an evening exhibit

Linking time  ---  If you cut through the Carlton Gardens between Rathdowne and Nicholson Streets, and head between the Royal Exhibition Building and Melbourne Museum, you’ll find yourself a small figure in a vast grey plaza, dwarfed by space and scale on both sides. This open space is a physical span that metaphorically links architectural achievement from very different points in history, creating a dialogue between contrasting tastes and modes of design. Walking this line between two grand constructs, you could be tracing the midpoint in a filmic split screen. The 1880 Exhibition Building stands like a regal aunt next to the youthful contemporary edges of the Melbourne Museum. Its dome is modelled ambitiously on Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence, and the Italian Renaissance influence cries of the bold European aspirations of early Melbourne.

Facades  ---  I’ve often stared at the Royal Exhibition Building as I rode past on the tram or walked this way. For all its World Heritage–listed status and fame, I’ve found its appearance to be rather one-dimensional, like a stamped piece of plain white cardboard. Great dome aside, there’s something particularly artificial about this building’s facade, as though it were a theatre set propped up from behind. It’s easy to imagine pressing a palm flat to its side and watching it topple to the ground with a sudden clap. It reminds me of the magic garden a friend gave me once for a present, which had a Venetian-style architectural facade erected amid a coloured backdrop on a bed of sprout seeds. A little water each day saw the seeds flourish, and an ensuing alfalfa crop grew a spindly garden around the cardboard building.

A way of seeing  ---  On the night I walked the grey plaza that connects the two buildings, twilight was brightening. It’s a paradox perhaps, but twilight sometimes feels this way as the sky hangs luminous, rather than the darkening that it is. It was solstice, the true start of winter. It was the start of a new season and things appeared to me differently. The Exhibition Building loomed solid and majestic, lit by electric light from within and the falling sun from behind. The light was an embellishment. More than that, it was a fleshing out. As I walked I noticed too that the building was at my feet. Its dome reflected neatly in a puddle in the forecourt. It had been raining solidly for days. Areas of the state had flooded. We’d had an earthquake substantial enough to have me bracing beneath a doorway. In the puddle I saw an alternative dimension revealed at my feet. History had become alive. My breath dispersed into the cold night before the cut-out building that was now transformed, full and substantial. 

at home by the sea

a homecoming 

is never complete without a visit to the sea. Just hours after my arrival in New Zealand, we find ourselves down at the beach. Leaning against the railing, camera in hand. Staring out at the horizon, watching waves crest and crash, then crest and crash again. Conversation seems superfluous. Memories and aspirations converge in what seems like a single, drawn-out moment. The sea carries them away again in its thunderous motion before we can grasp them.

a few days later, 

we walk along the beach to the rocks at the headland. We scattered my father’s ashes here many years ago. We feel free here. Nothing exists except the wind in my ears and the teal green sea frothing and slapping across the rocks. My mother tells me a story of our childhood here on the beach, how my father dragged me through the water on an enormous piece of seaweed, how he built a chair out of sand for her, how she was at the time heavily pregnant with my brother.

we have to walk

to the headland because the road has been closed off to cars. Once you could drive along and up the steep hill to the lookout. We often did this with my grandparents when we were younger, parking at the top and watching the violent waves crash beneath us. The sea is a powerful lure. Its tide commands the blood, breath and dreams of a person. Since the council reduced access to the rocks, the suicide rate has dropped dramatically.

the sea 

is a 

place

of

contradiction, 

a meeting place of opposites. A place of baptism, a place of farewell. You could watch the sea all day and never see the same wave twice. It’s the tidal repetition, the unending ebb and flow, that creates a sensation of stillness. Of eternity. A perfect way to end one year and prepare to see in another. Standing seaside, at the edge of future and past, love and loss, and more of both to come.

desert dreaming

For an hour or more I have forgotten my destination, lost in the fog of a pre-dawn departure, contenting myself with aerial routine – settling in, taking off, drinking unremarkable airline coffee and then reading. In time though, to no apparent call, I look up from my page and turn to look out the window. Immediately I am presented with an altered landscape. Beneath me lies a pale ochre expanse. It is mostly flat but not undifferentiated. In fact, deep grooves and rises feature across the surface, twisting, wending and doubling back. A ridge pushes its way through the earth and presides reptilian-like, archaic, knobbly like an ancient spine with no head nor tail to be found.  

We are heading for the first time to Alice Springs, to the Northern Territory, to the heart of this country: a place as yet known to us only through myth and dreams. We are flying above the desert. Everything is new and unknown to me. Is that a lake to my west? My companion shrugs, also a novice. And that expanse, blueish, pale. Is it dried, desiccated? Sand, salt?

I look to the horizon, and through the clouds the hazy orange meets the blue and merges, opalescent. Creases in the earth appear like long, thick folds in a dress. Elements collide. We fly now for certain above a body of water. A river claws its way across the land, nubile, its tributaries like limbs outstretched from its winding body and angling for grip. Or, wait: is it a river of trees, a dry ravine, arid but full of growth?

The desert is no desert from above; it is full of treasure and mystery and later I will understand how naive it was to expect barrenness. This is semi-arid terrain sustaining much life. Ravines spill across the land beneath me like long, dark, wet hair splayed down a back; like a rope untwisted and separated into parts and lain down, dropping anchor. Why these water images for a dry land? I wonder. They come perfectly formed like snapshots, paintings, poems prepared and left in my path. These are stories communicated from the land.

Later, settling in with friends in Alice, I learn the lake I spotted is indeed a dry salt lake. A mirage that appears on the long, hot terrestrial traverse to Alice Springs. I picture the travellers who encounter it after driving for hours, who press hard on the car brakes, alight keenly and run for the water, hoping to relieve their overheated bodies, only to realise the error upon reaching its edge. Disappointment is a dryness in the throat, the rasping of parched lungs; the body remains pushed to its limit in the heat, veins swollen and visible beneath the skin. 

My friends tell me one day they will be considered Alice locals when they witness the Todd River flowing for the third time. Driving to Uluru, up close to the red dust and cracked earth, we encounter tourists at a roadhouse sunbaking on a green patch of grass beneath sprinklers, amply cooled by the extensive subterranean Artesian water source. At home, in Melbourne, we have water restrictions; children grow up not knowing the pleasure of sprinklers and water fights.

The desert, I realise, is an enigma; elusive, contradictory, lawless, magical. In all my imaginings, I never dreamt of water.

Flying home, I look out the window again and watch the shadows of clouds across the pigmented earth. I try to spot the same ravines, the river with its tributaries, the salt lake, but the desert keeps its secrets this time. There is a perfect, defined line where blue meets orange and the horizon appears before us.