patriotism?

Of course, Australia Day is slightly complicated; because it celebrates the arrival of the First Fleet of British Ships in 1788, it also marks the invasion of Aboriginal lands - so has been a key moment for demonstrations by indigenous peoples and their supporters.

As an attempt to circumvent such difficulties, the media seems to focus on the positive side of citizenship, printing lots of feel-good interviews with immigrants telling us just how much they love this country, and how good it has been to them.  Was talking to a friend from work, J, about the wholesale appearance of goods of all types with the Australian flag on them. These days, she suggests, people wear the flag without any thought; when she was younger it was a much more problematic symbol (and looking patriotic was definitely not cool).


For an alternative version of the Straya national anthem click here. And note (unfortunately) all the White comments that follow. For the original - "Advance Australia Fair" - not an easy singalong, I'm afraid, click here. 

straya day

Can you believe it. Australia Day, a public holiday and this is the beach at Coogee. Not a barbie in sight. Rained off just like English bank holidays (made me feel quite at home).

to the opera house

Had a lovely evening with K, seeing The Artist with live music at the Sydney Opera House, such a fantastic space to be in. Lovely balmy evening. Also just gorgeous to be on the SOH terrace overlooking the harbour and the bridge at dusk. A variation on a typical conversation ensued - where I say that Sydney really is one of the best cities in the world, and she says it is the best city in the world...

the sea, the sea

Its no good, I can't pretend anything different - my heart lifts every time I walk down coogee bay road and see a band of sea and sky in the distance. I love that sort of view (the same happens to me in England's Brighton). I can take or leave mountains, give me the coast any day.

danger: wildlife

I may have gone on before about the sheer fecundity of the flora and fauna here (unlike Britain where in comparison everything has to be coaxed from the ground and nursemaided into adulthood; and where the animal and insect life is almost totally benign).

Everything here is bigger, brighter, glossier, more dangerous (I won't even get onto sharks or crocs). Ordinary butterflies are three times the size, spiders are terrifying large - although in this case the dangerous ones tend to be at the boring end* - and birds are just more full on all around. This sign warns of the reality that, when it has young (luckily a time of year we are now past) it will most certainly attack you, even peck holes in you. Particularly, it seems, if you are on a bicycle.  


* trigger alert: someone thought it was amusing to make the spider illustrations on this website jump about unexpectedly. 

mobbed

Had given up my habit of watching the sun go down whilst eating fish, chips and salad on Coogee beach following gym sessions on Thursdays after being mobbed - and I mean seriously attacked - by seagulls on every occasion. (The photo here is of only one seagull because I was in the process of a forced leaving, with one hand on my food, one hand trying to frighten away the feathery hordes, and one around my camera...)

But it was such a beautiful evening tonight that I tried again. And although there was some keen interest from a couple of inquisitive gulls, the only other birdlife around was a bunch of small noisy miners - for yes that is their name - being given flying practice by their parents.


Note: As another blog notes, it is very easy to get noisy miners and indian mynas mixed up; so here is how to tell the difference.  

city bingo - more on letterboxes

Been a pretty wet and windy (if humid) week. Proving my point that sydney letterboxes do not seem that fit for purpose...

white rabbit

Had a fab visit last weekend with K to the White Rabbit gallery.  This is centred on another wealthy private collector's personal enthusiasm - this time contemporary Chinese art.

And also a great place to get chinese teas. 

about devils

This picture is for A, who like me, first heard about Tazmania as a child through the Looney Tunes cartoon character of Tazmanian Devil. If I knew where the country was, I think it was a while longer before I knew devils were real, and even longer to be sure how big they are (small dog) and what their actual rather than cartoon characteristics were. However, as with A, the devil is the first thing I think of when anybody mentions Tassie.

And now the devils are at risk, their numbers seriously depleted by devil facial tumour disease. Despite the sign I did not see one (perhaps because they are nocturnal) although I did see a wallaby –shaped thing, which could have been, I learn from the parks and wildlifeservice, a potoroo, pademelon or bettong.

following the pipeline

After a day underground, I had a fabulous 3hour walk from Fern Tree down the side of Mt. Wellington, all the way back to the waterfront. I had originally planned to take a tourist bus up to the summit, but was stymied by a huge group off a cruise liner, so got the local bus half-way up instead. Lucky really as I took what was called the easy bushwalk from Fern Tree - the pipeline track - since I was stupidly wearing flip-flops, and it still involved a steep and dangerously uneven incline at Gentle Annie’s Falls (ha, not gentle at all!).

The track follows the original construction of Hobart water supply from the 1860s and its various additions from stone to metal to concrete pipes; the sound of underground water follows you most of the way down to the waterworks reservoir; and the views are fantastic.

no labels but lots of logo

One of MONA’s deliberate anarchies is to not label the work. Instead if you want you can hook up with iPods and/or headphones (the O guide) and learn about the art as you go; from a series of different voices, including Walsh’s own reasons for buying a piece. However, the project is supported by a large amount of written material – Monanisms, the catalogue for the opening show; the Making of MONA about the whole project; and David Walsh’s memoir A Bone of Fact. We may not be given ‘proper’ art-gallery-type instructions about how to read the art (who made it, when, what out of, where and in what context) but there is a tremendous amount of post-modern, post-everything ‘stuff’ which surrounds the collection, infused by all the irony, partiality, cleverness, and witty asides one has come to expect. How long this will seem ‘on-trend’ rather than deeply dated waits to be seen.

shocking?

The collected work at MONA focuses on the visceral, the ritualistic and the mythological (with some post-modern ‘Disneyland’ thrown in); picking up a rich thread in modern and contemporary art and tying it back to ancient Egyptian artifacts and the like. We are meant to be shocked – by the building’s unexpectedness, by the lack of labels on the work, by the refusal of ‘artwank’ and by the work itself. 

It is, of course, an artificial controversy (one that Walsh himself only seems often bored by). We have already had, after all ‘ the shock of the new’ of modern art, and it is nearly 20 years since Saatchi’s Sensation show spotlighting the supposedly notorious Young British Artists (the YBAs) and their enthusiasm for the distasteful and bloody.

Walsh’s collection, though, brings that attitude decidedly into the 21^st century and into the act of collecting and displaying work itself. The current guest exhibition is Matthew Burney’s Riverof Fundament, which seems a perfect fit. Other large permanent pieces such as Anselm Kiefer’s Sherivath ha Kelim, give some organizational structure to the space. This has it’s own pavilion (entered via a long dark and musical concrete pipe, which suddenly spits you out into really unexpected daylight).  It is also a ‘classic’ marker of the kind of work on show. For, despite all the hype, the work on show is both an incredibly coherent selection - whether you like it or not- of where much contemporary art has been going.

holidaying in Hobart

Have just had an amazing couple of days in Hobart; one to visit the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) – a kind of hugely impressive vanity project by the professional gambler and art collector David Walsh – and the other to climb up (well actually down) Mount Wellington.

MONA is all the critics say. You reach it best by boat up the river Derwent to Berridale (the Mona Roma, done up in dazzle camouflage, and with plastic sheep to sit on) then up a long flight of steps to what appears as a small single storey pavilion – a converted existing house on the site – with a tennis court literally in front of the entrance, plus cafes, pavilions, a stage and rolling lawns between.

Then through a mirrored front door and back down and down via a spiral stair cut directly through the sandstone into what feels like a huge subterranean gallery, dark and windowless. A second Piranesi-like staircase made of corten at the other end meanders back up through the levels, in and against a deep cut of exposed and often wet sandstone, that slices a linear void through length of the space.  The project, by architects Fender Katsalidis, is quite stunning and unlike most of what we know of galleries; or at least conventional airy white box versions. Of course, the space signals what the collector/collection is about – an odd mixture of incredible sophistication and naughty boy. Which I enjoyed enormously, even the obvious bits, because it still manages to feel refreshing.