Two Bays launch tomorrow...

Here is an open invitation for any Melbourne bloggers to come along to support the launch of Two Bays 2011

Hope to do some sea time blogging as we travel both Port Phillip and Western Port Bays over the last half of January.

Over the past weeks the Eastern Coast of Australia and especially Queensland has been on high flood alert. Brisbane has just experienced the worst flooding since 1974. Though the peak was a bit lower than the 1974 flood, the impact will be as high if not higher as the city has grown so much in the intervening years. Personally, all the people I know there and in environs are safe and mostly dry. But so many others are not as lucky.
The flood event is being linked to the fact that we are experiencing the La Nina weather pattern which is influenced by the Pacific Ocean. There has already been a lot of interesting science commentary linking the ferocity of the flood with climate change. It fits predicted patterns of weather behaviour even on top of the extremes predicted with a La Nina cycle.

Two years ago I was caught in a flash flood scenario in the Currumbin Creek Valley. I was staying with a friend in a cottage that had supposedly been built above the 100 year flood line. But the plans did not reckon with four lows sitting over the mountain looming behind and letting the heavens pour down on country already saturated by constant rain. This created an immediate torrent which transformed a peaceful babbling, platypus inhabited creek, into a raging river.
We survived due to a combination of luck and a bit of common sense. But luck was the more powerful factor of the two. That night a woman died just above us as she was swept off a culvert in her car. Along with some cows and horses.
Towoomba suffered the same type of event earlier this week, which was also not on the radar of the meteorologists because the cascading events occurred all too swiftly.

Time will tell to what extent these terrible floods are driven by local cycles and how much they have been exacerbated by climate change. All I know is that as I am not there on hand to help people mop up I can only feel slightly useful by working in the way we are with Pelican. I hope that by adding to the knowledge of the Marine environment and connecting people to the importance of this process with shared understanding and collaborative learning will aid in the task of getting to grips with the challenge of our rapidly changing world.

Conversations with the sky

Putting on the dusty coat of my neglected blog and shrugging the load of unsaid thoughts into my hands to throw skywards.

On reflection I see the year has hurtled by. So much has been spent in angst about getting projects up, paid for and attempting to pool as many elements together to create rich and meaningful times at sea. Both in a cultural and scientific sense. Lovely time has also been spent growing my daughter up. Following her journey through 2nd grade, watching her friendships, sometimes struggling to help her make sense of separated parents. But always sharing, talking and doing lots of things together.

The next Pelican project Two Bays starts up again in January and most of the last two months has been spent in frenetic activity to get all the pieces together.

But I found myself lagging a little behind the tasks I had set myself. Starting to stare at screens rather than reeling off e mails or making the important phone calls.



And perhaps the antidote to a niggardly sense of leaving something of importance behind is to give a few more moments to cloud gazing. Waiting and letting a quiet repose attempt to shuffle this unquiet mind.
This year has flown by and it is also incredible to reflect that this time last year my sister was dying. She held on for Christmas and passed just two days later. She is all around me at the moment, illuminating her absence.

I want/need more absent mindedness to give me a space to have the presence of mind to reach under/ behind the curtain of the daily tumult. And then perhaps I can gather the leaves of the year and throw them skywards and watch them fall ever so slowly.

Paean

My daughter lies curled up on the trampoline of Pelican,
She is tired after many days at sea, sun and constant movement.
So she curls up and rests.

Posting with posterous on Pelican- Cape York

I am off on a Pelican project and most of my posting is at this point through the active expedition posting site of posterous here,

but here are some photos so my good old blog doesn't feel quite so neglected...

Conferences, conferences, conferences---

Leonie Sheedy presenting at SNAICC conference



IPMEN delegates with Fijian school children at Taqage District school.

I have just been through a bit of a presenting binge starting with the Healthy Parks Healthy People Inaugural Congress in Melbourne, then IPMEN conference in Fiji and finally SNAICC conference in Alice Springs.

The three conferences managed to cover topics ranging from Parks Management, community engagement in both management and study of Marine parks, marine science (particularly water quality), sharing knowledge about Caring for Sea Country, Traditional Knowledge and social justice issues.

I am not quite sure how I have got myself entangled in these terrific themes. I think my job description must certainly be Generalist by now. The years of studying fine art, putting brush to paper or canvas and always feeling a deep uncertainty about my Art stuff has resulted in me branching out a little.

Perhaps it is also due to being the child of a young colonial nation with Ancient underpinnings which have called me from any path I could have predicted within my particular framework of schooling and social environment. Just goes to show what can happen if you have an open mind.

But it also means that the path is not smooth on a personal level. I now move with more surety in the world, feeling that what I am doing is the best way to respond to the incredibly complex times that we live in. And that I am blessed to be able to have the freedom to work in the way I do and learn.

I sometimes wish that the illumination and determination I feel in relation to my actual work could be translated into certainty around some of the major painful issues in my life. My heart is becoming a strange soldier, standing on guard, watchful.

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.