our boy, their buoys

Stony Creek Trestle Bridge 1916

 On the way to nowhere (but really, it is on the way to a place called Nowa Nowa) it is easy to forget how much it was worth to be able to transport timber, wool and produce from East Gippsland, if it could be done more directly than had been possible from port to port by boat. This was 1916 and labour must've been hard to find, with tens of thousands of our young men  serving the Empire in European War. This rail bridge was built by Victorian Railways as part of a link from Bairnsdale to Orbost.

Damaged in the 1980's by wild fire, it then became unserviceable. Spanning 276 metres and  18.5 metres high, the members are from single height logs. I am as inspired by the manipulation of the materials as I am by the history, but when we stand under such an old, confident statement made in sweat and timber, it is wonderful to ponder a few hows and whys. This region was one in which resources outnumbered people, and still is. And that's just the way I like it.

we have to look down for relief

I love the crazy geometry when looking askew

photo credit- Nicholas Ditterich

Cape Conran beach textures

Our first trip to Cape Conran on the East Gippsland coast- one of several new places for us to explore in an area of the state we have only seen superficially before. This is wonderful and expansive farmland, bush and coastal country. The bush is not unlike that of the Western parts of the state- the places most familiar to us- but there are significant differences in species and climate. In the bush this is Banksia country with gnarled old trunks supporting masses of the unusual flowers.

Exposure to deep ocean currents makes for interesting beach combing. I couldn't resist a few pics of sponges and weeds that competed with the horizon for my attention.

I was so lucky as a kid. Some thoughts on friendships lost...

Is it coincidence that I've just found a group of primary school friends from the early 1960's- all of whom I haven't seen or heard from in the intervening decades, at the very time that we have a house and shed almost entirely packed up to move to the other side of the state?

It has caused me to allow some introspection on my relationship with friends, and I think what I'm learning is that even as a small boy I formed attachments based upon specific areas of curiosity. I'm looking at a picture of my grade five group from 1963.

There is Graeme, with whom I had such creative fun writing outrageous plays,  and making language into a recreational tool. I think we loved ideas, but we didn't know that then. We also shared an interest in certain types of cars. Then there is Jeffrey, whom I sat next to in class and visited on weekends. We drew incessantly- but each for an entirely different purpose. I loved to represent things, especially if the drawings could show things working. He loved to draw things to understand how they were put together. We filled pad after pad of drawings, always sharing output. He seemed to groove on my mechanical interests and I lapped up his obsession with human biology. No surprise I ended up in art school and he ended up a brain surgeon. Can't help feeling his creativity did a lot more good than mine ever could. There is another whole story in that friendship which showed me aspects of the post-war world that I never could have seen without someone like him...

Then there were Graham and Wayne who I liked to play cricket with. G was a very good batsman, W was a good bowler as I recall...I was never brilliant with a ball, maybe because of my other interests.

There was Jon who used to be a great mate to make tree houses with, and we made exploding volcanoes in sandpits, and billy carts with so many extra specifications that they rolled over with the weight of them, as well as more mundane ones that simply went very fast. With Geoffrey the following couple of years it was Meccano- we became mini engineers.

Neville and I used to scour the area for miles collecting scrap hession, copper, lead or anything we could sell to the person who would now be called a recycler. We also built things. Made model planes. Flew them in parks far and wide, and sometimes high!

Then there was Lee, and we shared an interest in the mysteries of oil paint, colour and form. Oh and David; we worked out how to make roller-skate wheels into skateboards (he had the wheels and I could shape a plank)...and go very fast down hills before they were even called skateboards.

There were others, but you get my drift. For every interest, there was a friend to experiment with and to see what we could find out.

 I was so lucky, and yet I look back and none of these pairings overlapped, each was an entity in itself, a one-on-one exploration of something, and each of those somethings are things that still interest me in one way or another. Then we all went to different secondary schools and became focussed on Important Things on a proper curriculum. But when I finished tertiary study, I think I went back to just being curious, but without the pairings....with a wonderful family instead.

Creative pairings became very difficult as the depth I sought in things became more insistent. It is no accident that the people who made the re-discovery of my early years of schooling possible were female. I hate to generalise, but I'm married to one of those and I've learnt that they often seem to have a capacity for connection to a group that I have always lacked.

Metung, East Gippsland

Above, Lake King. Below, Bancroft Bay

Below, from the jetty at what will become our local Pub....

Smoky Cape Lighthouse, New South Wales

A seascape is never just a seascape. I love edges in nature, they are particularly productive places but also often the best places to see an interplay of light, atmosphere and surface.

not sailing Lake Colac

For years I had hoped to sail Lake Colac. It is the biggest body of water inland from home, and inland sailing has its own special feeling.

We have had lunches overlooking this lake since the 1970's, but it wasn't until I started to build a sailing boat that the lake began to dry up.

Over years of drought it finally became a paddock, a field, a grassy plain. The local sailing club take their boats to a smaller, more distant volcanic lake for their races.

In the time since it disappeared I've even built a second boat, and over the last year or two the lake has started to fill again, but I still lie in wait for solid Spring rains to bring the edge of the water up to the level of the launching ramps and jetties.

Once again, it looks tantalising, but there is no room yet for a centre-board.

north of Noosa, Queensland

dog turns 

on a pin 

celebrating 

the skin it's in

shoe strawberries

20 minutes south of home; autumn high tide, low crowd

Grey and a bit bracing is just the way we like it. Walk in a straight line without tripping over people. Birds are grateful for the company (so are shop assistants). Dog walkers, couples, joggers and wet-suited optimists spaced like pieces on a board.

the hubris of assumptions; reservations about our attitudes on ANZAC day

This is the building that I loved most in my travels (so far),  Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. It has meant different things to those under the leadership of several empires, inspired by both Christ and Mohamed, but all who stand in it feel the insubstantiality of their humanity and the ephemeral nature of their existence, because it conjures within us the scale of the spheres, and the forces beyond us.

This self-conscious manipulation of us, the common folk by the rulers and regulators, encourages an assumption that, because we have become so grand, we are right. And yet empires fade and paradigms change, and ordinary people want the same things they always did; food, shelter and safety for the children.

April 25th here is Anzac day, a day of remembrance for the soldiers from Australia and New Zealand who joined various struggles. I fear that it may become another media festival of self-congratulation and jingoism. Platitudes and simple explanations do nothing to underpin the service and loss of so many people in the past century.

These days of remembrance used to be rather sombre, quiet affairs. Most returned servicemen said very little about their experiences, except perhaps to each other as they marked another year in the absence of their friends, but in the guilty presence of the remainder who dealt as well as possible with the realities of having been the agents for all the things they had been brought up to abhor. Some families, such as mine, had nothing to do with the remembrance days, despite the family lives that were lost.

Ironically, because so little was said, generations of us grew up not really knowing much about the grisly realities faced by our forebears. Of course, a thirst for the truth followed, and history is the richer for the curiosity that poured from that.

But media and politics combined  have a bad habit of taking deeply held feelings and turning them into myths and national identities, and these breed simplistic self-congratulatory explanations that do no service at all to the dead. Along comes hubris, and the assumptions that our way is always the right way. I've seen this now in the last days of the British Empire, the Japanese Empire, the German Third Reich, The United Soviet Republic, and we are beginning to see it in the US of A. I won't live long enough to see the end of the next world power, but someone will. And along the way, millions of people will probably suffer all over again for exactly the same reasons that they always have- that exceptionalist belief  and that certitude.

I hope one day Anzac Day can again become a quiet day to reflect, remember, mourn and pay respect, without flag-waving and nation-building.

Annie gets her run

After years of regular visiting, we found ourselves for the first time at Port Fairy with a boat and with perfect sailing weather for a morning. The Port itself has a good collection of permanently berthed boats, and they are arranged artfully along the edges of the Moyne River. Access to the great Sothern Ocean and the little protected harbour is through a meandering channel. It is a very attractive stretch of coast, but it can blow very rough when it gets excited.

The waiting bays at the ramp were full of empty trailers apparently because Tuna were running and every fisherman in the Southern Hemisphere was out for the kill. Above, a local couta boat is taking a more leisurely approach to the tuna drama and was observed merely trailing a few lines for an hour or two.

One of the famous rock formations along the Great Ocean Road, these cliffs stoically resist the thrust of Earth's largest mass of water, keeping the the sea from pushing our dry continent upwards into Asia.

Airey's Inlet Victoria

A cold and quite wet Winter here has shown signs of wearing itself out. I sometimes know how it feels. Time to go outside and stare across spaces again, and let air pass over the face.

a camping trip to Mallacoota

 Above, near Port Albert. Below, picnic at an isolated strip on the edge of the 'bottom lake', Mallacoota

Above, camping on the foreshore.

It was a week of extremes, driving 600 km to find heat with no wind, but beautiful, complex systems of intersecting lakes, rivers, tidal swamps and glorious forest. Our first outings were through marked  channels to reach the deeper sailable waters of the bottom lake. Plenty of space, despite lots of friendly fishermen, a bit of sailing and a wonderful picnic on a small beach out of sight of anything and anyone.

Other trips saw us motoring under driving warm rain as a massive storm system swept down to cover half of Victoria, and extending north right up to Alice Springs where the normally dry Todd River was apparently flowing through town. Our trip home involved another 600kms without turning off the windscreen wipers.
The shallow water and sudden appearance of sandbars caused a wee bit of anxiety when the oversized 5hp motor on Annie pulled the motor mounting bracket a bit askew, scraping the sand in reverse. I had the tools with me to fix the bracket, and beef it up a bit, but took the opportunity to buy a 2.5hp fourstroke at a more than reasonable price when it arose. 

'secret beach' Mallacoota, Victoria

Apollo Bay Victoria

When I was a boy, the sight of this boat would have reduced me to a slobber, but the sound of the water quietly lapping at it would make my lust much worse. I find now that little has changed, except there are fewer things to slobber at.

cloudscapes

cloudscapes, a set on Flickr.

It's always up there...so far. So if you don't have the chance at this time of the year to look up and wonder, here are a few cloud- and seascapes from our region.