30 Thursday Apr 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
I'm about to leave my sleepy beachside village where winter is approaching to go into a Warsaw spring. If you'd like to join me there, I'll be blogging at https://warsaw2015.wordpress.com/ for six weeks, if playing with two year old twins leaves me time to blog.
Apologies if you find my blog-bopping confusing. I do it for my own benefit, so I can keep some sense of order in my gallivanting life.
30 Thursday Apr 2015
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My North Queensland holiday is nearly over. It's time to drive my mighty campervan back to Cairns. But as always there are journeying pleasures.
On the outskirts of Cooktown is Kalkajaka (Black Mountain), a place of importance to the local Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal people, with a number of sites of religious significance. In the early morning light, the black rock (black from a covering of lichen) looks an almost eerie purple. The mountains are a tumble of rock, with very little vegetation, formed by an unusual jointing pattern millions of years ago. A narrow gorge carries rushing water, glimpsed as you cross a bridge.
The road is pretty empty, so I can slow down to take a photo through the windscreen, a rough orangey bluff ahead of me and the shadow of my van leading the way. I pass the anthills again, fascinated by their shape and their profusion. I turn off the Mulligan Highway and head down the mountain out of the savanna to the green of Mossman, which seems now like a town I know. I indulge my penchant for photographing the murals on public lavatories.
The coast road back to Cairns is spectacular, with plenty of pull off spots for the camera. It fancies the blue-green of the water, the glimpse of islands and the receding headlands, and it's a bit startled by rocky beaches.
Too soon I'm handing over my companion van and heading for the airport. The flight back is a bit bumpy, and the landing a bit more so, but nothing too bad despite Sydney's cyclonic weather. The bus on the way down the coast leaves a wake to rival that on the reef catamaran, and the roadside has waterfalls, and fountains wherever there's an overtaxed stormwater drain. By the time I reach Potato Point, I'm anxious about washing with my minimal turnaround time before I head off to Warsaw.
30 Thursday Apr 2015
Posted in Northern Queensland
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Here are ten things I especially loved, in descending order
Being girly with my niece and her bridesmaids
The mangrove forest on the way to Cape Tribulation
Mossman Gorge in the rain
The Tanks Arts Centre
Cooktown history
The two exhibitions at the Cairns Regional Gallery
Walking amongst butterflies
Seeing coral from the glass-bottomed boat
Life in a hillside cabin and a campervan
Being made moderately beautiful
And four things to fear, in ascending order
Crocodiles
Cassowaries
Fear itself – of car ferries, steep hills, campervans
Falling coconuts
As close as I got to a crocodile
Not on my head, thank you
A few days after I arrived home, there was something to really fear. We had a hefty hailstorm which shredded leaves from trees, dimpled cars, smashed windscreens, pounded roofs, damaged solar panels and gave my son a lump on his head when he ventured out to protect the ute. So much for all the phantom fears of North Queensland.
29 Wednesday Apr 2015
String theory: focus on contemporary Australian art is a travelling exhibition from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. It showcases the work of Aboriginal artists working in a variety of mediums. No photography allowed, unfortunately, because every piece demanded the homage of my camera.
There is a dramatic grouping of sinuous spirit figures sculptured from a weaving together of string, grass, feathers, wool, and synthetic sparkles: orange, straw, pink, brownie-grey, green, red. One figure branches like a tree.
A series of panels use raffia, plaiting, embroidery, felt, wooden beads, feathers, turtle shell and sticks to create images of butterflies, fish, turtles, sulphur-crested cockatoos, kookaburras and emus, on a backing of hessian. Some of them tell stories of the area round Lightning Ridge, where my father-in-law had an opal mine, and feature familiar places like Cumborah and Narran Lake, where we once got bogged. One panel tells the story of the formation of opal, another features fish traps. They were crafted by the Boolarng Nangamai Arts and Culture Studio.
A large eye-catching mobile created from feathers (Feather string yam vine by Frances Djulibing) occupies a whole corner of the room, white against a black background. In another corner, a film made by the anthropologist Charles Mountford in the 1940s shows Aboriginal people turning string deftly into what we used to call cats cradles. A series of linocuts by Evelyn McGreen (Spirit baskets 2009) shows traditional baskets she has made herself, surrounded by the objects they are used for, such as berries and shells. Tony Albert’s photos (Optimism 2008) feature traditional two-horn baskets of the North Queensland rainforest worn around the head by his cousin. Each one contains autobiographical items like a football or newspapers: objects that belong in his everyday life in urban Brisbane.
The pleasures of the exhibition are many: it’s variety, its modern take on the traditional, its colour, and of course its sheer artistry.
Spirit figures
Feather string yam vine
Spirit baskets, 2009
Optimism 2008
http://www.mca.com.au/touring-exhibition/string-theory-focus-contemporary-australian-art-tour/
29 Wednesday Apr 2015
Photography is a “crystal clear window on the world.” (information panel)
Photos capture “the decisive moment” (Henri Cartier-Bresson)
“Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as the precise organisation of forms which give the event it’s proper expression.” (Henri Cartier-Bresson)
Photographs provoke “narratives beyond the frame” (information panel)
“Photos don’t tell stories: they show you what something looks like.” (Garry Winogrand)
After strolling the esplanade and booking a reef trip, I went into the icy cool of the Cairns Regional Art Gallery, not expecting the treats that lay in store. I spent a couple of hours looking at the history of photography, being introduced to processes I’d never heard of and charmed by the many different artistries of photography. There were the documenters, the impressionists, the social commentators. I made copious notes of names to follow up, and photos to admire at greater leisure, and quotes to contemplate or argue with.
The highlights were many, and in many modes.
Manhatta is a short documentary film directed by painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand, interleaved with quotes from Walt Whitman, The leaves of grass. If you’re interested, you can have a look at it on YouTube to savour the motion, the extreme angles and the Whitman quotes. (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qduvk4zu_hs)
I’m always interested in the way artists pursue and shape their subject, and series hold a particular appeal, beginning with Monet’s haystacks and Hokusai’s views of Mt Fuji. August Sander had a life project: he wanted to produce a “typological (photographic) catalogue of German people”, in categories such as farmer, women, artists, the disabled and disenfranchised. Americans Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein documented “the rural poor” during the depression, “sucking a sad poem right out of America onto film” (Jack Kerouac). In 1970, Robert Rooney put dots on a transparency, which he then placed over a map. He moved a Holden around to these random places and photographed it at different times of day, creating Holden Park 1 and Holden Park 2.
Then there were the abstractions and the staged photos. Imogen Cunningham’s Unmade bed looks about as arranged as an unmade bed can be, like a sculpture. Weegee’s photo of the encounter between two high society ladies and a drunk was very definitely posed: the drunk was paid and pushed into the encounter, so the story goes.
Then there were five special photos that really lodged in my memory for a variety of reasons. Olga Winston Link’s Hawksbill swimming hole has wonderful zigzagging diagonals and contrasting dark and light in contrasting textures, and it captures the immense joie de vivre of the swimmers, bringing together the industrial and the human.
Horst B Horst’s Carl Erickson drawing Gertrude Stein and Horst (1946) links the three people with a masterful line from Horst through Stein to Erickson’s hand. If this is an early selfie, I am in awe. The composition and the eye focus of each subject is superb, as is the balancing of the heaviness of books against the light from the window and the dog.
David Moore’s Redfern interior (1949) shows three generations in three different intimate moments. The young woman is concentrated on the baby, two dark heads together. The older woman is deep in thought, not altogether pleasantly, thinking about, maybe, the implications of this new life in an already stretched household. The little girl is holding her doll, almost imitating her mother, but she is also trying to connect with the grandmother, and knowing intuitively something of her concern. This is really capturing “the decisive moment” as Henri Cartier-Bresson calls it, for three people in one photo.
Robert Capa’s French mistress of a German soldier being marched through town (1944) tells a savage story of disapproval and group hostility, with a touch of schadenfreude, if you look at the expression on the women’s faces. In this case there really is a “narrative beyond the frame.”
Arthur Rostein’s Oklahoma migrants (1936) is beautifully arranged, faces framed by the car window. These are the people John Steinbeck writes about so movingly in The grapes of wrath, victims of nature and the economy, and yet retaining dignity.
28 Tuesday Apr 2015
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In the story of Mary Watson, three Cooktown groups meet in a tragedy: European settlers, the Chinese and the Aboriginal people.
Mary’s husband set up a beche de mer fishing station on Lizard Island and took her to live there in a small cottage close to a creek with the island’s only fresh water. He and his partner went off in their luggers and left Mary and their son behind with two Chinese servants, Ah Sam and Ah Leung. A few weeks later a party of mainland Aborigines of the Guugu Yimmidir group made one of their seasonal trips by canoe to the island. They attacked Ah Sam, who suffered seven spear wounds, and Ah Leung was killed as he worked in the vegetable garden. Mary Watson frightened them off by firing a gun, and then set out in a cut-down ship’s water tank, used for boiling sea slugs, with Ah Sam and her son, hoping to be picked up by a passing boat. They drifted for a week, occasionally landing on reefs and islets. Mary’s final diary entry reads “No water. Near dead with thirst.”
When fisherman reported that the stone cottage had been destroyed and that fires were burning on the island, people thought that Mary had been kidnapped or killed. Mounted police and native troopers under Inspector Hervey Fitzgerald from Cooktown shot a number of coastal Cape York people, possibly as many as 150, in retaliation. Later there were claims that the people shot were not involved in what happened on Lizard Island.
The remains of Mary and her baby were found some months later among the mangroves on No. 5 Howick, still in the iron tank, but now covered with fresh rainwater from a recent tropical downpour. Ah Sam had died on the beach nearby. A concealed spring existed on the islet, but they had not found it. When the bodies were returned to Cooktown, a procession of 650 escorted them to their burial at Two Mile Cemetery, on the road to the Palmer River goldfields.
I found the details of Mary Watson’s story in Wikipedia in an article with “some issues” after my interest was piqued by an elegant and very white drinking fountain in Cooktown’s main street, a memorial to “the heroine of Lizard Island”, with a poem telling part of her story. I’ve quoted Wikipedia pretty well exactly. This story is also told in a section of the Milbi Wall.
27 Monday Apr 2015
Cooktown does a great job of honouring the various strands of its history. The streets are full of information panels, statues and street art that draw attention to Aboriginal history; Captain Cook’s visit; the Palmer River gold rush and the flood of Chinese; and European settlement. The Captain Cook museum, housed in a beautiful old convent restored out of rack and ruin, has Aboriginal and Chinese rooms as well as Cook memorabilia.
The Aboriginal story is told on the tiled Milbi wall, created by Aboriginal artists. It begins with the story of the creation of the Endeavour River and proceeds in a long flow through the missions up to the present. The story also appears in footpath tiles, an image paired with words, and in word-panels and objects in the Cook Museum.
Captain James Cook is memorialised everywhere. He spent forty eight days in Cooktown strategising his next step when his ship, the Endeavour, ran aground on the reef. There is James Cook monument commemorating his landing on June 17, 1770, featuring kangaroo and wombat heads; James Cook statue; a cairn to mark the place where he beached the Endeavour; and in the museum the tree he tethered the Endeavour to and one of its anchors.
Other traces of white colonisation appear in a cairn dedicated to Edmund Kennedy, an explorer of the region who was speared in 1848; a statue of a hopeful miner with swag, pick and pan; and a cannon begged from the government in Brisbane to ward off a feared Russian invasion. The story of Mary Watson, wife of a beche-de-mer fisherman, told in another post, is also honoured in a monument.
When gold was discovered on the Palmer River, there was of course a rush to make fortunes. By 1877, an astonishing ninety percent of the goldfield population was Chinese (http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:205732/s00855804_1987_13_2_49.pdf) Cooktown acknowledges this huge Chinese presence with a sculpture near the wharf and a room of objects in the museum, including a pair of tiny shoes, not much bigger than a baby’s, to fit bound feet.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooktown,_Queensland
http://www.nationaltrust.org.au/qld/JamesCooktheEndeavourRiverandCooktown
26 Sunday Apr 2015
Posted in bench series, photos
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Bench with a view over the Endeavour River (Wahalumbaal Birri), Cooktown
Rock bench with a view over a pond: Cooktown Botanic Gardens
Linked to https://smallbluegreenwords.wordpress.com/2015/04/26/bench-series-17/
26 Sunday Apr 2015
I bounce along a bit of dirt road towards Finch’s Beach, splashing through mud puddles and hoping I don’t get stuck. I make my way along a track, past the yellow crocodile warning sign, and find a beach unlike any I’ve been on before. It’s not very big, contained by two headlands, one with forest reaching down to a rocky ridge, the other a tumble of big boulders. A huge rock in a pool looks like a sculpture. Other artists have been at work. The whole beach is a maze of sand balls, around crab holes, in a graceful variety of patterns. I’ve seen such patterns before, but not in such profusion, and I know well that such things are the enemies of photographic restraint.
26 Sunday Apr 2015
Three years after the first European settlers arrived in Cooktown, a botanic garden was proposed. By 1878 ‘Queens Park’ was a reality. Water was diverted, wells sunk, fountains erected, greenhouses and formal gardens constructed. It was the pride of the town and the centre of dignified recreation.
By 1896, money was getting a bit scarce, so townspeople could subscribe to the gardens, in return for a weekly bunch of flowers. Gradually, as prosperity dwindled, the gardens were ignored and reverted to weeds and shapelessness. In 1979, the site was cleared for an arts festival and signs of former splendour were uncovered. Cook Shire Council began the business of restoration and expansion. Some original plantings are still there and so is a lot of granite stone pitched channelling. Without documents, restorers depend on archaeology to show what the gardens used to be like.
As I ramble around I stumble across the circles of the old fountain, and stone channels and ponds. I visit the garden beds where flowers were grown to sell, and loiter near lily ponds. I encounter the Cooktown orchid, unfortunately behind wire, and the Vanilla orchid, unfortunately not flowering. The feeling is of parkland, and their are many invitations to sit: smoothly carved benches announce the name of the timber they are made of and encourage contemplation of the prospect.
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