Adventure

Post #154 Monday 15 March 2021 – Travelling circus

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Monday 15 March 2021

Following on from the last post I couldn’t find on the internet exactly the final passages that I was looking for from Gerald Durrell’s charming book. But I did find something related which I thought I’d post to remind people who know the book. On reflection the book seems altogether too innocent a thing to recall in these difficult times.

This summary review has been written by a person who does home schooling, which is very apt considering Durrell’s book is an account of his childhood during five brilliant school-free years on Corfu in the years before the war, filled with variety and the wonder of the natural world.

https://journey-and-destination.blogspot.com/2017/07/my-family-and-other-animals-by-gerald.html


Durrell did have private tutors though, as the reviewer reminds us in this quote and final note:

“One day, Mr Kralefsky, one of Gerald’s tutors, informed Mother that he had taught Gerald as much as he was able and the time had come for him to go somewhere like England or Switzerland to finish his education:

‘In desperation I argued against any such idea; I said I liked being half-educated; you were so much more surprised at everything when you were ignorant.’

Mother was adamant and so the family returned to England with the words of a [Swiss] border official, ‘One travelling Circus and Staff’ written on their ‘Description of Passengers’ document.”

I know I put this book reference up because I was amused by the Swiss border official. But incidentally, looking at this summary review, I’m reminded it took me until first year university to discover this idea of education for myself, when a philosophy tutor, responding to me in a tutorial when I’d commented that perhaps it was a good thing we first read the great thinkers as part of the basic curriculum, had said, well maybe not, maybe it was a good thing to experience ideas thinking you are the first person to uncover these truths. His idea was a complete revelation to me. I may well have fancied myself liberated by a creative “free school” high school education but I was deeply conservative – maybe even conformist lol!

xx MG

Post #153 Thursday 12 March 2021 – March visit to Sydney

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Thursday 12 March 2021

Dear friends, thanks to so many of you for understanding that I am just having to keep things low key for the foreseeable future. You are always welcome to get in touch any time though, I am not going anywhere 🙂

Meantime I have a visit booked for Sydney 24, 25 and 26 March. I am also still visiting Canberra and Wollongong, and locally in the Southern Highlands, on an ad hoc basis. While I am in Sydney at other times from time to time, it’s not for MG.

My last post had a photo of the black swan Harold looking all moody and elegant in the middle distance behind the bullrushes. I have great news: he finally flew away, it would have been about Valentine’s day. So his gammy foot did not hold him back. He has launched into his own life finally and will be somewhere out there finding swan friends.

So while going out with my kayak on the water is still as nice as ever I miss seeing Harold doing his thing. There are always other diversions though, such as blackberries (terrible pest but lovely fruit).

And also interesting flowering plants, including this small pink flannel flower which scrambles down the rock and hangs over the water in one place. I have never seen this flower before. My gf sent me an article saying that it is apparently not common and generally will only grow after bush fires in higher altitudes. It is exceptionally lovely.


And I have a new animal friend, a white goat. He’s very philosophical looking, perching calmly out on the high rocky outcrops in the day, or tucked away in a protected sunny spot early in the morning. I think he’s basically feral. And also something about him makes me think he could be a senior goat lol. I’ve been taking him carrots (when I remember), and leaving them at the same place I’ve seen him in the early mornings.

There are quite a few water dragons on the rocks too. I was paddling up the centre of the waterway and saw what I thought at first was a stick, but then it was moving, so I thought water dragon swimming from one side to the other. As I approached the reptilian head and neck, I swear in an instant it changed its’ body language expression from: “dum dee dum doo daah …(minding my own reptile business, swimming along delicate little head high up and out at an angle)”, to “crikey what’s that”, and then “yikes, I am outta here!” as it saw me, heaved to an urgent stop and lurched away. It was a red bellied black snake. The deep red showing up as it turned.

And all this story telling about creatures reminds me of the end of the book by Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals. It never gets old. I will find it and post a copy.

xx MG

Post #150 Thursday 7 January 2021 – New Year

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Thursday 7 January 2021

Dear friends, Thanks so much for the lovely gifts and the good wishes over Christmas New Year.
It’s been beautiful here in the country with waves of different coloured wildflowers from one week to the next, following on from so much rain. I’ve never seen it so lovely.
A close relative died before Christmas and it’s been a very sad time. Even when you have known someone is dying for a long time there seems to be no accounting for the level of emotion when that time actually arrives. Also some family members are more evolved than others and each can be playing out their own unresolved drama so right at a time that sensitivity would be the right thing, there isn’t any. I have to say I’ve found it all very difficult and it’s taking me a while to recover.
My plan has been to visit for the short week after Australia day, which would be Wednesday 27 January to Sunday 31 January 2021. I’m very wary of the developments with the virus though. I cannot understand how the the crowds can be allowed to go to the cricket today. And I do not understand why the vaccines are not approved and issued now. So can we agree I’m planning to come but it might have to be postponed? Absolutely none of us wants to get the virus!

On a happier note, I had the loveliest visit to Wollongong in December. The storms have been so dramatic in recent times and that day was no exception. Here is a clip from the beach in the evening. This panning shot up into an intensely coloured sky really reminds me of the cinematography in an Australian film called My First Wife. I saw the film years ago late one night on SBS, maybe someone else will remember it too. The sky above the beach was very colour saturated and stormy and the fast scanning movement of the camera evoked the main character’s searching. It was beautifully done, with wheeling gulls (like this clip), and an intense choral music sound track (the main character was a music teacher). This clip is much more peaceful though, like my state of mind when I was down there with all the waves surging up onto the sand and round me :-).

xx MG


Post #144 gentle perfect sounds under the full moon

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Monday 6 July 2020

My Sydney visit could not have started better than it has. I actually came up early for a girlfriend’s birthday drinks. That was so fun. While I stayed in the Campari lane (Negroni much as I love it, is too strong for me), I was also introduced to the pretty amazing flavour of an Australian “smoked gin”. Does anyone know about this? I will make efforts to penetrate the local gin distilling scene and report back.

This evening I’ve done one of my favourite things – walking at night. I can’t really walk at night in the country (a) because it is too dark (b) it puts the farm dogs into a frantic (c) walking at night is really a city thing anyway. It’s all about the quiet lights radiating from houses, glimpses of people at home in their rooms with books and paintings or in their kitchens, or watching the tv, still city gardens – intimate landscapes, the harbour, city lights, the racket of occasional flying foxes.

It feels a bit Venetian (well land-based Venetian :-))

This is a slice of my night walk, coming back over Darling Point, looking through the terraces toward Elizabeth Bay.

The best of all, is coming down the hill to Rushcutters Bay to hear one of my favourite sounds, rope gently thumping against the mast. And once there are a few boats rolling gently it’s like a gamelan orchestra. You never hear them tolling so clearly and gently during daytime.

I made a lovely little clip of the full moon and the gentle sound of rope against mast.

MG xx

Post #139 Wednesday 6 May 2020 – Poplars

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Letters from America

Wednesday 6 May 2020

This photo is a bit out of focus and overexposed but your glamorous aunt is doing real yoga.  There are some lovely spots just off the highway to Canberra.  This is one of them, at a rest area commemorating one of the bravest second war VCs, Diver Derrick VC.

Looking up, arms reaching up

In the Iliad there are one or two passages that changed the way I looked at poplars. Everyone knows I love trees. I already loved poplars. But now I love them even more. I have included one of the passages from Homer, which is about the death of a Trojan named Simoeisios. It follows a standard formula: the fall of the warrior in the battle, his precise wound, the story of his humanity, the metaphor.

There Telamonian Ajax
struck down the son of
Anthemion
Simoeisios in his stripling’s
beauty, whom once his
mother
descending from Ida bore
beside the banks of
Simoeis
when she had followed her
father and mother to tend
the sheepflocks.
Therefore they called him
Simoeisios; but he could
not
render again the care of his
dear parents; he was
short-lived,
beaten down beneath the
spear of high-hearted
Ajax,
who struck him as he first
came forward beside the
nipple
of the right breast, and the
bronze spearhead drove
clean through the
shoulder.
He dropped then to the
ground in the dust, like
some black poplar,
which in the land low-lying
about a great marsh grows
smooth trimmed yet with
branches growing at the
uttermost tree-top:
one whom a man, a maker
of chariots, fells with the
shining
iron, to bend into a wheel
for a fine-wrought chariot,
and the tree lies hardening
by the banks of a river.
Such was Anthemion’s son
Simoeisios, whom
illustrious
Ajax killed.

4.473 – 489

xx from MG


Post #119 Saturday 2 November 2019 – Banksy

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Letters from America

Saturday 2 November 2019

I went to the Banksy exhibition at the Entertainment Quarter. If you go, it’s better not to buy tickets online – they are a much better price at the door. Also, to avoid walking around looking for the exhibition hall, go straight to the end of the main entrance road off Lang Road (I walked all around the place before I figured it out :-)).

Even though the Banksy images are such well known street art there was nothing “old” about the look of the show – mostly original stencils and various prints. Here are some of the street images from Google:

flower violence
art for the burbs
a trusty Council contractor

The organiser of the exhibition was manager/accomplice to Banksy for many years, Steve Lazarides. Banksy himself is still unidentified.

One of the best things about the exhibition was the use of videos – streaming on loop around the hall between the exhibits. They told the story of the extraordinary rise of the guerilla grafitti artist with his witty, anti-consumerist themes. It was a very well done story and made the exhibition a really coherent experience.

There was film called “Exit Through the Gift Shop” mentioned in some of the commentary of the exhibition, a film I’d never heard of. In the evening when I was home I looked it up and found a copy on youtube to watch.

The film was an extended commentary on the consumerist art market hype that Banksy parodies (and was itself a clever hoax). It started out purporting to be a documentary on Banksy, being made by a dotty French American amateur photographer/film maker. This character had, according to the film, doggedly followed Banksy for years on his secret missions trespassing at night to plaster his distinctive stencil posters and do his grafitti on buildings and signs all round the UK and both sides of the US. When it becomes apparent about half way through the film, that the quality of the documentary is hopeless, Banksy enters stage left (appearing simply as a dark hooded figure – no face – being interviewed) and persuades the film maker to become the subject of the narrative. So he does, and somehow sets about to transform himself into a grafitti and print artist (like Banksy) with a huge output (none of it displaying any talent or skill whatsoever). The reconfigured “documentary” then follows the film maker’s hugely successful first exhibition in Los Angeles (playing to the cynical undiscriminating art market hungry for the next “thing”). It’s done with a light enough touch though, to make it excellent fun to watch.

Here is a link to the film if you’d like to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHJBdDSTbLw

It reminded me of a documentary (but not a parody “documentary” at all), about Andy Warhol’s protegee, David Basquiat, who perished very young, apparently a victim of his own success. From the wrong side of the tracks, with no training, he suffered trying to cope with the hype of his spectacular conquest of the contemporary art market at a very young age. His tragic fate perhaps an outcome, at least in part, of the social realities that are the focus of Banksy’s work. Here are some images of Basquiat’s pictures – in a heavily worked totemic grafitti style.

And here is a link to the documentary film about Basquiat, which turned up in my internet searches when I was getting these images of his paintings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6ibOFlSM6o I think the film features (the real) Andy Warhol and (the real) David Bowie.

xx MG

Post #118 Monday 28 October 2019 – more on the Whitsundays

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Monday 28 October 2019

Following on from my earlier post about adventures in the Whitsundays, I wanted to add another image. These are the Norfolk Island pines, with their very distinctive geometry, everywhere on the Whitsunday islands. This is the ridge of the cove at Refuge Bay where we anchored overnight.

I managed to find an internet link which gives the back story to how the pines came to be here. I had some ancient recollection they were not native. https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A7952664

So it was Captain Cook who brought the seeds of the pines to northern Australia wishfully supposing they might provide timber suitable for masts.

I have always found it hard to be on the water in the Pacific and not think of Captain Cook, Joseph Banks and all the great naturalists. For quite a while one of my favourite non fiction books was a book called “Darwin’s Armada” by Iain McCalman. It’s an account of the great sailing voyages of Darwin’s peers. It’s absolutely compelling reading (if that’s your kind of thing). It’s ages since I read it but one of the passages that still stays with me vividly is an account of how the Pacific peoples must have experienced navigating, with only the simplest instruments and no charts – what resources, skills and understanding of the sea they must have had.

But then I am very partial to all things Charles Darwin (and his milieu). The Voyage of the Beagle is so engaging. Here is a favourite passage in which Darwin describes interactions with wild llamas.

Scientific method: “…if a person lies on the ground and plays strange antics, such as throwing up his feet in the air…”

xx MG

Post #117 Saturday 26 October 2019 – Whitsundays

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Saturday 26 October 2019

I am back from lovely holidays sailing with friends in the Whitsundays. I have an excellent tan to show for it. I actually didn’t want to come back. The South African guy at the charter yacht company was no help either, just suggested I read the book with the self explanatory title “Sell up and Sail”.

This was the outlook when anchored overnight in a place called Refuge Bay:

In the evening I could hear a slightly mournful bird call. At first it sounded like a dove but it was too insistent. It turned out to be a couple of pheasant coucals calling to one another. (Don’t ask me how I figured it out, it was intuition confirmed by internet searches.)

The call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lluJIiLuuFg

Here are some images of the bird itself which I borrowed from Google:

Flying … (this type of feet first flying, good for short distances only)

I put this second image in because it has the fence wire for size. I have actually seen these birds and I can warrant they are concurrently large birds and small dinosaurs.

The “sell up and sail” caper is something I like to enjoy vicariously these days by watching youtube channels. My favourite channel is one called Free Range Sailing. It’s a youtube vlog maintained by an Australian couple who are cruising in a very modest yacht, mostly in tropical waters. Apart from the sailing, they do quite a bit of free diving on the reefs, spearfishing and exploring on shore. Pascal is a very good and resourceful cook. She also seems to be the creative lead in making the vlog – which is high quality well edited video. Her partner Troy is an excellent hand at keeping their 30 foot 50 year old yacht on track and in shape. He seems to handle the inevitable breakdowns of gear in good form and has a droll sense of humour. They are of course, “free range” so it all appeals to my tree hugging temperament. You aren’t going to find them zapping around churning up the peace of the natural world on jet skis any time soon. Highly recommend! And here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbU2ulPD3rJ4OZCNH7-gjjQ

xx MG

Post #113 Sunday 23 June 2019 – Pretty Balmoral

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Sunday 23 June 2019

The lovely thing about Sydney, well there are many but this is also one of them, is that even when it is overcast it can be very pretty.  

I was at Mosman last week during the week, a bit of an event because I don’t go over the Bridge so much these days.  Afterward I dropped down from the steep ridge that Military Road follows, to the pretty harbour beach, Balmoral (surf beach for the under threes).  I had a nostalgic and quality fish and chips from the Bottom of the Harbour fish and chip shop, which I think has been there about 20 years, loyally taking cash only and reminding some of us of scandalous tax avoidance schemes from the days of when…

It was an overcast day.   A steady number of citizens walked their dogs along the foreshore.  I have always liked the somewhat art deco style of the concrete foreshore walkway, complemented by the little bridge across the isthmus which you can just see at the end of the beach here in one of my afternoon snaps.

Bottom of the Harbour – tax schemes from the past

MG xx
Both sides of the Bridge

Post #112 Tuesday 18 June 2019 – Newcastle Art Gallery

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Tuesday 18 June 2019

In the course of my recent excursions during May when I was away from work for a couple of weeks, I had the pleasure of going up to the Newcastle Art Gallery for the first time. It was a Saturday early afternoon and the occasion was the opening of a retrospective exhibition of the works of the Australian artist, Virginia Cuppaidge. Virginia was interviewed at the opening, to a very attentive audience. The paintings in the exhibition covered her work over a 40 year career spent in New York. She has recently returned to Australia to live.

Here is a photo of two of her pictures from the 1970’s:

And here is a sculpture made by the Australian Clem Meadmore, with whom she worked for a time in New York. The sculpture is entitled Virginia and lives in the Sculpture Garden at The Australian National Gallery in Canberra.

I became aware of Virginia’s paintings because I was friendly with her mother: author, botanical illustrator, japanophile and horticulturalist, Judy Cuppaidge. Judy and I became friends when Judy was in her 90’s: a more lively and remarkable person you could not hope to meet and, as she said, with her macular degeneration: “blind as welder’s dog.”

I’ve been planning to make a recording of one of Judy’s short stories.

MG xx