Tongue orchids: Cryptostylis leptochila

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Bodalla State Forest, Cryptostylis leptochila, pollination by wasp

I like tongue orchids. They announce their presence by very distinctive leaves – a maroon underside – although fallen eucalypt leaves often cause confusion.

 

One of our local colonies in Bodalla State Forest shares a hillside with greenhoods and caladenia, one of those slightly ruined hillsides that undermine the notion of orchids as delicate plants. The colony on J’s block is far more attractive to wildlife and rarely reaches flowering.

I monitor those leaves obsessively one year and am rewarded by a number of patches of tongue orchids in full flower.

It’s not until I watch David Attenborough’s The private life of plants that I become interested in the pollination of orchids. In the case of a tongue orchid, pollination requires sophisticated deception. The male wasp Lissopimpla excelsa has to be convinced to the point of copulation that the labellum of the orchid is a female wasp. Jones assures me that this is easily observable on warm days.

Some excellent photos, unfortunately taken by someone else!

Walk the headland with me

A diverse walk yesterday (26th September). Here’s what I saw

Greenhoods: Pterostylis pedunculata

Tags

maroonhood, Potato Point orchids, September orchids

N.B. I’m rarely absolutely confident in my identification. If anyone reading this reckons I’m wrong, please let me know!

These are the first orchids I’ve encountered since I began my blog. They are about two blocks from home, in hiding on a pile of dirt created by a clean-up a few years ago. They are quite tiny, and even though I expected them to be there it took me two or three visits to see them. I spotted them on September 12th, 2011 – I’m learning to record date and year, so flowering comparisons can be made from year to year.

I’ve learnt a few things about photographing plants for ID over the years: I need to have habit and habitat shots, as well as those voyeuristic peerings down the throat and the artistic shots. This time I manage to remember to capture the rosette of leaves that is one of the identifiers. It’s harder to capture the whole orchid from the ground up. I seem to run into as-yet-unsolved depth of field problems.

The next weekend I spend a few hours going through my orchid books, trying to find a name. I decide it’s time to get a bit serious about the naming of parts, so Jones’ detailed descriptions will make sense. I look at diagrams and try to memorise: dorsal sepal, lateral sepal, petal, labellum, column, ovary. All straightforward with a diagram: not so straightforward with a photograph or a 3D orchid.

I gradually narrow possibilities down, ticking off basal rosette, single flower, coastal scrub (almost), August to October flowering period, whole-of-NSW distribution, green and white at base, apex dark brown (you could probably say so). My best guess is Pterostylis pedunculata and my orchid-spotting companion agrees, with reservations.

I return to my orchids a week later, armed with camera, hand lens, improved knowledge, specific aspects to photograph and questions. This visit should nail ID.

The ground around the patch is black. The grass and leaf litter has gone. My orchids have been incinerated.

I spend a long time looking for survivors and I find one. It’s in a different spot. The leaf litter is untouched by fire and this one looks as if it died a natural death.

“Infinite horizons” (part 1)

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Australian landscape painting, Fred Williams

My copy of Artonview arrives. It’s the journal of the National Gallery of Australia, and one of my pleasures is leafing through it over lunch. A number of paintings leap out at me. They are by Fred Williams. I’m particularly taken by one that shows a seascape in four panels. The colours are luminous and the artist’s found a way to contain and express a very large view, showing both its scope and its detail.

I decide I must see the exhibition. In the past I’ve resisted what I saw as the bitsiness of Williams, but the sample images don’t suggest bitsiness at all. Maybe I’ve become far more familiar with the real landscape over the years and therefore more appreciative of representations. I’ve inhabited dry bush, seaside and the red centre and loved them equally. They are his subject matter.

I visit the exhibition the first time on a Monday morning just after it opens. I have time and space to wander through, reconnoitring, which is my favourite way to tackle an exhibition. The first painting – Tree loppers – is of dismembered trees – not what I want at all.   The commentator talks about “paring away nonessential elements”. Branches seem to me to be essential elements of any self-respecting tree. Even as a painting I can’t see its virtues.

Fortunately Young saplings, Mittagong is nearby and enchants me with its vertical lines, its rich colours and its vitality. I’m a tree trunk and bark afficianado from way back.  

I continue my reconnoitre and enter each chamber on a sub voce gasp. The rooms pulsate with the colours of hillsides, waterfalls, ocean, mesas, bush, waterholes, creeks.  The horizon line is always interesting and unexpected. I like the hillsides that represent shape and steepness of the countryside. I’m particularly taken with Hillside 1963-64 and Hillside 1 1965 and stopped in my tracks by the circular format of Circle landscape 1965-66. Even the most minimal paintings draw my eye, those that aroused my youthful dislike. Landscape 69 triptych, 1969 – 70 has astonishing spatial depth despite its subtle ground and its sparse detail. The dates on these paintings indicate how Williams works on his paintings until he’s satisfied.

I spend a long time hogging the small video screen that enables me to leaf through his wonderful sketchbook of a visit to China, a perfect use for technology. I read in the catalogue that he often absented himself from the busy-ness of the tour of China and retired to his room to sketch and reflect. The heads, birds, mountains, statues, dragons are full of action and life.

I plan to return for a second visit, and buy the catalogue to prepare myself and remind myself. As I read it, I find the man behind the artist. Williams lacks the stridency of the stereotypical artist – no alcoholic binges or dramatic affairs. He dislikes being in the public eye, and his exhibitions are thoroughly considered. He doesn’t like the pressure of annual exhibitions. He’d rather prepare for six years and put together an exhibition that shows him, as well as the gallery browsers, something about the development of his work. He drinks up landscapes wherever he is and paints them over and over, solving technical problems as he goes. His diaries are thoughtful considerations of his craft and of the weather and his painting experience, full of the diffidence of question marks, and the immediacy of the present tense. He plots his own exhibitions, giving careful thought to what goes best with what. I like him.

I visit Infinite horizons again on a warm day 6 weeks later. This time I gorge on the close up. I stand with my nose up to the canvases and the composition boards, hoping my adoring breath does no damage. I find grounds that are brocaded with thick colour and textures and gleaming with the sheen that only oils can produce. I become fascinated by the pallor of his skies. I focus on a blob of paint – one of his “notations” and see in it the details of a closely observed landscape, a hint at a bird or a flower or a rock, through subtle stripes of paint that look as if they have just left his brush. I didn’t see any of this last time, and it’s something that the best reproductions in  the world can’t capture.

I’m not enamoured of his portraits – I want landscape! However I am charmed by two. One of an elephant, light and full of motion despite his size, and one of Williams’ daughter Kate at the beach, a little girl surrounded by all the treasures that the beach offers. 

I’ve developed a new interest in gouache, so I pay particular attention to paintings behind protective glass. I’m astonished at how close-up blotches of paint become rich representations of Sturt desert pea and at the characteristic care with which Williams paints a selection of mushrooms. Manyof his beachscapes are also gouache, sometimes mixed with sand. They are probably my favourites – until I move into another chamber and favour the Weipa paintings, or the waterfalls, or the riverbeds, or the billabongs and forest ponds.

 

Fred Williams paintings and background

Orchid spotting in Eurobodalla

Tags

Eurobodalla, orchid photography, orchid reference books

For five years now we’ve been finding native orchids, terrestrial and epiphytic, on J’s block, in the Bodalla State Forest and around Potato Point. They inhabit dry sclerophyll hillsides recently burnt, rainforest remnants, slashed roadsides, open grassland and disturbed ground beside bush tracks. A number of different species often grow in a zone along a line of hillside. The rule seems to be if you find one species, look around and you may well spot another one.

Our tally grows slowly: we’ve spotted helmet orchids (2 species), bearded orchids, caladenias, greenhoods (2 species), hyacinth orchids, glossodia (only one sighting), donkey orchids (2 species), dockrillia, wasp orchids, mosquito orchids, rock orchids, tangle orchids, snake orchids, tiny tree orchids.  I’m not much good at initial spotting. I’ve only ever found one species independently. But once somebody else discovers and attunes my eye, I become almost expert.

Even when you know an actual location, or an exact habitat you can overlook native orchids. On one memorable occasion, J was stomping around on the track near a moist patch of ferns saying “They’ve got to be here. This is ideal for helmet orchids. Why aren’t they here?”And suddenly, there they are, discreet and prolific, as if he’d stamped them into existence. (He seems to have this power. In the early days of our orchid acquaintance, when greenhoods were the only ones we knew, they appeared on a particular slope wherever J put his foot, as if his steps were giving birth to them.)

Capturing orchids on camera is a seperate challenge. It involves a lot of lying down. The ground is usually damp, rocky or steep. The sun leaches colour or intrudes a blue spot. The wind woggles delicate flowers into a frenzy. The canopy produces a dimness  beyond my camera settings. The construction of an orchid poses problems with depth of field. Occasionally there’s a warning from my companion as I brace my feet so my lens can peer into the inner parts of an flower on a vertical hillside: “Be careful! I’ve seen adders in that pile of rocks.”

Spotting and photographing are the easy, pleasureable bits. Identifying and documenting are the hard work. I shudder at the sheer number of members of the Greenhood Alliance.  I am delighted when the flowering season or the distribution cancel a particular contender. Betty and Don Wood’s local book (Flowers of the South Coast and ranges of New South Wales, vols 1-3, Wood’s Books, 1998) is the first port of call: their colour coding is a gentle introduction for a rank amateur.  Two versions of David Jones monumental work on orchids are our ID bibles. My preference, for reasons of laziness and ignorance is the smaller one – A field guide to the native orchids of Southern Australia by David and Barbara Jones (Bloomings books, Victoria 2000). However D.L. Jones’ A complete guide to native orchids of Australia including the island territories (New Holland, 2006) provides detailed information and generates aspirations: “Oooh! I’d really like to spot that one!” When I’m stumped, I send off a photo to my friend R, who is knowledgeable, passionate about orchids and more meticulous than I in her search through Jones.

What is the attraction of encountering orchids in their native habitat? They are usually quite small, so their discovery is unexpected. There is the magic of nothing, and then something. I often try to recover the feel of that recognition moment but it’s located in a miniscule time spot from which it can’t be retrieved. I suspect there is an element of glamour too, deriving from the time when the only ones I knew were exotic, and they fulfilled a corsage role on special occasions.

Spotting a native orchid amongst the leaf litter or twining round a grey myrtle is a gift to beat any corsage, and an encounter makes an occasion of a pleasant stroll through the bush.

Learning Polish

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avoiding Alzheimers

Sometimes I have ideas beyond my skills. For a long time learning Polish seemed to be one of them. I suspect I’m not the only English speaker who would be daunted by a sentence like this:

Chcemy się pochwalić że zostaliśmy dziadkami.

There is a paucity of vowels for a start. I was comforted at first by assurances of phonetic consistency. After English, that seemed promising. But in the daunting sentence, there are three different kinds of z s (and one possible kind is missing, I discover later). There are c s and e s and s s with and without diacritical marks. They all sound different – I think.

One of my goals (to avert Alzheimer’s without resorting to crossword puzzles) looks as if it will be well served. The brain will certainly be breaking new ground. My main goal – to communicate with my daughter’s in-laws when I go to Poland – looks completely unachievable.

I fumble round the edges of learning: I buy and borrow teach yourself Polish books. I blu tak a bewildering array of flash cards on the kitchen cupboards, although I know osmosis probably won’t take the place of hard work. After all I spent 9 years of my working life espousing explicit teaching with absolute conviction.

I identify patterns and become enamoured of adverbs and conjunctions because they hold their identity, no matter what the rest of the sentence does. They are the mature parts of speech in my view – the ones that don’t succumb to the pressures of proximity. As I “progress” ponieważ (because) becomes a particular favourite, because it enables me to move out of the realm of the simple sentence into more complicated sentences, such as “I like it because it is nice.”

I don’t seem to be getting any closer to my first goal of emailing O and J. The breakthrough is the arrival of a postcrossing postcard. The front of it delights me with its palette and patterns.

When I turn it over, this is what I see

It’s from Poland. And then I realize that not only is it from Poland but that most of it is written in Polish. (I have progressed. I know it’s not Swedish, or Lithuanian or Russian.) I did post on my profile that I “was struggling to learn Polish” and Anna has called my bluff.

So I begin a process that becomes familiar (and easier – a bit.) I pull out the dictionary and work through word by word. My greatest triumph is niedaleko. I don’t need the dictionary. I can read Polish!! I know nie – like a 2 year old one of my first Polish words was no or not. And daleko is on my flash cards. I even remember what it means. So niedaleko means “not far.” Context kicks in – I’ve always been good at leaping over unknown words in another language and getting it roughly right, provided there aren’t too many unknowns. I reckon Anna lives not far from Roztcze. And the dictionary confirms it.

I become cocky and do two things. I add to my postcrossing profile: “If you speak Polish, please write in Polish to make me work hard to translate, and learn a bit more about this challenging language.” And I send an email to O and J.

Stagnation sets in again. O and J don’t reply. Have I offended? Should I have addressed them more formally as Pan or Pani? Or have I been totally incomprehensible? My daughter reassures me – they don’t use their email much now, because both their sons have returned to Poland and live nearby.

I soldier on. I comment in broken Polish on my daughter’s blog, blithely using the infinitive instead of the first person. I write part of my emails to her in Polish. I send Marcin birthday greeting in Polish. However, when I look over what I have written it doesn’t flash into meaning. I’m still stymied by unfamiliar letter couplings.

By now I’ve discovered an online keyboard that provides the diacritical marks I need – ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż – and I’ve discovered Google translate, so I can see how it interprets my clumsy attempts. I’ve become vaguely familiar with pronouns and the conjugation of verbs and the declension of nouns. The dictionary seems to have more of the words I need, now that I recognize forms and transformations, and know that z has a different section from ź and ż.

Then M sends me a note from his parents in Polish. I spend an engrossed Sunday morning learning that they thank me for my letter, that they are grandparents,  that they are delighted that R (my daughter) and M have arrived and that I am invited warmly to Poland. The sentence that leaps out at me is Twój polski jest bardzo dobry. I know exactly what it says. I can read a whole sentence in Polish! It says “Your Polish is very good.”

Now it’s my turn to respond. I draft a few ideas in English, shape them to the capabilities of my Polish grammar, and write my reply. I congratulate them on being grandparents (Chcemy się pochwalić że zostaliśmy dziadkami means “We want to boast that we are grandparents”), ask them about their holiday on the Baltic; talk about spring here; say I want to hunt for mushrooms with them when I go to Poland. I am very pleased with my letter, despite its kindergarten constructions, until I feed it through Google translate and find that I have said as my opening line, not “I liked your letter”, but “I have fallen in love with my letter-box.”

 

 

Saturday in the bush

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Charles Harpur, spring flowers

On Saturdays I often wake to the sound of a lyrebird deep in the gully in front of the house, or, if I’m lucky, strutting along the flat area just outside the bedroom. One morning, I surprise a young male in full display, tail shimmering, on the rocky hillside outside the kitchen window. Many years ago J. promised me a rose garden: the lyre bird is a very satisfactory substitute.

We begin the day immersed in our reading. This weekend it’s Bertrand Russell’s History of western philosophy for J. He’s ecstatic because he’s escaped the oppressive throat-slitting world of Pope Gregory and Ulfilus the Hairy, and emerged into the renaissance where people are allowed to think, although there are still those who say “I denounce the telescope.” I’m slow-reading Gisela Kaplan’s Birds, fascinated by the world of bird behaviours so like the human.

Outside the mist has lifted, and the day looks warm and inviting. After a bowl of porridge and leatherwood honey, J. goes outside to smash an old concrete tank stand with crow-bar, block-buster and pulley, to make way for the huge blue tank tethered on its side just outside the window. Rain is predicted later in the week and the tank needs to be inched into place along a narrow path to catch every precious drop.

I go for a walk, in search of a little patch of greenhood orchids. The pittosporum at the front door is pouring out perfume so strong that even my aged nose can smell it. I potter up the bush road, looking for new spring flowerings. Of course there’s a stiff breeze which means  the pink pea-flowers of the indigofera woggle and resist photography. 

I know this track well. I used to roll my eyes when J. said “Let’s go and visit the myrtle in that gully – you know the one”, but I have my own familiars now. I remember a wonga vine wrapped around a stringy bark from last year and I search the roadside bush to find it. It’s in perfect blossom, maroon throats with tiny spots visible even from a distance. The wind has dropped a bit. The photographer only needs to avoid the large blue circle that marks the sun’s intrusion.

To my left Gulaga mountain looms, without its possum cloak of cloud, clear in the clear morning. The hakeas outside F.’s place are a pink haze of blossom. Despite my preference for indigenous plants, I can’t help being charmed by these invaders. F. died more that a year ago and the new owner is busy scraping back the paint work.

I’m getting close to the place where greenhoods are rumoured to be. A wallaby thumps off into the bush and distracts me briefly. I begin at the mossy guide post and eyeball every patch of dirt, even moving into the bush a bit, on casual alert for snakes.

There are no greenhoods. I suspect my vision, and am ready to be mortified when J. has a look and spots them immediately. However, my camera-eye is caught by elegant coils of grass and the cheeky green eyes of luxuriant purple hardenbergia.

I give up on the greenhood search and move to the seeping bank on the high side of the road where I find treasures: maiden hair fern, trigger plants, more hardenbergia and a blue rock forming a wonderful back-drop to the seed heads of kangaroo grass. Two motorbikes zoom past in a cloud of dust.

By the time I return home, J. has had enough concrete smashing, so we laze the afternoon away. At 4.30 we grab a bottle of wine and head down to the river reserve. J. has cleared it into a pleasant strip of wattles, she-oaks and callistemon. The river flows bank to bank below our chairs and we watch the sun sink. It spears light onto the water like the flares at the tip of sparklers.

At first we can’t hear the rapids because of the wind in the she-oaks. As the wind drops, the rapids and frogs take over and a couple of tractors clatter their way home.

Our desultory conversation settles for a while on Charles Harpur, an early Australian poet who was gold commissioner at Nerrigundah and whose grave is on the hillside above us. J. wants to name the reserve after him. We revisit an old argument. I find him totally unreadable. J. feels as if we should give him a chance.

The light fades to true dusk. We pour another glass of wine. Against hope, I grab the camera and try to catch the fading light on the river ripples. An owl swoops in front of us as we drive home.

Back at the house, there are two text messages from the larger world. K. has just signed a contract to teach at Bamaga on the tip of Cape York for a  year. A. is interested in a job at an international school in Indonesia, but will probably settle for 10 weeks in Abu Dhabi.

About Charles Harpur

Friday on the Gaza Strip

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Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, pain of others, Susan Sontag

I shall not hate, by Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish takes the reader into the dailiness of life on the Gaza Strip, where he has lived all his life. He shows the difficulties of getting an education when his family desperately needs the money he can bring home by working. He recounts the humiliations of crossing the border into Israel where he works as an obstetrician – sometimes it can take 24 hours and there is always the chance of being turned back. He reveals the poverty and the hopelessness of his fellow Palestinians.  Then, 3 months after his wife dies of leukemia, three of his daughters are killed by Israeli shells while they are talking in their bedroom.

As the title suggests, he refuses to hate. He learns as a 15 year-old that Israelis can be caring people when he works on an Israeli farm and is treated as one of the family. In an interview at the 2011 Sydney Writers’ festival, Abuelaish  expresses a rare burst of anger when the interviewer asks him how he can deliver Israeli babies, potential killers of Palestinians. He says that a baby is a precious new life and that no child is born violent or a terrorist.

How do I think about Dr Abuelaish’s story and the long agony of Palestinian refugees? This question has been nagging at me for a week now. I’ve read a number of cognate books recently – Mahboba’s promise, Three cups of tea, The hospital by the river. The difference between these books and I shall not hate is that Abuelaish is writing from inside the pain – the others are all outside it and therefore they (and I more so) are distanced. I feel relatively easy about the other books –  I can donate to the charity attached to the book. Of course, I can do that with the Daughters for life foundation as well. But it seems inadequate.  

I hoped book club discussion would help to clarify my thoughts, but something quite strange happened. Everybody told a parallel story, after minimal reference to the book – a mother stationed in Gaza in World War 2, grandparents driven out by the Turks, a murdered girl and a Year 12 assessment task, Daniel Barenboim’s Palestinian-Israeli orchestra, the local fund-raising concert for Mahboba’s promise, membership 20 years ago of the free Palestine movement, good Jewish friends who went to live in Israel, Palm Island in the 1950s, the tensions under a three-day threat of bushfires. This has never happened before. We always focus on the book we read. Was it evasion? Were the actual events of Aubuelaish’s life hard for us all to cope with? And if that is so, why?

I look for help  in Susan Sontag’s Regarding the pain of others (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY 2003). She focuses her discussion on photos of atrocities. I scan it for words that might open up avenues to make sense of my responses: evasion, compassion, outrage, empathy, helplessness, frustration, sorrow, despair, indignation, pity, disgust, shame, shock, sadness. Some of these words resonate.

She encapsulates my problem for me: “How do I respond with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence?” She suggests that being human requires us to look at hard facts and startles me by saying that someone surprised by human cruelties hasn’t reached moral or psychological maturity.

I have many strategies to “avoid being moved”. Usually when I close a book “strong emotions become transient ones.” Sontag might say it’s normal to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others. Maybe this is what I’m fighting in my feeble way. Fighting to be haunted.

Sontag speaks of “the task of imagining” and an obligation to look at real horror.  Abuelaish doesn’t leave much for me to imagine. He describes his daughters after the explosion that kills them: her eye was on her cheek … her finger hanging by a thread of skin … (Mayar) had been decapitated … arms in familiar sweaters and legs in pants that belonged to these beloved children leaned at crazed angles where they had blown off the torsos.  As I copy this I feel invasive (Sontag calls this “the indecency of spectatorship”): I feel sick: I feel an urge to withdraw from the contemplation of this absolute awfulness. I draw back from the appalling act of imagination that seems to be required if I’m going to truly understand: putting my own children in that bedroom. I can’t do it.

When I previewed this post, my header was of burrawangs against spotted gums, in the peaceful bush near my unthreatened home. Other random headers show flowers, the ocean, rock patterns, birds – unspoilt things. I am writing this from a position of absolute privilege. How could I possibly understand life in a Palestinian refugee camp, carved off from the rest of the world by Israeli brutality and bloody-mindedness? My days are never a perpetual struggle for food and water, for education, for opportunity, for safety. I have what Sontag calls “the luxury of patronising reality”.

I don’t know that I’m any further forward. I can’t answer the main question: what does it mean to protest suffering? My final position is one of helplessness, and the shame that accompanies that. At least I didn’t, this time, “see the list in the morning paper and dismiss its recollection with the coffee.” But how can I take pride in this?

I can’t get out of my mind the accusation. Unless we alleviate we are voyeurs.

Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish website

Mahboba promise website

Three cups of tea website

Hospital by the river website

Thursday at Book Club

Book club is just as much about logistics as it is about literature. It begins with the not necessarily harmonious discussion of which book next. Determination beats hushed thoughtfulness every time. What really irritates me is that the determined suggestion is usually a good one. (We never get as far as evaluating the hushed one.) There’s an odd tendency for the suggester to be elsewhere the night their choice reaches the table.

Then there’s acquiring the book. I’ve taken an oath to borrow rather than buy – usually I’m glad to have read the book but I don’t want to own it. So I need to make a fine judgement. If I read it too early in the 2-month period, I’ll forget it. If I leave it too late, the book will be out on loan to a series of people until well into the next century. Usually I manage to get it right. If I borrow too early, I make brief notes – character, theme, key events, nice turns of phrase, things I like best, things that drive me nuts (like the green eyes of the woman in Shantaram –which I did buy, since it was my first book club and I had a strong sense of proper behaviour.)

Occasionally there’s a dilemma of modality and courtesy. Judith Lucy’s Lucy family alphabet soup is abysmal. How do I express the level of my dislike without offence? As it happens, no-one else likes it anyway. We spent discussion time that night reassessing the way we do things.

When I stopped teaching, I thought I’d finished with the fine discriminations required by marks out of ten. Not so. We start our discussion with a round-table numerical assessment, so we can see how the land lies. Is it a 4.5 or a 5? And what can I say to justify that rating when everyone else has struggled not to give it 10/10, because it wasn’t quite perfect?

After the scoring we take it in turns to talk about our response. That’s to circumvent interruption and domination. I enjoy this time. It offers an insight into the minds and preoccupations of these quite amazing women, most of whom I meet only at Book Club. Even when I’m in wild disagreement with an interpretation I know it will provide me with food for thought as I drive home the next morning.

Then there’s the alternate video nights. I’m dumb in the face of choice here mostly, because I’m not a big video consumer and I’m usually part of an audience of maybe three in the small Kinema at Narooma. So I’m almost hesitant to complain when we watch Ben Kingsley don his medals and suffocate in a plastic bag in The house of sand and fog. However, I become vocal about dismemberment after The lovely bones, all the more a seed-bed for nightmares because it is suggested rather than actual butchery. I practise appropriate modality in less-than-strident insistence, and the next video night we watch Babies. To put the record straight, I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed, against all expectation, Mama mia and (with no expectations) Black Orpheus. 

I haven’t mentioned food. Food takes as much thought-space as the most demanding book. I can’t take fruit salad every month, but it’s about all I can think of to cater for the fish-allergic, the gluten-free, the dairy intolerant and the vegan. That accounts for 70% of us. My limited repertoire, lovingly accumulated over 60 years, has to be ditched and I struggle to replace it. Curried vegetables. Fruit salad. Lentil and lime soup. Fruit salad. Fruit salad. And today orange almond cake, which needs, I’ve just discovered, food processing – and my food processor is broken.

None of this matters at all when I think about the life of Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, whose book I shall not hate we read tonight.

Wednesday at pre-school

 I usually prepare for pre-school amid a flurry of photos, trying to decide how I’ll record last week’s session to be useful to the director, L., or interesting to the children. L is doing battle with the Regulator and the Being, Belonging, Becoming document which is a maze of outcomes and indicators. This is familiar turf to me as my battered English K-6 Syllabus attests, so maybe I can be helpful. 

Sometimes I stick photos on cardboard with a bit of text. These posters are blu-tacked to the windows, the outcomes and indicators discreetly stuck to the back. The kidlets love seeing photos of themselves and words about what they are doing.

Sometimes I write letters to I.  who has written to me from her “office”, and scrunched her letters up into envelopes.

I write a letter back and I too put my letters in envelopes.

Hello I.

I’m very pleased! I got another two letters from you and a drawing that filled up the whole page. Here are some butterfly photos to say thank you, because I know you like butterflies.

Your friend,

Meg

Sometimes I make a sheet for L to file, marking particular achievements with a photo and words, accompanied by the dreaded outcomes and objectives.

Today I’m empty handed. I’ve been absent for two weeks and impetus has retreated behind a cold and a trip to Sydney.

I drive through the village at snail’s pace to avoid dogs lying on the road or ambling along it. The view is magnificent – out across the headland to the sea and down over the lake out to the mountains.  The closer view is not so good: yards full of battered vehicles; broken windows; a burnt-out car; smashed glass.

The pre-school nestles at the bottom of the hill with a view through the trees to the lake. The solar panels were a community installation and have only been bricked once.

T is standing at the easel, wielding a paint brush with total confidence. He’s painting his mum, laying on the paint for her smile thick and sure. S is a bit surly: “Don’t look at it.” I can’t charm her. Later she resists my comments about the sparkly glitter in her hair with the same glare.

I is at the table with paper and a texta, drawing a friendly monster with enviable speed. She pastes it in her special book. Then she writes her name, over and over, stumbling only at the “e”, which she doesn’t seem to be able to master. I make it out of dots for her to trace. She turns all the other letters in her name into dots too. She tells me about the football day yesterday to celebrate fathers day. Her dad won the lucky door prize. We look at the photos L has taken and read the story she has written.

K, another volunteer, is on the reading lounge, engulfed by children. No-one is playing with blocks today: there have been some splendid constructions on other days. The sense of balance is amazing – I’m certain the whole construction will tumble, but small dexterous fingers add one more, and then another. Sometimes they make long roads, or garages, or a tall gateway to walk through. My favourite blocks are the stained glass ones, which have been turned into many architectural splendours.

I don’t spend much time with M, aka Capman, today. He’s a lad of passions. One week it was snakes, another it was dinosaurs. He is meticulous in his colouring in, but his speech is very hard to understand. Today he shows me his monkey T-shirt.

Mid-session L and Aunty C come in. I’ve known them both for a long time, from different pieces of my past life. They are spending the day further down the hill at the old graveyard, identifying where bodies lie. They won’t be able to find the exact place for each person, but they plan to put all the names on a plaque.

The session ends with big plastic teeth. L shows the children how to clean the teeth, and they each have a turn. Then she gives them a toothbrush each and a box to keep it in, so they can clean their teeth after lunch at pre-school. They are all very definite about what colour toothrush they want. They are not quite so definite about the round and round, along, across movements necessary for a good clean.

I scrub two tables, removing glitter, glue and play-doh, ready for afternoon fruit. It’s time to  head off back through the village, taking the speed-humps cautiously and waving to a couple of teenagers leaning aginst the wall in the sun.

Gulaga looms, its crewcut of trees sharp against the grey sky.

Dreamtime story of Gulaga