  I feel so fortunate to have this beach so close.   Our Japanese garden.  Shakkei (Japanese) or jiejing (Chinese) is the gardening principle of 'borrowing the background landscape'.  Bellingen Music Festival After enjoying last year's inaugural festival, I was looking forward to this year’s and they pulled of another great program with no external funding. Congratulations. Jennifer Eriksson “The Marais Project” was wonderful. Dhe is a great champion of the viola da gamba, an instrument I fell for listening to Paolo Pandolfo account of Marin Marais’ 'Le Labyrinthe' and she has taken up the challenge of playing all his works, 750 all up, wonderfully ambitious. The highlight for me ended up being Riley Lee on shakuhachi and Claire Edwards on marimba performing Anne Boyd’s 'Goldfish through Summer Rain’, a version the composer now prefers to her original scoring for flute. Despite wonderful playing, I didn’t think cello and marimba could ever reach the bluesy feel of Piazzolla’s ‘Oblivion’, and they didn't. “Life without music would be a mistake” Nietzche The coldest May in 40 years - wet all day then light suddenly appeared in all directions:    The environment as political football The O'Farrell government is abolishing sanctuary zones in Jervis Bay and Solitary Islands marine parks. Primary Industries Minister, Katrina Hodgkinson, told Parliament they had been introduced ''without proper community consultation.'' That is a lie. The NSW president of the Australian Marine Sciences Association, Melanie Bishop, said the claim was ''incorrect and seriously misguided''. The new zones were ''based on extensive community consultation processes that included more than 70 stakeholder meetings attended by hundreds of people as well as review of almost 10,000 submissions from the broad community''.The decision to abolish the protection zones and revert to those established in 2002 ''makes a complete mockery of the public consultation process and puts the important conservation values of these areas at unnecessary risk''. See The Australian Marine Conservation Society on the importance of these two reserves. Friday   species) flew by, the sun scorching the females' yellow cheeks to sulphur. Thursday   Australian slang And galahs were flying about too. The word comes from gilaa, Yuwaalaraay for a pink and grey cockatoo (a dialect of the Kamilaroi peoples from the Hunter region. Ethnologue suggests there were only three fluent speakers left over a decade ago - languages are as sad an extinction as species and we are in the middle of a decimation). These birds congregate noisily and love playing; they can form large flocks that eat/destroy crops. You can see them clowning around, swinging the loop around power lines and performing aerobatic stunts. They are beautiful, especially when flocking with the sun buffing their pink almost rosy breasts. So why the word is slang (again) for a fool I have no idea, for a loud-mouthed clown maybe. 
Our
garden is an assemblage of areas, most natural, some original
vegetation, and some, like the Japanese stone garden with it's three
bonsais and covered vegetable garden, highly artificial. 
Gardens in the 17th C were artificial, minimalist, obsessively tidied, and often geometric in the form of knot gardens. Eden was
uncontrollable as Nature is, and Milton's
Satan regarded it with ‘‘wonder,’’ Raphael reached Adam and Eve: “ . . . through Groves of
Myrrh, What was the first name of the famous English poet Milton?
 Am I a snob? I hope not, but I do get annoyed by people's laziness in not discriminating ethically or aesthetically and not thinking about how they live in the world . . . such people are drongos. Pierre Bourdieu has noted that ‘taste’ in art and cultural life generally are key factors in how society is organised into hierarchies of class (see Distinction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1984). Clearly education is a crucial factor. Kant thought taste (aesthetic judgment) is subjective but universal and disinterested. So am I in an artist's class? Bourdieu writes that in museums and galleries: “. . . everything leads to the conclusion that the world of art opposes itself
to the world of everyday life just as the sacred does to the profane.” Pierre Bourdieu &
Alain Darbel, The Love of Art, Polity
Press, 1991, p112. The photographs I took today (above) are of the ordinary everyday – to bring attention to the simplest things. In my shots of the ordinary, I am not interested in Russian formalist’s ostrananie, or Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’, perhaps more the notion of contingency and surprise. (As in Barthes' concept of the punctum, often residing in a fragment or detail - see Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, Vintage Books, 2000, p42-3). At the same time, I can't resist a 'postcard view' that the Rev. Gilpin might have appreciated. Botanic Gardens, Coffs Harbour Inside the glass house, the fern room The next room is stitched with orchids, The threshold of the succulents   Sunday Nambucca  " . . . thanks to Prometheus we cleared the land for farming and burnt water to steam to power the ongoing revolution."   Birding - in the last three days Sooty Oystercatcher, Nambucca Heads Close up, the bill is not typically red but the colour of old fashioned ice cream cones, comical as Pinocchio’s but made of keratin plates. The same colour runs a thick ring around the eyes, one of which stays on me, the other fastens to the rock it is probing on blancmange pink feet. It’s an extraordinary species, vulnerable in this state if you can believe that, that we are remaking reality so fast. 
 Grey Goshawk, white morph. Photo courtesy of Terry Evans. Nambucca - Existentialist tourist "If wonder is to be construed not merely as a provocation for reflection, but also as containing the germ of fundamental truth, we may do well to mark that it involves an openness on the part of a person in his entirety." Henry Bugbee Jnr   The Gumbaynggirr ate/eat the Pandanus fruit when ripe and a rich deep orange-red colour. The tough leaves were split, dried and made into string for dillybags, jewellery and fishtraps, or used for mats and shelters  Birding Sunday Highlights: tawny frogmouths preening, rose robin, red-backed wrens, varied triller, mangrove 'warbler', plenty of sea eagles and more . . .     and great shots from Terry Evans - with a long lens   Saturday     On the way back from lunch with Cleo centrefold Feb 1973, the sun was setting over the Bellinger plain  Friday the thirteenth (and superstition) 5.40 at the headland, the stairway to heaven leads to Venus, Jupiter, Mercury and
Mars, the rare alignment, a pattern of beauty. The waves are wrinkles
on silk satin moving through the glasses so slowly that I felt
unbalanced. The planets are rising, the earth tilting forwards . . .  (Venus, the brightest with Jupiter and a faint Mercury right, Mars is directly below Venus, not visible in the image). Visible in the Southern Hemisphere, for the first time in 101 years.  Scorpio was stinging the Milky Way above the forest behind us. Colin Turnbull tells us the people of the forest lived in fear of the dark, of sorcery. A shooting star arced out of the south east. I noticed a dark shape, Mick is out on his board vanishing into the slow waves, a forest of cloud grew along the horizon and gradually the flash from Smoky Cape light softened. Mars was the first to go after an hour. The coastline reddened, wrens and honeyeaters sang awake and below us a Brahminy kite was gliding as if sliding down a wire, showing a wingspan of such a rich red in the low flying sunlight.  Patterns like star signs and astrology are inevitable; humans
seek patterns, but this need is combined with an insistence on cause and effect
– witchcraft, or belief in God interfering with our lives on earth ignores chance.
Evans-Pritchard thought the Azande attribute sickness, loss, bad luck to
witchcraft and sorcery, and believed in the efficacy of their divinatory
techniques; Michael Polanyi found that their secondary beliefs explain away
predictive failure. However Evans-Pritchard suggested that belief
made rational sense in the Zande world and denied it revealed a primitive pre-logic
mentality [Levi-Strauss thought science & magic are “two parallel modes of
acquiring knowledge.” ‘The Science of the Concrete’ in The Savage Mind.] However, he thought the Azande are wrong in believing
in witchcraft and ignorant not knowing the scientific view. Witchcraft or any religious belief
for that matter is an attempt to bring anomalous events or experiences (like death)
to being manageable and controllable, sometimes it’s a matter of wu-wei, and of thanking your lucky stars
or realising it’s bad luck. Peter Winch in "Understanding a Primitive Society" argued reasoning is context dependent and depends on the Western thought taking science to be objective in the way the world works – yet science like witchcraft is dependent on faith. One key difference is the word luck. Aristotle wrote of four causal factors: the matter, the form, the end, and the agent, and thought that they were subject to either regular, predictable events, or chance, which we cannot explain.
The Royal Society formed in 1660 was primarily concerned with practical matters, and one of the first, most important and interesting was the by now well known search for a way of measuring longitude. It also collected curiosities, but knowledge was coming to be seen dependant on being witnessed and agreed upon, forming a community of scientists was important. Though it was not until 1750 that the Royal Society and Paris Academy reciprocated copies of ‘Memoires’ and ‘Philosophical Transactions’. Scientists are trained, they refine research skills through study and apprenticeships, it is collaborative, and experiments are verifiable, and not just one person’s expertise, wisdom or say so. However, science has moved beyond the experimental stage to some extent. Werner Heisenberg tells how Planck took his son for a long walk in the summer of 1900 in the Grunewald, a wood in Berlin, and told him he had made a huge discovery, as important as Newton’s, but being of a conservative disposition, he wasn’t happy, the world had just become stranger. It is a story, it was late autumn, would have been cold. He published his hypothesis on 14th of December, the birth of quantum mechanics – that energy could only be emitted or absorbed in discrete packets. It did not fit current heat and radiation theory. Five years later, a 26-year-old Bern patent clerk published one of five landmark papers that year, ‘On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light’ establishing the basis of quantum mechanics, fusing wave and particle posed the dual reality of reality. You need both descriptions for complete explanations just as you need poetry and prose both to demonstrate the obvious – we simply don’t know what we don’t know. (Einstein explained why the photoelectric effect depended not on intensity but frequency of light). 
  Burnt cabbage palms, Gap Beach, near Arakoon    Green Island from Smoky Cape, 11 May. Named by Captain Cook when he passed by on 13 May 1770 - "a point or headland, on which were fires that Caused a great Quantity of smook, which occasioned my giving it the name of Smooky Cape". Possibly a corroboree from the surrounding areas – the views are spectacular (& whale watching in a few weeks as they head north).  Fish Rock from Smoky Cape light  A 120 metre cave runs under the rock, one of the
largest ocean caverns in the southern hemisphere. Thousands of bullseye are suspended
over wobbegong sharks and a bull rays with trumpetfish and
black cod. In nearby gutters threatened Grey Nurse Sharks live. Anchoring
within 100m and bottom fishing is not allowed, however we saw a boat close by drop
a line in (which is permitted). 35% of NSW’s waters are declared marine parks, but only 6.7% o are sanctuary zones and off-limits to fishing. These provide important nursery areas and high in biodiversity. “Over 300 recent studies in Australia and overseas have affirmed the effectiveness of marine no-take areas, and some have shown fishery benefits." Professor David Booth Chief Scientist, Sydney Institute of Marine Sciences. The local issue for the Solitary Islands Marine Park is the prawn trawling industry. The National Party want to halt any increase in the reserves.  Smoky Cape light at 30°56¢ S., 153°05¢E., 510 kms from Sydney by road or 210 nautical miles by sea. Coastal management meeting This morning we walked the track and realised how ridiculous maintaining this track was. With beach erosion a major threat, not only from rising sea levels but more extreme winds are forecast, the last thing we need are cars driving down the beach. We
have some of the highest biodiversity on the East Coast, pristine
beaches and dunes, Banksia scrub, pockets of littoral rainforest (a
listed threatened ecological community) and more.We are not doing enough
to protect it yet. Dogs  they
couldn’t understand why – their dog was on a leash, despite clear signage at the entrance. I explained that:
The language of flowers The most colourful flower in the forest this morning was lantana – a weed. Lantana was here on this coast by 1848 and subject to experimental biological control well over a hundred years ago –
nothing has worked so far. Ross
Macleay describes the aftermath of weeding lantana (not a minor undertaking): “It was like the sleeping beauty, as if for half a century the whole place
had been drugged by lantana balm and now we were clearing the air and
scratching the earth’s back and it was stretching and turning over and waking
up to memories almost forgotten.” For everything you need to know but
were afraid to ask see Ross Macleay’s marvellous
chapter, ‘Lantana: Portrait of a weed and what it does to the bush
infested with it’, Nature Culture: Natural history, beauty, and the art of ecological
restoration, North Bank, 2005. And he corrects Tim Low’s generosity to exotics. We spent an hour in the garden weeding. John Ruskin described weeds as plants with “an innate disposition to get into the wrong place.” Our garden is mostly native, but not exclusively and so
would disappoint the landscape architect of Nazi Germany, Alwyn Seifert, who said
"nothing foreign should be added, and nothing native should be left
out." We prefer natives, they belong here, though native plants should refer
to your habitat and bioregion and outsiders can become invasive. But another
reason is weed are so problematic in Australia, we should do our bit to save
our floral biodiversity, for its own sake and because native fauna depends on
it. Flowers have symbolic meanings and associations, but in the 19th C a fantasy of flowers forming a language began (with Charlotte de Latour's Le Langage des fleurs of 1819). Francis Bacon intended to invent one language where each word would carry a clear meaning and Seth Ward, a professor of astronomy at Oxford, elaborated Descartes’ idea of simple notions. John Wilkins, a code breaker in the English civil war, developed Ward's idea to invent a world language which divided the universe in forty categories, subdivided into differences, and in turn subdivided into species. His extraordinary classification was meant to advance science and be complete. Wilkin’s ontology, how he organised material of the world, was a great success, but his ideal language failed. Borges’ well known essay ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’ (1942), describes attempts to construct a universal language in which each word defines itself. Borges mentions the system proposed in 1850 by one C. L. A. Letellier, in which ‘a means animal; ab, mammalian; abo, carnivorous; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivorous; abiv, equine’, and so on. He recounts a similar example from Wilkins’ own ‘undoubtedly ingenious’ system: although the English word salmon tells us nothing, ‘zana, the corresponding word, defines (for the person versed in the forty categories and the classes of those categories) a scaly river fish with reddish flesh’. Borges was alarmed by some of Wilkins’ categories and divisions, however: the whale becomes, for instance, ‘a viviparous, oblong fish’. Borges used Wilkins’ odd logic to write his famous invented Chinese classification which Foucault placed at the head of his Order of Things. The ‘ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies’ of Wilkins’ system recall, he suggests, a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia: In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies. Borges concluded any classification is arbitrary and conjectural. Classification
functions to simplify the world (and binary dichotomies are the simplest),
whereas poetry celebrates its complexity.  I felt like classifying birds by the intensity of colours, as a child would, because the first birds this morning weer all yellow, some intense sulphur to and psychedelic yellow submarine to paler saffrons: Crested Shrike-tits, Golden Whistlers, Yellow Thornbills, Striated Pardalotes, one Eastern Yellow Robin and (with a dash of yellow) Lewin’s Honeyeaters. Then other colours emerged, crimson from the finches and scarlet (from the Scarlet Honeyeaters) and the Pacific blues of a Superb Wren and Blue-faced Honeyeaters.    How to birdscape your garden  Ai Weiwei I led 'The Slow Art of Bushwalking' in World Heritage Gondwana Rainforest last month, and on its last day, Hamish Fulton led a slow formation walk in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall as "a form of silent activism" to protest the recent arrest and disappearance of Ai Weiwei. “Ai Weiwei had a genius for annoying his government . . . If ever an artist had a stubborn streak, it was Ai Weiwei.” Waldemar Januszczak, Nov, 2008.  Tsai Yu-Long I want to make a gesture too, or join PEN, or think of the warm heart of the Buddhist artist Tsai Yu-Long who we met last year in his Shanghai studio.   Responsibility What responsibility do we have to artists? What responsibilities do artists have? Auden was asked to participate in
the Spanish civil war for propaganda value, being a well known poet; in a
letter he wrote: "I shall probably be a bloody bad soldier. But how can I
speak to/for them without becoming one?" Cyril Connoly said he spent his
time playing chess, Robert Graves thought it was ping pong.[i] He went to fight in the
International Brigade, but never fired a shot, nor drove an ambulance, nor
carried a stretcher, despite common knowledge – it appears he was blacklisted
for not being a member of the Communist Party. Auden was shocked by the suffering,
infighting and atrocities of both sides, but not wanting to support the Fascists,
like most, he wrote nothing on his return. He did modify his 1937 poem
"Spain" but then would not allow it be published for some time,
believing it espoused views he thought he should rather than he felt.[iii]
After Spain, Auden went to China
with Isherwood to observe the Sino-Japanese war, but left disenchanted by the
role of the intellectual writer in war and politics. Aldous Huxley had left for
America as a committed pacifist and opposition to war. Auden and Isherwood followed,
wanting adventure, but more ambivalent about pacifism. Auden’s poem ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’ with the well known lines, “poetry makes nothing happen” appeared in 1939, in response to Yeats’ late poem ‘The Man and the Echo’ which asks if his early play Cathleen ní Houlihan had caused people to die in the Easter Rising.[iv] It was the first poem Auden wrote in the USA, at a time when he and Christopher Isherwood were accused of cowardice for leaving England that year.[v] Auden wrote one of the first poems of the war; ‘September 1, 1939’ but later disowned it as "modish and corrupt." The Marxist Auden forgave Yeats for his right wing stance, his belief in fairies and spiritualism, and hobnobbing with the aristocracy coming to the view that art is autonomous and should not be didactic, though Yeats did not hold this view, and as an ecopoet I don’t either.[vi] [i] Peter Edgerly Firchow, W.H. Auden: contexts for poetry, University of Delaware Press,
2002, p137-8. [iii] See Eric Hobsbawm, ‘War of ideas’, The Guardian,
17.2.2007. [iv] There were unconfirmed reports that leaders of the
Easter Rising were reciting lines from that play as they carried out their
doomed rebellion. Though Harry Eyre points out that, “The Fenians who led the Rising
were by 1916 suspicious of Yeats, some considering him a turncoat.” ‘How words can
become action’, Financial Times, 28/01/2011. [v] They were named in parliament as examples of
"British citizens of military age who have gone to the United
States." In 1944 Isherwood wrote to Cyril
Connolly that, “our coming to America … was an altogether irresponsible act,
prompted by circumstances —like our trip to China.” Quoted by Brooke Allen,
‘Brilliantly frivolous’, The New Criterion, Volume 15 March 1997, p71. [vi] In a 1940 essay ’The Public vs.
Mr William Butler Yeats’
Auden mounted a mock-trial of the poet but found for the defence.
In 1988, Edward Said praised his anti-colonial attitudes. Hamish Fulton He displays photographs, diaries and paintings, but
he sees these objects as evidence of his art. He has been called a sculptor, photographer, Conceptual artist and Land
artist but he prefers 'walking artist’. Pakistan Bin Laden is dead - Pakistan is in the news. I once tried to write about the place, but it was hard to find a quiet moment. 
 Ipomoea
pes-caprae (or Railroad Vine) found on beaches all over the world
(without frost) from tropical North and South America, east central
Africa, west central Africa, India, Asia, and Australia.   |
