WEATHER

Sunday morning here, and the rain continues to fall heavily. Though I can now glimpse the Derwent—earlier it was swallowed by cloud—I can still hear the wind rising to strong gusts. Will the rain ease, as the paper predicted? In a short time I head off to give a workshop on nature writing—in a room in a downtown building. The workshop was to include time in St. David’s Park, both collectively and individually—in fact that wander and sit outdoors was its heart. If this weather keeps up we’ll be fortunate to manage even a stroll in the park.

Welcome to the world—refusing to fit one’s plans! Perhaps I’ll wear my Corvus corax bracelet, and talk about the raven—as respectfully as I can manage. The day will be whatever it will be—we’ll hunker down into the pleasure of being warm (perhaps) and dry while surrounded by the noise of weather and see what emerges, what that might generate.

ONE TASSIE INITIATION

I feel I’ve crossed one divide here, as of last Saturday, when we spent a day on Bruny Island. (The specific divide you’ll figure out, I’m sure, as you read.) We caught the 7:30 ferry and our first stop on the island was to look along the beach where the penguins head out to sea every morning at first light. We weren’t there at first light, though, so we all we saw of them were the lines of their footprints on the sand and a few burrows in the dunes. That viewpoint overlooks The Neck, and on the beach on the other side of the road we watched a pair of pied oystercatchers walking and bobbing at the water’s edge.

We hadn’t had breakfast, and were on the lookout for a place to eat. The café at Bruny Island Charters was open, and they had just pulled trays of blueberry muffins out of the oven. We settled ourselves at a table and savoured the muffins (not too sweet, with lots of berries in them, very lightly dusted with icing sugar) and good coffee. The music on the sound system caught my attention, it sounded familiar—and sure enough, when I checked it was Harry Manx!

Once we’d eaten we headed off to the Mavista Nature Walk that runs through a forest of man ferns and other trees that enjoy a certain dampness. The understory seemed open, relatively speaking, more spacious than, say, at Leven Canyon or in the rainforest dell at Lake St Clair. The air was filled with birdsongs, but we caught only a single glimpse of a small brown bird. Eventually black currawongs began to call, several, invisible except for an occasional glimpse of a wing high in the canopy. They kept up for 15 or 20 minutes at least, and we devised various collectives for them: a clamour of currawongs or a call are ones I remember. Irene came up with something much more descriptive but I’ve forgotten it.

As we headed back along the trail to the car Irene asked me to photograph a particularly lovely rectangle of moss with a flourish of leaves lying on it—it looked, as she said, something like a forest gravemarker. As I got my camera out I noticed a thin black critter fingering forward like an inchworm and was about to say “look at that!” when Kevin yelped “There’s a leech!” We looked down and they were on our boots. We scraped them off and continued, stopping every 15 steps (Irene was counting) to scrape yet more off. When we made it back to the parking place I rolled up my pant legs and one dropped off my leg leaving a small bloody mark. Another was clinging to the inside of the fabric and I had to shake it loose before we got into the car. In fact I felt nothing when the leech attached itself, and it left no long-lasting indication of its presence. But next time I’ll tuck my pant legs into my socks.

After the leech adventure we drove to the lighthouse at Cape Bruny. There we paused in the parking lot to eat the next round of muffins. It was very windy and cool. Kevin and I walked up to the light and stared over the island and the sea. In a shed by the lighthouse a starling had a nest in the eaves, with young; I could hear their squeaky twittering. (Non-electronic.) Irene stayed with the car and watched the sparrows and fairy-wrens.

From the lighthouse we headed to the Bruny Island Cheese Factory since we were hungry again. There we bought a lovely cheese platter complete with chunks of a sourdough bread, and some delicious very tiny olives, also a product of the island. While we were waiting for the food to be packaged we heard and then saw a young kookaburra, still a bit fluffy-looking, with an adult. The youngster was working at its call, but not there yet. We took our food off to Denne’s Point, where we hoped we might spot the rare 40 Spotted Pardalote, but no luck. However, eating the cheese and olives and bread by the sea was lovely enough. Then it was back to the ferry and Hobart, tired but happy as they used to say in children’s books.

ALEX MILLER

Tuesday, 17 November.

I’m just home from another wonderful author event at Fullers. Novelist Alex Miller spoke brilliantly about his new book, Lovesong, telling stories that both showed and told us his credentials as a storyteller. From his first sentence I was hooked. He’s as good a teller as any I’ve listened to, and that includes Alice Kane and Joan Bodger. At the end of his telling and reading I had to shake myself free of the story he’d woven of the novel and its genesis.

Miller’s choice to present the novel by telling stories, about himself, about it, about storytelling, was apt, since one of the novel’s concerns is the relationship between a writer and a story, one which he hears and is unable to resist going on to write it. So being taken over by it and then taking it over in turn.

Stories are everywhere around us, in the world, Miller said, we swim in them. They go on all the time. He wrote this particular book, unlike his other novels, entirely to please himself. I was taken over by his talking and wanted to buy every one of his books—but then I have to get them back to Canada. So I’ll do a little searching to see if they are available there before I carry an armload up to the sales desk.

THE BOTANICAL GARDENS

On Saturday the 14th, after our breakfast gathering at Cullen’s, Irene and I went to the Botanical Gardens, while Kevin headed off to the beer festival. It was an overcast morning initially, but the sun broke through before long. We wandered as we pleased, stopping to look at whatever caught our attention. I was particularly taken with the Subantarctic Plant House, a small building which replicates the landscape and plants of McQuarrie Island; it has diorama-style paintings of sea and sky and birds on its walls, taped sounds of surging waves, winds, and bird calls fill the air, and both wet fog and stiff winds blow through from time to time. The herb garden, the cactus house, the Conservatorium bursting with orchids, hostas, gerbera, and ferns, gave way to the Japanese Garden, where we took our time following paths. We’d bought sandwiches at Cullen’s and ate them there, listening to the birds. (See below for a list of the birds we saw in the gardens.) After lunch we made our way to the Visitors Centre for ice cream and overheard someone asking about the large embroidery of the garden. A few years ago the Hobart Embroiderers’ Guild put together a series of embroidered panels of differing areas of the garden; it’s hanging in the volunteers’ cottage, but unless someone is there it’s kept locked to avoid any damage. Luckily Rebecca Round, a volunteer in the shop, offered to take the questioner over to see it and we asked to tag along. It’s a very lovely work! Then we went to the lily pond with its ducks, and the various Tasmanian, Australian, and New Zealand plant areas, before deciding it was time to head home. We’d spent almost a whole day drifting about with no particular goal, unhurried, soaking up the sun and the plants, a truly lovely time.

Bird list: European goldfinch, Blackbird, English sparrow, Collared dove, Black-faced cuckoo-shrike, Magpie, Masked lapwing, Sulphur-crested cockatoo, Little wattlebird, Silver gull, Pacific black ducks (with young)

MANY EVENTS

November 15.

Since I got back from the northwest I’ve taken in a rich mix of cultural activities here in Hobart. This may be a small city, but it’s culturally thriving and active. Beginning last Thursday I’ve been to a book launch, an art exhibition, and a talk by an artist.

Late Thursday afternoon I went to the launch of Senator Bob Brown’s Earth. Self-published after being shopped around to various publishers, the book was eloquently and elegantly launched by Pete Hay (poet and author of Van Diemonian Essays). Cassie O’Connor, recently elected as a Green to the State government, orchestrated the event Greens with affection and eloquence. The book’s text is a meditation, in brief but moving statements, about how we’re called to live in relationship with the rest of the planet, while attempting to heal the damage we’ve done to it. Brown’s fine photographs are a fine accompaniment to it, underscoring what’s at stake. It’s a handsomely produced book using an attractive recycled paper.

Senator Bob Brown is the current Parliamentary leader of the Australian Green Party. In 1978 he was made director of the Tasmania Wilderness Society. Trained as a doctor, he became an activist during the campaign against the damming of the Franklin River. He served as an Member of the House of Assembly in Tasmania for 10 years before becoming the first Green Senator in the Federal Government in 1996. He was also the first openly gay member of the Australian Parliament. For more about him see http://bobbrown.greensmps.org.au/about-bob-brown

On Friday afternoon I stopped in at the Carnegie Gallery to see Irene Briant’s Lost, work based on a true story of a woman who was lost in the bush for 9 days in 1908. Briant has covered tea trays with fabric and placed on them, also covered in fabric, both expected and unexpected objects—a tea set and a currawong, for instance. A large handmirror suspended from the ceiling and covered with fabric patterned with leaves and branches on one side, reflected me back to myself lost among those branches and leaves. Many lovely small pieces constructed from combinations of manmade and natural objects made up an assemblage called “Here and There.” I liked the work very much, have not been able to find out much about Briant herself. But the catalogue essay (by Sean Kelly, though not the one in NYC) is available online at http://www.bettgallery.com.au/artists/briant/lost/essay.htm

At 6:00 that evening at Fullers, we went to an XYZ event, featuring American artist Chris Jordan who spoke about his work, Running the Numbers, and also his most recent project Midway. The Gyre. This last work is very powerful—a series of photographs of albatross carcasses from Midway Island in the Pacific, birds killed by their diet of plastic scooped up from the Ocean. The work is hard to watch, its stunning beauty making it impossible to feel unmoved by the images. You can see for yourself at: http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/240609421/chris-jordan Jordan has made the sequence available for anyone who wants to us it.

A MISCELLANY

It’s Sunday, November 15 now, and the morning has alternated between misty overcast and sunshine. I’ve been pawing through accumulations of paper and memories, thinking it’s time I packed up some books and shipped them home. Travelling by sea they likely won’t arrive in Toronto before I get back there myself in mid-January.

The pawing has brought various bits and pieces to the surface—like this link that my friend Lorri sent me to an image of the lizard I saw on the Bedlam Walls walk: http://www.parks.tas.gov.au/index.aspx?base=5297 Check it out.

And here’s a quotation I like, found in one of the appendices of the Baxter book on books. It’s from the preface to R.H. Blyth’s How To Read English Poetry, published by Hokuseido Press (intended for Japanese readers and extremely hard to find), and gives Blyth’s reason for writing the book: “I have an idea that the entrance examination to Heaven is a reading aloud of poetry.” I like this so much I think I’ll add it to the bottom of all my letters.

I’ve been meaning to write something about Australian book launches. They have some formality here, and carry a certain weight. It’s customary to have someone celebrate the book’s arrival by speaking about it at some length—not the publisher, but someone with related expertise or a relationship to the book’s concerns who can “place” and laud it. A historian launched Peter Timms’s book about Hobart, the 30th anniversary issue of Island was launched by a politician who has been a subscriber for the 30 years, and Sarah Day’s lovely collection of poems by a local columnist who counts poetry as necessary reading. I’ve felt a real sense of occasion at all the launches I’ve been to here, in the attention paid to the book and the attentiveness of the audience—as if the appearance of a new book is worth marking in the larger world, not simply time for a party with friends.

I remember when Stan Dragland was poetry editor for M&S at home. His comments, introducing each poet at the season’s launch, demonstrated his passion for poetry and the work at hand. They made that evening a real occasion. Beth Follett of Pedlar Press speaks with the same kind of commitment and passion about her authors’ books at her launches, and I consider myself fortunate to have had Drowning Lessons venture into the world under her banner.

FURTHER BOOKS

Clive gave me a copy of Along these Lines: from Trowenna to Tasmania, an anthology edited by C.A. Cranston, first published in 2000. The writings in it travel through time and across space, via prose (fiction and nonfiction) and poetry; the gathering itself is put together according to a strategy that both exemplifies and examines narrative, as outlined in the editor’s introduction. Its intention is to offer something of the complex texture of Tasmania. Perhaps it’s analogous to that forest texture that I’m so struck by.

Here’s a fine quote about the experience of being here, from the introduction: “It’s not for nothing that Tasmania gets left off the maps. Its geography insists that there are no seamless narratives here; that it does not share the same narratives as the mainland, that the break in the journey to get here requires a shift in perspective.”

I’ll note also that I’m struck by the title’s echo of Along Prairie Lines, the anthology published by Turnstone Press in 1989 that first focused on the long prairie poem and, I think, (from this distance in time and space) made a case for the long poem (and often long line) as a reflection of the prairie landscape. Cranston comments on the highways and grids that provide ways of arriving and framing both place and writing: “The title Along These Lines signals the structure: an anthology patterned on visible and invisible lines that traverse the city and countryside, both of which have prompted or inspired the lines reproduced here by poets and prose writers.”

Now the more about Birds on Farms, subtitled “A glovebox guide to birds and habitat restoration and management in NW Tasmania”, published in 2005 by the North-West Environment Centre. The book arose from a project, “Restoring birds to Northwest Tasmania for healthy sustainable landscapes”, coordinated by the centre, and including field research on farms across the area to teach bird identification and habitat management. The beginning sections of the book describe the project, which encouraged collaborative and community responses to create larger patches of habitat as well as offering suggestions for combining farm production and bird conservation.

Most of the book consists of the guide to specific birds, Each gets a full page with an illustration and comments on behaviour, foraging habits, breeding, habitat, range and status, as well as a description. At the bottom of each page is a description of the bird’s key habitat. The end material includes lists of resources, programs, and scientific names as well as strategies for monitoring birds on your farm.

The project and book are fine examples of locally-based initiatives that address an environmental situation or concern, and also aim to build community. It must have been exhilarating to be involved with it.

BOOKS ON THE ROAD

I resolved to travel light on my tour of the north. I packed my computer (not needed) and the bird book and Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem for a shared-reading group I’d been invited to join for an evening, plus one book for reading on the road. I can’t read in a moving car, and besides, why would I read when I could be staring out at the ever-changing surround? The book I took for reading was Ashley Hay’s Gum, a copy from the Hobart Library that Irene borrowed for me. There’s a subtitle on the cover, but the barcode is over it, and the titlepage itself says only Gum. The book is about Eucalyptus, the dominant tree here. “Tree” I say, but it exists in hundreds of species, no certain count known even yet. Though DNA research seems to indicate that trees quite various from each other might turn out to be members of the same species.

The book opens with an aboriginal legend about the eucalyptus, and then goes on to track European—and Australian—awareness of them. Hay notes various explorers’ records of them, and the first attempts to collect and classify them. Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook, began collecting, and returned to England with an enormous number of specimens, but never got around to publishing descriptions of them or naming them. The early white inhabitants of the continent found the trees generally too hard to be useful for timber products, and besides they wanted clear land to farm. Forests in North America were also not what settlers wanted, but at least the trees there bore some resemblances to—or in fact were—trees already known in England and on the continent. Eucalypts were regarded as not good for much, and far from beautiful for a long time.

Hay traces the growing knowledge and understanding of the eucalyptus through time, and the slowly changing attitudes towards it, as white Australians grew more attuned to the land here. Though John Glover had painted it accurately very early, in general early painters made the forests here look more like English woods until late in the 19th century. Hay also outlines the 20th century development of the woodchip industry and of forestry, the period in which trees were seen as a useful crop to be harvested, and then the slow growth of conservation ideas that challenged those utilitarian notions. She writes, too, about its relationship to fire.

Her book is very readable in part because of her choice to structure the information around various individuals who were engaged with or by the tree, so the reader gets a series of portraits of people as well as of the trees. She writes clearly and the story is interesting enough that I found myself settling with it compulsively before bed each night on the trip.

Though I only took one book with me, I’ve brought 3 or 4 more home to Hobart. On that first day on the road we stopped at The Shop in the Bush, on the Tasman Highway between St. Helen’s and Scottsdale. The shop bills itself as “Tasmania’s Top Bric-a-Brac Shop” and it does indeed have all sorts of stuff in it, but I only trolled through a few shelves of books. I came away with two finds: a book on books, Australian-born John Baxter’s A Pound of Paper about his adventures as a collector and writer (a good read, I’m half-way through it now) and a lovely little bird book published in 1956, illustrated with watercolour drawings: Some Common Australian Birds by Alan and Shirley Bell. Each bird gets a full page of text (sometimes with generous bottom margin) and a full-page drawing. The very first bird in the book is my companionable Blue Wren (Malurus cyaneus), and here’s a lovely sentence about this tiny creature: “Often one of these atoms of polished elegance, as he hunts the undergrowth and runs down insects, is shepherded by three or four soberly-feathered brown wrens—a concourse of wives, it has been suggested, but more probably the current brood, a family of females and young males.” Atom of polished elegance—very nice!

I also bought a glovebox-sized, spiral-bound handbook of birds on farms, a landcare project more about that later—and Clive bought for me a pamphlet about Highfield House. So the collection grows—

TOURING THE NORTH AND NORTHWEST

It’s an overcast and slightly rainy morning in Hobart, and I’m trying to sort out the welter and wonders of the past several days. Starting last Friday I was treated to a driving tour of the north and northwest areas of the state—courtesy of Clive and Roz Tilsley. Our drive began by heading to Launceston, via the east coast, not the standard route. The day was brilliantly warm and sunny, like everyone’s dream of summer. It’s hard for me to credit that it’s really November. Christmas flyers arrived in this morning’s paper … but I seem to be floating outside of time with nothing to indicate days of the week or what season it is.

That first day I glimpsed Maria Island, a lovely shape floating between blue sea and blue sky. It’s moving to see the whole shape of a piece of land, as if it can be grasped in its totality. We stopped frequently—at Mayfield Bay Conservation Area for a brief walk along a sandy beach where we saw a 3-arch bridge foundation dated 1854; at the Spiky Bridge, convict-built, from local stone if the surrounding terrain is any indication; alongside Great Oyster Bay overlooking a huge sweep of sea and mountains (Freycinet Peninsula and Park), and the Moulting Lagoon wetland; and at several beaches, any of which could feature in splendid tourism ads, especially under the sunshine and blue sky we enjoyed. I took photographs at every stop and wrote down names of places so I can identify them.

At Swansea we found a takeout lunch, hamburgers that we carried to the beach and ate while perched on large chunks of rock soaking up sun and the noise of the sea. There were brilliant pink and pale yellow flowers growing on the way to the sand and rock. In the slightly dozy aftermath of food and afternoon sun I remember large sweeps of road winding up and down through forests where sun fell between trees, high walls of ferns and trees on one side of the car and a view through trees to country beyond on the other. The forest full of textures so unlike the ones at home, and a blue light in the air.

At one beach Clive spied a black-cockatoo in the distance. We walked towards it as he tried to show me where it was and finally I could see something black in the green of a large tree. When we got a little closer three cockatoos suddenly took wing and I was astonished at their size. They are more fully named Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoo, and their outer tail feathers are yellow. Though they were still some distance from us when they flew I could see those yellow tails.

We drove on through St. Helen’s to Pyengana and the cheese store there. It smelled like my great uncle’s farm where I spent summers as a child, and the coffee in the café was delicious. Was it called the Holy Cow Café? Perhaps. I’d stopped writing things down by then, but I did take a photograph. Clive bought a huge cheese which we sampled at dinner that evening—also delicious!

The next morning we set off for Stanley, driving alongside Bass Strait from Penguin west, past wonderful flower plantings by the railway tracks. Another day blazing with sun and light bouncing from the sea. Rich agricultural land rises behind the towns. The soil was sometimes almost black and at others a rich red-black. Bright new green rows of seedlings poked through. The hills looked raked or combed, lines of soil alternating with lines of green.

Before going into Stanley we visited Highfield House—more about that in another post. We checked into the Stanley Hotel, put on our walking shoes, and walked the Nut, a large lava plug that rises behind the town. The trail up is at a killingly steep angle. Clive bounded ahead while Roz and I took our time, stopping every now and then to catch our breath. On the top there’s a trail you can follow around the height, through heathy growth, a walk unlike any I’d done here before.

When we came down from our good walk we went to the pub for a beer before heading to Xander’s restaurant, just up the street, for a lovely view to the west and dinner. I ordered the beef salad for starters—we were in cattle country, after all—and the ravioli main. The salad was thin slices of beef with assorted vegetables, including beets (beetroot here), red onions and rocket, and the ravioli was feta and spinach, served with a pumpkin sauce. Everything was full of flavour. We ate and talked as the sun sank slowly and the hill we could see through the window grew dark.

And the further adventures of the tour will have to wait for another posting.

BEDLAM WALLS WALK

Last Friday I went on a walk at Bedlam Walls with Susanna van Essen. She drove us to the east side of the Derwent and north to a trail that runs along Geilstone Bay and then along the Derwent to Shag Bay. On the drive I caught sight of a white-faced heron fishing. The trail is a soft track, not stony like most of what I’ve walked here, and follows the shore quite closely, so you can look out at the water—and across to the Oil Depot and the Zinc Factory, which are not exactly scenic highlights.

The path takes you past a stairway that leads down the face of the cliff into some caves which were used by Aborigines for a long time. The entrance to the stairs is blocked by a fallen tree that the Parks Dept. has announced it can’t afford to move, but the stairs themselves are in good shape, and it’s easy to slide under the railing at the top and get onto them if you want to see the caves. The caves themselves aren’t deep. They contain—or did—middens that yielded mussel and oyster shells when excavated.

The interpretive signs along the trail and at the site have been scrawled over and badly scratched—I assume Parks also can’t afford to clean or replace them—so it’s not possible to read them completely. However, one interesting fact I could make out was that it was unusual to find middens with evidence of only two foodstuffs in them. It seems no one really knows why the remains are so limited—the ease of harvesting the shellfish there is one possibility.

The stairway down to the caves and the walk about it are lined by large and very beautiful sheoaks, members of the Casuarinaceae. They have leaves that look like long needles (“fused to slender, erect branchlets, arranged in whorls” it says on the Tree-Flip chart). Their colour has a hint of blue in the green, perhaps, and their foliage is unlike any tree at home. Perhaps it’s their shape or something delicate about the foliage, but they make a mournful note at this place, very near the site at which an Aboriginal band hunting kangaroos was mistaken by whites for attackers and massacred.

Susanna and I went on to the near side of Shag Bay. On the way I nearly stepped on a small lizard, a lovely grey colour with whitish diamond-shaped markings. It matched the weathered sticks it stood on, and so stayed still for me to photograph it. Susanna thought it was called a dragon of some sort. I hope to be able to identify it eventually. We perched on some rocks near the water and opened the thermoses. The shore on the other side went up steeply, a rock face with trees on top, their canopy ragged and open.

After our breeak we went back to the car, and drove to see the remnants of the barque Otago, at Otago Bay. That ship was the first that Joseph Conrad captained. How it ended up here, or just what happened to it, I don’t know. The wreck looks as if there were two ships—two largish chunks of broken ribs lie at the shore. Or perhaps it was double-hulled.

DAFFY DUCKS

Further to the black swans, I didn’t note that Liz and I caught sight of an oddly-shaped bird on the river that we couldn’t see clearly because it was backlit and not close to shore. Larger than most ducks, and with a long low silhouette, its head seemed to be pulled into its back. Its profile didn’t resemble any bird I could think of. Paging through the bird books a few days ago I came across the Musk Duck (Biziura lobata) and suspect that’s what we were watching swim quite swiftly downriver. Watts mentions Musk ducks can be seen on the Derwent at Bridgewater, which was more or less where we were, and that they frequently sit low in the water.

Later that Sunday Irene and Kevin drove me to Kingston, on the Derwent some distance south of Hobart, where there’s a beautiful beach. We followed the road that hugs the coast, a wonderful road to drive if you like driving since it’s an (often tight) succession of bends and curves and hills. If you’re inclined to car-sickness, however, it wouldn’t be such fun. I found myself thinking as we swooped and shifted directions that the drive might be the closest I’d ever get to experiencing the fractal nature of coastlines.

Stretches of that road afford lovely views of the river growing wider and wider, as well as hills on the far side; at other times you see houses set in fine gardens. The weather had grown overcast since the morning with rain threatening and occasionally falling. When we reached Kingston we stopped at a park alongside a small river to see the ducks. Gulls perched on the fence and a crowd of mallards was hunkered down on the grass—though I had trouble deciding if in fact some of them were mallards. Several had white or beige heads and white scattered through their plumage—perhaps good examples of what at home we call “daffy ducks,” mallard-domestic duck crosses.

Mixed in with the mallards were some further anomalies: several lovely ducks with plumage much like the mallard female’s, but they had a dark eye-stripe with paler stripes above and below it. Checking the bird books at home we realized we’d seen Black ducks. And a smaller duck with an elegant profile, richly brown head, and grey body with speckles on its chest turned out to be an Australian wood duck.

From the park we made our way along the beach road. It had started to rain and the gorgeous stretch of sand was empty except for a few gulls. Waves were rolling in. Out the other window of the car we could see lovely seafront houses in pretty yards—perfect places for a beach holiday, though perhaps slightly out of season would be the best time to be there. To get back to Hobart we drove the highway—much faster, but not nearly as interesting or pretty.