Visual Diary #16

Surprise bogs, Fenwomen, Blue Girls at the Bus Stop, Poison Trees

I bought some paints that are pearlescent but this just means all my people now look like ghosts, and somehow I have waylaid my cheap-but-good paints, so nothing is working. This week I discovered an area of our front garden that is basically a bog. I was trying to weed it and then realised the mud was seeping into my crocs. Something must be broken somewhere underneath. Last night I dreamed that my friends were all diving into a pool on a cliff. I found a hundred dollars and an IOU note buried in the ground. Still in the dream, I had postcards and buttons left over from the promotion of my second novel. I gave them to my greatest fan. She had curly hair, and an estate, and was a craft maven. She kept asking how much of it was true, who each character was based on. And I said, it’s how I was but not how I am now.

Quite excited because today for one whole dollar I found a book called Fenwomen - A Portrait of Women in an English Village. It will go well with Women of the Hills ( interviews with women living in the Dandenongs) and Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women.

“There’s a certain culture here too, a kind of folklore. The fens have always been an isolated, strange place. The people are very secretive and you have to take them their way. You can’t barge in …”

And here are some overdue pictures.

I have been spending some time south of river, walking with Dad and checking out all the op shops. This was three teenage girls dressed, I think, as Smurfs in blue bodysuits - one had a fake pregnant belly and a red bikini. They were congregated at the bus-stop, blithely on phones (I didn’t draw the phones). I like how in this picture they could be nymphs or maenads or witches or the Pointer Sisters.

And then I was thinking about the Shaggs and their whole look. And their OWN THING. Also partly thinking about the Beach Boys because W and I watched Summer Dreams - the Beach Boys Story which is heavy on Dennis Wilson narrative and also, as I remembered, moves rather quickly from early to late 60s. In one scene they’re in their Pendletons and moments later the full beards are in effect. Something about the way hair FELL in the late 1960s fascinates me. Looks like pelts. LInking these two sibling musical acts because both had heavy intervention from the patriarch of the family, and then I was trying to come up with a list of similar. Lately I have a lot of music lists happening in my head. One I have been curating is songs of escape, utopian dreams of travel. This prompted by hearing Big Star’s The India Song.

This is a cocks-comb coral tree at the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, with some red hot pokers thrown in for good measure. It’s from South America and it’s apparently a weed! “The plant contains alkaloids which have powerful narcotic and purgative effects in humans and the seeds are reported to be poisonous (Plants for a Future 2008)” I love its bulbous bendy shape and corky-hide and tufty bits. I hadn’t been to the gardens in years. I used to love going to the California garden, but it was repositioned and name-changed to the North American garden to make way for Guilfoyle’s Volcano. The volcano is also cool, and was especially lovely on this day because there were little moor hen chicks all fluffy black and half-winged hanging out for their worms. Also lots of cactus flowers. But I used to like how no one seemed to go to the California garden, and you could sit there undisturbed among the purple sage and desert lavendar and the hulking grandeur of the Fairlie Flats in the distance.

On my treks across the river my eye was always drawn to Lancaster Lodge on Punt Road. Built in 1935 in the Georgian Revival Style, it looks like the location for an historic murder mystery. Also it’s name made me think of Lancaster Gate, which made me think of England. I am always missing England, except when I am there, and then I am missing home. I know I only went a little while ago but I already want to go back, and, as with any trip, the list of things I didn’t do keeps me up at night.