Saturday Evening on the Harbour with Sunday

Last Friday was the start of the German winter festival known as ‘Yule’ and was also Friday the thirteenth - Teutonic darkness and spookiness combined. I know this because ABC’s Vanessa Hughes announced as much when I was on my way back from a meeting to discuss how our writers' group will survive un-funded for another year. Her choice of Grieg’s March of the Trolls was apposite but my sense of unease was not dispelled as I mused on the non-funding situation and the proximity of Christmas. 

So far my life this December has been uncluttered by tinsel and baubles. My new year resolution of not trying to force the ‘jolly’ has inhibited me from making any seasonal accommodations whatsoever. The only mince pie I have tasted was an organic one my spouse purchased from the local produce market with dry pastry and burnt filling that I deposited in the compost bin after one bite. Let’s hope the $1.50 individual Christmas puddings from Aldi are more edible! 

Extent of my Xmas preparations so far

As far as gift shopping goes, all I have bought so far are a couple of calendars and a Spike Milligan CD from a bric-a-brac shop in Coolamon. One of the calendars, Ugly Medieval Cats, was a gift for my friend of many years whom I caught up with in Sydney at the weekend.  She is a fan of medieval illumination and a cat fancier (though currently cat-less). Our main gift to ourselves though was dinner, conversation and seeing the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Sunday at the Sydney Opera House. 

We ate at one of the restaurants that line the foreshore where, true to our grumpy older women demographic, we challenged the waitress about the volume of Riesling in our glasses. She pointed out that we had mistaken a line in the restaurant’s logo design for the standard drink line level and laughingly pointed to the rim of the glass saying that’s where she’d pour up to ‘in my country’. Dinner, salmon fillets baked in banana leaves in spicy coconut cream  and served with ample firm broccolini spears, was delicious. Not so the overpriced, over sweet, but still bland gelato we purchased en route to the Opera House. Thank you, Saxenda for letting me bin this ice cream like I did the mince pie! 

Arriving at Circular Quay

Since my last visit, security screening has been introduced at the Opera House. The checkpoint had several staff clustered around it. One glanced at us, judged that we did not need to put our handbags on the conveyor belt and gestured that we could just walk through the detection arch. I set off the alarm and a dapper uniformed man in his early forties exclaimed ‘bag check’ at me. Unaware of the drill I hesitated momentarily and he barked the phrase twice more. I presented my bag to a young woman standing beside the conveyor belt; she rummaged and found nothing concluding that my glasses case had triggered the alarm. The confusion and inconclusiveness of the encounter led me to mutter ‘ridiculous’, at this the man fixed me with an officious stare and told me firmly ‘It is NOT ridiculous’. How I missed the affable front of house staff at Wagga’s Civic Theatre at that moment! If that wasn’t enough evidence of my incipient parochialism, at interval I crossed swords with a server on the refreshment counter who took so long to  comprehend my request for black tea with a splash of cold water that interval was almost over leading him to say ‘you know you can’t take it with you?’   I had heard that somewhere before. I don’t like to think that I am  a curmudgeon. When I related to my sister that Sam Neill was in the audience and that I had a brush with security she immediately thought I had to be restrained from pestering the star. That is the reputation I would prefer!

But to the play itself, Sunday – a play with a title to torture box office staff, for example when I asked if we could exchange our Wednesday tickets for Sunday to Saturday! It is named for Sunday Reed the wealthy unconventional philanthropist, art collector and arbiter and muse to Australian modernist apainters who, with her husband John, founded the artists’ retreat, Heide on a  dairy property on the banks of the Yarra in Bulleen, Victoria. Playwright Anthony Weigh has created Sunday as a fascinating, complex, sometimes vitriolic, sometimes vulnerable believable woman. Nikki Shiels brings his characterisation to life brilliantly. She is on stage for almost all of the play’s 140 minutes performing a role that is both heavy on pithy dialogue and physically demanding. It was a tour de force! 

L to R: James O'Connell as Sidney Nolan, Nikki Sheils as Sunday Reed and Matt Day as John Reed in the MTC's production of Sunday at the Sydney Opera House (source: https://www.stagenoise.com/review/2024/sunday)

Set in the 1930s-40s, Sunday traverses Sidney Nolan’s initial naïve meeting with the Reeds, his passionate affair with Sunday, his creation of the iconic Ned Kelly series and his eventual estrangement from his patrons.  Coincidentally I had seen the Ned Kelly series the weekend before at the NGA and had again marvelled at their skilful combination of iconography and truthful landscape and their penetrating evocation of the contradictions of the Australian psyche. Weigh’s writing about art is exceptional. Sunday’s description of The Slip (1947) Nolan’s painting depicting troopers in procession, outlaw  tracking, on a steep incline with a huge foregrounded horse that has lost its footing and fallen but remains suspended inverted for all time becomes a metaphor for the limbo, suffering and cruelty she and he are experiencing in their doomed relationship.

Sydney Nolan's The Slip (1947) from his Ned Kelly series 

This is only one of the many amazing translations of visual art qualities into dialogue that Weigh achieves.  I have never experienced writing that so vividly conveys the concepts and impact of visual art. If I have any qualms about the play they relate to the eccentric casting and costuming of the Joy Hester character and the underutilisation of both her and Sweeney’s character in the drama, but these are minor quibbles. Sunday was a wonderful (un-Christmassy) gift to ourselves! 

Confluence by the Sea

It was apt that the evening of what would have been my dearest friend’s 66th birthday, 7 November, I spent at the theatre. Monica was a theatre devotee and saw everything from Broadway blockbusters to the most modest and quirky amateur shows. Whenever we could we went to the theatre together. Given Monica’s catholic tastes and our countless conversations about the merits of the productions we saw, Alice Spigelman’s The Kingdom of Eucalypts at the Bondi Pavilion was also an apt choice.

It was raining and the skies above Bondi’s ecru sands and glass green surf-less ocean provided a muted backdrop. The Pavilion has been extensively and expensively renovated since I was last there, but as that was in 1970 to see Graham Bond and Rory O’Donohue in Hamlet on Ice, some refurbishment was to be expected. There are exhibition spaces but both were closed as was the bar, so I was pleased I’d had a glass of on-tap NZ Marlborough Sav Blanc at the Icebergs en route.

Bondi Beach evening of 7 November 2024 (my photo)

I had selected the play on a number of grounds: commemorating Monica on her birthday, revisiting an iconic Sydney venue, ticket availability during a short visit, and its subject matter. The Kingdom of Eucalypts is subtitled The Enigma of Miles Franklin. I think the title is drawn from Franklin’s posthumously published memoir, Childhood at Brindabella while the subtitle accurately reflects the playwright’s inconclusive picture of this classic Australian author.  Monica and I shared an appreciation of Miles Franklin, of the 1979 film of My Brilliant Career and of Australian literary history generally. The play tells the story of Miles Franklin’s life on her return to Sydney in 1932 after years of living in Chicago and London. The early triumph of My Brilliant Career is well behind her and she is trying to get her more recent works published, with little success. She feels stuck caring for her elderly widowed mother, living frugally in suburban Carlton. Miles bonds with charismatic publisher PR ‘Inky’ Stephensen over their shared passion for forging a distinctly Australian cultural identity independent of Britain. In regard to these goals, Franklin was also active in the Fellowship of Australian Writers and the Sydney PEN Club championing emerging writers and supported the new literary journals Meanjin and Southerly though these facts I gained from Wikipedia, as The Kingdom of the Eucalypts dwells almost exclusively on her tumultuous relationship with Stephensen.

Official poster for the production (Moira Blumenthal Productions) 

The problem with The Kingdom of Eucalypts is that it literally TELLS the story of Franklin’s life. Alice Spigelman has done her research and regurgitates it via not one but two Miles Franklins (the ingénue of My Brilliant Career and a contemporary one). We are treated to a recounting of biographical data with regular self-conscious feminist observations about the unfairness of gender roles and a longed for future where female writers do not need to adopt masculine nom de plumes. The exploitation of the inherent tensions and drama of Franklin’s life is minimal. Given her fraught relationship with her mother, who was disdainful about her indiscreet depiction of the family, frustration with the curse of early success, famed refusal of marriage proposals and flirtation with fascism, there was ample scope for confrontational themes, but the rancour and passion of scenes that touch on these themes were mild.  Instead we got screeds of discursive ‘text’ from the two Mileses with Spigelman puzzlingly, perhaps to be even handed in apportioning speeches to the actors, putting insights and questions into the mouths of the younger and older protagonists almost arbitrarily.  Alan Bennett’s more successful use of the technique of multiple personae in The Lady In The Van came to mind.

The scene that most captured some of the real tensions and contradictions of Franklin's life was when she visits Inky in detention and he rails against her lack of loyalty and indignation at his imprisonment. I have since read that his internment in 1942 for supposedly supporting and even potentially spying for the Japanese and Germans was based on flimsy, circumstantial evidence and was a major abuse of his human rights.

There is always a danger in applying a modern lens to the behaviour of our cultural heroes. I approached Anna Funder’s Wifedom with a trepidation that reading her impeccably realised work proved unfounded. Alice Spigelman’s attempt to fathom the supposed contradictions of Franklin’s character, giving her the benefit of the doubt about her adherence to Inky’s right wing nationalism, felt slightly redundant. Any examination of the cultural and political scene of 1930s and 40s Australia, or indeed of any period of social evolution, reveals that things are seldom clear-cut. Norman Lindsay was a champion of free speech; creator of beloved Bunyip Bluegum and that grumpy Puddin’, a technically brilliant etcher and watercolourist but who also created those ghastly Bacchanalian pastiche scenes and some deeply racist cartoons. Likewise Margaret Preston, a hugely talented and influential artist who produced many works that remain at the centre of a modern sense of Australian-ness, advocated an adoption of Aboriginal art motifs, which she described as ‘emotional’ and ‘rhythmic’, to create designs and decor evoking the ‘same primitive feeling with an educated result’[1]. Is it realistic to focus only on the paternalistic, uninformed language without acknowledging Preston's real appreciation and promotion of Indigenous art, culture and experience however clumsy it may seem in modern terms?

The two Miles Franklins: Sarah Greenwood and Beth Daly (image Igor Turin sourced from https://www.stagewhispers.com.au/reviews/kingdom-eucalypts)

I don’t know if the small turn out on the night I saw the play was typical. If so I pity the cast who have had to sustain a season of twenty two performances. One imagines any doubts about the wordy script  they felt during rehearsal  may have been assuaged by believing the ‘magic’ would occur when the play was presented to large sympathetic audiences. Playing to only a handful of us yet pitching the intensity of their performances for a fuller house did not make for a subtle experience.  Sarah Greenwood (the younger Franklin) and Beth Daly (the older) were burdened both with propelling the story and with dialogue of an expository and declamatory nature not supporting nuanced performance; nevertheless both were likeable and engaging.  Alice Livingstone (Miles’ mother) and Lloyd Alison-Young (Inky) had the advantage of far fewer lines and less didactic writing so elicited some of the play’s few gentle laughs.  

I notice that the Melbourne Theatre company is currently staging a musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and it is getting raves. Perhaps a visit to Melbourne is in order.  Je ne regrette rien though… Monica and I would have enjoyed dissecting the production of The Kingdom of Eucalypts, Bondi’s beauty and its elegant Pavilion did not disappoint and the gentle rain fitted the mood well.

The Kingdom of Eucalypts, is at the Bondi Pavilion from 30 October until 17 November 2024.

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[1] Leslie, Donna, Margaret Preston and Assimilation, Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, Vol 18 No 3, Sept 2015

Coota Calling

In March 2023 we took a round steam train trip from Junee to Cootamundra to experience the Bethungra Spiral. When we reached our destination we were meant to stay on the platform for twenty minutes then re-embark but I used the time to blitz the local heritage centre and the arts and crafts shop. I ventured no further or would have missed the train. 

Previously I had only seen the station and its immediate environs

Recently I again went to Coota, as the locals call it, this time specifically to see ‘Ivy Hill Gallery Goes West’ at the Arts Centre Cootamundra in Wallendoon Street. How I heard about this exhibition is one of life’s strange coincidences. I hadn’t talked to my old school friend Robyn, who lives in Tanja on the New South Wales’ South Coast for months and called her to see how she was going. Her husband suffers from vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s and I know her life isn’t easy. Two serendipitous nuggets emerged from our chat. One was that she had secured respite care and would be in Sydney during the same week that I would be later in the month. The other was that her longtime friend, Carolyn Killen, former proprietor of Ivy Hill Gallery, was bringing a collection of works by South Coast artists to the Arts Centre Cootamundra imminently.

Sandwich board displaying exhibition poster

To my delight the exhibition opened just days before my planned Sydney trip which meant I could introduce myself to Carolyn and report back on the exhibition to Robyn. My sister, Belinda, and  I took my yellow MG on the road on the morning of Sunday 22 September passing glowing fields of canola, the carcasses of unlucky roos, flocks of foraging galahs, looming silos and dormant rail yards. We talked incessantly in our private patois which involves assuming the voices with which we endow family pets, many now long dead, and impersonations of colourful characters we encounter in our daily lives. It is not false modesty to state here that Belinda far surpasses me in skill and variety in this endeavor but I am her seasoned stooge.

We needed to re-assume our mild mannered public personae on arrival in Cootamundra.  We did the obligatory loop of the town before realising we had passed the Arts Centre on the way in. It is a reclaimed industrial building that has housed many businesses including a butter factory and an importer/exporter and occupies a whole block. This background and much more was conveyed to us by the delightful Anne Steinke, one of the centre’s management committee, who greeted us and gave us a tour. Carolyn was out but expected back in about an hour. Anne showed us the ‘dirty studio’ a term probably familiar to ceramacists and printmakers but new to me and the meeting room with its eclectic collection of art books and art works. Her greatest pride is the impressive Tin Shed Theatre space that seats 122 and hosts film screenings and live performances. After facing a few funding hurdles the Arts  Centre has forged an impressive presence in the town and offers an amazing range of creative opportunities.

The  Arts Centre, Cootamundra

To the Ivy Hill exhibition itself…

The exhibition poster (see above) showcases one of Karen Sedaitis’s joyful acrylic floral paintings. There are four in the show and they are among the standout works. Botanic motifs also feature in the paintings of Tanja Riese and Veronica O’Leary. Riese’s watercolours impart an ethereal, sometimes apocalyptic mood to plant forms, rainforest and waterways. O’Leary’s bold acrylic still lifes evoke a comfortable bourgeois existence with nods to Cubism and Margaret Preston. Kerry McInnis and Philip Cox have both contributed bold landscapes – it was unsurprising given her palette to learn that some of McInnis’s watercolours share their locations with those depicted in Fred Williams’ work. More abstract in style are the oils and acrylics of Helen Gauchat and the ink drawings of Ivana Gattegno. Gauchat’s display a spareness and luminescence reminiscent of the Heidelberg painters while Gattegno brings an expressionistic writhing quality to her depiction of intertidal land and tree forms.

A Kerry McInnis landscape (image from exhibition catalogue)

Several figurative and landscape works by Penny Lovelock are on show, the former have a whimsical, illustrative quality and include beautifully rendered rural animals, both domestic and native. Livestock are also celebrated in the cattle portraiture of Megan Crane and the delicate porcelain figurines of Anneke Paijmans. The other sculptors and ceramicists included in the exhibition have a diverse range of styles from Jen Mallinson’s sleek stainless steel forms to the fusion of industrial and organic motifs in Mike MacGregor’s pieces to the naïve chunkiness of Jackie Lallemand‘s charming dog and chook sculptures. All works are for sale. The exhibition itself is rewarding as was making acquaintance with this remarkable Cootamundra facility.

One of Jen Mallinson’s more monumental pieces

Post exhibition viewing we asked for recommendations for lunch. Being a Sunday, not much was open. The weather was fine and we wanted to be outdoors. Helen’s in Parker Street has a courtyard so that’s where we went. The courtyard at Helen’s reminded me of those in pre-gentrified Glebe terrace cafés from the 1980s. A jumble of outdoor furniture crammed into an ungroomed space, a concrete path leading to an outdoor dunny. The plastic palm fronds and tin butterflies and birds were the only touches of 2000s aesthetics. Our coffee was fine but our Caesar salads rather disappointing. Next visit to Coota I hope we find somewhere to rival the cafes we’ve found in Temora and Coolamon.

Carolyn Killen with Megan Crane's bovine character studies

We did get to meet Carolyn Killen, albeit briefly, before leaving town.  We congratulated her on the impressive exhibition and asked about the logistics of bringing such a major cache of works overland.  And of course I told her I would be seeing Robyn in a few days and we both wished we could have been experiencing ‘Ivy Hill Gallery Goes West’ together.

 All photographs except the Kelly McInnes image are mine.

Agenda Dysphoria

This week (and most weeks) the issue of gender identity has featured prominently in the media. It was also a central theme in two of the plays staged as part of Riverina Water’s /SOACT’s Ten X 10 Play Fest (23 – 25 June, Basement Theatre, Wagga Wagga).

On Tuesday night Sarah Ferguson interviewed US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on ABC’s 7.30.  The rationale for doing so was that, unusually for a Republican, Taylor Greene is a strong supporter of Julian Assange and Ferguson sought her comments just moments before the beleaguered WikiLeaks founder set foot on Australian soil again, after 17 years, 14 of them in captivity, self-imposed then state sanctioned. In her responses to Fergusons’ questions, Taylor Greene appeared either to fail to grasp what was meant or to deliberately answer with rehearsed generalised clichés about the importance of ‘freedom of press’ and ‘truth’. Disturbingly, while praising Assange, Taylor Greene snidely insisted on using the name Bradley Manning in relation to the US military insider who provided the 400,000 classified military documents to WikiLeaks despite their transition to the female gender, as Chelsea Manning, in 2010. Taylor Young described that transition as‘parading’ a new identity.   Ferguson took issue with that choice of vocabulary and went on to ask the Congresswoman if her commitment to ‘truth’ extended to accepting as fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 US election, defeating Donald Trump. At that Taylor Greene turned hostile, repeatedly asked what Ferguson’s questions had to do with Julian Assange and, to her off camera team and presumably the viewing audience, asked if Ferguson got ‘her marching orders from the Democrat party’.

I have since read in The Washington Post  that Taylor Green is a full blown gun-toting alt right conspiracy theorist who so terrorised her Democrat opponent Kevin Van Ausdal in the 2020 Georgia Congressional election campaign that his life virtually imploded and he had to withdraw from the race. As Sarah Ferguson said, that indeed makes her a ‘strange bedfellow’ even amongst the diverse ranks of Assange supporters!

Then the next day my news feed featured reports that UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has condemned actor David Tennant for his remarks at an LBGT award ceremony whilst accepting a ‘celebrity ally’ award for his LBQTI rights advocacy, Tennant said that he wished Kemi Badenoch, Women & Equalities Minister in Britain’s Tory government, would ‘shut up’ and hoped for a world in which she ‘doesn’t exist anymore’. These admittedly strong comments relate to Badenoch’s reactionary stance on  a number of social issues including denial of the harms of colonialism and the slave trade, repeated criticisms of trans people, and moves to have biological sex deemed a ‘protected characteristic’ under the UK Equality Act. Badenoch, who is of Nigerian descent yet lists Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill as role models, seems an odd fit for the role of Minister for Women & Equalities even in a Conservative administration. A bit like Jacinta Price, the LNP’s spokesperson for Indigenous Affairs, leading the ‘No’ campaign for The Voice referendum.

The above are, of course, examples of the so-called ‘culture wars’ where liberal inclusive and traditionalist privileged paradigms clash in the arena of public discourse. That clash was a theme in The Study of Reuben March and The Sensitivity Editor two plays that featured in the recent Ten X 10 Play Fest. The first was a debut play from Imogen Rubi who also took the titular role. It dealt with scientific and sociological assumptions about the identity and sexuality of non-binary people and was an impassioned challenge to stereotyping and applying the wrong lens to others’ lives. A two hander, presenting an interview scenario between an asexual gender fluid person and a scientific researcher, the play set out to disabuse the researcher, and by extension the audience, of their preconceptions. The researcher character had little dialogue, largely serving as a sounding board for Reuben’s educative remarks. His growing realisation that he might himself be gender fluid may have had more impact if there had been some ‘tells’ planted along the way. The play would also have benefitted from creating more dynamic of tension between the characters with less obvious delineation between enlightened Reuben and the wrong-headed interviewer.  

The list of characters listed in the program for The Sensitivity Editor held out the promise of hearing from PL Travers, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie and Shakespeare about recent moves to revamp their work to suit twenty first century values. Sadly that opportunity was squandered with declamatory dialogue from the editor character and the same, or mere throwaway quips, from the literary luminaries. The cast did their best but Rod Marsden’s approach was hopelessly reductive and superficial. It showed scant familiarity with the works of any of the authors and resorted to cheap digs at various supposed examples of ‘wokeism gone mad’. These included suggesting that the sooty faces in the Chim Chimmeny number of the Disney version of Mary Poppins had been decried as blackface, and that the demise of golliwogs in popular culture has diminished literature (as far as I am aware none of the writers featured were reliant on golliwogs to propel their plots). Marsden willfully misinterpreted the pronoun debate and sought cheap laughs by lumping it in with anti-monarchist and racist issues. I am not necessarily an apologist for sensitivity editing and the reworking of classic texts. I believe different criteria apply to adult and children’s fiction, with an appreciation of context and history obviously being more accessible to mature readers. The depiction of sensitivity editing in this play as solely about not offending ‘snowflakes’ without acknowledging its role in redressing past cultural dominance is unforgivable when there is such scope for a nuanced and valuable approach to the debate.

A Grand Tour of the Grand Garage

Paul Seaman is a well know Wagga Wagga mechanic who has owned the remnant, central part of the Grand Garage complex in Fitzmaurice Street for over 40 years and trades there as the Swift Service Centre. He lives onsite in the back portion of the building with his partner and their cat, Misty. I made contact with Paul through the Lost Wagga Wagga Facebook Group and we exchanged messages about the garage’s location having been, in the late 19thC, the site of the Chinese camp in Wagga Wagga with original buildings extant until as late as 1954. Paul shared with me some interesting newspaper cuttings, photos and a plan of the site. The latter included a tantalising note saying that Chinese graves were discovered adjacent to the Murrumbidgee river bank during construction of the levee in 1957 and the evidence submerged. Recently I visited him to ask him if he had discovered any vestiges of the Chinese presence on his property and to see what remains of the swanky Grand Garage.

The Grand Garage/Swift Service Centre as in looks today (my photo).

The old Grand Garage building retains the distinctive P&O style curved profile depicted in the Daily Advertiser’s article about its opening and opulence in 1954. Its stucco façade, windows, main door and some external fittings are original and Paul has cleverly incorporated a coffee kiosk that follows the architectural lines.  Inside, the customer service desk and main workshop occupy the part of the structure that once housed the ballroom. It has an attractive timber sprung dance floor which for practical reasons has been overlaid with concrete in some parts.  Paul pointed out small surviving details of the ballroom’s 1950s art deco glory: vents, cornices and a couple of chrome door handles with the style’s characteristic geometric design. He said there was once concealed lighting around the walls.  He must have worked that out from the old wiring as neither he nor I have been able to find photographs of the ballroom, or indeed of any part of the interior, of the Grand Garage.  I mentioned that the parents of a Wagga-born friend of mine attended dances at the Grand Garage and Paul told me that the wife of proprietor, Alf Ludwig, grew tired of attractive single women ‘hanging around’ and put a stop to the dances sometime in the 1960s.

Art deco plaster vent given a touch of gilt by Paul (my photo).

Paul opened one of the doors that feature those art deco handles, it is framed with cream painted timber and has a bubble patterned glass inset, all of which are original. The door leads to the ‘waiting room’ which is how the space is described in a 1954 advertisement in The Daily Advertiser listed along with the garage’s other amenities: ‘hot showers, telephone, writing facilities, boiling water, electric iron’.  It was likely designed as a rest area adjacent to the kitchenette and men’s and women’s showers and conveniences and now serves as a storeroom. Paul thinks it may be haunted as he has felt shivers along his spine when in the room alone at night. I wonder if it is the spirits of Riverina travellers or of Chinese gamblers that are restive in the rest room!

Original door to 'Rest Room' (my photo).

The network of rooms that contained these facilities has been extensively modified and now contains modern toilets and a bathroom, a kitchen and Paul’s living quarters. His bedroom does still incorporate a 1950s fireplace converted to bookshelves but other than that there are not really any hints of Alf Ludwig’s ‘ultra-modern’ facilities for visitors / prospective used car buyers as they existed back in the day.

We looked at the workshop area /lubritorium spruiked in the 1954 advertisement as follows:

Our new lubritorium is in charge of a specially trained man whose job is not only to grease every working part of your vehicle but to report to you any worn part. For 15/- he will check your car thoroughly replace any broken nipples, grease it, inspect gear box and diff and change oil if required.

Still attached to the ceiling are the now non-functioning 1950s lubricating device and compressed air hose that the ‘specially trained man’ would have employed.  Paul, ever the vintage car enthusiast, is currently using the area to restore a couple of 1970s Holdens.

Original 1950s lubricating device (left) and compressed air hose (right) (my photos).

Paul’s office occupies the bow fronted area to the right of the ex-ballroom. It reflects his long tenure in the building with many mementoes and photographs relating both to the business and his family. There are several pictures of his sons, who have both entered motor trades, one is a mechanic, the other, a panel beater. Paul’s collection of historical clippings is in a filing cabinet beside his desk. In  addition to what he had already generously shared with me he gave me copies of images of George Lloyd’s grocery shop, which preceded Knights next door, inundated by 1950s flood waters, and an image of George himself at the counter of his shop. 

George Lloyd's grocery store, now Knight's Deli, marks the northern boundary of the Grand Garage site pictured here during floods in the 1950s. The Grand Garage's bowsers and signage are on the right
(source: Lost Wagga Wagga Facebook page).

Paul told me that originally the garage, its showrooms and workshops, all the customer amenities and several outbuildings covered the area from where the side wall of Knights deli now stands to Meccanico’s café and the Cadell Place development. That explains why the address is given as 167 - 183 Fitzmaurice Street in the old advertisements whereas the Swift Service Centre’s is just 175. This approximately 3000 square metre site is where Wagga’s Chinese camp was situated from the 1860s. We know from newspaper articles that the Joss House/ Free Mission Hall was demolished in 1938 and that a church constructed behind that building to the rear of the site was still in use as a storeroom by the Grand Garage in 1954.  

The boundary of the site as it looks today, Knight's Deli has a similar profile to the grocery store that used to occupy the site (my photo).

Two Chinese businesses existed where Meccanico’s and the rest of the Cadell Place development now are. Foon Kee, herbalist and grocer, had a cottage and store on the site until the 1930s when he departed Wagga after 60 years to return to his home province of Canton for his final years. His next-door neighbour, Tommy Ah Wah, a successful business man who owned property in Wagga and Junee, is credited in Tracking the Dragon with operating the first garage at the Fitzmaurice Street address however according to a Daily Advertiser report of 1927 two ‘NRMA-trained’ mechanics, ‘Messrs. C E Kent and W E Pulsford have opened the Grand Garage in Fitzmaurice- street,  near the Hampden Bridge, and hope, by expert advice, to have a share of the patronage of resident and travelling motorists’  so perhaps Tommy Ah Wah bought it from them or was their landlord.

Foon Kee's cottage and store in the 1920s, he is just visible in the doorway
 (source: Wagga Wagga City Council website).

Back to my tour…

Paul told me that the forecourt area of the building would have originally been lined with used cars for sale as shown in The Daily Advertiser’s 1954 photograph. Now it has a driveway and a row of petrol bowsers as well as parking spaces for Swift’s and visitors’ vehicles. The concrete is heavily crazed and a gravel drive leads out into a back lane that runs beside the new levee completed in 2020. Within the garage site’s boundaries are several ageing structures. Sadly none is the remnant church where Chinese characters and drawings could still be clearly seen in 1954. Paul said he believes that was probably demolished later that decade.

Meccanico’s Café and Cadell Place incorporate some of the older structures on their sites and recently, just up the road, the Prince of Wales Hotel (1865) created a restaurant that includes some of the pub's heritage features. Paul said he would love to see the Grand Garage restored to its art deco grandeur and functioning as a restaurant at some point in the future. The wooden floor would come up a treat and he has already experimented with adding gold lustre to some of the stylish vents. The building is well equipped with a kitchen and multiple toilets and there is ample room at the back to extend the premises. The large curved windows make the interior light and they could look out onto some plantings and statuary instead of the bowsers. It just needs someone with the vision!

Alf Ludwig at Wagga's Gold Cup racing carnival probably in 1999
(source: Wagga and District Historical Society collection).  

Our conversation touched on rumours relating to the Chinese occupancy of the site which still need research, but which will more likely forever remain mysteries. These include the purported graves, the supposed network of tunnels under Fitzmaurice Street and a legendary statue appropriated from the temple. Paul said a man of Chinese descent called by one day and told him an ancestor of his had been buried somewhere on the site. That seems unlikely but not impossible depending upon the year of death. There are Chinese funerals recorded at the Wagga Monumental Cemetery from 1874. A person has posted on the Lost Wagga Wagga Facebook page that there are multiple tunnels under Fitzmaurice Street connected to David Jones, Romano’s Hotel, the Courthouse and, of course, the Grand Garage (he cites Alf Ludwig as his source for that one). Their purposes are variously described as giving a magistrate quick access to his liquid lunch, a route for Chinese gamblers escaping a police raid and use as conduits for WW2 military communications!  However, the only substantiated story of an underground cavern in Wagga Central relates to the now filled in men’s lavatories outside the Union Club Hotel in Forsyth Street. Lastly, the ‘holy grail’, a missing religious statue, possibly gilded, liberated from the Chinese temple.  Paul told me Alf Ludwig lived in hope of discovering gold somewhere on the Grand Garage site. He reached 86 years of age so he had ample time to search, but from what I’ve read he had more success making his fortune taking bets on the horses and as a purveyor of used cars and television sets. Is it just possible that he enjoyed fuelling this urban myth?     

References:

Morris, Sherry, Wagga Wagga – A History, 1999, Council of the City of Wagga Wagga

McGowan, Barry Dr, Tracking The Dragon - A history of the Chinese in the Riverina, 2010, Museum of the Riverina
Lost Wagga Wagga Facebook Group 

The Fall

Fifteen minutes earlier we’d been admiring the heritage streetscapes of Millthorpe and enjoying coffee and cake in a trendy café.

Sporting my new Middlemost coat and oblivious to what lies ahead in Millthorpe

Then, just one step. One misstep. That’s all it took! Does it happen in slow mo? It definitely absorbs your attention. Descending and landing. HARD. On the floor for far longer than you’re airborne. Then leg buckled under heavy body. Gyrating like a semi turned turtle. Gasping in pain. Lots of hands and lower limbs come into view as people crouch down offering aid. The shop proprietor has to go next door to get a cup of water. Water is a panacea. I gulp down my arthritis meds and take deep breaths between sips. There are ‘Mind the Step’ signs pinned up and fluoro tape edging on the floor apparently; I saw neither. I was chatting to my husband and the owner about a scarf we were buying. I reached out to touch some garments on a stand and fell in a split second. 

The fateful scene (well just adjacent to the fateful scene)

Adrenaline lets me exchange pleasantries with the people who gather around me and I somehow manage to sit upright on the rogue step. A woman says ‘it is dangerous, it isn’t obvious’ and her husband says ‘there’s signs and tape that’s what you’re supposed to do’. The shop owner laments the uneven floors of old buildings. ‘You do need to do something’ says the first woman. An Irish guy wearing a tweed sports jacket with toning scarf asks if there’s anything he can do to help. There isn’t. Then he compliments my husband who is now swathed in the new scarf, on being ‘nattily’ dressed. The proprietor takes my name and phone number. I don’t think to get anyone’s.

Somehow I stumble without yelping audibly to the wooden bench outside the shop and wait while my husband goes to get the car. He’s been assured it is okay to double park. The streets are hardly busy. He returns and I hobble into the passenger seat. My leg and ankle feel like something is ripped. I ring our lunch hosts and leave a pitiful message about having fallen and needing to get to Emergency. 

Triage, Orange Hospital

We drive the 15 minutes to Orange hospital. The staff bring me a wheelchair and fast track me to triage where the kindly nurse with a spectacular inked moth at her throat asks me if I’d heard a ’crack’. I say I didn’t but the impact was undeniable. I hand over my Medicare card. For some reason the medical practice I have been attending for 10 years doesn’t present itself on the hospital’s system three hundred kilometres from home. I give them the number from my phone contacts. They let me keep the wheelchair and bring me an ice pack for my now elephantine ankle. 

Three quick X-rays and the wait begins. Jury finalisation for Trump’s trial is on the small TV screen suspended from the ceiling. The reporter says it has been hard to find anyone without strong preconceived views. I exchange superficial remarks with a thin woman cradling her wrist. ‘I fell off my bike yesterday evening’ she says. ‘I slept with my wrist like this’ she gestures holding it gently to her chest. It is mid-morning and the waiting room is almost empty. That changes over the next three hours as more injured and unwell trickle in. 

Self explanatory

A woman whose name is almost a homophone of mine gets called and I optimistically ask to be wheeled up. Our lunch host returns my call. ‘We’ve just eaten the lasagne and the apple crumble and feel guilty’ he says and wishes me a speedy recovery.

In the consult room the lanky red headed registrar asks me to recount what happened. I do, concluding on the note that I hope it is just a sprain. ’It is broken’ he counters and shows me the image of my fibula with its clean horizontal fracture. He tells us where there is a coffee cart for my husband to get us drinks while we wait for an orthopaedic surgeon to give a ruling. They’re operating so it will be a while. I get chatting to the thin cyclist with what does turn out to be a broken wrist who is waiting to get it set. She is depressed about her general health and talks fatalistically about the future. She doesn’t have a phone so we send her boyfriend a text giving him an update on her progress. The lanky registrar returns and catches my husband trying to look at my x-rays on the laptop and chides him. ‘It’s a breach’ he says as he might see other patients’ records. I apologise and he is cordial. We develop a rapport as I tell him we’re in town to see a show that evening and comment on his striking colouring. He says he’s used to it, that strangers would come up to him and ruffle his hair when he was a kid. 

There’s another hiatus. A nurse checks my blood pressure (still a little elevated) and temperature (normal) again and I drink my take away tea. I brave the unisex accessible toilet relying on my husband to direct the wheelchair to both the loo and the hand basin. That occupies a good ten minutes. Eventually the Registrar comes back and says he’s shown my x-rays to one of the orthopaedic team now. They’ve given the go ahead for me to be fitted with a cam boot and crutches and to be discharged. I learn that he originally trained as a physiotherapist but found the work dull. I remark that he must certainly now get variety in ER. He enjoys it he says. He chooses a medium cam boot and adjusts the crutches to my height then drills me on how to walk with them. I am allowed to place some weight on the foot. ‘Bad foot, crutches, good foot, bad foot, crutches, good foot’ I repeat the mantra out loud and he watches me take a turn about the corridor.

It’s a Saturday and no-one at the hospital back home can take a referral so I need a hard copy discharge letter and treatment plan. While we’re waiting for them the bike rider and I introduce one another properly and chat a bit more agreeing it has been nice to keep company on and off for four hours. I ask my husband to take our photo which we send to her boyfriend and post on Facebook dubbing ourselves ‘The Fracture Sisters’. 

The Fracture Sisters

We leave with the paperwork and a prescription for some strong pain killers which we get filled en route to the guest house. The adrenaline carries me through enough to joke with our hosts who are most solicitous bringing me a footstool and another ice pack. They recount their own experiences with fractures on holidays – a smashed sacrum from falling off a trail bike and a shattered wrist sustained while tugging at potential firewood. My story – tripped while shopping – feels distinctly bourgeois in comparison. 

Although I have missed two thirds of historic Millthorpe and lunch with our friends I have been treated royally by hospital staff and our hosts and had a few laughs with the other ER patients. I will rest now and be able to go to the theatre this evening.

Serendipity Tribute

Introduction

Having just broken my ankle I was unable to attend our Word Play writing session in person this week. Facilitator, Claire Baker kindly sent me the Haibun* exercise they did for me to complete at home.

Write a haibun recording a recently experienced scene, or special moment, use a highly descriptive and objective manner. It may be factual, wholly fictional or dream-like in tone

Then write an accompanying haiku that has either a direct or subtle relationship with the prose and encompasses or hints at the gist of what is recorded in the prose section.

* A Haibun is a prosimetric literary form originating in Japan, combining prose and haiku. 

Prose

Like many people I often research what there is to see at my destination before taking a trip. Travelling to England and France in the 1980s I had a ring binder folder full of sights I planned to see. Among them were pre-Raphaelite murals in Oxford and a Lewis Carroll memorial stained glass window in Daresbury neither of which we could find. Often though, just happening upon somewhere, unplanned, can be incredibly rewarding. Like being in Windsor when Frogmore Gardens was open to the public and seeing Victoria and Albert’s lavish mausoleum.  Or visiting Versailles on the only day of the year the fountains were ‘playing’ (it drains the town’s water supply to have them on too often) their grandeur eclipsing the actual palace for me. Or, on a more modest scale,  arriving  at the little 15thC  church in my childhood village, at dusk  expecting to see it in ruin,  but instead a kindly onsite caretaker unlocking  the building and letting me look at the restored building as the sun set - an unanticipated and moving experience.

I recently discovered (see previous blog post) a local automotive business, the Swift Service Centre on Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga Wagga, which opened to much fanfare in 1954 as the Grand Garage, the epitome of (late) art deco modern conveniences for travellers. It boasted fluorescent lighting, pastel décor, showers, a kitchenette and even a ball room. While interesting in its own right to a local history and architecture nut like me, I was more fascinated to discover that the building stands on the site of an 1860s Chinese settlement/camp that had included substantial buildings progressively demolished between the 1930s and 50s, one of which contained original art work still visible when the Grand Garage started operating.

An illustration from a Sydney Mail article of 10 July 1935 recounting the Lambing Flat riots  

Researching the Chinese presence in the Riverina and reading about the 1861 racist riots at Lambing Flat where white miners ran their Chinese counterparts off the gold fields, physically attacking and humiliating them, meant that when we drove through Young (as Lambing Flat is now known) recently my attention was particularly alerted to a sign post in the town pointing to ‘Chinese Tribute Garden’. We took the road four kilometres out of the town centre to investigate…

What an oasis of beauty we found. The gardens, constructed in 1992, incorporate the historic Chinaman’s Dam site and an additionally created artificial ‘placid lake’ supporting a wealth of diverse plant life and water fowl. An elegant gently curved bridge spans the lake leading to a pagoda-style green and red triple gateway guarded by a pair of handsome carved marble lions with cascading manes and eerily finger-like digits, one impassive and one with suitably bared fangs.

 
The marble lions and ex-Taronga Zoo gateways (photo Bob Erwin)

Beyond that is a further gateway, a circular opening in a sinuous cream symmetrical curved wall with matching discs featuring painted Chinese dancers flanking the opening on both sides. Reading the signage on arrival I discovered that these structures were part of the temporary panda exhibit at Taronga Zoo in Sydney in 1998. While they may have looked twee there, afforded sufficient curtilage (great word that another architecture buff introduced me to) and surrounded by sufficient plantings in the tribute gardens I think they work. But I love follies, gazebos and rotundas having grown up in the English park tradition.

Plantings include maples, yuccas, conifers and camellias and many other species I didn’t identify interspersed with stone quarried from nearby Boorowa. The paths and gardens hug the sides of a ‘Pool of Tranquility’ populated by water lilies and three sculptures of disparate style: a cairn-style structure of four piled boulders, a rustic waterwheel and a replica of a 1,600 year old Chinese bronze ‘Matafeiyan’ depicting a horse gliding on the back of a swallow and probably the park’s most authentic evocation of Chinese culture. The dimensions of this sculpture,  at 34 .5 cm x 45 cm it is quite small, means it is in danger of being overshadowed by its companion pieces but its wonderful verdigris and dynamic form draw the eye.

On one edge of the pond is a stone and red lacquered wood pavilion providing a vantage point for contemplating the water. There is also a stone mounted brass plaque under a ‘Peace and Prosperity Tree’ planted in 1997 to commemorate Young’s sister city relationship with Lanzhou. The path circles back to the dual gateways affording multiple glimpses of red and green foliage and plump ebony moorhens that seem to thrive in the gardens.

The 'Pool of Tranquility' (my photo)

It was a sunny autumn weekday when we visited and there were few other walkers. One young woman I passed several times seemed to be walking around the park for exercise carrying a take away coffee. A mother and three children sat in one of the picnic shelters adjacent to the carpark. The eldest boy, about six, ran after a bread bag that had blown from their table, retrieved and binned it. I praised him. Less laudable was the action of three flannelette-clad young men carrying fishing gear who emptied their unused bread and sausages onto the grass in front of a group of ducks. Admittedly there were no signs discouraging the practice and based on their builds and swagger I elected not to challenge them. Probably wise as when we stopped briefly to check the sat nav on the road out they hooted impatiently at us from their metallic blue Holden. So not a thoroughly Zen experience...

What remains with me though is that in roughly 140 years Lambing Flat has gone from assaulting and reviling Chinese miners to celebrating ‘the contribution of the Chinese community to the settlement of Young… and the ongoing contributions of the Chinese people to Australia as a nation’ and the means of acknowledging that has provided a calming and aesthetic experience for anyone who visits the gardens. 

 

The Matafeiyan - flying horse balanced on a swallow (source: https://www.goldtrails.com.au/article/youngs-chinese-heritage/)

Haikus

1.

eighteen sixty one

assault and persecution

today some recompense

 

2.

elevated tail

head and three hooves held high

speed on sleek bronze horse

 

3.

feeding sausages

to undiscerning waterfowl

is never okay

NOTE: This short video gives a good summary of the clash at Lambing Flat