La vieille garce (James Joyce's The Auld Bitch)

During April 1900, less than a year before she died, her majesty Queen Victoria toured Ireland. Thousands turned out, the Royal Dublin Society suggested a national monument be erected to her, and, following the monarch's death the calls and enthusiasm for this monument gained momentum. A sculptor named John Hughes got the gig, got the cheque and bailed to Paris to make the "The Auld Bitch" which is a gorgeous name for the piece attributed to James Joyce around 1922.

Whilst the Irisih Jimi Hendrix of the written word James Joyce, and Irish Royalist regime sculptor clacquer John Hughes appear to be at very different ends of the Queen Victoria love/hate spectrum, there is one civic truth uniting the pair of them ~ they preferred doing their art in Paris, rather than being down and out in Dublin and Derry.

"The Auld Bitch" was the last statue of Queen Victoria to be made in her honour in Ireland. It was unveiled in 1908, standing at Leinster House in Dublin until it got the flick in 1948. That area then became a carpark. James Joyce never lived long enough to enjoy the convenience of the new parking which become available in front of Leinster House. 

Therefore, for the Joycean mortal timeline, The Auld Bitch held her place where its sculptor and his betters had determined She be placed. Among the verbal turds the magnificent Joyce hurled at The Auld Bitch  included a Ulysses reference by Joe Hynes where refers her as "the flatulent old bitch that's dead," (Cyclops ep.); and has his character of Stephen Dedalus thinking of French journalist Édouard Drumont, who'd dubbed Queen Victoria as the "...old hag with the yellow teeth" (or "vieille ogresse avec les dents jaunes")". 

At The King's School in Parramatta, there's still something of a quirky tradition in that since the first School day following her passing in 1901, out of respectful mourning, the lads took to wearing a black tie. The custom passed on through the decades, has been going for longer than a century and continues today, largely because no-one can now recall what the King's School tie prior to initial mourning period actually looked like.

Admittedly, my photography is more of a Joycean approach to form; although when under the effects of Laudanum (a tincture composed of approximately 10% powdered opium dissolved in 90% alcohol, also containing morphine alongside other alkaloids) perhaps Her Majesty might have been amused by the wildness of her form in these photographie conceptuelle. 

Like many of her Irish predecessors, The Auld Bitch was dispatched to Australia without having any say in the matter Herself, and, now sits, unhoused, in front of the QVB in Sydney.