Once was a bridge

Tags

destruction, memories, Tyrone Bridge

There you are, a low wooden bridge spanning the Tuross River at Eurobodalla, taking traffic over the mountain to Nerrigundah. You’ve done it for years. You were an old hand when we arrived in your neighbourhood in 1977.

Photo credit: Annette Gray

You provided a basic kind of music, rattling away as trucks and cars slowed down to cross you. You were a primitive and functional work of art, worn wooden planks with gaps between them; bolts and replacement bolts; a thin swathe of sand and a slither of casuarina needles at the edges.

Photo credit for images used in two collages: Annette Gray

Your low parapet looked down onto the river, sluggish sometimes, other times whirling with flood waters. Many times you were completely submerged, but it didn’t seem to bother you. You surfaced in all your sturdiness ready to continue the job you were built for.

You wove your way into our lives. We used you to gauge the height of floodwaters. We walked across you to reach the sandy beach on the other side. The boys rode bikes clunkety clunkety clunk across your uneven boards, chucking wheelies for your whole length and triumphant if the gaps didn’t upend them. One day, I sat, motor revving at the town end of you debating what use I’d make of childless freedom when the kids were with their father: Bodalla pub? Or sitting around languorously in my black lingerie at home?

Once the army was using you and the area around you for training exercises. My son wanted to know what was going on. “They’re trying to take the bridge”, I said. He was mystified. “Take it where?”

Thirty-five years later you have indeed been taken, by the council, not the army. There you are, neatly sliced and laid out in piles in the reserve beside the river.

You’ve been replaced by a sprightly concrete bridge, much higher than you were. It will never have your charm. It will never grunt continuo to accompany our swims or Saturday night wine on the river bank. It won’t wear attractively into wooden scars. It won’t respond to our feet with splinters and clatter. There is no way we’ll be walking along its parapet, looking down on schools of tiny fish or sand ripples under slightly tea coloured water.

Photo credit: J

And you? What’s in your future? You’ll be used for transplants and spare parts, to extend the lives of other old wooden bridges in the shire.

You leave us behind to mourn you.

Cabinets of curiosities

Tags

cabinet of curiosities, Macquarie chest of curiosities, shells

I’ve always been intrigued by cabinets of curiosities, those precursors of grand museums, and the repositories of passion for the natural world. They’ve been called microcosms of the world and a memory theatre, both fertile metaphors. For princes they were yet another measure of power and control, for scholars they represented knowledge and an attempt to categorise the world as a way of understanding it. The cabinet itself was often a thing of consummate craft and beauty. At this point I think of the story of Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s collector’s chest.

Once upon a time, 1818 it was, Captain James Wallis, in charge of Newcastle settlement for reoffending convicts, had an idea. Macquarie was finishing his term and returning to England. Wallis decided to make him a cabinet, the design based initially on military campaign chests lugged around by serving officers to hold their possessions. But this chest would be special. He found four convict craftsmen to work the red cedar and rosewood, and employed forger and artist Joseph Lycett to paint panels. Then he filled it with Antipodean wonders and presented it to his boss.

Macquarie’s return to England was not a happy one. His vision for the colony didn’t sit well with the English government: too much grandeur and too much spending. He ended his days embittered in Scotland and the chest disappeared.

Until it reappeared in rumours in the 1980s: stories of a chest in a junk room at Strathallan Castle. A man visited the castle on the off-chance of finding something, making his way there in the village taxi which doubled as a hearse. He left with photos, and in 2004 it was bought by the NSW State Library for more than $1million, after a message that said “Come in 30 minutes if you want the first option to buy.”

The curator, Elizabeth Ellis, was alone when she opened it after the purchase. She describes it as very plain, with recessed brass handles. Until you begin opening the lids and taking out the drawers. Then it is all brightness: the colours of the paint, the bright parrots and other birds, some of them now rare; butterflies and moths arranged around the centrepiece of a huntsman spider; and trays of shells.

In our shell collecting days, J made such a cabinet, a basic one out of plywood, painted a not so subtle purple (the paint looked a fetching shade of grey at point of purchase) to house the hundred species of shells we found on local beaches and in shelly coves. In making this he was following a tradition as old as the late 15th century, the preserve of nobles (which we aren’t) or enthusiasts (which we definitely are). Now I reduce the notion of a cabinet of curiosities even further, and offer shells arranged in virtual compartments.

Coda

Overspending was not Macquarie’s worst crime by any means. He sent Wallis off on one of the first massacres of Aboriginal people, and in one of those twists of history and human nature, Wallis later became good friend and hunting and fishing companion to Burrugun Jack, whom he deeply respected.

The source of the information about Macquarie’s chest was a radio interview with Elizabeth Ellis. There is a longer interview here, and you can see the chest on YouTube.

The flying pieman

Tags

art, Flying Pieman, Speewah, walking

What treasures I’m finding in my study purge. My bed is now littered with old copies of Artonview, the magazine of the National Gallery of Australia, which I leaf through in that twice-a-day liminal state between awake-and-asleep and asleep-and-awake.

A beautifully written and idiosyncratically conceived article, The story of Australian print making, by Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, had an intriguing image of the Flying Pieman, with an even more intriguing story hinting at his walking exploits.

 

The flying pieman by William Nicholas 1847-48

 

This of course was irresistible to a woman who collects walkers for her pantheon of ambulants, so I went investigating. I discovered a man called William Francis King, once a school teacher, who after, so the story goes, an unsuccessful love affair, earned a living betting on his own walking prowess.

His walks always involved more than walking. He might carry a goat or a dog weighing over thirty kilos hoiked over his shoulder. Or he might challenge himself to walk 192 miles in 48 hours, round and round the Maitland racecourse: he finished this marathon in 46.5 hours. On another occasion he “ran a mile, walked a mile, wheeled a barrow a half-mile, dragged a horse carriage with a 89-kilogram lady half a mile, walked half a mile backwards and leapt over 50 stones set 91 centimetres apart”: this took him less than 90 minutes.

He was unmissable, sporting a flamboyant moustache and wearing “white stockings, crimson knee breeches, a blue jacket and a top hat bedecked with coloured streamers”, none of which show up in the subdued colours of the print.

However, his story is not a parable lauding the benefits of walking, at least not à la William Francis King. Gradually people realised it was foolish to bet against him, his income dried up, he became corpulent, he wandered the streets of Sydney selling pies (hence his nickname) and offering unsolicited rambling proclamations, a parody of his glory days. He died in the Liverpool asylum.

The stories about the Flying Pieman have something of the flavour of the tall tale, a favourite Australian yarn-spinning genre, typified in stories about Crooked Mick and the Speewah, a mythical outback station where dust storms are so thick rabbits dig burrows in them and trees so tall they have hinged tops to let the sun through. However, King’s legendary exploits are reported in respectable newspapers such as The Maitland Mercury, and he has earned a place in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, where he is tagged #pedestrianist and #street character.

 

Acknowledgements

I harvested these stories from a newspaper article and the Australian dictionary of biography

 

 

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