Sounds like wish - A quiet place.

8 November, 201327 August, 2018

The colours of New Zealand – volcanic plateau, North Island

A couple of days ago I posted about single colours I came across in Auckland, New Zealand, on this, my first trip there. After leaving Auckland, my husband and I made our way down through the middle of the North Island, stopping for morning tea where the roses on tables were twice the size of those in my Australian garden. The land on either side of the road was green green green. And bumpy: the hills rising from the surface are steep and lush and crowded together.

GREEN

Around lunch time we stopped at Rotorua for a few hours, known by some as Sulphur City. That was a different experience. The pools we saw were in a large park where each one was fenced off. A few odd small eruptions had appeared and were not yet fenced, so we could reach down and feel the water. It was HOT.

BROWN

GREY

7 November, 2013

The colours of New Zealand – Auckland

New Zealand is a country just three hours’ flight from my home, yet I had never been there till last week. It’s a gap in my travelling experience I was ashamed of when meeting New Zealanders in Europe! Well, now I can say I know something about NZ, and I can agree with all those who have told me it’s beautiful. I enjoyed finding particular scenes where one colour was dominant, and happily snapped a multitude of photos.

I went with my husband, who’s been to NZ a few times before. Without me. Auckland was our first port of call, where I was struck by an inviting turquoise sea, streets lined with white houses, and a knockout red wrought iron fence.

RED

WHITE

TURQUOISE

2 November, 2013

Weekly photo challenge: Eerie

New Zealand, Auckland Art Gallery: I was there this afternoon. When I saw this painting, I thought of the ‘Eerie’ photo theme…

In nineteenth-century literature and paintings I’ve come to expect bereaved women to wear black, so when I worked out that the women and girls in white were not celebrating but grieving, I was a bit shocked. All these white dresses suddenly took on a pallour that moments before had in my mind been the colour of a wedding or communion. It’s particularly sad to see, not men, but women bearing the small white coffin.

Frank Bramley combined social realism with painting en plein air, out of doors. There don’t seem to be any male children in the cortège, but there are some boys in the group of children off to the right, who seem to belong to fishing families. Their ruddiness suggests they are healthier than the girls, who look a bit grey, as though they may all be afflicted by the same curse.

If ‘eerie’ means strange and frightening, the suggestion of something lurking that we might not want to know about, then this photo is it.

Bramley_KIngdom of Heaven — ‘For of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven’, Frank Bramley, 1891, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand

29 October, 2013

Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 16

The Drover’s Wife, a short story by Henry Lawson published in 1896, has a plot that unfolds over an afternoon and a night, marked by time phrases like “It is near sunset” and “It must be near one or two o’clock”. The story is an excellent example of Australian realism, well-told with dry, short sentences, few adjectives or adverbs but plenty of active verbs, all of this good for keeping the tension on, as you’ll see in this mid-point paragraph.

A bit of background: A drover has been gone from home for six months. His wife and children are alone in their bush hut. A snake has slid under the floor boards and a thunderstorm brews. The dog, Alligator, is wildly interested in the snake.

Near midnight. The children are all asleep and she sits there still, sewing and reading by turns. From time to time she glances round the floor and wall-plate, and whenever she hears a noise she reaches for the stick. The thunderstorm comes on, and the wind, rushing through the cracks in the slab wall, threatens to blow out her candle. She places it on a sheltered part of the dresser and fixes up a newspaper to protect it. At every flash of lightning the cracks between the slabs gleam like polished silver. The thunder rolls, and the rain comes down in torrents.

Alligator lies at full length on the floor, with his eyes turned towards the partition. She knows by this that the snake is there.

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File:Henry Lawson photograph 1902.jpg — Henry Lawson, 1902

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23 October, 2013

Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 15

The Sleeper Awakes. It’s 1890s England when an insomniac falls into a sleep-like trance and awakes 203 years later to find he is the Master of the World. But while he had been sleeping, the masses had been oppressed, and they now find he has awoken and hope he will rescue them. One hundred and ten pages into this 220-page H.G. Wells novel, the sleeper, Graham, decides to reveal himself to the multitudes of people waiting:

“Will you let them see you, Sire? said Ostrog. “They are very anxious to see you.”

Graham hesitated, and then walked forward to where the broken verge of wall dropped sheer. He stood looking down, a lonely, tall, black figure against the sky.

Very slowly the swarming ruins became aware of him. And as they did so little bands of black-uniformed men appeared remotely, thrusting through the crowds towards the Council House. He saw little black heads become pink, looking at him, saw by that means a wave of recognition sweep across the space.

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22 October, 201311 December, 2017

Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 14

Yesterday I was teaching migrant English using an abridged version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band. I enjoyed it so much, I sought out the original unabridged version and found some lines in the middle of the story that reveal Conan Doyle’s sharp wit and great sense of rhythm. It’s also clear at this point that Sherlock Holmes has the suspect worked out and now simply has to nail him. Here, Holmes’s associate, Dr Watson, records an exchange between Holmes and the suspect, who is screaming at him furiously:

“I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler.”
My friend smiled.
“Holmes, the busybody!”
His smile broadened.
“Holmes, the Scotland-yard Jack-in-office!”
Holmes chuckled heartily. “Your conversation is most entertaining,” said he. “When you go out, close the door, for there is a decided draught.”

Sidney Paget, 1892, illustration from The Speckled Band, courtesy Victorian Web.org

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19 October, 2013

Brown

Ailsa from wheresmybackback challenges us to find photos of things evoking the colour brown. Check out her photos of bog brown water and a ginger brown castle.

Here in Canberra there’s a large written sculpture on a hill in the new Arboretum, a special place planted with masses of trees to replace all those that burnt in destructive fires ten years ago. The words ‘wide brown land’ come from a poem by Dorothea Mackellar published in 1908: Core of my heart.

Unfortunately, while the Arboretum is a promise that this land and its people can recover from fire, the threat is always with us. There are massive fires burning right now, closer to the coast. And the burnt trees, the pall of smoke, the tumbled bricks of houses – 192 homes destroyed so far – evoke the colour brown, once the fires are under control. The photo below is from the Daily Telegraph web site:

Firefighters keep watch at Buena Vista Rd, Winmalee, in the Blue Mountains. Source: News Limited

19 October, 20135 February, 2018

Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 13

At the centre of Great Expectations is a paragraph about Pip’s love for Estella, about his great expectations to win her heart. Though I’ve read this novel several times, I’d never thought of Dickens as romantic until today when I read this paragraph separately from the rest of the story:

Far into the night, Miss Havisham’s words, ‘Love her, love her, love her!’ sounded in my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, ‘I love her, I love her, I love her!’ hundreds of times. Then, a burst of gratitude came upon me, that she should be destined for me, once the blacksmith’s boy. Then, I thought if she were, as I feared, by no means rapturously grateful for that destiny yet, when would she begin to be interested in me? When should I awaken the heart within her, that was mute and sleeping now?

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16 October, 201327 August, 2018

Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 12

A few days ago in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, I found an account of Sherlock Holmes performing one of his earliest deductions, at exactly the middle of Part I. You can read about it here.

Halfway through Part II of this short novel, Doyle wrote a short paragraph that was not about scientific deduction but rather about an eerie countdown, guaranteed to keep the reader turning pages. The character John Ferrier is given a deadline – 29 days – to hand over his daughter in marriage to one of the Mormon men. The next morning, at the breakfast table, his daughter points upwards:

In the centre of the ceiling was scrawled, with a burned stick apparently, the number 28. . . . That night he sat up with his gun and kept watch and ward. He saw and he heard nothing, and yet in the morning a great 27 had been painted upon the outside of his door.

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13 October, 2013

Weekly photo challenge: Infinite

Infinite – like grains of sand on the beach, the number of numbers, stars in the sky, dots on an Aboriginal painting . . .

When I bought this painting in Fitzroy Falls, NSW, from the artist Marie Barbaric of the Dunghutti Nation, she wrote its story on the back of the canvas for me:

One day an elder of our Nation was walking with his daughters, they came to a waterhole and the father told his daughters to wait by the pool till he returned from hunting. . . . While he was away a hunter came from another tribe and wanted to take one of the sisters for a bride. . . . The sisters ran to their father, and to help hide them from the young hunter, he threw his daughters to the stars. . .

Untitled painting by Aboriginal artist Marie Barbaric, 2013 — Untitled painting by Aboriginal artist Marie Barbaric, ochre, charcoal, acrylic, 2013

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