A daybreak walk by Coila Lake

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Coila Lake, dogs, early morning, friends

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Nothing like a friend of more than thirty years to coax me out at daybreak. I drive cautiously along the Potato Point road in the pre-dawn light to avoid macropods, and meet Sarah beside the lake, near the boatshed that used to be her home and is now an Airbnb rental. She’s waiting for me with her dog Penny (you can play “spot the dog” if you like) in an unexpected chill that requires jacket and scarf.

We walk across the grass to the squelchy sand interlaced with dried sea grass that runs along the side of the lake. Everything is encrusted with barnacles, pink in the early light. The water suddenly breaks windripple into splash, as a school of fish leap and fall. The rising sun blazes along the edge of the bank of cloud and sends elegant thin shadows across the sand. Soon the early light catches the trees and makes it clear why early morning is called the golden hour.

 

While I was away …

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Downward Dog Cafe

… some things changed. In Batemans Bay shopping centre revamped parking and a new road complete with traffic lights. In Bodalla a new cafe. It was once Mexican, as you can see from the sign, beginning its afterlife as a ghost sign complete with Mexican hats.

You look at the notices in the window, to see what’s on offer as well as food.

You walk through a blue door, held obligingly open by a wooden dog wearing a studded collar.

You notice the textured white walls straight away, and then the collection of bonsai. A woman in her seventies is walking round with a tan plastic watering can, making sure her dwarfings have enough water.

You have a choice of four spaces for your meal, including a semi outdoor area and armchairs in front of an open fireplace.

You might choose inside space, which acts as a gallery for three artists: Rita Easton, Lois Selby, and the cafe owner, Megan Small.

When you leave through the opening into the car park you encounter a muscly tree;  a dilapidated shed buried under honeysuckle and lush grass; and a view out to the mountains.

Hotchpotch 1

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leaves, patterns

Now I’ve left northern hemisphere sophistication behind, miscellany can become hotchpotch! This series will collect odds and ends that encapsulate something of my Potato Point life, things not netted by more substantial posts.

Sold for $1.1 million: my block recently valued at $160 000.

Sand and grass patterns on Potato Point beach

Town sign for Moruya, source of Sydney Harbour Bridge stone

What a great idea. Justifies owning shares in Wooliies.

Indulging my delight in leaves: shape, texture and colour (or lack of it)

Street flowers in Moruya

Outside Gallery Bodalla, since I couldn’t take photos inside.

Python sheddings on my deck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postcards from the past: Laura

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Aboriginal rock paintings, Laura North Queensland

The idea for this series has been hanging around in the back of my head for a long time. It serves two purposes: a chance to resurrect pre-digital photos, and an opportunity to indulge in intermittent and discontinuous memoir. When I finally decide to initiate the series, I have to turn the house upside down to find the photos to use for my first postcard and the travel notebook to refresh my memory.

I’m travelling with my eldest daughter in 1996 on a road trip in North Queensland from her home base in Townsville. We venture out to Laura where there are galleries of cave painting depicting the Quinkins, spirit creatures from Aboriginal story we first encountered in Percy Tresize’s picture books when she was a child. It’s a hot day, as you would expect, and there is no one around at the site office, situated at the bottom of a sandstone ridge. We walk up a narrow rocky path, carefully, because it’s under construction and because this is sacred territory. We reach an overhang, and there they are, galleries of paintings from the distant past: hands, dingos, eels, animals, the bad Quinkin squat and goblinish, flying foxes, handprints, even a foot. We take them in, these messages from distant people and time, and continue up the path until we reach the ridge, up tree root stairs with loose rocks and sand, and saplings for maintaining balance. As we look across to the escarpment on the other side of the valley, there’s the sound of wind in the trees and among the rocks. Then, suddenly, there is complete silence, as if time’s suspended. It’s an eerie feeling, a sense of being on a threshold. A feeling I’ve only ever had once before and the power of which I can’t begin to capture in words.

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Of course I can’t limit myself to one image, so I’ve included a slideshow, and a bit of background as well. Maybe in future I’ll manage mere postcard format.

The rock art at Laura is somewhere between 15,000 to 30,000 years old. It’s included on the Australian Heritage Estate and listed by UNESCO among the top 10 rock art sites in the world. It’s in Quinkin country, those spirit people of the Yatanji tribe. One group, the Imjim, small and fat-bellied, steal children; the Timara, slender, almost wispy, play tricks on people but protect children from the Imjim.

“The zookeeper’s wife”

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"The zookeeper's wife", Jews, Warsaw in WW2

This is my transition book, the book I begin appropriately in Warsaw, which is where the events take place, and finish through the haze and weird sleeping patterns of jetlag, as I try to remember that I’m back at Potato Point. It tells in fascinating detail a story I heard glimmerings of a few years ago as I researched my second home. The book was recommended in an email from J’s cousin, an engineer who lives in Brisbane. Such are the winding connections of the modern world.

“The zookeeper’s wife” by Diane Ackerman is the story of the Warsaw Zoo during WW2, where Antonia Żabińska and her husband Jan gave refuge to 300 Jews who escaped from the Ghetto, hiding them in the villa and in the animal cages. It’s based on Antonina’s journal and many other intriguing sources. It captures life under the Nazis in a detail I haven’t encountered before, what another historian I’m reading calls “whispers from the past” that break through the generic retelling of events.

There are so many threads to the story: life under bombardment and constant threat of discovery and execution; the child who has to be silent about what’s going on at home as he attends a secret school; the comings and goings of the Guests as they move into the zoo and then out again to other “safe” places; the agony of waiting for Jan to come home from his work with the underground; the loss of zoo animals to bombing, hunting, and appropriation by German zookeepers; fascinating details about the animals and their domestication to life in the house; and an account of attempts to back-breed to recover extinct animals and to set up hunting lodges in the primeval forest at Białowieża.

It’s Antonina who maintains life in the villa. Her courage in confrontations with Germans is astonishing; her fear for her son is palpable; and her knowledge of animals encyclopaedic and empathetic.

The day I left Warsaw the film of the book premiered there. I was eager to see it until I realised it was shot, not in Praga where the zoo is, but in Prague and the Czech Republic. The trailer looks a bit too animal-cute and romantic for my sense of the book. An article on culture.pl confirms this feeling.
The New York Times review is worth reading.

A walk without purpose

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fungi, Jemisons Beach, sand cliffs, seaweed

My stamina for focused reading has dropped right off, although I can devour a lightweight detective story in three gulps. So I discipline myself to sit for a solid hour with notebook, pen and Kindle, as I read “The years of extermination: Nazi German and the Jews 1939-1945” by Saul Friedländer. I recharge the iPad in another room so I can’t flick it on to check this and that. By the time I’ve finished, I’ve learnt more than my heart wants to know.

After lunch walk struggles with doze. Walk wins. Along my street past a cluster of mushrooms, the big-as-a-dinner-plate ones, pushing through the loose soil on the verge, some smaller and creamy-brown, one with a peeling browned-meringue top. Up the board stairs, watching my footing carefully, and down on to Jemisons Beach, high sandcliffs a legacy of heavy seas. 

I find a sand-shelf just the right height for sitting and let the sun, the breeze, and the sound of the sea relax me. My companions are a swathe of sea-weed and a white crab claw. I watch the waves crashing on the rocks, counting to seven as I wait for the next big one. 

When I’m sufficiently soothed I head towards the track behind the dunes and discover freshgoldenred seaweed, traces of the ocean far beyond what I thought was its reach. Along the track, more fungi: beige spots and stripes, rich velvety brown, orange, and brilliant red. 

There are tiny flowers, even wattle with its fist-buds, and in my front yard minute red mushrooms lurking under the creeping foliage of scurvy weed.

Oh and near home, traces of the hobbit among the casuarinas.

Five minutes with a clothes horse

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clothes horse, raindrops, regular random

When I was in Warsaw, I determined to join DesleyJane at musingsofafrequentflyingscientist in an intriguing challenge called RegularRandom, once I returned to my leisurely life at Potato Point. To meet that challenge you need to spend five minutes with one object and photograph it in a variety of ways.

My back deck offers many possible subjects. A tumble of shells on the glass table, emptied out of a dish to remove mosquito-breeding water. A python skin shed by my resident python and not yet dried out enough to lift and drape around the neck of the china goat on my chiffonier. The ragged covers of the deck chairs. The spectacularly rusty stand for the deck umbrella. A clothes drying rack with an apron in recovery from the outfall of a rotten potato in my vegetable rack.

It’s the clothes rack I decide to focus on, with its lines of raindrops, colourful pegs and the black and white check of an apron that belonged to one of my beloved aunts.

This post celebrates two things. Drying washing outside, after a year of indoor drying – always supposing the rain stops.  And the power of photography to capture a moment that won’t return. By the afternoon, the rain drops have disappeared and the clothes horse becomes merely mundane and functional.
 

 

 

 

St Joan

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"St Joan", National Theatre Live

There are continuities. And there are differences. In Warsaw I frequent National Theatre Live screenings in a glitzy multiplex up five escalators, in a cinema with more than 200 seats, in the evening, after a ten minute tramride and a walk through the main station. In Narooma I go to the same screenings in the intimacy of a small cinema of thirty seats in the afternoon after driving for half an hour, parking nose to nose with a tree, and walking five paces to the side door.

I activate these comparisons continuity when I go to see Bernard Shaw’s “St Joan”, last seen in Sydney in my youth when I used to take my theatre loving aunts to Old Tote performances. After all, they were the ones who introduced me to the theatre: “The merchant of Venice” when I was eight, starring Robert Helpmann and Katherine Hepburn. As soon as I saw Gemma Arterton as Joan, I was reminded of Zoe Caldwell, the 1962 Sydney Joan, and my faded memory even produced her name. 

The performance this time was filmed in the Donmar Theatre, that erstwhile banana storage warehouse in London. The setting suggested a boardroom with a background of sharemarket screens, a news reader and paintings of the medieval Joan. This worked for me, although not for many critics, making the entrenched positions of church, state and army overtly modern as Joan, dressed in a way that suggested the medieval, challenges their entrenchments with her passionate convictions of rightness and her role as one appointed by God. The dialogue is unexpectedly lively and amusing in the hands of a superb cast: I remember it as irritatingly dialectic and abstract.

One thing the performance revealed to me was a rather worrying conservatism and respect for authority, the same feeling I have with the conviction of Julian Assange. How can someone believe so absolutely that they are in the right? Especially with many “experts” saying otherwise? 

And I’m left with a gnawing question: did Joan sheer her hair off with her sword onstage as featured in the trailer? If so, I didn’t see it. Where was I?

For other portrayers of Joan, read 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/national-theatre-live/actresses-that-played-joan-of-arc/

Reclaiming the headland

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casuarina, fungi, ocean, spotted gum, tracks

Gradually I’m re-establishing myself at the Point. My second walk is out onto the headland, on a misty morning when Mother Gulaga is completely buried under cloud. I need to watch my footing: Warsaw cobblestones are replaced by banksia roots; dog shit by kangaroo poo; ice and snow by squelchy mud.  

Beautifully constructed ant-nests, like the work of a master potter, emerge from the sandy track. I am startled when I reach the beach: the creek has retreated from the sea, cut off by a high sandbar, and I can cross the sand directly without having to angle my way along a crumbly sand-cliff edge. When I left a year ago this was not so: the creek intermittently emptied straight into the ocean. I miss the actual presence of kangaroos: I don’t see one where in the past this early in the morning I might see up to 40. My son reckons they’re all grazing on lawns in the village.

I walk up the wooden stairs and along the track heading south. I stand on the headland and watch the sea rolling in, sending up eruptions of splash and waterfalling back down over the rocks. Here at the place where I lay watching eagles swirl just overhead with my niece; contemplated life on the first day of retirement; sat reading and whalewatching in beautiful solitude; photographed friends in a studio without equal; and fended off the man in brown shoes.

I’m glad to renew my acquaintance with old familiars, casuarinas with their lichen trunks and spotted gums with their hallmark splotches.

There’s a fanfare of fungus: everywhere the white tops and frilliness of mushrooms, some as big as a good-sized saucer with a stippled cap;  some delicate, not much more than skeletal; some standing proudly on a tall stem; some brown and white; some russet as they emerge from casuarina needles; and one a rich crimson with a minute pool in its cap.

Soon I’ll be a re-natived Potato Pointian!

Reclaiming the beach

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fungi, home roads, Potato Point beach, seaweed

I’ve been home from a year in Warsaw for a week and all I’ve done is sleep peculiar hours and feel displaced. It has taken me all that time to drive my unwilling feet down to the beach, despite all the envy I expressed of other people’s beaches. Why? I want stimulation and I tell myself, as I have many times before, that I’ve seen all there is to see. I finally drag myself out early on a drizzly day, sky vanished in grey sea mist. I ramble around the village, walking up my street, stopping at the viewing seat above Jemison’s Beach and passing judgement on the wooden stairs completed while I was away; walking up the hill to the trig past grazing wallabies and a raindrop-speckled yucca; and then down to the seaweed strewn sand of Potato Point beach. 

The tide is low and the colour leached. I see the world through rain-specked glasses, and feel the beach working a bit of preliminary magic. The light is perfect for photography, and clumps of seaweed lie on the sand arranged like artworks on a gallery wall, not so many that it’s overwhelming.

I leave the beach to walk back along the puddly road and encounter the precursors to a festival of fungi.

I  amble across Troll Bridge and the grassy kangaroo-lolling patch. One old fellow missing an ear looks up at me from the swamp. I’ve begun to reclaim my southern hemisphere home.