When the tourists leave town

I feel like the Venetians must in October when all the tourists leave.  Suddenly after the Australia Day long weekend my town is back to normal: you can turn right onto the main road, get a park outside the post office and skateboard along the side roads without being run over. 

First heat, then flood

Blueberry bush with heat-dried leaves (left),puddle with umbrella reflection (middle) and wet shoes(right)

The leaves of the poor little blueberry bush that I have been nurturing were burnt by the 46C heat last week ... and now we have a major rain storm.  Australia has always had extreme weather but it is getting even more erratic with global warming. The poor folks in southern Queensland are faced with flooded houses yet again, the second time in two years. One in a hundred year floods are becoming one in ten year floods, or one in two year floods.

Local school ...

Chris Masters: Uncommon Soldier

I just came back from a talk by Chris Masters about his new book Uncommon Soldier: The Story of the Making of Today's Diggers. He is an excellent speaker and his book looks very interesting as well. For anyone interested in understanding a bit more about the military I think this is a 'must read'.

Chris Masters

I drew Chris Masters as he spoke and when she saw my picture, one of the women sitting at my table said, "Oh you should get him to sign it, I'm sure he would."
I smiled as I remembered the trouble that Helen Clark got herself into when she signed a picture for charity under similar circumstances. There was a big fuss because she had signed a picture she had not drawn herself. An easy mistake to make.

Self portrait in dim light

Acrylic, 51 x 72 cm

Nowadays, even when I don't have a painting project underway I keep an empty canvas on my easel because I have learned that if the materials are at hand the paintings often arrive by themselves. This is one such painting. It drew itself on Monday evening and I finished it off yesterday. I didn't have much light as you can tell.

When you paint self portraits from a mirror, which is what I did, you get a mirror image which is opposite of how you look to others. Sort of amusing and it just shows that you that you never see yourself as others see you. The mirror was perched precariously on top of the canvas and it fell off as I painted ... so I had to finish the painting using the mirror shards.

Mirror with paint daubs

Blue Tulips

 

I have just published Blue Tulips, an autobiographical book about love, music and art.  Love -  music - art,  what more could you possibly want? Wagner you say? Yes, well of course Wagner is in the book as well ... and happy 200th birthday to him!


Blue Tulips is online as a Kindle book at Amazon : http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1T64E0



You can download free Kindle software onto a PC or any other e-device to read Kindle books.

Blue tulips is at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1T64E0

Cooked vege patch

The heat has passed, the damage is done. The vege garden cooked in the record 46C heat today. The  young fresh bean plants are now dried specimens. Everything suffered apart from the very heat resistant plants and even they look unhappy. Sage is normally pretty resistant but it curled its leaves.

I think it is time the rest of the population sued the climate skeptics who prevent drastic measures being taken to save the planet.

Poor little bean plant

Pumpkin

.

46C in Sydney

Holy moly ... we are being cooked alive.

46C in Sydney today

I was in Sydney this morning ... it was searingly hot. It reached 46C by 2:30 although thankfully I was nearly home by that time. As the (thankfully air-conditioned)  train traveled very slowly along the Hawkesbury River I wondered if the heat was causing problems and crossed my fingers, hoping there wouldn't be a problem that would trap us in a hot train for hours. Looks like I was one of the lucky ones.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:
"Transport problems
The record heat across the city triggered multiple failures on Sydney's train system as steel wires buckled and a hose used to run a key signalling system melted.
There have been at least three equipment failures on the CityRail network on Thursday afternoon, triggering widespread delays across the city as train commuters swelter in air-conditioned and non-airconditioned carriages.
At Dora Creek, on the Central Coast, the heat caused an overhead wire to buckle onto a train at about 1.30pm. About 250 passengers were trapped on the train for about half an hour, until CityRail could organise another service for them to switch to."

Now I am back home and it feels like  ....  like an oven. Everything is hot. The floorboards are hot underfoot, the window panes (even in the shade) are very hot to touch.  Luckily I left the shades down and the curtains drawn at home and it was only (!) 37 inside when I arrived back.

Sophia

This Sophia, painted last Saturday. Sophia is three years old (and a bit) and as you can see from the painting she has a determined streak.

Sophia, 3 years 3 months old

Black and yellow flying insects

Is it the heat? Suddenly lots of insects have appeared on the back lawn. They look like black-mushroom type growths from afar but up close you see lots of black winged insects have climbed up the grass leaves. They are all over the vegetable garden as well. What are they I wonder?

Bugs crawling up a tomato plant

Yellow bodies, black wings

On a pumpkin leaf

Sketching reveals one's thoughts

The New Year has arrived with fuss and fireworks. A happy 2013 to you!

During my New Year tidy-up I found this sketch of an art school tutor I drew in Dunedin in 2008. I must have thought that this fellow was a bit ageist to produce a drawing such as this ... or was it just the bit of emerging gray in his hair that conjured up this image? I was a mature age student in Dunedin and was not alone. But in Hamburg I was the only mature age student in the class and the staff were a bit flummoxed to have me there.

Four faces over time

Blue Waters

Brisbane Waters is nowhere near Brisbane but at my back door, on the Central Coast just north of Sydney in New South Wales.

Brisbane Waters near Woy Woy

We have a new local council and one of their ideas is to re-name Brisbane Waters to something less confusing. Big Blue Puddle perhaps, or the Aboriginal equivalent?

Christmas

Christmas is over? Time to go home?

Christmas

Christmas? So soon?

Teasing

When I was growing up teasing was seen as a way to toughen up children to prepare them for life. It was only later when I was living in Europe did I realise that teasing was not universal and that societies without teasing produced more secure citizens. When you think about it rationally humiliating children is bound to have deleterious effects.

Prank calls seem to be most prevalent in societies where teasing is rife, societies which also have the biggest problem with bullying. Australia is trying to deal with bullying in schools but I think the tragic results of the recent 'prank' call shows that we need to tackle the issue on a whole-of-society basis.

The so-called 'prank' call

When I was in Slovenia in September the economic downturn was biting and an art dealer told me that everyone would prefer to live in Australia. I looked around at the Slovenians sitting in the relaxed but arty coffee shops or wandering along the picturesque streets and was at a loss to explain that it wasn't all roses in Australia. Now the so called Kate Middleton 'prank-call' has provided the explanation for me.

Several years ago a barista making my coffee in Sydney's Hyde Park told me he used to work at Sydney Airport. I told him how much I liked the coffee at the Italian coffee shop there and he said “It used to be good I know but it has changed. All the shops have been bought by Canberra politicians."

Those were the years when John Howard was Prime Minister and Max Moore-Wilton was head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Some time later I read that Moore-Wilton had become CEO of Sydney Airport and I remembered the words of that barista.

Sydney Airport became a place everyone wished they could avoid. Passengers were (and still are) forced to walk for miles around cosmetic/alcohol counters before boarding their flights, stale food (I have friends who have become very sick after eating it) is served by harried and obviously low-paid worker and short term parking areas for those picking up incoming passengers was abolished and replaced by threatening men in fluro-jackets who forced everyone into astronomically priced parking stations. It became the worst possible welcome to Australia for overseas guests and Sydneysiders were very unimpressed.

Now Moore-Wilton is in the news again as Chair of Austereo which owns 2Day FM, the Sydney radio station that played that so-called "prank" that has caused the death of a British nurse. 2Day FM management vetted and approved the 'prank' call. Local radio shock-jocks, the type of people who put out mis-information (many are climate-change-deniers) and encourage others in their prejudices, are not only tolerated here but are popular and have been able to push the boundaries of good-taste with impunity.

There are a lot of Australians who are embarrassed and now appalled at their behaviour. When I voted in a Sydney newspaper's poll about the 'prank' (before the nurse's death) I was one of 61% who said they thought the hoax was silly and juvenile.  This large swath of the population who finds such 'humour' distasteful has been disenfranchised.  You are regarded as a poor sport if you complain and are bullied into silence. (Try ringing up one of the shock jocks to put a reasoned point of view and you will see what I mean.) Let's hope this changes but I am not very hopeful. Commentaries in the newspapers find the death tragic but are being very quick to point the finger at everyone but themselves ... the hospital ... the British Press ... etc etc.  The chip on the shoulder mentality is alive and well.

Sydney by NIght

Sydney Opera House (left) and Harbour Bridge at midnight

Yesterday was very windy but by midnight when the host of a Christmas party I attended took his guests onto the rooftop of his apartment building to look at the view the wind had died down. The evening was balmy, the view spectacular and we remaining guests lounged along the railing watching the lights of a huge ocean liner as it moved along the harbour.

A new laptop

My laptop died. It was bought in 2007 so some people would say it was old .... but not me. In the interim I have been using my travel EeePC. You can do a whole lot on these little machines, but they do have their limits.

Last week I got a new laptop a Dell Inspiron 17R Special Edition that reviews said has whizz bang insides in its rather old fashioned exterior. Certainly it is enormous and you wouldn't want to carry it far. It is also fast ... and hopefully can deal with video editing software reasonable well. We shall see.

EeePC (left) and Dell 17" (right)

Brisbane Waters

I made a card from a recent painting of the Brisbane Waters. Not that anyone buys cards any more because postage has become so exorbitant it makes you think twice about sending cards. Perhaps I should figure out how to make my own e-cards. Now there's an idea.

NSW Central Coast Greeting Card

Port Navalo .... in 1981

 I have just found a couple of little sketches I made in 1981 in Port Navalo in France. We spent a very happy family holiday there.

Sydney by night.

Sydney Opera House

This is where I have been for the past three days - and late into the night. The Sydney Opera House is a wonderful place to work, especially when you come out at night to a view like this.

The photos were taken on my Android mobile phone. It is amazing what sort of quality these small devices can produce but you have to  keep still or you just get lots of lines of lights.

Photographs of city lights usually make me feel a bit lonesome because that is how I view skyscraper cities but I know and love Sydney  so when I look at the photo below I get conflicting  messages. Weird.

Sydney at night .... view from the opera house