HAUNTED LANDSCAPE

Haunted Landscape is a carefully selected collection of paintings about landscape, memory, and the passage of time. These paintings were exhibited at Nolan Art Gallery in Salamanca Place, Hobart, between 21 July and 14 August 2018. You do not have to agree with my commentary; bring your own experiences and interpretations, but above all, don't take them too seriously. Relax and enjoy!

Following the Van - 66 cm x 112 cm oil on canvas

FOLLOWING THE VAN

Is that an actual mountain? Somebody asked. I had to say “no – I made it up”.

I spend a lot of time walking in landscape, looking at landscape, and occasionally recording a piece of its history, often illustrated with photographs I have taken.

The infinite variety of shapes, texture and colour in the Tasmanian bush provides me with endless inspiration, but when it comes to painting I am not interested in recording an accurate image of a specific feature. My paintings are about ideas. Landscapes provide the stage and help set the mood of the picture and I adjust and modify them freely to fit my needs, working from memory but occasionally referring to a photograph for an odd detail.

The people I walk with are never as strange as these, and so far the landscape has never been so desolate. The caravan has moved on, and the stragglers are left behind.

McCrae's Hill - 91 cm x 76 cm oil on canvas

McCRAE'S HILL

In the early nineteenth century Mr McCrae and his wife took up land near the foot of the Western Tiers. They built a standard Georgian farmhouse; the front rooms red brick; the back, over the brick-lined cellars, were timber. Perhaps the intention was to rebuild in brick once land was cleared and money came in from crops and livestock.

Decades passed. Properties changed hands, new roads were formed. McCrae's Hill, a low rise surrounded by swamp, was marooned far from commonly travelled paths. In the twentieth century the old house was abandoned in favour of a new home convenient to the road. Now great trees that once shaded a colonial garden lie rotting across the path. The head of a broken windmill hangs upside down over a rusty tank. Timbers have rotted away. There are gaping holes in the wall where bricks have crumbled, floors and staircase are treacherous, the stone lintel fallen onto the steps below. Nature, season by season, reclaims its own.

Among The Fallen - 66 cm x 97 cm oil on canvas

AMONG THE FALLEN

There is a historic cemetery in Richmond, behind Australia's oldest church. Below it flows the Coal River, where a platypus may occasionally be glimpsed at sunset.

My friend and I walked, after a scenic drive and cream tea, among the crooked headstones, reading names of other people's ancestors. The hill is steep, the grass was wet, and my friend slipped and fell. It was not a serious fall, but she has back trouble and was in a lot of pain. It was a few moments before she let me help her up, and we made jokes about fallen women. She wore a pale coloured coat; I was in my customary black. By the time we reached home all these images had begun to form a picture, and this is what it became. We didn't see a platypus that day, but I thought a thylacine was more appropriate. After all, we didn't see one of them, either.

Settlement Day - 66 cm x 97 cm oil on canvas

SETTLEMENT DAY

The idea for this painting fermented in the back of my mind for many years, bubbling to the surface now and then, until I decided it was probably ready. A lot of preparatory drawings were rejected or, in some cases, re-purposed to appear in other paintings.

Tasmanians are regularly reminded that we are descended from invaders who stole the land; in fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a country anywhere that hadn't, at some time, suffered an invasion. Here is a happy farm in a pretty valley, loosely based on a property I visited on the Clyde River near Hollow Tree. A dark force is approaching; this does not augur well.

I particularly enjoyed painting the sheep. Sheep are cute, warm, woolly, slightly demented (by human standards) and incredibly useful. They have completely changed the landscape, nibbling vegetation to its roots, compacting the soil and churning up mud with their sharp little hooves. Native bushland is turned into pasture to accommodate them. Some people call this deplorable environmental damage. Other people call it economic development. Anyway, here they are, a vital component of rural industry or ravenous little beasts intent on destruction.

The phrase “settlement day” has at least three different meanings – invasion, retribution or debt collection. Take your pick. If you think of another one, let me know.

Laughing Girl - 76 cm x 61 cm oil on canvas

LAUGHING GIRL

This is a painting “of” three figures based on an old family photograph, and a distinctive feature on the Clyde River near Hollow Tree, but that is not what it is “about”.

It is about landscape and the memory of people who have passed through it. As future becomes present and fades into yesterday, only memories remain. A thousand generations have left their memories on this country; I am qualified to address only those arriving since the end of the eighteenth century. The characters in my paintings are no more sad, happy, benign or malicious than people you meet every day, nor are they lost souls. They are part of the land and its history.

Bones of the Ancestors - 76 cm x 152 cm oil on canvas

BONES OF THE ANCESTORS

Everywhere we go, we find traces of people who went before us. “Bones” in this context include any skeletal structure, be it metal, masonry or timber. Anything that endures after the soft bits are gone. I have even extended it to include earthworks, ruined forests and colonial history. That might be stretching it a bit, but it's my painting and I make the rules.

Wherever you get interesting ruins (and a successful marketing strategy) you get tourists as well. I have painted about them in the past, and will have more to say in future paintings.

A Child's Guide to Wilderness - 84 cm x 91 cm oil on canvas

CHILD'S GUIDE TO WILDERNESS

This painting is about the present, and more easily explained in dot points. Interpret them as you will.

• we live in an increasingly urban environment and many people rarely experience bushland or natural places. They run on treadmills, climb indoor walls and inhabit virtual landscapes where they can farm or fight as they please
• nature has become a theme park, where the wealthy go to play on their holidays while David Attenborough shows the pretty bits to people who can't afford holidays
• “wilderness” is a modern construct; there is no such thing as a pristine landscape, especially in Australia where it has been carefully managed for thousands of years. “Wild” simply means “neglected”
• we are increasingly spreading plastic and other pollutants all over the country and ocean, to the detriment of the non-human people trying to share the natural world with us
• does it matter?

Ancestral Memories and a Gothic gully

A chilly Saturday morning, with snow on the mountain, frost on the garden and the Bridgewater Jerry winding its way down the river. I tossed a bucket of water over my car to clear ice from the windscreen and went to meet the rest of the group for a walk on private land on the approaches to Spring Hill. We parked beside the Colebrook Rd and headed off into the paddocks.

frost on the ferns

shadows on the frost

The first part of the walk followed the appropriately-named Serpentine Valley Creek.

We became very familiar with this creek as it wound its way back and forth across our path and we hopped, scrambled and splashed across it. There were also plenty of fences to climb.

the weathered sandstone hills closed in on each side

the valley floor remains in shadow, but sunlight catches the higher rocks

big rocks

 Really big rocks

more big rocks

past mid-day - and there's still frost in the shadows

Although this was generally a fairly level walk, the energetically inclined scrambled up hills to inspect particularly interesting caves

we stopped for lunch on a sunny hillside

The trouble with living alone is nobody else will make your lunch. Today I invented a new game - Schroedinger's Lunchbox. While I didn't look in it, my lunchbox contained roast fowl, venison pastries, delicate salads, charlotte russe and a small bottle of white wine. Alas, when I opened it I found this:

compulsory food shot 

Life is full of these little disappointments, but I wasn't going to let it spoil a lovely day.

Coffee in hand I followed several other people along a sheep track to a delightfully bijou cavelet a little higher up the hill.

I did remember to pick up my coffee mug

view from the cave

lone Blackwood

as if I don't have enough photographs of rocks and trees

FAQ of the day "Do we really have to cross it here, or can we get around on this side?" 

some cows wonder what we're doing in their paddock

the end of the valley in sight

At the end of the valley we joined the route of the convict-built coach road from Kempton to Lovely Banks. This runs through another rocky gorge called Murderers Gully, ostensibly where bushrangers held up the odd coach. It is certainly an isolated, unfriendly place to have to travel through and a great place for an ambush. In the 1820s Major Bell changed the route to somewhere near the present line of the Midlands Highway, through more open country, but some people still seem to have used the Serpentine Valley road.

entering Murderers Gully

we looked in vain for convict remains but alas, there is barely even a trace of the old road left

In Highway in Van Diemens Land, G. Hawley Stancombe wrote "Nearby and to the east lies the curious Serpentine Valley . . . It rejoined the Main Road at the foot of Spring Hill, but was too narrow for carts, being a narrow defile between steep cliffs."

Robert Knopwood travelled to the Tamar in 1814. He described Stony, or Serpentine Valley, as "a beautiful valley but should you meet with the natives you must inevitably loose [sic] your life the hills of each pass so high that they would kill you with stones."

Governor Macquarie went this way when he travelled on horseback from Hobart-Town to Port Dalrymple in 1811. With a  cavalcade of officials and a military escort to accompany them, they would have had little fear of attack.

up another optional  hill

a magnificent cave at the top

and the den of a Tasmanian Devil

One of my forebears was the District Police officer at Kempton (then Green Ponds) in the 1830s; he would have been familiar with the road through this dark valley.  Another hired out his bullock team to Governor Macquarie for his second trip to Port Dalrymple in 1821.

Many of my ancestors lived at Ross, Oatlands, Jericho and Parattah and some travelled frequently to Hobart.

I tried to imagine my great-great-great-great grandmother here in a small horse-drawn conveyance late on a winter afternoon; what warm clothing would she be wearing? Would she have a soft possum-skin rug to wrap around her knees? And would she and her companion be urging their pony to trot faster, fearing that at any moment some rough character or a group of aborigines would leap down upon them from the enclosing hills?

We had no such things to bother us. We encountered nothing more terrifying than a large black bull who was not too sure whether we should be in his territory, but did no more than snort and paw the ground as we passed.

there is some evidence of roadworks here

the bull didn't seem exactly overjoyed to see us

the end of the gully must have been a welcome sight for coachmen

looking back up Murderers Gully from the safety of open country

the moon in the early afternoon

Another Winter Festival

Dark Mofo finished last weekend – but that's not the only festival that brightens up a Tasmanian winter.

LANTERNS FOR PEACE

It was a chilly evening, but a large group of people turned out at Cornelian Bay for the Multicultural Council of Tasmania's celebration of Refugee Week. 

Earlier this month I spent two Sundays at the Red Cross office in Melville Street with a horde of enthusiastic lantern-making volunteers. 

Naomi, designer, instructor, and terrifyingly efficient person, managed to organise a motley crowd of all ages and levels of ability wielding strips of gaffer tape, five-metre lengths of cane, and various sharp implements in a confined space.

The following weekend we came back and worked with buckets and brushes of glue, grease-proof paper and lots of people milling around in the same confined space. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, somehow nobody ended up seriously injured or wallpapered to the ceiling, nobody put their foot in a bucket of water, and we succeeded in transforming cane and paper into five big lanterns – a leafy sea dragon, lighthouse, sea turtle, dove and pelican.

I've been looking forward to seeing them in action – and tonight it happened. Here are the pictures:

the choir

ready for the onslaught

onlookers

the drummers

the dancers

so here's the lantern I worked on - with many other people, I hasten to add

and here are the rest of them

lit up - it's almost dark enough to see the pretty lights

Lucie Cutting, who did all the organising, opens proceedings

My camera doesn't have a lot of fancy settings, being the cheapest one I could buy (within reason) so I had to take an awful lot of photos to get these two. They're still not very good, but you get a bit of an idea.

oh look - the pelican again!

And last of all, this:

DARK MOFO 2017 - I make my debut as a performer

Two Performances

Imagine. You are brought to an open field on the edge of an island on the edge of the Southern Ocean. In the centre of the field stand eight rows of black plastic chairs in a cleared rectangle of dark earth but you are not invited to sit. Your group, people you have never met, assembles in a semicircle around the chairs. It is long past midnight. The moon, just past its full, slides behind a dark cloud. You can hear waves breaking on the beach. Nobody speaks. You begin to wait.

Lights are bobbing across the field, approaching. A chant, distant on the breeze: “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.” The voice calling cadence is cracked, the timing irregular. A cloud passes and sudden moonlight reveals a ragged column of people, four abreast, not shuffling, but not marching either; no-one could march to that uneven beat. The crowd parts to let them through and the caller falls silent. 

Quietly, people file in to occupy the chairs, and now you see they are old. Senior citizens in their night clothes, dark dressing gowns over regulation striped pyjamas, grey hair escaping from identical black beanies. Grandmothers and grandfathers dragged from their institutional beds to confront the Hour of the Wolf in a windswept field. Another cloud drifts across the moon as the lights go out. Waiting resumes.

There is a click, tentative. Another, hesitant. A third, then a rising clatter of percussive sound. Sparks flash between the ancient fingers. Seventy two pairs of wrinkled hands, seventy two pairs of quartz pebbles from the seashore rise and fall. A rhythm builds, accelerates, breaks apart, a new one forms. Light follows shadow as clouds obscure and reveal the waning moon. The clack of rock striking rock goes on, and on, relentless as the waves striking the beach. Patterns of light and sound are mesmerising, primal. The old folk are absorbed in their pointless occupation, striking sparks from stones. Minutes pass, become an hour.

A shock when the noise suddenly ceases. Carefully, reverently, the performers place their white stones on the dark soil in front of them, rise and file silently away. The caller resumes - “One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four”; a better cadence this time. As the column vanishes into the darkness you are left with the moonlight and the ocean.

A passing speedboat shatters the mood.

It's winter again, and that means Dark MoFo, Hobart's feast of noise and light, of music, film, theatre, art exhibitions and amazing food. The performance on Bruny Island was Empty Ocean, Mike Parr's latest creation. I was one of the seventy two participants.

At MONA a new exhibition opened on Saturday – The Museum of Everything. It is a maze of gallery spaces chock full of sculpture and painting created by so-called “outsider” artists, by artists who are intent on expressing their opinions and emotions regardless of prevailing movements and fashions in contemporary art. Here are no self-conscious intellectuals rebelling against their art-school training; these artists are totally serious and sincere. For many of them theories of art, traditional art making materials and techniques, and often the entire “art world”, are simply irrelevant. Some don't even think of themselves as artists; they just make stuff. Like the best punk rock, it's often raw and confronting. Some pieces are incredibly beautiful; some so bad they're brilliant. All are fascinating, challenging and thought-provoking.

The entertainment at the opening must have followed this do-it-yourself aesthetic for I was invited to perform as part of Gunshy Polyphony, a group of seven singers. 

I am the old lady in the front pew who sings all the hymns very loudly, out of tune and probably in the wrong key, but today the emphasis was on dissonance. I can do that. We improvised vocal polyphonies while strolling around showing off the most fabulous luxury fake-fur coats from Melbourne designer Kathryn Jamieson. 

Her Gunshy label is attracting attention world wide and fans include Wutang Clan and Conchita Wurst. This collection certainly attracted attention on the MONA tennis court. Not me in the photo, I hasten to add – but I was lucky enough to wear this coat.

You can see the rest of the collection here  http://www.gunshy.com.au/category/pimp-it-bitch-collection-aw16-high-end-range

These two experiences could not have been more different. Those of you who are actors or performance artists no doubt take all this in your stride, but I am a visual artist. I spend my time locked away alone in the studio, only occasionally emerging to show myself at an exhibition of my paintings.

Performing in public is a new and exciting experience, not least the “dressing up” part. Kathryn's coats lift the spirits; they are so frivolous and extravagant they just made me happy. In one of her coats I could do anything – even sing! Getting into costume in the hall on Bruny Island had the opposite effect. I suddenly felt uncomfortably diminished, institutionalised; nobody is a hero in striped flannelette pyjamas.

Several of the performers were fellow members of the Hobart Walking Club. We are used to seeing each other with backpacks and stout boots, covered in mud and leeches, scrambling over rocks and logs half way up a mountain. Now we looked like a lot of non-descript geriatrics and I kept thinking of Art Spiegelman's famous graphic novel Maus. In fact, Mike Parr made a point of reminding us we were all born around the end of the Second World War, and referred to Nazi death marches. However, he also talked about positive things, like the significance of the number seventy two - it's Mike's age – and being a child playing games with his brother, striking sparks from pieces of flint. And he exhorted us to go out there proudly. We did. And it felt great.