31 Monday Mar 2014
Posted in boating
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The boat I can't row is designed so I don't have to learn to sail. I'm quite capable of sliding my bottom four inches to the left, or four inches to the right as instructed, and I achieved success in this in a very light breeze the day after the rowing fiasco. The boat zigzagged its way up the lake and back on its maiden sail. The breeze came in intermittent flurries, heralded by a change in the texture of water surface, as we tacked in wide sweeps from shore to shore.
31 Monday Mar 2014
Posted in confessions
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There's nothing the matter with the day. It's blue and beautiful after rain. The lake sparkles and ruffles in the breeze: white sheep graze on a green hill: thin tree trunks shimmer reflections in the water: the oars drip circles.
Then it's my turn to row, and I can't do it. It requires a number of things I don't have. Coordination. Upper arm strength. A sense of kinaesthetic rhythm. An ability to follow oral instructions. A willingness to try something that I'm not good at.
The oars are in my hands. There are three simple moves I need to make to propel myself in a straight line back to lunch. Pull my arms back, gripping the oars close together. Dip both oars in the water at the same time to the same depth with the same strength. Lift the oars out of the water and repeat.
We make up a song to help me achieve this. It doesn't work. My instructor is uncomprehending. He's been rowing for 60 years, since he was seven. He's rowed seven hour stints up the Murray. He tackles a number of different instructive strategies. Finally, he turns his back to me, dangles his feet into the water, and says “It's your job to get us back for lunch.”
I pick a cluster of trees on the green hill, on the sky line above the white sheep, to monitor my direction. I mutter mantras to myself. I zag and zig down the empty lake, the trees relocating themselves giddily from far left to far right. Sometimes I pull on the right oar (or the left oar) to get my trees back in line: sometimes I pull on the wrong one. I try rowing first with one oar, then with the other. I zig and zag. I feel tears of failure. The wind is behind me so I make progress.
The boat looks innocent and idyllic, sitting on the water without its oars. To me it's become demonic. Is all I need to master rowing practice? I hope so. Over the years, I've had four children, clambered down very steep hills into rainforest, jumped over rocks where the surf roils, camped in places way off the beaten track, all in the company of my rowing instructor. Has he finally set a challenge I can't meet?
This week he will leave the boat in the creek at Potato Point for a day so I can practise by myself. My mind is generating excuses. The creek looks very shallow: there won't be enough clearance. Maybe it's the school cross country: they marshall at the launching point. Oops! I forgot: I have to go to the dentist.
My mind hasn't been this excuse-active since I had to give a talk on the Continental System to my history class in 1954.
31 Monday Mar 2014
Posted in photos
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I'm a bit startled to discover that I didn't pursue a statue theme while I was in Ploand. I just embedded statues in other blogs. I needed the inspiration of Ailsa at
http://wheresmybackpack.com/2014/03/28/travel-theme-statues/
to bring together a collection of Polish tatues. Her blog about the whispering statues of Rome is a wonderful precursor to the statue challenge
http://wheresmybackpack.com/2014/03/27/congregation-of-wits/
Here's a collection of Polish statues, mainly in Warsaw, but also in Częstochowa and Krakòw, beginning with Warsaw's symbol, the mermaid, in the Old Town market square. I'm on the verge of returning to Warsaw, so putting together this blog was a reminder of delights in store.
Bear in Old Town
Street vendor, Mariensztat town square
Figure near the fountain in Mariensztat town square
Little insurgent: monument to children who fought in the Warsaw Uprising
Monument to the heroes of Warsaw
Shoemaker who fought with Kosciusko
Outside the drama theatre in Stalin's Gift
Outside the new Jewish museum, Warsaw
Lions outside the presidential palace being trucked away
Lion returned to duty outside the presidential palace, Warsaw
Tableau made of salt in the salt mine at Wieliczka
In the town square, Krakòw
Halina Poswaitowska, Polish writer: Częstochowa
Girl with pigeons, Częstochowa
28 Friday Mar 2014
Posted in photos, Potato Point beach
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For three days small spears of rain have bounced off the deck table and hung like icicles in the making from the gutters. Home has been a cosy and justified retreat. The grass, mown last week, lengthens and greens. Tiboochina buds promising a purple deck-haze fatten and a few large purple flowers erupt. Downstairs, the poison peach branches hang heavy with moisture to head level, and the branches trimmed back from the upstairs deck for Christmas are beginning to reach back towards the windows. The tipsy cup on a dowel near the front door fills under the rainforest canopy. Kangaroos lounge at midday on greening lawns.
The sea is murky brown where the waves break. Seagulls and a single white crane are busy harvesting largesse where the creek meets the sea. People and their dogs frolic knee deep in brownish curling creek-sea water where last week the sand was strewn with desiccating seaweed and bleaching shearwater skeletons. Rocks once reclining under sand lie in jagged lines.
The creek is deep and inky black. Between the dunes and the creek, flat brown water reaches through the bush to the road. A light wooden clacking noise, undisturbed by passers by, explains itself as a chorus of frogs. The creek invades the fishing spot near the big tree with the view round water curves to the mountains. Spindly trunks on the other bank merge into their reflections.
The next day the beach is even more gouged and nets of beach grass roots cover the channel from the outlet drain. Along the Blackies road, water from the creek has receded, the thin trunks have their base in mud and the frog chorus dwindles to a quintet. But the rain still plops its expanding circles into puddles. It hasn't retreated yet.
12 Wednesday Mar 2014
Posted in photos, phototheme
10 Monday Mar 2014
Posted in occasional pieces
10 Monday Mar 2014
Posted in photos, Potato Point beach
07 Friday Mar 2014
Late afternoon. A sky swirling with grey clouds. Bright sun occasionally glaring down. A blue bay stretching across to the graceful shoulder of mountain. The white wake of launches returning to harbour. The warm air of early autumn. A sloping hillside, green grass drying to straw. A few people wandering around, mostly with cameras.
And scattered across the grass a pack of two-dimensional dogs of many breeds, a large white rhinoceros, figures in a range of human shapes, a large metallic shark, a curvaceous trout, a small school of metallic fish, a bed of white flowers rising out of tyre rosettes, a stone carved in spirals and circles, a flight of stairs running away from the oppression of feet, a pole with a corona of red-eyed heads, welded or ceramic birds, and sensuous forms in steel, hardwood, granite, welded metal.
If you have a space with a background of mountain, sea, sky or bush just waiting for a sculpture, take your pick. Prices range between $400 for a small dog to $12,000 for a largish shark.
Trevor Dunbar & Dinah Vandermeys - Just fine K9s
Ben Eyles - Don't forget about me!
Todd Costa - Juz (just for the fun of it)
Sonja Jacob - Quiet moment
Olive Tanner - Silhouette in profile
Brett Martin - Protection
Travis Woodbridge - Trout
Dustin Clancy - Spot fish (?)
Nina Garcia - Sweetlips detail (?)
Rachel Develin - Enlightened wasteland
Michael Purdy - Pulse 2013
Michael Purdy - Stepping out 2014
Tony Millard - We are watching ... We are listening ... We know
John Gosch - Raptor
Joy Georgeson - Dusk, Boobook owl
Jen Mallinson - Marine motion
Edward Wilson - Evolution
Jenni (Yamuna) Bruce - Move to metal
03 Monday Mar 2014
From the external ultra-modern assertive geometry and scale, I moved into the National Museum of Australia, and the quietness and detail of bark paintings by “old masters”. For most of the two hours I spent in the galleries I was alone, so I could stand and look without interruption, a rare treat in front of such masterpieces.
All the paintings in the exhibition were made between 1948 and 1988, representing landscape, skyscape, rituals and animals of Arnhem Land. Their creators were not only supreme artists with a stunning mastery of colour, design, composition and fine detail. They were also ceremonial leaders of their clans and the stories their paintings tell are a complex of history and ritual. I could see the building of bark huts; and patterns of flying foxes or stingrays, axe heads or possums and sugar gliders. I could notice the fine white lines like stitching that gave the paintings the appearance of fabric or the thick white almost enamelled dots. But my appreciation was of the surface.
Birrikitji Gumana - Stingray dance
Yirawala - Birth of a Mimih (c 1970)
Bardayal Nadjamerrek - Possums and sugar gliders feeding
Mungurraway Yunupingu - The great brushfire dreaming of the Gumatj People
George Milpurrurra - Stringy-bark houses
George Milpurrurra - Flying fox dance
John Bulunbulun - Creatures of the Arafura swamp
Mithinarri Gurruwiwi - Stone axe heads (1965)
Valerie Munininy - Djang'Kawu Sisters at Gariyak
Mawalan Marika - Sydney from the air (1963)
I asked for permission to use these images saved from the NMA website. Permission was given in the following words: “We actually licence our use of the images of the barks for all our uses including website, which also means low resolution versions are available for download. This enables people to use the images for ‘personal’ and ‘research’ purposes. I consider your proposed use is of a ‘personal’ nature.”
Many more images from the exhibition, and videos of the artists at work, can be found at
nma.gov.au/oldmasters
As I looked through this site to find images to share, I realised how many paintings I'd failed to see. I need to visit again.
03 Monday Mar 2014
Posted in musings, phototheme
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Brown often has bad press. It suggests words like murky, undistinguished, gloomy, dreary, commonplace, lacklustre, unmemorable, banal, insipid. However when I began to investigate it as a photo theme I found that drab colour vivid and full of stories
At the Great Masters exhibition at the National Museum of Australia a tin of ochre chunks was on display as part of the kit of one of the master painters. Brown ochre was used as a pigment in the cave paintings at Lascaux and master bark painters in Australia still use it to create their subtle beautiful-toned masterpieces. The name for brown ochre is Goethite: suddenly Goethe, eighteenth century German poet and scientist, intrudes in the history of brown and on the palette of artists.
Mummy brown was a favoured colour for centuries, a brown of “good transparency”. And yes, it was indeed created by crushing up mummies. When nineteenth century artists discovered its origin, they stopped using it. Legend has it that the pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones ceremonially buried his tube of mummy brown in his garden when he realised what it really was.
Isabelline, a pale cream-brown or parchment colour, usually refers to the colour of bird plumage and horses, but is also used to describe the colours of fashion. Elizabeth I owned “one rounde gowne of Isabella-colour satten … set with silver spangles”. The regal nature of the colour is undermined by a story that its name derived from the colour of underwear worn – and not changed – by an Isabella during an eight-month siege in the fifteenth century.
Made by combining red, black and yellow, brown is a colour of multiple identity, nudging its way into many shades of the spectrum: towards orange or crimson or white or green or blue. In the world it's gregarious, displaying itself best in judicious companionship with other colours or against a background that serves it well, maybe beige and dark brown fungus against sharp spears of green. The litany of brown is in fact poetry: burgundy, isabelline, umber, bister, beige, taupe, ecru, fawn, sepia, bronze, chestnut, sienna, sinopia, khaki, cordovan, fulvous, maroon, tan, wenge, russet, buff, mahogany.
Not drab at all.
Wikipedia is my source for the stories retold here, and the blog was inspired by a long-ago photo challenge whose deadline I well and truly missed.
Posted with Blogsy
