What I Overdid on my Holidays

I have a habit of getting sick on holidays.  On our Lindeman Island honeymoon, I had sunstroke and heat rash. On holiday with a friend at Lake Cathie I had an allergic reaction to sun block that brought me out in hives. I have had food poisoning in Katoomba, Adelaide, Cessnock and Southend on Sea. I have broken my ankle in two places: Sydenham & Millthorpe. Admittedly the Sydenham ‘trip’ wasn’t a holiday, I was on my way to work, but falling over in Millthorpe was a decisive break in our Orange winter break!

Recently a planned Sydney visit was presaged with foreboding when I developed a nasty cold and needed Sudafed and nasal spray to get through the car journey and that evening’s performance of Candide at the Opera House. However, judiciously balancing activity and rest over the following days got me fit as a flea* for dinner with friends and An Evening with Jimmy Webb by week’s end. My smugness was to be challenged though – imminently…

 

The ABC reported on Sydney's heat and humidity on 15 March

According to an ABC news report, Saturday 15 March was the hottest autumn day Sydney had experienced for 149 years. Temperatures nudged 40 degrees and humidity was over 70%. Sydney’s mugginess was one reason for our decision to leave that city. Early in the day, I was coping well through brunch, a bit of telly and an afternoon nap. When I headed to town I noticed that the air conditioning on the train to Kings Cross was struggling a little, but waiting for my friend, Ian, by the Victoria Street station exit I felt a pleasant breeze while enjoying the passing parade of tourists and denizens.  

The calm before the sweat tsunami

Ian arrived dapper in pressed jeans and a T-shirt and joggers, both of luminous white. I teased him about his immaculate appearance and he admired my colourful jungle print dress. Our dinner/theatre booking at The Old Fitzroy was over an hour away so we had ample time to amble through Potts Point to Woolloomooloo. Both assuming we knew where we were headed, we went north down Victoria Street toward Garden Island Dockyard and turned left/west into Cowper Bay Wharf Roadway and ferocious sun.  We turned off briefly into Brougham Street mistaking a backpacker hostel for The Old Fitzroy but did a U-turn. Ian is ex-navy so I appealed to his supposed navigation skills only to be told he had left his sextant back in his apartment. I consulted my phone but the combination of the map’s scale, the ever reorienting little blue arrow and conflicting verbal directions sent us crisscrossing through Woolloomooloo. Soon my steamed up glasses and sweat filled eyes prevented me from seeing the screen clearly anyway. Ian’s glasses were back at the apartment with his sextant. Tourists from Byron Bay, New Zealand and Ireland we asked were as clueless as us and with better reason. 

At the corner of Bourke and Dowling Streets we intimated that we were well wide of our destination. By this time I was a sodden wreck and had rung the pub and left voicemails twice hoping to get directions. Cathedral Street was a denominator common to the phone app and to Ian’s recollections but we couldn’t agree whether to turn right or left at the corner of Forbes. Luckily a kindly local convinced us to go right and lo, the sign for The Old Fitzroy came into view. Appropriately enough, that signage contains the phrase ‘This must be the place’. We were 5 minutes early for our dinner booking having traversed Woolloomooloo for approximately 45 minutes. Two flights of stairs took us to the restaurant cooled only by ceiling fans. I asked where the loos were so that I could ‘repair’ my hair and visage and the charming maitre’d pointed back down those two flights of stairs. One jug of iced water, 2 glasses of Sauvignon Blanc a piece and some ill-advised pate and gnocchi later, it was time to see Iphigenia in Splott in the basement theatre. Back down the stairs we hurried and, as the last to enter, found the only remaining seats, on a narrow bench at the very top of the steeply raked rows.  

The Old Fitzroy pub, theatre and restaurant in Woolloomooloo (Google for directions)

The brick walls of the small theatre are uneven and painted a dull black. The air conditioning seemed to be the evaporative sort with humidity poorly managed. The atmosphere was claustrophobic. Meg Clarke, in skanky active wear, used the four intersecting grey rectangles that comprised the set dynamically to deliver her monologue. We were introduced to her character who is a tear away young Welsh woman in an unsatisfying relationship with a thick bloke who fails to pick up his dog’s droppings in the street.  Her main recreation is getting blotto in Splott and one night, fulfilling this mission, she meets a soldier, an amputee, with whom she begins a passionate affair. That’s about as far as I got…

I wonder how it turns out...

I felt waves of cold sweat wash over my brow and I flopped forward in three distinct micro second movements coming to rest on the shoulder of the audience member in front of me. The next I knew I was lying on the bench seat unable to right myself and semi delirious. A disembodied woman introduced herself as a doctor. She took my pulse, described my colour, clamminess and respiration to others and at one point stroked my cheek reassuringly. I heard someone say ‘call an ambulance’ and report back that there would be a two hour wait. The anonymous doctor took matters into her own hands and spoke to the ambulance dispatch people. In ten minutes paramedics were on the scene.

The Old Fitzroy is somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty years old. It is amongst the most intact pubs of its era still operating and perhaps the only one to have maintained its performance space for decades. Before Iphigenia in Splott it staged a smorgasbord of praised productions including plays by Harold Pinter and Lillian Hellman and solo shows by Paul Capsis and iOTA. Given its age the fact that it is not an accessible building is unsurprising. This presented special challenges for the ambos. The gurney made it through the doors and a special folding carry chair got about half way up the incline. Somehow my support squad, which included Ian, the doctor, the man whose shoulder I had come to rest on (I think), and the paramedics eventually got me vertical, down a couple of stairs and into the seat and from there onto the stretcher/gurney. All the while the kind ambulance officer talked me through what was happening  as they got me settled in the ambulance and applied monitors for my heart rate, took my temperature and pulse and measured my  blood pressure which was a disturbing 80/30. She gave me a tubular vomit bag to clutch but fortunately, while I felt woozy, I didn’t need to use it. Ian stayed beside me on the trip to St Vincent’s and tolerated the hospital environment until 11pm despite its less than happy associations for him.  I was a little uninhibited in my conversation apparently as twice he responded to my statements with ‘TMI’. I do remember warning him not to steal my frock when they made me divest myself of it for a hospital gown. Its riot of candy colours would have shown off his complexion to excellent effect. 

St Vincent’s staff were amazing in their thoroughness and good humour and the care they took of me.  I had two more ECGs, blood and urine tests (I hadn’t peed from 3 pm to 11.20 pm which supported a dehydration diagnosis), three lots of fluid and oxygen because my level was initially 87. When I explained that there was no one with a car to come and collect me they moved me to a quieter area of the Emergency Unit where I managed to get some reasonable sleep amidst the symphony of machines that go ping, PA announcements and patient call buzzers. While Sydney sweltered through that uncharacteristically sultry autumn night I was cool enough in my cubicle to need two blankets.  In the morning I was given a breakfast of juice, cereal and yoghurt and provided with four soft towels to have a shower. By the time I was discharged and caught a taxi back to where I was staying my electrolytes and spirits were high. I scored a taxi driver whose daughter coincidentally works in Pathology at St Vincent’s and who knew about the history of the Grand Pacific Blue Room currently being refurbished as the Olympia Boutique Hotel on the corner of Oxford and Streets. That was of course right up my alley! And I made my 3.30 pm flight home with ease.

St Vincent's brekkie pack

Everyone has been commiserating with me about this incident but I think I had a very easy time of it and am full of appreciation and gratitude for everyone who intervened especially lovely solicitous Ian who kept me light hearted throughout. I am sorry I interrupted the play and the enjoyment of the other audience members. When Lucy Clements, Artistic Director of New Ghosts Theatre Company emailed me the following day to enquire how I was going, I apologised for my show stopping performance and she was kind enough to reply:

please don’t think twice about the show stop – the plot points you missed in the play were all about how wonderful healthcare staff are, but how hard it is for them to work with such large funding cuts – so the events that unfolded in reality (being told the ambulance would take 2 hours to attend to you!!) were much more dramatic, poignant and impactful to us than the play ever could be.

What a trouper! I will certainly visit the Old Fitz again but will be avoiding Sydney humidity. As for my and Ian’s inability to make the walk from Kings Cross Station to the pub in the nine minutes Google maps now tells me is standard, let not our excitement in meeting up after almost a decade ever again eclipse the need for sensibly checking our route in advance, or at least let’s not leave the sextant at his place again!

*why are fleas particularly ‘fit’? I suppose they must do their squats to be able to jump like that.

Just another week in arts paradise

The Wagga Wagga Art Gallery is currently hosting four exhibitions. I have seen three of them: Fantastic Forms – celebrating the drawings & ceramics of Merric Boyd, Nuanced: 75 years of the Wagga Wagga Art Society, and Mei Zhao: Remapping Erased Landscapes which explores the history of early Chinese migration in the Riverina region.  There is also Lisa Sammut: Radial Sign – three dimensional works which I have yet to see, and an additional two exhibitions at the National Glass Gallery. To say the gallery is showcasing contrasting bodies of work is an understatement.

His naïf coloured pencil drawings of landscape and farm animals were rescued by son Arthur from Merric Boyd’s spiral bound sketch books and framed. Their usual home is Bundanon the property the Boyd family bequeathed to the nation. I was particularly taken by the Munch-like swirls of some tree studies and by various chubby bucolic creatures. They and some forty of his miniature pearlescent glazed ceramic figures comprise a travelling exhibition that is beginning its national tour in Wagga Wagga. These, though less blatantly hedonistic, reminded me of John Perceval’s delinquent angels which I had the joy of encountering back about a dozen careers ago when I was at Craft Australia.

Where Mrs Milk Babies Play, Merric Boyd, 1949 (source: https://www.shoalhaven.com)

Having previously blogged about the vanished Chinese settlement in north Wagga, I was excited to meet Mei Zhao and to view her work. The exhibition, the culmination of two years of field trips throughout the Riverina, is on show in the self-contained Margaret Carnegie gallery space. Mei Zhao’s mixed media canvases evoke the lost market gardens and other remnants of 19th and early 20th century Chinese presence in the region.  Its centerpiece is the vibrant Wish You Luck GongXiFaCai Joss House installation conjuring the textures, structures and artefacts of joss houses once situated in Wagga Wagga, Narrandera, Adelong and Tumut.

Mei Zhao's Wish You Luck GongXiFaCai Joss House installation (my photo) 

Nuanced: 75 years of the Wagga Wagga Art Society, is a different kettle of fish altogether. The society, founded in 1949 by local art lovers, has operated continuously as a space for practice, education and exhibition for local artists. I discovered via a Trove search that in 1954 the society made a donation of £50 toward founding a permanent home for the Wagga Wagga Gallery by holding raffle (see clipping). Some other tidbits I found about the society’s history will keep for another post. While this show celebrates a 75 year anniversary, it is not a retrospective, all works are by current members. There is a wide diversity from Marion Adinsall’s meticulous botanical watercolours to Karen Walsh’s clever mixed media A Place of Many to Cheryl Wheeler's curiously named almost opaque Coming With Clouds – a religious theme one supposes.

The Wagga Art Society was instrumental in fundraising to establish a permanent home for the regional art gallery, clipping from The Daily Advertiser,17 July 1954 (source: Trove, National Library of Australia database)

Visual art has not been my only cultural exposure in the past week; I have also been to a reading by Blue Mountains poet Hugh Crago and a production by of our local amateur theatre group. First to Hugh. His poems are conversational, accessible, peppered with allusions that I ‘got’, wistful, occasionally melancholy and also sometimes very funny. I bought his 118 page collection Wind Age, Wolf Age and am enjoying it.

Hugh Crago's poetry collection (my photo)

Now and Then is a play by US playwright Sean Grennan that was staged by the School of Arts Theatre Company (SOACT) every Sunday throughout February. I have seen and reviewed a number of SOACT productions and must admit my first exposure to the company, Air Swimming back in 2014, mere weeks after my arrival in Wagga, set the bar very high. Subsequent experiences have not always matched that, however, Neighbourhood Watch and now Now and Then have done so. No point in promoting this production specifically as the season has just finished, but a shout out to SOACT for a witty enjoyable choice of play , to the talented cast: Blayke Thomas, Olivia Jones, Fi Ziff and Lucas Forbes and to director Craig Dixon.

We are very lucky here in Wagga to have this calibre of cultural activities on offer. I’ll have cinema, more exhibitions and an upcoming concert to blog about soon and I have a few poem ideas percolating too. Then there’s the Art Society's portrait prize controversy to research and write about! 

Death Café

On 31 January I woke up to the news that Marianne Faithfull had died. I already had Death Café in my diary for later that morning. Mementos mori were proliferating. My own ever present obsession with ‘dead uns’ (that is how my spouse refers to my genealogy research), the inevitable result of ageing i.e. more people you know die, and then the welter of celebrity deaths reported in the news in recent months. We’ve lost Maggie Smith, David Lynch and Shelley Duvall and now Marianne.   There is definitely a spike in road deaths and drownings over the summer holidays. Then the toll of warfare and climate related disaster just grows…

Death is more certain than taxes, eh, Donald?

When it is coming for us is unpredictable although the online mortality calculator Death Clock says I will die at age 73 years, 9 months and 25 days.  Better get a wriggle on with travel plans and memoir writing.  While I am skeptical about the accuracy of this prediction, the message is carpe deim and get my affairs in order…

That is also the message of Death Café, the two hour get together held this week at the Wagga Wagga Library.

Poster advertising the  Death Cafe event

When I saw it advertised, averse as I am to euphemism, I did wonder if it wasn’t a bit of a blunt way to market an end of life planning event. I realise now that the phrase ‘death camp’ may also have been echoing somewhere in the back of my mind. But the phrases on the poster: ‘no agenda’ and ‘discuss things that are on your mind about death and dying’ appealed. I have been procrastinating about finalising my will and power of attorney for too long. Going to this workshop might galvanize me into action.

Numbers weren’t huge. At first I mistook the journo and photographer from The Daily Advertiser for participants. Logic dictated otherwise. They were both in their 30s and male, whereas the bona fide attendees were all women and, with the exception of a social worker and a palliative care worker, in our 60s and 70s.

Jocelyn Mason who convened the café is cheerful, down to earth and perfectly equipped to run such an event having worked in the funeral industry for over 25 years and witnessed a wealth of death and dispatch related issues. She got us to introduce ourselves and say what we were hoping to get out of the two hours. One woman is currently nursing a dying husband and needed practical advice and reassurance. Some of us wanted to check we were doing the right thing re. our wills and to ask about funeral arrangements. There are four funeral directors in Wagga Wagga, it costs $6.5 K to get a burial plot, eco burials are available here. Nearly everyone had a poignant or frustrating experience associated with the loss of a loved one to relate. Dying intestate or with a will that challenges interpretation or implementation were common difficulties relatives had to face.

One person epitomized cognitive dissonance as no matter how strongly or frequently the facts around dying intestate, leaving one’s body to science or qualifying for a pauper’s burial were explained she was adamant in voicing her belief that all three were straightforward available options.

Jocelyn Mason, Jan Pittard and Vicki Bowles immediately after the workshop (source The Daily Advertsiser newspaper)

Most of us though left the café with greater clarity around preparing for the inevitable. One of Jocelyn’s wise tips was to consolidate all information about insurance, superannuation, online passwords, arrangements for pets etc. in a single document that is readily accessible to your executor and family members. She offered a template for preparing this. A similar, related document that contains your funerary wishes such as music and reading choices and any anecdotes you would like shared  is helpful guidance for  relatives and may ensure an uncringeworthy commemoration.

Jocelyn plans to offer further death cafes in the coming months in Wagga Wagga. They are happening elsewhere across the country too. Death can be a subject avoided by many with women more likely to be proactive in planning. I would encourage participation whether it seems immediately relevant to you or not. There is nothing negative about being informed and if death is a great leveler, death talk is a great source of affinity.

 

Parlez vous Francais a la Wagga Wagga?

It was not long after we settled in Wagga Wagga, the town so good they named it twice though only ever utter half its name, that we became aware of the distinctly continental flavour of many of its small businesses. Indeed Wagga boasts an entire Parisian ‘arrondissement’ in the northernmost part of town, known logically enough as ‘the Paris end’! The location of Wagga’s former Chinatown and of its only Spanish Mission style commercial building, the upper reaches of Fitzmaurice Street, show unmistakable evidence of  l’influence Francaise. Many ‘boutique’ shops are located there: Knights delicatessen with its terrine and camembert, the Circa 1929 day spa, a chandelier hanging in its foyer, as well as the café with the oh so French name, Uneke!

The Uneke Lounge has a totally unique spelling (source: TripAdvisor)

The street was named in 1849 by Colonial Surveyor-General, Sir Thomas Mitchell after one of his fellow-officers in the 95th Regiment of Foot (Pied), John Fitzmaurice. Despite sounding Scottish, Fitzmaurice had served in the Pyrenees, Nivelle and Toulouse, so his French credentials are impeccable. Mitchell was merely exercising a subtlety that has informed the naming of Wagga enterprises since his time, not all of them confined to the city’s Paris end.

For my first couple of years here I got my hair done at Salon Christé in the chic South City retail complex. It is located cheek by jowl with that phenomenal European marketing success, Aldi and has le magasin du articles des rejets and viandes de qualité du South City as companion businesses! The local business directory did let Francophiles down though by listing it as Salon Christ, probably a sop to Wagga’s huge devout Christian population.

It's official - Wagga is the 'Bible Belt' of New South Wales

A favourite haunt in our early days was Café Niché in Coleman Street (now sadly re-named The Brew). There was clearly a two for one special on acute accents when they arranged their signage. They served such authentic French delicacies as coffee with milk (cafe au lait) and ham and cheese toasties (Croque Monsieur) and had a chien-friendly jardin out the back.

Operating for several years in Baylis Street was Cache a cafeteria-style eatery that also contained meeting and conference facilities and accommodation on the first floor. One sad jour a combination of Wagga summer heat and the operation of a clothes drier caused un feu to break out in the premises and it was closed for some time. Attempts to re-invent the business as a chocolatier /patisserie were in exactly the right esprit but had short lived success. While the patriot in me applauds their use of Florence Broadhurst wallpaper perhaps Isadore Leroy designs would have been safer. But as this business, in contrast to Café Niché, completely omitted the acute accent on their name, their attention to detail was always clearly lacking.

Blogger's daughter nonchalantly poses avec beret in front of the Artisan Baker

Truly attaining Parisian standards is the Artisan Baker in Morgan Street which makes wonderful tartes, croissants and pain. Its slogan ‘So French, So Fresh’ is reassuring as is the inclusion of the mots ‘boulangerie’ and 'patisserie' on its window and website. While I applaud such discretion following as it does the lead of Sir Thomas Mitchell, would it not be in the business's interest to re-brand as Boulangerié, Patisserié et Café Formidablé de Wollundré?

STOP PRESS: Wagga also has a French Choir, a branch of L'Academie Francaise and an annual French film festival. Now if we just had a French restaurant...

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.