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~ my Potato Point life

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Monthly Archives: November 2011

Spotted gums after rain

23 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos, plants

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Corymbia maculata, spotted gums

What I really like about both photography and nature is the need to snatch the image today, because it won’t be there tomorrow, or even, often, in an hour. Nor was it there yesterday. If you’re not in a very particular place at a very particular moment, you miss it. This keeps the experience everlastingly fresh and new.

Last week I looked out the study window in mizzly rain and saw a slender spotted gum unpeeling its bark to reveal a tender green trunk. So many things came together to give me this gift: me in the study, staring into space when I was supposed to be working. The tree shedding its bark. The rain colouring the underbark delicate green. A pause in the rain allowing me to expose my camera for a photo-shoot.

The purple ribbon

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by morselsandscraps in Spencer Albert Small

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family legends, World War 1

“Of course Spencer never married. He left his heart with a girl in Belgium.” That was the family story about my great uncle.

So when I found a piece of purple ribbon in a pocket of his war-time wallet, it immediately confirmed the romance: he carried her hair ribbon through the war and preserved it all his life.  I imagined the fair-haired woman and the serious older soldier (Spencer was thirty when he enlisted) falling in love and then being separated by the intractability of war, the only legacy of their love a length of purple ribbon. Ninety years later, the creases are immutable, and the taffeta torn along the folds.

This version of the purple ribbon was unchallenged until last week. I’d been thinking about Spencer deeply on and off for a number of years and it seemed to be time to round off my research and move on to another project. I was looking through his wallet again, gently separating the newspaper clippings and dance cards, and poems and hymn sheets folded into small squares. They too were splitting along the folds.

I found this.

Suddenly the romantic story was eradicated, as family stories often are when they encounter reality. The purple ribbon was no longer a relic from a love affair, but a lucky charm against passions and evil influences.

Ten minutes with George Raper

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by morselsandscraps in art, Australian native orchids

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Dendrobium speciosum, First Fleet watercolour artist, George Raper, National Library of Australia

George Raper was only 17 when he sailed for Australia with the First Fleet on board the Sirius in 1787. He carried with him a box of the newly-invented watercolour tablets, which cost him two month’s pay. He made such good use of his paints and his skill at observing and representing animals, birds and plants of Sydney Cove and Norfolk Island that Governor Hunter copied his paintings in his sketchbook Birds & Flowers of NSW.

When I decided to celebrate my birthday in the National Library of Australia, I wasn’t thinking of George Raper. I was planning to spend the morning with Ellis Rowan’s wonderful flower paintings. The day before I travelled to Canberra, I rang casually to ask if I could also see Raper’s painting of the Sydney rock orchid (Dendrobium speciosum).

“Oh no! ” they said. “His paintings are too important. Too fragile. Too unique”

“Well, maybe,” they said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

Two days later, I was absorbing Ellis Rowan’s painting of Sturt’s Desert Pea in the Manuscript Room. I had a case containing ten of her paintings on the table in front of me. Someone came up behind me and said “Are you Meg? Ten o’clock or two o’clock?”

And that was how I was offered ten minutes with George Raper.

I was overwhelmed to the point of unaccustomed and inexplicable tears at the thought of time with something so precious. Two guardians wheeled his large black case to the table and slid it off the trolley. Reverentially, they unclasped the lid and began, with four hands, to move the mounts to avoid buckle or bend. Through the cover sheet I could see the faintest tantalising outline of paintings that weren’t the orchid. However, I accepted that my ration was one.

And then, the guardians relented and lifted the veil on the Glossy Black Cockatoo. I was stunned by the brightness of the colours. I’d seen the cockatoo before, but in pallid digital form. The spears of the burrawang behind him gleamed dark green. The glimpse was brief, but special: Glossy Black Cockatoo is my online avatar.

No more glimpses were vouchsafed until we reached Dendrobium speciosum. The cover sheet was removed, the guardians stepped back  and I was sitting down in front of a a flower painted in Sydney Cove 220 years ago. I had ten precious minutes to breathe it in.

The digital version, used here with the permission of the National Library of Australia, had done nothing to prepare me for the original.

I felt the urgency of looking well. I began with the paper to settle my excitement. It was woven and cream, with slight spots of foxing and a mysterious pencil annotation Can – no. No one seems to know what this signifies.

Raper didn’t begin his painting with a background wash. His approach was business like: the plant and just the plant.

I began with the pseudobulb. It perches on the rock (or log), minute hairs protruding finely from the base. The bulb is rich pink and yellow with fine lines and the clearly marked criss-crossed casing for the leaves. The leaves form a deep bright green ribbed chalice with a rim of gold as they curve around the racemes. Little scrapes of paint escape from the outline of one of the leaves.

The artist manages the crowding of the creamy yellow flowers skilfully. Mostly they are in profile and on these his maroon spots are sometimes a bit slapdash and the flowers are contained by a slightly unsteady outline. But in the two blooms that look directly at the viewer the orchid characteristics are portrayed with detail and exactitude.

Once I had looked my fill, I began trying to imagine the young man in the sparse settlement of 1789, painting, with precision and grace, portraits of things new to him.  He is sitting with his paper on his knee, or a makeshift table, his precious watercolours beside him and his eyes scouring the specimen, just as my eyes are scouring his painting. Maybe my two first fleet ancestors notice him as they go about their convict business.

The guardians seem to have stretched my ten minutes, so I return to the painting and experiment with another way of looking. I begin at the bottom and breathe in what I see and then close my eyes to reproduce it for my memory. Slowly I move up the painting: the bulb, the leaves, the flower sprays.

I sense movement beyond my concentration and the guardians flank me again. The careful putting away begins: four hands, muted voices; the cover paper, the mount; the sliding. But there’s another treat. A faintly limned bird calls through its veil, the veil is lifted, and we have a brief glimpse of the Common bronzewing, richly coloured with hints of gold to catch the pigeon gleam, and in the background a xanthorrhea.

I stand watching every move, until the clasp on the black case is closed and it slides back onto the trolley.

For more information about George Raper

Linda Groom First Fleet Artist: George Raper’s Birds & Plants of Australia National Library of Australia 2009

The George Raper Collection

George Raper watercolours

Why I love you

13 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by morselsandscraps in occasional pieces

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You are sleek and suave and elegant, a joy to look at and caress.

You let me ruffle your perfection and readjust you to my liking.

You are there day and night, always available no matter where I am.

You continually offer me something fresh and new.

You maintain your flawlessness unsullied and without defilement no matter what I do.

You always acknowledge my needs and take me expertly to where I want to be.

You skillfully accommodate my body and all its limitations.

You allow me to trawl through your endless riches without resistance.

You carry me to places and pleasures I never dreamed of reaching.

Your name is Kindle.

Rock lilies or Sydney rock orchids: Dendrobium speciosum (or is it Thelychiton speciosus?)

07 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by morselsandscraps in art, Australian native orchids

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Arthur Boyd, August to October, Bald Rock NP, Bournda NP, Brogo Dam, Bundanon, Dendrobium speciosum, Ellis Rowan, George Raper, Joseph Lycett, lithophytes, Margaret Preston, Thelychiton speciosus

Wherever there are rocks, rock lilies seem to appear. My first sighting was from a canoe on Brogo Dam about fifteen years ago, before my love affair with orchids began. There they were, creamy white against a sheer cliff face which dripped with moss and moisture. I had no idea what they were but I knew they were beautiful.

I encountered them again years later on a high ridge in the bush west of Bodalla. Leathery leaves on sheer rock face, much drier this time, and yes! there were flowers.  Of course, as survivors they had put themselves out of reach on a steep cliff. But they made themselves known, and us hungry for more.

So we returned a week later, now a bit familiar with their habit and habitat, and took a bet on another ridge in the neighbourhood. We walked up a gentle slope through the reddish-orange trunks of angophera, and there they were – pseudobulbs, those thick stems typical of rock orchids, and racemes loaded with buds and occasional flower, all within easy reach of eyes and camera.

This was the beginning of a trek through treasures. The whole of that ridge was alive with rock orchids. Sometimes we needed to scramble and contort for the perfect view.

I managed climbs and balances I would not have believed myself capable of. I wanted to see and smell and take photos and  peer down throats and delight in the maroon freckling and breathe in the spicy perfume.

After that visit, I considered myself an apprentice connoisseur of the rock lily. I recognised them immediately in paintings  by Joseph Lycett and felt inordinately proud, given my usual poor recognition skills.

I found rock lilies many times over the years: on the rockface as I walked down the rock staircase into the rainforest patch around the lagoon at Bournda National Park in southern NSW;

on the tors called the Two Sisters as I drove along the highway between Bodalla and Narooma;

and as I walked through the bush to the top of Bald Rock in granite country in northern NSW.

When I visited Arthur Boyd’s studio at Bundanon with an old friend and fellow orchid afficianado we saw his painting The amphitheatre still hanging on the wall. A white snake slithers down the rock face,  cropped trees lean every which way and rock lilies bloom. (The painting is reproduced here with the permission of Bundanon Trust.)

After a picnic under old European trees near the house, we strolled up the track towards the amphitheatre, detouring to visit a hut set in the middle of a slashed paddock. A snake slid out of the grass, an omen of orchids we hoped.

The amphitheatre was a grand place. The rock walls towered above us and the trees leaned in just as they did in Boyd’s painting.

There were great clusters of rock lilies everywhere.

Boyd and Lycett weren’t the only artists drawn to the rock lily. George Raper, a midshipman on the Sirius in the First Fleet, painted a watercolour of the rock lily, probably in 1789.

Ellis Rowan, that most wonderful of flower painters, also captured rock lilies in watercolour

and Margaret Preston celebrated them in a series of woodcuts.

Having seen such a luxuriance of rock lilies in the wild and out of the tip of the artist’s paintbrush and knife, it was an anti- climax to discover them cultivated in a manicured front yard in Oak Flats, and in amputated sprays on the table at a family celebration.

Addendum: As I was preparing this blog I discovered that the rock lily has undergone a name change. In David Jones’ Field guide (2000) it is Dendrobium speciosum. By his 2006 Complete Guide it has undergone a taxonomic segregation from Dendrobium and become Thelychiton speciosus. It is also known as both Sydney rock orchid and rock lily.

Acknowledgements:

The National Library of Australia gave me permission to include

Ellis Rowan: Rock lily (Dendrobium speciosum) nla.pican 6723370

George Raper: Dendrobium (Rock lily) vn3579494

Thanks to my fellow orchid tragic for finding the Lycett images for me and for drawing my attention to George Raper.

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