Adventures in Oz: A journal of Deb & Walt's sojourn in Brisbane

Eye of the Beholder

September 4, 2007

There's a groovy new art museum on the bank of the Brisbane River. It's known as GoMA, or the Gallery of Modern Art. Right now are two installations by German artist Katharina Grosse. She uses a spray gun to douse weather balloons and piles of dirt (yes, you read that right - dirt) with colorful swaths of paint. According to an interview with the artist, she 'realized that painting with a brush was restricting her freedom to express [her] discovery about the mysterious quality of paint as it hits a surface.'

Katharina goes to work like she's going to paint a 747. Dressed in white protector suit, aspirator mask and eye shield,  she climbs aboard her waiting cherry picker. Paint whooshes wherever she wants it to go. We watched a video of her doing the installation. It did look like a blast.

Is it Art, and do you Like It? A critic wrote: 'She uses the diffuse impact of a compressor to explore and evince a new and highly dramatic physiognomy for the pragmatic container of the existing architecture.' Very cosmic, right? Ms. Grosse is a big star in the abstract art world and as such is in demand. I'm sure she's a nice person, even if her stuff is hard to fathom.

Yours truly took an art class recently at the Brisbane Institute of Art. It was titled 'Imaginative Drawing,' a fancy name for 'draw something that you make up.' We did some stuff with charcoal, and collage, and silhouettes. It also was pretty abstract, given that what we were trying to draw was invisible.

At the end of the term, the school hosts a show for the work of the students in all its classes. My class of idiot savants dutifully put up our exhibit. My 'piece' was a narrative collage about the experiene Walt and I had of being swooped by magpies during nesting season. It looked a good deal like a comic book, frankly. I couldn't draw a cyclist or a magpie, so I traced images and blew them up on a photocopier. I used scissors and glue stick. Much of the piece was created while I wore my bathrobe. We rolled on the floor when our teacher asked if we wanted to list prices for our works. Puh-leez! People purchase 'Art,' not this amateur crap.

Is it Art, and do you Like It? The Monday after the show, I got a call from the school. Someone had expressed an interest in purchasing 'my magpie piece.' 'You mean, like for money?' I yelped into the receiver. I called the potential patron. 'Oh, I love magpies,' she said. 'Your piece is so whimsical. Such joie de vivre. And the song of the magpie - it's so Till Eulenspiegel.'

Very cosmic, right? When I got to the school, the cold weather had loosened the glue on several critical parts, so I had to borrow a glue stick from a guy at the front desk. My patron was on time, very lovely, and had two hundred dollars Australian in cash  money in her hand. I signed my work (a small oversight), thanked her again, and waltzed out the door before she could change her mind.

Not that I thought she ever would, of course.

FNQ

July 9, 2007

To capture foreign tourist dollars, Cairns has posed itself as Japanese-friendly, a small irony given the wartime defenses we'd seen at The Tanks. In the downtown core are a smattering of luxury clothing emporiums - Gucci, Prada, etc - and health stores selling concoctions made of sea urchin roe and 'essential' shark oil. There's the usual flotsam of cheesy souvenir shops, and Walt asked me to buy him a stubby cooler he fancied. 'I wanted you to buy me a gift' was his explanation (oh, dear. I should surprise him with something once in a while, shouldn't I?). This one sports a collection of Aussie hazard signs with silhouettes of emu, kangaroos, wombats, koalas. Rustic, but it's hard to imagine these critters wandering in the wild anymore.

At a sushi joint for dinner, we perused the small plates clanking by on the metal conveyor belt. An older Japanese couple sat next to us, the gentleman conversing in broken English. His brown face was heavily lined, his golden dental work gleamed through his smile. While their empty plates stacked higher and higher, he urged us to have some of their edamame, assuring us they had 'too much to eat.' He called me Madam, and noticed Walt's relish with sushi and my comparative caution. 'It is so healthy to eat fish,' he said, 'not like white people eating beef and getting fat.' He drew the shape of a big belly with his hands. 'Fish is good,' he went on. 'Fish will make your blood very smooth.'

We drove the notoriously windy Gillies Highway, 19 km that slithers up from Gordonvale to the Atherton Tableland. I rolled down the window and focused on the black ribbon of snaking bitumen. It was raining intermittently, or more accurately, we were driving into and out of clouds pushed up against the ridge. The tableland is very pretty, with cleared swaths of green paddocks, holsteins, and horses. It must have required tremendous effort to clear the land, because it's natural state is jungle. Signs call the forest 'the Wet Tropics.' Here in FNQ, Far North Queensland, there are new smells, a new softness of moisture in the air. We took a walk in Wongabel State Forest and stopped to view the Curtain Fig.

A gravel road leads to the Mareeba Wetlands. A sea eagle has built its nest on top of a high voltage tower. One white head is inside the nest and the other adult bird perches nearby. Surprise! An emu crossed the road 15 metres ahead of us. What an oddity these critters are, their heads like a billiard ball adorned with a sharp beak.

We paid the $10 per head conservancy donation and got a map of the walking tracks from the attendant, a rangy young man in bare feet who smells of beer and cigarettes. Avid about birds, he told us that he and a mate hiked to the sea eagles nest after the fledglings left, to see what animals the birds had eaten. On the ground under the nest were remains of black swans, wallabies, and quolls.

We stayed the night at Port Douglas, north of Cairns and quieter. It's loaded with resorts and pricey restaurants. In a linen tablecloth joint we ordered a snack plate of white bait, inch-long fish that are fried and eaten whole, a fish version of french fries. Now it's Walt's turn to grin as he observes my tentative bites. 'Their little eyes are watching you, De-bor-ah!' he crows. 'They're looking right at you!' Hmmm....somehow this isn't feeling like 'smooth blood.'

Critters watch us, and we must watch for critters - what will the currents bring next?

To read more on marine stingers, click here.

Cairns

(A few stories about a trip we took back in May, after we shifted house and lost our broadband for five weeks...)

  May 10, 2007 -- Cairns is the main portal to the Great Barrier Reef, but on our weekend there, the forecast was for strong winds and high waves. We decided to stay on shore. I was disappointed, but I don't enjoy being cold and seasick. That  first night it rained, a good soaker, and the next morning started with mixed sunny clouds and strong gusts. I was glad I wasn't out on the water tossing my breakfast chum to the fishes. Instead, we spent the day exploring the land-locked grottoes.

We found the boardwalk through the mangroves adjacent to the airport. Popping and snapping sounds came from the ooze, in a random and audible patter. The native prawns were snapping their one claw, made massive from overuse, at other prawns, warning them to stay away from their burrows. On the out-going tide, tiny dark red crabs and thousands of slimy green-yellow whelks were visible on the muddy bed. Of the different species of mangroves, one especially has radical branching roots well up the trunk, so they look like an upside-down coat rack jammed into the muck. It was dark under the canopy, with just a thin wedge of sky above as the trees crowded toward the sunlight. The dense roots were all around, producing a grasping sensation, an interlocking expanse of dark synapses and barely-contained anxieties. I thought: the psychoanalyst's nightmare. It was more than a little creepy.

Outsite the city's core is the arboretum and something called The Tanks. We wandered into one of them. In a back corner, a group of historians were interviewing elderly residents, putting together a history of The Tanks for the city's interpretive center. A bloke was heading out for his smoko but he paused to answer our questions. 'They were built by you guys. You're Americans, right?'

In WW II, the US Navy built a total of five tanks as fuel depots for its warships. The three tanks made of reinforced concrete are now spaces for performing and visual art. Their walls and girders are stained black from the heavy furnace oil, but the floors are miraculously clean. Four inches of water  covered the bottom of the tank, allowing all the oil to be pumped out from the top by gigantic levered pumps. There are leftover bits of machinery, now  engulfed by vines, as well as the earthen barriers built around each tank to contain oil if they were bombed by the  Japanese. Decommissioned in the mid-80s, they sat vacant until the 90s, when city council started their renovation and cut doorways for access to the interiors. History has come full circle - the current show of landscape oils are by three Japanese painters who live in Cairns.

Built on mangrove-lined swamp land, the 'city beach' is black muck decorated with rocks. The city council built a freshwater pool on the Esplanade, right by  the muddy mangrove shore. Here, in the afternoon sun, mermaids swim and pose for photographs.

Briefly...Corinda

June 2, 2007

Apologies for the almost 2-month gap in postings. I would claim field surveillance of the traveling godwits, now in their Yukon breeding grounds, but that begs the truth. We didn't have broadband until May (*@#! Optus!), and then had visitors from the great state of Missouri (Walt's sister and niece).

Our new house in Corinda sits on the corner of Clewley and Clara streets. Being at ground level, it lacks the treehouse feeling of our Sherwood digs, but there's still plenty of foliage around us. The rooms are high-ceilinged with interesting nooks and details. We're particularly grooving on the indoor/outdoor living space adjacent to the kitchen.

It's great to be in walking distance of the Corinda hub. Here's some random shots of the neighborhood and an idle history to match:

Prior to the charting of Oxley Creek in 1823, Aboriginals from the Jagara tribe, part of the Yerongpan clan, lived along the muddy waters. They fed themselves with the bountiful fish, shellfish, and wild duck. Europeans cleared the rich land for farming and pastoral ranches, eventually pushing the Aboriginals out. The 1897 Protection of Aborigines and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act moved the remaining natives to reservations.

It was a wild and woolly place. Angela Francis, an early settler who bought land with her husband in 1863, described the area round their property in Corinda thus: “The land consisted of about seventy acres, quite untouched by human hand. A wild scrub and forest where the Wallabies, Opossums, Native Bears, Iguanas and Snakes made their undisputed home. Thousands of Frogs in the water-holes and Parrots, curlews, Wagtails, Hawks, Butcher-birds, Laughing Jackasses, Satin and Stockwhip birds lived all around us.”

In the 1860s, small farms at Corinda (then known as West Oxley) grew maize, potatoes, and bananas. During the American Civil War, cotton was grown here. Sugar cane was planted but a series of cold winters literally killed the sugar industry in Brisbane.

A rail line was completed from Ipswich to Brisbane in 1884. Shipments of wheat and coal passed through  the suburb on their way to the wharves on the south bank of the Brisbane River. The name Corinda was in use by 1888, probably taken from a surrounding pastoral estate.

The Corinda library began life as the Corinda School of Arts in 1895. It functioned as drama space, library, meeting hall, and emergency relief site during the 1918 influenza pandemic and the Great Depression. It's part of the line of shops and services along Oxley Road. There's a hardware store; a hair salon and a tea parlour; the chemist, the hot bread store, the St Vincent de Paul's Thrift Store; and the pub, current roost of the "laughing jackasses."

The local bowls club sits on a ridge above the Oxley Creek Commons. On Wednesday afternoons, and again on weekends, white-suited members play their genteel game on the manicured greens. Their average age looks to be about 68. The younger generations are tempted in by evenings of Barefoot Bowls, followed by sausage sizzles and amber fluids. When this resumes next summer, Walt and I will make a point to go. Another unique Oz experience in our backyard.

Want to read more about Corinda? Click here.

First Godwits, Now Us

March 30, 2007

An article in yesterday's The Australian tipped us off about the remarkable migratory flight of the bar-tailed godwit, a shorebird found in eastern Australia and New Zealand. These 250 g birds - that's about half a pound, including feathers - fly to the far northern hemisphere each March and April. 

Scientists captured 16 godwits in New Zealand and fitted them with little birdie transmitters. Satellites are now following their movements to the Yellow Sea off the eastern coast of China. The birds will feed and rest for a month or so on the tidal flats before resuming their journey. They'll arrive at their Alaskan breeding grounds by mid-May (click here to see photos of the birds and their flightpath).

On the project website, each bird has a reference number, so you can follow him (or her), and place bets on who reaches Ketchikan first. Four females have set endurance records, flying 10,000 km to the Yellow Sea in six to seven days. This is the equivalent of a round trip drive from Orlando, FL to Seattle. 'The birds did not stop to eat or drink on the first leg of their annual migration from the southern hemisphere to Alaska, the New Zealand Herald reported. Massey University ecologist Phil Battley told the paper scientists had been suspected the birds could fly such distances but this was the first time it had been proved. He said no other creature had demonstrated such a feat of endurance.' Deemed 'clinically obese' from their summer gorging in New Zealand, the birds loose roughly half their body weight after completing each leg of their migration.

Disproving the adage 'birds of a feather flock together,' several godwits seem to have made individual travel plans. One is currently on a Micronesian atoll; one is visiting the Phillipines; and one turned back over Papua New Guinea and is now at a 'staging site' in Queensland, scientific jargon for drinking mai tais on the beach at sunset.

Next Tuesday, Walt and I will undertake our own migratory flight. We're 'shifting house,' in the local vernacular. The owner of this lovely house has returned from her sojourn in Singapore, and we can't extend the lease any further. We're quite sad to leave this place, so charming and alive with birdsong (and bat screeches, and possum thumpings, and gecko burpings). Oh, all the stories that we'll tell...

It's been two months of looking in a tight real estate market, but we've secured a lease on a pleasant house in the adjacent neighborhood of Corinda. It has a nice kitchen, and bifold doors that open onto a side porch. We can walk to the grocery store, the library, the train station. Walt can stay in his carpool to work, and I can cycle to my job at a high school down the road. There'll be new neighbors and new explorations - a lawn bowls club is down the block, plus a loop of Oxley Creek, flush with mangroves.

Still, we are puny humans and no match for the mighty, tiny godwit. It will take two blokes and a truck 8-10 hours to move us a scant 1.44 kilometres. I'll eat heartily, stop for a coffee, and have a beer or two with dinner that night. I refuse to wear a transmitter, but you can follow our pathway on Mapquest or Google Earth. Starting point: 11 Palm Ave, Sherwood. Ending point: 59 Clewley St, Corinda. Postal code: 4075. Continent: Oz, Girt by Sea.