02 July 2017

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

25 June 2017

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:


14 June 2017

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.



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.

08 June 2017

The Falls in Winter

Winter in Tasmania is THE BEST time to go walking; the days are short, but the sun shines and the sky is blue. There is a crispness in the air that makes you want to get out and stretch your legs.

Today's stroll from Bennetts Road to Kermandie Falls along the old Hartz Track certainly stretched everything.

Here is the walk description from the Hobart Walking Club circular:
This is the middle section of the historic Kermandie Track which goes from Geeveston to Hartz Peak. Damaged forestry roads have been a problem so our approach to this middle section ending at Kermandie Falls will be from Bennetts Road going downhill to the falls. When we are feeling weary, we will return uphill to the cars. The track goes through magnificent forest with mosses, fungi and even lyrebirds. The final kilometre of the track has a number of fallen trees to negotiate but the forests and the falls make it all worthwhile.

Every word of it is true, right down to the lyrebirds - not only spotted crossing the road as we drove into the forest, but keeping us entertained with a rich variety of melodious calls.

plunging into the forest from Bennetts Road



Many of the logs we encountered had been cut nicely - but many more had not. For some reason every photograph I took of people climbing over logs had a bad case of camera wobble, so you'll just have to believe me when I tell you much of the walk consisted of crawling under or scrambling over fallen logs of varying degrees of slipperiness and complexity.



A stretch of cutting grass and mud


Some very soggy button grass

there's still ice on the water . . .

and frost on the button grass where the sun has only just reached it

We are back in the forest





out of the creek and over a log



late in the season, but a bit of Climbing Heath (Prionotes Cerenthoides) is still hanging in there


morning tea



I believe there was once a tramway for hauling logs through here



Here and there a huge stump still shows a scarf cut by early twentieth century loggers


this stump has built itself a palisade

for the fungi lovers




Leaving the main track, we plunge off down a steep slope to the falls. Lots of tree roots to slip on, plenty of things to scramble over, under and through.


Towards the bottom an even steeper, slippery track along the side of a deep, dark gully brings us to our destination.

lunch at Kermandie Falls

tangled logs at the foot of the falls

Terrifying to imagine the force that swept these logs into the valley.


Having lunched, we retraced our steps. Up the hills, over and under the logs, across the creeks, through the mud . . .


emerging from the forest - afternoon sun on the button grass


Hartz Peak


It was a welcome sight - our cars waiting for us at the end of the track. And the afternoon sun showed traces of snow still lingering on Hartz Peak.

What a wonderful winter walk. Now for a long, hot bath with lots of scented bubbly stuff and a good book.