Jan -Feb 2012

Dawn 26 Feb. I took a sequence of 26 images of a wonderful dawning,

and tried the next day to do the same under quite different conditions.

And today the 28th, the light not brilliant, but an Osprey with a fish and a Sea Eagle right overhead made up for it

Dawn over Blue Poles

I am no great fan of dogs (or cats or birds in cages), wolves are much more interesting and if as much attention and $ was spent on our native fauna and flora, the future of the natural environment would be much rosier. But . . .

Sunday Nambucca

The never ending story - Saturday

Phallus multicolor with 'egg' (stinkhorns)

Tree on the Scotts Head Rd, Feb 15

I take photographs so easily, camera on automatic, too easily perhaps:

"Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away; the beautiful hues insisted on being traced, – without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant . . . At last, the tree was there, and everything I had thought before about trees, nowhere." John Ruskin

Valentine Day's dawn and poem (extract)

Out on the deck, below a half moon, stars fire

scattered sharpened points of gold, silver, red.

I see lightning enchanting the horizon, you don’t.

I see a shooting star, a short unspectacular arc, you don’t,

yet you always see more than me.

The sea roars from the south, as if it has moved or changed

direction from due East, sometimes the world's hard to understand.

I run my hands through your hair, feel the warmth of your kidneys,

in the presence of the dark find a place for my mouth.

Double Drummer Cicada - the largest cicada here, makes the loudest sound in the insect world (in excess of 120 dB, near the pain threshold of the human ear). It's been a bad year for cicadas, last year we were pressing our ears closed at one section of Jagun. They spend around 7 years underground, the popluation naturally varies year to year.

I wake in a cold house in the middle of an old quarry filled

with clear blue water! I protest, ‘It wasn’t here yesterday’.

We release water lilies and fragments of aquatic vegetation

into the deep hole gouged into the earth. I‘m too late to stop

what we’re doing, worry we may have infected this pristine place,

gleaming silvered sheer rock walls imprison pure cut-glass light

- a dream in hibernation from yesterday on East-West Road.

I stopped to photograph the tall dead trees, the mirrored cloud,

the unearthly beauty. I am carrying the ephemeral inside me.

Soldier crabs are small crabs with pale legs and blue helmets They scoop sand up with their front claws, sift through for particles of dead plants and animals, leaving small, cleaned round pellets of sand.

Poets were once very image conscious. The best known image of a Romantic poet is probably Byron in Albanian dress, fresh faced with lipstick lips, wrapped in a bright technicoloured turban and thin wave of a moustache. Thomas Phillips was the painter, Byron the Napoleonic art director. He created images of himself. Do we recall Byron’s pox, his appetite for sex with children? Their image fashioning and self-fashioning parallels movie stars.

My self portrait - as a travelling poet? A shy one? A knowledgeable one?

I'm unsure which one fans of the Beard would prefer:

You get feelings you don’t understand,

have sex with a bearded man . . .

His sweaty beard drips like a watering can

sex with a bearded man.

You Should Consider Having Sex With a Bearded Man. The Beards

It's a great song with a bluesy rif from a wonderfully eeccceentric band (from Adelaide, where else?). “It’s a holy experience. I think that most people have a void in their life, but people with beards don’t have that." Bassist Nathanial.

Valla Beach line of poetry.

In 1913 Ernest Fenollosa's widow sent his unpublished papers to Pound. Fenollosa had suggested that Chinese script derives from a vivid shorthand picture of the world with, an original creative poetry' with far more vigour and vividness than any phonetic tongue'. He argued that Chinese written character "speaks at once with the vividness of painting' because it combines both visual and temporal elements."

A dragonfly caught - over 200 species in Australia, not sure which one, but it was freed.

I wrote a letter to council requesting a register of significant trees, after a 200 year old Cabbage Gum, a tree we gazed at every time we left Nambucca, was destroyed. It was cut down in the breeding season - we get there and lorikeets are calling from smaller tress all around, disorientated, probably having lost nestlings. Apparantly, a local business requested it be removed.

By the late 18^th century artists working in the Romantic style featured dead standing trees and fallen wood for their intrinsic beauty and qualities of naturalness. Rare and vulnerable animals and plants rely on a continuity of old trees in our landscape for food and nesting/roosting sites. The natural process of decay, of hollowing and ageing is vital to ecosystems that have developed on old trees and surrounding them.

Feb 3 The sun is back

Choosing a ghost

1 Feb 5.40pm

Driving the most dangerous stretch in Australia,

flood alerts active, lights on, wipers swabbing fast,

cloud pummelled to mist, just near the slow lefthander

where the truck driver died and those in the jam

started licking strewn Magnums before they melted,

someone has painted white crosses on wet black

tree-trunks. The headlights pick out these simple

powerful symbols, art is morphing into warning.

Embroidering the verge, an avenue of November Lilies

late in their season, has sprung up all at once,

swollen blooms focus attention on death

or marriage, one by one the white trumpets ask

what we’re doing about invasive species

(driving me crazy - I wrote to the Minister Friday),

or a reminder that this extraordinary machine

has chalked up its 50 millionth kill to date.

My hands rest lightly on the wheel,

I’m on automatic, even here (in the poem)

on the shiny asphalt, sediment moving north.

Consciousness is overrated, we know much less,

put our trust in what the body has done before.

Why let terrorists and drugs worry you when statistics

blister on smoking, horse-riding, rock-fishing

and travelling the highway between head and heart.

Wreaths and small crosses, some with names, point out

plenty of places to locate an entrance into the darkness

we will all endure. You rest your hand on my thigh

I suggest music, the CD starts where it stopped in the middle

of ferocious drumming, we saw him in the Persian Garden,

remember? An old man in a bandana, two sticks in each fist

beating out wild rhythmic patterns like a shaman.

I will never forget you, not even when asleep.

Feeling crook again today, a small Sacred Kingfisher looking at me through my study window was inspiring. You can tell I'm crook, three photographs from my study window in 3 days.

A few weeks ago we went searching for the rarest bird in NSW, the Rufous Scrub-bird, up on Mt Killcrankie - it came within two or three metres but remained hidden in the undergrowth - sure made a racket though. Hear it here (mp3 509KB)

Art

Lost, 1996, David Shrigley (His show 'Brain Activity' is at the Hayward Gallery)

Good art or interesting art deserves repeated attention, humour rarely so. If you want a really funny 'Found' sign that isn't art (but may be) this is from Sydney five years ago or so.

I do like his Stump from 1999, sustainable/unsustainable art:

Alain de Botton is an atheist who thinks that religion has insight particularly for our core selves, our hopes, desires, fears and needs. Modern capitalism ignores this and the tools religions have used like art, architecture, ritual, music, ceremony , poetry etc. “We have allowed religion to claim as its exclusive dominion areas of experience which should rightly belong to all mankind.” (Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, Penguin – published 2 days ago).

He wants to build a temple to atheism. "The roof will be open to the elements and there could be fossils and geologically interesting rocks in the concrete walls. Each centimetre of the tapering tower's interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet. The exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence."

Not everyone agrees. Richartd Dawkins finds it daft and Andrew Copson (from the British Humanist Society) comments: "The things religious people get from religion – awe, wonder, meaning and perspective – non-religious people get them from other places like art, nature, human relationships and the narratives we give our lives in other ways." (Robert Booth, ‘Alain de Botton reveals plans for 'temple to atheism' in heart of London’ guardian. co.uk, Thursday 26 Jan 2012)

I am looking out through rain-streaked glass at Jagun, Black Cockatoos are flying past, and I am reminded (again) of what Jakob Grimm wrote: “A temple is simultaneously a wood. What we think of as a walled building, merges, the farther back we go, into a sacred place untouched by human hands, in a grove and enclosed by dense trees. There the God dwells, veiling his form in the rustling foliage of the boughs. . .” (Introduction to Germanic Mythology, 1835).

Promises

A sublime dawn turns to rain

And even with all this rain I am not finding the time to read all the authors coming to the festival. “Not having enough time to read is a common complaint. Not having enough time to read is a common complaint . . . Read a novel, they urge us, because it will enable you to travel in time and space, learn about falling in and out of love, growing up or growing old. Read a poem because it will “run a cable into the heart”. Read, because it will transform your life and even alter the circuitry of your brain.”

I agree with the sentiments, though why is poetry always elevated (and then ignored)? This reviewer, Emma Hagestadt, has time to read because she has invented time travel. ‘Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! By Mark Haddon, Michael Rosen, Zadie Smith et al’, 23 February 2012 11:43 AM www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/

Australia Day

The roos on our driveway don't mind the rain

Deep Creek flooding

Meantime in Canberra, a white faced Prime Minister is flung into her limo by security as an angry indigenous crowd push towards her, though it was Tony Abbot who triggered their anger.

What's there to be angry about?

1. Native Title/ Landrights has not brought about many material changes;

2. Self determination seems a long way away when the Northern Territory Intervention is ongoing;

3. The statistics for indigenous health, education & incarceration are appalling.

[Aboriginal people living in remote communities are 10 X more likely to develop dementia than people living in Africa, India or Indonesia; 60% of Aboriginal children are significantly behind non-Aboriginal children by the time they start Year One; Aboriginal people represent only 2.3% of the total population, yet form over 14% of our prison population (2008). For more information see Creative Spirits]. Plenty of effort and money has gone into redressing the inequality, but it's proving complicated and difficult.

Flooding in Bellingen, another festival meeting postponed

The sea is red at Nambucca

Year of the Dragon - a wet birthday

Porcupine Tree, Forgotten Songs from Provence, Thank Christ for the Bomb. A blind beer tasting before the pub - James Squires Golden Ale was the unanimous winner (no Belgian beers though).

Saturday - got my G11 back (Valla's fine sand grains costing me $207) I celebrate with photographs and a poem>

. . . sunburst of creation, brilliant instance of the spectrum glossing our survival - gold, burnished copper, white fleece and fast gestation of blue, the coherence of a new day when anything can happen . . .

The highway is still a death trap

Paperbark swamp

The silvered ingots float heavily, bullion

on water black from tannin and leaf litter, this reticence

deserves day’s end dragging darkness down on us

when the bats and owls and gliders start their morning,

feeding, hunting and romancing with no use for colour.

Wyn is water colouring so I walk round the margins looking

for photographs, there are so many patterns of pale trunks on billiard slate, reeds angled like a shower of arrows.

I disturb two Black Ducks that splatter into air

- Splash - . . . ripples

a dragon’s head eyes me, submerges back into darkness.

Leave nothing but footprints. The beach . . .

is deserted, we skinny dip, follow parallel goanna tracks, lose them in the wattle. 'Beachcombing' is Melville’s term and not applicable except for the unemployment, but we feel ownership and responsibility. Unusually, this park is gazetted to mean low water mark, includes the beach, on the way back we collect the flotsam, a flipper, fenders, unknown organics, plastic bags, DVD case and stinky golden baleen used for collars and corsets . . .

The wonderful large seed, with the geomery of a cardinal's hat, of the Mango Pine, found in Queensland, a totally poisonous rainforest tree.

Fringed Lily

Last week I introduced my class to haiku and renga:

The old pond / A frog jumps in / splash

Today (18th) I wrote just before taking this photograph:

splash / what has jumped into / Oyster Creek?

Victoria's cows, Valla Beach

Camp Creative

is over for another year. Friday 13th began with a 6.20am interview with the ABC, I just had time to take this first.

I was lucky, another great group that got to grips with nature poetry and ecology. Everyone had their insights and unique approaches. On the last day we worked by the Never Never then enjoyed a champagne feast.

It was a week of writing, listening, keen observation and 'being present' - exercises to open up experience, of discussions on place, natural processes, readings and more. John Clare came to the fore, it looks like Roger Scruton doesn't read him:

"It is essential to Scruton's thesis that it insists the real rape of green England began with the postwar intensification of agriculture, backed by national and eventually European subsidies. But it began much earlier, with the enclosures of 1750-1850. In this period, more than two million acres of downland, heath, fen and ancient wood-pasture were cleared for cultivation. Put that together with the four and a half million acres of open arable fields privatised in the same process, and a quarter of the entire land surface of England and Wales was robbed of its cynefin". Richard Mabey reviewing Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet, by Roger Scruton New Statesman, 02 January 2012. Mabey notes that "the beautiful, home-grown Celtic word cynefin [means] "a place of personal belonging".

Clare loved his cynefin and hated the Enclosure process, that industry of improvement that led to the toxicity of Silent Spring.

Exercises (mine):

From the bank's shade, the Bellinger is clarified,

weed combs the centre channel, fish jump,

sick protruding teeth on the far bank,

old wharf posts, are evidence of the muscle

the river uses to fall off the mountains.

A tiny gold fly

lands on this surface and writes

a surprised poem.

Mud Dauber Wasps

This wonderfully worked straw-coloured pot,

ovoid, glued to the brick wall of the toilet block

reminds me that what’s so extraordinary about

birds’ nests is that we are unable to make them.

From the neat dark round hole a bright orange

and black adult has emerged to begin all over

the task of stinging jumping spiders and

carrying them back then laying a single egg.

The larva feasts on its paralysed larder

then pupates in a miracle of metamorphosis

that begins with a small mouthful of mud.

I always teach Hugh MacDiarmid's 'Perfect Poem', a wonderful poem of plagiarised prose, and quote Ezra Pound “Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.” 'A Retrospect' (1918).

Just jealous of Bron

Goat moth

Keep your garden untidy and everyday will bring a new event, sighting, surprise. Yesterday (5th) it was a big blue-grey domestic rabbit and family of beautiful Buff-banded Rails.

Jennifer Owen's The Ecology of a Garden: The First Fifteen Years (1991) was a landmark in urban ecology after fifteen years of an ordinary town garden (741 sq m). Thirty years later (Wildlife of a Garden: A Thirty-Year Study) she has identified over 8,000 different species of insects, plus hundreds of spiders, worms, millipedes, slugs, mites and other invertebrates. She has even recorded 20 species new to Britain – and four new to science! Then there's the flora!

In studies of other urban gardens, it was found that gardens with trees and large shrubs had more (and more diverse) wildlife than gardens with few or no trees.

Gardens ARE IMPORTANT habitats!

TREES are IMPORTANT!

Our garden, when we arrived 18 months ago, had five palm trees and two bottlebrushes, all doing badly. We are letting trees grow naturally where we can, orchids are appearing, bush tucker is appearing.

Busy finalising the program for the 2012 BRWF - on the way to a meeting this morning (4th) popped in to Bongil Bongil National Park:

Sails, dried lagoon, and beach Bongil (out at sea were the sails of the

yachts racing the Pittwater to Coffs Harbour Regatta)

Surfing, Bonville

JAN 1 The new year starts well with a beautiful morning breakfast and a swim at Scotts Head then a walk in Yarriabini National Park, we had the park to ourselves. Passed Dave, the field officer, on the way out - he's been busy telling campers to pack up and move on from Jagun.

Party left overs, Scotts Head.

Yarriabini National Park

Yarriabini is on the boundary between two groups and is still an important meeting place for the Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti people. The name is Dunghutti for 'koala rolling'.

Detail from a a large ceramic work in the park by two indigenous artists Richard Campbell and Sharon Smith, with assistance from Guy Crossley who specialises in public ceramic art on the Mid North Coast.

Tali Sharot argues that both neuroscience and social science have evidence that that we are more optimistic than justified by how the real world pans out (in The Optimism Bias: A Tour Of The Irrationally Positive Brain, Pantheon, 2011). One reads the news and should be depressed. One unending disturbance to my equilibrium is ongoing land clearance. Australian bushland is still being bulldozed, chained or poisoned to 'improve' land for forestry and agriculture. This practice is a not only devastating for natural eco-processes, habitats and the fauna and flora, but also greenhouse gas emissions.

The NSW Annual Report on Native Vegetation (Dec 2011) reveals that 2009/10 was the worst year on record for clearing native bushland.

What is our bequest?

Sign on the Yarriabini to Rosewood road.