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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.

The Bomb. Reconsidered.

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In early August 1945, atomic bombs were dropped first on Hiroshima and then three days later on Nagasaki. This is a precise replica of ‘Fat Man’, the second bomb. The dark colour is a compound designed to seal the seams of the outer shell.

There were several reasons why Nagasaki was included in the list of target cities. One was its location as a major port and as an industrial centre for Mitsubishi where ships, military equipment and armaments were produced, employing 90 percent of the city’s workforce. Another was, unlike most Japanese cities, it had suffered very little damage to this point in the war so it would be possible to quite precisely estimate the bomb’s impact. It could play its role in a scientific experiment.

Kokura (in the upper red rectangle), on the other edge of Kyushu, was the initial target. But heavy cloud coupled with black smoke from burning coal tar lit precisely to obscure the site from enemy bombers meant there was limited capacity for visual identification. The plane carrying the bomb was handicapped by an inoperative fuel pump which meant there was no access to 2,400 litres of the petrol it was carrying. It flew on to Nagasaki where the same weather conditions prevailed but, just as returning to base became essential, there was an opening in the cloud, the weapon was armed, the electrical safety plugs were removed, the bomb doors released and Fat Man, one of three such, was dropped targeted on a tennis court in the mid-reaches of the Urakami valley four or five kilometres from the centre of town.

One presumes it hit the tennis court although the impact of the destabilisation of the 4.85 kilograms of plutonium it contained was felt equally at the two primary schools and cathedral close at hand. Two of the Mitsubishi plants were destroyed along with those working in them, who included 4,000 Korean slave labourers. One count has 39,000 dead immediately, then within 12 months perhaps 70,000.

It might be pointed out that in one night the fire bombing of Tokyo by the allies killed 135,000, and that that fire bombing continued over weeks. It might also be pointed out that Russia’s choice to enter this war was the most likely impetus for Japan to surrender.

Historian Martin Sherwin suggests that there is a consensus among students of this aspect of the war: ‘The [deployment of the] Nagasaki bomb was gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst’.

There are others who think that, regardless of the real reasons, the bombings in combination provided a suitable public scrim for the Japanese capitulation.

• • • • • • •

Of course being in Nagasaki we went to the Atomic Bomb Museum. Of course. There are things you must see there because, in the circumstances, they must be confronted.

The Hypocentre the day after the bombing. The blast was visible from the air 180 kms away. Although most things within a radius of 1.6 kms were completely destroyed (severe impact was noted 4-5 kms away), the stanchions holding up the wires for the electric trains are somehow standing; a factory’s chimneys remain upright in the background. A tumble of bloated bodies can be identified. But the really weird thing is that people are walking around with their clipboards having no idea of the continuing presence of danger. This is a bomb unlike others; there is so much of its impact you can’t see.

The bomb doors opened at precisely 11am.

At the same time one of the support aircraft dropped three packages of instruments designed to measure the bomb’s impact. Each package contained a letter to Professor Ryokichi Sagane, a physicist who had studied at Berkeley and had been a colleague of three of the scientists responsible for the development of the bomb. The letter urged him to tell the public about the danger of these weapons. They were found and passed to Sagane a month later.

I find that both strange and plangent. What is that? An attempt at expiation?

As indicated by the clock, the bomb exploded at 11.02.

I had read about this at Hiroshima, but this seems like a definitive illustration. The bomb blast 4.4 kms away has disintegrated the watchman, who has just climbed down from the roof, and his ladder. But their ‘shadows’ are left.

These ‘objects’ have been between the bomb’s flash and the wall and have left their imprint not as flesh or substance but as something more akin to a photographic image.

These shadows along with victims moving with flesh dripping off them are two of the frequently commented phenomena associated with the bomb’s impact.

But how much better to have died like this rather than to have lingered on with radiation sickness for months, years — immobilised, suppurating wounds, ulcerated skin, constant diarrhoea and vomiting, permanent headaches.

• • • • • • •

I left moved, but not as much as I might have been and not, I think, in the direction intended. We had been to Hiroshima before and had had the very dramatic experience of listening face-to-face to the testimony of a survivor. ‘We left’, I concluded that blog, ‘chastened’. I didn’t feel chastened this time. The meaning had shifted focus.

It’s not even about ‘atomic bombs’ any more; it’s about ‘nuclear armaments’. Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea possess over 12,000 nuclear weapons almost all of which are vastly more powerful than the bombs that were dropped in 1945. And when I say vastly more powerful, the Russians have tested ‘Tsar Bomba’ which was 4,200 times more powerful. Glass shattered in windows 780 kms distant as a result of its blast which was visibly evidenced more than 1000 kms away. All buildings in a town, Severny, 60 kms away were destroyed. Atmospheric changes were recorded in New Zealand.

Have we become inured to these issues, or do we manage them by ignoring them?

What was front of mind for me after the visit to the Museum was not the nuclear threat, but the increasing fecklessness of leaders oblivious to the medium and long term consequences of their actions and the cheapness of their motives. I was thinking of the results in Ukraine, the Sudan, Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere. We can kill the leaders of Hezbollah with three American-made and -provided 8000lb bombs. Why worry about nuclear arms? We can revel in the impact of conventional weapons which have become so much more sophisticated and deadly what does ‘conventional’ even mean? Worrying about nuclear weapons suddenly seemed so very last century.

It might also be me getting older and suffering fatigue at the record of humanity’s infamies. But my worst suspicion is that we need another cataclysm, a catastrophe of the highest order, to revise this behaviour, to rekindle something like fellow feeling and civil behaviour on anything but a local level. The ‘rules-based order’ that emerged after the last world war — including the current ‘Rules of War’, the Geneva Convention for International Humanitarian Law, now broken casually and mendaciously daily — was born from a clear memory of its horrors and the equally clear realisation that no one wins a war. No one. There is no glory, no honour, no triumph in the consequences of fighting, not for the vanquished and not for the victors. Wars never leave resolution behind. The ‘lesson’ the enemy is taught is to hate their opponent, perhaps more covertly but with just as much passion. And the consequences, so widely visible today, are the collapse of empathy, of generosity of spirit, of curiosity about and tolerance of others.

‘Lest we forget’, we say every 25th of April. I’m afraid we’ve already forgotten.

• • • • • • •

In the documentary The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, who relayed the Presidential order to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, saying: “‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?’

Chihiro Watanabe, 2009, Jesus of Nagasaki

Nagasaki and Dejima

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In the woodcut above it is the Dutch flag flying over Dejima (‘exit island’), an artificial island barely attached to the city of Nagasaki which on completion in 1634 was about 120m long and 75m wide. That elegant curve was shaped by its junction with the Nakashima River at its outlet into Nagasaki Bay, a traditional landing place for ships. At the right hand end it has a sea gate. It is connected to the mainland by a modest bridge that had a guardhouse at each end.

Two years earlier the Tokugawa Shogunate required 25 local merchants to build the island as part of a project to curtail the spread of Christianity and what was seen as the predations of Portuguese merchants (and missionaries) while still enabling a trickle of bilateral trade. After some muscular diplomacy and an undertaking that there would be no dabbling in any sort of religion, the Dutch East India Company was chosen to be the responsible partner.

As well as the major staples of trade, Japan was introduced to beer, coffee, chocolate, sundials and astrolabes, tar-based paint to caulk ships, badminton, photography and many new foods including cabbage and tomatoes through the sea gate of Dejima.

For just over 200 years at any one time only about 40 people lived on the island, 15-20 of them Dutch half a world away from home, supervised by around 50 Japanese officials some of whom lived on the island which was also visited by cooks, carpenters, interpreters and other essential workers.

There were no Dutchwomen there. Yūjo (‘women of pleasure’) were included among the essential workers.

Kawahara Keiga documented life at Dejima in the early 19th century in hundreds of paintings of which this is one.

The Dutch officers could, and did, eat right here most nights.

Once a year only they left the island to go to Edo (Tokyo) to pay tribute to the Emperor, of the material as well as ceremonial kind. To glam these annual events up the Dutch sometimes included exotic animals: an elephant, a cassowary, a leopard, and on one occasion a camel.

Dutch East India trading ships would visit — on average, it did vary — just twice a year in May and June, the season of favourable winds. During the years Napoleon controlled the Netherlands no ships came. For Hendrik Doeff, the Chief Factor during this period who ended up living on Dejima for 17 years, this must have been an existential puzzle. (From his log: ‘Nobody who is not here in person can imagine our state of mind. Separated from all community, attached to a place which is never visited let alone passed by ships, not knowing, not hearing, not there, in the whole other world going on outside.’)

Dejima is now embedded in city buildings and surrounded by office blocks and shops with a strip of restaurants calling themselves ‘Dejima Wharf’ between the island and the bay. 18m was carved off the inner curve in 1888 as part of a diversion of the River. Today, from one angle, it looks like this.

From another, like this.

And this, I think, is my favourite photo from our trip. Taken by Myrna. It is a shadow as well as a figure against one of the Dejima warehouses. And I don’t know where the blue flash came from, but there it is.

• • • • • • • •

Dejima is a fertile place to start talking about Nagasaki, a city full of important stories and a great place to visit. Known largely in the west as one of the sites for exploding an atomic bomb, it is so very much more.

The city streams, long and narrow, down the valley of the Urakami river. Its population today is about 430,000, not big for a Japanese city. It was about 240,000 in 1945 when the bomb was dropped. It has a substantial and sheltered deep water harbour with industry at various scale lining its western banks. (Massive ship yards with a giant gantry on the left.)

It has always been a place where things were made: Japan’s first porcelain and glass, metal filigree and silverware, textiles and lacquerware as well as steel, machinery and armaments. This is one consequence of its location: the obvious first port of call for contact with China (silk, ceramics and lacquerware), Korea (glass) and later for European traders (the filigree and other products associated with precious metals).

You would have to assume it has always been cosmopolitan. It is a city at the edge. Edge cities … oddities like the sale aisles at Aldi — surprising enough to throw you just slightly off balance, but comfortably embedded in their own context. Nagasaki has distinctive flavours and shapes very much of its own. Customarily, there are regular attempts to rope such cities back into the mainstream. That adds to their character.

It also has an unusual religious history.

The Jesuit priest St Francis Xavier was the first Christian missionary to arrive in Japan (in 1549), first at Kagoshima in the south of Kyushu but then, more productively from his point of view, at Nagasaki and Hirardo in its north. He had matched tenets of Christianity up with aspects of Buddhism and persuasively evangelised in these terms. Hundreds converted to this version of religion quite quickly, expanding into thousands over several decades (possibly to 300,000 by the end of the 16th century; most of the inhabitants of Nagasaki for example). One of these converts was the daimyo (magnate, overlord) Omura Sumitada who in 1580 vested control of the Nagasaki prefecture in perpetuity to the Society of Jesus. Remarkably the Jesuits had their own substantial administrative region in Japan. Just think about that.

This didn’t last long. Toyotomi Hideoshi, the ‘Great Unifier’, placed the Nagasaki region under his direct control in 1587 and ordered the expulsion of all Catholic priests. He had the example of the Philippines to consider. It was not paranoid to assume that Augustinian and Franciscan friars had paved the way for the colonisation of those islands by the Spanish. In 1596 a Spanish ship, the San Felipe, had foundered on the coast of Shikoku. Those on board, including Catholic missionaries, rather foolishly suggested that they were the precursors of a much larger Spanish presence.

Within a fortnight Toyotomi stepped up the urgency and stringency of his suppression of Christianity beginning with the arrest, public humiliation, torture and crucifixion of the ‘Twenty-six Saints of Japan’: six Franciscan missionaries (four Spanish, one Mexican, one Portuguese), three Japanese Jesuits and 17 Japanese members of the Franciscan community, including three young boys who served as altar boys, one aged 12. This process included an 800km forced march which ended at Nishizaka Hill above the heart of Nagasaki, a destination chosen pour encourager les autres, of whom there were many at that time.

A 17th century Japanese rendering of what occurred.

There were many other subsequent examples of Japanese martyrdom as the authorities sought to enforce the nation-wide ban on the practice of Christianity. But the Twenty-Six Martyrs, the first, beatified by the Church in 1627 and canonised in 1862, caught the wave and are widely memorialised to the extent of being the subject of their own Museum. There is no challenge in finding renderings of the event.

Shūsaku Endō’s prize-winning and brilliant book Silence provides a fictional account of this period and in particular the practice of having to stomp on fumi-e, images of Jesus or Mary, as part of a process of renunciation of Christ and Christianity. (Martin Scorsese made a film of the book starring Adam Driver and Liam Neeson.)

Read the book to find out what happens, but nearly the last word is given to an official who speaks to Rodrigues, the priest: “Father, it was not by us that you were defeated, but by this mudswamp, Japan.’

• • • • • • • •

This story could head off in a number of directions because the themes of politics, religion and commerce in this context are so intertwined. But the basic underlying issue is deeply familiar: how do you get what you want from an innovation/ new situation without all the bits you don’t want as well? (See eg social media, or the internet in general.) There were major benefits to be gained from contact with Europeans, not least the prospect of making a lot of money. But what were they bringing with them? Among other things, an untidy mess of alien mysticism and creeping insubordination.

In 1571 the port of Nagasaki was officially opened to world trade, at the time a limited concept. Among the first ships arriving was a Portuguese vessel which left behind cases of syphilis and other previously unfamiliar health disorders. And yet it also brought the first velvet the Nagasakians had ever seen, along with a host of unfamiliar spices from Indonesia. It offered silk and unknown types of woven cotton from China, and its traders provided good prices for Japanese silver, copper, ceramics and camphor. What do you do?

By the first few years of the 17th century the rulers of Japan had decided. They instituted Sakoku (‘chained country’), a series of directives that enforced self-isolation from foreign powers. From the Edict as it evolved in 1636:

‘No Japanese ship … nor any native of Japan, shall presume to go out of the country; whoever acts contrary to this, shall die, and the ship with the crew and goods aboard shall be sequestered until further orders. All persons who return from abroad shall be put to death. Whoever discovers a Christian priest shall have a reward of 400 to 500 sheets of silver and for every Christian in proportion. All Namban (Portuguese and Spanish) who propagate the doctrine of the Catholics, or bear this scandalous name, shall be imprisoned in the Onra, [the common jail of the town]. The whole race of the Portuguese with their mothers, nurses and whatever belongs to them, shall be banished to Macao. Whoever presumes to bring a letter from abroad, or to return after he hath been banished, shall die with his family; also whoever presumes to intercede for him, shall be put to death.’ 

Strong.

Foreign powers were entirely banned from any diplomatic and trade relations, with the exception of the Chinese … and the Dutch at Dejima. This situation didn’t change until the mid-1800s, when Japan was forcibly ‘reopened’ by naval emissaries of the United States.

Japan might have been closed, but the door was still open just a crack at Nagasaki. This is one of the things that makes the city special.

It had then and has now, unusually for Japan, a Chinatown at Shinchi (its current entrance at left). For most of its life this was a high-walled enclave which seems to have been treated more strictly than the European compound.

Among the Dutchmen on Dejima there was always a trained doctor. Engelbert Kaempfer and Carl Thunberg were two of these in the early years, skilled, professional … and endlessly curious. Both wrote books about aspects of Japan on their return from Dejima which clearly indicated that they had made the most of the crack in the doorway. It is hard to imagine that even in Japan the strictness of the observation of the rules of interaction would not have waxed and waned, particularly when there was perceived benefit.

In time Japanese and especially the well-to-do were coming from long distances to be treated by Dejima’s Dutch doctors. By 1823 when Philipp von Siebold arrived there must have been some relaxation of the rules because, after curing the illness of an influential local military officer, he was invited to set up a practice off-site and a year later he had developed a school for more than 50 students studying western medicine.

It was also Von Siebold who introduced the first piano to the nation of Yamaha and Suzuki. What a man he must have been. He is pictured below with a telescope, (‘Dutchman watching an incoming ship’, another Kawahara), along with two Japanese women one with the flame-haired child he fathered at Dejima.

This daughter, Ine (pictured somewhat older at left, but still with reddish hair), became the first trained female medical officer in Japan eventually becoming physician to the Empress. A son from his Dutch family introduced the study and practice of archeology to Japan.

Von Siebold wrote a six-volume treatise on a vast range of subjects related to Japan. Some of his collection of 12,000 Japanese plant species remains at Leiden University in Holland. He also began a huge collection of ethnographic material which provides the foundation for collections in several major museums including the British Museum.

Along with all his gifts and interests Von Siebold seems to have been arrogant and pushy with a tendency to misjudge his own indispensability. He had his own set of rules. He illegally smuggled the seeds of tea plants which became the foundation of the Indonesian tea industry to Batavia (Jakarta). Later he pressed the court astronomer for maps of Japan and Korea, also an illegal act. By chance, court officials discovered them in his possession. He was accused of high treason, was subject to house arrest and then expelled from the country. This is how his initial contact with Japan ended. This was 1825. He had done so much in that time.

The Japanese were also absorbed with the possibilities of western technology and military science. Along with medical knowledge, these fields became known as rangaku, ‘Dutch studies’ or ‘learning’ and became the foundation for a series of academies which grew up in Nagasaki over this period. Dutch had already become an influential lingua franca of the immediate region. Over time, more than 15,000 books were imported from the Netherlands and translated into Japanese for the practical value of their contents.

Despite criticism from Japanese traditionalists, Nagasaki flourished for decades as an important seat of learning. By 1853 when Matthew Perry brought his gunboats into Edo (Tokyo) Bay, as well as Siebold’s medical school, Nagasaki had a naval academy, western-style steam ship building yards, an academy of sciences with interests in physics, chemistry and optics, and the beginnings of steam engine manufacture among many other adventures into western ideas and technologies. Nagasaki was one of the heartlands of the explosion of activity which took place during the Meiji Restoration when Japan re-opened to the world, and ready for it in ways the rest of the country wasn’t.

• • • • • • • •

On display at Dejima. It might be construed as a commentary on gender relations during the Edo period; the tag says something about balloon fighting. But I think it is 玉突の場 (‘Ball striking table’). The game of billiards was introduced to Japan via Dejima in 1746. Intercultural exchange can be a strange and wonderful thing.

• • • • • • • •

Along with a relaxation of the rules regarding contact with foreigners came a relaxation of the laws relating to religious practice. Some Christians jumped the gun. When Nagasaki’s Oura Catholic cathedral was newly consecrated in 1865 a group of several hundred Kakure Kirishitan (‘hidden Christians’) appeared, largely peasants from the upper reaches of the Urakami valley. For their imprudence they were deported to various distant parts of the country. But in 1873 when all restriction was lifted more than 30,000 people claiming to be Christian emerged — after more than 200 years in the wilderness. Their various doctrines were not immediately recognisable to the priests of Nagasaki (French at the time) who declared them Mukashi Kirishitan, ‘ancient Christians’ and not part of or welcome in the orthodoxy. But Oura cathedral is still very much there.

And it’s still there at the end of one of those tourist avenues where you can buy your fill of soft serve, biscuits, souvenirs, Castella cakes (a remnant of Portugal) and on and on.

And that really is my point. There are vestiges of this rich history everywhere.

Some of the treasures we found in this imposing building, the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture which we pretty much had to ourselves, apart from the customary rash of attendants. Look at it. Enormous! And very good.

In the background and to the left of the pic below is where the 26 Martyrs met their end. But it is buried from this perspective behind one of the several giant pachinko parlours, office blocks, electronics shops just there, a major tram stop, a construction site and I am standing on the terrace of Amu Plaza a giant shopping centre attached to the very stylish Nagasaki Rail Station.

We got control of the city’s four tram lines fairly early in the piece and used them extensively to get around. But to get out of the valleys in which they run you need to walk. This is one of the things we found,

… the ‘One-legged Torii’, a reminder that there is another story at Nagasaki. There is the matter of the bomb.

Kumano Kodo

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The Kumano Kodo is a series of ancient pilgrimage routes that crisscross the Kii Peninsula (as below), which is south of Kyoto and Osaka. These mountainous trails were and are used to reach the Three Grand Shrines of Kumano, at Hongu, Shingu and Nachi. Shrines of what? Shugendo Buddhism borrowing extensively from and influenced by Shinto and other local forms of animism.

It was the Nakahechi variant (in yellow) where we were going, left to right.

This area has been visited as a site of religious significance by pilgrims seeking healing and salvation for more than 1000 years. More recently it has become a popular walk for tourists, including many Australians and New Zealanders. I’m not 100 percent sure why. It’s not far from Kyoto and Osaka; it is heavily marketed by several dozen companies (who benefit from conveniently located accommodation); and it is a physically-demanding challenge, some of it especially, but not outside the limits of feasibility. All strong reasons, but there are lots of options for walking in Japan which would offer more. That said, a great time was had by all and there was so much to enjoy.

Four and a half days walking after three hours on two trains and half an hour on a bus, gradually getting further and further from the conurbations of the Kansai plain, and marvelling yet again at the genius of Japanese transport engineers as we slid along beside rivers and were swallowed by tunnels.

The first day — for anyone, this is a heavily standardised process; in some cases there is no way of getting off the track end-to-end — was from Takajiri-oji to Takahara. (‘Oji’ literally meaning ‘the younger brother of one’s parent’, but in this case subsidiary shrines pointing the way to the major shrines.)

Clockwise: Takajiri-oji with its torii or gate framing the shrine itself. The bridge which provided access from the bus stop to the information centre and the beginning of the walk which is very well waymaked. A case in point: when it says ‘Start’ that’s what it means. Note the person fishing in the river just to the left of the pole. An engraved stone typical of Shinto shrines, large and small. Among other things. We decrypted one that looked like it might have some particularly cosmic insight and it said this building (a toilet block) was opened by the governor of blah blah prefecture on blah blah date. Shinto adherents believe that natural features are often enlivened by kami, spirits, and that special ones like many of the mountains on the way and the Nachi waterfall have profound powers. A spider, because it was there. A good one though. Tigers’ colours.

Had the smile wiped off my face pretty smartly. ‘Climb steadily through the forest’, the notes say, as they often do. A climb of 350m in a kilometre. Stern. And it was very hot, although not as hot as it had been. But it is a pilgrimage, what do you expect? A bit of pain and suffering might be taken as given.

Clockwise again: One typical version of the track. A lot of it was far more broken and difficult to find footholds than this. Recently tended jizus in a small shrine on the way. Among the endless mysteries of Japanese Buddhism, a jizu is a bodhisattva, a representation maybe of a person who could have reached nirvana but has chosen not to do so that they can help others. Jizus are particularly supportive of mothers who have a child who has died in childbirth, early or stillborn. The oddity was not to see them here, but to wonder at how few there were. When we were walking on Shikoku whole hillsides would be covered in them. Arriving at Takahara (which means ‘plateau’ or high ledge’, we had gained about half a kilometre), passing a gardener at work, the mountainous, and verdant, surrounds, and a lane in the late light.

One of the features of the walk is where you might be staying and what you might eat there. The company we went with, Oku, is very good at choosing interesting minshuku or ryokan, guesthouses of various scale, and Kirin-no-sato at Takahara was an excellent example.

This is our host taking his own version of a selfie. Described by three widely distributed sources as a ‘special Japanese’, he was. Very much the exception to the rule. He sang, he danced or cantered at least, he uncovered the origins of his 20 or so guests and made a cheery little speech about the virtues of internationalism. Then he played flamenco guitar, and not for too long. Below I am pictured pledging my everlasting admiration.

It rained that night. From our bedroom window it looked like this about 5.30am —

and like this at the front door an hour or two later.

It was incredibly humid all day but didn’t rain.

Up past the backyards again — I do like Japanese backyards walks, and there are many of them —

— and into the forest

where we stayed all day. The pictures with Michael and I in them are anomalies. We are not walking through cedar forest. This might be true of 5 percent of the day and provided one of the talking points with comrades of the track. At least one found the monocultural nature of the cedar all about the same age mystifying. He pointed out the absence of bird and animal life (true), the very limited understorey (true) and ground cover (true), and wondered if it could be natural. Sitting in an onsen with him I said I thought at least some appeared to be growing in straight lines about 1.5m apart even though it would mean planting in ridiculous situations on slopes of 70-80 degrees. Subsequently we found obvious evidence of forestry, two harvested coupes in particular on from Jizo-chaya on the last day that looked like they had been subject to intense military bombardment. There were also foresters’ signs up claiming various plots. But is it all like that? Thousands of square kilometres? Could it possibly be? And here, blow me down, just to hand, is the answer I have been looking for. ‘The vast majority of forests are monoculture plantations which were planted to rebuild after the destruction of World War II.’ Planted! When you see the topography of these forests this is simply super-extraordinary. So Ian (son of a Gerrigerrup soldier settler; one for you Ned), we were right.

It also means that there are very few long views but the short views were often quite compelling.

I also notice just now that we climbed another 600m before a 5km descent to get to Chikatsuyu, and that we recorded the absolutely no doubt correct distance of 10.5kms as 14.6. We do tend to wander. Probably just looking where to put our feet.

Chikatsuyu was spread through rice paddies. (Yes, we were down. Proof.) There was even a lookout with a rest area to confirm it.

(Immediately above, this would be Michael checking the race results; and look at her, not even puffing.) ‘During one of the first Imperial pilgrimages here, Emperor Kazan (968-1008) was constructing sutra mounds when he picked two kaya reeds to use as chopsticks. Noticing damp on the red stalk, he inquired whether it was blood or dew. Chi ka tsuya?’ That’s what it says. I’m just passing it on. Oh, and the answer was tsuya. You can relax.

Tonight we would be in the Minshuku Chikatsuyu, prima facie suburban but with an onsen and wonderful food of which this was a small sample.

A typhoon was due the next day, he said casually. Oku have a branch, small but indicative of how much business they do on the Kumano Kodo, in an old tea house in Chikatsuyu. We thought we should consult with a knowledgable person about what our plans should be. The next section could be done at three levels of difficulty by judicious use of buses. He suggested that, given the likely weather, we pursue the easiest option. Even though my wife demurred I thought that sounded terribly wise. Insightful. Even first rate. So … you know. We cheated and took the bus with our friends from Toowoomba and various other pilgrims to Hosshinmon-oji …

where it was pissing down. Furiously. It was an umbrella day, but full of feature and interest and fun. Maybe, just maybe, because it wasn’t so far (supposed to be nearly 8, our instruments said 10.8. Wandering again.), but I think it was the day I enjoyed the most. And it was just the tail of the typhoon. The bigger winds had passed nearby the night before.

It included arriving at Hongu, one of the three Destinations, and how wonderful it was.

‘Cosmic time: Past.’ Quite. And then a few hundred metres out of town at the side of the Kumano River,

was this, the largest torii in Japan …

a gateway to a vacancy which, for whatever reason, moved me profoundly.

As far as I can understand the signs, the temple complex used to be here before it was washed away in some massive floods (I note the levees along the banks of the Kumano now), and it has been left. Vacant. Oyunohara, the place where the foundation deities descended to earth in the form of three moons in the branches of an oak.

Oyunohara, where Yatagarasu, the three-legged crow appears. Yatagarasu, the mark of rebirth and rejuvenation, the creature that has historically cleaned up after great battles, symbolizing renaissance after such tragedies. (The Japanese soccer team wears Yatagarasu on their team uniform, and it is an honoured badge for the winners of the Premiership league to wear for the consequent season.)

This day, the rain had stopped and it was very quiet. The man in the background is a worker picking up rubbish. He would find very little. And it was still. We bought wonderful softu kurema and Michael remembered his stick.

That night we stayed at Yunomineso, a short bus ride away, which describes itself as a ryokan, but one which you would have to say was a long way up market, so far up market that

a) it offered, without asking, a shoe dryer;

b) it provided an illustrated face-to-face lecture with guidebook on how to go about your business there before handing over the keys;

c) it is very close to Yunomine Onsen, a very famous version of that genre (see below) and has its own mineral springs which can be drunk, cooked in, bathed in and which turned my silver ring a bright gold;

d) it has its own indoor and outdoor onsens. Perhaps I should explain. The weary traveller strips off in the dry room, enters the wet room, washes very thoroughly, often sitting on a stool and using a small wooden bucket to contribute. After getting absolutely every vestige of soap off, same enters a large public although gender-separated bath, the onsen, often quite hot, often with mineralised water. The effect is claimed to be restorative, meditative and so on. I usually found them to be too hot and preferred a good scrub under the shower.

e) it does serve a renowned and very fancy kaiseki, the traditional Japanese version of a tasty and tasteful feast. And here it is, but without the river fish.

And here are the instructions and order of consumption supplied to each consumer with additional verbal instruction.

I tussled with the boiled sea snail but found the duck ham on apple very much to my taste. There is a photo of Michael scarfing up the horse sashimi. However, not much for the vegetarian here or often elsewhere in Japan. Myrna ate a lot of rice.

Here’s the river fish.

Don’t eat the head and bones.

Our room. Such comfort really. AND, permitted by both the weather and the building, unconditioned air at last.

We left the next day from Yunomine Onsen, a five-minute drive from our ryokan and a very popular spa town.

Yes. Hot. The bus driver told me that the water bubbling up in the cage behind Myrna was 90 degrees Celsius and I have no reason to disbelieve him. On the basis of visual evidence, it was heavily mineralised.

Ukegawa to Koguchi. We managed to buy some nashi pears at Ukegawa. They are heavy to carry, as big as a handshake and expensive, but they were remarkably refreshing and satisfying for a snack.

It was another day in the forest, distinguished by two things. One was that it was a beautiful day, clear, sunny, mid-20s, comparatively low humidity. The second was that there was a view. One view.

It was a long climb out of Ukegawa’s paddyfields too, 500m up but over five kilometres, steady rather than crippling, and then about half way along this day’s section of the track there is a sharp bend where the trees have been cleared, Hyakken-gura, which looks out over the ‘3,600 peaks of Kumano’. The second photo, from the edge, shows some of the places where logging has occurred recently.

Mr Fit had run ahead and we found him cooling his feet in the river at Koguchi.

Our accomodation that night was Minshuku Momofuku, the building down to the right of this road with the grass in front of it.

It had been a school building with two long single-storey wings joined by an office block.

The river ran past within 20m of our room, a lovely sound, and the windows opened wide. The food was a bit like a school canteen in that you could get what you liked and there was plenty to like. For the first time in several weeks I had cereal and fruit for breakfast.

Probably our favourite accommodation.

And then the final day. Perhaps it is appropriate for a pilgrimage to end with suffering: 14.8 kilometres, all of them difficult. We did end up walking more than 20 that day but there were extra bits at either end.

You start by sneaking in behind a small house with a pale blue (not customary) sign on it to Nachi. After most of an hour we’d done 2 ks. and it wasn’t too bad, in fact it flattened out a bit, and I thought we’ve got this beaten.

The easy bit

The young Belgians who had done the entirety of the third day in the typhoon’s rain came up and offered the idea that it was just up, then across, then down and we were nearly up. Myrna pointed out, correctly, that that was errr never true. But hope springs eternal. Anyway then it got hard, really hard.

I have noted before how hard it is to take a photo of ‘steep’ but at least you can get a bit of idea about the state of the track. You’d get to a corner and think that’ll be it. It’ll ease off. And round the corner there’d be another equivalent stretch, and then another, and then another, and then another … It took a long time to get to the first of four peaks. And then there were three more.

I look a bit done, but I shut my mouth and looked fine.

And of course, it wasn’t flat across the top. It was a constant series of sharp up and downs.

About mid-way this day there is a rest stop (accessible by a narrow road) with a shelter and vending machines. Iced coffee, ah iced coffee, has it ever tasted so good? Had lunch — rice balls, folded omelette, a bit of fish — moved on.

The view below signalled the end of the climbs. Our eventual destination, Kii-Katsuura on the coast, is visible in the background but we were getting there by bus. The temple complex at Nachi was the walking destination.

There was the small matter of getting down.

I usually find it harder than going up and it wasn’t any different this time. The surface varied. Steeper sections were often covered with rocks, sometimes stepped, sometimes flat, at times more slippery than the gravel. I found it quite hard. I think it was quite hard. I’ll say quite hard. The photos peter out around here.

Eventually we stepped out into a parking lot which signalled the edge of the Nachi compound. It had a view which led to the next descent through what I can only assume was a mighty adventure playground: huge slide, dramatic climbing frame, giant swings. And then the next section began. My knees at this stage were beginning to crumple. Steps only for the next 600 metres. I would think literally several thousand. The next sign said ‘500m to Nachi’. We stepped down for 10 minutes or so, signage says ‘450m to Nachi’. Ooo I hate that. I know we’ve gone more than 50m. We’re going down zig-zags which are about 80m long and we’ve done four. It’s a lie. Do it again. Signage says ‘400m to Nachi’. It’s a test. I’ve lost all confidence in advice and just don’t think until Myrna steps out on the first flat bit. There … and there I notice is a comparatively civilised sample of the steps. We are in Nachi.


I’m sure there is some bright witticism one could make about arriving at a temple, the Three-tiered Pagoda no less, and finding that it’s just a photo on building fabric. Does the Wizard of Oz step out perhaps when summoned? At least the Nachi Falls to its right were in honest fettle. Whatever disappointment I felt (negligible) was overtaken by the revelation that we now had to go down another 2-300 steps to get to the bus stop. I’d given over my role of navigator to take up the position of grump and did my best to grimace and moan all the way down.

What would the Buddha say? Probably chuckle and say, ‘Well did you make it or not?’ And I’d have to shut up and say, Yes. Happy in the service. It was memorable, and I’m better for it.

• • • • • • • •

We stayed at Manseiro that night, the six-storey building on the other side of Kii-Katsuura bay: a ryokan with a straight up and down version of the rules with communication via Google Translate. Dinner complex and sophisticated, I have no doubt their very finest work. I’m not sure why the gaikoku hito get parked out of the way by themselves, probably so that their infamies are not widely observed. But we were all a bit tired and I didn’t feel like too much intercultural interaction involving effort. That said, the Manseiro satisfied my two priorities: a load of washing clean and dry, and a comfortable bed. The next day, Kyoto.