On the lower slopes of Black Mountain in Canberra is a unique form of Botanic Gardens. The entrance seems to promise a dry native forest, but the gardens offer examples of all kinds of Australian native plants, and nothing but. We rode our bikes here this morning, and as I walked my bike up the incline of the entrance, I snapped Black Mountain Tower and admired the symmetry of trees either side. This is Canberra. The city of symmetry.
With many native plants hailing from the warmer tropical parts of the country, it’s tricky to keep them alive here in the cool capital where we have several months of frost and very low temperatures. Yet, in an old dry eucalypt gully, a rainforest has been developed with the addition of 2,000 misting sprinklers that keep the humidity high and allow specimens from the tropical north to survive. The rainforest canopy is dense and keeps out any light breeze; the only agitation today is the flitting and scurrying of birds and lizards on the forest floor.
Signs along the rainforest boardwalks say that Australia once looked like this all over, cool and damp, dark green and fungal. These timber boards are gradually returning to that wilderness state, but as they wear down into a more natural form they make a good canvas for shifting shapes.
Marianne at East of Málaga says we take trips at least once a month. Some of us go to countries at the other end of the world and towns on the other side of the continent. But we all leave our dwelling places now and then and, intentionally or not, end up in a park or an orchard or a beach we’ve never been to. Marianne wants to know where we go, where our trips, long and short, take us.
For Christmas I was given The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 9 and over the past days I’ve read six or seven of the stories. I’ve noticed that, like a good tale, each one builds in tension until there’s a turning point, a part where something bad happens and a solution has to be found.
My piece of travel writing won’t end up in The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 10; it was just a happy trip to the south coast of NSW, trouble-free from start to finish. Just one day, a short holiday. The only turning point was at our destination, at the end of the afternoon, turning the car homewards.
We like to take our time, to stop and smell the coffee. So after an hour in the car we typically stop in an old country town, Braidwood, for morning tea. This day, we found many of the cafés were closed, the owners away for their summer holidays. But behind the shops of the main street a small bakery-café was still open, operating in an old rusty-roofed cottage, with some empty tables and chairs outside under the grey dry sky. Under the roof, above the door, out of sight here, some dried bread dough letters form a curious introduction to the bakery: “Fee fi fo fum”.
Dojo Bakery, Braidwood, NSW
From Braidwood we drove up over the misty mountains and down to the sea. Our second stop for the day was at Circuit Beach. Last week you might have seen some photos of my family skipping stones here. It was a tricky little bay of a beach, with a multitude of flat stones, trunky gum trees and a small cave.
Circuit Beach NSW
If Circuit Beach is good for paddling and stone-throwing, it’s no good for bodysurfing. So we moved on to Malua Bay and found a beach divided: a flagged area for swimming, and a no-go zone for swimmers. My lot said the waves were piddly, and the surfers might have agreed.
No swimming. Unless you can dodge surfboards.
Real men need real waves, so we drove on till we found a place with a rugged name, Guerilla Bay, where cliffs were steep and corroded, and grey mounds of rock rose above the sea. But you can’t surf water that’s millpond flat. It was only good for stone-throwing, which I’ve discovered looks great in black and white.
Guerilla Bay NSW
We hadn’t given up, because there was always the old favourite to fall back on, a beach which deserves its name, Surf Beach. The sun came out for the first time that day, the others went swimming and I sat on the beach photographing them. They’re in the water, far out, where real men surf. And I’m safe on the sand.
Surf Beach, NSW
Pretty good day, huh? It’s worth the two hours in the car to get there, and another hour driving from beach to beach to beach, and the two hours back again. Back home inland, I laid a few shells on the windowsill to remind me to return to this place of rare pleasure.
But there was another reminder, at my local shop. They’ve started selling Dojo bread that comes up from Braidwood three times a week. It’s good bread, but I need my strong arm to get the knife through the tough crust. Fee fi fo fum.
A few days ago a few of us from my family went to the south coast for the day. We tried four beaches, but this one was the best for skipping stones: Circuit Beach. I took these action shots as my husband and two of our sons sent those stones back into the ocean.
Skipping stones, Circuit Beach, NSWSkipping stones, Circuit Beach, NSW
A window to this artist is not just a transparent barrier between him and the weather. It’s a place for colours and picture tiles and wooden shutters and an iron grill. The plaque says: “In this house the painter Willy Mucha lived and worked from 1940 to 1995. Friends of Willy Mucha.” See how he has inlaid some tiles in the wall around the window frame?
I found a small image of one of his paintings and pasted it below. It’s Collioure in its sunniest colours.
Willy Mucha’s window, Collioure, FranceCiel jaune sur Collioure (Yellow sky over Collioure), Willy Mucha
I’ve just stumbled across Cee’s challenge to find black and white photos of cars. I have just the thing, though I didn’t take the photos. My father did, way back when these cars were his. They were taken long before I was born, in a spot near the beach, probably Noosa Heads (long before they solved the sandfly problem and turned it into an internationally appealing resort town). The first photo is of the family car; I have other photos of it with my sister and brother as toddlers sitting on the running board (that’s how wide it is!).
My father’s car, c1943
The next photo is of Dad’s ute (short for utility truck). My mother told me he made the tray on the back to put his tins of paint and work gear in.
There would be no Christmas stories without Christmas, and there would be no Christmas without Christ. So for this last and bonus post about middle lines, I’ve enjoyed searching for the turning point in the story of Christ’s birth.
We know how the story begins: an angel announces a virgin birth to come. But what happens in the middle?
For my journey to the centre of the story in search of great lines that draw me on into the second half, or that throw up a problem that seems unresolvable, I’d have to choose Matthew, chapter 2, verse 8, the King James version for the poetry of it. Here, Herod is speaking to the wise men, the Magi, telling them to go to Bethlehem. We know his intentions can’t be good because of all his earlier expressed fear of being dethroned.
Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.
Such a liar! Fortunately, the wise men were ‘warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod’. And fortunately, an angel warned Joseph to take Jesus and Mary and flee into Egypt. And so the Christmas story ends well for Jesus (and badly for other boys, but that’s another story).
Merry Christmas to all of you out there who’ve read my writing this year. I wish you many literary surprises in 2014!
It’s Christmas, a time of year when half the world is not covered in snow. Half the world is not even chilly. Many of us are melting in mid-summer heat. I had to find a Christmas story that Australians would ‘get’, where the characters were not wearing long sleeves!
Christmas in the Floods by Olaf Ruhen sounds like a true story, if only because it tells of a disaster that could typically happen here at Christmas. It’s written from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old boy who has been watching the river rise. It’s not long before dawn and the flood has chased him and his family into the attic. So at the turning point of the story they are on the roof, the characters not being able to go any higher. It’s a great movement from ground level upwards.
I went to sleep, but Ralph wakened me. It was still dark, but there was a little light coming, and I knew there was only one more day to Christmas Eve.
There was water on the attic floor now, and Dad and Ralph wanted us to shift on to the roof. It didn’t seem as if the flood could come any higher but if it did, they said we mustn’t be trapped inside the attic. They had rigged up the trestle-table so it was half out of the attic window, and you could climb on it and step back on the roof at the gully between the two gables.
Illustration for “Christmas in the Floods” in The Oxford Book of Christmas Stories
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry is a Christmas Story with a good example of the opening line reappearing in the middle of the story. It’s a good story, with a twist in the tail. Its first line is ‘One dollar and eighty-seven cents.’ Half-way through, the reader is again reminded that this was the total of Della’s savings. Yet, she still wanted to buy her husband a Christmas present, so she sold something precious. Later, in a more cool-headed moment, she thought about it:
“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do – oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?”
On an evening not long before Christmas, say the Brothers Grimm, something curious happened to a shoemaker and his wife. In “Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm”, in a short, short story, The Elves, two pretty little naked men arrive to make Christmas joyous for a hardworking yet poor couple. The Grimms describe in one sentence a scene that tickles my fancy, and must surely tempt any reader to continue to the end:
When it was midnight, two pretty little naked men came, sat down by the shoemaker’s table, took all the work which was cut out before them and began to stitch, and sew, and hammer so skilfully and so quickly with their little fingers that the shoemaker could not turn away his eyes for astonishment.
The Elves and the Shoemaker, illustration from the Girls and Boys Bookshelf, 1920
A few months ago I became interested in the middle lines of a story, which are usually, but not always, the turning point. I posted on this blog 16 examples of great middle lines, then I went to New Zealand and lost my momentum with novels, not only because I had gone away and come back, but because the novels I read after blog post no. 16 didn’t have great middle lines, or because they were meaningless without adding a substantial whack of the story before and after.
Now, I’ve been reading some short stories about Christmas and have seen some pretty good turning points in their middles. Four of them are worth blogging about, so between today and Christmas Day I’ll share them with you. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, for example, the middle lines of the middle chapter are meaningful. Perhaps even great. Here, Scrooge is with the Ghost of Christmas Present, and from this page on he will never be the same:
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”
“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”
“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.”
“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,” returned the Ghost, “will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
The Ghost of Christmas Present, John Leech, 1843. Courtesy Wikimedia.
