland!]. Not forgetting <ahem!> that Poland helped herself to a 800 sq.km chunk of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 dismemberment of that adjacent Republic.

Anyway . . . Strzelecki, like Joseph Conrad [Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski] 60 years later, left Poland, learned English and travelled far. Along the way Strzelecki taught himself the rudiments of geology and mineralogy and spent several years prospecting in the Americas - Chile, California, Canada, Cuba and that's just the Cs. He moved on to Australia in 1839 with a bit of rock.cred to his name. Along one of his Oz prospecting expeditions he summited the highest [2230m = 7300ft] peak on the Australian mainland and named it Mount Kosciuszko [see L & licence] after Tadeusz Kościuszko the dishy dashing doomed leader of the Polish independence movement in the years before his own birth.

Strzelecki is in the news this week because he is being memorialized in Glenties Co Donegal with a plaque commemorating his climbing a metaphorical mountain by feeding Irish children during An Gorta Mór in the 1840s. He started as the 'neutral' [i.e. not obvs British oppressor] representative of BRA = British Relief Association which fussed about trying chink the gaps in the environmental catastrophe into which the Central UK Government was unwilling to pour money. 

Strzelecki spent about 3 years in The West in various capacities. Key insight was to mobilise one element of infrastructure - schools - to relieve the pressure on another element - the workhouse - which was ill- equipped and under-resourced to deal with such widespread poverty, famine and pestilence [horses]. He contrived to distribute hunks of rye-bread to 200,000 children in schools across Connacht. Some readers in Mayo, Sligo and Donegal, and across the diaspora, are alive today because their ancestor developed a taste for pumpernickel like they too had been born in Poland ! The Polish Embassy in Dublin hosted a tribute exhibition in 2018.  He has a whole list of peaks, peeks, creeks & tracks named after him.