March-April 2012

APRIL

Sunday 30th Fungi day - picking porcini and seeing all kinds

Sunday morning - Robert Wyatt is singing to me; a Pied Butcher bird is calling – I hear it as music, but it is not music to the roos below, or the lorikeets or probably to the Butchers themselves. Music is universal in cultures (at level of rhythm anyway) and deeply moves most of us – but we don’t know why – is it:

1. a biological adaptation – in which case surely not simply for sexual advantage as Darwin reduced adaption to (alternatives are social or familial bonding) , or

2. a cultural evolution – a bricolage using existing skills and abilities such as language, pattern perception and emotion?

A wet miserable Saturday - Happiness is so topical with Depression now an epidemic - a Perfect Day will not suffice - see John Holmstrom's wonderful (5 page) cartoon. Four kangaroos browned by the rain in our garden - perfect - (not The 5-HTT gene which regulates serotonin). Thomas Jefferson made a mistake in emphasising the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, now conflated with the "pursuit of pleasure' - happiness comes to you.

Autumn is here: starry nights, cold mornings, plenty of fungi about and Fan-tailed Cuckoos.

Cortinarius australiensis, a meaty forest mushroom, apparently inedible and with no common name. It should have a name - any suggestions?

I asked Gary Williams who teaches at Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Centre for the Gumbaynggirr seasons. He told me: The two seasons are : galaagarr – warm weather and maguurr – cold weather. There are times during the year when other things happen, that have no specific names, that denote change but these two words are the main ones.

From a poem of mine from Sydney):

We are now in the middle of bana’murrai’yung

when the tiger quoll seeks a mate and we haul down the doona.

The Maguurr light is immaculate:

Mangrove, Nambucca River

Letter Box Beach, Valla - tyre tracks - In 1909 "it was a wild and lonely place but always beautiful." Early Valla Days by Kathleen Thurtell and 'Pop' Smith

Start the week with a fish

at Deep Creek

Built in obsolescence has become ridiculously pervasive: watches, cameras, and even a hand windscreen wiper-washer I bought this morning – no way of changing the sponge pad.

Thanks to the Capitalist move from production (Fordism) to consumerism - with serious repercussions for the health of our planet and our psyches. Charles Kettering of General Motors should be remembered , not for the starter motor, but for arguing in the 1920s that ‘The key to economic prosperity is the organised creation of dissatisfaction.’ General Motors began to introduce new model lines every year and ran advertising campaigns designed to make people discontented with the cars they owned. The emphasis on production now turned to the consumerism and vast marketing empires.

In 1954, Brooks Stephens, industrial designer (of Harley-Davidsons and early Jeeps) explained that "planned obsolescence" is "instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary".

Out with the Bello Birders - 73 species - very close views of ospreys (on a farm - and a parent bringing a large mullet to the nest over the Highway - by the speed camera)

Macksville sewage works, swallow drinking algal bloom

Volunteer Wrap for the BRWF - congratulations to Roby for getting 8 out of 10 in my lit quiz including:

Richard Glover in Desperate Husbands wrote: “During the 1970s, I spent most of my leisure time trying to summon up: a) Satan, b) a decent pair of sideburns, c) the courage to ask the girl next door to go for an ice cream, d) a single chest hair.

Bellinger River

Photographs from 18 April - Jagun forest - and flooded bridge

I was reading Rimbaud, who I find mostly too rich, too boisterous to appreciate, then read about his life. He gave up poetry at 19 and roamed - he claimed to have visited "Palmerston", now Darwin in 1876 - ended up in Ethiopia attempting to become a rich colonialist- finally ending up back in France in agony on one leg. He left what little he had to his boy, none to his mistress.

His Voyant period ended with A Season in Hell:

I! I called myself a magician, an angel, free from all moral constraint.... I am sent back to the soil to seek some obligation, to wrap gnarled reality in my arms. A peasant! 'Farewell'

I used to believe in every kind of magic. 'Second Delirium: The Alchemy Of The Word'

My kind of poet knows the soil and the reality of the soil and its destruction - John Clare.

‘Soil is the mother of all things’ – Old Chinese proverb

I missed my 'Pocket Diary' launch in Sydney over the weekend - along with the other poets in Kit's Pocket Series. Rae Desmond Jones read from my 'Easter Songs':

I wake early, put on the radio, Neddy Seegoon

is constructing a ladder to save the world with buckets

of water. He’s just heard the news – the sun is on fire.

I look. It’s hiding under the sea’s skin.

Ra’s resurrection is an engineering triumph with

another six billion years of performance. I hurry

to shore for the bleed, only the brightest planets

are sticking to this rubbery darkness.

We had guests from overseas. The weather held for walks, fishing, swimming and a barbecue - the most natural activities.

Nambucca

Crustose lichen, Deep Creek Bridge

More than 3200 species of lichen occur in Austalia and its islands in around 400 genera from about 100 families.

.

Wednesday

Last of the light

Tuesday

A rose wired from the roos who tend to stick with grasses. A late afternoon stroll to the creek revealed a couple of Swamp Wallabies in a clearing downstram, playfully wrestling. They stay in the forest thankfully, they eat anything in a garden.

Easter Monday

A pair of Sooty Oystercatchers, Shelly Beach

Easter Sunday

This is Paradise, but Paradise doesn't exist - we were on North Beach - henceforth reverting to its name Postbox Beach, from when a postbox was nailed to a tree and the postie rode along the beach delivering mail.

Unknown to us, as we sat watching a rough dirty green sea, a young local man drowned off Deep Creek, just the other side of the headland; a wave swept him off his kayak. There is no resurrection, not even today.

Do we indeed desire the dead

Should still be bear us at our side?

Is there no baseness we would hide

No inner vileness that we dread?

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.

It took him 17 years to write (the final spurt probably due to reading Chambers' Vestiges, which suggests evolution progresses from simple forms to Homo sapiens). Queen Victoria told him that the poem had helped her deal with Prince Albert's sudden death more than anything apart from the Bible. And by coincidence, an old uni friend sent me his most moving eulogy for his mother and used the Dylan Thomas poem know for such occasions - grief is hard to assuage, but somehow poetry assists.

These guys stuck to the ground:

Easter Saturday

Deep Creek, not that deep

The tiny Leek Lily

Warning Urunga

Winter Senna in Jagun - a beautiful but highly invasive weed, yet people cultivate them. What to do: dig out the entire root system and leave it out of contact with the soil. Cut, scrape and paint the stump or inject it with glyphosate.

Female Golden Orb Weaver Spider, Nephila (Tetragnathidae) with her larder and male (above her back left leg). He gives her a back massage to try and calm her and avoid being eaten. We saw more species of spider in our small Marrickville garden(about 15) than we have in our much larger one here.

Nambucca Storm - it quickly came and quickly went

A walk to Coachwood Falls, Dorrigo

One Red-necked pademelon, one thrush, one April Fool's tick, one leech, hundreds of tadpoles, lyrbirds singing, and the white song of the Never Never for much of the track.

Our C'tte wrap party began on Valla Beach

and continued in the Headland Cafe, with another quiz:

Alice Pung was a lovely guest of the festival – but what is a Pung

a) a simple horse drawn sleigh

b) a plumber’s wrench.

MORRIS GLIETZMAN sold his first story to which magazine?

a) Dolly

b) 17.

A series taken in a Greek Cafe with original interior, a rare one remaining in rural NSW - Big Jim's, The Bridge, Macksville.

Time for a litle gardening now the festival is over.

How would you have done in my literary quiz at BRWF's Saturday Night Live?

8. This festival sits beside the Bellinger River, which one of the following lines come from Robert Gray’s poem ‘A Day at Bellingen’, (the others come from a poem of mine about canoeing down the river) a) Now the reflected water becomes, momentarily, white b) over shadowy fish, submerged forests and rippling grass beds, c) Like hippos, black bulls stand their ground on shifting gravel beds, d) Mountains veer in and out of view, green as ‘in the beginning green’?

9. Charlotte Wood keeps a blog called? a) How to kill a lobster, b) how to shuck an Oyster, c) How to Bombe Alaska, d) How to cook your Goose, e) How to eat and read and be happy?

A great start at Valla Beach 7am with wonderful weather

with surfing legends, Rusty Miller and Derek Hynd (and Taylor Miller). Here am I confessing to my lack of ability.

Derek Hynd modelling – futuristic surf wear. Riding a finless surfboard, he is the star of Jack McCoy's new surf film, Deeper Shade of Blue – which by wonderful synchronicity opened at our local cinema The Majestic, the same day!

Photos of the morning's surfing here.

100 emails a day last Wed & Thurs - a rare chance to get to the sea last week revealed By-the-wind-sailors - rows of them beside a wrack of Blue-bottles and the nudibranch Glaucus.

Coming up !!!

Marathon Reading of Peter Carey's Oscar & Lucinda - kicking off the BRWF this Sunday 18 March, 7am to 9pm Glennifer Hall in the Promised Land.

A charity event for Life without Barriers that help with care and protection for those with disability, mental health, homelessness, youth justice and immigration issues. Glennifer Hall next to the small church Peter Carey helped save and which inspired the book. Peter Carey is the Festival patron and his response to the idea was 'wow'

if you would like to read and be sponsored email info@bellingenwritersfestival.com.au subject Marathon.

In slow motion on the ocean at a discrete distance . . .

the impulse of the eye is to force itself on the form

lines, keel, bow, rigging the skeleton of an engine

constructed from accumulated ideas that swallow oil

drilled out of the Carboniferous Period, with batteries

topped up with vitriol. The effort to leave behind

the current and move and manipulate is an imperfection

of kings, dictators, lawmakers, institutions, careless

followers and our day-to-day disregard for language.

The world opens and closes on this small pale craft.

Reading: March 10, 3pm Coffs Regional Art Gallery, 'The Poetry of Art and the Art of Poetry' - see details. I rose from my sick bed with a high temperature, some microbe from the plateau.

Just back from a reading in Armidale, a quiet place now . . .

The Plateau & Ebor Falls is in full flight.

I read a poem from Field Notes, from 15 years ago

The ground I stand on, buffed hard as nails

and dry enough to burn, is the northern aspect

facing Ebor Falls just wet enough to fall . . .

The drover sits on his saddle inside

a driz-a-bone making an honest living

engrossed in a paperback.

Our car noses in amongst the young beef cattle

meandering the last of the long paddock,

the worst drought in faded memory.

Wollomombi Falls (believed to be the tallest in Australia at one time).

5:44 March 2. I can't get bored of this giant canvas viewed from our deck ~ the picture is continually changing, birds fly across, song irrupts, the sun stares too hard, the sky is tarnished, polished, clouds bulge, eviscerate,vanish, re-appear.

So busy with the festival and the modem dies, a new modem arrives - wrong one. Agggh!!! How did Rome conquer half the world without mobile phones or the net? With less distractions -

"As our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming and a dehumanising merger between man and machine.” Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.