Pets

Post #27 Monday 8 May 2017 – McElhone Stairs and the black and white cat

May 7, 2017 by MG Leave a Comment

Posted in: Art, City, Letters from America, Pets, Urban landscape, Wildlife

Letters from America

Monday 8 May 2017

This is a 1944 painting by Sali Herman of the McElhone Stairs.

These Stairs are at the end of Victoria Street and lead up from Woolloomooloo to Potts Point. I have often walked these stairs down to the City or to Lady Macquarie’s Chair and the Botanic Gardens and sometimes just to do a circuit alongside HMAS Kuttabul which is at the bottom of Potts Point. I think the Stairs date from the 1870s.

Sali Herman distorted his painted view to make the Stairs much wider and steeper looking than they are. And he made the figures smaller to add to the effect. The male figures in the bottom right are uniformed, perfectly suited to 1944 (though there are always uniformed service people about with the local naval base and the dock). The house on the right is a fine house also from the 1870s, with very fine detail in the balconies and ironwork. I think there have been continuing battles with successive owners over the tackiness of renovations that get done from time time to the heritage listed building (the down pipes got painted a shiny gold not so long ago :-)). On the left at the top of the Stairs is an enormous ventilation pipe – which is a structure of 1930s engineering, quite impressive!

Sali Herman’s painting of the McElhone Stairs

Here is a really interesting image of the Stairs taken in 1927 in a silent film that was miraculously discovered in the 1950s and reprinted. I think it also captures that sense of the Stairs having a great size, which is exactly what Sali Herman’s painting was after.

The photo shows a very spare environment. Woolloomooloo, at the bottom of the Stairs, was a dockside slum district. It is still home to relatively deprived people with a lot of house commission homes built in the 1970s and 80s, following the amazing green ban campaign and federal government intervention to save the area from the worst forms of rapacious Sydney property development.

I love these Stairs for their own sake. But I also have loved them because of a small animal spirit who has occupied the Stairs for a very long time.

Over the years I have taken quite a few photos of this cat, even though it was not mine, it didn’t seem to belong to any person so much as to the place. I had a real affection for her. Here are some pictures, the ones I found on the phone anyway.

She frequently dozed in the sun on a broad sandstone rocky outcrop next to the Stairs and that is where her minder left her food and water.

And I was very sad to see today this little sign at her usual sunning place. The woman in my photo above with the lilac shirt, was her minder, Hill, who had herself lived on the streets a few times in her life.

It’s a clever photo, it even lines up the wires running along the wall behind her sunny spot on the sandstone. And the cards and flowers were touching. I did not know she had been living there as long as 15 years, no home, just her minder diligently feeding her on the street.

Farewell philosophical cat.

MG xx

Post #11 Thursday 24 November 2016 – A word from the sponsors…

November 24, 2016 by MG Leave a Comment

Posted in: Letters from America, Pets, Urban landscape

Letters from America

Well this isn’t really a word from the sponsors but it is a post to mark a pause in proceedings. As some of you know I wasn’t too well during the last week or so. That means there wasn’t a lot in the way of action, adventure let alone one single post to the website. Even my regular lorikeet visitors found it a bit testing when their human just lay inert in bed instead of leaping up in the usual way to provide the usual feasts. Here is a series of pics of the lorikeets showing their concern. One enquiring soul seeming to think the feasts could be behind the mirror:

So it was a dull time for me being unwell, but there it is.

I did some modest excursions though, just locally, when I thought I was recovering. One for instance, involved going down to Rushcutters Bay through the laneways in Elizabeth Bay. On that excursion I came across an interesting local parking sign of the sort I would expect to see in St Peters rather than in Elizabeth Bay (where the demographic is 80% female over 70). I mean how would the senior women reach up to make those prescient pre-election additions to the sign?

I also made a short excursion down to Woolloomooloo using the Butler Stairs from Victoria Street down into Brougham Street.

Butler Stairs are very pretty sandstone stairs, less well known than the more magnificent stairs at the end of Victoria Street, the McElhone Stairs.

In the time I have lived in the neighbourhood the landing in the middle of the Butler Stairs has been a preferred place for French backpackers, who lounge around there smoking, playing music, and chatting in the afternoon and into the evening. Generations of French backpackers come and go and knowledge of the meeting place on the landing just gets passed on time and again. This enduring knowledge might perhaps be a modest local songline for Gallic wanderers.

MG xx