Great Southern Land - Icehouse - Australia Day Live Concert / Canberra (Tue 25 Jan 2005)

Great Southern Land - Icehouse - Australia Day Live 2005 / Canberra (Tue 25 Jan 2005)
City on a rainy day, down in the harbor
Watching as the gray clouds shadow the bay

Great Southern Land - Icehouse


A pretty random post, but it has put a smile on my face and was fun to put together.

Heard this song on the radio on the way to training yesterday evening. It's a song you will often hear on the radio on a stormy afternoon or evening.

The storm clouds were looming as we got closer to Bank Street and it had started to lightly rain. The wind came up and the air became colder, and in combination with the songs haunting lyrics, driving beat of the bass and drums, and the memories it evoked, it made me tingle and I was covered in goose bumps.

The music and lyrics seem to capture the feelings and mental images that I carry with me, to be and feel Australian.

Australian Parliament House - Canberra - eight years ago today (Sun 17 Mar 2002)
I guess that's all reasonably vague, but feelings for me are difficult to describe - much in the same way Dennis Denuto demonstrates so passionately, yet unconvincingly, in the classic Australian Movie The Castle:

It's the vibe of the thing, your Honour.

The vibe or the gist are terms I use a lot to cover for my inability to express my feelings or what I am thinking :-) Dennis is my hero. Here he is at his definitive best:

The Castle - in the Federal and High Courts (youtube)
Some random memories. The song goes back to 1982, which would have been my last year of full-time uni. I did see The Flowers (Iva Davies predecessor to Icehouse) at the University Union in the 2nd Term of 1980 and then a few weeks later back in Wagga Wagga for the University Holidays. Was excited to have some friends, from my school days in Wagga Wagga, to be the local supporting act. For some reason I asked Jenny whether we could have the song played at our Wedding Reception. She liked it and it was played during the night and as a filler as we said our farewells at the end of the evening. It was put on repeat as I we took a lot longer than we had planned.

Great Southern Land Lyrics

Standing at the limit of an endless ocean
Stranded like a runaway, lost at sea
City on a rainy day, down in the harbor
Watching as the gray clouds shadow the bay

Looking everywhere 'cause I had to find you
This is not the way that I remember it here
Anyone will tell you, it's a prisoner island
Hidden in the summer for a million years

Great southern land
Burned you black

So you look into the land and it will tell you a story
Story 'bout a journey ended long ago
If you listen to the motion of the wind in the mountains
Maybe you can hear them talking like I do
"They're gonna betray you, they're gonna forget you
Are you gonna let them take you over that way"

Great southern land, great southern land
You walk alone like a primitive man
And they make it work with sticks and bones
See their hungry eyes, it's a hungry home

I hear the sound of the stranger's voices
I see their hungry eyes, their hungry eyes
Great southern land, great southern land
They burned you black, black against the ground

Standing at the limit of an endless ocean
Stranded like a runaway, lost at sea
City on a rainy day, down in the harbor
Watching as the gray clouds shadow the bay

Looking everywhere 'cause I had to find you
This is not the way that I remember it here
Anyone will tell you, it's a prisoner island
Hidden in the summer for a million years

Great southern land, in the sleeping sun
You walk alone with the ghost of time
They then burned you black, black against the ground
And they make it work with rocks and sand

I hear the sound of the stranger's voices
I see their hungry eyes, their hungry eyes
Great southern land, great southern land
You walk alone, like a primitive man

You walk alone with the ghost of time
And they burned you black
Yeah, they burned you black
Great southern land
Great southern land
Great southern land
Great southern land

You might be able to guess why I picked this particular youtube clip of Great Southern Land. Two weeks to Nationals. Canberra here we come .. really looking forward to the racing with my team mates and catching up with all our friends from right across Australia.

Lake Burley Griffin Sunset - Black - Canberra (02 Aug 2002 *)

Follow Your Own Path - David Brooks / NYT (Wed 27 Jun 2012)

"Black Abstraction" Abstraction - Georgia O'Keefe - The Met / New York (Mon 15 Aug 2012)
David Brooks makes some interesting observations (*) about growing up, locality and following your own path:

Don't try to be everyman. Don't pretend you're a member of every community you visit. Don't try to be citizens of some artificial globalized community. Go deeper into your own tradition. Call more upon the geography of your own past. Be distinct and credible. People will come.

On Black Abstraction (*) - I had known of Georgia O'Keefe through her relationship with Alfred_Stieglitz (*) (I have a book on his life, but can't remember it's title or where it is now). When I walked into the Gallery Hall with her paintings, I knew I would spend some time there. There were many colourful paintings of abstract views of flowers, desert scenes and buffalo skulls. Black Abstraction caught my gaze and I just stood in front of it and thought of many things. Maybe I thought the dark painting reflected how I felt after recent experiences.

Becoming a little abstract and self absorbed (as i do this time of the year). The path through the painting represented my journey since Jenny left us and I had become stuck (*) in this place (I had known this for some time). The little bright white dot gave me hope that there was something still inside me and all it would take was a small sign to get me on my way again. Funnily enough, it would come two days later on a Subway Train. It was such a tiny gesture (*) by a complete stranger.

Maybe the importance to me of such a tiny and simple gesture, indicated how low I had sunk in my journey in life without Jenny there beside me. I don't know really, like most things. Anyway I did like the painting and I am glad this post gave me the opportunity to put the photo here and to research it's background a little more.

To finish, I love this quote by Georgia O'Keefe on Abstraction:

Abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

Maybe I could say the same thing except apply it to photography, as my words seem totally inadequate to describe where I have been, what I have felt and where I think I am heading.

Grief is concentrated in the face [take2] - The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

Grief is concentrated in the face. It makes the flesh sodden and unresponsive, dull with blood, like when you are drunk and heat comes off the skin like vapour off water, as if your vitality is evaporating into the air. The muscles go dead around the mouth and eyes. It almost hurts when others smile and your own face remains inert, held down by the drag and weight of the blood. The memory of grief stays in the flesh. The body recalls it, feels its weight, moulds itself automatically to its shape as the loss is remembered, the mask becoming tighter as the memory becomes clearer; not the memory of the dead person, but the memory of grief itself.

Page 24 The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

Geoff - "an early start for the first day of the rest of my life - 'where do you start?'" - Alexandria - 7am Wed 01 Jul 2009 (picasa)
Took this photo of myself the first morning after Jenny had died. I slept OK, all things considered and was up early - I had no idea what the day would bring. All I knew there was a Funeral to organise and many people to be contacted. No stranger to all of this, so I headed up to my usual Coffee shop (Cafe Sofia) so that I could have a few quiet moments to myself before the onslaught of the day.

Not sure why I took the photo - maybe so that I could remember that moment of numbness, despair and initial grief. I did a similar thing when my younger brother Tim died (see here).

The words above by Jonathan Walker (he reviewed one of my photos that I took in Newtown - see here) seem to match up with what I now see of myself in the photo.

The following gives some context to his writings on Grief - The Art of Grief - and its relationship to his new Novel - Five Wounds. It is complicated, but Grief is a long drawn out and complicated process. I am still trying to work it all out myself.

Five Wounds: An Allegory by Jonathan Walker

Five Wounds is a parable as well as a fairy tale. Throughout, it refers to an invisible, suppressed source: ‘The Art of Grief’, an abandoned essay on the deaths of my parents. This essay is never acknowledged directly within the novel, but it will be made available in March or April 2010 as a free download on my website for those who wish to investigate.

[..]

‘The Art of Grief’ is a key, which unlocks hidden meanings in Five Wounds. However, the relationship between the two texts is more complex than that of a riddle to its solution or a joke to its punch line, because Five Wounds has an independent life of its own. Its characters act according to their own natures, and make their own choices. They are not mere ciphers, condemned to act out episodes of my biography in a disguised, pathological form. The characters may be fantastic, but they are real within their own world, even when they unknowingly refer to events beyond its borders.

In this case, then, one text does not solve the other. Rather, Five Wounds places stolen fragments of ‘The Art of Grief’ in a new setting, which transforms their meaning, as the Venetians studded the façade of the church of San Marco with pieces of marble looted from Constantinople. Here, however, the arrangement is reversed. It is not the loot that shines brightly, but the container, within which the quotations are safely hidden away, like bones in a reliquary.

UPDATE: To download a PDF version of 'The Art of Grief', go to this part of my site

[Geoff: A repost of a version I was working on that somehow got posted on the 10 Apr 2010 - subsequently deleted and this is the remaining version.]

"concentrate yourself upon details" - Baker Street Tube Station / London (Wed 16 Aug 2013)

"concentrate yourself upon details" - Baker Street Tube Station (*) / London (Wed 16 Aug 2013)
Sherlock Holmes (*) from A Case of Identity (*):

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. [..]

Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.

On Photography - Jorg Colberg (Tue 09 Jul 2013)

Jörg Colberg (*) writes On Photography (*):

People usually love talking about their photographs, and they love telling you what is in those pictures (even if most of that is not apparent to a stranger at all – we’re certainly all photographers in the sense of believing there are things in the pictures someone else simply can’t see, given her or his lack of background knowledge).

via Photography’s Existential Dread (*).

Dimitri the 6 year old Carpet Snake - Newtown (Sun 07 Jul 2013)>

On Venice - Mirsada Hadzic / Adam Marelli (Fri 21 Nov 2014)

Untitled - Venice (Wed 10 Sep 2014)
Adam Marelli (*) writes on the Words and Photos (*) of Mirsada Hadzic (*):

there is nothing more reassuring than reading the words of a perfect stranger who is saying exactly what you feel

via Venice, through the eyes of a Writer, Mirsada Hadzic (*) by Adam Marelli (*).

The Warrior and regrets ..

The warrior knows an old saying: 'If regrets could kill…'

And he knows that regrets can kill; they slowly eat away at the soul of someone who has done something wrong and they lead eventually to self-destruction.

The warrior does not want to die like that. When he acts perversely or maliciously - because he is a man of many faults - he is never too ashamed to ask forgiveness.

If possible, he does his best to repair the wrong he has done. If the injured party is dead, then he does some good turn to a stranger and offers up that task to the soul that he wounded.

A warrior of light has no regrets, because regrets can kill. He humbles himself and undoes the wrong he has done.

Another passage from Paulo Coelho's - 'The Manual of the Warrior Light'.

If we have some regrets (founded or unfounded) about something (and we all do at times), then this is not a bad way to think about things. (Note: promise to write something different and more positive next time :-)

Veil - Newtown - 2 Apr 2008

On Vivian Maier - Joel Meyerowitz (2013)

self portrait - ATP / Redfern (Mon 11 Jun 2018)

Joel Meyerowitz on Vivian Maier:

To go up and photograph a stranger on the street you have to hold your ground and be fearless and take what you want because it is yours.

via Vivian Maier BBC Imagine (2013) by Joel Meyerowitz.

Will see an exhibition of Vivian Maier photos in Vienna in mid-July.

Contact Sheets (picasa) - New York City - Lower East (Wed 17 Aug 2011)

Picasa Contact Sheets (1 of 6) - East Village / Brooklyn (Wed 17 Aug 2011)
Picasa Contact Sheets (2 of 6) - East Village / Brooklyn (Wed 17 Aug 2011)
Picasa Contact Sheets (3 of 5) - East Village / Brooklyn (Wed 17 Aug 2011)
Picasa Contact Sheets (4 of 6) - East Village / Brooklyn (Wed 17 Aug 2011)
Picasa Contact Sheets (5 of 6) - East Village / Brooklyn (Wed 17 Aug 2011)
Picasa Contact Sheets (6 of 6) - East Village / Brooklyn (Wed 17 Aug 2011)

187 Photos - all in an afternoons wanderings.

Contact Sheets of the photos I took on the afternoon of Wed 17 Aug 2011.

Later that evening after walking across the Brooklyn Bridge (*) for the second time, I remember sitting on a train on the subway on my way from the Bridge to 80th Street on the west side of Central Park. I just sat quietly on my seat and decided to review my photos on the back of the camera in slideshow mode. I was tired from a long day wandering around and I went into a daze and a kind of trance as the subway stations passed by and the photos scrolled by on the rear screen on the back of my little Canon S95.

At one of the subway stops well up the line, the young lady sitting next to me, as she got up to exit the train, touched me on the forearm and said they are really nice photos. I was touched (*) by the compliment and said thanks. Such a small gesture from a stranger so far away from home - put a smile on my face and inflated my confidence (*). Probably one of the nicest moments on the whole trip.