I didn't take a lot of photos in Adelaide. I did walk around a lot, but my camera is quite heavy so there will be only a few shots recording the 5 days I was there.

This is the old bandstand in Elder Park down by the Torrens River (for the political economists out there, the river is named after Col. Robert Torrens: major contribution he made was the land-titling system we use in Australia). I never really noticed how lovely the bandstand is before, but I do have fond memories because this is where we started many of our anti-war demos back in the 1960s and '70s. Once, while visiting the Revolution Museum in Hanoi, I saw a photo of a person haranguing the crowd from this bandstand. I'm quite proud to say that the said person was my ex-partner (it was before I met him and actually I was overseas at the time of that demonstration).


On that walk, I continued down along the lakeside to the weir. Here's a photo of the (weed-infested) river or creek below the weir.


And here is the lake formed by the weir. The pink building or sore thumb is the Hyatt.


This is the old Adelaide Gaol. The railway tracks run between it and the river, so I couldn't get closer. It was still open in the 1970s and many of my friends spent an uncomfortable night there.


I'm intrigued by this graffiti on the wall of the old gaol. Could it read "Fuck Screws"?


On the Thursday I went to visit my brother and we went for a walk along the creek opposite his house. The big lump in the tree is a koala!!! This is 20 minutes from the city centre.


The creek runs through a narrow linear park.


Sunset from my brother's verandah.


The following Saturday I set out bright and early on the road back to Sydney. I went due east from Adelaide (morning coffee in Lameroo), across the northwestern corner of Victoria (lunch at Ouyen - what a dump!), to Tooleybuc and then up to the Sturt Highway and on to Narrandera. The next instalment in this epic will be about Narrandera.

Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith were two painters. Bowen was born in Adelaide in 1893, went to Europe at the age of 20 and never returned. The other was born in Sydney in 1892 and, apart from a couple of 2 year trips to England (you had to go by ship in those days, so it was never a short trip), lived there all her long life. The book about their lives by Drusilla Modjeska is wonderful. Stella Bowen wrote an autobiography in 1940 Drawn from Life, left a raft of letters behind and is referred to in the papers of people like Ezra Pound, Margaret Cole (née Postgate) and Edith Sitwell, so her story is firmly based on documentary evidence. The story of Cossington Smith has a much more flimsy basis - there is way too much speculation for my rather academic taste. Nonetheless it presents an interesting puzzle, if only it could be unravelled. How could somebody produce such brilliant works and be a pioneer of modern art in Australia without ever having participated in the artistic life of London or Paris, having been taught by a Neapolitan impressionist émigré (Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo) and having lived all her life in an outer suburb (Turramurra) of Sydney? The two years living in Winchester, within a short train ride of London, must surely hold some kind of key, but there is no shred of evidence available! Moreover, in interviews given when she was 90 and in a nursing home, she denies such grand origins for her ideas. Yet in 1915 she had painted the first ever clearly modernist Australian painting . Surely you can't paint like Van Gogh or Cézanne when you’ve only ever seen reproductions of the work on the walls of your art teacher's studio?

Bowen was better known during her lifetime as the consort of Ford Madox Ford, a writer apparently well known in England and among the expatriate community in France,though his reputation never made it to the colonies. Her book is really about the difficulty of living with a man and trying to be an artist at the same time. In Modjeska's hands it makes a very gripping story and one from which Bowen emerges with huge dignity, as well as some bloody good paintings. (In her case, however, a lot of the paintings are lost). She and Ford separated in 1928 - he having spent her Australian middle-class capital already - and she struggled with poverty for the rest of her life. But it was only after the split that her painting came good. The story is a very moving one. I think Modjeska (or was it Bowen?) sets up a rather straw-mannish opposition between Love and Art, but it is surely the story of thousands of women of talent who have tried to make something of and for themselves in the face of ego-centric and demanding men.

Ford never understood why I found it so difficult to paint whilst I was with him. He thought I lacked the will to do it at all costs. That was true, but he did not realise that if I had had the will to do it at all costs, my life would have been oriented quite differently. I should not have been available to nurse him through the daily strain of his own work; to walk and talk with him whenever he wanted, and to stand between him and circumstances. Pursuing an art is not just a matter of finding the time – it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.

The title of the book comes from a story of Stravinsky who,apparently, demanded total silence from his wife and kids while he was working,including during lunch!

But Love and being around to pick up the laundry are not the same thing. Cossington Smith also had a home drudge: for most of her life it was her younger sister Madge, who the parents kept at home to look after themselves and her painterly sister. Modjeska shows several pictures of Madge in which she looks unremittingly downcast. After WW2, when the parents were both dead, Madge went back to England and her pre-WW1 fiancé who, despite having married somebody else, had become single again. Of Grace, Modjeska says, "Her lack of domestic proficiency, maintained over a lifetime, was quite an achievement."

Neither woman achieved much recognition during their most productive years. Incredibly,there was a touring exhibition of modern art in 1939 (Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin and everyone). It had to be shown in department stores because the state galleries (AGNSW and NGV) wouldn’t touch the stuff with a barge pole. In the end, all of the paintings were stored in a basement at the AGNSW for the duration of WW2. Despite protests, the Gallery refused to put them on show and not a single painting was purchased for any collection. They’re all now in major collections in Europe and North America. Modjeska quotes Robert Menzies, he was briefly Prime Minister in 1939, telling the modern artists that they would sink into oblivion because people like him (people with money) would never buy them!

In Cossington Smith's case there were extremely antagonistic reviews by male defenders of 'true art'. She and a handful of colleagues were virtually alone trying to do modern art in this country (and only she and Roland Wakelin didn’t really have the option or desire to escape abroad like Bowen). It wasn't until the Second World War that a new generation of male artists found modernism.They, of course, didn't acknowledge the legacy of their female forbears, but commanded attention as the pioneers of modern art in Australia. Cossington Smith's only champion before 1967 was a female art critic, Edith Anderson, who had access to the press because of her husband's position in the NSW Governor's office. But Anderson was also a lone voice among a chorus of anti-modernist male critics. GCS was by no means the only female modernist whose work had to overcome the male prejudices - there were also Grace Crowley, Dorrit Black, Margaret Preston (Bowen's teacher in Adelaide before the First War), Clarice Beckett, Thea Proctor and Nora Heysen. Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre got more attention, but the latter also felt he could survive better in Europe.
I wonder why it is that such a high proportion of these female modernists - Bowen, Preston, Black and Heysen - came from Adelaide?

Edith Anderson and her ear trumpet (from the book). I couldn't resist this - I thought ear trumpets were a myth.


Cossington, the house in Turramurra named after Grace's father's English home village. I drove up there this afternoon to have a look.


The street, Kuring-gai Avenue.


Added to my list:
Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life
VirginiaWoolf, To the Lighthouse
Christina Stead, For Love Alone

My mother and I went walking last Sunday in the Adelaide Botanical Gardens.

The Amazon water lily, originally planted in 1868, has its own new glasshouse. The flower is about a foot across (larger in the wild) and the leaves are as big as a dinner table - and with huge, inch-long thorns underneath! The leaves have been known to grow to 165 cm wide (5'6") when the water is deeper, but here they're only about 3-4'.




The old palm house from Bremen (1875) is dedicated to Madagascar.

The Palm House was opened in 1877 and has been a focus in the garden since that time. It features a fascinating collection of plants from the island of Madagascar, once part of the great supercontinent Gondwana. About 150 million years ago, Madagascar and Australia were still part of Gondwana, its evolving flora producing the ancient ancestors of today’s modern native plants. Many of the plants are at risk or endangered in their natural habitat.

The plants are from the dry southwestern part of Madagascar and, if they are related to anything Australian, it would probably be on account of their water retention abilities and the grey-green colour of the palm. I certainly couldn't find anything else familiar. Thorns are the dominant theme in this glasshouse.








From the Amazon, to Madagascar to... New Caledonia, or Nouvelle Calédonie, whence, apparently, comes the genus Araucaria. For many years I thought Araucaria was a cryptic crossword setter for The Guardian, until I discovered that it was a botanical genus which includes the 'Monkey Puzzle' tree. Here we see the Araucaria known locally as the Norfolk Island pine on the left and right, and the Araucaria Columnaris from New Caledonia in the middle.


Here is another Araucaria, known as the Bunya Pine:


Norfolk Island is out there in the Pacific, somewhere north of New Zealand, east of Australia and south of New Caledonia. The trees are bizarre. Here's a young one from my walk around La Perouse a couple of weeks ago.

I've had a good weekend in Adelaide, including a visit to my brother's house. Across the road, down by the creek, is a patch of European stuff which was making a nice autumnal display.


About a hundred years ago, somebody planted a row of English oaks. Their leaves are just starting to turn, although the plane trees have mostly dropped their leaves and the poplars are already bare.


Walking down towards the creek.


The track on the other side. I'm not sure what all these are, but there's quite a lot of hawthorn on the left (still green, with red berries).


That side of the creek is in almost permanent shade. So a lot of the trees are covered in lichen.


The creek.


Back on the other side, looking at what my brother calls the Mount of Olives. The big Aleppo pine died in the drought, as did quite a few other things by the look of them - strangled by the olives, which are a declared weed in Adelaide. Most of that hill is in the state park, so my brother takes his chain saw over there every now and then. He showed us two giant piles of olive and hawthorn that he's cut down from an area the size of somebody's living room.


The first photo above shows what the hillside will look like when he finishes the job. All the stuff in the top right part of that photo is regenerated native grasses and shrubs after the olives were cleared off.

When the British settled South Australia the ruling class had to have Hill Stations to escape from the summer heat on the plains, so a number of villages sprung up in the Adelaide Hills where the wealthy established their English-style shade gardens and rose beds. Alexander Downer, the former foreign minister, grew up in a stately home called Arbury Park just outside Bridgewater, the farthest village from the city (but not the highest) and originally connected to it by a railway involving a 2-3 hour trip. Maybe he still lives there. I spent a wonderful year in my student days living in an old cottage at Aldgate, the next village down the line towards Adelaide. Once I got used to all the hairpin bends in the road, I could make it into the city in about 35 minutes. We had lunch on Thursday at the Bridgewater pub. It is now only 20 minutes from the city centre by a freeway tunnelling through the hills and is, therefore, starting to become suburban, though the core of the old village is still there, full of English trees.

We did not eat lunch at the Bridgewater Mill. Although the food would not have been a whole lot more expensive than at the pub, the wine would certainly have added a chunk to the credit card bill. Originally a flour mill, it was established in 1860 by a Mr Dunn who was later to become the victim of brand name theft. The water wheel still turns, though I cannot find any information on what for it turns. Does it power the rest of the building or does it just pump water back through the mill race (which has long been disconnected from it's original source)? In the 1980s the mill was purchased by Petaluma Wines (now owned by Lion Nathan, a New Zealand brewer which, like all brewers, has diversified into wine in order to stay profitable). If you dine at the Bridgewater Mill you get a double whammy, food by Le Tu Thai - one of the country's leading chefs, a Vietnamese who cooks in the French style with, of course, Asian influences otherwise he wouldn't be Australian - and wine by Brian Croser, one of the country's top winemakers. The restaurant is upstairs and on the patio, the wine cellar (with half a million bottles) is downstairs.

The mill from the car park.


Through the wheel. I guess the dampness helps keep the wine cellar cool.

The 19th century European-Australian idea of a nature reserve was something full of European plants - a reminder of home in what was still seen as a hostile environment. So until my brother got going the area was full of willow trees, blackberries, Scotch thistles, sweet peas and god knows what else running wild. The olive trees were planted somewhere else and got spread by birds, but they soon took over in the drier parts, away from the creek.

Across the road from my brother's place was a stand of huge trees - mostly Aleppo pines and oaks. Half of one of the Aleppo pines fell down during a storm and the whole tree had to be removed. My brother persuaded the local council to cut down all of them. After they were cut down, they counted the rings and realised that they'd chopped down an avenue that had probably been planted for Federation in 1901.


Before that episode my brother had been keen to get rid of everything foreign, but since then he's decided he's not really against the oaks. There are seven huge old oaks. He thought maybe somebody had planted them to remind themselves of Sevenoaks in Kent and, feeling that he has already offended the ghosts of the Federation citizens, he has accepted the oak trees. They make a totally different landscape down by the creek. And anyway, he says, it's a small pocket that hasn't spread.


There are other European plants down there too. My brother discovered that people even used to grow crops in this so-called public reserve - at least up the top end near his place. Somebody had actually terraced the hillside on the far side of the creek by building stone retaining walls to make flat spaces for crops. While he can identify every native species in area, he's not so good on the European ones, only that they create dense shade, as distinct from the rather spindly growth and sparse shade from the local species. I don't think he has plans to get rid of this shady dell, but he has already planted river red gums on the former farmer's lower terrace and is intending to work uphill from there. I have no idea what the local council, who are supposed to manage the reserve, think of this (but I suspect they'll go with anything that keeps him off their backs)!

Part of my brother's woods - the section in the former lucerne paddock/car dump. He planted every single tree himself, mostly about 10 years ago. They are all native to the area. He keeps a fire trail mown through the middle of it - just in case.


Now he's experimenting with various plants to create an understory that will attract small birds like the blue wrens and firetails that inhabit the bushes he also planted along the roadside in front of his block.

I had Christmas lunch on my brother's verandah as usual. It was very pleasant - the temperature was in the mid-20s, it was sunny, we ate a load of salad and we went for a walk afterwards. He lives in a Depression era cottage on 15 acres in the foothills. My parents bought it 50 years ago and planned to build a big house further up the hill. But they decided to get divorced instead and then the tenants of the cottage had a disaster - the husband died and left his wife with a large number of children (about 7 I think) to bring up on by herself on the pension. So my father let her stay there for hardly any rent and the place just ran down (a typical gesture from my father who thought only of tax deductions and land value). The sons filled up the former lucerne paddock with dead cars that were picturesquely covered in weeds. My brother still finds bits of cars down there and on Christmas Day we found a spark plug. When her kids had all grown up Mrs D moved out and my father and brother started clearing things up and restoring the cottage. The place has 4 rooms and is clad in corrugated iron. The interior walls and floors are of timber that creaks. The upper parts of the interior walls and the ceilings are covered with pressed tin. The front verandah had to be reconstructed as it had rotted and the lean-to at the back was extended and improved to make a proper kitchen and bathroom.

My brother eventually moved in about 12 years ago. Since then he has worked constantly to eliminate weeds from the land and replant it with native vegetation. Mrs D had almond and citrus trees next to the house, but my brother has planted cherries, plums, a quince and peaches - the kangaroos and lorikeets eat most of those, but he doesn't mind because there are kangaroos and lorikeets, koalas, kookaburras and all sorts of other native species hanging around since he got rid of all the weeds. He also lobbied continuously at the local council to clean up the nature reserve across the road. It's a long narrow strip of land along the creek which was the first such reserve declared in SA - some time in the late 19th century. Finally, the council set aside a budget of $10,000 a year which means that they clear the weeds and replant about 100 metres every year. This is improving the health of the creek and there are now several species of native fish living in it. One of the major weeds is olive trees and my brother, having got them all off his own land has taken his chain saw across into the reserve and begun clearing patches from there as well. His neighbour Luke has done the same with his own land. They are a bunch of fanatics, but they're gradually turning a weed patch into a beautiful piece of bushland.

Mrs D died a couple of years ago. Her kids scattered her ashes in the reserve across the road from the house. My brother says he saw her ghost last week. I like this story and I like that my brother has kept in touch with the D family.

This is the view across to Luke's block.


And this is the view west from the verandah through the orchard to the woods that my brother planted.

I've been back in my hometown visiting the family.

Took these last Sunday in the park across the road from my mother's flat. The local Kurdish community were having a picnic. There was a band playing incredibly hypnotic and monotonous music and a long line of dancers going around and around in a big circle.




My mother wanted to visit her hometown, Port Pirie, to do some research on her family history, so we hired a car and drove up there on Monday and Tuesday (230 km north of Adelaide). I'd only been there once before and it was nearly 50 years ago, so it was interesting for me to visit, not to mention all the little towns along the way. The landscapes are so utterly different from those around Sydney - we were in a zone that gets only 10 inches of rain a year so it is extremely dry at the moment. The rain should come soon, but we're having an Indian summer, so the weather was lovely. Early settlers hugely underestimated the dryness of the place and made ambitious plans for settlement on 20 acre farms - long since abandoned or consolidated into large scale barley and sheep farms. Most of the villages have heaps of abandoned buildings, though a few have been renovated for arty, crafty shops, bed and breakfasts, and the like. God knows how they make a living from the trickle of tourists passing through.

Port Pirie itself has a smelter, originally established in the 1880s for the mines at Broken Hill. Since the main ore from Broken Hill was lead, the town has suffered serious pollution and health problems. The smelter is still functioning, but now imports most of the ore, and one supposes that after the report that was published on the extent of lead poisoning in the 1970s it must have been cleaned up a lot. Parts of the town have been demolished because the land on which the houses (workers' houses of course) were built was too poisonous.

We also found this fenced-off area on the outskirts of town.

The area includes a water tower! We wondered if the citizens of Pirie had been drinking radioactive water.

The explanation is found in this paper by Helen Caldicott.
Wastes from the processing of Radium Hill uranium concentrate (1955-62) and of rare earths (1970-72) at a site adjacent to the sea at Port Pirie were stored in a tailings dam. The management of the tailings dam deteriorated over the years to the point that children were playing on its surface.

After six years of community pressure and after high tides breached the walls of the tailings dam in 1981, the dam wall was increased in height, the tailings were covered under a metre of slag, clay and topsoil, the area was re-fenced, and a trench was constructed to drain run-off water into an evaporation pond.

It took 30 years to take these stopgap remedial measures.

I am now in Adelaide where I was born and my parents still live. I left here 13 years ago, but it is still rather familiar. Physically very little has changed, although I hardly know anybody except my family any more.

I'm in the internet cafe around the corner from Mum's place. It is called Ngapartji.
I have done little since I got here on Wednesday afternoon but shop and visit the family. I've done a year's worth of shopping and probably won't be able to fit it all in my suitcase. Never mind. It is easy to buy a year's worth of clothes here, since everything is located within half a km.

Word is that consumers are not in the market and many small businesses are on the verge of bankruptcy. This doesn't surprise me at all since the state economy is probably one of the weakest in Australia.

I get different impressions. On the one hand, if there is a worldwide depression coming, this place will probably suffer more. On the other hand, because people here are perhaps more conscious of their vulnerability, they seem to put more effort into finding ways to develop new industries and get things going again. Quite a few people here are heavily into R&D in the telecommunications and IT industries and, on top of that, formation of clusters including researchers, government and businesses. There seems to be more planning going on. Therefore, they might suffer more in the short term (from the coming recession), but survive better in the long term. Well, it's a theory anyway.

Meanwhile, compared to Sydney, it is pretty quiet.

Parents have slowed down a lot. Especially father. Considering how slowly he moves and speaks it is truly amazing that a few weeks ago he climbed up in the ceiling to fix some electrical wiring. Unfortunately he then slipped and ripped the biceps tendon of his right arm off the bone. Which then had to be surgically reattached.

Tonight I'm having dinner with my godfather. A person I haven't seen for maybe 40 years!!! Maybe it would be better to refer to him as my father's cousin. I remember him as very ebullient and rather intimidating. When I was a small, shy girl, he always roared about calling me names I didn't like and, indeed, felt offended by, though I've no doubt they were not intended that way.

Yesterday I met another cousin of my father, a retired neurologist. We weren't sure if we'd ever met before, but I remember his mother's house in North Adelaide. When I was a kid we visited there sometimes and what I remember is neither the house nor its inhabitants, but the two metal objects on the footpath outside. They were leftovers from an earlier era - things to tie your horse up to and they were two black boys, dressed in B&W Minstrel-type costumes.

Current thinking re Melbourne is that I may have to give up altogether. I'll wait until I've been there and seen how things pan out. But I'm not optimistic. While H is undoubtedly a very interesting person, he seems a bit too self-absorbed (contrary to initial impressions). I guess I need a bit more confirmation that the interest is not all in one direction.