Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
This Will Make You Stronger, Son
Stormboy and I arrived in Launceston, Tasmania, after a true red-eye from Perth. We hadn't slept at all on Sunday night; well I think he may have slept between three and five before Melbourne - but I know I didn't. At Tullamarine airport I gathered our luggage in a circle around us, set up the laptop on a stainless steel bench, read my paper out loud to my son, accepted his critique and revised my powerpoints. He checked his face book. All around us people were looking at their screens. I pointed out the orthodox Jews lining up for Los Angeles, the Somalian families heading for Adelaide, the Maori man in his sharp suit and white shoes in the London queue. A whitebread Albany boy is Stormboy and his eyes were widened that night.
We staggered into the backpackers in Launceston and learned that we couldn't check in before two in the afternoon. This was the point where I pulled the overtired parent role - pointing out that my child hadn't slept for days and all we needed was two beds and some doonas. Like. Now. The Arthouse Backpacker staff are super cool and make up their own rules and we got a bed within minutes.
We found the supermarket after a beannied adventure and trudged to the backpackers through howling rain and other rhetoric, carrying bags full of food and shampoo. "This reminds me of Dunedin," Stormboy grumbled. He was close to fainting from lack of sleep. Only the thought of climbing through the abandoned gasworks building kept him awake. "Walking through a strange, cold town, carrying food and having no home because my Mum's got a university agenda. Dunedin.Tasmania. Yay. Go Mum."
We staggered into the backpackers in Launceston and learned that we couldn't check in before two in the afternoon. This was the point where I pulled the overtired parent role - pointing out that my child hadn't slept for days and all we needed was two beds and some doonas. Like. Now. The Arthouse Backpacker staff are super cool and make up their own rules and we got a bed within minutes.
We found the supermarket after a beannied adventure and trudged to the backpackers through howling rain and other rhetoric, carrying bags full of food and shampoo. "This reminds me of Dunedin," Stormboy grumbled. He was close to fainting from lack of sleep. Only the thought of climbing through the abandoned gasworks building kept him awake. "Walking through a strange, cold town, carrying food and having no home because my Mum's got a university agenda. Dunedin.Tasmania. Yay. Go Mum."
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Historians Conference
I've been away, as you dear reader, may have guessed. Away from my little shack overlooking the harbour and away from A WineDark Sea. But I return with stories to tell! The photographs from the last few posts were from Launceston, where the historians of the world (okay, Australia and a few random adventurers) gathered for the annual conference.
Apart from the constant guilt about the ratio of written work to scholarship cash, the falling away of my social circle, the feeling that I am talking into air when someone says "So what is your thesis about?" and the long hours spent inside my head's interior cities (the pleasant bit), another job of mine as a PhD candidate is to attend conferences and present my latest research. I'm beginning to understand that the reasons for this is so that everyone else in the same discipline knows what you are up to: overlaps get sorted pretty quickly, connections are made and resources shared - or deliberately not shared. Is this a scary concept to a young blood? Fuck yes.
Two posts down, I commented that I was surrounded by rock stars. In the conference rooms at one morning tea time (the only sessions that Stormboy always made sure he was present for) I saw an old man walking towards me. He was really heading for the chocolate crackles. John Mulvaney. The man who excavated a Tasmanian tiger on the Nullabor during the seventies or eighties. He'd found the earliest trace of dingoes too and come up with the theory that the arrival of dingoes saw out the end of mainland tygers. I wrote some fiction about him once, it is here.
Mulvaney edited a beautiful book of Captain Barker's journals called Commandant of Solitude, the story of European beginnings in my home town (He complained to me that MUP had remaindered them). He also wrote Prehistory of Australia. I turned around to see Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan getting stuck into coffee and carrot cake. Far out. More of them. I've been reading their stuff for ten years and here they all are.
It was quite a surreal experience. Like the rest of us amateurs, the rock stars were presenting papers on their own latest findings. Ryan's paper was on the success of the Black Line. For anyone who doesn't know about Tasmania's Black Line, it was a systematic attempt to round up the Pallawah people, using a 'net' of soldiers and civilians spanning the island of Tasmania. It was paid for by the British Government and is considered one of Australia's most expensive military exercises before the Japanese invasion of World War 2. It was also seen as a colonial-style economic stimulus package, where cash was injected into a struggling community to buy meat, boots and guns. The official result of the Black Line was the capture of one old man and a boy. But Lyndall Ryan argued the Line's success in that, within twelve months, many of the northern and eastern tribes had disappeared from Tasmania.
That the conference was situated in Tassie this year (they take place in a different city each year) meant a lot of the academics were locals, including Reynolds and Ryan. As I've written before, Tasmania's history is bloody and close. Many of the younger academics were focused on Black Line history.
What I found striking was that despite the research, the talk and the ideas flying around the campus during this conference, Tasmania as a state seems content to smother its other history with a kind of Disneyfied colonial aesthetic. Contemporary Tasmania is a palimpsest: pretty paddocks and buildings pasted over a rather nasty past. The academic world whirls with stories and theories of What Happened, while a hotel in Launceston is named after the two leaders of the Black Line - those men regaled with songs, flowers and food as they rode out on their mission.
Apart from the constant guilt about the ratio of written work to scholarship cash, the falling away of my social circle, the feeling that I am talking into air when someone says "So what is your thesis about?" and the long hours spent inside my head's interior cities (the pleasant bit), another job of mine as a PhD candidate is to attend conferences and present my latest research. I'm beginning to understand that the reasons for this is so that everyone else in the same discipline knows what you are up to: overlaps get sorted pretty quickly, connections are made and resources shared - or deliberately not shared. Is this a scary concept to a young blood? Fuck yes.
Two posts down, I commented that I was surrounded by rock stars. In the conference rooms at one morning tea time (the only sessions that Stormboy always made sure he was present for) I saw an old man walking towards me. He was really heading for the chocolate crackles. John Mulvaney. The man who excavated a Tasmanian tiger on the Nullabor during the seventies or eighties. He'd found the earliest trace of dingoes too and come up with the theory that the arrival of dingoes saw out the end of mainland tygers. I wrote some fiction about him once, it is here.
Mulvaney edited a beautiful book of Captain Barker's journals called Commandant of Solitude, the story of European beginnings in my home town (He complained to me that MUP had remaindered them). He also wrote Prehistory of Australia. I turned around to see Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan getting stuck into coffee and carrot cake. Far out. More of them. I've been reading their stuff for ten years and here they all are.
It was quite a surreal experience. Like the rest of us amateurs, the rock stars were presenting papers on their own latest findings. Ryan's paper was on the success of the Black Line. For anyone who doesn't know about Tasmania's Black Line, it was a systematic attempt to round up the Pallawah people, using a 'net' of soldiers and civilians spanning the island of Tasmania. It was paid for by the British Government and is considered one of Australia's most expensive military exercises before the Japanese invasion of World War 2. It was also seen as a colonial-style economic stimulus package, where cash was injected into a struggling community to buy meat, boots and guns. The official result of the Black Line was the capture of one old man and a boy. But Lyndall Ryan argued the Line's success in that, within twelve months, many of the northern and eastern tribes had disappeared from Tasmania.
That the conference was situated in Tassie this year (they take place in a different city each year) meant a lot of the academics were locals, including Reynolds and Ryan. As I've written before, Tasmania's history is bloody and close. Many of the younger academics were focused on Black Line history.
What I found striking was that despite the research, the talk and the ideas flying around the campus during this conference, Tasmania as a state seems content to smother its other history with a kind of Disneyfied colonial aesthetic. Contemporary Tasmania is a palimpsest: pretty paddocks and buildings pasted over a rather nasty past. The academic world whirls with stories and theories of What Happened, while a hotel in Launceston is named after the two leaders of the Black Line - those men regaled with songs, flowers and food as they rode out on their mission.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
Saturday, July 2, 2011
I'm Going Out of Chooks
I've had chickens and the associated dramas for twenty years. It all began with inheriting some chickens with a house I moved into. I've undergone every chicken owners' class in the theology/theory/philosophy of chook pens. (Ask a chook person. Go on. If you think I'm being kooky then you are not a chook person and need to know these things. Invite them home, get them on the couch, make them a cup of tea and then ask them. They are not scary people or weird or from a cult.They just get chooks.)
At present I live with a cat and four chickens all inherited from Mum/Bob/Stormboy/Sal. None of them are mine, in fact few fur or fowl I've lived with are critters I've specifically gone out to acquire. They just end up at my place. The rooster from that initiation into chookery was a surly bastard who thought he held some sort of title, seeing as he'd inherited me. My daughter did not feed him wheat fast enough, it seemed. She was feisty even at two and would not succumb to his bullying in the chookpen. But two year old children are close to the ground. I saw him jump straight into the air (I thought; 'I've seen that rooster move somewhere'.) before he slashed her face with his chookpen spur. Fucker. She's still got the scar under her eye and he was tough as a boot in the pot.
'Cause there's nothing strange
Stormboy and I took the torch and four cardboard boxes up to the chookpen after dark. We shut the gate behind us. "Got the masking tape ready?" I asked him.
"No!" He ran back down the stairs.
Then I plucked the girls, one by one, of their perch and stuffed them into the boxes. Stormboy taped them over. The squawking was tremendous.
I was a bit proud of Stormboy tonight because the last time we did this, he fell to bits over their protesting. "Just grab them!" I'd say. But he couldn't do it and got all upset.
Anyway, tonight, he was great and we packed the girls into boxes. Then Dad turned up in the ute and took them back to his and Sal's house, where they will see out their retirement ...
At present I live with a cat and four chickens all inherited from Mum/Bob/Stormboy/Sal. None of them are mine, in fact few fur or fowl I've lived with are critters I've specifically gone out to acquire. They just end up at my place. The rooster from that initiation into chookery was a surly bastard who thought he held some sort of title, seeing as he'd inherited me. My daughter did not feed him wheat fast enough, it seemed. She was feisty even at two and would not succumb to his bullying in the chookpen. But two year old children are close to the ground. I saw him jump straight into the air (I thought; 'I've seen that rooster move somewhere'.) before he slashed her face with his chookpen spur. Fucker. She's still got the scar under her eye and he was tough as a boot in the pot.
I've seen and participated in nights of murder.
'Cause there's nothing strange
about an axe with bloodstains in the barn.
There's always a bit bit of killing
you've got to do around the farm.'
Tom Waites
Dark, dark stuff of chicken theology aside, chickens are also the key to true happiness. Feeding happy chickens is akin to watching goldfish, except that chickens are always happier than goldfish. Momemts of feeding chickens are the existentialist's dream (eggsistentialist, perhaps?). When buying wheat recently, I mentioned my chicken happy theory to the girl at the counter of the stock feeds shop. She said, "Well that is all very well for you! My last customer said the two things that make him very unhappy are - 1. Combing his hair and 2. Going into the chookpen with his socks on.
Anyway, the whole point of tonight's post is to say that I am finally going out of chickens. Recently a pair of dogs culled half the flock and that was a traumatic event. I'm moving to a place out in the bush that is not conducive to scratching about and planning to become a lot more nomadic (not conducive to scratching about - or building chookpens). So the chickens have to go.
Here is some photos I took tonight of the girls with the resident bandicoot. (For those not in the know a bandicoot is a marsupial who carry their young in a pouch, like a kangaroo.)
"No!" He ran back down the stairs.
Then I plucked the girls, one by one, of their perch and stuffed them into the boxes. Stormboy taped them over. The squawking was tremendous.
I was a bit proud of Stormboy tonight because the last time we did this, he fell to bits over their protesting. "Just grab them!" I'd say. But he couldn't do it and got all upset.
Anyway, tonight, he was great and we packed the girls into boxes. Then Dad turned up in the ute and took them back to his and Sal's house, where they will see out their retirement ...
Hail, the crone chickens going are home.
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