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Monthly Archives: January 2018

What I’m reading 3

30 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in books

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

“A million wild acres”, “From the Edge”, “My struggle” “Heart’s desire”, “The first wife”

As I read books like Meadowlands, I long to read something Australian that shows such love of one particular place, such knowledge of its history, such acquaintance with its birds, insects, animals and plants. In A million wild acres: 200 years of man and an Australian forest by Eric Rolls, a work of monumental local knowledge and research completed in 1981, I find such a book.

I’ve known about it for years, but it kept on sliding off my to-read list. Having recently walked briefly in the Pilliga, the Australian forest of the title, I reckon its time has come. I borrow it from the local library, and halfway through, when I get to the chapter on plants, I know I have to own it.

It gives me an entirely new perspective of the spread of settlement from Sydney, spearheaded by cattle and ratbags, of whom Australian history has many. The outline of early history absorbed at primary school and only a bit refined since then is fleshed out as he peoples the Pilliga with early white arrivals – some wealthy expanders, some men and women hoping to make a go of it with slim resources. There are convicts serving time and convicts who have served their time; timbergetters and sleeper cutters; opportunists and hard workers; thieves and, very occasionally, honest men.

The early chapters are a bit jerky as he presents one-paragraph cameos of too many people. It’s when he gets within living memory that he really grabs my interest as he profiles people like Ned Edwards and Billy Reed, and outlines in detail technologies of the past: timber felling, shale oil lamps, the making of bullock bells, the breeding of cattle dogs, using spotted gum for coach spokes, how bullock teams worked.

Once he begins writing about his own observations of wasps and butterflies, I’m riveted. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a poet as well as a close observer.

The main presence lacking is that of the Aboriginal people. Massacres are mentioned casually, and a whole chapter is devoted to the murderous rampage of Jimmy Governor. This lack of balance is the only thing that irritates me.

The first wife: a story of polygamy by Pauline Chiziane

This book came to me through a post on The year of reading the world blog, which began when the blogger committed to reading a book from every country in the world in a year. It has taken me a long time to read this one, partly because I couldn’t quite get a handle on where it was going. That’s what happens when you read outside your culture. However the world of Rami and her four co-wives gradually draws me in as they take on the male culture of Mozambique, and I’m increasingly delighted as they support each other: starting businesses and challenging the husband’s behaviour in ways that make it read like a feminist text. Tony, like many men, never understands that his days of entitlement are over. The novel explores the roles of men and women and the many contradictions and manifestations of love in a way that make its particularities universal.

From the edge by Mark McKenna

A radio national program introduced me to this book of Australian-history-with-a-difference, three strands woven together: first contact with Aboriginal people; colonial appropriation of Aboriginal land and the enterprises of trading, farming, gold mining, pearling; and McKenna’s own visits to the places he writes about. He has chosen four sites: the first particularly engaging to me as he tells the story of a 1798 shipwreck and the trek of survivors up the east coast through territory I know well, leaving weakened Lascars behind in Moruya, one of my shopping towns. First encounters in this story are benign, as the local tribesmen help with food, river crossings and pathways, many times making the difference between life and death. Despite the immense help given by the locals, the official report to England somehow twists this into “the savage barbarity of the natives” and is only one of an expanding litany of misunderstandings. McKenna retraces most of this walk with his own feet – that’s the kind of historian I admire.

He explores three other histories on the edge of the continent. At Port Essington, near Darwin, an attempt to establish a settlement doesn’t last long. Hurricanes, disease, and the difficulty of life in the tropics is too much for representatives of the British empire and that settlement is abandoned, leaving a legacy of introduced cattle, pigs, buffalo and wild dogs. In the Pilbara, one of the oldest parts of Australia with well-preserved fragments of continental crust and ancient galleries of rock art, there was indiscriminate killing of indigenous people and forced labour on the pearling luggers – “dark deeds in a sunny land” indeed. Dark deeds continue as mining rides roughshod over an ancient culture and the Federal court extinguishes native title rights over the Dampier Peninsula.

By now, I’m completely sickened by the detail of dispossession, but of course there’s more to come as McKennna exposes the history of Cooktown where Cook repaired the Endeavour. He began the long history of conflict by poaching turtles with no understanding of protocols and provoked grass fire attacks on his camp in retaliation. In the 1870s the Palmer goldrush ripped apart the 30000 year old culture and heralded a relentless war of extermination for twenty years. When mining ended pastoralists moved in and continued the policy of wiping out the Guugu Yimithirr: seven remote rock art sites show European and native police on horseback brandishing rifles.

It’s a grim history, but one we have to acknowledge. Books such as this – and its sequel, which I’m eager to read – are the beginning of acknowledgement.

My struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

This is another book that has been sitting unread on my Kindle for about a year. What I’d seen of it in reviews both attracted me and turned me off. Once I began reading I was hooked, and paraded through the five volumes without a break, regretful when I finally reached the end. I’d been offered a minutely detailed account of a man’s life, an exhaustive and painfully honest diary: the whole gamut of family relationships, sexual dilemmas, self image, and obsession with music, as he experienced childhood, boyhood, teaching in a remote community, love affairs, marriage, children. He sums up: A life is simple to understand, the elements that determine it are few. In mine there were two. My father and the fact that I had never belonged anywhere.

These threads run through all volumes: his alcoholic father and the damage he’s done; Knausgaard’s (the persona’s?) savagely low self-image (The flame of stupidity burnt bright inside me. Oh such an idiot I was. What a stupid idiotic bloody idiot… my mouth shapeless, my thoughts, shapeless, my feelings, shapeless); his determination to become a writer and all the setbacks he encounters (And writing, what else was it but death? Letters, what else were they but bones in a cemetery?); his sexual dilemmas and adventures and his own drinking (three volumes of it!) (Instead I opened a new subdivision in my life. ‘Booze and hopes of fornication’ it was called and it was right next to ‘insight and sincerity’).

His writing credo he summarised thus: The idea was to get as close as possible to my life. You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the loo and hold your readers spellbound. And blow me down, he did – at least this reader. I’m awaiting the verdict of my two daughters.

Here’s a taste of what kept me reading:

His descriptions

Everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence.

The sky was as grey as dry cement

His occasional humour

My brother tricked me into thinking that exhaust pipe and carburettor were the filthiest words in existence.

His reflections

What you see every day is what you never see.

(Reading the two evening papers) was like emptying a bag of rubbish over your head.

What would it have been like to live in a world where everything was made from the power of your hands, the wind or the water?

The world is full of inner cripples bumping into each other.

And, predominantly, his self-excoriation, which should drive a reader nuts, but somehow doesn’t

Dad’s dead, I thought, this is a big, big event, it should fill me to the hilt, but it isn’t doing that for here I am staring at the kettle.

Had I ever initiated a conversation with a stranger? No, never. And there was no evidence that I ever would.

For Christ’s sake, being a good person, was that beyond me?

She said I couldn’t see other people. I was completely blind. I saw only myself everywhere.

I knew it would be more difficult to show a midwife the door than to be stabbed with a knife in the Metro.

Heart’s desire by Edward Hoagland

In pursuit of better writing I read Phillip Lopate’s To show and to tell: the craft of literary non-fiction. This led me to a consummate writer, Edward Hoagland, who was my first-coffee companion for a couple of months. He’s a writer to savour, not guzzle. I was very sad to finish this book of amazingly diverse essays, written with panache, honesty and humour. What pleasures did he give me? An immense treasury of apt words, often in unexpected and vivid collocations. His ability to portray a person deftly and affectionately in a short paragraph – appearance, personality and life story – even when their views don’t match. His self-deprecation and confessional tone. The diversity of the worlds he enters – boxing, hunting, conservation, puppet parades, circuses, city life and country life. His chapter titles are gems: The lapping itchy edge of love, The courage of turtles, The threshold and the jolt of pain,Walking the Dead Diamond River. I’ll miss trekking with him in wild country, rafting with him down wild rivers, hunting wolves, sitting in a law court, watching a pageant of medieval dimensions.

My son enjoyed it too, most of it. Not often our tastes concur.

So there you have it. A couple of months of reading (excluding the pot boilers while I was fasting for two days), and an account of the paths that led me to each book.

RegularRandom: 5 minutes on the verge

28 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in challenges, photos

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

grasses, RegularRandom

My morning habit of a mini-walk at daybreak is easily transportable to the bush block where I spend weekends. After a respectable amount of rain (this was written in early December), the roadside grasses are flourishing and beckoning. Everything is still wet from dew and river-mist: my new sneaker-things are obviously unsuitable footwear, because soon squelching is added to bird song and the faint sound of running water. I walk the length of the reserve where we used to enjoy Saturday night wine, and find plenty to delight me. My flower camera lets me down a bit: I’ve scored a lot of blurs. But I’ve also made discoveries about the nature of grasses and the phases of their unfolding. All the roadside luxuriance boils down to six different species.

The silhouettes against the pinkening sky are dramatic and pleasing, and I have enough good enough grass shots for a post, despite their woggling habits.

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This week DJ does miraculous things photographing a pink hydrangea in a way that makes me think “delicate”, not a word I’d usually apply to what I’ve always regarded as a cumbersome flower.

Still life, written

23 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in words only

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

clothes, food, written still life

In a short period, only a few days, I am solicited over and over by possibilities of still life. Sue offers many examples: books, embroidery, wine bottles, old cameras, artfully posed. DesleyJane arranges her subjects for RegularRandom with great artistry. Paula and Suzanne transform pears and celery. All these temptations come from the blogosphere, but I know I don’t have the knack of casual arrangement that still life requires.

Then my writing companion comes out of left-field with an invitation to attempt still-life in words. She sends me a link to Wikipedia on still life. On a wildly windy Sunday morning I read it avidly, and begin to see potential. Portraits of my aunts through inherited objects. The celebration of a season. A slice of life in words. Contrasts, maybe bleakness and plenitude. I make a list of still life artists and still life ideas to pursue.

And then I raise my eyes from the iPad and see my first subject in front of me.

1

They lie there on the black and white geometry of the carpet, a carpet bought to please the eye and encourage it to take the mind rambling in evening cogitations. About philosophy. Wire gates. Solar-powered washing machines. Poetry. The nature of the mind.

The jumble of clothes gives no hint about the mental life of their owner. The red track suit pants are worn thin. Those round shapes are holes. They are comfort clothes, strictly in-house. Their use-softened fabric wrinkles and folds, catching shadows in its creases. A pseudo-leather belt coils out from under them, a snake to the idle unfocused eye. Behind them is a scrunched up black waffle-pattern undershirt, discarded once the day warms up, and black rumpled work trousers. They offer protection against march flies, nettles and sunburn when the man works amongst his corn and chillies and tomatoes and herbs in the wire-netted dome-garden visible through the window. The sketches lie, one on its side – the one with the green splotches of deck paint – the other one pointing a dance-step away from its mate. This is a composition in basic black and white and red, with just a small accent of green.

I’m a woman of excess. Once I’ve spotted one subject my eye is attuned. The man is not only a gardener but a caterer. He brings me my breakfast fry up. And lo, another still life.

2

Out of the old cast-iron frypan, handle long since gone; from the old fuel stove, oven and hot water tank long since gone, comes Sunday morning breakfast. The host places it on the black and white geometry of the carpet, so I can appreciate its contrasting circularity before any attempt is made to desecrate it by mastication. The old silver knife and fork are angled perfectly and begin the theme of gleam. They don’t match – nothing in this house does – but they have history. The plate is simple white china with two maroon rings marking its rim. A few minute pieces of onion loiter away from the main meal. The food is arranged to show off its components, and topped by a glisten, a gleam, a sparkle, a blink, a coruscation, a scintilla of olive oil. The egg is neat, shaped by a teflon egg ring, the yolk bright yellow and off centre, the white crinkled brown around the very edge. The potato slices are elongated oval and well-browned, interspersed with glossy half rings of onion. The small tomatoes, picked five minutes ago from the garden, have collapsed into a bright splotch of red.

Switching off cicadas

22 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in performances

≈ 7 Comments

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“Twelfth night”, Essential Theatre, Eurobodalla Botanical Gardens

“Could I ask you to switch your mobile phones to silent? And those of you who brought cicadas with you, could you do the same with them?”

It’s a hot summer afternoon in the Eurobodalla Botanical Gardens. The cicadas are shrill, and the heat is shrill too. I can feel it boring into my back as loudly as the cicadas into my ears. However the crowd is jovial, neatly arranged in front of the stage in three sections: rug section, low chair section (that’s me), and high chair section (that’s classier people.) Everyone’s brought picnics, ranging from bowled salad to clumsily constructed rolls, and of course the easy option, biscuits and dip. People drink from bottles in stubby holders, wine glasses, plastic cups.

A can tips over slyly and pours its beer-foam onto a rug. A young woman throws a piece of carrot into the air and after three tries finally catches it in her mouth. A curly-headed lad is sent to collect his mother’s sparkly sandals when the family moves camp without them. A pile of chicken bones grows just in front of me as al fresco food disappears at a relishing rate. The feasts have been brought in wheeled eskies, camping refrigerators and a variety of carry-bags from the tatty to the elegant.

The crowd grows. This event was sold out well before Christmas, and cars were pouring off the highway when I arrived at 5 for a 6.30 start.

What the heck is it we’re all here for? Shakespeare of course. “Twelfth night.” Cicadas fade as singers approach and the play begins.

It’s a romp. Malvolio is obviously the centre of this play: he always manages to steal the show. This time he plays for laughs (my last Malvolio achieved sympathy), hamming up lovelornness, exaggerating body language and using the minimal set brilliantly, especially when he appears cross-gaiters over yellow stockings. Sir Andrew takes refuge in the crowd: trees are used for lurking: Sir Toby is a very credible drunk; the fool is wise and mischievous; and Maria and the Count are childish aristocrats, determined on getting their own way.

Interval is announced with a song, directing us to the throne room, coffee and a raffle. Food appears again. Fruit skewers now. Tubs of strawberries and blueberries. Slices of cake. Dragonflies skim through the crowd. There a gentle breeze and the sun is sinking, taking with it its heat.

In the second half misunderstandings multiply, emotions escalate, actors sweat, duels fail to eventuate, and of course all ends well.

Waiting

The actors are from the Essential Theatre Company, an independent group that offers a summer season of Shakespeare in the Vines (and gardens) all over Australia. Eight actors double up to fill all the roles and it’s a tribute to their acting that they manage this without confusion, even when costume changes take place in full view.

This evening is yet another jewel in the crown of Arts in the Eurobodalla.

RegularRandom: 5 minutes with peeling bark.

21 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in challenges, photos

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

bark, Corymbia maculata, spotted gums

Just below the house where I spend weekends is a grove of handsome trees, spotted gums (aka Corymbia maculata) interspersed with stringy bark. We’ve watched them grow from striplings in the 45 years we’ve known this block. We’ve raked and composted their leaves, slung clotheslines between them, sought mobile reception perched on a mossy bole at that magic spot where, if we’re lucky, two bars appear. Towards the end of last year, late (a privilege of beauty), the spotted gums set about the ravishing business of shedding bark. I take advantage of a non-beach afternoon to capture the process of this shedding

I’ve never actually scrutinised the process before, and I’m interested in the way it happens. First a vertical split. Then a peeling back, a detachment, little pieces breaking away, but not quite completely, like the doors of an advent calendar, to reveal the underflesh. Soon the whole trunk is little doors, sometimes pinned by a tiny knot. Then gradually, and much faster if the wind rises, the bark falls from the tree and it’s up to its fetlocks in bark strips.

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This week as DJ posts a fading rose on RegularRandom, I offer an unveiling into naked white glamour.

An early morning walk and an act of gross disloyalty

20 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

different camera, Potato Point beach, seaweed, shells, sunrise

My Sony Cybershot is barely interred before I’m taking a daybreak walk along the beach with a replacement camera slung around my neck. No Victorian period of mourning for this heartless woman. The camera is not, however, THE replacement. That will have to wait till I go through that awful process of making a decision. It’s a cheap Fuji Finepix, bought to replace the last camera I killed when I fell getting out of a boat – again in 2″ of water. J is only an intermittent photographer and he passed it on to me almost with glee: he hates the business of downloading and discarding. He’d rather not photograph at all.

I leave my empty house just before daybreak. My Queensland mob are safely back home, and I’m enjoying a tidiness I fear won’t survive long. All the windows are open and the cool air is pouring in. By the time I return home, light has joined it.

I use the walk to explore the simple programming of the camera, via a menu more accessible than the one on my dear deceased. When I look through the results, I decide the colour is a bit bland, and since I don’t have as many megapixels to play with, 12 as opposed to 20, cropping isn’t as effective. So, Sony Cybershot, you are still superior, and hold an unrivalled place in my heart.

Thanks to the morning light / thanks to the foaming sea: so wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. I feel that gratitude every time I walk along the beach at daybreak, and even more so this time. No camera could fail to be charmed into delivering delicious shots full of radiance. Lemony Snicket is on the money too: how you spend your morning can often tell you what kind of day you are going to have. Yesterday was a gleaming day.

Vale, Sony Cybershot DSC-RX100

20 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos

≈ 21 Comments

I’ve just had the doctor’s report on the health of my camera after its dramatic encounter with sea sand and salt water. “Extensive corrosion throughout camera.” The treatment is dire: “Dismantle unit, remove circuit boards and switch block to replace parts listed. Perform alignment and update firmware when appropriate. Clean unit and exterior optics. Clean exterior and test unit.” The cost? $922. I can buy a new one, with a retractable viewfinder, for less than that.

So it’s time to say goodbye to my loyal companion of the last six years. We’ve travelled together along beaches and rock platforms; through the bush; around five cities in Poland and a few in Australia; in country towns and rural Poland; to many exhibitions and events in different parts of the world; on road trips in NSW, Victoria and Queensland; on a quick dash through Slovenia, Croatia, Budapest, Vienna and Prague; into the hearts of flowers. We’ve recorded the first five years of Jaś and Maja; the visitations of a python; and even the occasional sunrise.

It’s served me better than I served it, killing it while it was still in the prime of life. I’m sorry, and I thank you, my friend, for showing me more than I could ever see for myself.

Message

19 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in challenges, photos

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

bushfire, message, Thursday's special

Paula’s latest Thursday’s Special theme is message. This sign, just up the hill from where I live, offers a scary message, lurking in that word “safer”. Not safe, mind you, just safer. Bushfires are a real and present threat around here. My village is in the middle of a strip of the discontinuous Eurobodalla National Park, and part of its beauty is the bush, which comes almost down to the sea. However, it’s part of its terror too.

I’ve had a few heartstopping encounters with bushfires over the years, not here, but where I spend my weekends. Once you can see the shape of the flames there is no guaranteed safety, the price you pay for being surrounded by spotted gums and casuarinas, and looking out the window at lyrebirds and sacred kingfishers.

As if “safer” isn’t enough, the message continues. Here, at the tip of the headland surrounded by the village, just near the track down to Jemison’s Beach, is the “place of last resort.” This gives a whole new terror to the word resort, which is how most people see my home: a peaceful place where you can loll on the beach, and frolic in the waves, and ride your bike on bush tracks and see macropods grazing on village lawns. However, once you reach “last resort” there’s no room for anything but fear.

Fortunately this summer there’s been enough rain to dowse down the threat, but summer’s not over yet.

Photos from the wilderness

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos by other people

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

exhibition, Franklin River, National Library of Australia, Peter Dombrovskis

For my friend Meg who was a warrior for the Franklin

I first met the photos of Peter Dombrovskis as postcards thirty-odd years ago. I used to have a bundle on hand in the days when I still communicated by snail mail. I wonder now whether his splendid closeups of lichen, moss, seaweed and pebbles influenced my own image-capturing once I started to photograph obsessively.

Dombrovskis came to the fore in the Australian consciousness in the 1980s, during the fight to save the Franklin River from damming. His iconic photo Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River was used by the Wilderness Society in a campaign that unseated a Federal government, rewrote relations between state and federal governments, and prevented the construction of the dam. It didn’t hurt that the area was placed on UNESCO’s world heritage list about the same time.

Now, finally, I have seen his photos large scale, in an exhibition at the National Library of Australia, and I am astonished. They are splendidly textured, three-dimensional, and the detail, every last shred of it, is sharp and focused. The composition is stunning: water leading to middle-ground rocks, leading to faint mountains; rounded moss-covered rocks leading to pines, leading to misty mountains; foreground of giant kelp (three quarters of the image) leading to rocks in the sea, leading to a sliver of ocean; orange flowers leading to an eroded mountain top. Then there are the closeups: coils of seaweed; the striped bark of snow gums; the swirls of ice patterns; the bright circles of fruiting lichen; a curl of driftwood and a slab of black rock amongst brightly coloured shells. Perhaps my favourites are the misty monochrome ones: a twisted tree against a background of mist and in front of the pale silhouettes of other trees; reflections of the straight thin lines of reeds in misty water; and more reflections amongst nebulous river boulders.

It would be insulting to post my photos of Dombrovskis’ photos, severely compromised as they are by reflections in the glass, the darkness, an unfamiliar camera, and a lack of skill. So let me direct you here, or suggest you search google images. This seaweed is a taster, snaffled from an NLA article.

As you may guess, Dombrowskis’ statement expresses my own feelings about taking photos.

Read a lively account by Bob Brown to mark the 30th anniversary of the Franklin campaign, including bizarre elements that make it seem, in parts, like a comic opera.

Thank you Annette for sending me this article.

RegularRandom: 5 minutes in a hardware store

14 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in challenges, photos

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

hardware store, RegularRandom

J’s putting the finishing touches to his solar electrification. He still needs a hot water tank, so we abort the Saturday beach and head off to … RED ALERT: product placement! … Bunnings monster store. I’ve already decided to pay it a visit with the camera: it struck me on my last brief visit as having some of the attributes of an art gallery. While J heads off purposefully to Plumbing, I prowl the aisles, attracting the odd strange look as I point and shoot. J’s a bit concerned they might think I’m an industrial spy, so he keeps well clear.

Plastic is almost an insult to DJ’s wonderfully delicate orchid, with which she spends an exquisite 5 minutes in this week’s episode of RegularRandom. Go here for an antidote to the brashness of my post.

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