Two drawings from the Geelong Waterfront

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Here are two of the sketches - in biro, though one I've tricked into being brown, I made yesterday during my prowl around the waterfront - an old man and his dog resting, and one of the buoys and fan palm trees. I'll probably add some colour with paint a bit later on.

Photos from Geelong Waterfront

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While Peceli played 18 holes of golf at Barwon Valley (and won because the excellent players were very confused by the coating of sand on the 'greens') I took a bus to town and walked around the Waterfront. Today was sunny and a beautiful autumn day, not like the bleak weather of the past week. I took several photos of the North sculptures, giant buoys, palm trees, carousel, and bollards, then ran out of camera card space, so I did some pencil sketches. Tourists were about and school groups and while I drew one lady bollard holding seashells, somebody was taking pictures of me as I sketched! I hope they got the best side, but I doubt it! A bollard is a large post made of wood used in piers and around waterfronts and Jan Mitchell (who died last year) made hundreds of beautiful sculptures of Geelong's history. Now there is a Bollards Walk of them all. Her bollards project started with school children many years ago down at Barwon Heads and the original bollards there were of soldiers.

Boab trees

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There's a strange Australian tree shaped like a bottle or bottles that grows particularly in the Kimberly region of West Australia. It was part of a near-kissing scene in the movie 'Australia' so I guess will be recognized everywhere now! I've been using two photos of boabs (borrowed from the internet as I haven't been to the Kimberleys yet) to crop and change into new pictures. I think some are too 'sharpened' and are a bit hard on the eyes.

I had trouble using floppy discs today, which I move between two computers. The floppy would not open. I had pulled one floppy disc out when shutting down, so this time I left one in, shut down, and opened up again, clicked on the error etc. and shazam the floppy opened this time!

Geelong is also a livable city

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The following is adapted from a handout promoting Geelong. I left out stuff such as about investment though because that's not my scene. I took out a lot of the fancy adjectives praising Geelong too much and added a few bits as well.

Why Geelong is a good city to live in1. LifestyleGeelong has the modern amenities of a larger city, including world-class health and community services, education facilities, a clean and healthy environment. It has a beautiful waterfront, cultural events such as Pako Festa, churches and social amenities, and a pleasant natural landscape. Everything is within easy reach, including surf beaches, access to Melbourne less than an hour by freeway, and also Geelong is not far from forests in the Otways and Youyangs.

2. HousingHousing is considered affordable compared with Melbourne with a population of more than 190,000 with some 70% living in the urban areas. It is assumed that most people own their own home. Urban growth has centred on suburbs such as Highton, Grovedale, Wandana Heights, and Waurn Ponds. The outlying areas include Lara, Leopold, Clifton Springs and Ocean Grove.

3. Attractions
Geelong offers numerous recreational facilities, hotels, restaurants and cafes, and an calendar of cultural and sporting events, golf courses and other sporting facilities such as Geelong Football Club's Shell Stadium and the sports Arena in North Geelong, the Geelong Performing Arts Centre (GPAC), the 1500-seat Costa Concert Hall, and the Geelong Art Gallery, National Wool Museum, the Botanic Gardens, and two multiplex movie theatres.

4. Education
Geelong's mix of public and private schools provide education to more that 40,000 primary and secondary students annually. Another 27,000 students a year are enrolled in tertiary and further education courses at Deakin University, the Gordon Insitute of TAFE and Marcus Oldham Agricultural College. Geelong's private schools - including the Geelong Grammar School, The Geelong College, and Kardinia International College - enjoy international recognition.

5. Health
The Geelong Hospital is one of Victoria's major regional hospitals, offering advanced cardiac facilities, plus other surgical, medical and specialist services. There are two major private hospitals. Geelong is well served by general practitioners and specialists, with more than 200 in the region. Other facilities include six community health centres and 33 maternal and child health centres. There are also 34 aged accommodation centres, facilities for mental health and people with disabilities.

6. Work opportunities
Though this changing in the current recession, in Geelong more than 10,000 businesses employ over 80,000 people in the region. Manufacturing and processing industries provide around 15,000 jobs, followed by retail (13,000) and health and community services (8,000). Tourism, hospitality, education, health and business services are among the fastest-growing sectors. Many people who live in the Geelong region commute to Melbourne each day.

7. Shopping
Geelong has at least three large shopping complexes, numerous supermarkets, department stores, suburban shopping strips, and a variety of specialty stores, galleries, restaurants, fast-food outlets and plenty of opportunity shops.

8. Transport
Geelong has a large inexpensive bus network, railway links to Melbourne and the West Coast, an airport at nearby Avalon. Roads are very good in the suburbs with a freeway to Melbourne.

9. The people
A mix of Aboriginal, migrant British and European from the 1830s and a boom in migration after 1945 and now a small number of recent arrivals from places such as Sudan and Burma make up the diversity that is Geelong and people get along well together. Also, many rural people from country Victoria move down to the Geelong region to retire. Geelong is relatively safe - people don't put bars on their windows, and groups like Neighbourhood Watch give tips to people on getting along. When you go shopping you will surely bump into people you know, so it's like a large country town.

Working on three canvases

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This morning before I went out to our bookclub in the afternoon, I did some more work on the three canvases I want to submit to the Wisdom's Feast exhibition in June on the theme of 'Holiness'. Wow, a very hard topic. I started off with the idea of the mandorla symbol and using an opal then it took off and seems to be earth, fire, and water now! Anyway I added some oil pastel and medium to try and get these three pictures more lively and working better. Peceli cheered from the sidelines and gave lots of advice! Meanwhile the powerpoint with 35 slides is getting there and a friend checked out the texts for odd lines, (and theology) etc.

In the suburbs

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Yesterday afternoon while the Fiji group drank kava after church, I watched TV and did a small drawing of the passage looking towards the front door. In Tau's house in Wyndam Vale, a home beautifully kept and so neat and tidy. Not like our lounge room with all the books, paints, music, sermons, music about. Sailosi and Tau and family live in a typical house in the new suburbs, but it is still very Islander with the bundle of shoes at the door when visitors arrive. We just never wear shoes inside the house, do you? Tongans, Fijians, you name any Islander group,and I'm sure you pick their house by the pairs of shoes left outside on the porch or just inside the door.

Gallipoli and Anzac Day

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Thousands of young people visit this isolated site in Turkey on April 25th as part of the mythology of a terrible war and the loss of many Australian and New Zealander young men. The British blundered in ordering this campaign and some of the soldiers of that time said they respected the opposing Turks more than the British army leaders! The campaign, lasting from April 1915 to January 1916, led to over 52,000 Allied and anywhere between 50,000 and 200,000 Turkish casualties.

The Anzac (Australian, New Zealand Army Corp) story of the Gallipoli failure has become part of Australian national identity and today is a time for remembrance of the war dead, mateship, with a fair bit of jingoism. Often neglected are the stories of the maimed, disorientated, mentally wounded men who returned to their homeland traumatised.

There has been a resurgence over the past ten years of interest in this public holiday and many young people visiting the site. Perhaps it's a need for ritual and connection to family history. It was such a tragedy.

One thing that comes to my mind is the futility of war and anger at the loss of life of young people by incompetent orders. Are army bosses more to be admired than bullies? I know that many people of my generation do not like being dictated to, to be told what to do. They say that in World War 1, one in twenty soldiers refused to obey orders and many went to court martials. Are they heroes too because they stood up against incompetent orders?

Just testing

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Got a notification that this blog site is spam. Come on, it certainly isn't, so I'm testing to see what happens here.

Geelong putting on Fiddler on the Roof

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Coming up; Geelong Christian College are putting on a production of Fiddler on the Roof soon. Check out their school website with details. May 1.2.3. at the GPAC. Way to go!
http://www.christiancollege.vic.edu.au/Main.asp?_=NEWS%20*and*%20EVENTS

Draw as if no-one is watching

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Sometimes at meetings you just feel out of sorts and want to be 'the naughty girl in the class'. The topic was Human Rights, Racial and Religious Vilification laws, etc. and it was meant to be serious, but I had to ask 'What about cartoonists? It's their job to make people look stupid. To pick on people, even a cultural group at times?' Well, the two guest speakers - public relations (dowm to Geelong from Melbourne) scrabbled for their guidelines and eventually said that artists can be excused. Their presentation with powerpoint was by reading the texts in a monotone(which we already had in a handout) and utterly serious. Of course it is bad to pick on people, call them names, refuse to give them jobs, just because of their race, religion, looks, etc. I did a drawing, using one of those large yellow envelopes, drawing the two speakers quietly as if no-one was watching me!

I reckon that a presentation on this topic could have been really interesting - it is important - by telling stories, or even 5 minutes of the movie 'Gran Torino' where Clint Eastwood's character tells people to get off his lawn and calls the Hmong people next door names. That would have been a good starter for a discussion on harassment, racial vilification, neighbours, and so on. I thought it was an excellent film, one for senior students to watch and discuss.

A pity that our meeting last night wasn't better than speakers reading texts. Now next Tuesday I have to do a presentation at our Interfaith Women's group meeting - about 20 minutes on Human Rights in Fiji - so I know now not to be a know-all and give them ten pages of notes full of jargon from politics-speak.

Going backwards or forwards?

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Found an old painting of a pot that I made in the 50s, (very fussy then) then some from the 80s, (parts of a large drawing on paper based on our garden at Shenton) then one from this year (based on rocks at Torquay). Perhaps I am going backwards.

the Talanoa Exhibition

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Here are some pictures from the launch of the Talanoa Fiji exhibition at the Immigraton Museum Melbourne. It was a super afternoon of catching up with stories, traditional dance, and plenty of laughter. More on the Babasiga blog, (but not much as I don't really want to post there at present.)

Nothing is lost - lots of pictures

(click on picture to enlarge)
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I put all my (only on computer) pictures together for the topic of 'Holiness' as works in progress for the exhibition in June. Still haven't set it up as a powerpoint presentation with text - haiku kind of words, or as a book. The three acrylic paintings I made last week aren't exactly what I wanted yet, so might try out a collage or two using coloured papers. Not feeling like looking at 'holiness' when there's an unholy mess in the world today!

But there's always grace coming out of troubles such as after the bushfires one group called Blaze(something) has volunteers putting up new fences where the farms were burnt out. Some of the guys from Geelong are going up to Kinglake area to help and coming back telling us stories of people, starting over asgain.

Dinner party at Wyndam Vale

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Yesterday I roasted a chicken etc and Peceli made vakalolo to take up to a dinner party at the home of Sailosi to welcome three visitors from Fiji. Wyndam Vale is one of those new suburbs of new housing and it is hard at night to find your way through the maze of bendy roads (though our old car knows its way any time!) The special visitors were Rev Tomasi and his wife, and Rev Tevita from the Methodist Church in Fiji. There was plenty of yaqona drinking, formal speeches and story telling. Our group represented the Fijian congregation of Altona Meadows/Laverton and the purpose of the visitors, who are also spending time in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra, was to talk about the next Conference in August and the opening by Fijians abroad. And give us an update on the Methodist church in Fiji which is where most of us had come from.

It was a lovely evening to share in hospitality and listen to stories of joy and of sadness. We tried not to talk about 'you know what'. Thank you Leba for your delicious puri and goat curry. She looked with a critical eye at Peceli's vakalolo because after all she had been his teacher of that recipe! Here are a few photos I took. It was a late night and we didn't get back to Geelong until about 12.30.

The taste of vakalolo

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From our safe little suburb of Newcomb in Geelong, we can still smell the sweet brown sugar of Fiji when Peceli uses his (secret) recipe to make vakalolo from coconut, cassava, taro, and brown sugar. Yum. But there's no sweetness about other aspects of life. I've been thinking about 'what do you do when things fall apart in city life'. Some people are losing jobs, can't keep up a heavy mortgage in the city, so what to do. My answer would be to go to a country town. Houses and rent is cheaper, people are friendly, and there's land to plant. Many people are making that kind of 'tree change' or 'sea change' - to the seaside. It might mean leaving friends and networks behind, but there's the opportunity to experience cleaner skies, less noise, land to plant all your vegetables and for some even have chooks and animals. It's not for us, though we have lived in several rural communities and I can say they were the best days of our lives - in Rakiraki in Fiji where our first two boys were born and we lived between a village and sugarcane farms, and at Hopetoun a Mallee town of wheat farmers and our boys (three by then) went to primary school.

Now when we think of people living in a city like Suva in Fiji, you just got to really think - is this the best place to live? There you have to pay for all your food (and today the Fiji dollar was devalued by 20% will will lead to higher prices for imported food). And the anxiety and stress and mayhem of interference by officialdom. Does the '4 and a half coup' of the past four days impinge on the lives of the country cousins? Less so, I am sure.

One Ratu (chief) has suggested that youth who don't have a job in Suva (which means young men and young women up to about thirty if unmarried!) should go back to their Fijian villages immediately. Forget the electricity (when it works), the running water (when the taps are not dry) the gyms, and go back and plant a food garden because in three months time many people are going to be hungry. Sounds good to me. If I was young again, I know that I would live in a Fijian rural community, start a plant nursery, flowers and vegetables and fruit, and live a subsistence life once again. All that walking between the sea and the main road certainly keeps one slender!

Plenty of art going on

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We had a lovely visit today from Fiji friends in Melbourne - to help pack up a container bound for Fiji, sort books, etc. and afterwards we ate pizza at our home. Two little boys did some drawing, Ratu Eferemi Junior and Viliame. Vinaka Mereani also for the hard working sorting books with me!

Three works in progress

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Peceli and I have both been painting the last week and here are three works in progress - based on the pictures I made from scanning stones, leaves, an opal picture, etc. Having trouble with the paint quality and the 'opal' so far. They seemed to have turned out as Earth, Fire, Water, instead of 'Nothing is lost' so there's much more work to be done on them. I can't get that luminous look of the pictures created through coloured light on the computer screen.

Sun arise in the morning

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We waited and waited for signs of the sun rising this morning but at 7 a.m. it was hidden by grey clouds, symbolic perhaps of the need for patience, yet knowing the reliability of day and night. From our little church Bay Room we watched beyond a large gum tree, the magpies carolling, over the suburb and sea but it was only a dim light until during our Easter Sunrise Service breakfast - shared muesli, raisin bread, coffee, etc. - the sun suddenly blazed brightly behind the tree. Alleluya, Christ is risen. Last year we took photos but not this time so I've 'borrowed' a photo of a Geelong sunrise. Sunrise here is usually quite beautiful as the sun rises over the sea. May you and your family have a blessed and reflective day today as we remember the first Easter.


(later) From 9.30 a.m. we had a lovely morning service at East Geelong Uniting with the baptism of Nanise, daughter of Christine and Damien, and the baby's Bubu Siteri comes from Levuka - so what more can I say, with Labasa and Levuka kind of close cousins! I'll post more picures and story on our other blog - babasiga.