video journalism
| Ameland |
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One of the many reasons for the media’s disproportionate coverage of rural issues is the inherent incompatibility between country life and consumer culture. It’s not that nothing ever happens in the country; it’s just that no one ever buys anything there... With even the most banal urban culture commonly displacing rural issues in the media, widespread disinterest in the countryside is endemic. Given these circumstances, it’s comes as something of a surprise that anyone would want to engage in the clearly unprofitable and slightly thankless task of writing and independently publishing books about life in small isolated communities. But thankfully, and contrary to the malignant influence of market forces, there remain a reassuringly large number of local authors who understand that a story’s real worth is in no way related to the size of its potential readership. Having studied a representative sample of backwater publications, I’ve come to the conclusion that a defining characteristic of the genre is a tendency to focus exclusively on a single, specific-to-the-point-of-absurd, niche subject which is then explored in arduous detail. Ameland’s literary offerings are no exception to this trend - a keyword search on Amazon produces just two publications in English: "Independent Bus Operators of the Frisian Island Ameland 1923 – 1967*" and "Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating: Proceedings of the Joint Workshop: EC-10, Ameland, Netherlands**." Were it not so obsessively concerned with buses, the first title would probably be relatively useful in an anthropological sense. As it stands, it’s quite difficult to know just what to make of it. The following paragraph is the introduction to one Dutch bus enthusiast’s sentiently sweet account of a weekend trip to Ameland. "Back to the ferry – slowly Ameland was coming into sight, the ferry point, yes, I think I can see the buses waiting. The view gets clearer. At once a strange feeling came over me. What’s this? Yes it’s the cream/grey buses, which look very much like the cream/grey buses of NZH of Haarlem. Yes.. no... certainly... they are the Haarlem buses!" [Independent Bus Operators...R F. De Boer] This second extract relates to the most competitive era of public transport on the Island. An all time high of 3 independents were competing together in a cut throat contest to be the Island's principle bus operator. "1925 had seen the import of three buses to the island – Visser’s Ford T had come in mid-1924 followed by Stender’s Spyker, and now Ridder’s bus. It was also a Ford T chassis which carried a van den Bos and Brouwers body – but with a larger seating capacity than Visser’s – 19 persons to Visser’s 12. This was a great blow to Visser who reacted by buying a 4-persons T-Ford taxi. So Ridder also bought a 4-persons Ford-T taxi not long afterwards in retaliation. In 1929 Gerrit Visser bought a new Chevrolet 15 seater bus. Then in reply to this – in 1930 – ...a beautiful new 25-seat Hainje-bodied GMC bus was acquired." [Independent Bus Operators...R F. De Boer] And so it continues in this vein. The author painstakingly charts the working lives of a handful of different vehicles. Inevitably, he tracks down the buses' final resting places, usually on a scrap heap or being used as chicken coops, and sorrowfully laments over their undignified and untimely demises. *The years (1923-1927) relate to the only time there were actually independent operators on the Island. Motorised transport was introduced in 1923, and the municipality took over the service in 1967. ** This title appears to relate to a particle acceleration conference, which for reasons not entirely clear, was hosted in Ameland. It falls outside the realms of even this hastily fabricated thesis.    
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