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Merv’s World

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The subtitle of Black, White + Colour is ‘A Biography of Mervyn Bishop Australia’s First Indigenous Professional Photographer’. And of course that’s true, important and commercially sensible to bill the book that way. But its contents provide a more complex if still wonderfully coherent account of what it is to be Merv and the contexts and events which have helped shape him. In my related blog I’ve referred to this as ‘the warp and weft of culture, in plural form, the magic of its assembly and the extraordinary variety of its products.’

I’m particularly interested in this because it has provided a lesson I have had to learn myself, many times and sometimes to my cost.

Naturally you must read the book for a proper account of Merv’s world. (Off you go and buy it. HERE.) Treat this as a taster with a slight twist of emphasis.

• • • • • • • •

HOME

This is the map from the book which describes the road trip Tim and Merv took together to help prepare it, revisiting old stamping grounds and relations, the sites of some of his photographs, RSL and Bowling Clubs — landmarks of north-western NSW, a very special, interesting and not much visited part of Australia. The grey nomads pull in at Goodooga’s springs and might buy an opal or two at The Ridge, but they’ll whip past the steel shutters of Walgett and not spend too much time at Bourke. Byrock’s population is 50. Maybe. It used to be the case that one of them would be a teacher.

This is remote country, and the distances between settled points can seem vast, in fact it might seem that no one lives here, but that would be quite wrong.

Merv was born in Brewarrina (known to anyone who knows it as ‘Bre’, pron. ‘bree’). The Barwon, which when joined with the Culgoa becomes the Darling, teeters along between Walgett and Bourke in great whorls now often barely damp. Bre is half way. Above Walgett the cotton farmers have stripped out the rivers’ flow. When they were left wild this stretch of the Darling was home to an important paddle steamer trade. At Bourke you can still visit the wharf where the steamers used to tie up, now usually 10-15 metres above water level. The Wandering Jew was one of the last to operate. It caught fire at Bre in 1914 and sank.

150 years ago Bre became a hub for that commerce. It had a bank, a courthouse, two hotels, two stores, a regional administrative office, a school. Today it has a population of about 800, from some points of view 30 fairly sparsely settled blocks in the middle of nowhere, but big enough for a swimming pool and a Catholic primary school as well as a government one. Leo Schofield was born here in 1935. His father was one of the publicans.

And it has its fish traps, Bhiamie’s Ngunnhu, Bhiamie being the creator figure of this region’s mythos.

Most of the straight-line barrier in the photo is a comparatively modern contribution. The rest could be 40,000 years old which would make these traps one of the oldest human constructions in the world. That’s the claim. But there is no doubt that the river and its traps — already a fluid junction of several First Nations groups: the Ngemba Weilwan, the Murrawarri and the Yuwaalaraay — would have been major drawcards for festivities, food gathering and other forms of socialising for the dozens of clans spread through what today we think of as northern NSW. A mix of peoples.

In 1886 the Aborigines Protection Association established a mission near Bre on a reserve of 5,000 acres 10 miles east of the town and on the opposite bank of the Barwon. The very first mission in New South Wales, it kept operating until 1966. If you want to know a bit about what it was like [in 1954] you can read Dr. Ruth Latukefu’s recollections here.

Bre Mission kids, sometime between 1932 and 1937: the Reverend Canon A. Leyland Bird

The mission was established initially to deal with/ accommodate/ respond to the number of Aboriginal people camping round Bre and their ‘intemperate behaviour’. It soon became marshalling yards for the problems (and non-problems; just sent, or taken) drawn from an area ranging from Tibooburra, 10 hours drive west from Bre today, to Cobar and Lightning Ridge, half the distance in different directions. The mission was — not my term but a Royal Commission’s — ‘an enforced concentration of Aboriginal people’, a concentration camp. And in that camp were ‘Aboriginal’ people, or ‘Indigenous’ people, or ‘First Nations’ people. But whatever you want to call them, it is a bit like saying ‘European’. They had different languages, different cultures and lore, and different Countries none of which were at Bre. They didn’t always get on. Why would they? A mix of peoples.

Bre was also home to some of the powerhouses of the Aboriginal world. Essie Coffey might be the best known, but Steve Gordon and Tombo Waters lived there as well. Big names, strong leaders of renown. Part of the mix of peoples.

One of my own Bre stories is a memory of giving a talk to the staff at the school where at the time Michael Chamberlain, post-Azaria, was teaching. If he lifted his head once from his newspaper during the time I was speaking I didn’t notice, suggesting that as well as unwonted celebrity he was a man of keen judgment. Part of the mix. Places may be small but they are not without characters.

• • • • • • • • •

Mervyn’s father Minty was the lovechild of a travelling [Punjabi] merchant, Baroo Fazldeen, and Mervyn’s grandmother, Suzannah McCauley Bishop. Suzannah’s mother is listed as Aboriginal in her marriage certificate to Robert Bishop of Melton Mowbray, England. Her father is identified as a labourer named John McCauley, likely an Irishman according to family DNA results. On Mervyn’s maternal side there is a similar pattern of Aboriginal women and White men. (p. 24)

Such ancestries are not uncommon in parts of Australia, especially where there were disproportionate numbers of White men and White women.

• • • • • • • • •

Merv’s mother, a woman who wore a hat when she went out, had a camera, a Brownie Box which Merv started using at 11. He bought a camera of his own when he was 12.

‘We were uptown Blacks’, Merv says. ‘We knew we were kind of special but we didn’t chuck it around saying “We’ve got this” or “We’ve got that”. We would have got a slap.’ But, nonetheless, ‘I think we [Merv and his sister Cynthia] missed a lot of the stuff the other kids copped, racism stuff in town.’ (p. 40, 41)

SCHOOL

Mervyn did well at school in Brewarrina despite a full plate of other interests. ‘Margo Collins and I used to run neck-and-neck for the top of the class,’ said Mervyn. ‘If I came first, I’d get five pounds from dad and if she came first she’d get five pounds from her stepdad. They used to bet on us.’ (p. 51)

But when Merv was a student there Bre Central topped-out at Year 9. After that for Aboriginal boys the trades were an unpredictable possibility, for girls domestic service might have been feasible. For smarties and if you got a leg up, a bank or an office job might be available.

Both Merv’s mother and father were ambitious for him. But it was the interest of the vicar of the local Anglican church where Merv was an altar boy which might have been decisive. At the age of 14 he was sent off to the Holy Trinity Boys Hostel in Dubbo so he could attend the local public high school. Bits of money were put together from various sources — including the efforts of the Dobbyn family — to find the £60 per term boarding fee plus the other costs associated with going to school. He had two mates there from Bre, but of the 60 boarders he was the only Aboriginal kid.

At 14. Late morning on your own catching the steam train from Bre to Byrock. With some patience that would hook you up with the daily diesel from Bourke to Dubbo where you’d arrive in the early evening, home a day away … already an adventure and you hadn’t even started.

And Dubbo: Queen of the Western Plains, with a river and a zoo. Population in June 2021: 43,516, of whom an unusually high 86 per cent (including Glenn McGrath, various famous rugby league players and Dave Mason and the rest of The Reels) had been born in Australia.

Dubbo is on Wiradjuri Country, and at the census 16 per cent of the town’s population described themselves as Aboriginal. In summer that proportion rises as folk come down from the river towns further north to get out of the heat. This is not always to everyone’s taste including that of the local Aboriginal population.

The first two public buildings erected in Dubbo were the police station and the gaol. The Old Gaol remains a major tourist attraction, ‘an appealing oasis in the midst of the Dubbo CBD’ to quote the brochure. Eight men were hanged in its courtyard: a Dane, two Chinese, three Irishmen and two Aboriginal people. A mixture. ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ (in fact Thomas Alexander Browne) wrote Robbery Under Arms while he was Clerk of Courts there.

When I was a regular visitor you could get excellent coffee at Scotty’s in the main drag. It may now be Ha Noi Corner. The Hog’s Breath Cafe where I mistakenly ate once, and I think once only, closed in 2021. It’s the same sort of muddle of cultural influences, borrowings and exchanges that can surprise you in a middle-sized rural centre.

• • • • • • • • •

Merv ‘went into some sort of meltdown’ in his Leaving (11th and final year) exams and failed four of his six subjects missing out on the prospect of a job with the ABC. He went home to Bre.

WORK

He got a break.

Early the year after he left school he was offered a job at the ABC in Sydney, “a general dogsbody” sort of job. Not quite out of the blue, but a pleasant surprise nonetheless. Three months later, bored, he applied for a job as a photographer at the Sydney Morning Herald and got it. Subsequently he had some formal training in a part-time course at the Sydney Tech. Tim Dobbyn, the author, quotes Harry Millen who originated, devised and taught the course as saying, ‘It was most strange to have an Aboriginal in the class.‘ As might be assumed, his work took him to all sorts of places including to the social pages. On page 76 of the book there is evidence that Merv has been snapping at a cocktail party in Rose Bay. The women in the pic look like they may also be thinking, ‘It is most strange to have an Aboriginal in our lounge room.’

Merv had been a prefect. He wouldn’t have cared. He would have giggled about it later as he produced a delightfully embroidered recount.

A colleague at the Herald: “None of us ever thought of him as Aboriginal . … there was a real camaraderie there.” (p.77) This somewhat ambiguous quote is paired with a ho ho story that turns up everywhere in Blackfellaland. In the darkroom — “Hey Bishop, are you there? Are you there Merv Bishop? Smile so we can see you.” Dominance is sometimes spectacularly unaware. And dumb. And wet.

Like run-ins with the police on the basis that he was the Blackfella in a group who were otherwise White; or the continued occasional refusal of service in a bar. And it could turn around. I don’t know that he could count the number of times he has been called a ‘coconut’ or similar. (‘Coconut’? Black on the outside, White on the inside.)

Eight years after beginning at the Herald he took ‘Life and Death Dash’ (see below) the photo which won him the Press Photographer of the Year Award. Mervyn was a C-Grade [pay grade] photographer when he took the award-winning photo and would be a C-Grade photographer when he left three years later in 1974. … Even absent the contest win, it seems incredible that Mervyn would not progress to at least a B-Grade level by 1974. “There was a glass ceiling for Aboriginal photographer Mervyn Bishop at the Herald,” Merv said. (p. 87) Later Tracey Moffatt asked him why he didn’t stack on a turn. “I had to maintain a sense of propriety in the hope that maybe other Aboriginal people would be able to gain employment there as well.” (p. 89) I had entered the assimilated world of the White institution. There were very few Aboriginal people in any profession and hardly any that I could share my experience with in Sydney. My Aboriginality was in different places, but there was no place for it at the Herald. (p. 188)

He left, and applied for a job as a liaison officer with the newly established federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs. The interviewers were concerned about whether he could relate sufficiently to Aboriginal people living on reserves and in impoverished communities. “Have you had much to do with Aboriginals? Mervyn recalls being asked. (p. 91) Eventually he was employed as a low-paid clerical assistant to take photographs.

During these years he had married Elizabeth Johnston whose mother believed her English ancestry could be traced back to the days of the Magna Carta. She asked Merv one day how much money it would take for him to walk away.

ART

The thing is, Mervyn was never in the art world, he was a photojournalist. (Tess Allas, art curator and champion of his successful nomination for the Red Ochre Award for a lifetime achievement in the arts by an Indigenous person. p. 150)

The ’80s for Merv were a period of mooching round between different jobs, a number of which were tenuously associated with education. He began hanging round Tranby College, ‘a space [in Glebe, very inner Sydney] for Mob to gather, share stories, and gain further skills and knowledge through community programs, events and accredited training’. He needed the use of a darkroom for a project he was working on, and of course he would start chatting because that’s what he does. Merv is a world-class chatter. He and Andrew Dewdney, an English academic who was working at Tranby at the time and who had become a mate, were putting up an exhibition of student work in a shopping centre. One of the panels included a print of the Whitlam/ Lingiari photo. Merv said, ‘That’s my photo,’ He wasn’t upset about it being used. It was more pride. (p. 120)

Dewdney … argues that the Tranby experience enabled Mervyn to look back on his archive and reassess his own work and heritage. ‘He could look at that collection not merely as Joe Photographer but as an Aboriginal photographer.’ (p. 130) ‘[Tranby’, Dewdney says] ‘was where he was challenged around his cultural heritage and Aboriginality.’ (p.119)

His first major show was ‘In Dreams’ in 1991 at Sydney’s Australian Centre for Photography. Tracey Moffatt was asked to curate it. ‘I thought I have only seen this one great image of his. But [when she started digging through all the material at Merv’s home at Oatley] I found this treasure trove of images.‘ (p. 131)

The show opened the day his wife died. Tim [Bishop, Merv’s son] said the ACP was packed that night and if you hadn’t known his mother had died that afternoon you wouldn’t have caught on. ‘I truly think that some people have a calling, and one of Dad’s cards that he plays so well is that of a showman … to this day I don’t know how he was able to do it. ‘ (p.133)

‘In Dreams’ toured 17 Australian venues and went to England. ‘So much of becoming known as a photographer has to do with being established within the history of photography. This means getting your work seen in an exhibition, and, more importantly, being published as well written about.’ Sandy Edwards reviewing the exhibition in Filmnews. (p. 135)

There were some more landmarks along the way, including some international recognition and a solo exhibition at the AGNSW. But two others stand out vividly.

The first was in concert with the NSW State Records office. Susan Charlton, its Creative Producer, recognised this image as one which was also held by the Records Office during one of the more exotic turns of events in Merv’s life: his story, illustrated, at the Sydney Opera House with him narrating. William Yang, Chinese-Australian artist, with his hand on the wheel.

This is Merv’s maternal grandparents plus flowergirls on their wedding day at Angledool in 1925, colourised and with birds inserted.

The Records office had 1000 images which had been collected over the years from the Aboriginal Welfare Board which they wanted to develop into an exhibition.

This was the mission: ‘Though the policies of successive governments aimed to dismantle their culture, Aboriginal people have always found ways to reunite with family and community and to create contemporary links to their culture. Today the Board’s written records and photographs are valuable for the leads and clues they may provide to help in this process, creating a new purpose and place for the photographs within contemporary Aboriginal life.

‘Decades after the photographs were taken, they still produce mixed emotions for Indigenous viewers — from the delight of seeing rare evidence of community and culture to the sad reminder of loss and separation. Because of these sensitivities, the entire exhibition process involved the consent, advice and support of many strands of the Indigenous community, including the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs for guidance and protocols; an advisory group for ongoing input and support; and the approval and contribution of individuals and communities represented in the Board’s photos.​​’ (From the catalogue which can, and should, be viewed HERE.)

But the real stroke of genius was to have Merv along not just to take photos at this extremely popular and important activity (over two years visiting 17 regional centres), but to just be himself, greeting, introducing, facilitating. What a VERY good idea.

The second was a commission to take portraits of 22 of Sydney’s Aboriginal Elders for the Australian Museum. ‘I always think: Do a picture that they would like as much as me.‘ (The Bishop Theory of Art, p. 176) And this proved to be the case. Here they are: huge, but warm, relaxed, comfortable, feeling at their best, representatives of a living vibrant culture.

‘In this startling image, composition, contrast, and Aboriginal social commentary combine. It is a classic example of photojournalism that has since transgressed its original context and come to insinuate the impact of religious missions within Aboriginal Australia and, in particular, on the Stolen Generations.’ AGNSW art note

Merv: ‘There was only one Blackfella there that day and he was behind the camera.’

THE BARRICADES

‘Mervyn didn’t charge the barricades,’ [Hetti Perkins, a distinguished art gallerist says.] ‘Instead he went under or around them to get where he needed to be.’ (p. 200)

Mervyn’s story is … a caution against easy assumptions at a time when race and racism occupy large swathes of public discourse. He cut his own path, defying at times the expectations of both White and Aboriginal people. Mervyn is often celebrated as a chronicler of Indigenous Australians but sees his body of work as much broader. He resists drawing too large a message from his life and his images, yet he inescapably stands as an Australian treasure. (Tim Dobbyn, the author, p. 9)

Random Events

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A screenshot displaying blog traffic data with China as the top country of origin.

A screenshot of half a day’s worth of blog traffic.

A pattern that started 5/6 months ago. A whole lot of new customers in China … interested in the Australian bush, Lake Eyre, travel in Japan, family history, Warrnambool, hyper processed food, Aboriginal art. You name it really.

Isn’t that good I thought. Genuine cross-culturalism. Absorbed by the details of how other people live. That is proper preparation for an … er hem … increasingly globalised world.

Didn’t think anything more about it till I had dinner recently with a friend with his own classy website, the sine qua non of finding out about Australian film stars from other times. He asked me how my traffic from China was these days. Remarkably strong I replied. That’s great he said, and a real public service. Training Large Language Models is very much an activity of the moment. No I expostulated. (Think: big noise.) No. Come on. Surely not. My blog? What the hell would they want with that?

Your ‘blog’? ‘Your’? His voice heavy with irony. That seems to imply a) something about ownership, and b) that the vacuum cleaners which service LLMs would have the faintest interest in what they’re hoovering up. It’s volume that matters baby. QUANTITY is the name of the game.

And he’s right of course. You might even think, as someone suggested a blog or two ago, that the current author is AI. You’re implicated even when you’re not.

So ni hao Chinese LLMs. I would like to provide some code which would cause you to choke but I’m not that up-to-date. So I’ll just wave as I sail past with my eyes closed.

••••••••

‘So curious that such a wealthy man [Elon Musk] never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book; pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems to be totally uneducated. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the “most wealthy” person in the world.‘

— Joyce Carol Oates on X (Twitter)

••••••••

And, bad luck LLM, this is just a collection of bits and pieces (like the tweet above which happened to catch my eye) from the last few months, except — chronologically — in one case. This.

Two people enjoying breakfast at a cafe, with one showing a surprised expression while the other smiles, with a large plate of food in front of them.

Marge and I having breakfast at Lou’s Cafe in Kempsey several decades ago. (Still there. Just checked. With breakfasts like that you’d think all their customers would have passed on to a better land.)

A masterpiece from the master, Mr Mervyn Bishop. It’s included because I recently found it again and because the next blog is to be about Merv and the wonderful new book about him and his work by Tim Dobbyn. A teaser. [Hear that LLM, a teaser. Know what that is? No you don’t do you. Hah! Ah you do. 😵‍💫]

••••••••

There was the Dogs’ triumph in the VFL. Premiers.

A crowd gathered on the football field after a match, with spectators in the stands and the scoreboard visible in the background.

Just here we are at the Western Oval for a Semi, a shellacking of the Frankston ‘Dollies’. Dollies. Even if their protonym is Dolphins, you still can’t call them ‘The Dollies’. You can’t. It’s just not on. (‘Go Dollies.’ 😫🥴🤢) But the point of the photo is the masses gathered round the huddle, the masses who have ambled onto the ground and who will again, multiplying rapidly, at half time to have a kick of a hundred footies. Proper footy behaviour at proper footy.

A young Australian rules football player posing for a photo with two fans wearing team scarves, smiling in front of a tent backdrop.

This is Poults. Poults, before the Grand Final with fans. Just come off from the warm-up. Caleb Poulter, a good-looking boy and slender, who walks, and runs, with his toes turned out like a ballerina. Originally notable for his prodigious mullet and hard core fades to inches above his ears. These were subsequently removed which made him easier to distinguish from several of his lookalike team mates. Not as fast as Oskar, but fast. Throws himself into it. Can take surprising marks in the middle of packs, and on this occasion nailed two very difficult set shots. For all those reasons, and the fact that he has to deal with being called Caleb, we love him.

But it is Footscray who are this year’s VFL premiers, the Seconds, the ‘Reserves’ of the Western Bulldogs. He is in the Firsts’ bottom 10 from whom five are chosen in any given week. He might have had ten games this year.

We now have to say he was in the Firsts’ bottom ten. Along with JJ, he’s been de-listed. Cut. Jonesy and others have retired. Jamarra has been exported in a somewhat ambiguous gesture — possibly good will, possibly good riddance — to the Suns. The Dogs got nothing during the trade period. And they have dumped Poults! What the hell!!! What were they thinking!!

I don’t know exactly what being de-listed would be like, but you’d have to pick yourself up off the floor pretty smartly. The community around which you’ve built your life and your identity has just ejected you. You’re gone. Poults! Mate. You’ve left a hole in our hearts at least.

••••••••

A person standing beside a large pineapple sculpture, surrounded by palm trees and a clear blue sky.

There was a visit to Queensland. One of our friends has tried to insist that this isn’t a real pineapple.

We experienced and admired the sinuous lines of a rainforest:

A close-up view of a unique buttress root from a large tree in a rainforest, showcasing its wavy, elongated shape with surrounding foliage and fallen leaves on the ground.
A person standing next to a large tree in a lush rainforest, surrounded by dense greenery.
A large monitor lizard climbing up a tree trunk in a forested area, surrounded by green foliage and dappled sunlight.
A coastal carpet python slithering across rocks and grass, basking in the sun.

A buttress root; a very large fig tree; a monitor scrambling away from us at pace; and a 2.5m coastal carpet python slithering across the rocks to bask in the sun. Non-venomous and excellent pets: that’s what they say.

••••••••

A large group of people gathered outdoors, smiling and raising their arms in celebration, surrounded by trees and a campfire setting.

Oh, and The Camp. The Camp, The Camp: once a year, Melbourne Cup weekend. The drumming and dancing hordes descend on the North Otways to have a transcendent experience, and generally it seems they do. “The best four days of my year.” That’s what she said. (A participant, not the organiser.) New Zealanders, Western Australians, Chileans, Columbians, someone from Singapore (for this purpose!), someone from Xinjiang.

They drum.

A group of people gathered in a circle, participating in a drumming workshop outdoors, surrounded by trees and green grass.

They dance.

A vibrant performance featuring several dancers dressed in colorful costumes, showcasing traditional dance moves in a lively setting with decorations and musical instruments in the background.

They do both at the same time.

A vibrant group of people performing a drumming and dancing activity outdoors in a grassy area surrounded by trees.

And, eventually, it’s over. (Exhalation of breath.) Till next year.

A storage space featuring two orange chairs and three drums, one with an orange placed on top. The background shows stacked camping gear.

••••••••

And, last day of school. Ever.

(13 years ago …)

A young girl with curly hair, wearing a checkered school uniform, smiles at the camera while sitting in a colorful room with art supplies and family photos in the background.

You could think chronologically. You know, where did those years go? That type of thing. But a moment’s reflection indicates that quite a lot happened, both incident and accident, during those 13 years and not just to the girl in question.

Or you could be inclined to think where’s that little cutie gone? Why don’t kids stay the same, somewhere between 5 and 8 always? And that’s fairly pointless too. Genuinely wasted energy.

But I did get a shock when we got that photo. I suddenly remembered what a big step this one is, and not just for her.

Could you possibly be ready for this? Can anyone? No more teachers, no more timetables, a sudden withdrawal of all the structures that have held you in place. You could go crazy. That’s an option. Or you could withdraw into yourself and the shelter of home.

As a country boy who wanted further education that last wasn’t an option for me: I couldn’t stay home. I had to leave and that was generally understood. And I remember, like it was yesterday, the tremendous load which seemed to lift when my parents drove out the drive of Queens College leaving me behind. (My parents may have been feeling very much the same. I don’t think I was much fun in my late teens.) I could get on with my life, unconstrained. And, at the age of 17, I absolutely thought I was ready to do so. I had no doubts.

But, apart from everything, what did I know? The world is at your feet, but the closer you look the more like a morass it can seem. There are so many bits and pieces. So much detail. Do you know not to put a woollen jumper in a hot dryer? Do you know how often to change your sheets and for that matter, your underwear? Do you know not to vacuum wet material that will clog up the machine? So you want a car, do you know how to look after it? What type of petrol does it use? Do you even know how to open the petrol cap? Can you do your tax?

That’s the trivia, but the critical trivia, sometimes called life skills (and they should be in CAPITAL LETTERS).

My father wrote me a letter, quite a long letter, which he gave me just before they drove off. At the time I took it as an artefact of the things I wanted to leave behind. Not necessarily its contents, although at the time if I’d been as smart as I thought I was I would have understood it as advice to himself, if 50 years too late. It was good advice, solid advice, even if the style was oddly distant … as though he’d never met me.

“How would you like it yourself? is no bad rule. The positive side is even more important — noting and encouraging the shy person, bringing the whole circle into conversation … Ask questions, don’t make assertions. Be constructive rather than critical. Especially never tease children nor make fun of them. … Truth is many-sided, and therefore there is always a great need for tolerance and to attempt to appreciate other points of view of others. Don’t be afraid to differ, but let your differing be a matter of principled non-conformity and not just wilful eccentricity.

‘Women will intrigue you and often puzzle you. Interest in sex is natural, normal and right.   …

        REDACTED         

… Courtesy everywhere is most important — in prompt answers to correspondence, keeping faith in little things, acknowledging all the services given to one, the returning of books and so on. Don’t be a gossip.’

And so on indeed. Perhaps 1500 words. Very Dad, and I understood it as such and was appreciative of the gesture. But it was 1967, and I was 17 with the whole world in front of me.

None of this advice was about life skills, unless you count ‘Make light of injuries sustained’. It was all about relationships and human interactions. And you hope quite a bit has been learnt about those ever fluid mysteries by 17. But who’s ever got a fix on them, even after 70 years of practice?

By 17 you might have had your heart broken. I’m pretty sure that should be seen as a useful enrichment of your emotional education, widening your landscape and signalling business you might have to learn to manage, toughening you up in useful ways. But it is hardly something to encourage.

In another blog I have written: “Perhaps everyone has stories to tell of their 20s: the dangerous years, the careless years, when you knew everything, alert to neither Scylla nor Charybdis, scarcely aware of their existence so immersed are you in your own immediate framework of concerns — relationships, friends, trying to find a job, brooding about who you are and what you should be doing.” None of this takes 10 minutes. It might be 10 or 15 years before things shake down into some sort of stable shape.

Looking outwards from the Late Teen Ledge, a relationship is just one of the big three along with a job and somewhere to live. (The need for friends I have taken for granted.) But is a spouse and house still a benchmark?

When one of my sisters was about this age (a long time ago now) it was fashionably correct for a young woman to be engaged at 19, married at 20 and a mother at 21. She hit the trifecta of what might be seen as a protective social ritual, but frankly how spooky. We should be glad that at least some expectations change and quite dramatically. That’s one.

The blog I referred to was part of a series about our choice to build a house. By ourselves that is. We did, and with our 58 acres of land it cost $11,752-ish, equivalent today to $102,124. We built it for complex reasons only one of which was cost. We started with just $1000 (prize money for a film) and were able to pay the rest off as we went. This is an unsuitable comparison for many reasons, but at the end of September this year the median house price in Australia was approximately $929,495, with capital cities having a median of about $1,068,696 and regional areas around $715,916. Might you have to be a millionaire to own a house now? Well … maybe. In the US the median age of first-time homebuyers in 1990 was 28. It is now 40.

And you can only assume job churn, and that where your thinking starts at 17 or 18 will probably be nowhere near some of the places you end up. You are likely to have had 8 or 9 jobs by the time you’re 35, some of which you probably had never even heard of when you were a late teenager.

And then, perhaps speaking as an older person, you lift your eyes a bit higher and see the monsters on the horizon, the Creatures of the News: the predations of climate change, AI, social media, the wars, regional espionage, appalling politicians.

Let’s lower them again. Quickly. A clinical psychologist who spends most of her time with 20 somethings suggests: “Young adults may no longer have work and love sorted out in their 20s, but they can use their early adult years to build the kinds of skills and relationships they will still feel good about as they age. This is what we ought to be telling them. They’re not delayed or damaged or doomed. They’re digging in. I don’t expect my 20-something clients to have it all. I do expect them, and 20-somethings everywhere, to become happier and healthier over time, as they become more likely to have—and do—what makes people happier and healthier.” (Meg Jay ‘We’re Thinking About Young Adulthood All Wrong’ The Atlantic 15/11/25) After digging through the hot air and the failure to confront the facts of biology and reproduction, that all seems like a very good idea. Let’s say the arc of life is long but — generally, more often than not — it bends towards stability and improvement. We have to believe that.

Finally, it is important for me at least to note that something reciprocal is going on. That might have been what gave me the biggest shock. The girl in the pic is a kid. And isn’t. And that ‘isn’t’ requires a recalibration of our relationship, a different sort of equilibrium, increasingly and over time, as two adults. Over time. But, yes, that is what’s required. Lord almighty.

§§§§§§

Advice is a tricky and troubled genre, often being simply a waste of time (not that that in any way limits the immense volume of advisory endeavours). So what would I say to Rom? Be courageous. Give things a go. Be adventurous in thought, word and deed. Work hard. Exercise. I could say all that and I’d be right.

I could also say, stay friends with your grandparents. Be nice to them. They won’t be round for that much longer. But that’s special pleading rather than advice.

Maybe best — if you want some advice we’re always willing to try to help. Yeah that would probably be it. That, and the assurance that whatever happens we at the very least will still love you.

••••••••

A child taking a photo of two adults posing in front of a red brick wall, with a stroller nearby.

In a lane near the market. And they think they’re going to keep kids off social media …

Kati Thanda – Lake Eyre

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Try to look at this blog on a desk top if you can. Phone screens simply will not do the pics justice. The introductory material is here.

‘The bush holds much more than the eyes can see.
Photographers seek to capture it, filmmakers record it, but what they bring back is mere imagery. Beyond the image, another world lies.‘ (Nicholas Rothwell, Ilkara)

But the image still has power: to startle and surprise, to intrigue and expand your perspective and sense of wonderment.

I wondered if we were going to see something like this. (Click here and watch it move.)

A dry riverbed with scattered branches and a small flow of muddy water, surrounded by sparse vegetation.

Wouldn’t that have been out of the box! But we didn’t. We got this close to Kati Thanda South. It is salt, not water, that we’re looking at.

A close-up view of a green bush in a dry, arid landscape, with a vast salt flat visible in the background under clear skies.

From the air like this …

Aerial view of a vast, shimmering salt lake with intricately shaped patterns and brown land surrounding it.

While we were there, water which would possibly fill the southern lake from the floods north of Innamincka was on its way down the Cooper. This stolen photo provides a rather thrilling update. That’s it. The real thing. The Cooper entering Kati Thanda South — a most unusual event.

Aerial view of a dry, expansive landscape with shallow water channels meandering through the sandy terrain, under a clear blue sky.

Our views were mostly from the air.

A detailed map showing the regions around Lake Eyre, including marked locations and routes, as well as the Tropic of Capricorn.

We flew from William Creek to Birdsville in the late afternoon, at about 800-1000m, and were able to see how the water was creeping in. We flew back early the next morning, and very low, 150-200m, following the Diamantina and Warburton through Goyder Lagoon to one of the northern entry points to the lake.

And this is what it looked like initially. (You can click on any of the photos in the galleries of three or two to enlarge them individually.)

Aerial view of a vast, arid landscape with scattered vegetation and winding paths, showcasing the dry terrain and sparse greenery.
Aerial view of arid desert landscape featuring a large, dry salt lake surrounded by earthy tones of brown and beige, with a clear blue sky above.
Aerial view of a vast, arid landscape with subtle texture variations in earthy tones.

And then …

Aerial view of a winding river flowing through a stark desert landscape, with blue sky above and distant salt flats visible.
Aerial view of a dry, cracked landscape with white salt flats and a winding salt channel reflecting soft pastel colors.
Aerial view of a winding river in a dry landscape, showing contrasting colors of water and earth.

Aerial view of the expansive salt flats of Kati Thanda with a blue sky reflecting on the water's surface.

Aerial view of a vast landscape featuring shimmering salt flats and patches of water under a clear blue sky.

Aerial view of a reflective landscape, likely featuring water and light reflections, with textured patterns on the surface indicating natural formations.
Aerial view of reflective water surface with clouds casting shadows, showcasing the textures and patterns of the landscape below.

Some of this may have been cloud reflections. We don’t know and neither did anyone else. But that’s what we saw, us and the camera.

Aerial view of winding rivers and salt flats in a vast, semi-arid landscape under a clear blue sky.
Aerial view of a winding river system surrounded by various landforms and vegetation under a clear blue sky.

Aerial view of a vast, textured landscape featuring winding rivers and patches of water, with dry areas and unique formations evident.
Aerial view of a winding river flowing through a dry, undulating landscape with sparse vegetation and distant salt flats.

Aerial view of a lush landscape featuring wetlands, red soil patches, and green vegetation under a clear blue sky.
Aerial view of scattered trees casting shadows on a light green, marshy landscape.

And below is a gibber desert (the stony edge of the Simpson) … with channels which have recently run through it!

Aerial view of a vast landscape featuring a mix of red and green vegetation, with a prominent stream cutting through the terrain.
Aerial view of a unique landscape featuring a mix of reddish-brown and green vegetation, with winding waterways visible in the foreground.

And Birdsville. Population 110. For the annual races 8-9,000. Red dirt country: but on this day in such vivid green. It is the Diamantina at right. The plume of steam from the town’s artesian bore is in the top left hand corner. The water comes out of the ground at a constant 98C.

Aerial view of a small town with a runway, roads, and nearby waterways, showcasing green landscapes with patches of water.

The next morning we went back the other way, lower and following various water courses.

Aerial view of lush green landscape intersected by a winding river, showcasing a scenic and expansive natural habitat.
Aerial view of a green landscape with distinct patterns created by fields and trees, showcasing shadows cast by natural features in the sunlight.

At right above, meeting the Diamantina are the famous longitudinal sand dunes of the Simpson desert, usually a vast sea of orange and magenta.

There were these big intermittent bodies of water with their extraordinary shapes and colours.

Aerial view of a landscape with winding watercourses and patches of dry land, showing a mix of green vegetation and sandy areas under a clear blue sky.
Aerial view of Kati Thanda South, showcasing elongated land formations surrounded by water under a clear blue sky.

The Goyder Lagoon.

Aerial view of textured green landscape with visible water channels, showcasing the unique topography of a wetland area.
Aerial view of a green landscape with winding water channels and patches of vegetation, showcasing the vast and intricate geography of the area.

And the Diamantina which crossing state boundaries has become Warburton Creek splitting into myriad channels and then re-forming.

Aerial view of a meandering river surrounded by lush green vegetation and sandy terrain, highlighting the natural landscape.
Aerial view of winding rivers surrounded by lush vegetation, showcasing the intricate patterns created by the waterways cutting through the landscape.

We went looking for birds and did find some. At left is a collection of pelicans not so far from the shores of the lake (at right).

Aerial view of a winding river surrounded by lush greenery and trees, with a group of birds visible along the water's edge.
Aerial view of a salt lake meeting arid land, showcasing contrasting textures of water and dry earth.

But the remarkable scale and geography of the whole — from our vantage point — didn’t lend itself to a focus on wild life. It was there absolutely no doubt, but this was a different sort of life.

A vast landscape showcasing a flat, reflective surface under a clear blue sky, evoking a sense of tranquility and expansiveness.

Aerial view of a vast landscape featuring a shimmering body of water reflecting the sun, surrounded by textured land patterns.

Aerial view of a tranquil water surface reflecting light, with a subtle gradient from green to gray, depicting the vastness of Kati Thanda South.

The transcendent type.

Weather

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We arrived on Monday. Tuesday was one of the wettest and coldest days ever recorded in Adelaide: a top of 8C with 85mm of rain not to mention wind gusts of over 100kmh. We sheltered in the gallery finding, as anticipated, ‘Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940’. Fifty of them. A movement. Ma préférée:

Hilda Rix Nicholas, born Ballarat Victoria, L’Australienne (1926), probably painted while she was in Brittany. She went to school at Merton Hall and earned money from time to time by providing illustrations for that seminal periodical The School Paper. George Nicholas, an Australian soldier, saw other work which she had had to leave behind in Étaples at the outbreak of the First World War. He decided he wanted to get in touch and found her in London in September 1916. They married on the 7th October and had a honeymoon lasting three days before he returned to the Western Front. He died there on the 15th November. Her father played football for Carlton.

However fascinating, a digression. We are on weather, its confounding variety and its consequences.

We had left a state without an autumn break for the third dry year, desert-like conditions in some of its regions and just the thinnest of grass elsewhere. We were going to look at floodwaters, so immense that they could travel up to 2,000 kms without being absorbed in their path by endless deep cracks and waterholes, salt pans, flat plains and relentless evaporation. How fast? Depending on the terrain somewhere between one and ten kilometres an hour. A flow? More of a slow ooze.

Just 80 million years too late, we were going to look at the remnants of an inland sea. Kati Thanda or Lake Eyre provides the lowest point on the continent at 15.5m below sea level, and among the flattest. Its high point, well over 100kms from the low point, is 15m below sea level, a height gain of 50 cms. And this is where the water from a catchment area considerably bigger than Germany, the Low Countries, France and Spain combined, one-fifth of Australia, flows. Except that it doesn’t. Most of the time. The Macumba, the Warburton, the Georgina, the Diamantina, Cooper Creek, the great waterways of the area, are most frequently dry or reduced to intermittent waterholes.

Every three years or so water reaches the lake, which is actually two lakes — South (the enormous one) and North (the far bigger one). That water rarely lasts beyond a month or two. This is desert country, the most arid part of Australia with each year at least six months of searing evaporative heat. The lake has filled three times in 175 years. The last was in 1974 … before I was 30.

There are lots of reasons why this is unsurprising. One is its dimensions: around 180 kms north-south and about 80 kms east-west, 9,700 square kilometres, the second largest salt lake in the world. In parts it can be 6m deep when full but the average depth is more usually 3-4m.

Flows restore what has been called an ‘invertebrate swamp’ to life. The water resurrects frogs, fish, prawn-like creatures, crabs and other amphibious species. These in turn provide feeding grounds for a wide variety of bird life: pelicans, gulls, stilts and stints, sandpipers, terns, even black swans. How do they know!! Just how do they know? And for that matter how do these these things stay alive in any form during the decades when the lake is dry, or for that matter when it becomes hypersaline during the process of evaporation. I am interested to discover that the pink bands visible in the shallows of the lake are the consequences of a particular salt-friendly algae. This can have dramatic results. (Not my photo, but you can see the bands in my photos which appear in the next blog.)

I knew that there had been massive floods in northern and western Queensland round Christmas time, and that it had hardly stopped raining since. That water had to go somewhere.

We heard a super-excited scientist talking about what was happening to the lake on ‘Late Night Live’. The next day an ad for an APT tour of Kati Thanda – Lake Eyre landed in my Spam. It was a sign. We needed to go.

But first we had to get there.

• • • • • • •

The orange arrows on the map at left refer to places mentioned in the blog. This is Kym our guide and driver who did everything and extra well.

We’re on a 4WD bus/ truck, comfortable and warm, good on bitumen if a bit rocky on the dirt and corrugations. ‘We’, 19 members of a very defined demographic in terms of age, class and ethnicity, the heart and soul not to mention the cash registers of the travel industry. It was easy and well designed with plenty of comfort stops. Excellent guide. Etc.

• • • • • • •

The country immediately north of Adelaide is devoted to feeding its citizens. Fertile plains full of vegetables, fruit comes from elsewhere but eggs, chicken and pork are all produced here. It’s already flatland and under some pressure from the city’s northern stretch, Two Wells already almost a suburb.

But dry.

After passing the top of St Vincent Gulf one of the first towns you come to is Snowtown which has a Big Blade for you to look at, but which will be known forever as the town with the bodies (11, such a lot) in the barrels in the bank vault. If you must, you can be reminded about the story and its horrific intimations here. The town discussed changing its name (to ‘Rosetown’) but didn’t.

Wind turbines at work, big blades spinning hard, began appearing. These are six of the 1300 near Port Augusta which also has two of the largest solar farms in Australia and the first of South Australia’s seven Big Batteries (‘opened’ in the presence of Elon Musk).

Port Augusta is home to the now de-commissioned coal-fired power station which for decades provided almost all of South Australia’s electricity.

At present 77% of all SA’s power is generated renewably. It is intended that this be 100% by 2027. It can be done.

By Port Augusta we’re in the arid lands, just here in fact we’re in the town’s Arid Lands Botanic Gardens. And we’re at the end of the Spencer Gulf after which the water courses become so nondescript they don’t have a name until, after several hundred kilometres, you get to Lake Torrens, customarily a salt pan.

But this point has other significance. For millennia Barngala and Nukunu people would have stood here looking north-east at what the perambulations of two giant rainbow serpents had left behind. In 1802 it was Matthew Flinders. This blog is very much in favour of Matthew Flinders for reasons some of which are explained here. But one is that he didn’t consider naming those ranges after himself.

We left early next morning as we did every morning. It was a lovely morning.

Almost immediately saltbush and bluebush country.

Through the Pichi Richi Gap, and then there’s Quorn.

Once a railway hub that required spending a night in order to transfer from one train gauge to another — train transport has been so profoundly important to the white version of this area — Quorn has four hotels like this one and not much else. It makes its money from a steam train ride up and back through the Gap, entirely scenic. It also has a popular cafe devoted to dishes made from quandong, native peach, and just a little surprising. But it also has a collection of built memorabilia decked out in South Australia’s sandstone ochre and brick maroon. This is the Town Hall.

And then Kanyaka. (These blue skies are deceptive. It was at least three layers cold.)

Kanyaka Station was selected in 1852. Two years after, Hugh Proby the English aristocrat responsible, died aged 24 trying to cross the Willochra Creek in a flash flood. It’s a story I’ve expanded here, a story most emphatically about weather and its exigencies — an early ‘rain will follow the plough‘ story. That very creek, or its bed at least, is below right.

But it was good to see those muscular remnants again.

And then Parachilna, tethered population somewhere between 2 and 16. Activity: the Prairie Hotel, owned by the local cattle station owner, ‘understated iconic landmark and legendary destination’.

Most of us ate a delicious meal of home-made damper, smoked butter, emu pate, camel sausage, sliced kangaroo fillet, locally-cured ham and salad washed down with beer made in the hotel’s brewery. A completely unexpected touch of gourmet provender.

Now, more than 600 kms north of Adelaide, Farina, another of the several dozen towns on our route representative of so much ambition but dilapidated by the reciprocal impact of drought and the closure of a train line.

Farina is being restored at a gentle pace by voluntary labour.

Grey Nomads are apparently among those who choose to spend a fortnight here rebuilding the stone walls or manning the classy store or helping bake the bread and other goods which come out of the wood-fired underground bakery.

The plans on display provided for a town of 2-3,000. That never happened.

This general goods store was operating in 1987, the end of its 70-year history. Now 40 years later its site is scarcely discernible. Two or three piles of rubble mark its rough dimensions. It’s startling how decisive this process is.

Marree Station … and its line. That line extends past the platform but not very far. The last train to Marree was in 1987. There were issues about varieties of gauge — the distance between the lines, a moment’s thought will clarify what such differences might mean. Problems. And there were questions about the best route north. Marree lost. Then there was the weather: long droughts. Isolation. Marree, 46 metres above sea level, the beginning of both the Birdsville and Oodnadatta Tracks, an important Outback destination. A sort of whitefellas dreamtime.

The pub. There might have been 200 people enjoying it the night we were there. Perfectly acceptable food and a comfortable cabin. Backpackers provide the staff for these enterprises. Last Christmas this hotel employed 45 of them.

Marree is also home to the Lake Eyre Yacht Club, a real thing, with strong and lively views about who can use the lake and how. With the filling of the lake, these will no doubt surface again soon and vigorously.

Over the road are remnants (a wooden frame and thatched roof) of the first mosque built in Australia, a reminder of the place of Afghani cameleers in this cultural landscape.

The pic below is here just because I like it. Marree’s main street at night with two people meeting under the light.

On to the dirt of the Oodnadatta Track, 200 kilometres of corrugations to William Creek.

And this chap, a doctor being ‘[Where’s] Wally’, who was riding a postie’s bike some vast distance soliciting financial support for traumatised soldiers of whom his brother was one.

Also on the way was one of Australia’s 5000 mound springs naturally venting the water of the Great Artesian Basin.

Mineralised water was oozing out of the side of this mound at various points and pooled at the top where the native grass is growing, a reminder that water flows underground as well as above ground, and that this too is affected by the weather.

One-fifth of Australia is also the catchment area for the Great Artesian Basin, the natural phenomenon which provides the lifeline for the living creatures, human and otherwise, who have made and now make their home here. Even underground its water tends to flow towards the lake area. Science suggests that some of the water coming out of the bores and springs in its southern regions might be two million years old. I have mentioned in the other blog how it comes out of the ground at Birdsville at 98C.

To go on the tour you had to wear a uniform.

Coward Springs, another oddity in the middle of absolutely nowhere, also survives on its spring. A modest date farm and tourist stop selling date ice cream and date milkshakes as well as dates. Why Coward Springs? Well, it was named after Thomas Coward who was a member of Warburton’s expedition north searching for the inland sea. How tedious! You could hope for something a bit zippier.

Our destination, William Creek, consists of not much more than a pub and a very busy airstrip. Trevor Wright has spent 30 years building a flourishing aviation business here — 29 planes I think I remember Kym saying — and we were to use his company’s services.

If you look closely at this pic you can see a black dot in the middle which is the plane carrying the other half of our group. Everyone had a window seat. You’d want that really wouldn’t you?

The accompanying blog illustrates what we saw on the flight but we got to Birdsville where David Littleproud had come to see us. He nodded warmly in my general direction. (Adam Bandt picked us up in the Flinders Ranges.)

And this is the excellent Birdsville pub actually very early in the morning as we were leaving. It sold 74,000 cans of beer at the last races, a matter of some concern as there were only 75,000 on hand. (What are you thinking? How did they get that many cans of beer there? And perhaps more particularly, what did they do with the empties? Yeah me too. I have lots of questions like that.) The person who told us that was a teacher from Mansefield in Victoria who decided that he and his ‘beautiful wife’ would live in widely varying parts of Australia as they got older. He’d been at Birdsville for 16 months including through the summer. Hmmm … so. He’d be valuable. And he was. Great. He took us to see Big Red.

‘Big Red’, at 50 metres the highest sand dune in Australia, and made so that you can drive your 4WD all over it.

True dinks. That’s Big Red from our plane two days after 79 year-old John Williamson kicked off his farewell tour here. (His CD The Big Red released in 2012 includes the songs ‘Marree Girl’ and ‘Prairie Hotel Parachilna‘.) You can see the squares organising the audience at the top of the pic. John and his band were up on the dune on a ‘platform’ carved into its northern side. Apparently there were several instances of John offering a different song to that of his band. 79, that could happen, is almost likely to happen in fact. 1200 people there. Where do they come from!? And go to? The bottom (wet) tracks in the picture above are the entry from/ departure to the Simpson Desert but that’s not where they came from, not en masse anyway. It usually looks a bit more like this.

But on the night we were there to drink a little wine and have some nibbles watching the sun go down (Correct Official Grey Nomad Behaviour) it looked very good in parts.

You can have a look at some of the highlights of the flight back here, but one deviation stood out — a visit to the Marree Man carved by earth-moving equipment into the top of an isolated plateau south of Kati Thanda South some time between 27 May and 12 June 1998 (provably by photos from NASA’s Landsat-5 satellite).

It is an Aboriginal man with a woomera, a throwing stick, in close to perfect dimensions just under three kilometres from head to toe. And no one knows who did it, except the person/s who did it — and they may have died. Ideas have circulated round bored locals, seemingly unlikely given the effort, equipment — and skills — required to create it. It sits near the edge of the Woomera Protected Area which has been home to American servicemen who would at the time have been experimenting with GPS technology, quite probably required to construct it. And then there was an Alice Springs-based artist, Bardius Goldberg, who has since died, who had told his friends he wanted to create a work that would be visible from space. He had the skills and access to the technology and received a mysterious sum of $10,000 around this time. Coulda been … dunno. But there it is. No one knows. Dick Smith spent $5,000 trying to find out and is none the wiser.

It is not without controversy. The local native owners believe its construction damaged an important cultural site. If you double click on either the left or right hand pic you can see some of the extraordinary features that might render it special. Politicians have called it environmental vandalism and graffiti. The area is currently closed to the public and, over time, probably quite considerable time in this environment and climate, it will be resumed into the landscape.

Okay we’ve been, and now we’re coming back. A quick visit to the Flinders Ranges (named by Governor George Gawler in answer to your question from some time ago) and we’re on our way home. Sorry to have detained you this long.

You’ll have forgotten by now, but when this blog began we were in Adelaide and it was pouring down.

I like to maintain a narrative curve in my work so here is Myrna outside our cabin at Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges preparing for our walk round the St Mary Peak circuit and while it wasn’t raining at that minute, it did rain for the next three and half hours. But as I said to Kym, there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad preparation. (I know, ridiculous, but you’ve got to say something.)

This is a walk we have done before. Not an easy one: 20 kms with a big climb, and 4 or 5 kms to be spent stumbling over cricket ball-sized rocks. But it’s a good walk and we were looking forward to a day spent out of mechanical transport. The last time was seven years ago and in different conditions. Could old people still do this walk? Not altogether definitely.

I took a number of pics in the same place. This was one.

As can often be the case, things take on their own patina and sheen, their own mysterious beauty in the wet. In enlarged versions of the first one you can see droplets of water hanging off the foliage and branches.

There was quite a bit of this …

before the final step.

I think ‘suitably impressive’ is the term you’re looking for.

From Tanderra Saddle there can be a wonderful view. Pretty good in either sort of weather really.

After we got down into the Pound the rain stopped and the cloud lifted to some degree. But this is the rocky road I was referring to. Hard work! And not much used.

Same callitris. Same red gums. Same rocky field. Seven years later.

The walk finishes near a pool in the Wilpena Creek of almost impenetrable stillness. Weather again.

And then we went home.

The National Capital

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‘We desire to have a city that will be the Gotham of Australia … [and] in a few years will rival London in size, Athens in art and Paris in beauty.’ King O’Malley in 1904, an American masquerading as Canadian so he could be a member of the Australian parliament, taking on the job, as Minister for Home Affairs, of designing and developing a capital for Australia.

1907: The minute containing Sir John Forrest’s report to parliament on a site for the national capital.

Dalgety, about 150km south of the ACT, got the initial nod for the site of the new capital but the NSW government wouldn’t cede the land. Too hard and expensive to build a rail connection certainly, but also too far from Sydney. Canberra was second choice from eight options.

The word ‘Canberra’ may be a corruption of Ngambri, the name of one of the four Indigenous tribal groups living there prior to the disruption and assumption of their lands. Or it may mean (in Ngambri) ‘space between a woman’s breasts’, the breasts in this instance now called Mt Ainslie and Black Mountain.

Alternative names proposed at the time included: Austral, Aurora, Captain Cook, Caucus City, Cookaburra (😬), Dampier, Eden, Eucalypta, Flinders, Home, Hopetoun, Kangaremu, Myola, Meladneyperbane, New Era, Olympus, Paradise, Shakespeare (🤔), Sydmelperadbrisho, The National City, Union City, Unison, Wattleton and Wheatwoolgold. Probably lucky some of those didn’t get up.

1927, the opening of Parliament House by the Duke of York.

Not the Duke of York, but almost certainly with more claim to the land.

Imagine. It would have been a very strange life. Government from a paddock. Note the comparative absence of trees.

Building of the new ‘old’ parliament house commenced in August 1923 and was completed, after what must have been a constant series of construction and other challenges, early in 1927. It was not designed by the Griffins, Walter Burley and Marion Mahony, but it could have been. Very Chicago School: clerestories, very strong horizontals, interesting sight lines, furniture matching walls matching floors matching fixtures matching ceilings. Passionately symmetrical, built round the two houses — Reps and Senate. Snug, I thought. A building very easy to warm to if not to heat.

The old King’s Hall with King George V standing guard.

The view via this transect through the House of Reps frames the War Memorial (invisible here) perfectly.

John Smith Murdoch, Australia’s first Commonwealth Government architect, did design it in what was called the ‘stripped classical’ style. Good job, but it was only ever intended to be temporary. It does seems like a lot of work and effort for a temporary building.

The Prime Minister’s Office, to my eye perfectly fit for purpose. Bob Hawke’s voice is heard.

The Prime Minister may have had ample space but a run-of-the-mill MP and three aides would work in an office smaller than this, about 4m x 2.5m. Shall we say limited confidentiality which, who knows, may have been a good idea. New Parliament House where more than 5000 people work on sitting days has nearly eight times the floor space of the old one.

Labor gets a surprisingly good go in the displays, away, that is, from the John Howard Library. And, yes, that is The Australian Constitution being kicked downstairs.

Always was …

• • • • • • • •

‘You won’t find a whole settled essentially stable community that is so smug, so bourgeois, so comfortable, so well-educated. I mean this may be fucking paradise. I’m not saying it is. But it’s as good as it gets.’ (Jack Waterford, staple of the Canberra Times, legend. And I know just what he means. It has occurred to me every time we go there. All those facilities. All that cycling and jogging.)

It can be quiet downtown.

Although there will usually be a jogger to add to the vibe.

It will also be socially aware, generously so.

With plenty of thoughtful instruction.

• • • • • • • •

In his very good book about Canberra, Paul Daley suggests ‘the role of a [national] capital is to host its legislature and judiciary, its memory (the National Library of Australia; the national archives, the galleries), its conscience (the Aboriginal Embassy and the National Museum of Australia with its vast collection of Indigenous remains and relics) and tell the story of disastrous events that almost derailed a fledgling federation (the Australian War Memorial).’

In a recent visit we made the most of these, especially its memory.

One of the reasons for our visit was to have a look at ‘Fit to Print’, the exhibition in the National Library curated by Mike Bowers of press photos printed from glass-plate negatives (one chance only). A very generous selection and display from the 18,000 or so held by the Library in its Fairfax Collection. All round 1930: another time, another life.

Moments caught at a performance by Inge Stange’s dance gymnastics students, Sydney 1933. ‘This type of physical education is better adapted than almost any other for inspiring inner cheerfulness and new courage to face life in these uncertain times.’

William Lygon, 7th Earl of Beauchamp and, for a time, Governor-General of NSW, with some chaps at Bondi. ‘I doubt’, he observed, ‘whether anywhere in the world are finer specimens of manhood than in Sydney. The life-savers at the bathing beaches are wonderful.’ Using certain information about his activities which could only be described as salacious, his enemies were able to move him on. Smith’s Weekly noted that when his wife divorced him at the time ‘it came as little surprise’. But, bless him really. He’s having such a good time.

The National Library also had its customary display of ‘treasures’. I liked these two among others:

At left, Major Mitchell’s sextant; and above, Banjo Paterson’s ‘Diary used as a notebook’ open at a draft of ‘The Wind’s Message’. Not his finest work, but ‘The Man from Snowy River’ is just over the page.

And … you can look at Leonard French’s glorious windows while you’re having your coffee.

National Library: 9.7/10. At least.

And then there was the Gallery. You must go to the Gallery, but it was looking and feeling a bit Brutalist, just a tiny bit stuck around 1980, those enormous rooms bullying their contents which examined closely seemed like they might be second choice. The new Gaugin, the new Monet, the new Munch: not my favourites anyway, but the sort of thing you might mention when you are talking about examples of the absolute range of an artist’s work including when they had a go at something that didn’t quite work.

Best thing downstairs by a mile —

What a very great painting that is. And what a cultural landmark. It was time.

Upstairs was ‘Golden Summer, Eaglemont’ in its very fancy frame. A Mention Honorable at the Paris Salon of 1892 is noted. I’m confirming golden and not just because it’s the Dandenongs in the background. This was the title piece (called ‘Golden Summers’ at the time for some reason) for the best exhibition of Australian Impressionists ever mounted, NGV 1985. I remember it indelibly.

Also upstairs was this, ‘Bush walkers’ by Freda Robertshaw painted in 1944.

Intriguing. So carefully painted, and so formidably un-bushwalkerly. The figures, frozen from inception to completion, would not have been capable of walking anywhere let alone in the bush. Could they be aliens perhaps? Which is not to deny the considerable interest of the painting. I’d be happy to look at it carefully …hmmm, four times a week. Evidently the same genre as Charles Meere’s iconic ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ (which can be found in the Gallery of NSW) from just a bit earlier. Similarly carefully painted. Statuary, with a sea made of actual glass. That ball, suspended forever. (You might note the hint of domestic violence in the deep background. Us Aussies! Always up for a laugh.)

Just incidentally it is on record that Englishman Meere really didn’t like the beach, and he may have painted himself into the picture as the chap at left looking at least thoughtful (perplexed?) if not entirely discomfited.

Also on display was an exhibition of contemporary ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, the best known example of which is Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa‘. In his Hawaii Snorkel Series Japanese-American Masami Teraoka offers his own take on the slightly libidinous shunga tradition. His ‘View from Here to Eternity’ is below. The placement of the woman’s head provides a challenge.

There was also this glorious ‘Lotus Table’ by A&A Design, 1200mm in diameter and made out of ‘custom-dyed rye straw’.

The Drill Hall gallery had a very large exhibition of conceptual art which we think we are unable to explain except that some conventional thinking is involved as well as aesthetic appreciation. I liked it but not as much as a series in the same place by Simon Gende, an artist from PNG. (When did you last see paintings exhibited by an artist from PNG?) Even more exotic was that the theme of the series was the attack on the World Trade Centre and subsequent events stalking, capturing, killing and burying Osama Bin Laden.

This is ‘Twin Towers’. The legend in always so attractive Pidgin at the bottom says ‘Tupela balus bumpin Twin Tower long America USA‘. ‘(‘Two planes [balloons/ birds/fellas] crashing into the Twin Towers which belong to/in America USA.’)

In the museum, one-third closed for a new exhibition when we were there, we found the last day of Pompeii, so to speak, a good deal made out of not very much but with its moments …

and a pink van plus Holden. Good. And someone taking a somewhat decontextualised selfie.

It is a city — now, so very much not in 1927, and not really till the 1970s — of public art … (You can tap on these pics to see them better.)

and edifice. Hard to move without bumping into, or at least experiencing, an edifice.

The Gallery (bottom left), the High Court building (‘Gar’s Mahal’) overwhelming two galahs as it does its users, the massively over-engineered Bowen Place pedestrian underpass, and the mysterious ‘Commonwealth Place’, the outcome of a competition, from front and back, itself just in front of John Dunmore Lang Place. John Dunmore Lang, a Scotsman, a Republican and an Australian patriot who didn’t live to see Federation. I don’t know what he’d make of Canberra today. His Place is largely a blank of struggling lawn.

But just along from here is Reconciliation Place which does have a range of features including these standing stones each of which incorporates some First Nations art.

As appropriate the art is representative of different traditions and cultures, quite easily recognisable like the one on the left. But I have never seen Gwion Gwion (at right) with all their complexities anywhere other than the Kimberley. Perhaps a courageous decision.

And trees. Trees trees trees. Hundreds of thousands of them. One of the great arboreal projects of Australia. What a wonderful thing. Especially thinking back to the bare paddocks of 100 years ago. It was autumn of course and there was ample evidence of the extent of alien deciduous planting …

and the absorption with monocultures, a version of town planning aesthetic concerns dominating the truths of ecology, but at least they’re trees.

A bit of the National Arboretum from its main pavilion.

Perhaps the most signal image from our trip was this: round 9pm, Lonsdale St as downtown as you get, temperature minus 4, queuing up at the Messina gelato bar for ice cream. You might imagine otherwise, but you don’t miss out on a thing in Canberra.

SYD

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Yes. ‘Sunday’. Ken Done. Dominant in its gold frame at the public threshold of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The attached note says: ‘Sunday was painted from a beach house on the Wyargine Point in Sydney Harbour that Ken Done calls “The Cabin” nestled into the landscape of Rosherville Reserve and overlooking picturesque Chinaman’s Beach. … While Sunday was painted from and inspired by this setting, Done says it’s not a direct representation. It “reflects a feeling that shows the joy of being in this space. The pattern of the clouds, the boats, the people on the beach … it is a feast. And if colour is a language, then the language for Sunday is joy.”‘

It would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Ken Done? Not to be taken seriously. A bit awful really. Hopelessly commercial. For tea towels, place mats, cheap scarves, possibly swimwear; and for people who don’t know anything about art.

But, frankly, how absolutely correct that placement is: Sydney as it would like to see itself and sometimes is. Gorgeous.

The Harbour was covered with scales of sun glitter, the bridge exhibited itself like a formidable flexed (and symmetrical) bicep, the Opera House was perched on Bennelong’s Point like a ruffled cockie. And then in the evening there was the breeze, an erotic whisper, the fag end of the Southerly Buster massaging your sensibilities and because it is summer leaving dainty beads of humid sweat.

Melbourne to live, but Sydney for a visit.

We’d come as the final leg of the Tour de Siblings to celebrate my 75th birthday — we’re all getting on — and this was to see 90 year-old Dorothy. I thought we would stay at Kings Cross. I hadn’t been there for a while and the station is handy. It was also just a walk to her church in Waterloo where we would meet.

I had some uncertainties about the accommodation I’d booked and paid for. It had been very hard, impossible actually, to get in touch with the property owners to find out, for example, how we would get in. So I was disappointed rather than flabbergasted to arrive at a laundrette with no obvious place to sleep or make a cup of tea. I had two ideas in my pocket. The first provided a room but with no view and we needed some offset for our distress. The second — the Hotel Indigo, warmly recommended — had everything we needed including wide perspectives through our windows over Woolloomooloo to the city.

The Cross has tidied up and gentrified since I last looked, especially the Potts Point end (which was always pretty schmick).

In the 1930s buildings of this sort

were replaced by buildings of this sort

with entrances like this.

Art Noveau Deco run wild. [There now Graham. Okay now?] And after nearly a century they’d still be good those apartments.

Just for the memories.

The Gazebo, the ‘Gazza’, once a hotel and for a long time my Sydney accommodation of choice, now apartments and a distinctive building visible from many points of the skyline.

I knew this was the El Alamein Fountain but thought it was located in Anzac Square. I now discover that acre of paving and concrete is the Lambert Peninsula National Park and think that to be a bit weird.

The walk from the Cross to South Sydney Uniting ambles its way through the tree-lined streets of Darlinghurst and Redfern full of blunt but picturesque Georgian cottages tight to the footpath. Every 100 or 150 metres there are hole-in-the-wall places with a dozen boxes or stools on the footpath where people eat pain au chocolat and drink coffee. Runners pad past in their leisure wear; torsos often naked for the men, nearly so for the women. Buff bodies everywhere. Gay couples (in the week before Mardi Gras) lean in to each other, sublimely indifferent to public interest. These streets are theirs.

There are cities in the world that would kill for areas like this. There are other cities which would kill them off promptly and decisively.

Dorothy is 90, a sweetheart and a bit of a dag. As well as that she is the Reverend Dorothy McRae-McMahon, resolute pioneer of the place of women in the church, the author of a dozen popular books of liturgy, and a warrior — without necessarily meaning to be so, it came to her as naturally as breathing — for the rights of the downtrodden.

She has a gift for saying and writing things that people can connect with, especially those living with trouble, helping to ease their pain. God has spoken to her mysteriously but directly. Her certainty of that is complete. You can make of that what you will but in her line of work it is practical.

For many years she was the minister at Pitt St Uniting in the heart of the city. But now she is a parishioner at South Sydney, a most remarkable church on the southern fringe of its inner suburbs. The church property is 100m from Redfern Park where the Rabbitohs used to play, and more saliently where Paul Keating gave the Redfern Address, still a vivid reminder of what all Australians should know, remember and take to heart: “It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol.”

The church’s congregation is unusually diverse: in terms of sex and gender; in terms of affluence; in terms of cultural and ethnic background; in terms of education; in terms of health and wellbeing; in terms of drug of choice (which might be Ceremonial Grade matcha). Dogs, kids, people in off the street looking for some shelter just absorbed into the mass which I remember on my visits as being striking for its relaxed intimacy. Stuff going on all over the place, but still having a purposeful shape, capped off with a shared feed.

That’s a church service. But a year ago. Various parts of the church building are being renovated because the Sydney sandstone of its decorative front has turned out to be porous and flakey. The service I went to most recently was held in a community centre a short way down the road. But just the same sort of thing. Everyone publicly welcomed by name, the minister providing the homily but not a lot else. There were a dozen ways to contribute and perhaps 20 people did, reading lessons, providing notices, or mentioning people and their situation to be remembered in thoughts and prayers.

One reason I wanted to use this photo is because Andrew Collis is in it. It is shared magic, but he’s the magician. Slight, quiet, but both deft and definite, he is such an admirable presence. There is not the slightest sense of disorder, nor is there anything about these services that is dumbed down. A lot of the ideas discussed are chewy and testing.

The text for that Sunday’s thinking out loud — like everything else, so carefully prepared — was Luke 4: 14-30, a curly one made more so by the reality of its rendering.

Jesus goes home to Nazareth and at the synagogue reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed.” He rolls up the scroll and sits down. You can see it. This is direct reportage. Then he says, ‘It’s me. You heard it here first. I’m the one.’ After the ‘That’s Joseph’s lad though isn’t it? I thought he was a carpenter’ moment, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”

There follows a bit of to and fro where Jesus seems to be demanding to be a prophet but without honour in his own country. The history of prophecy, he suggests, is that people like Elijah and Elisha largely ignored local issues and did their best work elsewhere. But “when they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” A sharp turn, about which you’d like more detail for full comprehension. However, and what might or might not be the moral of the story: “But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”

It’s a story with its share of puzzles, but this day it seemed to be about courage in the midst of adversity, about adhering to your principles, about being honest and open regardless of the consequences. And that would all fit.

Andrew has been there for 10 years and I imagine the fact that there is a garden and chooks in a chook pen at the back of the church might be at least indirectly down to him. I grow in confidence when I look at the list of the church’s working groups: Arts, Mirrung Garden, Hospitality, Ministry Development, Property and Finance, Safe Church, and the ‘South Sydney Herald’ a monthly with a circulation of 10,000. How do these things grow out of such apparently sparse resources? Andrew has been there for 10 years, but for only a few weeks longer. I hope another hero emerges.

This might be the modern church everywhere. I don’t know. I’m not an adherent. I don’t as a rule go to church. But this is the ultimate Anti-Trumpism, alive and well. However modestly, ‘Great’ in actuality rather than as a word on a red cap. This is lived and productive and sustaining diversity, equity and inclusion — the much maligned DEI — and proof that it can happen at least somewhere and be beneficial for all concerned.

• • • • • •

Finally the gallery seems to have been tarted up. There’s better stuff in the new building; there has been some re-hanging among the Victorians for the first time in living memory; the Asian section has been re-imagined. My arts correspondent tells me there is a new director. This turns out to be only prospectively true. July. So it wasn’t that. Just time for a bit of house-keeping, and the revelation again of the superior quality of the AGNSW’s Indigenous collection.

A fine way to finish. Ginger Reilly at his best: Nyamiyukanji, the river country with gnak gnak, Ginger’s Jukurrpa, in the foreground.

The Lanes of Warrnambool

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The correct answer which you probably will have had at your fingertips is: Pretty Bloody Good. That would be my view certainly as well as this young gentleman’s. Liebig Street, humming, ice cream shop doing good business, Hole in the Wall coffee shop mopping up the last caffeine-heads of the day, an on-shore breeze moderating as much heat as the Western District can muster, The Whalers getting ready to feed a crowd. The Bool: 12.81% of a Geelong, so … substantial. How good? Bloody good.

What’s it got? The beach for a start.

And it’s far enough away from The Big Smoke (258 kms) to discourage day trippers. Getting there requires a commitment. The weather mightn’t necessarily draw you unless you enjoy variety and majestic southerlies.

It has Tower Hill, where you will find emus which, as in this case, may boldly reach forward and snatch from your lap the apple slice from Wyton of Warrnambool (‘Beautiful selection of interesting baked goods, salads and impressive desserts in a classy-yet-casual atmosphere’) you’ve been really looking forward to eating and scoff it in a threatening manner in four (4) seconds. Culprit at left.

It has a gallery where you are very likely to find Indigenous representation, this time from Kait James a proud Wadawurrung woman who lives in Melbourne: Treaty Barbie, large and small, and poor old Cookie taking another pasting.

It has, well lots of churches, heaps of churches. It has been a very god-fearing location in its day. But it has this Uniting Church which has in the past been the main Methodist church (once served by Meredith Freeman’s father).

I like the original building which is just a tiny bit Frank Lloyd Wright and unlike any of the other churches in The Bool.

This photo is included however, not just for the cyclist, but because our accomodation overlooked the entry to the church (now at the rear). Sunday service was about 25-30, not a bad roll up, but unless there is a successful recruitment drive focused on people under 70, I wondered if there would be anyone at all there in 10 years time. The new wing at left is a very well patronised early education centre. At the rear is a large accommodation complex for the elderly. Between them is a large and busy public car park on church property. I am reminded of the three nuns of Belorado in northern Spain who despite being excommunicated refused to leave their expansive and highly valuable property. I am thinking that as the congregation declines the worth of the church (in the centre of town) and its operations will increase and not necessarily proportionately. And I find that interesting and wonder how that situation will resolve itself.

Elsewhere Extreme Life is offered.

Although it has ‘Zero Tolerance for Disrespectful or Abusive Behaviour’. What the hell has been going on in there?

But perhaps above all The Bool is a land of symmetry and order. In its treatment of lawn, for example, I have thought it may indeed be the Service Club capital of at least the Southern Hemisphere.

Just here is someone trying to break out.

Five parallel planes including the most regularly creamy bricks capped appropriately in Mission Brown glazed terra cotta carried upwards through the property to the highest roofline. What’s with the bits of sandstone? Do they want to muck it all up? It can only be a misunderstanding.

But we’re on lanes.

We’ve been to The Bool a lot. We go there by choice, not misadventure. Strong choice, and enjoy it each time. I know there is a certain amount of public art (and it is a stronghold of live music!) but this is the first time I’ve really noticed the lanes. I don’t know how this has shaken down but the blocks of the CBD are big and their hinterlands are accessed by lanes, some for cars and some for pedestrians. There is a bit of decoration via intentional art, but I thought in the vistas they offered, maybe with the lurid colours of a Toyworld or a Chemist Warehouse in the background, they also provided some sense of the place, its flatness and order. But also a lot of unintentionally attractive aesthetics.

Maybe it’s just me. Okay. It’s just me. But here are some of them. (You may be wondering where those 35 thousand four hundred and six people are and I can’t tell you. They’re not at the beach.)

Yes. I’ve convinced myself. They’re wonderful.

And I’m not sure if this is my favourite photo from our recent visit but there are good vibes floating out of it: the East Warrnambool Milk Bar where you (and especially the overseas reader) may not have been. Didn’t look promising initially but great salad rolls and excellent coffee. And, really, fair dinkum, what a Cherry Ripe.

Go The Bool. Love The Bool. Be back in the winter to watch the footy.

Bonus Xtras

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A collection of pics that didn’t really go anywhere else of things I’d like to remember from Japan in 2024.

Atmospheric. At an izakaya (small neighbourhood pub that serves food and beer) under the main northern rail line flyover near Tokyo Central Station. It’s hot and the end of a long day. We are eating edamame (‘A great source of plant-based protein, fibre, healthy fats, vitamins, and minerals. It is also low in calories’) and salad and, like the gentlemen nearby, drinking excellent Japanese beer.

Our bedroom at the Sonic Apartment Hotel in Dazaifu. Plenty of bed, not much room. I am standing in the shower.

Where salarymen have their smokes in central Tokyo, but you need a phone as well.

Korakuen (‘Lake Paradise’) of Okayama, one of the four ‘Great Gardens of Japan’. Michael and Myrna thought it was pretty good. I was disappointed. I wanted more variety and inventiveness in the layout. But what do I know?

A motorbike shop over the road from our hotel in Nagasaki. There was something about the busy-ness of the illuminated highlights and also the way the T-shirt rises so ghostfully out of the machines.

The trams and tram stops of Nagasaki. Trams several decades old with very peculiar driving control mechanisms which produce a great deal of jerking, but otherwise just so functional. And cheap to ride. Panels at each tram stop include a stylish floral decoration.

Nagasaki again. Looking closely behind Myrna you can see the tori which became one-legged after the atomic explosion. But to the right arrayed along the hedge behind the seat and protected by bollards is all the rest of it. A fine act of remembrance.

This is some of what sits under the red heart on your iPhone. Often not terribly reliable. If you want to know exactly where and how far you’ve walked you need another version of a GPS. Or a GPS. Either will soak up a large amount of power. The red heart doesn’t. Usually you don’t even notice what it’s up to. And as for being accurate I’m sure it didn’t know what time I went to bed and may have interpreted being carried around as being awake. It doesn’t seem to have registered how my walking asymmetry was going — it would have to have been much worse than that as I staggered along. On the other hand, I’m not sure how it registers ‘Flights climbed’ but 237 both seems about right, and seems like a lot. That benchmark edifice, the Empire State Building has 102 floors and the tallest building in the world Burj Khalifa in Dubai only has 163. There is some suggestion that a ‘floor’ equals 3m. which would make sense. So we might have climbed 711 m. How much is that? The Empire State is 381m high. Burj Khalif is 828m, but only 585m can be occupied. This was the last day on the Kumano Kodo and my sense of things is that all that’s missing is the additional descent of 237 floors.

The walls and power poles of Kyoto. So good looking and such an expansive policy. I hope he got in.

Tokyo’s National Art Centre. A photo of a photo from an art society’s massive biannual exhibition. Stairs, pain, effort, teamwork, artificially added difficulty, a religious icon. Can you get more Japanese than that?

Shibuya. Rich Tokyo. He is not part of the display. He has simply walked in for a photo. The heads are wagging backwards and forwards, up and down. I think the eyes opened and shut as well. It is a sunglasses shop.

Takeshita Street, Harajuku, a suburb of Tokyo. Somewhere everyone should visit to be reminded how much variety there is in the world. (See also The Substrate.) Thrilled to have her photo taken. This was just over the street from the Micropig Cafe. I have video of this which I can’t load here which would show small pigs running over people sitting on the floor of a room. In this instance these people include our granddaughters along with another customer who appears to have three pigs climbing on her one of which might be being kissed. Otters were also an option.

One of the reasons we went to Japan was because Simon, our son-in-law, wanted to see Mt Fuji again. Fuji-san, one of Japanese Buddhism’s three sacred mountains, peak 3776m above sea level 600m higher than any other Japanese mountain, World Heritage Site, social and cultural icon, Japan’s national visual branding. And very often hidden by cloud. And that’s pretty much how it was for the three days Simon and family spent at Kawaguchi. It might have peeped out once.

It’s our last night in Japan and I’m cleaning my teeth in our hotel bathroom. Peer out the window … and look it might be Tanzawa but, right direction right size, I’m calling it Fuji.

The Substrate

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substrate /ˈsʌbstreɪt/ noun

  1. an underlying substance or layer
  2. the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment.

I liked this. In fact I loved it. I loved it all. ‘Adventures in Memory’, a massive retrospective of the works of Keiichi Tanaami which opened at Tokyo’s National Art Centre just as he died at the age of 88. It simply teemed with life and vitality, an electric sensibility pouring out versions of the fantasmagoria assembled in his mind. Room after room after room.

(He had a thing about bridges which he assigns to an early experience of Hokusai’s ‘One Hundred Bridges in One View‘.) It wasn’t just the ones on the walls which you might think of as messy. He seemed able to do anything, and so much of anything: collage, 3-D sculptures on all sorts of scales, storyboards, toys, magazine layouts, marketing art, video, a wall of his own thoroughly credible ‘Picassos’ as per the Dora Maar period.

And this is him.

Expressionless, opaque. Those art works emerged from him.

This seems to me to be such a telling photograph. Can we say that simmering underneath the so carefully ordered and stable surface of Japan is something quite different to which art provides a clue? Japan? Japanese? Generalisations are always flawed, ridiculously flawed, but I have to think so. Perhaps it’s obvious. It’s certainly not an original idea. That surface order — Myrna was scolded and firmly redirected after she had walked the ‘wrong way’ round a room in a gallery at Nagasaki — must surely disguise a tumultuous underground, heaving, wild, passionate, perverse, transgressive … and sometimes, often, great fun.

• • • • • • • •

Soon to be the subject of a major exhibition in Melbourne, Yayoi Kusama is known for her dots, pumpkins and ‘infinity nets’. Above, Myrna is sitting at the site of a major retrospective in Kusama’s home town of Matsumoto where we also found reasonably contemporary versions of her ‘infinity nets’.

Critic Claire Voon has described Kusama’s mirror exhibits as being able to ‘transport you to a quiet cosmos, to a lonely labyrinth of pulsing light, or to what could be the enveloping innards of a leviathan with the measles’, a witty and insightful comment on their absorbing and otherwise anodyne nature.

This pumpkin of hers is how visitors to Naoshima, the ‘art island’ in Japan’s inland sea, are greeted.

No collection of contemporary Japanese art would be complete without her being represented. But for that work. Not this.

Yayoi Kusama, 1969, Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MOMA

She left Japan — ‘too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women’ — for the United States when she was 27. I think it would be fair to say that she had considerable trouble establishing a presence. She was also left reeling from the theft of several of her ideas by Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. Female, Japanese … short, what chance did she have really? Her recourse was to very public nudity and very public sex. She had found another surface for her dots. And another way to work out her demons.

She became briefly famous at the time for offering to have sex with Richard Nixon if he stopped the Viet Nam war.

When she returned to Japan she was modestly famous, but for being a ‘Scandal Queen’. Matsumoto Secondary School expunged any reference to her from the relevant Year Book and school records, one of many forms of social elision which she incurred at the time. She committed herself to a mental hospital where she chose to live for some years. It was the late 1990s before her work began drawing interest, the interest which exploded — EXPLODED — internationally a bit over a decade ago. She describes the purpose of her work as ‘self-obliteration’. This has not come to pass.

The exterior of Louis Vuitton on the Champs Elysees

• • • • • • • •

Yasumasa Morimura, who we found in another major exhibition at the Osaka Gallery a few years ago, has found another form of ‘self-obliteration’.

This is one of a series of 16 works ‘Revolutionising the World through Personal Pain: An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo’. And yes that’s him.

So’s that. A photo of a made up and painted face, jacket and background.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. What’s he look like? Like that I suppose. No idea. Or perhaps like this, standing at the window in his version of Vermeer’s studio.

His work extends far beyond these portraits of ‘self as others’. His series dismantling and rebuilding Velazquez’s Las Meninas, ‘What the painter was looking at’ … What can I say? So many brilliant tricks, so many trompes of the oeil, so much fertility in the imagination, such brilliant craft skills. And so gloriously nutty.

He is not playing by the rules.

• • • • • • • •

In Nagasaki we found the works of a local, Chihiro Watanabe. Incredibly skilful woodcuts and mezzotints. This one was called ‘The Weekend’. Mesmerising. Look at it carefully for a few moments. There is so much going on. Find the cat for example. (Top left.) What’s the date on the boot? (1979) Where’s the road sign? (Top right.) What’s the wave made out of? (Goodness knows, but it’s chunky.) That back wheel … (He might be mending it …?) It repays.

But even apart from the eventful bike ride, how’s he feeling?

A lot going on there.

• • • • • • • •

The figure. I must say something about the figure.

There were, of course, colour field abstractions on show. Below is one of the very good ones we saw, in Kyoto this time quite close to the line of figures above. (Even with this one there are glimpses of ‘the figure’, dressed arrows, the eyes.)

But what I want to say is that there is a focus on the figure in contemporary Japanese art that is marked and that you mightn’t find elsewhere. And also that it is a particular form of concentration.

The figures I am referring to are not portraits. The ‘figures’ are not contemplative or pensive or just sitting or standing there. They’ve got a cloud and a bucket of water with someone swimming in it on their head. Or they’re encircled by a dragon. They are embedded in a narrative. To understand them you must look further, you must see more. They are action. Like in a cartoon. (What does Tanaami’s work remind you of after all?) Like in manga. Like in hentai. It would not be enough for me to do a drawing of you however outstanding, however perfect, or realistic. I would have to do something that made it BOUNCE into a story.

• • • • • • • •

In Tokyo we also found an exhibition of a selection from Ryutaro Takahashi’s massive collection of contemporary art (more than 3,400 works) at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Takahashi initially wanted to be an artist, but exposure to work by Yayoi Kusama when a student ‘made him aware of the limitations of his own talent’ and he returned to medical studies and became a psychiatrist. Who knows what he found in art to make him such an avid and perspicacious collector (and how he could afford it!), but what he has collected would be the equal or better of all but a few of the major galleries in Japan. (What he does with it all when it is not on display is another rather pedestrian but for me unavoidable question.) But it was on display, and it provided a comprehensive survey of contemporary Japanese art.

I liked this as much as anything else.

Manabu Ikeda, 2006, History of Rise and Fall

It is heavily populated (not least by birds); in fact it is packed with life and detail which you can’t really see here. My apologies. The work below by Makoto Aida Harakiri Schooldays will be more legible.

As will these works by Takashi Murakami.

The octopus eats its own leg

This one is called Embodiment of “A” and, typical of guardians of shrines, it has a partner, Embodiment of “Um”. This was initially part of an exhibition called ‘Japan Supernatural: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters’.

My case doesn’t rest here, but there is enough evidence to wonder about the substrate from which all this has grown.

And just by the way, how compelling is it that a psychiatrist is collecting this (wonderful) material?

And now … this is Jamboree-EP, 39 blocks of camphor wood carved by Mori Osamu (at left) collectively about 4 metres high. And yes, Elvis, Fat Elvis, with a superbly carved face. Iconic figure. The first universal celebrity. Maybe. Probably. Here in the middle of a signature gesture (with, what, ‘Suspicious Minds’ coming out of his mouth?) our attention is drawn to the fact that he has a broken finger. Broken off that is. Below a tuft of chest hair he has spectacular female breasts, or at least breasts constructed as spectacle. His left hand is caressing what can only be his erect penis. And he seems to be sitting on a pile of his own shit.

A lot of buttons are being pressed here. What are we to do with it? So many taboos to manage at once. Is disgust the only possible reaction, and if so why? In the flesh so to speak, when I was there looking at it I didn’t want to look away. There is something mighty about its transgressions, something that insists on your attention, insists on examining the nature of your responses — because there will be more than one. What are those breasts about? Why so much shit? Is it representative? Perhaps of all the rubbish, literal and figurative, that he consumed? Can I aggregate the sum of its parts, can I put it all together … and if so what have I constructed? What is it? Or is it too much to manage?

A lot of buttons are being pressed here. You might forget the work and think about the artist. What was he up to and why? Like Kusama, did he feel he needed to make a splash, a name for himself, by going above and beyond so many conventional boundaries? I am inclined to think that — as might happen with a lot of artistic construction — he became immersed in this monster project (yes, a monster project) and like us having to make of it what we will, so does he.

A lot of buttons are being pressed here. I didn’t want to look away. There is something so enormously pungent about it. It was the highlight of an astonishing exhibition.

• • • • • • • •

There is no doubt that personal trauma may play some role sometimes in feeding and shaping the substrate which produces such vividly crackling art work.

Going right back to the start of this blog, Keiichi Tanaami’s artist’s statement was unusually clear, honest and informative. It began:

“I was rushed away from my childhood, a time that should be filled with eating and playing, by the enigmatic monstrosity of war; my dreams were a vortex of fear and anxiety, anger and resignation. On the night of the air raid [in 1945; he was nine], I remember watching swarms of people flee from bald mountaintops. But then something occurs to me: was that moment real? Dream and reality are all mixed up in my memories, recorded permanently in this ambiguous way.” As expressed in his work, those memories are full of American planes, searchlights, bomb blasts, ‘crimson flames covering the entire night sky, flickering and wavering in a semi-circle like an enormous arched bridge … a stunningly beautiful yet terrifying sight to behold.’

Yayoi Kusama was born at a similar time. Her experience of the war included being pressed to work in a factory sewing parachute materials. She describes this time as ‘living in closed darkness … listening to air raid alerts.’ Prior to this she suffered at the hand of an abusive mother who besides destroying her art works insisted that she spy on her philandering father. ‘I don’t like sex’, she has said. ‘I had an obsession with sex. When I was a child, my father had lovers and I experienced watching him with them. My mother sent me to spy on him. I didn’t want to have sex with anyone for years […] The sexual obsession and fear of sex sit side by side in me.’

There might be stories of this type shared more widely by some of the artists who feature here. A whole section of Ryutaro Takahashi’s exhibition was organised around the impact and associated trauma of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima disaster. The curator of the exhibition thinks this is a category.

But I look at these works and commonly think religion, Japanese religion. Sometimes very clearly for the forms, almost copies in some cases, but also for their stories and teeming and unusual populations, their ‘figures’. And ‘religion’ meaning something a bit different, meaning something like the background stories that shape our understanding of ourselves.

• • • • • • • •

Shinto is the oldest and most pervasive of Japan’s religions. It proposes an animated world. Kami, spirits, can be found in rocks, rivers, mountains, trees, and most definitely in waterfalls. They can and do influence the trajectory of your life in complex and enigmatic ways. Their effects may be benign or malevolent. It is a world in motion which is unsystematic and heavily subject to your own imaginings.

Japanese Buddhism is its close friend and near relation, a very fine example of syncretism, ‘the [often scarcely conscious] amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought’. (In my blog about Nagasaki and Dejima I mentioned how the Catholic priests returning to Japan after 200 years found thousands of professing Christians but whose brand of Christianity was virtually unrecognisable. Kannon hadn’t simply been substituted for Mary; she had become Mary.)

In the past I have imagined Buddhist thought and practice this way. Human beings are not so much consistent individual physical entities as collections of constantly changing bundles of energy influenced by karma (the choices being made and the conditions in which that energy is operating). The task of improvement includes freeing yourself from the anchorage of the senses and the bondage of egotism. Self improvement is an intensely private journey driven by personal responsibility. Buddha was not a god. He was a man who found a/ the path to enlightenment which begins with the realisation and acknowledgement that life entails suffering. We don’t worship images or even seek comfort from them.

But I have been corrected. This is not as many others far more closely connected to the religion would have it.

The version of Buddhism established by the Japanese empire for several centuries was Shingon (‘True Word’) Buddhism. Shugendo (‘the path of training and testing’) which provides the religious flavour of the Kumano Kodo, evolved from that, as well as Shinto, animism and many other influences. But it is still described as Buddhism.

The point: these streams of Japanese Buddhism are so heavily populated by bosatsu they make the Roman Catholic Communion of Saints seem modest and responsible.

What are bosatsu? Well they are sometimes bodhisattvas, the literal interpretation, enlightened beings who have put off entering paradise in order to help others attain enlightenment or bohdi. (Sattva = ‘on the path to’). And sometimes they are not; they are entities of uncertain provenance to relate and pray to (like for example the ox at Dazaifu). I have mentioned jizu and their relative absence on the tracks of the Kumano Kodo. Here are representations to this bosatsu near an isolated temple on Shikoku and at Miyajima near Hiroshima. Hordes of them, all different, an animate universe.

Jizu are caring bosatsu. Fudo Myo-o — who in this instance just popped out of the bush near Shosan-ji temple on Shikoku — less so. A figure central to Shingon Buddhism, Fudo converts anger into salvation. The purpose of his crazed expression is to frighten people into accepting the teachings of Dainichi Buddha. He carries kurikara, the devil-subduing sword which represents wisdom cutting through ignorance, and holds a rope in his left hand to catch demons as well as to bind and focus thought. He is often seated or standing on rock because he is immovable in his faith. His aureole is typically inflamed, which according to this strain of Buddhist lore, represents the purification of the mind by the burning away of all material desires. 

On the way to nearby Fragrant Root Temple we found this youkai, if not religious at least a spiritual entity. 

I like to think of his, her, its name as providing an insight into the linguistic substrate of Japanese.

The word youkai is made up of the kanji characters for ‘bewitching; attractive; calamity;’ and ‘spectre; apparition; mystery; suspicious’. Now you know what a youkai is. Or do you? Written Japanese seems to me to be as fluid and allusive as public Japanese behaviour is precise, confined and measured. The kanji meanings bounce off each other like echoes in a well. 

But it is the visual references that are beginning to pile up.

Senso-ji, the very famous temple in Asakusa (eastern Tokyo) is guarded by two bosatsu, Fujin the god of wind (here) and Raijin the god of thunder.

We found a version of this pair overseeing the final entry to Temple 58, Senyu-ji, on the Shikoku Pilgrimage. They belong in this company. They live in the substrate, ‘the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment’.

• • • • • • • •

And they don’t just live there as visual ornamentation, however impressive they may be in that regard. If you want to relate to them seriously they are coupled with volumes of ideas and stories and acts and edicts and directives and mysteries and frustrating contradictions.

It might be that the only successful way to live on top of that mountain of emotional and psychological cultural substrate is a life of strict discipline and obedience to very careful rule-bounded behaviour. That might also be a good way to live in congested environments where there isn’t much personal space, physical or social.

So what do you do? From this intensely rich underground, tended in some cases by trauma and neurosis, but wound tight as a drum by rule-based behaviour, in a process of sublimation you make art. But, however thoughtfully, you EXPLODE onto the canvas, the model, the board, the sculpture, the paper — in a Newtonian equal and opposite reaction. And you produce work like the examples above, surely some of the most developed, interesting and unusual art to be found in the world today.

It might also be the Japanese zeitgeist: it’s what you do, it’s what everyone else is doing, it’s what sells. But I think for many of these artists it’s what they do on a much more profound level to survive.

The story of Japan? A gentleman in front of a Tanaami at the Hakone Sculpture Park

Wandering around Kyushu

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The writing on the shop window at left says: EAT IN TAKE OUT ATELIER PORCEL ARTS LUNCH COFFEE SMOOTHIE BEER KUSHIAGE [grilled food on skewers] PASTA. That surprises me. It is somewhere near Kumamoto which in turn is somewhere near the middle of Kyushu which in turn is Japan’s fourth island, the one off the end heading towards Korea and China. The one which seems to consist mostly of volcanoes in various states of tumescence. The one more obviously tropical, more wetter, more typhoony. It’s a long way from Tokyo, closer to Seoul actually, and quite far enough from Kyoto. And they would be some of the reasons you see fewer European tourists there than in other parts of Japan.

They might have reason to visit Fukuoka, the largest city on the island, with its gracious boulevards and general air of self-sufficiency. They might have come to last year’s world swimming championships which were held there when Australia won twice as many gold medals as the US (if not more medals overall, but that’s not how we count ’em. No way. 😐).

I haven’t been everywhere in Japan, but I’ve been to enough of it to know that out of town is different to in town. You get something quite different. Five years ago I developed a big Kyushu travel plan in that expectation. I even made an at-the-time invisible friend on Yakushima as we went back and forth negotiating our stay. And now I expect to see Kentaro in Melbourne quite soon. That scheme became disrupted by what Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene refers to as the coronavirus hoax. This time we made an effort to complete some of that plan.

What we wanted to do was built around three substantial day walks, none of which we did. It was too hot. Over 35 every day, nearly 40 in Dazaifu. Look at these people in the yard of Kumamoto Castle:

a couple of defiant nongs out in the sun, the others huddled in the shade of the giant gingko, under shelters, umbrellas or basking in the vapour sprays. So we drove around in air-conditioned comfort having a jolly time, seeing things we wouldn’t have otherwise. I’d do all this again any time.

We flew from Tokyo to Nagasaki where we spent four nights in a really good hotel with a very large air-conditioned room, a first-rate breakfast and most congenial staff. This may have coloured my roseate view of Nagasaki. Don’t know. Then we got the train back to Fukuoka (had to return our car to the pick-up point), found Michael and went for a drive.

The Toyota Sentia Hybrid 7-seater convertible van: highest praise. If they sold them in Australia I’d give purchase strong consideration. Drove 900kms in great comfort using one tank and $4 worth of petrol. The $4 worth was to procure a receipt to indicate we had bought petrol. Might have been necessary, might not. But it’s Japan … always better to be on the safe side.

Kumamoto

We were really only going to Kumamoto so we could get to Mount Aso early the next morning.

But I knew that it had an impressive castle which had been substantially restored and when our plans changed, they included going to have a look and to ascend to the top storey which provided an excellent view of the city and its surrounds.

We left thinking you might find many other things of interest in Kumamoto.

And then Mount Aso …

Mount Aso is the largest active volcano in Japan and among the largest in the world. It last erupted in 2021. That is to say, recently. Its upper reaches are dotted with masonry beehives for the protection of visitors should it be required. It has a very large caldera, the outer ring of what was there once and which has now collapsed, about 30 kms from one irregular side to the other. This is visible on the map further above. The elegant little cone to the left is to be found inside that ring.

Aso’s peak area is dramatically bare of vegetation, but there are several preparatory areas for leisure activity. We drove past a massive aggregation of cars on our way up and wondered why on earth they were there. It was a golf clubhouse. Look at the courses carved into its flanks. It is otherwise a national park. There was a well-patronised lookout, and then there was the comfortable party area with restaurants, cafes and horse rides (off to the right below).

From the small off white spot in the middle of the photo above of the whole mountain complex it is possible, on payment of ¥500, to drive to another even smaller off-white spot to its left and, on occasion, to walk and climb Aso’s five peaks. Visitors to the upper reaches are rewarded with views of the bubbling sulphuric stew in the active crater.

They are also subject to a barrage of warnings both visual and aural in various languages which are especially for people with asthma, bronchitis or heart problems.

We were walking around the rim on the track closest to the crater when the warnings increased in intensity and were accompanied by arm-waving. It always does to obey warnings in Japan even if you don’t feel they’re warranted. Obedience is the priority. Several things happened at once. The air did seem to thicken up a bit. Then we started coughing. It was one of those things you don’t think will really happen. Nah … that’s just what they say, etc. But there WAS too much sulphur in the air and, after putting up the windows of the car rather sharpishly, we drove away.

Having driven across the caldera, we are looking across its paddyfields to the rugged hills on the other side.

We were off to spend the night at Ukiha. It was a great drive, first through another national park and then along a series of river valleys. This (below) was an onsen establishment clinging to its hill next to some woven concrete holding that hill together. So much of Japan is beautiful but not much of it is untouched.

Ukiha


Why? Who goes to Ukiha? No one. This is one of those finger-on-a-map (to jump off to climb Hiko-san the next day; didn’t happen) and-then-find-suitable-accommodation moments. And in this, despite booking the wrong date, we were unaccountably successful.

Brand new hotel, so very stylish in the middle of not very much, so much room to park the car (hoorah, always an issue in Japan), no food, but beer, a wide variety of chips and lollies and containers of formidably excellent grapes in the vending machine, several very nice places to sit and drink the beer, and wonderful staff one of whom was very excited to practice his English.

While they mightn’t have had food, they had excellent recommendations about where to eat. At their suggestion we searched for and found a fairly well hidden eatery (pictured below the two pleasant sitting places at the Ukiha Fairfield) and had what Myrna thought was the best meal of the trip. Severe Momma, dutiful daughter serving, husband cooking in a rather grotty kitchen. But oishi, delicious. And then for breakfast you could visit the farmer’s market which operated next door. You couldn’t identify much, only marvel. We did buy some nashis. I can’t remember what else.

It was round then I discovered we had been staying in an establishment, a Marriott hotel, owned by members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. ‘Marriott International is the largest hotel company in the world by the number of available rooms. It has 36 brands with 8,785 properties containing 1,597,382 rooms in 141 countries.’ Its headquarters are now in Bethesda, Maryland but when it was founded by J. Willard Marriott they were of course in Salt Lake City. That’s what you can find out when you travel.

And you can also visit Ukiha’s Inari Shrine: you can climb 300 steps through 91 (and no, I have no idea why) torii to the entrance or, as we did, you can drive up. (There is another much more famous and heavily visited version of this near Kyoto.)

Inari (also applied to a type of sushi) means ‘rice harvest’ symbolising the idea of good fortune, blessings, something for which we should be grateful. It is a modest shrine but the hillside is covered not just with orchards — this is one of the fruit capitals of Japan — but also with what I imagined initially to be grave markers. They’re not. They’re posts with snatches of poetry written on them. ‘Looking out across the valley I think I see the distant spring blossom of Tsukushi (a suburb of Fukuoka an hour’s drive away).’ ‘Wearing a robe I was enveloped by the scent of my mother.’ ‘I fear the velvet night no more.’ ‘The full moon shines with brilliant light.’ That’s not something we have necessarily.

We determined that we would like to see the sea. There were murmurs about having a swim as it was still spectacularly hot. We found a road east along the Yamakuni River which provided satisfying spectacle around every corner.

We found its mouth but no, not swimmable. Both banks of the river were built environments as they had been for 40-50 kilometres. But here there were sets of steps like tiered seating every 30 or 40m as far as the eye could see. What for? We also tried to imagine what could be behind the giant fences but couldn’t. It turned out to be a marina (with a complex of football grounds on the other shore). But again, why? Mysteries.

We had ended up at another shrine, Hachiman Kohyo, which has been in its present location since 535 CE. The mouth of a decent-sized river, … that could be enough to incite a shrine. And there it was. Insofar as it is famous — not very far, it is well out of the way — it is for its lion dogs.

It was this sort of neck of the woods really: another Japan. Just as interesting. (The words on the front of the Isuzu in for repair say: ‘earth-friendly environmentally-friendly people-friendly’.)

It was near enough to 3 in the afternoon and we hadn’t had anything to eat since our rather desultory breakfast (bananas and grapes I just discover). I thought I would provide a solution by finding the nearest coffee shop. It would be bound to have food as well. So we headed off to Umi-san (coffee and cheesecake) in the very very back blocks of Yoshitomi, imagining iced coffee with a great dollop of softu crema or something equally interesting in it. We’d drink that while consuming extra large slices of cheesecake.

We found Umi-san under a tarpaulin attached to a shed. He was so overwhelmed by a visit from Australians he was rendered close to immobile. He wanted conversation. Wanted to know where we’d been and why. All via Google which I was, I’ll say, too faint with hunger to operate effectively. He had no cheesecake but he could make us some coffee. But first he had to spend quite some time finding and lighting a mosquito coil. Very thoughtful of course, but we were starving.

It took him just on half an hour to make the coffee which appeared, actually very good coffee, with two ice cubes in it and nothing resembling dairy. Quite correct really, but the doctor hadn’t ordered that and was pretty disappointed. I drank what I deemed to be respectable amount, a respectful amount, of what we’d been provided with and we fled to a Lawson to find something with plenty of calories.

The Lawson. Along with the 7/11 and the Family Mart, staples of the Japanese consumer economy. But the Lawson … so very reliable.

Mojiko

We were on our way to Mojiko to stay at this hotel. The Premier. I had read, I think, that it was on an interesting site stuck out into the Hanmon Straits which separate Kyushu and Honshu and that it was nested in among an unusual collection of art deco or ‘Retro’ architecture as you will find it referred to. That turned out to be true.

On our way to find some dinner I discovered these gals arranging themselves for a low-action selfie. They have found a boat named ‘Moji’, and they have managed to include the very ostentatious ‘Observation Room’ towering over the old Customs House. To the right you might just be able to make out clusters of lights and what might be marquees and canvas shelters. That’s what they were. We ate outside from a restaurant in the Customs House after strolling through what seemed like a dog fair with all things dog: prams, pushers, capes, hats, bells, bones, shark skin, dried meat, glow collars, anything you can imagine really, with several hundred perhaps a thousand dogs being catered for.

You may note their mmm dunno … dresses? their personal fan and the preparedness of the one at the back to have his or her photo taken.

There were beautiful buildings to contemplate. The former headquarters of the Mitsui OSK shipping company.

Breakfast suggested that there would be a story to be told about the hotel. It wasn’t overly expensive, mid-range I guess, but it was a place to take your family for a weekend away or a special occasion if you were a well-heeled member of the Japanese haut-ish bourgeoisie (congregations of whom are not always on display in Japan). And I think the highlight, the very special thing, about the Premier might have been its buffet breakfast. You could get simply anything, and if it wasn’t there they’d make it for you. I watched prodigious feats of eating, almost to the point of applause, especially by the younger members of the absolutely packed house.

But our schedule said Dazaifu, so Dazaifu it was.

Dazaifu

What’s a photo for Dazaifu? There could be so many.

The timber decoration of the Starbucks in the Baba Sando Line: this is so noteworthy it appears on guides as a tourist attraction. To its right the bustling throng is pushing their way forward for icy poles. They might have been plum-flavoured. The shrine that the customers were on their way to or from is surrounded by sacred plum trees. This was just a window in a wall near monster Japanese sweets cafes which were nearly empty. The owners had something going on.

Digressing momentarily, they were making equally popular plum cakes just a little further along the street via a sort of conveyor belt process. It would have been so incredibly hot where she was standing.

Continuing clockwise with the photos, the interior of Motsu Nabe, the restaurant in the bottom of our accommodation. Great food which could have been better if we’d worked out how to cook it properly (at the table) and decide when the cabbage went in. And then Myrna’s new Issey Miyake top on the shrine’s footbridge. An excellent colour match.

Could have been any of those; they all have stories attached. But I think this is the one.

Its existence saved us on several occasions. It is the interior of the Dazaifu Roll, an idea the specifics of which we never tested. More importantly a) it was air-conditioned, and b) unlike many of the other establishments in Baba Sando Line it was never crowded out, and c) it advertised and served excellent iced coffee.

The Baba Sando Line (just a street name really) is the major entrance way to the Tenmangu Shrine, a shrine of great importance, size and activity. The photo above is not mine because if it was it would have hundreds of people milling around in it searching for shade. The temperatures reached their apogee at Dazaifu, their zenith, their pinnacle, their peak, their apex. The energy bounce off that pavement was blinding.

Returning to the Dazaifu Roll, outside its door is the actual entry to the avenue of approach. But instead of dragons or lions or torii at the entrance to this holy collection of souvenir and lolly shops there is a takeaway yakisoba noodle joint on one side and the Dazaifu Roll on the other.

Dazaifu could today be considered an outer suburb of Fukuoka about 20 kms from the centre of the city. I thought staying there would be convenient for its Historical Trail, a half-day walk that sounded interesting. Because of the walk I knew that Dazaifu had been the seat of imperial power and the centre of politics and culture in Kyushu from the late 7th to 12th centuries — quite removed from Fukuoka — and that there had been a major complex of government buildings there, now in fairly modest ruins tended beyond any hint of authenticity. And I did know that it had an important shrine.

Dazaifu’s Tenmangu Shrine was founded in the 10th century. It is dedicated to Michizane Sugawara, a late 9th century politician and scholar who rose to pre-eminence at court. However, he chose the wrong faction in a dispute — probably the good guys — and was shamed and then banished from Kyoto 800 kilometres away from where we were. The ox pulling his cart brought him here … then, perhaps understandably, refused to move any further. Shortly after Kyoto was struck by a series of deadly storms and floods attributed to Michizane’s powers and there was a fairly hasty revision of his status. By imperial order he was renamed as ‘Tenjin’ or ‘Tenman’ and worshipped as the Shinto god of literature and learning. A shrine was subsequently built here, the head shrine of 12,000 Tenmangu shrines across Japan.

Almost guaranteeing popularity, one of Tenjin’s areas of oversight is success in exams. People here are lining up to rub the nose of a statue of Goshingyu, the ‘wisdom ox’ who decided to camp here, and to say their prayers possibly turning a C into a B+. In the foreground is one of the sacred ume (plum) trees, Tenjin’s favourite fruit.

The ancestor of one of these trees, mid-ground right in the photo, is believed to have flown here from Kyoto such was the power of the master and his poetry. The other feature of this photo is the rather dramatic thicket of vegetation growing on the roof of this temple building. It has its own story.

‘In 2027, the shrine will hold the 1125th anniversary of the Grand Ceremony of Dazaifu Tenmangu. This commemorates the death of Sugawara Michinzane, a scholar and government official who is now enshrined as the deity Tenjin.’ (Not sanctification note but deification; that’s different and worth thinking about.) ‘The main sanctuary of the shrine is undergoing extensive repairs, the first for 127 years.’ A ‘temporary residence for Tenjin’ has been built to last for three years while the work is completed. ‘It is crowned with a “floating forest” teeming with diverse plant life that transforms with the changing seasons.’ That’s the ‘floating forest’ you’re looking at.

Staying with trees, which we were that day, sacred and otherwise, here is a cedar old enough to have its own devotees.

Another reason to visit Dazaifu is the Kyushu National Museum, the terminus of the Historical Walk. Its remarkable waveform is built into the hill above the Shrine. It was full of treasures one of which was a brass mirror, something I’d never seen before. To the right rises Sonic Apartments, a satisfyingly exotic place to briefly call home.


A couple of hours separates these photos from our window. In that time it had rained, the temperature had dropped a few degrees and the cost per hour at the car park had fallen ¥100 (1 AUD) an hour.

Fukuoka

We took the car back, a small matter, and then walked 12 kms around Fukuoka, a larger one. The art gallery was closed so we walked around Ohori Lake and watched these cormorants with their throats flapping and click-clacking as they tried to manage the heat.

• • • • • • • •

This is a digital rendering of a photo of a postcard of an oil painting. So you couldn’t say you were seeing it at its best. But you still might infer that it is a very attractive piece of work. The artist is Hiroshi Ikushima but as far as I know it doesn’t have a name.

What could it be? What’s going on here? She is preoccupied well beyond her modelling. Her hands suggest it is not a vacant, even an innocent, pensiveness. I think, perhaps, that odd combination of uncertainty and guarded determination of a woman in conditional love. But the symmetry of her features and her unquestionable beauty take the edge off that anxiety. Or do they? I’m not sure.

It was in use as the poster for an exhibition of art at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, an exhibition which was devoted not so much to Asian Art as examples of stunning achievements in realism.

You could grate the peel coming off the lemon below.

However as we got further into the exhibition things took a turn: the young women had fewer clothes and the men looked creepier.

That was characteristic of our experience at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Closed at 6.00, we arrived at 5.15 and were encouraged to buy unusually expensive tickets to two exhibitions discovering at 5.28 the second one had packed up and shut the doors. Turned around, and so had the first one.

One reason why we arrived so late was that we stopped to have some sustenance. The Tomoyasu Cafe and Burgers provided genuinely outstanding thickshakes. But it was the other customers a few tables over who caught my eye. A couple, perhaps mid/late 20s. She was wearing a kimono and was perfectly made up. Perfectly. Like a very high end ad. Sometimes this sort of costume is complemented by one or more stray wisps of hair. Not in this instance. She was also strikingly beautiful. Startlingly. Like something off a film set. In my journal I’ve described him as roughcast, and I think that would be appropriate. A tradie who has washed up after work but not much more: jeans, slippers, T-shirt. They’re on a date but I’m not quite sure what type. It is 4.30pm … and it is taking place at the Tomoyasu Cafe and Burgers. She’s having a parfait. He’s having a burger. She’s doing most of the talking, bright but not familiar. She takes selfies that are hyper-organised, using a (clean) spoon, for example, as a prop. She could be very young but she has a throaty gurgle for a laugh which suggests that, regardless of her age, she probably isn’t. I couldn’t possibly take a photo. It may have a been a commercial transaction we were watching. At 4.30pm … in the Tomoyasu Cafe and Burgers.

• • • • • • • •

Fukuoka is known for its yatai (lit. ‘shop stand’), street food served from pop-up boxes, suddenly there and later suddenly not. We were a bit early to encounter the full schmeer, but we dutifully sat here and ate yakitori and oden, a mystery dish that we were assured was vegetarian. (Footnote: ‘boiled eggs, daikon or konjac, and processed fishcakes stewed in a light, soy-flavored dashi broth.’) Drank beer, memorably good on a hot night. It was all good. We were having An Experience.

We’d been summoned by a very lively tout who spoke bits of at least Russian and Chinese as well as English and knew enough about Australia to make a joke about Melbourne and coffee. When we left he said, ‘Copacetic?’ And I said, somewhat bemused and in the nicest possible way, ‘Yes. Most certainly.’ Copacetic! Extraordinary.

If copacetic brings anything to mind it might be well-built American sophomores in the 1920s or 30s, men never women, wearing large lettered jumpers exchanging agreement about the very positive nature of something. Anything. Jay Gatsby might have said it when Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t listening. It may occur, expressed hopefully, in Tender is the Night from the mouth of one of the more troubled characters. It is not something you hear every day, now or then. Neither William Faulkner nor Ernest Hemingway would have had anything to do with it.

Merriam-Webster describes it ‘as probably better known for competing theories of its origin than any other word of everyday use in American English.’ It appears in a 1919 novel about the young Abraham Lincoln. It might be like a term from Acadian French from Louisiana, coupe-sètique, which is of course only a breath (or a pee) away from meaning ‘septic tank’. African-American tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1877-1949) used it in radio broadcasts during the 1930s and claimed it as his own.

Copacetic. He said it. A hot night on the banks of the Naka River. Unprompted. And he was right. Copacetic.

• • • • • • • •

Just as it was sliding into its dock before taking us to Okayama.