CATCHING UP

What was that resolution I made to add a note to this blog once a week? It's just over a month since my last posting, and in that time I've had lots of reason to think about Tasmania. I met Richard Lemm for coffee when he was in town, and we traded stories about our Tassie experiences and adventures, scheming how to go back there. Kevin and Irene, my Hobart friends and hosts, were in Toronto for 10 days, and I spent the better part of 3 days with Irene, wandering and talking. And I've had letters and emails from several folks--mostly still waiting for answers, I'm afraid. But I've also been preoccupied with the next adventure. Peter and I leave next Monday morning for Seoul, where he will be teaching a summer course at Sookmyung Women's University. We'll be there for a month, and then spend 10 days in Japan on the return trip. I'm going to start a separate blog to capture some of our experiences--if you're curious it's called http://fieldnoteskoreajapan.blogspot.com. I'm also taking my Tasmania notebook with me.

TIME AND PLACE

I’ve just made myself dizzy, trying to sort a very small Tasmanian picture project. (Very small—it involves 12 photos of 800 or so…) While I was resident at Lake St. Clair I decided to photograph Mount Olympus from the viewing platform, on different days and at different times. I wanted to note the changing weather and light. And I actually managed to record the dates and times when I took those photographs in my field notebook.

Consider this project my variation on Monet’s haystacks, if you like. I love the repetitions one finds in visual art and have often wondered how or if such repetition can occur in poetry. How many poems called “Haystacks” could I write before someone muttered: well, she’s run out of ideas, hasn’t she? (I’ve recently completed a short haibun series that partly investigates this question—mapping a repeated winter walk at St. Peter’s Abbey in Saskatchewan—but it remains to be seen if anyone will consider it publishable.)

But back to the pictures. Several weeks ago now I pasted them, in chronological order, into a Japanese accordion-style notebook. It makes me happy to page through it—even if it usually also occasions a sudden longing to be back looking across the lake at the mountain. I hadn’t gotten around to labelling the images with date and time, and it’s that task that made me dizzy. Well, my inability to do so accurately, an inability spawned by what I discovered to be my original inability to in fact keep the pictures in chronological order. In spite of having another set of the images, plus index cards to the photographs that demonstrate their order …

Among other things, I discovered that I’d missed one photograph altogether. Mind you, it was the photo I took the day the cloud cover settled low over Lake St. Clair and erased Mount Olympus altogether—but had I read my notes re time and date carefully I’d have seen that one day there was “no mountain”. And had I written my initial labels with a pencil and not a fountain pen I could have corrected them neatly instead of scratching out wrong times and dates, and hoped that a couple of slight breaks in strict chronological order might have seemed some idiosyncrasy rather than total confusion.

This confusion seems another repetition, I realize—a variation on the off-kilter sense of time and place that seems all too characteristic of me since I’ve come back to Toronto.

THREE MONTHS LATER...

It's three months since I flew back to Toronto from Tasmania/Australia--three months! How did that happen? It's as if my life divides into before Tasmania and after Tasmania--the before, of course, feels very far away, but in an odd way so does the after. I haven't really found my feet back here yet--and actually I'm not "back here" but in Winnipeg for 10 days to discuss a mutual interview that poet Jan Horner and I are working on for the journal CV2. And where is Tasmania in all this? It floats, a weave of sensations, memories, ideas, conversations, landscapes, food (that flathead, yum!), books, light, faces, waiting for me to hunker down and attend to them.

Back in Toronto I have a lovely, new-to-me, pine desk in my writing room, many thanks to Kelley Aitken, and a sorting table littered with baskets of paper--correspondence, manuscript, print-outs, none to do with Tasmania. But my two post bags and one box of books and papers (shipped sea mail from Hobart) have all arrived, the final one a couple of weeks ago. When I go home I'll work at clearing space for them on that table. Then I'll haul out my file box of 800 or so photographs, and see what emerges. I want to use this blog as a re-entry point to those lovely weeks and months. Perhaps that will ameliorate the odd sensation of being slightly off-balance I feel when memories or images from Tasmania sweep over me.

AIRPORT ENNUI

Thursday, 14 January 2010. Melbourne Airport.

I’m sitting in the departures lounge at Melbourne Airport, “cushioned” by the white noise of an escalator proceeding steadily downwards. When I checked in this morning, an hour or more ago now, I was told there was a plane delay—I think the plane is late arriving here and so will be late leaving and therefore I will be late arriving in LA,, my re-entry point to North America. Not all bad news however, since they’ve rebooked me on an Air Canada flight direct to Toronto, saving me the LA-Chicago-Toronto legs of the original booking.

It’s the usual odd schmozzle of anxiety and boredom getting into and out of airports and finding flight information and clearing customs and security. Katharine’s Quantas flight is just now backing away from its ramp—about 20 minutes behind schedule. I made it into the departures area in time to see the still-long lineup of passengers waiting to go through the extra security clearance which involved a full search of hand luggage and a body check. I’m not clear on whether this flight will face the same lengthy scrutiny, but it would be odd if it doesn’t.

Yesterday we had a lovely time in Melbourne, even if the morning felt mournful as we had our last breakfast with the McGuires and then trundled out to the Hobart Airport. We were able to get the Best Western Airport Motel shuttle bus from Melbourne to our motel and even check in early—then the shuttle dropped us at Broadmeadows train station and we road the train downtown to Flinders Station, and made our way on foot to the Australian Ballet School. Katharine had arranged for us to have a tour of the school, which shares quarters with the Australian Ballet Company. It’s busy with summer programs at the moment, and the studios were full of dancing young people.

From the school we walked into the CBD and found a good salad lunch at Il Duomo Café in one of the Arcades – than window-shopped and ambled about, eventually ending up in Carleton Gardens where we parked on benches and read our books quietly for awhile. We had to pick up a forgotten camera lens from 55 Webb St., the apartment we had stayed in for our all-too-brief family visit to Melbourne. Then we went to Woolworth’s (a food store here, not a five and dime) for Kath to buy white chocolate timtams and Buderim ginger to take home—poked along Smith, Johnston, and Brunswick Streets until we met poet Andrew Sant for a drink at The Provincial, a nice pub. He suggested supper at a Greek place across the road from it and we shared good Greek tapas, a bottle of retsina, and fine conversation for the next couple of hours until we caught the train back to the station and called the motel shuttle bus to pick us up. The final event of the evening was to repack suitcases for the long ride home … which will commence eventually I suppose. There are alarmingly few people yet disposed about this lounge for a flight that was originally scheduled to leave in half an hour …

END OF THE TRIP

It's almost a month since I managed to post anything here. The time on the mainland was varied and interesting and I'll try to write about it eventually, but tonight is the end of my time in Hobart. I've got my suitcase more or less packed and ready for the morning. I fly to Melbourne with my daughter Katharine at 8:50 a.m. and we have the day there. We both head to Toronto, but on separate flights on Thursday, Jan. 14th. I'm feeling sad about leaving Tassie--everything about my time here has been wonderful. But it will also be good to have some time to remember and think about it all, instead of just adding more experience to the bounty.

Today we went to Bonorong Wildlife Park and saw, among other things, several Tasmanian devils scampering about their enclosure. They looked quite healthy. There are also Foresters kangaroos there, echidnas, bandicoots, wombats (including a small orphan called Mavis who lives in a plush pouch), emus, and koalas. I have mixed feelings about zoos, but I do enjoy seeing the different animals.

It's very hot here, and dry--there have been a couple of bushfires today, in the Derwent Valley. In Melbourne the temperatures have been in the high 30s, but I hear they've begun to drop. We have a tour of the ballet school there tomorrow, and then the late afternoon for wandering around in the downtown. We're meeting poet Andrew Sant for supper in Fitzroy before heading back to our motel near the airport.

It's my intention to continue with this blog once I'm settled in again in Toronto--using it as a way to remember and reflect on my experiences here. But it may be several days before I get to that.

A GROAN ABOUT THE CANADIAN POST OFFICE AND OTHER STUFF

Friday, 18 December 2009. Hobart.

In an hour I’ll be on my way to the airport, to catch my flight to Melbourne, and although I’ll be back in Tasmania for four days in January today feels like the end of something. It’s appropriately overcast and drizzly. Yesterday the rain pelted down all day long, putting a halt to my plan to amble about with my camera, photographing the houses here which I find so charming, unexpected views of the Derwent I’ve come to look for on my walks downtown, and St. David’s Park. I also though I’d walk on Knocklofty for an hour or so …

The day was not without accomplishment, however. First thing in the morning I took my books to the post office and two post bags full are now hunkered somewhere in the system—to be literally shipped and make their way across the sea to Canada. 2-3 months is the estimated time it will take them to make the trip.

Let me note here, crankily, that the Canadian Post Office has lived down to its increasingly poor service record. I was unable to insure my books—the only parcels to Canada that can be insured must travel by courier or express post. That’s not an Australian requirement, but a Canadian one. I suppose there was one small blessing in that—the argument I was having with myself about whether to take advantage of a special book and paper rate here (called Print Post and using the aforementioned bags but without insurance) or regular sea mail, boxing the books was settled since no insurance at all was available …

I’ve been more than impressed by the speed and courtesy of the Post Office here in Australia. My friends here receive books mailed from Western Australia in the next morning’s mail, and that arrives usually before 10:a.m.

This morning I made a short walk to the local post office in the Tattersall’s on Hill Street, to mail a few last letters. I took some photographs along the way, roses blooming in front of small (in appearance at least) bungalows painted in soft colours. Often these cottage-seeming houses turn out either to stretch back a long way or, because of the topography here to grow at the back into two- or three-storey buildings.

I’m not taking my computer on my wanderings and so this blog may languish over the next three to four weeks. I know I’ll have access to the internet here and there along the way, but not precisely when. My family are, I believe, somewhere on Fiji by now, putting in the 10 hours they have there before continuing on to Melbourne. They are to arrive at midnight tonight. It will be good to see them all after three months.

THE MIA MIA

Further to the mia mia that was recently discovered here: it was vandalized badly sometime over last weekend. The notice in the paper mentioned that Parks does not have the resources to adequately monitor or safeguard such a site, which lay just outside a conservation area. It added that the individual(s) who did the trashing must have set out to do so, since the mia mia’s location wasn’t such that you’d stumble over it accidentally while out for a hike. An editorial has been written about the tragic stupidity of such actions; the current government has made no comment on it. I suppose the jury is out on who might be responsible— and may well remain out. “Mere” vandals, racists, or timber industry supporters might all be included in the police line-up, if a line-up were held …