An Opening Read online

  In the Fantin-Latour still life the palpability of the objects, the sense that they have been and will be touched is very important. Like the fat novel covered in blue paper the pears are heavy, like the red and black lacquer tray the apples are smooth and shiny, the quinces are downy, the mandarin has soft white fluff inside its skin and on the outside that typical pitted citrus texture full of tiny pores of oil which can be squeezed to get an intense scent. The camellias in their shiny blue glass vase have soft petals like flesh that can be marked with a fingernail, yet they also possess the perfection of porcelain. In a minute an entire flower may simply drop off its stem without a sound. It is an artwork that seems ordinary and slight yet is tenderly about texture and weight, both physical and emotional. The peaceful halls of the National Gallery in Washington, walking through them looking at pictures with my mother, trying to appease my sister with painted food, being quiet for my father, looking for my own place in words and images, are all there in the painting for me.

  Still life art is often said to be about the love of possessions, or simply death. It is said that the transience of the perfection of fruit and flowers caught at the point of ripeness imitates our own fragile state of mortality, but to me still life evokes conversation with another person through a book, food or a work of art; and above all stillness, a quiet receptiveness, a moment seized from the constant movement of life, a space of contemplation in which the openness of a vessel is like an opening heart turned towards another one.

  ——

  About once a week I take the dog to the park at the top of the street. As the bronze sign on the stone gatepost says, it was given to the people of Australia by Miss A.E. Ferguson in 1945 as a National Pleasure Resort. It is a type of bush called grey box woodland. You might call it scrub rather than bush. It is a dry scratchy place which once would have been thought of as wasteland waiting to be developed, turned into something real or useful. It is never watered. Today it is recognised as one of the best relict scrub reserves of the Adelaide Plains, a valuable reminder of the Black Forest that covered these foothills when Adelaide was first settled by Europeans in 1836. Even though this piece of land has never been farmed there are Cape lilies and soursobs, plantain and nasturtiums, weeds from South Africa, Europe and the rest of the world growing on it among the natives like grey box gum trees, clasping goodenias, orchids, sundews, native cherries and cranberries, wattles and delicate callitris pines. A representative few of the native plants have been signposted but most of them have resisted being made into a living museum and died, though the signs remain. Native cherry says a sign, while a few weeds stick their dry arms and legs up near the signs looking like, well, weeds. The park contains possums, lizards, butterflies, birds and sometimes koalas. One of the most noticeable things about it is its intense dryness compared to the watered green lawns associated with public spaces. The soil is a sandy grey powder and the vegetation has a petrified, stiff quality, as if becalmed or preserved beneath glass, held in the stillness of a silent enchantment. The paths through it are hard smooth compacted earth. Here and there in summer balls of honey-coloured resin shine out on the trunks of wattle trees.

  FEBRUARY

  the presence of the garden

  Out of himself like a thread the child spins pain

  and makes a net to catch the unknown world.

  Judith Wright

  In May 1961 we left North America and got on a ship to Europe. No one is alive now to tell me exactly how that decision was made, but I remember for our last meal we went to eat in Chinatown in New York with one of my father’s students whose father was Japanese and worked at the United Nations with U Thant. At a grand dinner he gave all the ladies an original ukiyo-e woodblock print by Hiroshige. In earlier days it hung in our house in a room with a number of other Japanese prints removed from books and framed, including a very mesmeric one by Utamaro of a woman looking into a mirror where her face is seen only in the mirror. There were also objects from Japan brought back by my mother’s family at the end of the war – two sets of fine wooden lacquer cocktail glasses – an orange-red set painted with gold images of irises, bamboo, wisteria, peony and cherry blossom and a black set with golden roosters. The black set had a matching cocktail shaker and a round tray. There was also a small ceramic teapot wrapped around with green leaves, butterflies, birds and pink flowers. These treasures were displayed upon an elegant glossy black free-standing dresser with drawers full of cloth napkins, candles, boxes of silver-plated cutlery including bone-handled fish knives and mother of pearl serving utensils, and shelves full of fragile glass and china behind sliding doors on one side and a low narrow shelf to display large books or magazines on the other side. It was called The Room Divider. Remembering these objects is like becoming aware of a scent rising out of an old drawer that brings back The Past even though what is actually being brought back is hard to grasp. It is not the evocative scent of flowers or perfume, it is more like the indefinable scent given off by the kind of old plastic that is no longer made, or the particular dust that collects on the metal of old slide projectors and cameras. It raises memories of being small and secret, hidden under tables or beds accompanied by miniature books and tableaux of toy animals.

  The ambience of my childhood buried inside me is deeply attached to these images and objects. It was a place of instability and mystery where people and places moved but some objects were stable, where images in pictures on the wall provided serenity and sustenance, and art was both consolation and communion. As I write these words I look really closely and deeply at objects, artworks and images in books. Somehow this refreshes and transforms my eyes and thoughts to such an extent that when I enter our rather worn bathroom its old pink tiles glow fresh and luminously at me, and when I walk through the house all the surfaces, shadows and shapes surrounding me are transfigured to become more real, more gracious, more eloquent than at other times when they are an almost invisible shell around me.

  In this old suburban house the presence of the garden is everywhere. Through open doorways and windows the outside comes in to be part of the inside, the eyes travel deep into trees, bushes and the spaces within them, the reflections on the wooden floor show the light reflecting off leaves, glowing shapes of sky and trees, stretched auras of light. The garden was not designed but grew. Its tangled harmony is like that of roses which no matter how carelessly you push them into a vase always fall into a beautiful arrangement.

  I have a postcard of an interior painted in 1955 by Grace Cossington Smith stuck to the wall in the laundry above the old square white ceramic trough. At first the painting appears to show a window, but it is really a mirror on a wardrobe next to another wardrobe with a door opening onto shelves on which piles of folded clothes are stacked. The mirror door reflects yet another door that is open to the verandah and the garden beyond. The whole work contains a lot of yellow in broad square panes of paint, like pieces of solid light pouring in to flood the room with radiance and a kind of dissolving energy. The postcard is next to the laundry window that looks out onto two plum trees and an olive tree, but it is the tiny painting that suggests an escape from domesticity which is nevertheless embedded in the domestic, the possibility of glowing visions in a lump of butter or a drop of light like a coin on a window sill.

  Our garden is a marvellous adventure, an untamed place, an anomaly amongst the overregulated gardens around us, a place to dream. There are parts of it where you can hide among bamboo and jasmine, where time is visible in overgrowth and undergrowth. There are miniature cities of succulents quietly growing into tiny empires, a two-metre high fennel clump, grape vines, untouched places of still dirt and silent stones, weeds that are herbs, herbs that grow like weeds, self-sown trees, piles of oyster shells, fig, apricot, quince, olive and plum trees, rocks from the quarry up the hill that have quartz crystals tucked into them, an old banksia tree we planted when my son was small, and sections where you can walk through head-high white daisy bushes in spring.

&nbs
p; Hung in the cool darkness of the house the Hiroshige ukiyo-e print is Number 81 from his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Made in the fourth month of 1857 its title is Ushimachi, Takanawa, the name of a place on the southern edge of Edo (now Tokyo). Ukiyo-e is always translated as pictures of the floating world, the world in which we live – evanescent, fragile, glowing. The image shows a sea and a sky with the classic Japanese woodblock fade dropping in the sea from white at the horizon to light blue to deep blue and rising in the sky from pink near the horizon to white to pale blue to dark grey at the top. These fades create the illusion of depth and space, as well as of moistness in the air. It is a scene on a dock at dawn, the pink in the far horizon shows the beginning of the day. The position of the viewer is that of a child or a dog, lying under and behind the wooden wheel of a large wagon in the shade. A section of the wheel, its spokes and rim, fills the right front of the image. The sea is filled with sailing boats, moored or leaving the harbour, while others are out at a distant headland or on the horizon. The work seizes a fragment of time, a very ordinary moment in an ordinary place. There are two spotted pig-like dogs standing near the wagon, one of them holds a piece of string with a worn-out straw sandal on the end of it, a traditional symbol for the end of a journey, and near them two pieces of chewed watermelon rind on the ground mark the season as summer. As in a haiku, place, season and time of day are marked simply and subtly in this quiet image that is a lot like one of those accidental oblique photos that you take when you are unpacking your camera.

  The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo series was Hiroshige’s last work completed just before his death in 1858 at sixty-two. It was celebrated in Japan and influenced the Impressionists, especially Vincent van Gogh, who made oil studies of two of the prints. Our Hiroshige print makes me think of silent dinners and watchfulness. It holds some of my secret history and many memories of our family journey from America to Europe in the fifties, from Europe to Australia in the sixties, of our new favourite toy, the Etch A Sketch, sitting in the back window of the car as it disappeared into the ship’s hold (we never saw it again), of our American clothes somehow also lost in the hold of the ship, of our strange new clothes bought in port or on the ship, and the loss of almost everything else familiar twice in a few years. The print seems to remember the deracination, the resilience, the fragments that people hold onto, the way lines can both curve and lie flat on paper and how a colour can be a place of belonging or of love…

  ——

  Today the dog and I walk out early in a faint white mist of scented transpiration from the land after dawn. It has been hot for days and will be hot for many days to come. When we find a fallen tree branch he insists on stopping and examining the leaves and twigs so closely I always think he believes there is a piece of the sky caught in it. All the patchy-skinned gum trees we pass, big and small, seem to have exploded in the heat from the amount of bark lying beneath them, and the smooth lemon-scented gums have also stripped off their pink bark and stand looking newly naked and greenish yellow. We see a crested pigeon fanning his tail up, fluffing his body out, lowering his head and dancing for another pigeon. Then the first pigeon dances for the second one. Every now and then I catch the faint scent of water on dirt. It reminds me of being a child crouching down to turn a stiff metal tap on a tank and fill a water bottle, while feeling myself bleached pale and as transparent as the water in the blazing heat and white light of an Australian summer.

  MARCH

  he is my relative

  The Chamacocos of Latin America [who are descendants of ancient nomad hunters who are today mostly farmers and day labourers] listen to radios and tape recorders, walk to Bahía Negra to make phone calls and dream of having their own motorcycles. But when the night falls, they tell, whispering and staring at the fire, stories that took place before the beginning of time. Then at an invisible signal, they enter the jungle looking for their deepest identity, erase their faces with masks, cover themselves with paint, feathers and cries, shed their identities and become gods and strange birds.

  Ticio Escobar

  Pinned to the wall above my desk is a detail of the left panel from Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych which hangs in the Prado in Madrid. I have been looking at this painting that I cut from a calendar since I was about twelve and it has always renewed in me a sense of wonder at the natural world, and the multiplicity and fertility of its creation. The stillness of it is a place for me to retreat and I always find some new detail or event in it.

  The work has a solemn topic; God has just created Eve and is introducing her to Adam who has woken from the sleep that he was in while God got out his rib to form Eve. God is embodied as someone who looks like Jesus, a tall bearded man in long pink robes, holding Eve’s wrist in his left hand and holding his right hand up in a blessing gesture. Adam sits on the ground, like an obedient child, his feet fidgeting a bit with the edge of God’s robe. Eve is in a kneeling position but does not actually seem to connect with the ground. Adam looks across at her with interest, partly at her face, partly at her breasts. Her eyes are downcast. Behind Adam a tree draws the eye as much as the figures, but it is not an apple tree, it is a Dragon Tree. It is not, my book on Bosch tells me, the Tree of Knowledge but the Tree of Life.

  There are many such trees around Adelaide. An entire row of them lives along King William Road flanking the western border of Government House. A magnificent specimen spreads over the flamingo enclosure at the zoo. A terrific one is now visible at the edge of the eastern parklands since a building was pulled down at the old Victoria Park racecourse. The Waite Arboretum has quite a few. Once you know what they look like you start to see them in private and public gardens all over the place, at least in Adelaide.

  Dragon Trees are not strictly speaking trees but large succulents. They originally come from the Canary Islands, known to ancient European civilisations as The Fortunate Islands. The name Islas Canarias is said to be derived from the Latin term Insula Canaria, meaning Island of the Dogs. The original inhabitants of the island, the Guanches, used to worship dogs, mummified them and treated them generally as holy animals. The Islands were claimed by Portugal in 1341 and ceded to Spain in 1479, not long before Bosch painted this image. Located off the west coast of Morocco, the islands have fertile soil and a Mediterranean climate but central peaks high enough to carry snow all year. In 1492 Christopher Columbus used the Canary Islands as the staging post for his first trip to America. The exact date that Bosch’s painting was made is unknown, but around 1500 is the usual time given. Somehow a sense of the New World found over the sea has entered this painting. It is made with a strong sense of the restless and unpredictable nature of creation. For Old World peoples the finding of new forms of plant and animal life not mentioned in the Bible and the absence of archetypal plants like grape vines, figs and olive trees, called the entire creation of the world into question.

  Dragon Trees (Draceana draco) get their name from their shape; their branches are like arms, each time they flower a new branching division is created leading to a many-armed and many-headed look. Their name also comes from their deep red sap, which is known as dragon’s blood. The resin is exuded from the wounded trunk or branches of the tree. Ladon, the hundred-headed dragon which guarded the Golden Apples of the Hesperides (the nymph daughters of Atlas, the Titan who holds up the sky thus keeping it from embracing the earth), was killed by Hercules as his Eleventh Labour. The blood that fell became Dragon Trees. Another story of origin for Dragon Trees, told by Pliny, tells of the struggle between a dragon-like basilisk and an elephant that at its climax led to the mixing of the blood of both creatures. Pollen records indicate that twenty million years ago the trees stretched from the Canary Islands all the way to southern Russia.

  A part of every witch’s pantry, dragon’s blood is a crimson resin highly prized since ancient times and said to have been used by the Egyptians in mummification processes. It appears in the Bible alongside frankincense and myrrh, a
nd was used as a medicine, dye and as a fake stone in jewellery. On the island of Soqotra, the island of bliss, east of Africa in the Indian Ocean, where its very similar sister tree Dracaena cinnabari is a source of cinnabar, dragon’s blood is used to this day for stomach problems, as furniture varnish, to dye wool, freshen the breath, decorate pottery and houses, and even as lipstick. Often carried on sailing boats for their medicinal properties, Dragon Trees were on William Dampier’s ship when he landed on the west coast of Australia in 1674. He wrote that most of the trees that he saw were Dragon Trees on account of the colour and flavour of their sap. Dampier must have been referring to a bloodwood eucalypt or gum tree, because of its beads of red sap, and then imagined its long arms and straight leaves to be some antipodean modification of the Dragon Tree’s thick trunk and limbs, and strap-like leaves.

  Dragon Trees are miraculous trees, fabulous trees, trees with arms like human limbs that seem about to move. Their very strangeness suggests not mere growth but design. They intimate a plan for a tree rather than an organic form. Like a drawing or a dream, so strange and yet perfectly real, they look supernatural, legendary, mythic. The forms of other plants from the early days of life on earth, such as cycads, tree ferns and baobabs, in which function finds form in ways that are both direct and extravagant, are similarly bold. The strong simplicity of these forms is resonant and surely connects with some primal image bank within us. Their shapes join and divide with an enormous sense of rhythm, purpose, harmony and balance.