five past sunset

Well my friends, this is the last from me on Blogger.

I'm kinda sorry in a way - so much began here!

Oh well - it's said that change is the only constant and the time has come.

A new life has begun...

Peace and happiness to all beings!

evenstar

PS: All externally hosted content is now inactive.

UPDATE NOV 2007: The DT is reincarnated here.

the winter sun

After weeks of grey and grey, the sun's been out for a couple of days!

Sunbursts too, in the arms of one of the locals: Hakea Laurina.

island nightlife

Once the sun's gone the quiet here is even louder. The night sky fills with the sound of batwing, cricket and musk duck as the starwheel blazes and turns overhead. Heh! That's if we're lucky enough to have a clear night...

The musk ducks patrol the waters around the island like submarines. They're big, black and spend most of their time underwater. When they deign to surface, they cruise very low in the water and seem, just like submarines, to hate being observed. They never fly. At night they fire up their sonar and bounce "whip-pyu"s all around the estuary. I'd try for a photo of one but you know - low profile black on black in the black and all... I could be out all night... Not that sweet a proposition, as you've probably gathered from the last post...

The rains at night often bring flocks of moths to the verandah lights and among them the other night was a solo stranger. I reckon it's a wonderful thing that no matter how many moths you may have seen over however many years at any given place, there'll regularly arrive one you've never seen before - and may never see again. Here's a pic of the new guy the other night:



I was only going to post one of the following images but in the end I couldn't decide which two to dump. It's interesting (erm, or maybe it's not) the way the colour balance changes between them. I'm playing with a new camera here and there's a mix of light sources and I may well have tried a few different colour temperature settings on the camera too...



I'm pretty sure the only difference between the next two is that the first is lit by the flash on the camera, while the second is by available light - a standard lightbulb. As I'd expect, the first has a cooler colour balance on the moth's wings and the background is much darker due to the intensity of the flash. The second is lit solely by light coming from the other side of the window and is correspondingly warmer and reveals more of the inside of the house. What puzzles me though, is why the moth's post-punk spiky do appears cooler (less yellow/red) in the second shot than in the first. Meh! Maybe it's something to do with the refractive properties of the gel his stylist used...





I should probably be a bit more aware of how it looks to be standing outside our house for ages with the lens of my camera pushed up against the windows. It's a small community and it's quiet. Folks here need something to talk about. I suspect they think we're crazy anyway - while I was writing the last post I decided I'd like a picture of Kitty's memorial.

"Wanna come with me to get a photo of that plaque about Kitty?"

Bean gives me a look that says "What? In the rain? Just before midnight? Heheh! Sure!"

So we go running through the midnight bush with a rapidly fading torch (that's a flashlight, my American friends) to get the photo. We were noticed. The path to the memorial runs right by the island managers' residence.

Halfway there we came to an abrupt (almost screeching) halt. It was a still night, but the branch overhanging the bend in the track in front of us was waving wildly in the - um - still air. "WTF!?!" I play the torch over the branch and see - nothing! It's not until we sneak wide-eyed (and as far away as the track will allow) past it that we see the possum, now frozen in the weak light of our torch.



Poor devil - he was scarederer than we were!

Heheh... that evened the score somewhat for the red-eyed cats on crack thing they like to scare us with at home.

Oh yes - these island nights have eyes...

Lots of 'em...

island life II

This island's quiet alright, but it's not peaceful. There's no commercial activity, but there's wind. No traffic, but there's the creaking of tree limbs and footfall of many and varied critters. There's no noisy neighbours within earshot, but Mildred Ludlow wanders at all hours.



It's a bit creeptastic really. The trees behind our house, which are at the limit of the light cast from our kitchen windows, all lean away from the prevailing south-westerlies. They're jarrah and marri, which I'm used to as the strong and upright inhabitants of this region's predominant forest. The trees behind our house though, are all contorted, wind-wracked effigies of the real thing. Oh, they're impressive enough in the daytime when their synchronised arches mimic some sylvan cathedral, but at night their limbs scribe skeletal shapes against the black velvet sky and are filled with the red glowing eyes of possums.



Neither Bean nor I are particularly superstitious or easily spooked, but sometimes we see movement in this house that just... well... isn't really there. Most of the time getting up in the middle of the night isn't a problem, but sometimes it feels like someone's watching. Waiting in the unused bedrooms off the hall...

The night before last we both woke at about 4.30am for no discernible reason. We lay speculating what it may have been that would wake us simultaneously, when I noticed an unexpected light outside our window. There was no moon and we hadn't left any house lights on, so I got up and parted the curtains... it was the interior light of our car. OK... that's odd. We hadn't used the car in 48 hours and there was no way we'd left that light on and not noticed it after unpacking and locking it after dark on Monday. It certainly wasn't apparent on Tuesday night when I'd been out on the front verandah trying for mobile 'phone reception - there's no chance I'd have missed it if it had been.

Bloody Mildred! She's become a standard joke between us now...



Mildred's known as Kitty and she's been on the island a long time. She's one of the original inhabitants and I think she's not too happy about all us johnny-come-latelies. She wanders around the island, impervious to the elements and uncaring of the hour. The rain falls right through her, the wildlife doesn't seem bothered by her at all and the wind joins her in screaming through these grey sunless days of winter. Kitty does a lot of screaming...

Back in the day, Kitty worked as domestic help for the Molloy family. She arrived on their doorstep at night in a state of high anxiety after her husband had arrived home drunk and burnt their place to the ground. The Molloys took her in and gave her a job. She was with them for a while before her symptoms began to show...

In the dead of winter in these deep, dark forests, the last thing you want is a crazy woman on crutches screaming all day and night. It was hard enough for the Molloys and Turners, Bussells and Laymans, coming to terms with a totally alien environment that spooked them enough already, without Kitty screaming her head off all through the depths of winter.



Eventually, "for her own safety" they piled her into a boat and shipped her up here to the island where her husband was tending cattle and returned to Augusta, safely out of earshot eight miles down the river. They'd bring supplies up every so often, but I doubt they ever stayed very long. Three months after recording Kitty's departure from her house, Georgiana Molloy wrote:

"Kitty died on the island in a most lamentable state, totally deranged and unapproachable saving by her husband, from the disease which the climate made more offensive. Her funeral duties I was necessitated to conduct. She had to be buried by torchlight. Her poor frame was so discomposed that it made two of the bearers ill for some days"



Holy crap! No wonder we find it hard to maintain our composure on some of these quiet, grey days of early winter. We've gotta get off this freaking island...

island life I

At the confluence of the Blackwood and Scott, the island's four hundred acres almost fill the north-east arm of the Blackwood's estuary. It sails in the mist of day's first light, an ark of ancient jarrah-marri forest preserved from the encroachment of development.



Kangaroos swim the river channels in the hope of greener pastures over here and finding no grasslands, become gaunt beggars at the steps of the inhabited houses or give up and swim back to the life they knew. A preservation colony of endangered ring-tailed possums was established here and find the forest much to their liking - no feral cats, dogs or foxes lying in ambush down below.


"Wot? You don't feed the wildlife? Pfffft!"

But the island really belongs to the creatures of the air and water. Cockatoos, wrens, eagles and parrots. Water monitors, frogs, water rats... and those denizens of both air and water - mosquitos!



Perhaps once visited by the Wadandi, although no trace has been found, the island first entered our history as the possession of a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. He'd led the first colony established in this part of the country and gave his name to this place, but I'll bet the Wadandi spoke of it more lyrically.



It's not the island that draws my eye today,
but the waters that define it...

Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy

If you've been reading the dreaming track for a while, you'll know of my interest in Tibet, so when Bean and I saw the advertising for Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy we thought we'd go check it out. The brand was Tibet. The hype was perbole. It sounded awesome. It was awesome alright - awesomely bad!

Among the plugs for the movie was "Four years in the making and critically acclaimed and hailed as a masterpiece, Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy has not been seen in theatres for over 20 years." Yeah! We know why. It should've been locked away forever. I guess we should've wondered why a masterpiece had to wait 20 years before it saw the light of projector again....

Originally 231 minutes (!!) looooong, it had been "digitally restored and recut to a spell-binding 134 minutes". Uh huh. Spellbinding alright. Even The Reverend (whose lead I'm following here) at his most devilish, could not have cast a glamour of such stupefying boredom. We kept thinking "it'll get better, we'll wait just a bit longer". Alas, there was no respite.

The "cinematography" was underexposed to the point of graininess. The subtitling was.... well... I just don't know what to say. As a matter of fact, I can't continue, because the trauma's flooding back as I write. I so desperately want to place the whole experience in the repressed memory bin.

Oh wait! There was CGI. Oh yes... third eye CGI...

Maybe if you were a serious student of Buddhist ritual the film would be worthwhile. Maybe. The overwhelming impression was that it had been made by a bunch of British arts students who were all new converts to Buddhism. Arts students who had no idea how to wield a 16mm movie camera and recorded all the audio on a home cassette recorder with a built in microphone.

You know, we thought we'd be all inspired over dinner afterward, excitedly chattering "How was that...." and "That landscape..." and "What did you think of...." - but we just sat and stared at each other as if we'd just witnessed a horrendous accident.

Oh - I forgot to mention that there wasn't a single frame of Tibet in the whole thing! Not one...

Ahhhhhhhh! At least in space, no one can hear you chant...

in search of the new world

It's said that a building in a dream represents the dreamer's life. I've been dreaming of houses and hotels. Dormitories and derelict buildings. Of cave dwellings and bunkers and tents...

We're new inmates in this old asylum - wandering the hallways and staircases, examining the collected detritus of history, feeling the ghosts of the past as their hands pass through ours on the polished bannisters.



We stand in the their spaces at the windows that look out from this place, knowing that as long as we remain they will forever be inside us, raising the hairs on our forearms and the back of our necks, unsettling us just as we, standing inside them, rattle their frozen sensibilities.



What then, are windows seen in the buildings of a dream? What meaning has the vista surveyed through them, when the dreamer gazes out from within? If the eyes are the windows of the soul, are these windows then the eyes of the dreamer's soul? The representation of life's innermost direction or purpose?

All we can tell for sure as we wander these restored spaces, mingling with the ghosts of lifetimes past, is that there's a different view from every window. We can't determine the view, but if we like it, we're free to linger. If we don't, we're free to move.



The window we stand in front of now opens onto wide blue magic...

amphibiosity

the way that you see...

Bruce Cockburn.
He so often says it all for me...
Here's the complete lyrics of a song I've quoted before...



I love the pounding of hooves
I love engines that roar
I love the wild music of waves on the shore
And the spiral perfection of a hawk when it soars
Love my sweet woman down to the core

There's roads and there's roads
And they call, can't you hear it?
Roads of the earth
And roads of the spirit
The best roads of all
Are the ones that aren't certain
One of those is where you'll find me
Till they drop the big curtain

Hear the wind moan
In the bright diamond sky
These mountains are waiting
Brown-green and dry
I'm too old for the term
But I'll use it anyway
I'll be a child of the wind
Till the end of my days

Little round planet
In a big universe
Sometimes it looks blessed
Sometimes it looks cursed
Depends on what you look at obviously
But even more it depends on the way that you see

Hear the wind moan
In the bright diamond sky
These mountains are waiting
Brown-green and dry
I'm too old for the term
But I'll use it anyway
I'll be a child of the wind
Till the end of my days



Child of the Wind
from Bruce's 1991 CD
Nothing But a Burning Light

colour underfoot

bad ground

Up here above the river there's only two colours. The subdued, smoky green of the forest's breathing leaves and the chalky red/grey shared by the laterite soil, the detritus of expired, fallen foliage and the rough barks that clothe the trees. Those two and black. Black firescars on the trees and blackened crisp lichen on the outcroppings of granite that appear every so often by the narrow track.

I'm walking the river trail into town and remembering the stories told of the old days and the rough and desperate folk who lived here on the margins of society in the early days of settlement. I pass another black granite table emerging from the hardpacked earth and my mind's eye sees a standing stone cast down. I hear echoes of worlds long gone. Feel with certainty that here only rock and soil have always looked this way...

The sky is moving swiftly from the southeast. It threatens rain, which is unusual at this time of year (especially as rain here normally comes from the northwest) but no real surprise in this era of climate change. Looking up to see how long I have, I'm disoriented by the vertiginous apparition overhead. A high, sunlit deck of rippling cirrus is visible through the spaces in the rushing flocks of steel grey rain bearers low in the sky above. Between the two strata lies a third. A diffuse skein of fog, moving at odds with the rainclouds below. When the middle layer breaks, the high cirrus appears to move swiftly in reverse. A disconcerting, unnatural stop-motion effect, like a glitch in a digital projector.

I have no time at all. Before I've lowered my eyes from the clouds the first spattering hits my face. The only shelter here is in the charred maw of a fallen ancient tree. I crouch and enter without a moment's thought.



It's dark and my nostrils fill with the scent of a strange mycelium. As my eyes adapt I discern vast plates of a warm tan fungus stretching wide in this fire blackened cavern. The temperature drops as the rain sweeps through the outside forest. This charred cavern is festooned with spiderwebs whose builders are invisible. I shiver as I recall the stories of drowned children and pneumonia sweeping through the old community here.

In an instant midsummer has become the depths of winter.





This fallen giant had roots which deeply penetrated the earth, winding through the subterranean fissures in the concealed granite below. I sit at the focal point of these spreading roots, which now splay skyward from all around me like some twisted halo.

I see gargoyles.



I see contorted demons of the underworld wrenched into the light and frozen by its touch. There are minotaurs and Aboriginal spirits, a hooded figure hanging in inverted crucifix, Mayan masks and blind faces frozen in the rictus of being torn from the earth by the fall of this woodland soul who once transformed their malevolence into the kindness of shade and the beauty of foliage.











I wonder about bad ground and what the world would be like without forests...



When the brief shower passes and warmth returns it's all different.
I shake off this vision, emerge and resume my track.

A glance back over my shoulder reveals a Triceratops lurking in the trees....

feral pinks

drop me in the water

take me to the river

January 27 2006

January 26 2007

Where was I

...before I was so rudely interrupted?

Oh yeah: Comet McNaught.

Ahhhh - that's better!

descant for gossips

image from www.notbean.com

The crosses are burning again in outback Queensland.

Bean has just endured her Thea Astley moment and had to resort to the same defense.

Some things never change so I guess I shouldn't be amazed that the telling of a story should generate such venomous personal attacks as endured by Bean from the cockies of outback Queensland. Good on ya fellas - anonymous, parochial, and hypocritical to the last, lining up to smackdown the poor misinformed city girl in your midst. It was just a bloody story, and everybody except you could see it wasn't accusing all cockies of being like the exploitative mongrel character depicted.

That's right fellas - don't even consider reasoned argument, stern chiding or refuting facts - just come out swinging! Brute force solves everything doesn't it? And "Marta Holiday"? You're the best of the bunch! You don't know me, you don't know her, you don't know shit! All you've done is give all Bean's readers the impression that all cockies out there are complete cockheads.

Pfft! It's 1961 in Pomona all over again...

strange signs and portents II

It felt like the same time of year the last time this happened. High summer. But it was so long ago - a whole world away. Back then I was eight years old and was waking every morning at around three...

Now all these years later here I am at the other end of the day, looking west instead of east, being buffeted by a chill wind instead of held warm in the predawn calm, standing surrounded by vehicles and folks in conversation rather than lying quiet and alone in a camp stretcher on the back verandah of my parents' house...



The wind strengthens as night descends, the last of the colour fading from the clouds as the last of the surfers leave the water. The European and American campers gathered by the vehicle parked next to me debate the merits of vegetarianism as they cook their evening meal, while 1960's bluesfunk emanates from the van in the bay next to them...

Every so often heads crane and search the sky.



The moon is approaching half phase and is blurred by the salt wrack driven before the wind. A curtain of cloud draws across the sky from the southwest as the first stars emerge - it's not looking good...

I briefly regret having given up reading news. If I hadn't, this would be my third night of waiting for this spectacle and I would have seen it bigger and brighter than it will be tonight. If I see it at all...

As the daylight fades to black (as far as my digital camera's viewfinder is concerned) and the stars claim the sky, it's suddenly, miraculously there.



Appearing slightly yellow against blue gloaming, Comet McNaught is a golden scimitar, low in the southwest sky. As the gloaming fades to black, it appears to grow and brighten to the blue white of starlight. It's curving, diaphanous tail extends across the heavens and the sight of it makes me eight years old again.

Although nowhere near as spectacular as I remember Ikeya-Seki to have been, it's awesome nonetheless and I'm thinking of the Bayeux Tapestry and momentous events and mysteries...

I see the signs, but I don't know what they mean...

17 plus thirty

I've written about five thousand words and consigned them all to flames, for whatever story I would tell right now, somebody would feel blamed.

And nobody should. It was never anybody's fault but mine.

I'd hoped to post a picture as I usually do.
Something clear and concise this time - explanatory...
But I can't.
Because it isn't over.
Nothing's clear.
This story's only half told and I'm yet to discover its import...

All I know for sure is

At seventeen I fell in love
An abiku child, yet desperate
To prove love conquers all
Believing it would heal all wounds
(Because I knew it wasn't time)

She was a longhaired, dark-skinned angel
A batik bikini'd smile
My heart was a bare millisecond behind my eye
When it leaped from my sleeve to her

I was only seventeen
And not smart enough to have made
The realisation that giving yourself away
Needs always to be a trade

My dream was only ever of her and me
Moving together through this world
Each all the other would ever need
To feel safe, cared for and whole

But the shadows that played within our hearts
Proved cast by different trees
Whose roots were in different countries' soils
Different languages to their leaves

Although I'm sorry more than you'd know
And have been for so long
I'll never regret falling in love
I can't believe it's ever wrong

Love is all there is...

through these eyes

I'm in a new story...

Where to begin indeed...

It's a big story - it's shocked a few people already.

Part One is over here.

I'll post Part Two as soon as I can finish writing it, even though it could be part three (or four) by then...

"you don't see clouds like that any more...
well... maybe in the desert..."

2007

First post of the new year and everything's different!

The dream and wonder however, remain the same...

Yesterday's full moon marked a huge change in my life...

I woke up in a house different to the one I've lived in for the last 20 years and I know life will never be the same again for me...

The full moon....

I look back and I see it's been appearing in the dreaming track for some time. First back here in August (twice!) then again in October and November.

and along with the moon... those tides...

the memory of all that's been lost

coz i felt like telling a story

lake ballard

i'm back! (and i need help...)

look what the broom's swept out!

how it started

how she makes me feel

rain

and of course - all those other strange signs and portents

So here's to 2007 and the full moon and all of you.
I have the feeling it's gonna be a very special year!



By the way - I hope you all can live with the real me as a profile pic for the next year! Doing the Takjak thing.... if you don't know about evenstar in Taklakot already, you can find out here.

busy like bees

Yeah, well it might be called "the holiday season" but for those of us working in retailing, hospitality, law and order, health care and the industries supporting them, it's the busiest time of the year. We're all copping a flogging!

So if you're planning to raise a few glasses tonight, don't forget to raise one to the folks for whom New Year's Eve means the heaviest workload of the year!

Cheers!

Oh! This busy bee in the agapanthus? Western Australian native Blue Banded Bee. They don't build hives - each female breeds and they do so in burrows. Often many in the same place, but only one per hole. I don't know if they sting or not and I don't know which of the 25 species of blue banded bee they are either, but they're really busy right now too!

Happy New Year everybody! May 2007 be everything you wish...

Peace, Love and Joy to you all