bluntie

a watched pot never boils, like waiting for paint to dry. but in just one week the jasmine and this mysteriously branded plant called an Aloha are wrapping new tendrils up the wall. they need to grow quickly because we don’t know how long we will be here.
living plants and animals from Europe are prohibited entry to the delicate environments of the indelicate antipodean islands. but what’s done is done and some ivy was smuggled in before suitcases were x-rayed, in the years before the ban on French cheese but after myxomatosis. having jumped or been pushed from stucco to weatherboard, across the planet, is there still a molecule or a mannerism in the ivy that acts like a Catalan climber?
my past attempts at creating a jungle at home have been real and metaphorical failures, and these are still not the right conditions to grow beloved bougainvilleas, but the jasmine will not stop till the wall is covered.

there is always a headwind in Melbourne. if it is a hot day then the wind is warm, if it is a scorcher the wind is like an oven, and in winter it will come from Tasmania. but even if you swing round and change direction half way the wind will never be on your back. red sky at night, hazy blues all day.

the Poor Developer does his marketing images in-house. he paces his site to save on the cost of a surveyor and hires himself as on-site security. we laugh, thinking that the rich only get filthy rich through such penny-pinching, but later we realise that he has lost his home and lives, barely, on rubbish and tinned hand-outs.

here is one of the saddest, most beautiful paragraphs from a book whose first chapter made me breathless:

Yesterday I went to the doctor, to see about these dizzy spells. He told me that I have developed what used to be called a heart, as if healthy people didn’t have one. It seems I will not after all keep on living forever, merely getting smaller and greyer and dustier, like Sibyl in her bottle. Having long ago whispered I want to die, I now realise that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I’ve changed my mind.
- from The Blind Assassin: by M Atwood.

forty, no, fifty. sixty km ride from Eltham to the city alongside the Yarra River and its eucalypts. cross the river 5 times. skid where the track turns to gravel road, take the wrong fork and trace the goat’s trail back to the main trail, the sheep’s trail.
past a Turkish celebration under peppercorn trees, with their card tables and unfolded chairs, a line of nimble elderly dancing. I’m not even embellishing. then to Melbourne’s version of Parliament Hill, sorry to be still comparing after so many days.
the last stop was a colonial ghost, an empty building with chalk signs for ginger beer and the nostalgia of the English émigré. tables for tea and boats for paddling on the brown billabong.

and I know where I would rather be! KL is all jungle-rimmed highways, Melbourne has its flat grid, and you barely notice the roads in my version of Tasmania. In moments of pause, between visiting empty new malaysian shopping malls; tossing chinese new year salad with developers for dragon-year prosperity; smiling so hard that i fit a whole abalone-smothered baby pig in my mouth, I wonder if the world as we know it will end. Because it feels like you pay me to draw a bubble and then measure its area. Another mall, 60-storey towers of air-conditioned speculation, car parking for ten thousand cars. I am turning thirty next week, witness my crisis.

if you thought our world was small or our personal struggles were unique.
the film starts with immense annual scenes as two out of 200million Chinese workers try to board the trains taking them home (a 2300km journey through vast landscapes) to spend the new year together. this film contrasts their peasant origins with the anguishing factory work which will bring a better life; but at its root it is a story of a tense family relationship with parents wanting for their children the opportunities they did not have and children wanting to break free. I thought about this film while flying across the breadth of Australia. it takes so long to cross because there is so much of it. we live and farm on its edges, so what of the rest? is it possible this huge desert serves a purpose, or is it left over by chance; can it simply exist or is it there to balance the rest of the crowded world with the great weight of its mines? i would have seen the rock in the centre if not for the clouds.

to complete the Tasmanian environmental scope of coast, forest, farm and cliff is a mossy fork in the road on the side of Mt Wellington.

Berlin’s Naturpark boardwalk is a distant runner up. here in northern tasmania on the edge of the Narawntapu National Park is the most beautiful boardwalk in the world. simple silver timber slivers through pine-needle-floored forest over boulders to rockpools, dunes and clear salt water on new years day.

finally.
some of my favourites were:
1. Artifact by Gregory Barsamian. A large head lies on its side in the corner of a room, peering into cracks and apertures you see an un-hinged display of Disney-like motifs and anxiety, flickering and flashing inside.
2. A video called Placebo by Saskia Olde Wolbers, in which a familiar story is told; a lover assumes a flimsy false identity of a doctor.
3. Some Neolithic flints
4. The Morgue – Blood Transfusion Resulting in AIDS by Andres Serrano, like Piss Christ bringing body and blood to regal historical deaths
5. the beautiful sandstone wall
Mona plunges into darkness and maze after a journey of sunshine and wind. We arrived by boat, ate cured and moussed salmon for lunch and got back to Hobart just before the first yacht from Sydney followed us up the Derwent.