Busy busy
We're having quite a weekend. A couple of American
Eyes are in town. Strictly speaking there are four eyes, since there
are two people -- WIll the blogger and his friend Harvey. We met them via the
blogosphere and they have morphed into real-world friends. And they're here on
one of their regular visits to
Australia.
On Friday night they shouted us to Gallipoli at the Sydney Theatre, which we probably wouldn't have gone to otherwise, having found ourselves leaving too many STC productions at half time in the past, and not being enamoured of all-singing, all-dancing cast-of-thousands shows, especially if dealing with well-worn themes of war as the crucible of nations etc. But you know, it was a wonderful night of theatre, with brilliant use of slide projection, trapdoors, rappelling, documentary sources (including a gloriously polyphonic rendering of CJ Dennis's 'Austra---laise' with an F word instead of the more jovial B word that CJD intended, though click on the link for some interesting history). It was especially great to see the show with a couple of non-Australians: 'So Gallipoli is cherished as a defining moment in Australian history and at the same time decried as a complete shambles. Can Australians hold these two contradictory attitudes at once?' 'What are you talking about, contradiction?' It was fun trying to explain the bit where Billy Hughes was described as eventually becoming a Liberal, and giving a quick background on Alex Campbell, who, beautifully, got the final word.
Then yesterday was like totally packed. At 11 o'clock We picked them up from the Sheraton on Hyde Park (where they got a very cheap deal) and went to the Annandale Galleries to have a look at the current exhibition, Ambrym – The Art of Vanuatu. This was another intense experience. Many of the works hadn't been seen by anyone outside of the tribal culture of the island of Ambrym before. According to the catalogue, the exhibition resulted from a decision by a number of chiefs to take steps to preserve the culture by making it known to outsiders -- what is secret has trouble surviving. Mind you, the mere fact of being exhibited doesn't change the fact that most of these objects are totally enigmatic to (my) western eyes. However, the sale of these ceremonial articles will hopefully be seen as validation of traditional ways by young people on the island, as well as generating revenue. The catalogue also said that this was not ancient art, but current work, used for contemporary ceremonies and other purposes: the palm tree carvings and sculpted plant fibre were painted with brightly coloured house paints. Headpieces, ancestral spirits, huge hollow drums, enigmatic therianthropic figures, all tucked away in a former Masonic Hall in leafy Annandale. It's open until 23 August.
We lunched in Leichhardt, had gelati, bought chocolate from a man raising funds for education in Papua Niugini, then caught a ferry from Balmain East to Darling Harbour and from there to Cockatoo Island for a slice of the Sydney Biennale. The island itself is a treat: it was a shipyards until the early 1990s, and hasn't been polished up – it's possible to camp there overnight for a fee, and that's said to be a terrific experience. But we were there for the art. Mike Parr had the run of the old Sailors' Quarters: I lasted longer in his exhibit than any of my companions, though I wouldn't claim to have enjoyed it. The disused group toilet that smelled like a stale urinal, thanks to a line of buckets filled with dubious-looking liquid, was bad enough, but room after room showing videos of self harm was ten times worse. Of the other things we saw, the two that meant most to me were Susan Phillipsz's piece, in which a cordoned-off space, empty except for the hulking mechanical remains of its industrial past, became an echo-chamber for a solo female voice singing the Internationale as a poignant lament. The song resounded through many of the other exhibits, none more movingly that the other one I want to single out, Vernon Ah Kee's series of huge charcoal and pastel portraits. It was really something to face these delicately drawn, challenging Aboriginal faces with the strains of 'the Internationale unites the human race' filling the air like a fine warm mist. (I discovered from the notes that Vernon Ah kee was born in my home town of Innisfail, 20 years after me. If any siblings read this: do you remember the Ah Kees?) The program notes on the drawings read in part:
I can't say that they worked exactly that way for me. The faces were too gentle to feel like accusers. But as serendipity would have it, both that description and the images themselves reminded me of something that happened to me when reading Quentin Beresford's biography of Rob Riley (about which I plan to blog soon). The early pages of the book tell the story of Rob's grandmother, Anna Dinah (née Miller). It's a terrible story of White bureaucracy controlling a woman's life to the point of effective incarceration in perpetuity, solely on the basis of her Aboriginality. She asks permission to marry and is told it will only be allowed if she abandons her children; she pleads, argues, occasionally resorts to sarcasm, pours her despair onto paper, all in letters preserved on her file. But I confess I was reading her story as that of a victim, one more appalling statistic. And then, facing page 32, there's a photo of her, holding her Moore River Settlement identification number, but looking directly into the camera with an intelligent, perhaps slightly quizzical gaze, 'exercising a right of reply'.
Then last night we all four went to see Bangarra Dance Company's Mithanna. It Was Very Good. Will has written about it, much more eloquently than I could, and if you want detail, read his entry, 'The Great Australian Wars'.
This afternoon, less intensely, we took Will and Harvey to Vaucluse House, intending to have scones and jam and cream, but the tea house is closed, hopefully only for the winter, so we hopped in the car and drove under the Harbour to Balmoral, where we had giant Anzac biscuits and told tales of Krishnamurti not walking on water there in the 1920s. All in beautiful weather, the kind we like to think is typical of Sydney's winters.
And now Penny and I are about to spend an evening blobbing out in front of the television while presumably Will and Harvey rest from their exertions in a room overlooking Hyde Park.
On Friday night they shouted us to Gallipoli at the Sydney Theatre, which we probably wouldn't have gone to otherwise, having found ourselves leaving too many STC productions at half time in the past, and not being enamoured of all-singing, all-dancing cast-of-thousands shows, especially if dealing with well-worn themes of war as the crucible of nations etc. But you know, it was a wonderful night of theatre, with brilliant use of slide projection, trapdoors, rappelling, documentary sources (including a gloriously polyphonic rendering of CJ Dennis's 'Austra---laise' with an F word instead of the more jovial B word that CJD intended, though click on the link for some interesting history). It was especially great to see the show with a couple of non-Australians: 'So Gallipoli is cherished as a defining moment in Australian history and at the same time decried as a complete shambles. Can Australians hold these two contradictory attitudes at once?' 'What are you talking about, contradiction?' It was fun trying to explain the bit where Billy Hughes was described as eventually becoming a Liberal, and giving a quick background on Alex Campbell, who, beautifully, got the final word.
Then yesterday was like totally packed. At 11 o'clock We picked them up from the Sheraton on Hyde Park (where they got a very cheap deal) and went to the Annandale Galleries to have a look at the current exhibition, Ambrym – The Art of Vanuatu. This was another intense experience. Many of the works hadn't been seen by anyone outside of the tribal culture of the island of Ambrym before. According to the catalogue, the exhibition resulted from a decision by a number of chiefs to take steps to preserve the culture by making it known to outsiders -- what is secret has trouble surviving. Mind you, the mere fact of being exhibited doesn't change the fact that most of these objects are totally enigmatic to (my) western eyes. However, the sale of these ceremonial articles will hopefully be seen as validation of traditional ways by young people on the island, as well as generating revenue. The catalogue also said that this was not ancient art, but current work, used for contemporary ceremonies and other purposes: the palm tree carvings and sculpted plant fibre were painted with brightly coloured house paints. Headpieces, ancestral spirits, huge hollow drums, enigmatic therianthropic figures, all tucked away in a former Masonic Hall in leafy Annandale. It's open until 23 August.
We lunched in Leichhardt, had gelati, bought chocolate from a man raising funds for education in Papua Niugini, then caught a ferry from Balmain East to Darling Harbour and from there to Cockatoo Island for a slice of the Sydney Biennale. The island itself is a treat: it was a shipyards until the early 1990s, and hasn't been polished up – it's possible to camp there overnight for a fee, and that's said to be a terrific experience. But we were there for the art. Mike Parr had the run of the old Sailors' Quarters: I lasted longer in his exhibit than any of my companions, though I wouldn't claim to have enjoyed it. The disused group toilet that smelled like a stale urinal, thanks to a line of buckets filled with dubious-looking liquid, was bad enough, but room after room showing videos of self harm was ten times worse. Of the other things we saw, the two that meant most to me were Susan Phillipsz's piece, in which a cordoned-off space, empty except for the hulking mechanical remains of its industrial past, became an echo-chamber for a solo female voice singing the Internationale as a poignant lament. The song resounded through many of the other exhibits, none more movingly that the other one I want to single out, Vernon Ah Kee's series of huge charcoal and pastel portraits. It was really something to face these delicately drawn, challenging Aboriginal faces with the strains of 'the Internationale unites the human race' filling the air like a fine warm mist. (I discovered from the notes that Vernon Ah kee was born in my home town of Innisfail, 20 years after me. If any siblings read this: do you remember the Ah Kees?) The program notes on the drawings read in part:
The focus of each subject is their ‘gaze’ – the way they look back at the viewer. Ah Kee’s drawings respond to the history of romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’ anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time. The drawings inhabit the space as an Aboriginal and ‘human’ presence. On gazing at the oversized portraits the viewer experiences a sense of discomfort, as the confrontational act of the stare, of facing an accuser, of exercising a right of reply, is strongly felt.
I can't say that they worked exactly that way for me. The faces were too gentle to feel like accusers. But as serendipity would have it, both that description and the images themselves reminded me of something that happened to me when reading Quentin Beresford's biography of Rob Riley (about which I plan to blog soon). The early pages of the book tell the story of Rob's grandmother, Anna Dinah (née Miller). It's a terrible story of White bureaucracy controlling a woman's life to the point of effective incarceration in perpetuity, solely on the basis of her Aboriginality. She asks permission to marry and is told it will only be allowed if she abandons her children; she pleads, argues, occasionally resorts to sarcasm, pours her despair onto paper, all in letters preserved on her file. But I confess I was reading her story as that of a victim, one more appalling statistic. And then, facing page 32, there's a photo of her, holding her Moore River Settlement identification number, but looking directly into the camera with an intelligent, perhaps slightly quizzical gaze, 'exercising a right of reply'.
Then last night we all four went to see Bangarra Dance Company's Mithanna. It Was Very Good. Will has written about it, much more eloquently than I could, and if you want detail, read his entry, 'The Great Australian Wars'.
This afternoon, less intensely, we took Will and Harvey to Vaucluse House, intending to have scones and jam and cream, but the tea house is closed, hopefully only for the winter, so we hopped in the car and drove under the Harbour to Balmoral, where we had giant Anzac biscuits and told tales of Krishnamurti not walking on water there in the 1920s. All in beautiful weather, the kind we like to think is typical of Sydney's winters.
And now Penny and I are about to spend an evening blobbing out in front of the television while presumably Will and Harvey rest from their exertions in a room overlooking Hyde Park.
Posted: Sun - August 3, 2008 at 09:04 PM |
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This started out as a patchy journal about family life with my mother-in-law, Mollie, who has Alzheimers and was then living with us. Mollie has moved, first into a "low-care facility" then, in July 2004, into a nursing home. As these and other events have overtaken us, the blog has moved on ...
A note on comments: You can read comments on the same page as the entry rather than in a pop-up window, by clicking on the category button ("Mollie" etc) at the end of the entry and then on the "Read more" button.
A note on comments: You can read comments on the same page as the entry rather than in a pop-up window, by clicking on the category button ("Mollie" etc) at the end of the entry and then on the "Read more" button.
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