My photos - Sounds like wish

4 October, 20148 December, 2019

Weekly photo challenge: Signs

When the Australian government, among others, announced this week they’re sending troops off to Iraq to fight (if only in the skies for now), I thought Here we go again. As I rode past this bin today, the sign “General Waste” reminded me of the futility of war. It might seem an obscure connection, but when you see the page from my father’s anthology of war poetry compiled in about 1942, you’ll think what I thought. First, the bin:

Second, a poem entitled “General Waste”, originally written in World War One by Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, who volunteered as a British chaplain to the army on the western front. He was also known as Woodbine Willie for the Woodbines he smoked and handed out to the wounded and dying. But he had a threefold reputation, for he was also a great anti-war poet.

In Dad’s poetry book, I’ve often read “General Waste” and felt the hollowness of war. Studdert Kennedy wrote it in about 1917, but his poems were recalled by soldiers fighting again in World War Two. Dad has called it “General Waste”, though searches online suggest it was called simply “Waste”. There are a few spelling errors in his script, so I’ve transcribed it:

Waste of muscle, waste of brain,
Waste of patience, waste of pain.
Waste of manhood, waste of health,
Waste of beauty, waste of wealth.
Waste of blood, waste of tears,
Waste of youth’s most precious years.
Waste of ways the saints have trod,
Waste of Glory, Waste of God.
War!

“Waste” by Rev. Studdert Kennedy, c1917 (“General Waste” in my father’s script)

Thanks WordPress for this week’s photo challenge.

27 September, 2014

One trip EVERY month: September

I haven’t left town this month, but I have visited the National Museum which gave me plenty of opportunities to snap photos. Ours is a museum of social history. Neither the content nor the architecture is traditional, which is obvious even before arriving at the car park: the introduction to the building is this giant 30m high loop, part of what is called the Uluru line: In the foyer there are great glass windows looking onto the lake, and an artsy window dressing which produces the best shadows. As I moved up into the galleries, Eternity caught my eye. Arthur Stace famously wrote this single word in beautiful copperplate writing on the footpaths of Sydney between 1932 and 1967. Stace described an experience in church which prompted him to write Eternity half a million times over 35 years:

John Ridley was a powerful preacher and he shouted, ‘I wish I could shout Eternity through the streets of Sydney.’ He repeated himself and kept shouting, ‘Eternity, Eternity’, and his words were ringing through my brain as I left the church. Suddenly I began crying and I felt a powerful call from the Lord to write ‘Eternity’. I had a piece of chalk in my pocket, and I bent down right there and wrote it. I’ve been writing it at least 50 times a day ever since, and that’s 30 years ago … I think Eternity gets the message across, makes people stop and think. (courtesy National Museum of Australia website)

From reflecting on eternity I was taken back in time to the largest of all marsupials, the extinct Diprotodon. After all, it wouldn’t be a museum without a skeleton. Here’s the Diprotodon in and out of its skin:

An unmissable object in the Museum is an old windmill, its sails turning slowly and windlessly, old technology driven by new. It’s a Simplex windmill from Kenya station, north-east of Longreach in central Queensland. The windmill provided water for stock from a shallow bore, from the 1920s until 1989, when a deeper artesian bore came into service. It was one of two windmills on 25,000 acres! As the windmill owner, John Seccombe, who donated it to the museum says, Australia couldn’t have survived without windmills. One of the saddest sights in the museum was this gate, a reminder of times when some children were raised by institutions: There were other objects like leg irons and old pistols that remind us of our darker colonial past: and a convict bi-colour ‘magpie’ uniform, designed to deter convicts from escaping. But imagine the situation if, in 1788 and later, the roles had been reversed, and it wasn’t the English arriving to claim this land for the crown, but the Aboriginals arriving to take the land from the whites. Gordon Syron, an indigenous artist painted that ‘what if’ scene in The Black Bastards are Coming, 2006: Out on the museum terrace, one of the best spots to get a quiet waterside coffee, I was contemplating eternity when a man and dog came past on a surfboard (lakeboard?).

Before I go, if you’re wondering about the header image, it’s part of Martumili Ngurra, 2009, hanging in the museum foyer, painted in acrylic on linen by six Martu women from central Western Australia. Ngalangka Taylor, one of the artists, says:

“When you look at this painting, don’t read it like a whitefella map. It’s a Martu map: this is how we see the country.”

The painting shows tracks and roadways and geographical sites related to mining and pastoral activities introduced in the 19th century in their part of Australia.

More next month. Until then, see some other monthly trips on Marianne’s East of Málaga. She challenges us to take one trip EVERY month.

31 August, 201428 August, 2018

One trip EVERY month: August

Not far out of Canberra, a small village called Gundaroo beckons some of us to stop and stroll, and others to stop and live in the peace and quiet. This morning we drove there for a cuppa, parked in Cork Street outside the old police station, beside which there’s a tank on a tower, beneath which there was a sheep asleep.

We had morning tea at the Cork Street Café in the old stables behind the Gundaroo police station.

The chef suggested her freshly baked (in three minutes) foccacia with jam, and with our cappuccinos, it was all hot and delicious, outside in the sun, looking at the lockup.

Gundaroo lockup. Standard government design. Erected in about 1870.

Other side of the door, the side a prisoner would be glad to see.

Settlement in the Gundaroo area began in the 1820s after explorers discovered the well-watered land and fine black soil of the Yass River valley. From 1856 the village grew slowly with a general store, a Presbyterian Church and Royal Hotel going up. This small, small village needed a police station and lockup, sad but true, as well as a Court of Petty Sessions. Today the Court, built in 1874, is an Anglican Church. It’s fascinating to walk around it and work out how it’s been converted to a church, with the addition of three stained glass windows in an otherwise blank front wall, a bell in the yard to call people to worship, and a cross on the roof (only just visible in my photo).

A short skip down the street brought us to an old shop built in 1886, once called Sally Paskins’ Store, but which is now a kind of museum of old tools that can be purchased. Together with another shop beside it, the Gundaroo Store, it would sell all kinds of necessaries, from haberdashery to hardware items, and even explosives for miners, for gold had been discovered in the region. No one bothers with the gold these days, since Gundaroo has a pretty high average household income. In the header of this page you can see the outside of the store with its heritage-listed wooden plank walls and brick fireplace, quietly retiring beside an ancient tree.

Though it’s a shop, the building is laid out in the typical style of small 19th-century Australian houses, with a hallway extending like a tunnel from the front door to the back. I slipped out into the back yard while my husband was still inside looking at the blokey stuff.

A similar cottage across the street was put up as the Gundaroo Literary Institute and Library, which I once wrote about here. As we were heading down to the Village Common, run by the villagers as a common grazing ground, we saw the sheep that had been asleep, now standing close to the fence munching grass. We approached. She came towards us like a lonely dog looking for a pat. It’s been a long time since I’ve touched a sheep and I’d forgotten how thick the layer of wool is. I had to press down through several inches of it to make any contact with the actual head. As I stroked her, I found tiny horns curving over and hiding their tips down in the thickness of the wool. She seemed to like the attention even if she couldn’t feel me making much contact.

With her sweet ears that stuck out horizontally, two furry white triangles with pink inners, I couldn’t resist a few clicks. As we were walking away, she came to the gate and poked her nose through, like our dog does when we arrive home.

It was a good Gundaroo morning.

Thanks Marianne for inspiring me to take a trip EVERY month.

24 August, 2014

Orange

From Éloge de l’oranger by Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695)

Orangers, arbres que j’adore,
Que vos parfums me semblent doux !
Est-il dans l’empire de Flore
Rien d’agréable comme vous ?

"Orange de Malte", P. Doumerc, Oingt, France — “Orange de Malte”, P. Doumerc, Oingt, France

My translation, wherein I change the plural orangers to a single orange tree, for the sake of rhyme:

Orange tree, my desire,
How thy scent is sweet to me!
Is there in Flora’s empire
Anything as lovely as thee?

Thanks Ailsa for the orange prompt!

10 August, 2014

Weekly photo challenge: Texture

Judy Watson, an indigenous artist, created this sculpture, Fire and Water. It’s textural…

Fire and Water, Judy Watson, Reconciliation Place, Canberra

You’ll find it in Reconciliation Place, Canberra, where there are a number of sculptures by Aboriginal artists. Since this particular artwork is called Fire and Water, I’d always thought the grey object amid the fiery reeds represented a seal or dugong. But on closer inspection today, I saw it’s not an animal, but a stone. A gathering stone. Muted sounds are constantly playing through small holes all over it, representing bogong moths flying in on their annual migration and people gathering to feast on them. Michael Hewes designed the sound.

Looking between the two stands of rusty reeds, we see the National Library, one of my favourite haunts. In this wintry season, the reeds echo the hibernating poplars in the library forecourt. At the moment I took this photo, two jets in the fountain were working. That was just luck; the fountain is not always turned on. The elements in the photo are a great example of symmetry in this city of many symmetries.

National Library of Australia and "Fire and Water" sculpture by Judy Watson — National Library of Australia and “Fire and Water” sculpture by Judy Watson

Bogong moths pass through Canberra every year in about September. Last year they were in plague proportions, congregating on many of the national institutions in the parliamentary triangle, and particularly in Parliament House. At night they’re attracted to the powerfully lit flagpole on top of the House. We all had moths flying and dying in our homes, which was annoying for those of us who don’t eat them.

Since we’re thinking of texture for this week’s photo challenge, take a look at this image from another Canberra photographer, Donald Hobern, of a bogong with its fluffy head and carpet-like wings. When they land on tree bark they’re well camouflaged. But I can tell you, while one individual moth might look beautiful in a close-up, a crowd of brown, fluttering moths resting up in a corner of your room is not attractive. But thanks to Judy Watson’s sculpture, I learnt that they’re edible, and even delicious, and I was reminded once again that nothing is completely ugly or useless.

Photo of bogong moth courtesy of Donald Hobern, Canberra, Creative Commons — Photo of bogong moth (Agrotis infusa) courtesy of Donald Hobern, Canberra, Wikimedia

Take a look at more textures on the WordPress photo challenge page for this week.

26 July, 2014

One trip EVERY month: July

This is a story of mud, bats and abandoned boats. But it’s also a story of a certain beauty I found in a suburb that was far from a favourite when I was a child. Fifty years ago, Wynnum was a Brisbane suburb about 20 minutes away from our house, down the road on the edge of Moreton Bay. In my small mind, families poorer than mine lived there.

So it was weird this month to be holidaying in Wynnum, in a street where many of the old homes have been renovated by owners richer than their ancestors.

My memory of the bay is of mud flats, the poor man’s waterfront. Sure enough, as I approached the esplanade for the first time in a long time, it was night, but there was enough city light to see the vast expanse of mud.

When I walked to the esplanade in the morning, there was still nothing to see but mud, and rocks tumbling across it from the raised walkway.

To make a fair comparison, I had to see the bay when the tide was in, so I returned mid-afternoon which seems to be a good time to see the sand and sea, sans mud.

For water views there’s not only the ocean; there’s Wynnum creek and the mangroves where bats sleep, black, upside down and ugly.

But they’re not half as ugly as these abandoned boats in the creek, which the locals must find shameful. Whose responsibility is it to dispose of them?

So, Wynnum has mudflats, bats and abandoned boats. Is there anything good about this suburb? Well, there’s an excellent jetty that projects far enough out into the bay to enable reflection on symmetry, or to turn your back on the mud and reflect on Moreton Island in the distance.

And there are Queenslanders. I’m a Queenslander because I grew up in Queensland. But there are also houses that are Queenslanders, and that’s what you can see in Wynnum, beautifully renovated high-set weatherboard homes, set on stumps to allow airflow under the house, keeping it cooler in the sub-tropical heat. And from upstairs, many of these homes have a view of the bay, a peaceful sight whether the tide’s in or out.

The name Wynnum is possibly derived from Winnam, an Aboriginal word for Pandanus tree, a great number of which grow in the shore-side parks and streets. Pandanus is a palm-like tree with roots growing out and down in a pyramid form to keep it balanced…

… and it produces large fruit resembling a pineapple. Bats and possums love it, and it’s edible for humans, as are most parts of the Pandanus tree. As I walked down the street I caught sight of some niblets of the fruit under one of the trees, looking sadly up at me.

Moreton Bay. A quiet place. I’m glad I took the trip.

See some more monthly trips on Marianne’s East of Málaga. She challenges us to take one trip EVERY month.

16 July, 2014

Relic

In a Pioneer Museum in Queensland this week I saw a number of objects that are relics of Australia’s past. There was the original Dalby lockup, and a cottage with a backyard toilet, an old boxy TV with a remote connected by a power cord, and bones of local dinosaurs. There was also a collection which would normally do nothing for me: one of Australia’s largest gatherings of old agricultural machinery. But wandering through the open sheds, expecting nothing, I found something. The old beauties in the photos below are really my scene. I would have loved a ride in any of them. Well, almost any. There was this jazzy yellow Ford truck:

A 1957 Chevrolet fire engine:

A train whose chugging days are over:

And weirder than all of the retired vehicles on display, and one I don’t want a ride in, is this Chandler hearse, one of only two left in the world. I can’t say for sure there was no one in that box:

I was in Dalby to speak to someone in the historical society, hoping to find a few relics from my family tree… On a map, Dalby appears as the centre of a spidery star with numerous roads radiating out from it. Or is it that all roads in the region lead to Dalby? This town is the centre of a great farming region, the Darling Downs. The cultivated landscape is hill-free, tree-free, flat as if it’s been levelled, nothing but rolling plains of cereal and vegetable garden either side of the road. A few cows and sheep congregate under trees, when there are trees. Dalby was proclaimed a township in 1853, though my pioneering relatives were there a decade earlier, squatting on land, claiming it as their own. It’s all been divided up and sold off now, but it’s inspiring to know I had self-starters in my family.

Thanks to the retirees who run the Pioneer Park Museum and historical society, who care for our relics, for without them we wouldn’t know about the stages in our development, we wouldn’t understand the progress we’ve made and are making every time we try to do something that’s never been done before, like our pioneers.

See hundreds of relics on the WordPress photo challenge.

23 June, 2014

One trip EVERY month: June

This month, well, yesterday, I went to the Deep Space Communication Complex in Tidbinbilla, south-west of Canberra. Relaxing with a coffee in the Moon Rock Café, I had a great view of the largest steerable antenna dish in the southern hemisphere, the DSS43 (Deep Space Station 43), which was staring off into the distance, at this angle:

After coffee, I went into the gallery to see the moon rock:

Beside the rock stood an astronaut that some tourists were touching despite the do-not-touch sign. When they finally left him alone, I took a closer look, without touching, and in his mirrored helmet visor I caught sight of me and my son, who was reading some information on the wall behind me. I snapped the three of us:

And I wondered how he would look in a space suit, sans visor:

While I was dabbling in moon history, the DSS43 began to move:

I went out onto the balcony to watch closely as the dish rotated to look straight up at the sky. I wanted to know more.

Back inside, I read the information about the big dish and tried to understand it. Of course, I couldn’t. But perhaps you can.

Yesterday at Tidbinbilla, the weather was stunningly clear and fine, if wintry. Today it’s raining, the wind is howling and blizzards are threatening in the mountains. We had picked the perfect day for dish-watching.

Thanks Marianne for the prompt to take one trip EVERY month.

28 May, 2014

One trip EVERY month: May

I haven’t travelled far this month. But I have travelled. Just yesterday, for instance, I drove to the library, couldn’t find a place to stop, drove on to the lake, parked. From there I took the long way round to the library, first to the art gallery – ten minutes – in air uncommonly warm for the end of May. I wound my way through the sculpture garden and photographed dark forms.

"Angel of the North", Antony Gormley, National Gallery of Australia — “Angel of the North”, Antony Gormley, 1996

"Penelope", Emile Antoine Bourdelle, — “Penelope”, Emile Antoine Bourdelle, 1912

I did some work at a table in the café overlooking the sculpture garden.

View from café upstairs, NGA — View from café, NGA

Then I walked to the National Archives – ten minutes – and read a file about a soldier who stowed away on a ship heading to World War One. At lunch time I walked to Old Parliament House – five minutes – and had lunch with a view across the lake and up Anzac Avenue to the War Memorial and Mt Ainslie.

Anzac Avenue leading to the Australian War Memorial

From there I walked to the library whence I began – ten minutes – and read some police gazettes. I’d achieved much. But I had to walk back to my car – twenty minutes – under threatening skies with no umbrella. Back past the dark clouds over Old Parliament House,

Old Parliament House from behind the Aboriginal Tent Embassy

back past the dark sculpture of a burgher of Calais by Rodin,

back past dark swans swimming.

At the art gallery I learnt that dark sculptures are my favourite; at the Archives, that my grandfather spent more time in France than I have (4 months in 1916, between Marseilles and Pozières on the Somme where he was gassed and sent home); at Old Parliament House, that the café with the fantastic view is closing soon and reopening in the viewless courtyard out the back; and at the library, that it was a crime in the 19th century to desert an illegitimate child. Hence my searching of police gazettes.

An altogether successful trip. I can’t say I never go anywhere.

Be sure to check out some of Marianne’s Spanish trips at East of Màlaga. Thanks, Marianne, for your idea that we take one trip EVERY month, and what a good one it is!

4 May, 201428 August, 2018

Looking forward, looking back

Marianne at East of Málaga says: take a photo of something (interesting), turn round, take a photo of what’s behind. In the National Gallery of Victoria there’s a room where 96 nineteenth-century paintings hang as they would have in that century in the Paris Salon or London’s Royal Academy: covering the walls, tightly packed above and beside one another. In the hierarchy of hanging, the curator’s preferences were hung at eye level; the least favoured were hung right up the top where they’re very hard to see. In this NGV display there were different priorities, with wide skies placed at the top and small detailed paintings low down and easier to study. In centuries past, none of the paintings were labelled or attributed to any artist. However, for the NGV’s visitors the information is available near the seats in the centre of the room, which is where you have to stand to see the top row of paintings. As I stood trying to look at and enjoy every single piece, I took a general photo of one wall, turned round and took a photo of the opposite wall.

My favourite on this side of the room, at the bottom left of the photo, beneath the writing on the wall, is An Interesting Story by James Tissot. The two women are not really listening to this man and his ‘interesting’ shipping tale.

'An Interesting Story', James Tissot c1872, courtesy National Gallery of Victoria — ‘An Interesting Story’, James Tissot c1872, courtesy National Gallery of Victoria

On the opposite wall I was taken by the nude at the top right of the photo, La Cigale (The Cicada or The Grasshopper) by Jules Lefebvre. It’s a representation of the cicada from La Fontaine’s poem, La cigale et la fourmi (The cicada and the ant), in which the cicada sings all summer while the ant busily stores up supplies for the winter. The subject in this painting is standing naked in the wind while autumn leaves blow about her. When the painting was exhibited in the 1872 Paris Salon it was accompanied by a line from La Fontaine’s poem: Quand la bise fut venue (When the cold north wind blew). I felt a kind of pity for this woman in her lack of foresight.

'La Cigale', Jule Lefebvre, 1872 — ‘La Cigale’, Jule Lefebvre, 1872

I found an amazing blog about James Tissot while I was reading up about my favourite works from this room: Lucy Paquette on The Hammock. There you’ll find a large number of Tissot’s paintings, all of them brilliant. Check it out.