Christmas coming

Australia feels a long way off in time and space, now, although I haven't finished blogging about it and have promised to give a talk about it in French on Tuesday. The sky is dark and clear tonight, all the coloured Christmas lights are shining in the trees, downtown, and tomorrow we're due for an intensification of the wintery weather. We're driving to Bourget and back in the afternoon to visit our Christmas tree friends, and we must get back home before the blowing snow starts to reduce visibility and hamper the wheels.

Last night I walked to the Château Laurier in the bitter cold wind to attend a crowded reception for supporters and friends of Palestine and its diplomats, the General Delegation of Palestine in Canada. I had a glass of wine and some roast lamb with mint jelly. The Chief Delegate, Mr. Said Hamad (whose wife I know her through our Spanish conversation group) made an excellent speech announcing that next year, 2014, is officially designated The Year of Solidarity with Palestine.

Listening to the Hungarian choir.  The empty seat in the picture was mine.

Today I was at the banquet room of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club for an elegant and tasty Christmas lunch with some more diplomats, about 100 of us altogether, where we were entertained by a choir of Hungarians, the ladies dressed in Hungarian blouses. They sang advent carols in Latin, Spanish, German, French, Italian, English and their own language (Mennyből az angyal) and wishing us Boldog Karácsonyt!––Merry Christmas––at the end of the performance. We all joined in Deck the Halls, an old fashioned British carol which must have absolutely flummoxed the Vietnamese ladies at my table. I mean, what on earth must they have thought of these lyrics?

...Don we now our gay apparel, fa, la, la ... 

Troll the ancient yuletide carol, fa, la, la ...

See the blazing yule before us, fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la! ...

I told them these words were very old.

At this party I had an interesting chat with a lady artist, Fortunée Shugar, whose paintings and wearable art ("fused" glass jewelry) were on display at one end of the room. She told me she was rethinking her past, her childhood, through abstract paintings which I thought very good. She'd also done a series of mixed media paintings in response to her visit to Giverny in France, to see Monet's garden. Her husband was at the party too, taking better photos than I.

While all this was going on, the snow-covered golf course outside, seen through the windows, looked very peaceful and inviting.

The artists of New South Wales

What do you do if you want to understand a nation better? Sitting in a café and watching people interact is one way, or walking round the residential areas to make further observations, or riding on the slow, suburban trains, ditto, but the most direct way to the heart of things is to read their novels and stories (I bought a copy of Tim Winton's The Turning when I was in Australia, for that very purpose) or to see what they have painted and drawn.

On Sunday 17th November we had a walk before breakfast through the Lane Cove park and on our way back up the hill saw two wallabies in the wild, a mother and a young one. They were either swamp wallabies or rock wallabies, I'm not sure, but when they sat still they were well camouflaged against the sandstone outcrops. Then it started to rain heavily again, so we decided to go into town by train from Macquarie University in order to visit the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The picture above shows it in sunnier weather a few days beforehand.

We have visited this place before. It hasn't changed; it's still marvellous ... and free, and very popular. Other countries can take a lesson from that.

The Golden Fleece

Once inside Chris and I made arrangements to meet at a central point in an hour's time, and went off to explore in separate directions because we are interested in different things. I made a leisurely tour of the Victorians before homing in on the art that really grabs me, the mid-20th century canvasses. It's not surprising that the early Australian art is really homesick British art or documentary in style. There were paintings of settlers receiving letters from "home" in a "distant land," one portrait by Gordon Coutts of a decorously posed girl in a pink dress sitting in an outback railway station (the model actually posed in a studio and the background was added later)––this was entitled "Waiting"––and several large canvases depicting the NSW scenery, the creeks and beaches, the sheep shearers (Tom Roberts' "The Golden Fleece", 1891) and the gold prospectors. "Bailed Up" (1895) was another big painting by Roberts depicting an encounter with highwaymen in the outback. All somehow noble and grand. The artists who came fresh off the boat to this country were full of enthusiasm for it: "Sydney is an artist's city," said Arthur Streeton, "––glorious!"

The bridge in curve,
G. Cossington Smith (1926)

The next generation of Australian artists are the ones who impress me, their styles changing as they developed, Roy de Maistre in particular (he was the mentor/ close friend / platonic lover of the novelist Patrick White, whose books have a powerful effect on me, too); on this visit I was also struck by the versatility and forcefulness of a woman artist, Grace Cossington Smith––The sock knitter (1915), Bonfire in the bush (1937), etc.

The Aunt

Roy de Maistre works that I want to remember:
The boat sheds in violet red key (1919), an example of "colour music"
Rhythmic composition in yellow green minor (1919) (ditto)
Botanical Gardens, Sydney (1918)
The red boat (1934)
Deposition (1952)––crucifixion picture, a masterpiece!
Figure in a garden (The Aunt) (1945)–– this faceless figure inspired Patrick White's novel "The Aunt's Story."

Then came the idiosyncratic school the 1930s to '50s painters: Arthur Murch, William Dobell, Margaret Olley, Russell Drysdale, Arthur Boyd, visionaries all. The famous Sydney Nolan is in a class by himself!

(I'll add more to this blogpost when I have time.)

Back to winter

I'm in the departure lounge at Vancouver airport, en route to Ottawa via Toronto. Our holiday's nearly over and we're returning to an early and severe winter in Ontario, with deep snow in the garden already. Here in BC it's mild, but damp and grey. There's a picture of the Sydney Opera House and harbour bridge on the TV with Australian voices on the commentary-- a golf tournament taking place there--sounds like the cricket on ABC radio. We were swimming in the breakers on a Sydney beach three days ago, which seems as incredible and as unreal now as the wall painting of tropical sands with palm trees around the hot tub at the Accent Inn airport hotel that we sat in for half an hour last night, relaxing our back muscles in the stream of bubbles.

We spent another pleasant afternoon walking around Vancouver yesterday, on a cloudy day that suited our mood, winding down after the goodbyes in Sydney and the very long trans-Pacific flight, two thirds of which was in darkness again. Our seats were over the wing, not allowing us much of a view beyond a brief glimpse of Bondi beach in the rain on takeoff, choppy waves below us, a few anvil shaped cloud tops at sunset, south of the Equator, and the dark mountain tops near Seattle at dawn before we came in to land on the Vancouver runway right beside the water again. There are so many similarities between Sydney and Vancouver that it's hard to remember which place you're in, after experiencing two November 29th dawns within 24 hours. I felt rough during the second one and hardly had the brainpower to order breakfast at the IHOP, but a couple of hours sleep and a late lunch at an Italian cafe on Prender Street helped. Chris bought his second hand book about Emperor Julian that he'd spotted on November 8th and we walked right round Canada Place and by the Lost Lagoon again to English Bay where 14 container ships lay at anchor in the gloaming, some with their lights on. It was very romantic to see them there beyond the pine trees and the beach. Might cross the Pacific by ship one day!

An evening of music and thunder

After our trip to Narrabeen, I went out in the evening with George to the home of a lady who befriended him some years ago--they play together in the 'cello section of the Beecroft orchestra--and who is a most excellent pianist. Gaby, a young mum who lives nearby and plays the viola, drove us to Maureen's bungalow in her car along the winding, up and down, Delhi Road, and when we arrived, Maureen was already practising her piano part for the music they were going to rehearse, the Dvorak piano quintet. We went into the kitchen first where I helped to slice the chicken to go with the salad she'd prepared. Prawns and wine goblets were ready for us too. The other members of the ensemble turned up: Katrina, Liz and Nicole, and we all sat down to supper, but I could tell that they were all dying to get to the musical part of the evening, so I offered to wash up while they began to play.

From the kitchen sink I was quite startled by the quality of their playing and soon came in to observe at closer quarters. In the background a long and noisy thunderstorm raged, with rumbles and flashes that punctuated the music, but it didn't seem to bother the players. They were concentrating so hard that I don't think they noticed. Nicole and Liz were doubling the second violin part. After the first movement (that they played once again at the end of the evening) I turned the pages for Maureen. It took some concentration, being the page-turner!

Scuttling back to the car with the instruments from Maureen's porch we got drenched again.

On the lagoon at Narrabeen

(Friday, November 15th)

With George's car at our disposal, we drove along the Pacific Highway and other highways through Chatswood to Narrabeen. The roads in and around Sydney always seem very busy, whether or not it's the rush hour, but there was a pretty stretch of the Lane Cove / Mona Vale Road that wound up and down through the Bush and crossed a ravine; then we started to catch glimpses of the Tasman Sea (Pacific Ocean) through the eucalyptus branches and beyond the tiled roofs and palm trees. The last stretch of road skirted the Narrabeen Lagoon. From the car park by the shops we could walk on the other side of that lagoon to a place that rented kayaks and other watercraft, such as paddle boards for standing on. Chris and I took a double kayak, left our shoes and valuables with the man at the desk, we set off to circumnavigate the island at the business end of the lagoon, getting increasingly wet from the drips off our paddles. Later, someone told us we'd have got less wet had we paddled more vigorously, but we preferred to drift slowly along and look for wildlife.

The water was clear. We saw fantails, a white-faced heron, cockatoos, ducks and a few fish. No jellyfish. On the shore of the island were tiny sandy beaches framed with palm trees.

After our kayak ride, we walked over the hump of land where Narrabeen's houses are, and had our first proper view of the sea, with rolling breakers and miles of sand, morning glory and yellow sea flowers (climbing guinea flowers?) growing in the dunes. There were no shops or lifeguard stations here, so this beach was fairly deserted. I don't know whether or not it would have been safe to swim here.

For lunch we discovered a really good South Indian curry place on the main road, that opened just for us, when they saw us coming.

To the Forestry Trail, koalas and 'roos.

We shook the sand off the bed sheets after our swim in the waves on Tuesday. Our first visit yesterday was to "Athlete's Foot" in the Macquarie Centre where a politely assertive salesgirl took Chris in hand and insisted that he replace his old shoes, ruined by rain puddles and overuse. Then George drove us to Cumberland State Forest for a walk among the skinks in the arboretum, under the giant hoop pines and bunya pines which grow massive, green pinecones weighing up to 10 kg apiece. At this time of year they are not fully grown. We saw some leopard ash trees too with splodge patterned bark. Wonderfully tall and straight eucalyptus trees with white trunks were marked for chopping down. I was reminded of the white pines of Canada. Both these species were chosen for masts in the days of sailing ships on the high seas.

"Once they get their tails up against Australia, there's no stopping them," said the cricket commentator on the radio, referring to the England side at the start of the current Test Match.

We were back in the car and on our way to the Koala Park, where we fed wallabies and kangaroos handfuls of dried grass and saw dingoes, parrots and peacocks at close quarters as well as miniature penguins being fed whole pilchards---they refuse to touch them without the heads.

For the first time in my life I stroked the ears of a live koala and of several tame kangaroos. They are soft and warm, their faces a sort of cross between a sheep and a rabbit. Some of the females had "joeys" in their pouches, with a head or feet sticking out for proof. It seems a shame that we have a pack of kangaroo meat for stir frying in the fridge, chosen by George.

Koalas, so were learned, are not called koala bears in Australia. That's an English mistake. These animals live in the wild not far north of Sydney, though they are not numerous. They only wake up for 4 or 5 hours a day; the rest of the time they're curled up in the fork of two eucalyptus branches, somewhere high in the trees, sleeping. I was advised to watch out for their sharp claws.

P.S. (later) I hate to say it, but the kangaroo meat was very lean and tasty.

Come hell or high water!

Whale Rock in the rain

Today I waded barefoot across three fords of Lane Cove River and Devlin's Creek, carrying my shoes and socks, while following the Great North Walk through Lane Cove National Park. I am giving up all attempts to keep this blog chronological. Normally it's not necessary to wade, but all the waterways are full at present, after the latest bout of thunderstorms that came through at daybreak this morning, and there were more this evening. Here's a description from one of George's guidebooks of the local area:

The river valley is shaded by steep wooded slopes with stands of tall Blackbutts dominating the hillside and valley ... Among the 97 bird species found in the National Park you may see or hear whip birds [we definitely heard them!] scrub wrens, Grey Fantails, thornbills, Crimson Rosellas, White Cockatoos, Galahs and Rainbow Lorikeets.

This is all within a few minutes walk of George's house and I've noticed most of the above. A lot of today's walk was like a sandy riverbed, Chris soaking his feet again well before we reached the extraordinary whale rock (among other dramatic sandstone rocks) on the way up the hill to North Epping and so back to suburbia. Never mind that it was raining again and my umbrella was broken in two places. We continued 2 km down the side streets, Chris' left foot squelching as we went (because he hadn't bothered to remove his shoes to cross the fords), and found a coffee shop with outdoor tables near the station where we could watch some more of the Test Match from Brisbane on TV.

Then we came home on the 295 bus and played with the baby again who has now mastered the skill of grasping things after reaching for them, and is thrilled to find out he can throw things too, and let other people pick them up for him so that he can do it again. He makes ecstasy noises as he's doing this, especially with his jingly ball. The piano keyboard is another such excitement.

Baby Eddie sang a duet with me the other day.

The other activities of today were cleaning the bathroom, Chris devising a way of getting the garden hose through the upstairs window by means of a ball of string, then making a chili beef with tacos for supper, which Sha seemed to relish, followed by apple crumble and ice cream by request from George, followed by the washing up.