Unconfirmed Reports

8th Leg: Vienna - Budapest
Thursday Afternoon

Quite a short train trip, but an important one; conceptually, this crosses for me the half-way point of the journey, passing from West to East.

On the Hungarian side of the border, changes are immediately obvious, with much more run-down buildings, and general slight disorderliness contrasting with Austria’s compulsive neatness. Have you ever seen an Austrian heap of firewood? It looks as if it were stacked by someone with autism.

The changes visible on the Hungarian side of the border weren’t altogether unheralded. During our day in Vienna, I had already fancied I could detect shades of something easterly. Maybe it was just something florid and Oriental in the Viennese art nouveau, or maybe just the increase in Turkish shops and people. More likely, it was just the general effect of Vienna being more cosmopolitan than the rest of Austria. Really, it seemed very separate from the rest of the country: dirtier, more worn and decadent, and with more signs of unconservative cultural energies.

We were both much impressed by the architectural works of Hundertwasser, and I especially liked his design for a new Australian flag. Oddly, I couldn’t find an image of this design on the net - though his redesign of the NZ flag is widespread. I did find, however, that a flag design that won a competition in the Australian (neocon toilet-rag) newspaper in 1993 is a fairly blatant ripoff of Hundertwasser’s design. I wonder if this has ever been acknowledged, or even noticed by anyone? Hundertwasser’s orginal version looks better, anyway.

Hundertwasser’s re-design of the New Zealand flag (1970s)

The Australian flag redesign that won the competition in the Australian newspaper, 1993. This is actually a ripoff of an earlier design by Friedrich Hundertwasser.