Etching Lino

I'm having fun, just the sort of thing I like: protective eye goggles over my glasses, scummy workshop shirt all buttoned up and chemical-resistant gloves pulled right up to my elbows, and all because I want to try etching some lino. I can't show you the results yet, but I can tell you what I've done so far:



Whaddya mean, 'you look ridiculous'?

• First, find the box of caustic soda crystals you bought years ago for un-blocking your kitchen sink








(hint: you've looked everywhere except under the sink...)

• Second, find the handy pack of wallpaper paste you put in your daughter's 'making box' for doing papier mache. Make up about a half-litre of thick wallpaper paste in a glass jug or large glass jam jar




• Third, unearth a glass jam jar from the recycling bin, and a cleanish stick with which to stir things




• Fourth, empty your one and only multi-purpose plastic developing tray and line it with newspaper




• Fifth, fill two plastic carrier bags with small gravel to use as weights later on....

Then:

Half-fill the jam jar with cold water (this is important as water + caustic soda = heat, so don't start with warm water!). Then slowly add teaspoonfuls of caustic soda crystals using a plastic spoon (so that the solution doesn't eat away your precious metal spoon), stirring gently, until the solution reaches saturation point and no more crystals will dissolve in the water. Leave it to cool.

Once cool slowly add some of the caustic soda solution to the wallpaper paste and gently stir.

Next:

Place a lovely, grainy piece of wood in the newspaper-lined plastic developing tray. Paint with wallpaper/caustic soda paste. Apply lino (wiped grease-free with methylated spirits preferably) face-down to the area of wood you want to etch into your lino, and press down. Put a sheet of newspaper over the top of the lino and then weight it down with the bag of gravel, which will help to bend the lino in towards the wood.














At this point it doesn't look very impressive

Wait for 1 - 5 hours depending on desired depth of line and/or relative humidity and temperature, then wash everything off carefully with cold water - preferably outside - and avoid splashing yourself or your clothes in the process.

Now my only problem is what to do if the end result is singularly uninspiring, since I've made it sound so exciting! Oh well, the obvious thing to do while I'm waiting is to go and make myself a large, cold gin-and-tonic. Cheers!

I'm not finished yet!

But what do you think? Do you like the colour...? I keep going away from it and then coming back again, and I'll probably do a bit of experimenting with other backgrounds but overall I'm happy to move away from the black pages - they were fine when I started but they're a bit old hat now.

There may be trouble ahead...

Warning!



The whole 'hooray for 100 posts" thing unfortunately got me thinking that perhaps after 3 years and 100 posts (is that all the posts I've done in that amount of time? Huh!) perhaps this blog is due for a makeover. Whereas on other blogs I've gone with the new Blogger layout thingy, on this my oldest and dearest blog I've stuck to the original template and haven't fiddled at all. I'm not saying I'm going to spend the weekend re-jigging the html... I'm giving you fair warning: it could be a bumpy ride.



It could go either way

100 not out

It's my one hundredth post, apparently (I wouldn't have realised without Blogger keeping me up to date when I sign in), so hooray for DoubleElephant!



We went to the Japanese Children's Festival in the Coffs Harbour Botanical Gardens last weekend (on a glorious Sunday) and a local student kindly wrote 'Elephant' for me in kanji.

Artlink

Do you ever read Artlink? It bills itself as a Contemporary Art Quarterly, and although it focuses mainly on what's happening in Australia and New Zealand I've found it great reading for years before I moved into the Southern Hemisphere because of the way in which it concentrates on particular themes in each edition, and partly because it draws connections between what's happening in art around the world.

My biggest problem with it is the same problem I have with all of the lovely arts-related publications I like to read (A-n, Imprint, Printmaking Today, Art World, Art & Australia...) - it takes a sustained effort of will for me to carve out the time, quiet and headspace to sit down and read it properly, even though I know that I will enjoy doing so and benefit from it. Anyway, this quarter I have made the time to read the magazine from cover to cover, and found lots to enjoy and even some things I want to come back to, which means circling them with my trusty red pen and turning down the top corner of the page so that I can find my marks again!

One thing I really liked was the inclusion of a quote from Shakespeare's Richard II: I wasted time And now doth time waste me, which seems particularly apt to me at the moment. This quarter's issue of Artlink is concerned with TIME (and only tangentially with its wasting), so there is a selection of articles/essays about interesting things such as Aboriginal concepts of time (and how they've been misinterpreted) and whether culture evolves or is revealed, interspersed with examinations of many different artists' practices. What I find so helpful is that other people's discourses on other artists' works sometimes reveal to me insights about my own concerns and approaches to my art practice. It's not so much that I need to borrow other people's words, but that there are so many words about my own work floating around in my head that I find it hard to line them up coherently. Why do I do what I do? How do I do what I do? And what does it all mean? Well sometimes I find that looking at and reading about other artists coalesces previously wraith-like whisps of themes and meanings into a more tangible, presentable whole.

There is a fascinating article in this quarter's magazine about an exchange of video-letters between two artists: Victor Erice in Spain and Abbas Kiarostami in Iran. They have completely different approaches to their work: Erice is painstaking in the way he prepares for,organises and builds up his work into something that can be exhibited. He isn't prolific, and has to use what he has carefully, although he took the opportunity in the exhibition that resulted from their video-exchange to create a totally new piece of work. Kiarostami is described in the article as "prolific without trying to be... and this is a poise he carefully cultivates". His work is described as having an "off-hand, impulsive, almost unworked quality", and there is the suggestion that as he's so prolific he's almost lazy, walking away from anything that suddenly bores him even if it's only half-complete. And yet the other side of this is his emphasis on art making as "practising the art of seeing - with [the] eyes, not in the first place with any representational apparatus". He is described as having "a kind of openess, an availability to the world" that allows him to capture what he has learned to see swiftly, apparently effortlessly.

I find collaborations very intriguing and this one was clearly a challenge, certainly for Erice who was confronted with someone with whom he wanted to work but who didn't play by his notion of the 'rules'! The outcomes are interesting, but I find myself most interested in their different approaches to making art. In character I am probably most like Erice: I'm not prolific. I don't make vast amounts of work, and what I do make I make carefully, painstakingly... But in the same breath I say that I find myself like Kiarostami too: I rarely fill a sketchbook because with me it all goes in through the eyes and I prefer to spend more time looking than drawing. Sadly, identifying traits I have in common with two interesting professional artists doesn't necessarily make me either professional or interesting, but reading about them allowed me a glimpse of myself. And it also reaffirmed to me the value of collaboration, something I will continue to seek out.

The finished Journal

I really enjoyed making this! It's got headbands and a bookmark, about which I am ridiculously pleased



Inside the pages are a mixture of pastel paper, etching paper, wrapping paper and pages from the AA 1955 Touring Guide to Europe, highlighting some of the places we're hoping to go later this year

Learning the hard way

I mentioned I was busy making myself a travel journal a là Jan in a previous post. Well, it's almost ready! I've just tipped in the end sheets and it's drying for a day or so in my little book press. This is my second go at finishing it: I incorrectly positioned the book block within the covers when I first tried pasting the tapes etc to the covers, and while the end result was immaculately neat it unfortunately didn't open properly... I was a bit gloomy until I managed to pull out the book block again (despite the glue having dried) without having to slit the tapes etc off, and I put it aside for a couple of days until I had the time (and the courage) to try again. Fingers crossed that it works this time because now I've tipped in the end pages it will require a major salvage operation to repair any mistakes.

It's been a (slow) adventure making the book: it's only the second hard-cover book I've made, and I outdid my first effort by including a stiff spine, headbands and a ribbon this time, with few instructions on how to do it properly. If it works I shall take photographs to show to you proudly in a future post!

Rain

Cottage

Over Easter we did a whirlwind 2,200 km trip around south-western New South Wales visiting my darling husband's parents and one of his brothers. Stephen farms on a sheep and cattle station now owned by the University of Sydney but once the property of private land owners. It is the longest continually farmed property in Australia and within its boundaries are convict cells, graves and gold mines as well as miscellaneous buildings and sheds. One of the not-so-historically note-worthy is a small cottage previously used by a farm hand; it's few rooms and outdoor toilet are about to be swallowed by brambles having been vandelised by rodents and the odd human.












Once upon a time my husband and his first wife stored some unwanted possessions there in cardboard boxes and we went back to see if there was anything worth having (that we could also fit into the car this trip). We sort of feel we ought to go and clear it out: although it's Stephen's cottage the ravaged contents aren't his responsibility! We'd intended to take our trailer with us but of course it was ship-wrecked in our shed and we couldn't get to it through the floods so we couldn't do it this time.

Doing a Jan!

I do hope Jan won't mind me saying that I've taken her as inspiration, or at least that's my excuse for $28 of old hard backed books bought this morning from the Coffs Harbour Rotary Club's annual book fair! Jan 'recycles' old books into new hybrids, combining interesting pages from different books with etchings, drawings and quality blank paper. The re-built 'new' volume can then be used as a diary, journal, sketchbook, notebook or any combination of the above. The joy is in the mixture of words, images and paper from something else joined together with your own words/notes/images and I have to say that the idea is wonderful. Probably what I should be doing is spending my money in Jan's lovely Etsy shop but I'm clearly too mean... Actually the intention is to practice my bookbinding skills (or lack thereof) on some cheap books that I won't mind ruining, but I'm doing it in the guise of providing myself with similar eclectic mixtures of paper, words and images that I will naturally fill with exciting notes and sketches very shortly.

The Rotary Club book fair nearly didn't happen. March in Coffs Harbour is a wet month: rainfall statistics reveal average monthly rainfall of 250mm and 30 days of rain. You may be aware that on March 31st Coffs Harbour and the local region received an entire month's rain in a few days, which in combination with the equinoctial high tides caused widespread flooding. The Rotary Club's book store was several feet under water and the local newspaper reported that thousands of books had to be disposed of, so I feel lucky that the fair was on at all!

I picked up some great books:

A 1956 AA Foreign Touring Guide
An undated book of 'Great Stories of the Wild West' with a fabulous cloth cover printed with a recurring pattern of stetsons, pistols and rearing horses
'The World We Live In' by 'the editorial staff of Life' published in 1956 with lovely fold-out illustrations
A 1963 edition of 'Cours de Langue et de Civilisation Francaises'
A 1913 edition of 'A Village Story' by Mrs G E Morton which holds little interest for me except in the beautiful art nouveau style cover
C Hartley Grattan's 1941 book 'Introducing Australia' ("Here America's foremost authority on Australia explains why the continent, tells you why 'the Australians will one day be a great people'")

and others... what a bargain!

Schadenfreude

I"ve just had a call from friends further up the Pacific Highway: the road we used to live in is completely under water and cut off from the Highway... so I'm REALLY GLAD we don't live there any more (and there's a small element of me that is mentally pointing out to our former landlord that if he hadn't been such a pain and made us move it would have been us flooded out there and not him - although at the same time I do feel sorry for him because it must be awful). Meanwhile most of the schools and the centre of town are closed today so our daughter is at home. And those High School kids I mentioned? They all had to stay at the school overnight, including the daughter of our friends up the road.

Rain, rain, rain

It's been a fun-packed couple of days on the weather front as gale-force winds and torrential rain sneaked in and have surprised us. For the first time since we moved back into the outskirts of Coffs Harbour in February we had an electrical blackout yesterday evening that lasted well into this morning. We were a lot better off than we would have been in our previous house: at least here we have mains water so if the power goes out we can still flush the toilet and have a shower. And did I mention that the roof here doesn't leak..?

My clever husband has set up a UPS on the server so that it can at least shut down in an orderly fashion having saved our data, and we have a gas lantern, plenty of torches, spare batteries and a little gas ring burner with spare canisters as well as a gas barbeque so we're not exactly roughing it if the lights do go out. The weakest points of the house are things like the freezer and the fridge, in which food obviously begins to deteriorate over time, and the fish tank: although the water temperature and the air temperature aren't radically different so our tropical fish won't die of cold, we're not sure how long they'll last without oxygenation of their water, although they survived over twelve hours this time around with seeming ease.

It is amazing, though, how vulnerable we all are to climate and geography and Australia certainly provides its inhabitants with many challenges in both areas. Last time we had a prolonged bout of really heavy rain was the week we moved house (of course!), when we had 23" (almost 60 cms) in 3 days. Road surfaces and storm drains just don't cope with that amount of water in such a short space of time and the centre of Coffs Harbour simply floods, while surrounding rivers burst their banks and whole areas are cut off. There isn't much one can do about it. There are those who will read this and doubtless think that civil authorities are short-sighted and badly prepared, but I'm only just beginning to realise how tenuous any sense of established 'white European'-style civilisation is in this country.

I hear, with astonishment, that what is now the Botanic Gardens in Coffs was - until 1981, so only 28 years ago - the site of the "night soil trenches". Yep, you heard me: human waste from septic tanks was collected and buried in trenches close to the town centre until less than 30 years ago. Emerald Beach, a nice village a few kilometres up the coast, with lovely houses, a beautiful beach and unbelievable views, only got mains sewage facilities 5 years ago. Mains electricity is almost (I say almost) everywhere, but mains gas is virtually unheard of and only possible in the big metropolitan areas. I grew up with above-ground power poles but these days in the UK most towns have spent 25 years and more burying their services so that it was a big shock moving here and seeing power lines everywhere, with the poles also carrying phone and data cables. Surprise surprise, when the wind blows, the rain comes down and branches fall off neighbouring trees the power poles frequently come down with them, leaving people with regular blackouts and phone outages. If you live on a property with bore or tank water rather than a mains water supply - far from ubiquitous - then a power outage usually means your water pump shuts down unless you have a solar-powered pump, so no water for flushing or washing until the power company finds the fallen branch and repairs the line.

M assures me that metropolitan areas (and let's face it, the vast majority of Australians live in big cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth) have all the facilities I'm accustomed to from living in Europe. But outlying areas have been strapped for cash for years because so few voters live in those constituencies. Coffs Harbour might be the largest city in the thousand or so kilometres between Brisbane and Sydney but it's really very small; it practically counts as being in the bush, so conditions here really shouldn't be a surprise.

I have had to find a new attitude to go with living here. Australians allegedly moan about whingeing Poms and to an extent I see the frustration. If I was living in Sydney, with all the services on tap and a big infrastructure to support my lifestyle then moaning might accomplish something as well as afford me a pleasant passtime, but here it's pointless and annoying. You just get on with things.

In fact it's not all bad losing power. I can't waste time reading the news pages on the BBC website when I should be doing something else, I can go to bed when it gets dark because I can't see to do anything else, and we can play simple games of cards or just talk to each other instead of stressing out about 'more important' things. It's probably good for me.

I've just aqua-planed my way back to Korora after picking up our daughter from school and fruitlessly seeking a way to get to the large Bunnings Warehouse just south of town. Major accidents have blocked the Pacific Highway to both the north and south of town so the place is backing up with large B-double articulated trucks; rain has closed the airport, the link road to the airport and most of the sideroads off the Highway (including the road out to our block so interestingly if we'd been living up there we'd have been cut off from town by flooding!) and is encroaching on the centre of Coffs. We had to turn round half a dozen times, trying to find alternate ways to get to Bunnings until we could see, from a distance, that although the lights were on in the store there was a moat of water around it that must mean staff and customers are stranded. Close by, floodwaters have cut off a large High School so that parents and school buses were one side of a large and enlarging body of water while the 300 or so children were a kilometre away on the other side. On the way back up the Highway I stopped to buy spare batteries for the torches, bread and milk, butane gas canisters for the gas ring and petrol for the 4WD just in case we're stranded for a couple of days, and then we came home (with the back wheels of the 4WD sliding out from under us as we negotiated the windy hill back up to Korora). My darling daughter is - unusually on a school night - watching television for a while, since we will probably soon lose satellite reception, internet connection and power and our opportunities for entertainment will be slightly curtailed! And I feel fine. This is just how it is, and frankly we are going to be living a kilometre and a half up a dirt track some time in the next year or so, and I'd better get used to it, because it might be me stranded on the other side of body of water. I plan to have plenty of spare batteries, tow ropes, D shackles, torches, gas lanterns and other sensible stuff so that I don't whinge while I wait for the flood waters to subside.

The Horses of St Mark's Square

I find it hard to believe that I started this collagraph plate almost three years ago, before we'd even started thinking about moving over to Australia. The inspiration came from the verdigris runnelled surface of the horses of St Mark's Square in Venice. We'd taken my father over there for a short break in February 2006 and it was cold, sometimes wet and absolutely magical. When we returned to Bristol I dug out a large sheet of really thick card that had, I think, been used as backing for a pack of etching paper and I started drawing on it. By the time we emigrated, some eight months later, all I'd achieved apart from the drawing was the outline of the horse's collar and a small amount of texture from crumpled tissue paper saturated in PVA glue... I've carried the damned thing around with me every since vowing that soon I'd get on with finishing the plate.

Nothing has happened until today, and from somewhere came the enthusiasm to pick it up again. I've always liked the drawing but I think that as usual I've been afraid of failing with it, ruining it, or just not managing to make it properly. I managed to get over myself a bit today and have been cooking on gas: felt made for three flower garlands, washed, spun and hung out ready to dry plus the Codex 6 books are now complete and I've added surface and texture to the horse collagraph plate and I've started applying carborundum dust around the outside of the asymmetric image. In truth I won't know if I want that velvety darkness around the horse until I start proofing the print - I may end up cutting the whole thing out and using it as an element in the print. We'll see. Between now and then I think I've got a long way to go, not least in terms of figuring out HOW I'm going to print it as it is far too big for my press. I think I'm going to have to hand-print it.

Detail of the eye. I've tried to build up the surface so that when it prints in negative there is an indentation in the relevant places on the image. You can see where I've heaped up the carborundum powder over the wood-glue around the ear and mane!


The whole thing is 90 x 65 cms which is very big for me

Codex 6 - the second book

I'm not so sure I like the text on the covers of the second book; I should have made it chunkier



I've finished the second of the two books resulting from my residency and I'm pleased over all with the results despite my misgivings about my 'font size'! The words on the front and back covers come from the Greek roots of the words hegemony and antithesis (which is a form of resistance). Hegemony and resistance are words used in the pulp-printed pages in the book. Again I cut into the book board and used a bone folder to push the book cloth into the covers and reveal the embossing.



In some places on the papers we made during the residency I used pulp-printing to 'join' two newly formed sheets

First class

At last I've bought a drafting chair, which for those who don't know is a chair with extra oomph in the gas lift mechanism and can raise itself up to the height of, say, my printing bench or working table. I've rarely bought myself a piece of furniture that's specifically directed at my own personal needs so this is an important moment! Of course the person who has sat in it for the longest length of time so far is actually my darling daughter, but at least she's comfortable.




I now have levers for seat tilt, back rake and seat height! And I have to be careful with the height adjustment because it takes off rather fast if you're too enthusiastic

More Joy!

I realised after I'd posted the entry about the Sturt Winter School that I have some other exciting news to share which is that I'm going to the UK in September and will be able to attend the 10th anniversary IMPACT conference, which is going back to its home at my former university, UWE in Bristol. Hooray!

There is extra joy, in fact, because we're managing to combine it with a family holiday AND I get to spend some time with my friends by myself for the first time in a couple of years. I'm going out on my own, to attend the conference, and I will be joined by my delightful husband and darling daughter a week or so later. We're hoping to take my father back to the Veneto region of Italy (it's his birthday while we're there...), catch up with some friends in Paris and Brussels (which is always nostalgic for me as I used to live there) as well as the UK, and then I'm going to bring darling daughter home with me while hubby uses his proximity to some of his European clients as an excuse for a booze-up with his mates, oops I mean client visit!

And just in case there doesn't sound as if there's enough joy in the mix already, I can tell you (smugly) that we've accumulated enough points over the last two years to do all three return flights on our Air Miles. How about that.

Codex 6 - the first book

You'll remember that I went on a residency, Codex 6, at Southern Cross University in Lismore in January...? Well I've finally been able to start putting the resulting handmade, pulp-printed paper into book form and have bound the first of two accordian books. I promised to show the results, so here are some photos:


The books are in a simple accordian format with two hard covers




The pages are made from sheets of hand-made pulp-printed paper




The theme of the work was 'Resistance' and the motifs evolved into spiky viruses, prickly cacti and cogs







I've cut into the book board to create impressions of cogs, which are a recurring motif in the pulp-printed paper




Eventually the full set of 16 books will be boxed together in a slip-case although I believe that they will all be individually for sale. I hope that the set will be shown at the Southern Cross University Acquisitive Artists' Book exhibition later this year.

The Joy of Courses

Thanks to Ampersand Duck for alerting me to the Sturt University Winter School, running from July 13th - 17th. I knew about the Summer School and not about the Winter School, but there is a luscious range of courses from making "Beautiful Books & Boxes" with Caren Florance (who is, to those who know her blog, Lady Duck) to basket weaving, tapestry, printmaking, wood working... it's a long list and frankly I'd like to do about half of the courses but I've chosen the one that will contribute the most to me and my skill set!

Snakes Alive!

You'd think I would know better than to go away, wouldn't you? Either the action happens while I'm away or waits until I've just got back...

This time I've been up in Lismore on a residency at SCU for a week and a bit, and my dearly beloved husband and daughter found not one but three snakes while I was away. Number one is our friend the 2 metre long carpet python which provided the adults with entertainment at Darling Daughter's birthday party recently. He can now be found regularly sunning himself stretched out on a log near the pool, and he slithers around every once in a while, to keep us on our toes.




This little fellow is only very mildly venemous and is called a Bandy-Bandy snake, for obvious reasons




Our daughter had invited a friend around to play in the pool, but this little friend was already in there. Michael fished it out with the pool net and was kind enough to toss it into the paddock rather than smacking it with the flat of a shovel which is his first instinct! The Bandy-Bandy snake lives exclusively on blind snakes, which feed mainly on termites so I guess its presence around the house is suggestive of there being termites - which doesn't surprise me as I've found them in the vegetable garden. It's not good news for our landlord, however.

The third visitor wasn't so lucky, I'm afraid. red-bellied black snakes are venemous and we found one last night around the pool. It was only a juvenile, but it was rapidly despatched to slither around whichever is the afterlife for hapless snakes...

Codex 6

Lots of lovely bits of coloured cotton, snipped up with shears, ready for the Hollander at SCU in Lismore! More of the project in future posts, but I spent two very sweaty days there this week at the start of Codex 6, the next instalment of Tim Mosely's on-going series of collaborative handmade paper/artists' book projects.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this one: the theme is Resistance, which has been interpreted in this case as a semi-abstract notion of opposition. We've been talking a lot about different sorts of resistance and have steared away from more obvious political connotations, which is not to say that political feeling is entirely absent from the procedings.

The weather has been oppressively hot and humid, which makes working quite tiring, and perhaps because of this I would say that we haven't made as much progress as we might have liked at the start of the project. However, we're now into the Australia Day long weekend which means we won't get back to it until Tuesday, and in between household chores, trying to organise ourselves into renting a new house, doing things with my darling daughter and generally being a wife, friend and parent this means I do have some time to consider imagery to take with me next week. I've struggled a bit because I discover that I'm really quite engrossed with form rather than content in book-making terms. This does not mean I'm obsessed with a particular binding or tied to any one material - it's just that my own practice is deeply involved with form at the moment. From the outside this is blindingly obvious to you all, but for me it has only come to light as I've floundered around trying to get interested in a nebulous concept for the Codex project, failing dismally to find a 'way in'!

Just at the end of Friday afternoon we all made some progress, I'm relieved to say. The trouble is that a concept of Resistance interpreted as opposition or refusal rather gives everyone permission to oppose any idea put forward and to be tempted into working individually rather than collectively... I wonder if the outcomes will be as conceptually, intellectually or structurally 'tight' as they were for the last Codex project with which I was involved? At the moment it's hard to see how, but we've got a long way to go and I have managed to find a few hooks on which to hang my interest and work my way into the ideas that have been generated so far. And I have a couple of days in which to think about and identify some relevant imagery. Phew.

Amusingly Willis and I represent the voice of experience in this version of Codex! We're fairly aged compared to most of the other participants and it's a bit deflating to realise how ancient we must seem...

A break in Brisbane

Going away for a few days in the January school holidays is turning into an annual event (well, we've done it two years running, put it that way), and this year we headed up north as far as Brisbane and the Gold Coast in response to an email promising big discounts on hotel bookings.












We did various things, including taking our Darling Daughter (seven today!) to Seaworld, but by far the most satisfactory part of the trip from all points of view was our visit to the Gallery of Modern Art in the new South Bank complex. We have been there before and were impressed, and we were impressed again this time. Not only is the architecture stunning, but the project designers and gallery directors have really, REALLY thought about children in the whole thing.

There are walkways and low walls to run along, shady trees to sit beneath, funny things going on with inside-out buildings to look at, the river to enjoy, free circus activities in tents, open-air cafe spaces with real comfy chairs and nice food, nearby parking, plenty of toilets... and, the piece de resistance in my view, just fabulous art-related activities run in tandem with the GoMA exhibitions. Hooray! And if I sound like a walking advert for the whole caboodle, I really am. We love it and both times we've been we've said our big mistake (apart from lunching at the not-so-marvellous cafe at the hands-on science centre) was failing to get there early enough so that we can enjoy it for even longer before we get booted out at 5pm.

This time around there were at least five separate activities designed for children: indigenous artist Tony Albert had a room full of computer screens connected with identity card-making machines (somewhere behind the wall), and children were asked to answer a series of questions to find out if they were citizens of the Alien Nation. Questions were eerily reminiscent of the questions asked by the Australian Government of would-be citizens (as I know, being part-way through the process of applying for Australian citizenship), and raised all sorts of questions about belonging in the context of White Settlement in Australia and the 13th February 2008 "Sorry" from Kevin Rudd's newly-elected government to the Indigenous owners and inhabitants of Australia. Darling Daughter came away proudly wearing her new ID card on an elastic around her neck, and moved on to Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy's collection of fold-together houses. They set a 'creative challenge' for children to re-create their own home or their dream home, using templates that fold together to make a house, a castle and a caravan. For me the end result wasn't just about the making of something that became three-dimensional: it was more about the concept of 'home'. It was combined with their extraordinary piece Not Under My Roof which is essentially a house with everything cut off except the floor, mounted vertically on a wall like a painting! The pair seem to be concerned with 'im/permanence' and 'home'. The floor of the house in Not Under My Roof is actually beautiful, with the weathered stud wall constructions raised to the ground and forming a series of outlines, like picture frames, around different sections of patterned lino. There are residues of its former life as someone's home: you can see the scuff marks of the passage of many feet across the lino, the heat and scorch marks in what was the kitchen, and stains and damp from the bathroom. It seems strange to put a floor on a wall, but it presents a house in a totally different way, stripping it back, laying bear its materials and showing the marks made by its inhabitants in a former life. Sadly I couldn't take a photograph, nor have I yet found one on the web as it is a new piece, but hopefully at some point in the future you might get to see it for yourselves.


I'm hanging on to these cut-out shapes for my own amusement!






Ella had a quick go at a house while at the gallery before impatiently moving on...







In another part of the South Bank we'd been to see a display about museum collections: a series of cabinets revealing braces of dead birds, impaled butterflies and beetles, collections of aboriginal (in the small 'a' sense of native peoples of different lands, not just Australia) artefacts and pickled animals. In the GoMA children's activity rooms there was a perspex box with all sorts of things inside, but covered on the outside with different sized gilt picture frames. The effect was to 'frame', surprise surprise, the contents of the display in different ways. The kids were provided with printed, die-cut paper 'frames' and they could then choose what they wanted to draw and lots of their drawings were then exhibited alongside the display. I must admit I liked the idea and have purloined a couple of the blank 'frames' for Darling Daughter (or me!) to re-visit another day...


Beautiful faux frames for imaginative drawings






Darling Daughter also had lots of fun in a darkened room filled with glowing coloured shapes that could be fitted together and reconfigured. The darkness and luminous colour completely changed the act of slotting one shape into another, a game I used to get bored with quite quickly as a child! It became a very visual game, as well as tactile, and it seemed that no matter what you constructed the end result was beautiful. It was such a simple idea, and yet so well executed. There were other things as well, but these were the absolute highlights and M and I had as much fun as Daughter did, spending well over an hour in these activities alone.

Also very engaging was an installation piece by Kathy Temin called My Monument: White Forest, which is a Dr Suess-like landscape of white fake-fur shapes winding through an enclosed space. There's more to it than that, of course, and the landscape is Temin's response to visiting Europe recently and seeing Holocaust monuments. Her father and step-father were both Holocaust survivors and in a series of works Temin addresses the conundrum of meaning in a landscape that now contains the memories of the horror but may no longer contain the physical scars. The exhibition catalogue puts it all much better than I can, saying "As a personal reflection in a public space [the piece] constructs a somewhat unstable site for collective remembering, inviting viewers into a provisional, fragmentary encounter rather than a singular, rhetorical statement". I loved it, and it was an inviting space in which to remember people now gone: soft white tree-like shapes crowding around winding paths with white wooden seats against a Wedgewood-blue backdrop: peaceful, soft, comforting, poignant. I shouldn't really have taken a photograph but I did...


I didn't manage to get any sense of the overall 'space' of the installation, but you get the idea of the shapes




Michael Leunig is one of Australia's best-loved cartoonists/illustrators, with a really whimsical take on the world. I don't know that I warm much to his brand of essentially Christian spirituality, but I really do like a lot of his drawings. Judging by the comments posted up on the walls and various collaborative drawings he did with a bunch of visiting school children he seems to have had as much fun as they did with his drawings.


This is a picture of him doing a site-specific piece at GoMA on a big wall - lovely!



I do seem to be smitten by cityscapes and skyscapes. Here are pictures all taken from the window of our hotel room, overlooking south-west Brisbane and the river. Two huge tower blocks are going up nearby, and there were some spectacular sunsets

























This is a close-up of the sun setting, and I love the blurred, abstract quality of the photo. Not everything has to be in focus...

366 Daily Drawings

At last I've managed to post the final 'Daily Drawing': number 366, bringing the blog to a close, and it feels a little strange. My dearly beloved says the project has done me lots of good this year and why don't I carry it on into 2009? But I've found myself unprepared for the new year and don't feel able to do so. This time last year I had 366 little squares of paper, 7cm x 7cm, already cut into strips and scored, ready to fold and tear off... the blog was ready; I was ready. But this year I'm unprepared. Instead I think I'm going to spend a bit of time reviewing what I did and what it 'means', and whether I can draw any private conclusions from it.


The drawings don't look much, crammed in a box, do they?






Meanwhile I can show you some pictures I took of the 264 days' worth of drawings that I could fit onto my 11-foot long printing bench without moving the plate warmer (it's really heavy!).
























On a different note, this is a USB plasma ball I got for Christmas! Mad, but strangely beautiful...








And this is the USB glitter lamp that our darling daughter got... also mad.

Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by for a read and a chat over the last year. I've had fun posting about 2008 and I'm looking forward to blogging again in 2009.

My friend Jan over at 'In My Spare Time' gave me a task list for the Christmas period that includes instructions to enjoy myself, eat too much and drink too much, and of course I'm far to scared of her wrath to disobey... (just in case you're reading this, Jan!). I'm hoping to add some extra fun into the mix with 'making things' with my Darling Daughter over the long school holidays, some reading for that fabled PhD of mine that is about to start, and a two-week residency with Tim Mosely up at SCU in Lismore at the end of January. So much to look forward to, so little time! And in the brief periods between all the fun activities I'm going to have a good think about a couple of ideas for prints that are brewing away in my subconscious because if we have to move at the end of January (a distinct possibility) I may not have access to my printmaking equipment for a while after that.

Have yourselves a very Merry Christmas and all good wishes for a happy New Year, and I look forward to catching up with you soon,

Sara x

PS. In case you're wondering about the card, it's very simple: strips of paper are pushed through slits in the card. The paper this year is mostly taken from various newspaper coverage of Barak Obama's election to the US presidency and varies from headline quotations in various scripts to strips cut from pictures of the First Lady-elect's acceptance event outfit! The election raised some interesting (well to me, anyway) parallels with traditional Western hopes and fears in the Christmas season: you know, all the old chestnuts about new beginnings, the 'choosing' of a 'saviour', etc, etc. Obama's election has echoes for me of the elections of Tony Blair in the UK after years of Conservative government and all that brought with it, and also of the election of Kevin Rudd to the Federal leadership of Australia just over a year ago. Again and again we pin our hopes on individuals to make a real difference in the world; I wonder what a new year will bring for them as well as for us. When I ran out of election coverage I cut out glossy bits from tasteful 'special offers' I can't afford, like luxury tours of French chateaux and a gourmet's tour of London. Hence the festive uniforms of the Horse Guards on parade!

Australian Bookbinders Exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

I'm so happy, having just found out that my little book has been included in the selection from the Pine Street exhibition that has gone to the Art Gallery of New South Wales' Research Library. On the off-chance that anyone reading this might be able to go and see it, the link to the Research Library is here.

I love it: it's a hidden treasure, located down a marble staircase from the main 19th century gallery, and the librarian must love artists' books because there are frequent exhibitions of absolutely beautiful things. It is one of the places I always visit when I can get to the AGNSW; how thrilling that I'm there and what a shame I can't go and see it!

You're it

Ooooh, I've been tagged. Yep, Lady Duck, you got me. Actually I got myself, yesterday, bending down to put something in the washing machine and completely forgetting I'd left a piece of hardboard on top of it, in the "waiting-to-go-into-the-office/studio" freight area, so consequently I have a bruised cheek bone (to go with the stabbed-to-the-bone little finger that is the result of caving in to my darling daughter's demands to core her apple for her). Usually I'm very efficient/safe with my movements, but every now and again - usually when I've forgotten to take my HRT tablets for several days! - I get a bit wobbly and do stupid things. Goodness knows what I'll be like when they finally take the tablets away and I have to go through menopause... luckily that's another nine years of (relative) sanity left to me.

I'm digressing, I know, but I've remembered a hideous embarrassment from years ago. I was eighteen and had accompanied a drop-dead gorgeous friend from school to the local gym because she wanted to exercise prior to going on a skiing trip and was too chicken to brave the local blokes by herself. What happened was that she ran out after day one, I was hooked, and from then onwards I braved the local blokes by myself and got quite fit. Anyway, after a while my glasses would slip down my nose and I'd take them off... and on this one occasion I bent down and, yes, you've guessed it, clobbered myself on the cheekbone with the metal handle of a piece of weight-training equipment. Cue an enormous black eye the next day, and all the lads at work threatening to bash up my Dad for beating me until I confessed I'd done it to myself! Same eye, same cheek, but thankfully rather less bruising thanks to a swiftly-applied ice pack.

Where was I? Oh yes, back to the meme... so here you go, "Seven things about my Working Processes":

1 I am as tidy as I can be, but only because I can't bear the sense of panic that overtakes me when I realise I can't find something I need (car keys, daughter, you know the sort of thing). The inside of my head resonates with my mother's voice saying, "If you put things back where you found them you'll know where they are next time you need them", and the bother of it is that she was RIGHT. When I was learning something about making prints in Bristol a few years ago, my friend Emma Stibbon, who is a fantastic printmaker, commented that I was the tidiest printmaker she knew and it made me laugh because she always wore a boiler suit to ink up her (admittedly huge) woodcuts, but in a way I’m not sure if it’s a compliment. I don't know if being tidy is a marker for anything other than the fact that I need to have control over my working environment; I just know that not being tidy hurts my head and depresses me...

2 I, too, believe in the power of the hand in making things. I've never really been interested in things that come between me and the thing I'm making and I've always chosen to be painfully hand-made. I find myself tempted to take it to extremes sometimes, but as there aren't enough hours in the day to do all the things I'd like to do I have to compromise sometimes, which means that I buy the paper I use rather than make it. So what is the attraction of making things myself? I suppose its lots of things all rolled together. For me the act of ‘making’ is a kind of meditation; it is important for me to concentrate intently on what I do, and to maintain that concentration. I find that total immersion in what I’m doing produces a slow, rhythmic way of working that frees me. That sense of mindfulness is important to me and getting into that state of slightly detached mindfulness is the core of what I do. My mind goes off and chatters to itself, and I can sense currents of movements in my subconscious that develop into ideas and connections and understanding and which are the source of my creativity. I can’t focus on them with my mind’s eye; they are submerged, like deep currents of cold water in the ocean, and I only find out about them once they’ve risen towards the surface and become visible to my conscious mind.

I’m not a good practitioner of meditation, though: I’m not disciplined, and too often I slip into a dissociative state in which I am a separate observer in my life, rather than being truly ‘present’ in it.

3 Sometimes the materials come first and the idea comes second. I hoard lovely paper and bits of things, and if I’m lost for inspiration I do two things: look through my boxes of paper and bits, and look at my art books. I’ve never understood how anyone could be bored if they’ve got access to books! I spent a large part of my childhood leafing through my mother’s books about different art collections – the Prado in Madrid, the National Gallery in London and collections in St Petersburg, and it was like walking into another world. Art books – reproductions, surveys, art history or ‘how to...’ books – are a bit magical for me.

4 I work in layers: layers of ink, layers of paper, layers of meaning. I think this mirrors how I see the world, full of layers. People and events are never wholly one thing; we ascribe different meanings to everything and everyone and how I see something will not be the same as how you see it. Things that are essentially bad can also have good aspects to them, or at least this is the conclusion I’ve drawn from my life.

5 Following on from this, I’m interested in the distance between the work and the viewer and I’m very happy to allow it to exist, like silence in a conversation. I don’t want to be overt about the meaning in my work. I might do something for reasons of my own, but I might not want to share those reasons with you, and I don’t believe that any ensuing ‘lack of understanding’ about the piece is necessarily negative. Your conclusions about it and whatever meaning you might ascribe to it are as valid as my own; after all, once it’s made I hand it over to you in order for it to be viewed... from that point onwards the ‘meaning’ in it is out of my control!

6 Aaargh, still two more aspects of my working processes to reveal to you! I guess one of them is to let you into a secret, which is that I’m a dreadful procrastinator in my work. I spend AGES thinking about something before I can bring myself to start, and I think a lot of it is to do with an unwillingness to let go... I exercise a lot of control over myself and my environment, but in making things I have to release myself from some of that control and see what happens, and it’s hard. I am afraid of it, afraid of myself, afraid of the outcome, afraid of failure... But I have come to accept that this is itself an essential part of the creative process for me.

7 To compensate for the above insecurities I have a certain optimism, in that I believe I’ll be able to work out the techniques/problems/mess in the end. It’s very rare that I’ve found myself to be completely stumped as to what to do next (although I recall with a little shudder the sudden wave of fear that came over me while making a friend’s wedding dress a few years ago: the pattern – a pencil sketch – was fiendish and the material was unforgiving, and I got to a point at which I honestly thought I was going to fail... luckily, 24 hours later, I’d wiped away the tears of frustration and worked it out). It's not smugness or arrogance, honestly, but more like blind pig-headedness. I charge ahead, assuming that if I read the necessary pages in some of my books I’ll get there in the end. This is very relevant right now as I’m attempting to do my first ever case-bound book in time for my mother-in-law’s 70th birthday party on Saturday! Perhaps it says something about my belief in the power of books.

Now I have to tag some other people who might want to write about this meme. Who shall I tag? I know: In My Spare Time, Snippety Gibbet and Aine Scannell. Have fun!

Scraps

Little badges made from scraps for the school Christmas stall... now you know what I do in my "spare" time!

Lots of fun

Surprisingly I made it back from Sydney, despite inclement weather. I arrived at the airport to come home in plenty of time, only to find that my flight was already being called. It turned out that the thunder clouds were building over Sydney and they were packing people onto planes in anticipation of the departure schedule being thrown into disarray. It's funny how used I am now to the idea of hopping on a plane to go down there, but I do still feel a thrill at being in an airport - they are (non)places of such possibility!


















Anyway, I had a fabulous time. It wasn't just the fact that I could spend hours in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the MCA, or that I could wander the shops without a small person tugging at my hand asking for me to buy things, or that I could walk around the Botanic Gardens picking up interesting seedheads in the sunshine... what was loveliest of all was walking into the Australian Bookbinders artists' books exhibition at the Pine Street Gallery and seeing friends, meeting new people, talking about their work and my work, and having a wonderfully sociable evening which was rounded off by staying with Sue Anderson who, in addition to being a truly talented bookbinder and a very generous person is just lovely. So I've come away feeling inspired and energised and happy - and tired, if that makes sense.

I did have fun at the AGNSW. I'm a Country Member now (my Christmas present from M last year, and one that I have made good use of), which means discounts on entry to special exhibitions and access to the Members' Lounge on one of the lower floors, which has a library, comfy chairs and its own little cafe. It's a very civilised place to spend an hour, catching up on art magazines while sipping a coffee or a glass of wine. I'd forgotten that Wednesday is late opening, so I was able to make full use of the facilities, see both the 'Lost Buddhas' exhibition and the Monet exhibition, grab a coffee, have a general look around and use the very nice ladies' loo to get changed without the usual rush to see everything before 5pm.

I'd been looking forward to the Monet, but you know, this time I was disappointed. One reason is that having lived in the UK for 40 years, travelled in Europe and visited the Museum of Fine Art in Boston I've actually seen most of Monet's work, and that of his fellow Impressionists, in the flesh before now, and so my overwhelming feeling about the exhibition was to do with the lack of good Impressionist paintings. So I probably come across as a bit of a cultural snob here when I say that it is fantastic that so many paintings came to Australia, but very sad that the most spectacular pictures such as Monet's huge 'waterlilly' series didn't make it. The inclusion of one of the larger, later, more colourful and famous Monet waterlilly paintings would have made the show. Instead I came away with the feeling that I'd seen a survey exhibition of paintings that showed the development of Impressionism and how it both sprang from and differed from earlier themes and traditions in (mainly) French art. Where were Cezanne and Degas? Sadly only one early piece from each, and intriguing hints about their personal relationships with fellow Impressionists and the divisions and unravelling that happened. I thought that could have been expanded upon, but perhaps that is really another show.

What I did like were two quotes, the first from Monet:

"I am not a great painter, neither am I a great poet. I only know that I do what I can to convey my experience before nature and, most often, to succeed in conveying what I feel I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting - if they exist, that is"

The other quote I liked was from James M Millar, the rather enlightened CEO of Ernst & Young Australia, who were the exhibition's main sponsors. He summed up rather beautifully the value of art in the modern world:

"Art feeds the soul. It uplifts, inspires and enlightens us. And in this fast-paced life, it offers us moments of stillness and reflection". Exactly.

Ho hum.

The exhibition of The Lost Buddhas was, to my mind, much more inspiring. In brief, Chinese workmen were levelling a school playing field in Shandong Province in 1996 when they came across a pit full of 6th century statues of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas that had been buried for some unknown reason in the 12th century. The whole thing is shrouded in mystery: where are the statues from? What happened to them between their making and their burial? Why were they buried? And how on earth did they survive so beautifully...? The statues are amazing: carved from limestone, in the main, they have retained the delicate sketch marks incised on the stone to show the painters where to paint, and they are exquisitely colourful. Traces of deep reds and gold leaf adorn the statues' carved robes and jewels. I have to say that part of the enjoyment of the exhibition comes from the air of tranquillity in the gallery, achieved largely by the wonderful lighting. It is dark, but somehow not gloomy, in there, and the statues loom gracefully out of the blackness, which softens the stonework. Delicate shadows outline the planes of their faces and the fall of their robes. Such peace! Such serenity! Such uncharitably smug expressions in the shadows! I loved it, and sat there drawing for half an hour or so, oblivious to everything.

After my last visit I was careful to make sure I went to look at what was on display in the "Collections Focus Room", and this time it was a print by Frank Hodgkinson called Inside the Landscape, an etching/aquatint/drypoint from 1971. Just my sort of thing: an asymmetric image of a hillside, deeply bitten and irregularly textured in a way that suggested the use of open biting on the plate, which I love. And there was ambiguity in the image too: the fissures and cracks and texture in the image could have been leaves/roots/growing things as much as they could have depicted a cross-section of the hillside, as is perhaps suggested by the title.















This isn't the print I saw, but one from the same series and it's part of the National Gallery of Australia's collection in Canberra. In fact, when looking for the image on-line I came across the NGA's website page on Frank Hodgkinson and now I understand why I like him! Of course... he met people who had been to Atelier 17 in Paris, learned about viscosity printing and started making prints in series! A man after my own heart.

My schedule for this trip was: arrive in Sydney; march quickly up Pitt Street stopping only to buy 600 Williamson & Magor Earl Grey tea bags in the David Jones Food Hall for Michael, the Christmas stocking chocolates from Haigh's in the Strand Arcade, and a belt for me (by the way, have you noticed that I haven't mentioned visiting any of the MANY clothes shops I like to look at in Sydney, ALL of which had super sales on? Dedication to the cause, say I!) before ditching everything in the AGNSW cloakroom; see the various special exhibitions described above; grab a coffee in the members' lounge; change; grab taxi to Chippendale to attend the artists' books show opening; stay with Sue Anderson in Mosman; visit MCA on Circular Quay; return to Coffs Harbour; collapse.

While at the MCA I was able to go and see two shows: Primavera '08 and Yinka Shonibare MBE, the largest show of his work to date. Fascinating, both of them. I went to Primavera '07 last year (surprisingly enough), and enjoyed it but wasn't bowled over by anything in particular. This year there was one artists whose work I really liked, namely Mark Hilton. He showed several double-sided lightboxes which hung down from the ceiling on wires. I couldn't see any electrical connections so I presume the lights in the boxes were battery-powered. On either side of the box were large lambda duratrans prints, depicting what were clearly interpretations of real, contemporary events in styles that referenced Indian miniature painting or Chinese tomb carvings. I didn't 'get' the references to the Melbourne 'Salt Nightclub Massacre' or the 2004 St. Kilda football club sex-scandal, but I did 'get' the use of imagery to examine how we stereotype cultural groups. The imagery in the indian-miniature-style pictures was exquisitely executed - and I presume the methods used were digital manipulations of Mughal patterns and the like, but placed together with digitised images of Hilton's own painting techniques which added the contemporary references of footballers' faces, modern gestures and athletic/club logos.

I read on a wall inscription that "in the series Collective Autonomy Mark Hilton critiques the activities of group behaviour - particularly sporting and peer groups - and the way in which society and the media respond to tragedies perpetrated by these groups". I enjoyed the deliberate and self-knowing appropriation of a received way of painting to say something new, but I also found myself asking whether this critique could happen anywhere other than Australia, with its cultural dependence on sport? Whatever the answer, the results were both aesthetically beautiful and culturally intelligent and I spent a long time looking, which is always the mark of a good show, for me. You can read an on-line article about Mark Hilton in Art & Australia, HERE.

What else? Not much, really. I need to follow-up some contacts I made (more to the point, I need to find the business cards I squirreled away and haven't yet located!), thank Sue profusely for her hospitality, and get on with a load of stuff at home. The programme for this weekend? Making cup cakes, biscuits and Christmas presents with Ella, taking Ella ice-skating, finishing off some felt we made the other week (it's a bit wrinkly and needs some more fulling, I think), making some more felt on Sunday with friends and... oh yes, making the family Christmas cards for this year! Whoops - I'd better get on with it all.

Off on a trip

OK, I'm only going to Sydney, but it's very exciting nonetheless. My 'bridge book' is in the inaugural artists' book show organised by Australian Bookbinders Inc, opening at the Pine Street Gallery in Chippendale on Wednesday. I could have stayed at home, but I wanted to go, partly because the show is being co-curated by my friend Sue Anderson, and partly because it's just fun to go to Sydney. Dianne Fogwell - a printmaker whose work I admire - is opening the exhibition and I'll be going to the after-show dinner because I'm staying with Sue and if she's going, I'm going!

I fly there on Wednesday morning, I have the luxury of visits to the Museum of Contemporary Art AND the Impressionists exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (members' room here I come...), then the opening and dinner afterwards and staying with Sue, and as if that wasn't enough I can do some shopping on Thursday morning before I fly home. Bliss! The only slight downer is that I haven't really got enough money to shop on a grand scale, but who cares? Just catching a glimpse of the sort of thing one can't get in Coffs Harbour will be fun. I am an expert window-shopper.

Don't panic

I've had a certain amount of fun telling people my snake story, and you'll be relieved to hear that no-one has ever found a snake in their house. In the garage, yes; in the loft, yes; in the paddock, definitely yes; but in the house? No! Which suggests to me that it isn't very common and that you're unlikely to see one if you come and visit!

As I look out of the window now I can see a flock of wood ducks by the fence, and a couple of wallabies nibbling the grass about 20 metres away. Bucolic bliss; not a snake in sight.

A Hallowe'en visitor

I blogged about this on our house-building blog (http://lookout31.blogspot.com/), but thought you might be amused to read it here.... M has been away for a week at a techie conference in LA, and P was out at a party on Friday night, leaving Grub and me to celebrate Hallowe'en by ourselves. Since she was tired and I was tired and we were on our own this just consisted of dinner followed by Scooby Doo cartoons on the box, although we did manage to make a pumpkin lantern! It had been a hot day and was still hot in the evening which is part of the reason why I went to bed really late. The other reason was that I stayed up to finish Grub's recorder case (for those not acquainted with Steiner education, children play the recorder and weave a case for it, but as she needed hers quickly I was asked to do most of it in order to get it finished...). There are only so many evenings one can face watching recorded episodes of Rebus and weaving.

Anyway, at 2:30am Grub came into my room and asked if she could come into bed with me, and I told her to get her pillow, so she went out into the corridor and... trod on something and squealed. Thinking it must be a cockroach I got up, told her to get into my bed, and said I'd clean up and get her pillow, but when I turned on the light in the corridor I saw a.... snake! And I really did have to look twice in order to believe what I was seeing, because it was so unexpected! Luckily Grub hadn't been bitten...









The thing is, what do you do? I'm British - British people don't have much experience of snakes. Yes, there is one poisonous British snake, the adder, but I don't think it does much damage and it's pretty rare - I've seen one once, and only because I was walking on the South Downs, which is a common habitat. Coffs Harbour of course is full of the damned things, including very dangerous ones, and because we live 'on acres', as the phrase goes, it is to be expected that we would eventually see one, but outside, not in the house!

So there I was, in my T shirt, wondering what the hell to do, when said snake decided to make a right-turn into Grub's bedroom, which doesn't have a convenient 'way out for snakes'. I went and put on my knee-length Ugg boots (thick sheepskin, so I didn't think any fangs would get through them and I've read somewhere that most people are bitten on the ankles!) and followed the snake. Now at this point you are probably thinking I'm a complete fool, but what does one do? The worst possible scenario, as far as I could see, was 'losing' the snake because I'd never be settled in the house again... and I couldn't put Grub back in her room with the thought of a snake on the loose. So I followed the snake until it went under her bed and looked as if it was going to attack me (i.e. reared up, folded its neck into an 'S' shape and looked a bit scary!), and we eyeballed each other for about 15 minutes or so until finally it relaxed a bit and I was able to dash out and grab the phone and the phonebook, and get Grub's pillow, book and teddy so that she could curl up on my bed.










Luckily I'd read about the Australian animal rescue organisation, WIRES, and found their number. It didn't say it was 24 hours, but a lovely lady called Donna answered the phone and said she'd get a reptile person to call me back, so I waited for another 15 minutes or so until Tom rang. He's at Nana Glen, which is about 25 kms from here and he was understandably reluctant to come out at what was by then 3:30am, but when I told him about the shape of the snake's neck when it looked as if it was about to bite me he said a very rude word and announced he was on his way and that I should take up position in the corridor and monitor the snake's movements. And that's where my stepson found me when he got in from his party; I advised him to go and wash off his 'zombie army officer' make up before Tom arrived!

When Tom did arrive it was all over pretty quickly. The snake had sloped off to a comfortable place wrapped around the bottom of Grub's basketball, behind a storage box (hmmm, what was that ball doing behind the box rather than in the box??), and he was able to catch it with a stick and a pillow case and take it away. It turned out to be a brown tree snake, which is venemous but not madly so, rather than the feared Eastern Brown snake, and apparently it is quite unusual for one to come into the house, especially when we've got so many juicy lizards OUTSIDE!

The excitement was all over by 4:30am, and we rang M, who was sitting in the departure lounge at Los Angeles airport, to tell him all about it. Unfortunately my hopes of catching up on sleep were somewhat vain as the phone started ringing at 7:30am and didn't stop until I finally got up!