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 …

A CORRECTION AND AN ADDITION

The correction first: I mistranslated the FAW in my post yesterday--the organization is the Fellowship of Australian Writers, not the Federation. Fellowship is a much more accurate term for an organization that is as close-knit and supportive of its members as the Tasmania chapter clearly it. The anthology they have recently published is called A Net of Hands, and last night at The Lark I heard and enjoyed 8 poems from it.

The addition: In my note about the weather possibilities for tomorrow I left out the rather startling one of snow high on Mount Wellington. For those of you at home in Canada snow won't seem at all odd right now, but consider that here we are only days away from the solstice (winter? summer?) and today I'm wandering around in a short-sleeved t-shirt and feeling overdressed.

WEATHER

The weather here shifts and changes as quickly as the land does. Today has dawned overcast with thick clouds. There’s a brighter spot in them below where the sun sits but no beam of sunlight has broken through. And the forecast is such a mix: possibility of dry thunderstorms, a high of 31 degrees (rising from the morning’s 17), perhaps showers later in the day. It’s an odd situation, since in spite of the water everywhere Tasmania is rarely humid. Tomorrow the predicted high is 16, and there’s to be rain.

Thunderstorms of any kind are unusual here, dry ones even more so, and I imagine some cause for concern. Like the mainland, though perhaps not as extremely as in some areas there, Tasmania is prone to bushfires. The forest here is characterized by a fire ecology—eucalypts not only survive fires in a variety of ways, but some of them depend upon it to grow and/or remain healthy. Plants like buttongrass are so flammable they will burn even in water, and it’s not for nothing that the kerosene plant was so christened. So today also has the highest fire danger status—all burning outside is forbidden and tools that might throw off sparks should not be used. A large water bomber is being tested, and the fire service is on high alert.

In Fiji in the past couple of days a bad cyclone has struck, killing some people and forcing many to evacuate their homes. I wonder if the weather we have here is partly an effect of that. I also wonder if the other Harrises will encounter weather delays on their flights to join me—they have a 10-hour stop-over in Fiji on their way …

TIME FLYING

In Hobart it’s now 2:p.m., Tuesday, December 15, and the sun is shining brightly. I took my lunch outside to eat and let the heat pour down on me. Sunlight does feel more intense here than at home. I don’t think it’s brighter, but the air is so much clearer than in Toronto that it seems so.

I have roughly 3 more days here. On Friday I fly to Melbourne, and that evening the rest of the family arrive. We’ll settle into a flat there for a few days (while they attempt to get over the flight) before heading along the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide where we’ll spend Christmas. Then we drive back to Melbourne on an inland highway and fly to Sydney for New Year’s. Peter and Jessica return to Toronto on Jan. 4, while Katharine and I go to Cairns (the Great Barrier Reef), Atherton (where we’re volunteering in the bat hospital and possibly doing a walk to see nocturnal animals), and then to Hobart for four busy days that will include a Tasman Sea cruise, a walk on the mountain, and various meals and visits. On Jan. 13 we’ll fly to Melbourne and have a tour of the ballet school there. On the 14th we return to Toronto—though on separate flights.

A month from today I’ll be trying to collect myself in Toronto. I suppose there will be an accumulation of papers for me to sort through—though probably nothing to the accumulation from here that will make its stately way by sea and arrive perhaps by mid-March. By then I hope to have cleared space for them, and for the books that will be their travelling companions.

But in the meantime—I’ve been organizing poems and prose bits for a reading that I’ll give later today. I was invited to be part of The Literary Lark, the final Writers’ Centre Lark reading for the year. I’m reading with David Owen, who has just published a nonfiction book on the shark, and with contributors to an anthology of poems published by the local branch of FAW—the Federation of Australian Writers. The flyer announces flamenco guitarist Ralph Forehead as part of the evening, and since the Lark is a distillery, there’ll be Scotch for those who fancy it, as well as beer and wine. I’m pleased to have a chance to read, and look forward to seeing several of the writers I’ve met here. Not so much looking forward to saying good-bye to people, but it is a nice way to end my stay.

I have many moments and events and thoughts I haven’t yet “blogged” … I hope to get to some of them tomorrow and Thursday.

SOME OZZIE WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS

“No worries!” Said with a particular lilting intonation it means ‘you’re welcome’. So does “That’s awright then.”

paddock = field, even without a horse in sight; the third meaning in the Shorter Oxford, designated Austr and NZ, so long as it has fencing around it

ute = small truck (sort of analogous to the pickup truck, but with lower or no sides); also utility vehicle; I’ve heard it to applied to cars that can drive hard territory.

dam = an artificial pond to provide water for stock; analogous to dugout on the prairies

bogun = hard to get a handle on this one: a term of condescension, maybe covering the territory from from loudmouth through redneck to white trash …

hoon = usage here generally refers to those who drive too fast and aggressively, especially but not only young men, but in origin the term meant “a procurer of prostitutes”

the mallee = the scrub, the dry bush--characteristic of the state of Victoria. Used in a poem title by Robert Gray. Whereas “mallee root” sometime in the last century was rhyming slang for prostitute, and the Mallee bull is a term of compliment, as in fit as a … presumably because bulls that manage in mallee country are tough and strong (and bullheaded?)

yabbies = small freshwater crayfish, used for bait, but also eaten. Caught by children. Daniel at Lake St Clair mentioned catching yabbies several times.

flathead = a local fish, caught in the estuary; very good eating, though they are worried about the supply this year. Many mentions of catching large quantities of flathead to eat and to freeze in Gwen Harwood’s letters.

mia mia = an Aboriginal bough or bark hut. In the news here at the moment is the discovery of an until-now-unknown mia mia on land that is slated to be logged very soon

fined up = what the weather does in Tassie when the rain stops falling ; no sunshine required

shack = cottage or summer house, not necessarily in need of paint

squiz = an inquisitive or curious look

fossicking = poking about among things on the lookout for something valuable, ferreting about; what Irene and I did at the secondhand bookshops. In origin it meant to search out small quantities of gold usually from abandoned diggings.

bathers, cossi = bathing suit

MACQUARIE ISLAND

Macquarie Island lies about 1500 km. southeast of Tasmania. It was “discovered” in 1810 by an Australian on the hunt for new sealing grounds, but it first appeared about 600,000 years ago. At 34 km. length, 5 km. width, and 433 m. height at the highest point, it’s not huge—but it is still rising. In the recent past it's experienced a significant earthquake or two. Though Mcquarie is closer to New Zealand than any other land mass, it has been politically part of Tasmania since 1900. In 1978 it became a state reserve and now is a World Heritage Area and an International Biosphere Reserve. The Australian Antarctic Division maintains a research station there, and parks people carry out ongoing projects. Check out a view of the island and the research if you want at http://www.aad.gov.au/default.asp?casid=7151

No, I haven’t been there. But Macquarie is a presence here in Hobart.

In the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, where I have been (and this posting might duplicate some of my earlier one), the Subantarctic Plant House is modeled on Mcquarie Island. In it, the near shore zone, coastal slopes, rock stacks, mires, herbfields and short grasslands, and feldmark terraces are all replicated by plantings. Weather conditions on the island—its average daily temperature is 4.8 degrees C and it rains pretty much daily—are simulated so as you walk through, cold winds spring up and suddenly lower the temperature, then wet fog or rain spray rolls across the space dampening your face. Sounds of the sea and seabird calls complete the sensory experience. Given the weather conditions I was surprised at the variety and lushness of the plants. A panoramic mural by local artist John Lendis shows the island’s terrain so you can imagine you’re staring across it to the immense ocean.

Macquarie is a breeding island for many seabirds, including four different albatrosses and four penguin species. During the 19th century, as seemed to happen on every island where Europeans stopped, various animals were introduced. (Often the idea behind animal introductions was to establish food stores for sealing, whaling, shipping parties who would stop on long voyages to replenish supplies.) Large feral populations of cats, rabbits, rats, mice, and weka (a flightless rail from New Zealand) developed and these have caused serious damage to both island ecology and seabird habitat. Beginning in the 1970s a feral animal eradication program was undertaken by the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service that successfully got rid of cats and the weka. However, rabbits and rodents are still an enormous problem, and currently a large eradication program aimed at these animals is in the planning stage here.

At the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery there is an excellent exhibition on the Island, a part of the Antarctic Gallery. In it the geology of the island development is very clearly explained, and the plant and animal life is delineated. The history of its exploration is also outlined. More about that in another posting, perhaps, when I find my notes …

HANS HEYSEN

Before I enjoyed my Bruny Island cheese supper I’d gone to see the Hans Heysen show just opened a week ago at the TMAG. Heysen was born in Germany in 1877, but came to Australia as a child. He went to Europe for 4 years as a young man, studying at various studios in Paris and finally being accepted at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He also travelled and painted in Venice and Scotland before coming back to Australia. He lived in South Australia, eventually on a country property, and was perhaps the first painter to take the eucalyptus as his subject. Clearly he loved the trees and the landscape around him.

The area was agricultural and many of his paintings have cattle and/or farm labourers in them. I saw echoes of Millais in some. He was also enthralled by light, and it’s fascinating to see its variety in his canvases, sometimes soft and full of mist, sometimes inflected by bushfires in the distance, sometimes pouring out of the picture into the gallery. The focus on agricultural subjects made me wonder if we have an equivalent painter at home. Kurelek comes to mind for content in a way (more social?), but not style. Do I remember that Carl Dair painted Ontario farm scenes? Need to check this out when I’m back in Toronto.

Later in life Heysen went inland to the Flinders Range and was at first unable to paint what he saw there. The expanse of land without markers, the dryness, the intense range of colours, the flat light, were all challenges. It’s interestingly similar to early painterly reactions to the Canadian prairies, another dry area where reading the distance in conventional ways was difficult or impossible. Heysen changed his palate, developing new colours, and ended by painting stunning images that capture the sharpness and starkness of the region beautifully. Or so I think, never having seen it. The paintings are definitely beautiful.

I liked the show very much, and may go back to see it again. My favourite painting isn’t among either the farming or the Flinders ones, though. It’s a painting of his wife, sitting at a sewing machine, her back to the artist (and the viewer). It’s a summer’s day, or perhaps spring, there are white curtains on the window, and radiant pale brilliant sunlight pours in. The light is so strong that when I came around the corner and saw the painting I stepped back from it to keep from squinting.

MORE CHEESE

A few entries ago I mentioned the cheese plate we shared, from the Bruny Island Cheese Co. Well, yesterday the McGuires received their December Cheese Club shipment from the Company, so last night we feasted on cheese again. The package of 5 artisanal cheeses also included a container of apple paste and a bottle of wine.

The cheeses have their own names: tom truckle (a truckle is a small whole cheese).a hard cheese in the tradition of the Tomme cheeses from the French Savoie; o.d.o. (standing for one day old and so crumbly), a fresh cheese marinated in olive oil with roasted red pepper, garlic, and herbs; saint, a surface-ripened soft oozy cheese with a white mould; 1792 (the year the French first stopped in Tasmania), another surface-ripened cheese, this time brine washed; and gabriel, also surface-ripened, a delicious runny goat’s cheese. We left the Gabriel and o.d.o. for another evening but devoured large portions of the others on slices of a fresh baguette from Cullen’s, with olives, cherry tomatoes, green grapes and fresh cherries on the side. An unbeatable meal!

Did I mention that earlier that when we stopped at the Cheese Factory and bought the cheese we ate at Dennes Point, I bought a delicious milkshake for Kevin and very good caffe lattes for Irene and me? On a nice day there are tables outside the shop, under the eucalypts, where it would be lovely to sit and eat. The shop also sells T-shirts with a pair of boots on them (the Factory mark), notecards, and some sweets, if I remember correctly.

A SATURDAY URBAN WALKABOUT

Last Saturday, after our usual breakfast with friends at Cullen’s Bakery in Moonah, Irene and I went on a long prowl of shops and galleries in downtown Hobart. We began near the Art School, looking at fine jewellery and some fabulous wooden furniture, and then spending time in Art Mob (www.artmob.com.au), a gallery that specializes in Aboriginal Art. There’s a gorgeous show hanging at the moment, work by Dennis Nona, plus stacks of paintings not hung, and small items like Christmas ornaments and notecards, painted boxes and small trays. I bought a few small gifts, all the while wishing fiercely I had the money for a painting for myself. We had a brief chat with Euan Hills, the director, and he showed us photographs of an astonishing and large bronze canoe by Nona, called Two Brothers, now installed in Saudi Arabia. It would be fun to put that canoe beside Bill Reid’s, installed at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC.

Staying in the Hunter Street area, we went on to the Art School’s gallery to see the show (Silent Witnesses I think it was called—where was my field notebook?) by Frances Watson. The work, several installations, was done to complete her degree and is both brilliant and mordantly funny. She examines the weight of domestic objects within and on lives and families, while at the same time ambling among various conventions of the still life. I liked the show enormously, found it moving and exciting, and was delighted that Frances herself was there so I could tell her so.

Next stop on our ramble was the Carnegie Gallery, to see Light and Shade, featuring the work of Lorraine Biggs and Chantale Delrue. Both these artists make very beautiful images, and it’s also interesting to note the contrasts between them. Delrue is anchored in fine details, using dyes derived from natural materials to make precise images of butterflies and plants, all found on Mount Welllington. Biggs has focused on the hill as a shape, and her paintings explore repetitions of this large landscape form—in all instances depicted so the light emanates from behind the hill with a rich gold tone and the sky is luminous. Both artists address the body—Delrue by creating pieces that use the lungs and the heart as containers of growth (vases for branches and plants), Biggs by the velvety echo of a breast, sometimes nippled, in her hills.

From gallery to market—we strolled through the Salamanca Market, checking out jewellery, lovely scarves, handbags, gorgeous fountain pens, threading our way through the crowd. We stopped at Say Cheese and shared a cheese plate for lunch, stepped into the Handmark Gallery to look at more paintings by Delrue and photos by Christl Berg. Then it was up the Kelly Steps to Hamden Road and Sandy Bay to paw through secondhand books at Rapid Eye and Kookaburra. Irene and I each found irresistible things of course, and with our bags laden, called an end to the walk and went home.

Repetition marked the day—our repeated steps from place to place, the repetitive patterns of aboriginal art, repeated images and objects in the work of the 3 women artists, and then in the plethora of bird books we discovered in the shops. Watson had a quote from Gilles Deleuze written on one of her pieces: “If we die of repletion we are also healed by it.”

A MUCH-NEEDED BREAK FOR PARKS?

Monday, 7 December 2009.

The Mercury’s lead article this morning announces that the state government is about to thaw their freeze on public service hirings and makes specific reference to Parks as an area that needs attention. That’s very good news, if it turns out to be more than a pre-election gambit.

Since shortly after my arrival, I’ve been both impressed by, and concerned about, the parks here. At Lake St Clair, where I lived for three weeks. I was bowled over by the variety and beauty, and by the warmth and generosity of the staff. But I was also startled at how few staff there were, and quickly became aware of how stretched they were, trying to cover the needs of visitors and of park maintenance.

In fact, I was able to lend a small hand to maintenance when I accompanied one of the rangers on a walk, to Shadow Lake and back by Mount Rufus, to post a closed sign on a trail that was temporarily unsafe and inspect the tracks for fallen trees. We found a lot of trees down, sometimes covering the track completely, so walkers had to negotiate their way over, under, and around trunks and branches. We were able to shift some trees, and remove branches, but others had to be left until the ranger could get back up with a chainsaw—and to do that he had to wait until someone could be freed elsewhere and sent in to accompany him.

Eucalypts are called “self-pruning” since some species tend to drop limbs throughout their life, for no apparent reason. They are also often shallowly rooted and blow over or lose large branches in windstorms. Keeping tracks clear of fallen trees is an on-going job, and not limited to wild parks, either. The steps down to the cave on the Bedlam Walls walk just outside Hobart were blocked by a tree earlier this year; the parks people announced at the time that they could not afford to remove the tree and the steps were simply closed. (Though it was possible to negotiate under the railing and down to the steps if you really wanted to get to the cave.)

When we drove to Mount Field Park in October we found a popular trail had been closed for tree removal and wouldn’t open until some time in December. A letter to the paper, in response to the announcement that some special funds had been procured to do that maintenance work, stated the trail had been in serious need of attention for some years.

Tasmania’s parks are a tremendous—I’m trying to avoid the language of investment, without success it seems—resource and asset. Stunningly beautiful, full of birdlife and varied terrain, with a large network of tracks and overnight huts, they are widely used by both residents and visitors. They form an important part of the ecology (human and natural) of this island and deserve to be properly cared for. I’ve yet to meet a Tasmanian who doesn’t value the parks, or a park worker who isn’t dedicated to them. It seems odd that the state government has not been willing to give them the attention and care that they both require and deserve.

BIRDWALK

It’s 8:45 p.m. here and twilight is settling in. The sky is still bright over the Derwent, but Mount Nelson is dull. It’s been a gorgeous warm and sunny day with no rain though showers were forecast. It’s a week since I’ve attended to this blog. For those who are wondering, the nature writing workshop went well, though we weren’t able to walk in the park.

But this morning the McGuires and I walked in a lovely park, the Waterworks Reserve. We joined a birdwalk led by Don Knowler, who writes the weekly bird column for The Mercury. I’ve been enjoying his column since I arrived—he’s a passionate birder who has lived in England and America as well as here and has a healthy sense of humour that comes through in the writing.

I reckon about 50 people turned up for the walk—not surprising, given the weather and the fact that it was well-publicized. Knowler said his usual crowd was only half a dozen but I find that hard to believe. Birding with a crowd that size is a challenge—especially walking on narrow trails through the woods—but Knowler handled that well by explaining what birds we might expect to see, and telling us stories about his own birding in the Reserve before we set off. He’s an entertaining and knowledgeable a talker about birds, so a wonderful companion on a walk.

The morning was chock full of birdsong—the striaited pardelote was repeating itself as we started off and Knowler pointed out cracks between bricks where they had nests. He also noted a white-eyed heron and a native hen off on the grassy areas. I couldn’t see either of them, but did see the little black cormorant that flew in and perched on a railing. And eventually I got my glasses on the pardelote—my first sighting of one.

The calling continued as we wound through the bush—the shrike-thrush, various cuckoos, currawongs, a bronzewing in the distance, the grey fantail, all gave voice, though I couldn’t see any of them. When we came out of the trees and were standing near the water a sudden racket of ravens and then a pair of kookaburras announced the circling of a white goshawk overhead—a bird I was thrilled to get a clear sighting of and a ringing note to end the walk with.

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.

THE BLACK SWAN

On Sunday morning Liz McQuilkin collected me and we drove up the Derwent River to Bridgewater to see the black swans. Liz is working on a poem about the black swan, part of her ekphrastic responsibilities for the reading at the Salamanca Gallery in December, and wanted to see actual birds as well as the painted one(s).

It was a gorgeous morning, sunny, and we had no trouble finding the swans. Mostly they were floating serenely towards the middle of the river, which is very wide, but we were able to find a few near shore where grass or reeds grew out into the water. In fact, we spied two elegant swan heads in the reeds not far from where we stood, presumably sitting on nests.

We watched a family of 6 fluffy grey cygnets and two parents feeding and drifting for quite a while. The adults are smaller than swans in Canada, and perhaps a little more delicate. They have a lovely curve to their necks and the feathers towards their tail seem to stick up like a series of ruffles. Black swans moult following breeding—and can’t fly for about a month—so I thought the ruffle effect might be because of the moulting. But the drawing in Simpson and Day shows the ruffle, so I guess it’s simply how their plumage sits. The backs of both the adults appeared to be more or less bare.

The young ones were fun to watch and very sweet. As the parents bent those elegant necks into the water and fed, the cygnets clustered about them, dipping their bills, perhaps scooping up food, paddling back and forth around the adults. Then they began to tip themselves up, heads under water and little blunt tails to the sky, like dabbling ducks, as they discovered things to eat.

We then drove a road that follows the river, stopping by a railway station (no trains running at the moment, Liz thought, and no passenger traffic here in any case) and were able to see a larger group of swans further from the bank, some in pairs, feeding, some just a gaggle, to adopt terminology from a cousin. While we were there a very large bird flew over and I was able to get it in my binoculars—a white-bellied sea eagle, not in full adult plumage yet.

An additional pleasure of the morning was the near-stillness of the river. Clouds and patches of blue sky were reflected in it, and occasionally the swans themselves, the double curve of their necks quite beautiful and a little surreal.

Black swans are native to Australia, but not found anywhere in Europe. In fact, they were long a metaphor there for something that didn’t exist. In current online economic conversations there are references to black swans in connection with the events of the last year. The term was defined in the Huffington Post (without citation) as “high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events beyond the realm of normal expectations.” So the metaphor hasn’t entirely collapsed, in spite of its inaccuracy.

I first encountered black swans about 30 years ago now, at the Kortwright Waterfowl Centre near Toronto. We were driving home after an early morning foray to the Mennonite Central Committee’s fair and quilt show in New Hamburg and stopped in to see the birds and found black swans.

OBSERVATORY OPEN NIGHT

I’m so far behind with this blog I may never get caught up! Time flies when you’re having fun. And, when you’re writing. I’ve been working on a short essay, hoping to get it into shape to submit to the CBC contest, since they’ll take online entries. That’s used up my writing focus for the past several days.

But I don’t want to let the blog dribble into nothing. So I’ll just plunge in and write about last Saturday’s open night at the Canopis Observatory here in Hobart. It was a Galileo night. This year marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s discoveries, and I suppose almost the beginnings of astronomy as we know it. Certainly what he say when he held that telescope to his eye completely altered the European understanding if the Earth and its relationship to the rest of the heavens.

Galileo’s text was called Sidereus Nuncius or Starry Messenger—a lovely title for a deep change in perception and understanding.

The Observatory is small, and its own telescopes are not the kind you can look through to see the stars. They operate digitally, collecting data and feeding it back to computers I think. The larger one was shown to us, its mirrors and the track that light takes through them pointed out. Outside the observatory buildings several amateur astronomers and sky-watchers had set up their own telescopes and were offering views of the moon (somewhat less than half-full) and of Jupiter. To see the moon’s surface clearly the scope was aimed at what the man called the terminator—that’s the line where the bright side meets the dark. The surface looked a pale grey and was as pock-marked as you’d expect. Why am I always so startled and thrilled when things turn out to look like their photographs? Jupiter was a little blurry—I found myself wondering if that was because of the speed at which it turns, but more likely it was distance and/or slight cloud. It was indeed striped with colours, a couple of dark bands interspersed with pale yellows, sandstone-like. There were four moons visible, three in a line to the right of the planet, and one to the left. Apparently Jupiter has over 50 moons, though some of them are only the size of small rocks.

The Observatory is involved in interesting and important international research projects. We heard a presentation on it, principally on the search for new planets or exo-planets. (I meant to look that term up, but haven’t.) Three methods of discovering planets exist: the Doppler Wobble (best name!), transit, and microlensing. The last, microlensing, is the method of the Canopus project. It involves, if I understood correctly, the recording and measuring of light emitted by a star from directly behind another star. The position is important because the light bends around either side of the front star, an d creates a curve. If there’s a spike in the curve the light has been interrupted and a planet is the interruption.

Apparently this method is the one most likely to yield planets or systems of planets that are most like our own Solar System. It reveals planets that are 1-10 times the mass of Earth and a half to three times our Sun-Earth distance from their own star/sun. Quite a few planets have been found that fit within these numbers, though the research is relatively new.

The event was a slightly dizzying combination of facts and numbers and diagrams which provided interesting if sometimes hard to follow information, and the astonishing experience of staring at the grey surface of the moon and the round colours of Jupiter trailing its moons as tiny dots of light.