Caterpillar dreaming

Grandmother's gaze

My grandmother as a child, in an unknown backyard with unknown woman.




Self portrait by my grandmother, Shirley Nicholas.

I am lucky to possess quite a few things that have been passed down from my grandmother (Mum's mum) to me. Some are books that I treasure but most are photographs and film. These two pictures have held a real fascination for me as they both seem to articulate the mystery of self. I look at them now and see my grandmother as a young girl and woman and wonder who she is and was. The photos also have the powerful quality of trapped time and seem to offer some clues to her real identity. And yet at the same time they are held in an endless bubble of that moment, never to be repeated.

My love of photography was inspired very much by Shirley (who I called Nangy all her life as when I was introduced at a young age to say "Hello to Granny" I said "Hello Nangy" and it stuck). She was the chronicler of the family and also had a talent with the lens which has meant that many of her pictures are interesting in themselves.

Sometimes I take a photo today and wonder if my daughter's daughter would still have access to the pictures or interest.

Anyway I leave you with these pictures and hope to post more about the mysteries of image making and pay homage to more photographs of my grandmother.

Man and fish

The first time I scuba-dived,
a fish swam nearby
and oggled me,
swam a bit closer
and oggled me again.

Another darted past,
pretending not to notice.

On surfacing I realised I would never
think of fish in the same way again.

Suddenly I remembered..

...that I had a blog.
Scanning old pictures of mine and thinking my obsessions or interests really haven't changed much.
I have only really changed what I am doing.

So here are some cartoonish sketches from the time when I used to sketch a lot.

Tangles

Easter is upon us again though it was only Christmas yesterday. My daughter was born on an Easter Sunday eight years ago and has just had her birthday and tomorrow is Easter Sunday. I travelled with my ex and daughter up to my Mum's farm to celebrate her birthday. This was a wish of my daughter as she wanted to share it with all of us in a place we love. We all obliged and as we have always managed to get on pretty well, we had a peaceful and happy celebration day.

The exercise was not totally painless as even though I instigated the split from my daughter's dad, I still find myself embroiled in many conflicting emotions when we all get together. My ex's father died only a couple of weeks ago and I was pulled back into the orbit of his family for his funeral. This began the process of revisiting old strong connections. I loved his Dad and treasure all the time in his company. I know in his way he did too and also that he was upset and angry when left his son. I feel guilty about the impact that this decision had on his parents and his death certainly made me feel it all the more keenly.

Interestingly my ex is moving forward now and has perhaps found someone new and I know this has exacerbated my own strange chemistry of regret and need. It is not a very pretty picture and I wish I could be freer and less tangled.

Which leads me to the pictures above.

My daughter had a rough night last night with ear pain and we ended up at a local hospital till all hours. Things have sorted today and her ears are much better. So I thought we should make a fun excursion into the wilds of my Mum's place. Her Dad has returned home so at this point it is just the three generations of female family here. So we packed some crayons and took of to explore the 'wild'.
Mum's property is really an environmental project and she has spent much energy restoring the land to original health, particularly the riparian areas along the creek. So we meandered through very tall grass and soon found ourselves in the 'wild'. As we clambered over the areas photographed above I marvelled at the writhing tangle of vines and the extraordinary mesh of left over branches and debris from a recent flood. My daughter wanted to get deeper into the 'wilds', so we stumbled and slipped and giggled our way into the tangle till there was no sky to see.

And I realized that it is all right to feel the messiness of life. Things are never perfectly ordered. We are always slipping up, losing our way and finding it in a different way.

It is hard to accept sometimes and I know I lose a lot of sleep struggling against the tangled order of things. But there it is...

The Archivalists

Inside the Library of the Cairns Historical Society.



The Skipper of Pelican had flown back to Melbourne after our meetings in Cairns with Hope Vale Elders and Balkanu about this year's project. I was due back in Brisbane as I had planned to visit my Mum and hopefully meet my brother in law, Mark with my daughter for the weekend. But I just could not get on the plane. My Mum had warned me that things were flooding near her and advised me to stay an extra day. My brother in law was not able to get time off work and my daughter had to stay in Melbourne.

I did not need much prompting to stay for some extra time on my own. Solitude is a rare and to be treasured thing. It is the reason I had time to wander in Cairns. During this time I found the Historical Society of Cairns and its Library and ended up spending the afternoon researching Sea Country and looking up information about Cape York. A lovely older gent took all my slips of paper and diligently searched as I found more and more material. Some of the material was from anthropologists, one of them being Ursula McConnel, who worked up the Cape in the early part of last century.

As I buried myself in the piles of materials I had to reflect on the riches that were saved and archived by these wonderful volunteers working in the Library. You could see they had no money, surviving on the tuppences they get from the entry fee to the Museum. The main guy had worked there for 24 years following his retirement as a paid librarian. I just wanted to post a huge thank you to all those passionate volunteers in all walks of life. Our world would be impoverished without the dedicated work of these mainly unsung diligent people.

Falling averages

Think it is time to get a bit of a move on here, or the old Wild Dog road will curl in on itself. I think the scarcity of posting only attests to the fact that I am not getting the breathing space to meander in blogland. So to give my averages a lift here goes with some pictorial reflections of the last month. They are taken on or in the water during the Two Bays project.

I had blogged directly but often obliquely about my sister's illness last year. It was a terrible year for her and for us to watch her go through so much both mental and physical pain. She managed to shine through all the time which always astounded me. As she was hammered by the cancer; her sense of herself only seemed to grow, to catch up with what was happening to her. She died on the 27th of December, beating the odds to get that far. We held her funeral a week later and four days after that I was launching a 24 day community project on Pelican. I really did wonder if I would get through it. Having witnessed what my sister had been through it also made me more determined to make a good shot of it.

So the first month of the New Year has passed. Now over a month since my sister died. And it is still impossible to let go.

I can only float when I have the opportunity to immerse myself in watery moving worlds. Enjoy watching the way light travels through water and catches the myriads of gardens that are normally out of sight.