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Showing posts from 2018

The Espy: Track 1, Side 2

Day one. The Espy is back! Our local pub, our bay-windowed beauty. Two hours into my first re-visit, one of the new owners, Andy Mullins, spots me reading in an armchair on the fourth floor, shakes my hand, saying ‘this is what we want to see, people relaxing, using the spaces!’ and offers to buy me a drink. ‘Really? A shandy?’ he says. I think he's disappointed. The barman comments, ‘You don’t order a shandy to improve the beer, you order a shandy to improve the lemonade.’ I’m somewhat shamed, shandy-shamed , but I’m revelling in my retro memories, so say cheers, and just drink it all in. It’s been three years or so that the pub has been closed, and I’ve been time-travelling. I’ve come up the front stairs, past the patio where I used to watch over my sleeping kinder kids in the 15-minute carparks out the front. (Don’t judge me. OK, judge me; don’t care.) Up I go, through the double doors into the light-filled atrium. Down into the new public bar, looking for the old etchings o

Love a Plover

‘Are you aware of the birds? The birds nesting?’ I ask the couple, as they walk along the shoreline towards me with their two dogs off-lead. The bloke growls at me, ‘Our dogs are under effective control,’ as one lollops off, zigzagging its way into the sand dunes. Further down the beach, the small nesting boxes nestle into the grass, past the high water mark. There are ropes to signify ‘stay away’ from this marked-out safety zone. In this space between land and ocean–a place of submerged and washed up things, of life teeming below the surface and skimming across waves and the shore–small birds, camouflaged among the seaweed and beach grasses, build their tiny nests in depressions in the sand. I feel like I have a duty to speak, to alert these humans to the precious creatures, at risk on this coastal zone. I wonder how the dog owners will respond. ‘The whole beach here is on-lead during nesting season,’ I say. ’I’m just concerned about the hooded plovers. There are only a few

Magpies, my sentinel birds

Spring. Swooping season. Time for articles about magpies in attack mode. I have seen the terrifying images already, of the magpie approaching someone’s head at high speed. But, in my mind and heart, magpies are the birds that remind me of my father. When they visit, I try to sing their song to them: burdle-durdle-dup. I watch their heads tilt, they turn to survey me, and then they sing back. They are my sentinel birds: they keep watch and stake a claim. At the beach shack, when we are singing, more maggies join us from beyond the tea trees. They are always at the gate when we arrive, heralding us in; they sing to us each morning we are there; and as we leave, the magpie family appears from the perimeters. They stake out their claim to the property again, as we turn right under the gum tree and sweep away down the hill. It's as if  dad has seen us onto and off the block. That’s one of the magic things about magpies: they turn up, like some kind of portal. And when they do

Side by side with humans, let the songbirds sing

With Spring now upon us, Melbourne is heading deep into the midst of AFL footy finals. We are also in the middle of magpie nesting season. And that means talk of magpies swooping. (For a Collingwood fan, this has extra significance, but I digress.) Already the images of attacking maggies are circulating on social media—there's this  Buzzfeed tweet , and Google searches filled with helmetcam swoop pics . There’s even a magpie attack map where hapless humans can drop a pin where the magpie tried to drop in on them. There are dates, times, exact locations, but more than that, there are also magpie stories. Stories of swooping aggressors, sure, but stories of people making friends with magpies, feeding them, and learning to live with them. My great grandfather wrote stories of the magpies in the Australian bush, taking shelter in the highest trees to avoid predators, rain and floods. ‘The Magpies chose the tallest tree/That anywhere their eyes could see/Where they’

Contested territory

Little seems to evoke inner city community outrage as much as a battle over public open space, particularly where dogs are involved. At Elsternwick Park, emotions have become unleashed, as dog owners and sports fans vie for contested territory. It’s a typical weekend morning and Elsternwick Park is filled with people. There are parents with children at the playground, people kicking the footy, walkers, joggers and fitness groups. There are also people wielding clipboards, seeking signatures to preserve one of the area's largest off leash dog parks. Bayside Council’s proposal to rejuvenate open space into two ovals is causing residents to drop the ball, with reports of ‘aggro’ encounters between park users, and suggestions of a misinformation campaign. The 14.9 hectare park has provided space for passive recreation, off leash dog walking and sports, like hockey and Auskick, over its many years. But some residents are concerned that the proposal to fence and light ovals

Spin Cycle

In the gallery, in a darkened room a t the NGV, lying on what is an interactive, rendered body of water.   Watching the people and my boots in silhouette, feeling the floor beneath me, swipes and swirls moving, watching the waves. Get up off the floor! the gallery attendant demands. Get up! Then, Get up, please! She moves around the vortex and we comply, lifting ourselves back upright, to stand rather than lie in the pull.  Artist Toshiyuki Inoko and his collaborators at Team Lab explore the pull of currents, the dissolving of ‘ the borders between the individual human body and the forces of nature’  in this installation as part of NGV's Triennal. Why is lying down forbidden in the vortex? Is it the risk of being pulled under? Moving creates vortices and vortices create movement, Team Lab, 2017 Swirls of the vortex move around and underfoot, light moving through and over. The waves move to our human shape, interact with our force, adapt to move away and envelop us.

Forsaken

Jesus wept, the saying goes, and there he was, on his crucifix, laid out on the unceremonious bench, cast rigid into a plaster block, laid to waste on the Swanston Street spine.  The heat is searing, baking, under the transparent shell of the tram stop awning.   Six minutes til my tram. I don't want to sit on the bench with Jesus. I observe the form with suspicion. But I dare to touch the crucifix, lift its weight, to test it, from the metal slats. Only just, do I dare. INRI at the top of the cross: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum: “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews" (John 19:19) etched above the figure, carved into the wood of the cross, or in this case, dug out of metal. But these two? These two travellers snarling at the edge of the stingy shade? They are their own little kingdom, with rules and overseers. His body, coiled, the stringy neck of an unwell bird, head shaved. On her lower leg, a square within a square, locked away, inked into her ankle, just abov

Groyne Riders

‘Before Bells, there was Brighton’ wrote Michael Gordon in his book Bells. The Beach, The Surfers, the Contest. His story of Bells started with a tale of a break that no longer exists, between the Brighton Baths and the pier, where the grommets surfed in rude south westerlies. ‘There were a couple of peaks that broke more or less in the same spot and they were surfed with enthusiasm by a bunch of grommets, some of whom called themselves Storm Riders.’ These young surfers were the blokes who went on to make surf history in Torquay, after chasing waves ‘down the Mornington Peninsula to Phillip Island or along the Great Ocean Road, depending on the weather forecast.’ Bayside Melbourne seems an unlikely place to feature in the history of Australia’s iconic world surf league contest at Bells: the beaches along this suburban coastal strip are not known for their surf. But last weekend, it was Elwood’s chance to turn it on, with a decent southerly wind of fifty km/h which pushed the