2009 Archive pt 2
Dec
Looking to move to the Belllinger
Barrington, Monday
Behind us are the old goldmines preserved in Copeland Conservation Reserve, from our balcony looking down valley, the noise of cicadas and White-lipped Tree Frogs is deafening. These frogs are so elegant compared to the Green and the Magnificent Tree Frogs.
Night spotting, I almost step on a diamond python, I think it’s a stick in the gloom but some eighth sense intervenes, even for a harmless python. We both stop petrified (as in wood), what a beautiful creature.
Why are we so sensitive to snakes? (See E O. Wilson for the argument that fear of snakes is innate, because selected for, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, New York, 1998, p79). Lynne Isbell notes, “Visual systems are more developed in those primates that have shared the longest evolutionary time with venomous snakes and least developed in those primates that have had no exposure at all to venomous snakes.” (In The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well. Harvard University Press, 2009). Vervet monkeys have distinct calls for snakes, leopards and birds of prey, but cannot sing.
Harrington River Lodge, Tuesday
The hotel is at the end of a massive development failing to sell, four people sit in the vast ‘Irish’ pub next door, but Madison on the desk is lovely, we change rooms, a Wotif bargain with bathrobes. We appear to be the only guests, celebrate by taking a bottle of champagne to the pool beside the Manning River. The glasses chink, a brown honeyeater is competing with the nightingale of Berkeley Square, and an eastern rosella swoops by, and four purple fronted moorhens balance with difficulty in a baby she-oak leaning against the fence. I float through a hole in gravity streaked with guilt at this luxury, a pair of sea eagles swim lazily overhead inside our vast blue orbit.
Bellinger River Tourist Park, Wednesday
Beside the river, prone to flooding, mullet jumping high, a trio of imperial spoonbills, chic in Coco’s black and white, sweep the far bank where a Sea Eagle sits right opposite, high in a tall tree, the wind whipping the branches, it is an immature bird with the mottled markings, grappling with very long slender branches, drops one, tries fiddling with the beginnings of a nest gives up, soars above the river and comes up with a fish it carries by up river, the fish is horizontal, hanging below the bird, silver scales at maximum exposure, as if in an ad. It wheels back to its perch and starts tearing and feeding then takes off wheeling west. We put the tent up and I notice the eagle is back, on a lower branch, look again, yellow legs, a goshawk! It’s a brown goshawk with a long golden-brown tail between its talons, its chest hidden by the reddish fur of a water rat it carries off, heading east.
A kingfisher lands on the steps and analyses the flow of water, a tern tumbles acrobatically overhead, this all happens as the wind eases slightly and as the heat of a summer’s day dissipates towards dusk. I video light shining as if the river was a grand piano, a patina of gold creases the river, the light is delirious, improvising and unable to stay still for a moment.
We looked at 5 acres with peacocks and a house guest, but too much work for bare hands. ,
We have loved living in Sydney for nearly 30 years, but now have no qualms about leaving this (The Catholics at Quirz, 21/11/09):for this:
We stayed with old friends and met the friendliest people wherever we went, and found a vibrant arts and Green scene.
Heading north, camping and birding.
Rachel Carson asked if we could imagine a spring without birdsong?
A 2004 report has warned: “Since the year 1500, we have lost over 150 bird species – an extinction rate far higher than the natural background. Today, one in eight bird species is threatened with global extinction, with 190 species Critically Endangered, and Red List assessments show that things are getting worse. Particularly alarming are sharp declines in many formerly common and widespread species. This is a signal of wider environmental problems, and of the erosion of biodiversity as a whole.” (BirdLife International (2004) State of the world’s birds)
Andrew Bennett: When I compare the first two years of surveys to the last two years, there was over 40% decline in the numbers of individual birds that are recorded there, and when you multiply that out to a forest of 40,000 hectares, that means more than 150,000 fewer birds in the forest now then there was when I started these surveys. And that's huge. (Decline of birds in Victorian forests Andrew Bennett interviewed by Robyn Williams, The Science Show, ABC Radio National, 6 December, 2009).
The strangest thing I read today:
The American composer Ned Rorem when in his 20s used to write fan letters to anyone he regarded as worth cultivating, and then enclose a photograph of himself wearing bathing trunks.
It is a wonderful composition, natural looking but composed. For example, the dandelions are arranged, but their yellow flowers are one of the details that suggest it was painted in May.
The grass leaves are fresh, their roots trail into the earth.
Durer collected objects throughout his life, anything that interested him - snail shells, skeletons, sketches of people, a walrus, a gale. He looked for signs of the Apocalypse he thought was coming. The divide between the sacred, the supernatural and the ordinary temporal was not clear then. All art possessed a sacred meaning - mediating between the two worlds.
His interest in nature was revolutionary for an artist who never made a ‘landscape painting’. Durer’s "is observed from ground level, which gives each blade of grass and dandelion flower a startling significance." (Richard Mabey, ‘The Painter as Naturalist’).
Few of his botanical drawings survive, but one is a masterpiece. ‘Iris’ (1503, Bremen) is lifesize, the flowers beautifully painted, luminous and hypnotic. I have seen it twice and both times been hypnotised. Despite Durer’s having a few creases and browning, I prefer it to Van Gogh’s ‘Irises’ which became the world’s most expensive sale in 1987 when Alan Bond bought it for $53.9M. Durer used some of these as studies for larger paintings, or woodblocks, including his versions of ‘The Virgin in the Garden’.
Nov
Perhaps the first piece of eco-art
One of Albrecht Durer's greatest and most innovative works is the small: Great Piece of Turf, 1503, Watercolour and gouache on paper, 41 x 32 cm, Vienna.
Oct
Sculpture by the Sea again (see opposite). Met and became pals with Zero, a sculptor from Hiroshima. So called because he sold nothing in New York one time. 30 Oct
A beautiful sculpture that took six months to make
As if art can reveal what is hidden, if only for a moment
The Little boy facing the sea looks lost,
he was in the news yesterday for being forcibly
dressed in blue swimmers. I look over his shoulder,
we both watch a rough sea, beautifully modulated
silvers, blues and greens, a large fin appears,
a mother and calf, humpback whales so close to shore,
breaching just behind a surfer. I miss the shot.
Two days later the artist Paul Trefry removed the swimmers at dawn.
A cacophony overhead as a magpie mobs a cockatoo.
Visited the UK to see my frail father The leaves were turning and visited a frail friend in Bordeaux.
We spent a day out on the coast, on the Dune de Pila
the largest sand dune in Europe, near Arachon.
The world is blurred; sand is spinning its edges
shifting the contours of the vast dune,
for days afterwards my pockets are grainy.
We moon-walk, bouncing down to the beach
and its flotsam of tar and absence of shells
where you found seahorses as a child.
In any history we cannot distinguish cause
from fact in the fluency of events cascading
one after the other to drown in the past.
German blockhouses have slipped through
the restless dune, doors to graffitied concrete
open to three species of tit rustling the pines blue.
I came across a guy spray painting a wall in the Rue du Mulet, behind which jeu de paume, the origin of tennis was played in the 16th C, using a wooden frame strung with sheep gut and a cork ball. Louis IV tried to ban the game.SeptWith Will Barton performed 'Kitchen music' among other poems from Bundanon, and poems from the NSW outback with Auntie Delme at the Brisbane Writers Festival, Sept 11 & 12..