About seven or eight kilometres from Lismore (on the road from Bangalow) there is an area called Boatharbour. As the name implies, it was an important location during the early days of the European river settlement.
As a child, I remember it as the location of a wonderful recreation area. With permanent wooden furniture and shelter, and roads where you could drive easily drive in and out, I remember it fondly as a place for summer picnics and river swimming.
The gates to enter the park are still there, and you can see where the road once was, though it now seems almost completely grown over.
Still open to the public, you can go for a wander down by the creek, and the adjacent lands.Nearby, some lovely trees.There is some nearby farmland.With memories of the way stock used to be loaded for sale.
There were a couple of other cars stopped at the nearby informal carpark. I can only assume they had also gone for a walk down by the river/creek as the reserve itself is closed off to the public. I did mention that, right?
Looking down on Wilson’s Creek from the bridge.
As I read a little more about the recent history of the park, I read there was a death involving a schoolgirl, and it was the sight of “anti-social behaviour”.
There are a few online references to the park being “haunted” by the “ghost of the young girl”, who was killed by an accident involving a swing.
The references to “anti-social behaviour” are “code” meaning that it was, for a few years, a gay beat.
A search around the Trove newspaper archive, also reveals concerns about the preservation of the area go back to at least the 1920s/1930s, so the recent moves to close the area to public access probably go back quite some way.
It was a lovely way to spend part of Sunday, and if you’re ever driving between Bangalow and Lismore, it’s definitely worth pulling over to take a look at Boatharbour.
I’ve just returned home from a terrific week’s holiday on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne. I feel fully rested, have had some terrific experiences and have almost completely forgotten about work for a while (a major goal),In some respects it was a little like going home to Lismore, starting from the flight down. Not being entirely au fait with the geography of Melbourne, I booked a flight through Jetstar which flies into Avalon Airport. When my friend, Sue, told me “Avalon airport is half way to Geelong”, I thought she was just being dramatic. But no, she’s correct. And arriving there was just like arriving at Lismore airport in many ways.
We stayed at the house of a couple of Sue’s friends, Sue and Richard who were away. The house was at Frankston, overlooking Port Phillip Bay, and it was literally a 10 or 15 second walk from the back door to the beach, as this sunset photograph taken from the backstairs shows. In stark contrast to my life in inner-city Sydney, the house Sue and I were staying in was on a really quiet street, with the only noises we heard being that of the ocean and birdlife.
Consequently, we slept in most days until about 10am (or thereabouts), starting off the day with a bit of mid-morning television and breakfast ahead of some daytime wandering, shopping, eating, touring and visiting galleries.
Mornington Peninsula Sunset. We stayed at the house of a couple of Sue’s friends, Sue and Richard who were away.
The first gallery we visited was that of Marion Rozestky, an artist who specialises in painted pottery. Curiousity got the better of me, and I asked her if she was related to David Rozestky, to which she replied “I’m the mother of the artist”. I thought this was interesting, as the art group I’m part of, Hawkesbury One owns one of David Rozestky’s works. We spoke for a while about her talented children and about her own late interest in developing her artistic skills. “I still can’t draw”, she told us, “and so I guess that’s why I do dots”.
The local regional gallery, the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery had a very good exhibition called, Moist, featuring watercolours from the National Gallery. The exhibition featured an eclectic range of works, including Sue’s favourite, a piece called, “Curtis Dancing On E”. There was also an exhibition by Melbourne print-makers, including one called Lesbia Thorpe? “Do you reckon many children are called Lesbia, Sue?” I asked wyrly. “I’ll suggest it to Karen as she’s looking for interesting baby names at the moment”, she replied.
We also visited the McLelland Gallery, which is mostly focussed on sculpture. The garden featured a range of interesting works including some astroturf topiary, what appeared to be a toothbrush/windmill, some large glass mirrored cubes as well as some more traditional sculpture. We both really enjoyed the gallery and believe it would be worth a visit when the weather was better.
Visiting the gallery was the first sign of the local sponsorship of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch who lives closeby. Dame Elisabeth has also contributed to the new Royal Botanic Gardens (Cranbourne) which specialises in Australian plants. Our guide, Sue Galbally, told us the gardens had only recently been planted and that it would probably be two or three years before it comes into its own, since most Australian plants are reasonably fast growers (with the exception of the eucalypts).
Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne
With an emphasis on the importance of water on the Australian continent, the gardens recognise the many different biospheres, and in a very practical sense for gardens provides recommendations about various plants depending on water availability. An especially interesting aspect of the design was the use of computer modelling to help mimic the sound of flowing water in the bush, and the use of rusted steel to create the nearby escarpment. Overall, a very worthwhile experience and we would both recommend a visit.
When we weren’t out and about, we spent a fair bit of time just relaxing, eating, and watching DVDs. We watched loads of DVD’s including “My Fair Lady”, “Prick Up Your Ears”, “Ride On Stranger”, “Primary Colours”, “Frontline”, “To The Manner Born” and “Six Feet Under”. I’m not sure if the final episode of “Six Feet Under” has screened on free to air television here yet, but I have a preview DVD which we watched. It’s interesting. “A bit surreal”, as just about everyone who appears on television seems to say these days.
Mostly, we ate at home. But when we did wander out, we visited a couple of nice places including the “Flinders Bakery” (for lunch), where we enjoyed some yummy pies, as well as “The Baths” (for afternoon tea) at Sorrento, where the coffee and biscuits were good.
You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of a bad dream? Well, this morning I woke up in the middle of a good dream. It would have been nice to go back to sleep and continue the dream, though of course that wasn’t possible. It was a dream about my dad.
I was 16 (twenty-eight yeas ago) when he died from an awful condition called Multiple Myeloma (a plasma cell cancer). With the passing of time, sometimes it’s hard to remember some things about both mum and dad. And yet this morning’s dream was incredibly vivid.
Oddly enough, it had a Swedish connection. Yes, really. In the dream my dad and I were travelling in a car in the countryside. He was driving and I was using my mobile phone to take some video of us together to send back to my mum.
Minutes later we were climbing a snow-capped mountain in Sweden, and somehow we were strong enough to be dragging the car behind us.
It was an obviously very modern dream. And yet I as had the dream, I could almost feel my dad next to me. He was happy and healthy – pre-cancer – and we were having a wonderful time together.
Me and my dad, probably some time in 1966.
The last time I had such a vivid dream about my dad was several days after he died. Both my sister and I had similar dreams that night, and we had compared notes.
Throughout the day I’ve been thinking about what the dream meant, and why I had the dream right now. The conclusion I’ve come to is that it has something to do with my “wanderlust” at the moment with three overseas trips in two years. I can’t help but wonder how mum and dad would have felt, since they both lived most of their lives in Lismore, and only ever left Lismore to visit family and friends in neighbouring towns and cities. Or perhaps it’s not that literal? Perhaps there’s a deeper meaning?
My dad and me…
As I came home this afternoon, I went online to find out what dreaming about your father meant, I found these possible explanations here…
(1) For men, father may be a conscience figure. If this is the case, bear in mind that your father’s prohibitions and commands will probably represent either conventional moral options which may have no relevance to your true nature or ‘destiny’, or irrational fears and feelings of guilt that began to take shape in you in earlychildhood.
(2) For a woman, father may figure in a dream as one who generates affection.
(3) The presence of your father may be a straightforward representation of him, or of the way you see/remember him (which may owe more to your subjective distortions than to what your father actually is or was). In any case, the reason for your father appearing in the dream will be shown by the part he plays in the dream story.
(4) If your father features in the dream as a protector, it may be that you need to ‘grow up’ and rely on your own resources. After all, life can hurt you only if you let it, only if you identify with your emotional self instead of with that deep layer of yourself that is immune to life’s pains and perils.
(5) Father may be an animus figure (see Glossary of Jungian Termnology), representing a woman’s (unconscious) masculine qualities. In this case, the dream may be suggesting that she should cultivate this countrasexual side of her nature.
(6) Frequent appearances by either parent, or both, in dreams may be a sign that you have not thrown off an infantile over-dependence on them. Jung cites a young man’s dream in which the man’s father appeared as a drunken driver, smashing his car into a wall. This is the exact opposite of the real father, who was a most respectable person, rightly – but too too much – respected by the son. What the unconscious was doing through the dream was dethroning the father in order to enable the son to achieve a proper sense of himself as a person in his own right, with his own unique destiny and values.
I’m sure there are lots of other explanations.
Whatever the deeper psychological meaning, I just know it was a lovely dream about my dad, and one that made me feel good as I woke this morning.
I used to peel labels. I used to love getting a beer bottle, removing the label first as one giant layer, and then slowly, bit by bit would rip it up or fold it over, depending on my mood. According to popular folklore, it’s a sign of sexual frustration. Well maybe it is. Who am I to argue? There’s probably more than a hint of truth in that, as far as I’m concerned. I wonder, though, what it means to create little pyramid villages from TAB tickets? That’s exactly what I found myself doing in the minutes before closing at our local pub tonight, at the end of their trivia night.
I haven’t been to a trivia night in ages, which is interesting because I used to go regularly. Many years ago, Damien and I (and a group of others) used to regularly spend our Wednesday nights at the nearby Trinity Hotel playing pub trivia. It was a great way to catch up, have a few drinks, dinner, and have fun in the middle of the week. We were usually in the top two or three winning teams most weeks, and actually won the competition on quite a few occasions. But life changes, and I haven’t been to pub trivia much since then.
Until today, when a friend rang and asked if I knew of any good pub trivia nights. On an otherwise boring, wet night in Sydney, we was looking for one to entertain our friend Liesbeth visiting from the United States. A bit of a check on Time Out and I found the following three which were closeby…
The Local Taphouse 122 Flinders St, Darlinghurst 2010.
(02 9360 0088). Mon 7pm. $100 bar credit
The Shakespeare Hotel 200 Devonshire St, Surry Hills 2010.
(02 9319 6883). Mon 7.30pm. $80 in prizes plus cash jackpot to $1,000
Technology Park Hotel 1 Wyndham St, Alexandria 2015.
(02 9698 8999). Queer trivia with drag queen Summer Salt and topless male bartender. Mon 7pm. $100 bar credit
Although “tempted” by the idea of trivia with a drag queen, we agreed on the suburban familiarity of The Shakespeare. It’s an old fashioned Surry Hills pub that hasn’t been refurbished with chrome and floor-boards, and whose only concession to modern “pubbery” (if such a word exists) is the ten dollar bargain meal.
For a Monday night, we couldn’t believe how full it was. We had a great night together, sitting around, chatting, arguing the toss over questions, and generally enjoying each others company.
As for the trivia? In round one we did quite well. We’re pretty sure we were the only people in the entire bar who got to the answer “Lonely Nights (Angel Face)” by The Captain and Tennille to a music question, doubly impressive since it starts with a quiet atmospheric sound effect which I picked it in under 2 seconds. We didn’t do so well in round two, as the questions became a little more focussed on younger people and as we argued (not really) and changed answers. Famously, we chose “Michael Crawford” as the answer to another musical clue, changed it to “Rick Astley”, and of course “Michael Crawford” was the correct answer. I think generally speaking, with trivia nights, go with your first answer, it’s probably right.
Charlie Hides has one of the funniest live shows I’ve seen in ages. He’s an English comedian – though originally from the United States – who dresses up and impersonates (with humour and affection) some of the great modern pop divas, including Cher, Madonna and Lady GaGa.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been enthusiastically sharing his Youtube videos with friends. The first one that made me laugh was a sketch about the apparent rivalry between Madonna and Lady GaGa. Since then, he’s gone on to incorporate a bunch of other characters including Lana Delray, Joan Rivers and others with the same level of affection and humour. Unlike many other comedians, I don’t think there’s anything nasty or malicious behind his humour.
In the last year or so he’s been doing live shows in London, and I’ve read about this development with a sense of longing and wonder. “There has to be a lot of video in his live shows to achieve what he does”, I whispered to Graeme in the minutes before his live show at Sydney’s “Gingers” began. There is. There are also lots of costumes changes, and a comedy routine which continues to shock and surprise over the course of about ninety minutes. He works hard.
The comedy of his live show was far more cutting edge, and definitely less politically correct, than you see on the Youtube clips. Overall it was a fantastic night which we both enjoyed very much. Hopefully he’ll be back for Mardi Gras again next year.
I was a little surprised to see Bob and Blanche in the audience last night at “Giant Dwarf”. Though, I’ve seen them at heaps of theatre events around Sydney, it’s often been at the “top end of town”, whereas “Giant Dwarf” is a little more down-market, and it’s a little more “alternative”.
Last night’s show was by Penny Arcade, the New York-based performance artist with ties to Warhol / The Factory etc back in the 1960s. Now in her 70s, she’s still at the cutting edge, with her critique of modern day life. In particular, she hates the so-called “gentrification” of inner city areas, “turning cities into suburbs”.
Though I knew of her work, I had never seen her perform. And so when a friend said she was getting a group of people together to see the show, I jumped at the chance. And I’m really glad I did. It was, honestly, one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time. Penny makes you think, and Penny makes you laugh. And her timing, as she interacts with a musical soundtrack, is spot on. Highly recommended.
“The things you said on the TV about Warhol were really amazing”, I said to her as we chatted briefly after last night’s show. I was referring to an interview she did on ABC-TV in the last couple of weeks, in which she said Warhol wasn’t the great counter-culturalist you might expect. In the interview, she went on to say he just wanted to make money, hang out with other rich people, and had problems with his sexuality. Having read The Warhol Diaries all those years ago, I guess it makes sense, it’s just that I’d never heard anyone explain his life in those terms before. She was generous with her time, as she chatted with people after the show, and though she had a minder holding her hand, urging her to move on, she seemed genuinely interested in what I, and others, had to say, and ask her about.
Hawkie? As it happens, the former Prime Minister and the author spent a bit of time afterwards chatting with Penny. As it turns out, the Hawke Centre at the University of South Australia is a supporter of her current tour, and Bob, Blanch and Penny go back a long way, as I discovered earlier today, thanks to Google. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Hawkie was, after all, at Nimbin in 1973 for the Aquarius Festival, and I recall, our local newspaper The Northern Star, made a particular point of Hawkie having been seen skinny dipping in the creek.
Details Creator Milne, Peter, 1960- Title Penny Arcade with Bob Hawke and Blanche D’Alpuget and several erotic dancers backstage at the Seymour Centre Theatre, Sydney, April 1995 [picture] / Peter Milne Call Number PIC/10588/4 LOC Drawer PIC/10588 Created/Published 1995 Extent 1 photograph : b&w ; 51.2 x 51.2 cm, on sheet 61 x 61 cm. Physical Context PIC/10588/4 LOC Drawer PIC/10588-Penny Arcade with Bob Hawke and Blanche D’Alpuget and several erotic dancers backstage at the Seymour Centre Theatre, Sydney, April 1995 [picture] /
“Hi Jim how was the fridge? Have you settled in ok?” came the message from Karran earlier today. Having been away for four months, I told her I expected the fridge to be in need of cleaning out, but I thought the freezer would be okay. That wasn’t the case.
For dinner tonight, I pulled out some curry, frozen from a few months ago. After about two minutes in the microwave, the smell of something which had been frozen, but which had defrosted for a while became evident. Clearly, the power must have gone off for a while?
But aside from the fridge, I seem to have settled in okay.
I bought a few things online over the weekend and was surprised at how quickly they arrived. I was prepared for “lengthy delays”. A new desk and new chair from Officeworks arrived on Monday, though I wasn’t expecting it until tomorrow. For a moment I wondered why I didn’t get the fully constructed version of both. For the confusing bits (adding the casters in particular) I looked up how to do that on Youtube, instead of the paper instructions. Youtube is awesome for that kind of thing. In the end, I decided I didn’t really need to add the arms to the chair.
And I also bought a new vacuum cleaner, one of those “stick models” from Dyson. You wouldn’t believe how much “ground in dirt” there was in the carpet. It was like when I visited a bathhouse in China a few years ago and was scrubbed to within an inch of my life. I looked at my arms and there was dirt like I hadn’t expected. “Did that really come out of my skin?”, I asked the bloke who was scrubbing me down. Apparently so.
The one thing I can’t get over since arriving back in Sydney is the apparent low levels of mask-wearing. I spoke about this with some colleagues today. One of them lives in the Inner West, the other in Sutherland Shire, and they both reported almost everyone they’ve seen in their areas has been wearing masks. Here in Surry Hills, I’d estimate it’s only about fifty per cent.
A few months ago the non-mask wearers tended to be middle-aged and older blokes. Now it seems to be much younger people. They’re either not wearing masks at all, and or they have them under their chins. They’re clearly wearing them only in case they are pulled over by the police. By the look in their eyes, there seems to be defiance in their decision not to wear masks. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it?
That said, I saw someone at the supermarket last night who was wearing one of those “welding mask face shields”, rubber gloves, as well as full covering over her head and body. It was like she was in an Ebola ward.
Maybe she was immune-compromised or had another reason, but it did seem a little over the top. I snapped a sneaky pic! I’d love to listen in to a conversation between those in the two extremes of what I’ve seen so far.
Since arriving back I’ve been out most days for a walk or for some shopping. I haven’t been doing the amount of daily exercise I did in Lismore, and I’ve been feeling a little guilty about that. I’m back to making my own coffee at home, and it takes a little more effort to get to those lovely walking spots like I had in Lismore.
I think it’s time for a bit of exploration of my area, like I was doing back in Lismore.
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“There were a couple of other cars stopped at the nearby informal carpark. I can only assume they had also gone for a walk down by the river/creek ..,”
Moment I read that, I wondered about “anti-social behaviour.”
![Details Creator Milne, Peter, 1960- Title Penny Arcade with Bob Hawke and Blanche D'Alpuget and several erotic dancers backstage at the Seymour Centre Theatre, Sydney, April 1995 [picture] / Peter Milne Call Number PIC/10588/4 LOC Drawer PIC/10588 Created/Published 1995 Extent 1 photograph : b&w ; 51.2 x 51.2 cm, on sheet 61 x 61 cm. Physical Context PIC/10588/4 LOC Drawer PIC/10588-Penny Arcade with Bob Hawke and Blanche D'Alpuget and several erotic dancers backstage at the Seymour Centre Theatre, Sydney, April 1995 [picture] /](https://i0.wp.com/thelimbshift.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/penny.png?w=510&h=527&ssl=1 "Bob, Blanche and Penny")
“There were a couple of other cars stopped at the nearby informal carpark. I can only assume they had also gone for a walk down by the river/creek ..,”
Moment I read that, I wondered about “anti-social behaviour.”
Hahaahahahah! I hadn’t thought of that.