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Tag Archives: shells

Cabinets of curiosities

19 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in history, photos

≈ 9 Comments

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.

A weekend at the beach

04 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos, Potato Point beach

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

cuttle fish, fishermen, shells, sponges, wedding

While it’s snowing in unexpected places in Europe, and Warsaw is -15, autumn dawns gloriously in my corner of Australia. Saturday is spectacularly blue and sunny, and even foot-fumbling along the beach at high tide can’t diminish my pleasure. The beach is quite busy, at least for Potato Point. A couple I’ve known for nearly forty years are set up, he fishing for lunch with bucket and line, she comfortable on a chair under a shady black hat reading. Halfway along the beach a table, white-clothed, is set up for a wedding and a man in a satin- backed waistcoat waits with friends, including a guitarist and a crouched photographer, for the bride to appear through the dunes.

The sea is welcoming. High tide may make walking a chore but it makes swimming easy. No struggle to immerse myself: the sea does it for me, a calm serene sea where I can feel myself gently lifted and lowered.

On Sunday, we’ve had a southerly overnight and the sky is cloudy. However the water is still warm and the rise and fall remains gentle. The beach offers unexpected treasures: a scattering of white bones with elegant black patterning. These are the internal shells of cuttlefish, chambered and gas-filled, used to control buoyancy when the cuttlefish is in possession and for a variety of other purposes after its demise: as a polishing powder used by goldsmiths; a toothpaste additive; an antacid; a dietary supplement for caged birds, chinchillas, hermit crabs, reptiles, shrimp and snails.

There is also an unusual smattering of sponges (an interesting synchronicity since I’ve just spent five minutes photographing J’s dried sponge collection from our beachcombing phase) and a translucent shell.

There is one touch of approaching winter (or is it a gardening glove?) abandoned on our towel and hat rack.

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.

Hotchpotch 13

09 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in hotchpotch, photos

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

birds, death, flowers, oddities, on the beach, regrowth, shells

I wonder what it says about the balance of one’s life when there is more hotchpotch than coherent substance?

Still life waiting to happen

I have a lineup of bottles on my kitchen windowsill. The plan was to spend 5 minutes photographing them in different configurations and light, but my arrangements always look stilted, and since they are glass I can’t throw them towards a random arrangement, and hope.

A joke

Look closely at the base of the trig at the high point in my village. Maybe you’ll be quicker than I was to spot the joke.

Fallen woman

I continue to practise floral and foliage kleptomania on my early morning strolls, although the leaves on gravel are fair game since they lie on a public road.

Fallen blossom

High on the crown of the eucalypts – the dark pink one opposite my place, the paler one on the corner a few doors down – are blossoms. I know I will never reach them, either with my arm or with my eye extension which is my camera. But then, as time passes, they carpet the ground and all I have to do is crouch down for an intimate view. Colour difference is the result of two different cameras and two different species.

Piling up

The beach is usually pristine and the creek pool just before the rocks pellucid, tempting small children to flop and paddle and play. Over this holiday period the beach has been piled high with rotting seaweed and the creek an infective black, where no child plays. Just occasionally a coil or a spray of seaweed separates itself from the suppurating mass.

Elemental

Early morning perchers, swallows preening and fluffing on the wires, graceful creatures of the air. A taped off area on Brou Beach to protect nesting Little Terns in their earth-bound phase from unwary clodhoppers. A pair of emus grazing along the sand-cliffs, leaving their startled footprints when we move too close, forever birds of the earth. An unperturbed egret, fishing in the dark waters of Potato Creek, at home in air and water. Fire, you may ask? That too, close to home. Bodalla school crest features a phoenix rising from the flames.

Left behind

The beach is full of things left behind: the sea must be far more forgetful than me. It recedes and leaves shells, weed, sand grains, ripple marks. When it returns, it carelessly eradicates them all under its waves and its foam. Occasionally things people leave behind escape its attention, and very occasionally it returns what it has taken. We once found a jumper of J’s matted and salt-laden a year after he left it on the beach.

Prospect

On an empty block, a lowslung chair has taken up residence in front of a potential barbecue frame. It lounges there taking in the view over the grasses and up the beach towards Tuross.

A weekend of death …

On Brou Beach and in Brou Lake things out of place and dying, if not already dead. A cicada on a vast stretch of sand, and a jellyfish imprisoned in the lake. Overhead at the river a cicada shriek overhead – doomed in the beak of a bird. At home the front yard hakea crashing harmlessly over the drive where there could’ve been people, cars, dogs.

… and maybe resurrection

The tree in the Brou camping area is spouting new growth. I photograph it with J’s camera. Mine is awaiting either resurrection or a death sentence, after collecting a pile of sand and seawater when I inexplicably fell over on the edge of the sea.

Hotchpotch 10

30 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

flowers, rockpools, shells, trees

With this post, I say a very happy birthday to Tish, writer on the edge, who has given me so many pleasures with her posts – historical, geological, horticultural, botanical, African, stylistic and photographic pleasures – since, somehow, I found her in the blogosphere.






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Couplings: a photo essay 

11 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

maunderings, shells

Australia is in the middle of a totally ridiculous non-compulsory, non-binding plebiscite (or is it a survey?) which asks the question “Should the law be changed to allow same sex couples to marry?” And costs $AUD170 million. All to rescue timid parliamentarians from doing their job, which is to legislate in the spirit of Ireland and the 21st century.

I suspect this is why I use my non-geological beach walks to meditate on couples, using shells and occasional other findings to prompt my thinking. Shells have been paired at the whim of the sea, not unlike the nature of most pairings, brought about in strange configurations by the accident of proximity.

Take these two, for example. Totally different. You’d never expect them to see anything in each other.

For these two I see trouble ahead. They are very different from each other, both broken, marked by previous experience.

There could well be a different kind of trouble for these couplings. Look how they curl around and nestle up to each other. It’s pretty dangerous to seek completion in something else. And look how abrasion’s beginning already – grains of sand settling between them ready to niggle and damage.

Alarm bells ring here. See how one of them dominates. I foresee an overpowering matched to a diminishing.

Look around you at any cafe and you’ll see this couple, sitting silent, each in their own isolated niche.

Some couplings manage a nice balance of function and pleasure.

And some, like this man with his surfboard, offer pure unadulterated, undemanding delight.

Then there are the couples wrapped up in each other and excluding the rest of the world. These two are foraging companionably together, but when a third joins them they raise their wings and squawk it away.

A gutted crab and beached starfish are a final reminder that human pairings all end in separate couplings with death.

Despite all these negatives and nigglings, I hope my fellow Australians shape up and vote resoundingly “YES”, showing good sense that our politicians and many commentators and interest groups lack. No doubt same sex marriage will encounter the same mix of agony and ecstasy that seems to be inherent in most relationships, but that’s no reason for making it impossible.

Hotchpotch 9

22 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in hotchpotch, photos

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

fruits, Ones, shells, sunset, waterlilies






Finally, in homage to Sue and her Ones, two full frontal Ones. The man and his dog appeared in the frame just as I took the photo, aiming merely for an image of the track.

This One was captured in Warsaw. Concrete was raining down from the roof during renovations, and I whizzed down to take a photo of the debris. The man, presumably there to warn tenants before they got dinged on the head, didn’t want to be in the photo, and I caught him hopping the low fence to disappear somehow before I snapped.

A study in shells and pebbles 

28 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Cemetery Beach, pebbles, shells

At the bottom of the track from the cemetery to the beach, I crunch onto a mound of pebbles. I’m not bounding with energy today and the camera provides a good excuse to dawdle. The day is overcast and the light perfect. I bend down, scrutinising that crunch under my feet. I take portraits of individual shells and group portraits, using the pebbles as background, and I document the assemblages Mother Nature has created out of driftwood, cunjevoi, seaweed, desiccated sponges, leaves, rocks and shells.

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Then I set off in pursuit of J, who is well out of sight around a couple of headlands in the bounding company of a large white dog with silky fur and an independent spirit. I rejoice in the power that has returned to his adductor muscle, in my easy recognition of chert, BIM and mylonite, even in the wave that catches me up to the calf as I edge my way round a rock. 

By now the sky is lowering, and the tide is coming in so it’s time to head for the car. As we follow the line of the shell midden (featured in my last post) along the hillock of pebbles, the first raindrops begin to fall.

 

Wordless walks: Smugglers Cove, Carters Beach and Narooma Surf Beach

15 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in Eurobodalla beaches, photos

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

birds, rock face, shells

 

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And for those without JavaScript, a collage to click on for a slideshow

 

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Wordless walk: Shelly Beach

05 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

rock patterns, shells, Shelly Beach


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