A quiet place.
Derna Harbour, Libya. Also Darna, Darnah. A very small harbour, anchorage depth 15.5 – 16m.
In 1941, when Libya was controlled by the Italians, and the Italians were allied with Germany, the British bombarded the harbour. My father brought home this photo.
Today there’s a prompt to show and tell: show the last photo I’ve taken, and tell the story behind that moment in time.
Yesterday I was passing the Civic library where I’ve worked casually as a tutor for a couple of years. There’s something in there that I’ve often wanted to photograph, but when I’m working I’m too busy for such an indulgence, though I sit gazing up at it while my student is busy with his writing exercises. Yesterday it wasn’t a work day, I had my camera, and I had time.
Here it is, my last photo. It’s of an artwork suspended from the library ceiling, a stripped down Vietnamese boat. The oars are long golden arms and hands pushing through the air, while a pair of eyes on the prow watches where the boat is going. The artist, Nerine Martini of Sydney, created the work during an artist residency in Vietnam in 2006 and has exhibited it in Vietnam on a lake (on a stand in the water) and at outdoor sculpture exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne. The design of the Civic library is ideal for hanging a long object in the high-ceilinged space above the ground floor, up there at the mezzanine level where we can lean over the railing and look into the boat. The golden hands, each with a different gesture, reach out to the viewer; it was tempting to reach my own hand out to touch one. I didn’t.
It was an odd moment finally seeing the boat up close, as pleasurable as I expected it to be. But up on the mezzanine level where I took an earlier photo (see my header), as I leaned over the rail I was aware of a tutor at a table behind me teaching four students. I knew her. She was enjoying the interaction with her group, so I studied the boat for some moments and then I turned to her and quietly said “Hi, Jenny”. Although I have known her for five years, she looked at me blankly. I most uncomfortably interrupted her class to explain our connection as tutors. “Your face looks vaguely familiar,” she said.
I left the library feeling fulfilled but forgettable. Not so the rugged beauty of the Lifeboat.
*****
We escaped to the beach on New Year’s Day (yesterday). I’ve spent every New Year of my life in Australia, and take the summer holiday mood for granted. But since I’ve been blogging I’ve seen countless photos of New Years from the other side of the world where it’s snowing and the trees are bare and people are indoors in front of a warming device.
As I sat on the beach watching holidaymakers do what relaxes them, I was struck by the difference in the world’s seasons.
On most New Year’s Days, good-weather days in the fullness of an Australian summer, there’ll be families and friends playing beach cricket (or football or volleyball…). Rubbish bins are the wickets, the bat and ball are bright plastic, easy to see against a sandy background.
Dogs on this beach are allowed off-leash. There were three running free, in and out of the water and in and out of the cricket game. The one standing in the shallow surf here, a hyperactive apricot poodle, tore up and down the beach and even ran right across the back of my legs as I lay peacefully reading Chekhov on the sand.
A few people messed about in kayaks, rowing out to the deeper water and back again, then putting them away beneath the trees.
But not everyone was having a good holiday. Someone on this beach had a disappointing Christmas-New Year and wrote about it in a five-page letter, stabbed it onto a sharp broken branch from where it worked its way loose and drifted down to the urine-soaked sand beneath this rocky overhang at the far end of the beach. I read the five pages, recognised the pain of unrequited love, and scattered them again beneath the tree. Together, he said, they had come this far, but she had kept moving and left him behind.
Would she one day (before the next high tide) stroll past this overhang, see his writing, and change her mind?
When we were weary of the beach, when we’d walked far across the rocks, far from cricketers and mad dogs, examined every rock pool and cooled our ankles in the clear water of several two-metre wide beaches formed between rocky outcrops, we went hunting for food. Long lines emerged from the popular fish and chip shops. But there was another choice; a longer walk brought us to a small restaurant, Blank Canvas, where for a couple of hours we sat at a table, enjoying fish and chips and this view between two gnarly trees.
A good start to the year.
*****
It’s early days in December, but I’ve already taken a trip! Jervis Bay was the destination.
A friend who has a beach house there (and who loves the bay for its small population) says it’s a really awful place; she tells everyone not to go there. Of course, no one takes her advice. Jervis Bay has a number of isolated beaches, clean and white, with turquoise waters and plenty of fun water activities. It’s not awful, it’s awesome! See if you agree.
Huskisson is at about the centre of the bay shore and is the central shopping area, though there’s not a lot except cafés and restaurants, swimwear and souvenir shops. Across the street from the shops is this green landscaped park that slopes down to the water. I sat in the shade of the trees, staring out to sea, wishing it was my back yard.
Hole in the Wall is the name of this spot in the National Park at Jervis Bay. The rock is composed of sand grains solidly stuck together. As I sat in the gap rubbing at the sand walls I had a sense of reshaping nature, brushing the grains off the rock as easily as I brush them from my toes. Yet it’s strong enough to climb on, which my son did, declaring himself champion of the wall.
The water in the bay is calm with small waves, but down around the southern peninsula, on the ocean side at Sussex Inlet, the waves are surfable. If you look closely you’ll see my son waiting for a wave.
He enjoyed a number of water activities, especially lying in the boom net as it was dragged behind the tour boat.
…and the more peaceful pleasure of kayaking with his dad.
In the tour boat we were on dolphin watch, and we saw plenty, swimming around and under the boat and even riding the wash. The dolphins are free to swim wherever they like and easily cover the whole bay, which I’ve read is 124 square kilometres in size. Huge. Many times larger than Sydney Harbour. The dolphins are never fed by humans or made to entertain us in any way, unlike dolphins in marine theme parks. The captain announced his firm belief that dolphins should not be kept in captivity, and I can see why he’s so passionate about it. He frequently stopped the boat so we could watch them swimming and leaping out of the water for a synchronised breath.
At the mouth of the bay, cliffs rise from a turquoise sea, their vertical faces and horizontal layers tempting the captain to pull in closer so we can marvel at the geology. At the base of the cliffs are large cavernous tunnels, magnets for divers. Here’s one where you can swim in one doorway and out another.
If you don’t like deep water diving you could try a shore dive at Honeymoon Bay (a bay within the bay), but not when this red sign has been planted in the sand: ‘Range is active. Live firing. Do not land’ … Much of the Beecroft Peninsula is occupied by the Royal Australian Navy and is regularly (but not during school holidays) used for weapons training. Of course, the kangaroos can’t read, so they’re oblivious to the danger as they lie back on the beach. Zoom in and you’ll see one taking it easy on the soft sand.
I was amused by things that women do on Jervis Bay beaches; I saw things I haven’t seen on beaches further south. One, a bikinied Italian, hatted her head and wrapped her shoulders with her shirt, obviously wanting to keep the sun off the top but not the bottom! She laid out her towel in front of me on the sand, bending over from the waist. I didn’t want to see that. There was another, a bikinied Spaniard, who was also exposing a round bump. It’s rare to see an advanced naked pregnancy on our beaches. Probably no coincidence that both women were Mediterranean. And then, just when I was thinking, well at least Australians are predictable if reserved, I stumbled across eight boxing-gloved women punching each other beside the calm waters of the bay.
I often wonder as I’m people-watching, snapping photos, whether anyone ever catches me doing something unusual, a bit crazy, and … click! Pffft. Not likely.
Thanks Marianne for the prompt to take a trip EVERY month. I’ve done it, twelve months in a row. And thanks to all of you who’ve read my trippy posts this year.
Jervis Bay. Let’s make it the capital.
*****
The word ‘angular’ makes me think ‘Art Deco’, the popular visual arts style of the 1920s and 30s that embraced the hard edges of industry, machines and man-made structures rather than the soft, curving, natural lines of the previously popular ‘Art Nouveau’ style. Art Deco buildings are recognisable by their geometric, often symmetrical, forms and decorations: repeated lines, zigzags, steps, and ziggurat shapes. Here’s a photo from Dad’s WWII collection from 1941/42, showing the covered market in Nairobi, built in 1932. It’s now called the City Market.
The City Market building in central Nairobi has the classic features of Art Deco architecture: symmetrically stepped walls and straight lines at every turn – even the clock is octagonal. Well, that was in the 1940s; the clock is no longer there, as you can see in the photo below, taken in 2011.
How quiet it was in the 1940s, with a neatly hedged roundabout and only a few cars parallel-parked beside the building. Images online of the City Market now, including the one above, show a lot of people and traffic, and angle parking to fit more in. Photos online of the interior are full of colour and activity, showing local people buying fresh food, particularly meat and fish, fresh flowers, handcrafts and souvenirs for the tourists.
Inside, it’s an open space where the windowed walls step inwards, with unadorned concrete arches supporting the vaulted ceiling. Pivoting windows on both sides allow air movement and cross ventilation (see an enlarged view of them in the header above), and the vertical strips of louvres allow hot air to escape through the higher openings and cooler air to enter at the bottom. It was ‘green’ architecture long before sustainability became so important. There’s an interesting site here with more photos, as well as plans and information about the energy-efficient design that keeps the building cool. It’s very interesting reading.
I have to admit that while I have a few items of Art Deco style inherited from my parents, it’s not my first choice of decoration or architecture. Give me instead the organic forms of Art Nouveau, the stylised vines whipping asymmetrically around doors and windows and up and down balustrades. Give me environmentally sustainable curves any day.
Thanks Daily Post photo challenge for the angular prompt.
*****
I visited a neighbour one day in October to wish him a Happy 97th Birthday. That’s a pretty good achievement, surviving life’s vacillations for 97 years. He’s Dutch, born in Amsterdam he says, during the war (the first one). His greatest achievement, he says, was becoming a submarine navigator during the war (the second one). But what about his long long long life? He says everyone wants to grow old, no one wants to be old.
Before we sat down together on his birthday, he took a cooked sausage from the lunch delivered by Meals on Wheels, cut it up into small pieces, put them into a small decorative plate and stuck a toothpick into each one. He poured himself a glass of red wine and invited me to join him in his birthday celebration.
He is the eldest of 12 children and has no idea if the others are alive or dead. They all stayed in Holland while he moved to Australia, and now he only remembers the names of 5 of them. But he remembers his childhood, and often sings a Dutch song that his mother sang when he was small, a song of thankfulness for being saved from a shipwreck, ‘Als g’in nood gezeten’. He wrote it out in Dutch, and then translated it into English for me:
He has sung the song for me many times. For a while, he forgot some of the verses, so we turned on his computer and found, to his surprise and mine, that he still has an Internet connection. We looked up the verses, then he sat and sang it from start to finish. At the end he was so pleased with himself that he turned to me with this delightful smile. I snapped him.
Aart was a seaman and says he has seen more of the sea than most people, spending much of his life on it and under it. He now lives up the street from me, that is, several hours’ drive inland, so I asked if he’d like to come for a drive to the coast to see the sea. But he has no desire to see it again, and prefers his memory of it. He rarely leaves his house, and likes it that way. He wants to die there. If he gets what he wants in the end, without doctors and carers insisting he goes into an aged care home, then that will also be a great achievement.
*****
Thanks WordPress for the photo prompt. It was good to reflect on achievement.
Descent: a downwards movement, bad for a fragile object falling or a fragile person tripping. A good thing if you descend from an airless mountaintop or from worthy ancestors. It’s especially useful if you need an inexpensive system of water delivery, for even in the desert there’s the free pressure of gravity. The photo here is taken in a desert during World War Two, one of the many photos my father brought back from the Middle East. It’s captioned simply “Gravity Tank”, taken in North Africa, probably Egypt, in about 1941.
Prompted by the WordPress photo challenge.
Some months, rather than leave town, I go tripping around my local area and have just as good a time as if I’d taken a trip to the sea. This weekend, just by walking and riding my bike around the suburbs and by the lake, I’ve seen a few odd things that make me appreciate this beautiful unboring city. Yesterday, for example, I knocked on this door. Clearly the resident is not afraid of anyone:
Then I went to the lake to watch the weekend sailors. Let me give you a bit of the history of this central ornament of the nation’s capital, in honour of its 50th anniversary this week. Lake Burley Griffin is an artificial lake formed by damming the Molonglo River. The capital’s designer, the American architect Walter Burley Griffin, is immortalised in the name of the lake. He had included it in his original design in 1912, but the lake project didn’t begin until 1963, and finally the formal opening came in 1964. Residents and visitors have flocked to its shores ever since.
For me, it’s a body of water which is neat, if unnatural; it invites us to sit beside it but not to enter it. The water quality is frequently reported as unsuitable for swimming, and therein lies the disappointment. But I must remember that the Molonglo River is narrow and unspectacular, hardly a suitable river for a nation’s capital, unlike the Brisbane River in Brisbane or Sydney Harbour in Sydney. Here’s a photo taken earlier this year as I was walking beside the part of the Molonglo which still exists where the lake ends (begins?); you can see it opening up into the lake on the right:
Thanks to Walter Burley Griffin, instead of a stream that even I could swim across, we have a nice big lake. Yesterday I went to watch sailboats sail on it, an excellent antidote to the busyness of life. The weather was heavenly, an ideal spring day; blue sky, warm air, light breeze. If you were fishing, which I wasn’t, there was no need to hold on tight to the rod. No need to hold it at all, in fact:
Many of the national institutions are situated lakeside, including the Australian National University. One of the university’s sculptures by the water caught my eye with its aluminium birds roosting on the dead branches of this old gum tree. From a distance they give the impression of a flapping flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos, a familiar sight around here. But a closer look reveals the metal birds also resemble hands reaching up to the sky. The commissioned sculpture, called Witness, is by Indonesian artist, Dadang Christanto.
After seeing unreal birds in a dead tree, I turned round and saw real plants in a dead car. Another piece of ANU ‘art’.
Back in my suburb, I was riding my bike past a neighbouring house where a sheep is both pet and mower. She was very happy for me to take her photo but didn’t understand the concept of standing back from the lens.
And then she smelt my leather bag and began to nibble it…
Check out the reflection of me in her eye! Now that’s odd.
All in all, a good spring weekend tripping around my town.
Marianne sends out the challenge to take one trip EVERY month. If you’re reading this, Marianne, I say a big THANKS for the inspiration!
*****
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!
Thanks WordPress for this week’s photo challenge.
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.