Kookaburra sits in an old gum tree

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From the papers – fuss over a line in a kid’s song about a kookaburra.

Kookaburra sits in an old gum tree
merry merry king of the bush is he
laugh kookaburra laugh kookaburra
gay your life must be.

The fuss is about copyright of a kid’s song, and a riff in the great song Down Under. There’s a tiny riff in Down Under that resembles the Oz kid’s song sung at numerous Scout campfires or when a family goes on a long drive in the car. There’s a kerfuffle about who owns the tune. Well, I thought it was a folk tune in the public domain but apparently it was written in about the 30s by a teacher for a jamboree who DID get it listed as copyrighted and Larrikin many years later bought the rights. What a fuss about one line of a song. It seems rather silly to me. The story is in Saturday’s Age newspaper but it has been an on-going saga. There's a website from several months ago discussing it and showing a small video.

Down Under|Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree| copyright |legal ...
25 Jun 2009 ... Did Men at Work's Down Under rip off the children's classic Kookaburra Sits in an Old Gumtree? Listen and see. ...
www.theage.com.au/.../riff-row-leaves-men-at-work-up-a-legal-gum-tree-20090625-cx5i.html

And the song Down Under is at YouTube -
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNT7uZf7lew

The church and enthusiasm

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This morning at East Geelong Uniting Church, the congregation were most happy because it was a Favourite Hymn Service and the people in the pews chose the hymns - well, sixteen of them! Usually the minister and I (as muso) or the minister and Fae (another muso) choose five or six on the Friday morning, and include new and unknown songs - which doesn't always work well. My view is that we just can't stay with the very old and comfortable songs, but bit by bit add the best of contemporary Christian songs that are singable by a bunch of people.

We are a modest lot, mostly older, and don't clap hands a lot except today for 'Mine eyes have seen the glory', 'Lord of the Dance', and 'We are the church.' Today we sang songs that were chosen mainly because that were important at significant times in a person's life, or songs from the comfortable place of childhood. The first hymn wasn't even chosen until five minutes before the service - 'How great thou art' and they lifted the rooftop!

David with the laptop and data projector was ready with websites that had relevant stories. The Together in Song (Australia) book was used instead of the usual words on the wall so we didn't use other resources such as the wonderful books that have come out of Adelaide - All Together series.

Anyway, though Betty (piano) and I(organ)were like ducks, paddling like mad, it all went very well with lots of stories matching the chosen songs. I noticed that many writers, including several women, wrote the words of the hymns at a time of crisis in their lives.

Anyway I found two cartoons about being happy-clappy - one funny, the other not so. I do not write about happy-clappy style on our other blog as there is a sensitivity issue about church life in Fiji at present.

North sculptures in Geelong

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A group of pointed sculptures on the Geelong Waterfront look like sails or sharks but they are called 'North' I guess because they point towards the north. I've photographed them, as have thousands of tourists, and sketched them. Here are three collages created from just one small sketch. I'm a bit bored at the moment with Peceli away, and haven't got wheels to go to some of the meetings such as Diversitat, so am becoming lazy, watching too much TV, though todayI have cooked, washed, sorted five boxes of clothes to give away, and bagged old linen for the tip and at last I have thrown out my old life drawings from years ago!

Memory

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The weather has been terrible, gale-force winds and heavy rain (though that was needed) and a stack of old drawings blew down in the enclosed verandah including the conte drawing of a woman. (Part of as the drawing is too large for the scanner.) Then I placed shells etc on the scanner to come up with a hodge-podge - too much information - to make some quick pics. Perhaps it shows the state of my aging brain - very muddled up! I've been doing some editing for a friend - two manuscripts - a novel and a short story collection so that was interesting.
(Later: I think this one is better - keeping it simple might be better than too much information!)
And here are some other variations:

Variations from the Nukutatava painting

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Even though I really don't know what happened to the original painting of the spring in the rock at Nukutatava Beach where we lived one time - given away, lost, eaten by cockroaches, - I at least had taken a photo of it in the days before digital. Anyway here are some variations.

From the papers

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Saturday is my reading day - of two newspapers - The Age and the local Geelong Advertiser. This weekend the Melbourne Writers' Festival starts but I haven't got there yet. I liked the full page pic in The Age promoting the Festival and wondered how the artist got the effect of white on black etc. When I looked up the name of the graphic designer, I was delighted that the artist was my cousin's daughter, Judy Green! She does interesting graphics in her job at the paper. Hey Jude, how do get those great white lines - hand-drawn or using photoshop? The image here is part of the page as my scanner is only A4 in size. Click on picture to enlarge to see the details.

Keeping it simple

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I only wanted to use one word - the word that a troubled man chalked on the pavements of Sydney over decades in a beautiful script. Eternity. So I just put a couple or more pictures together to see what would happen. On the Babasiga blog I've been thinking about the Serenity prayer in the last posting and on second thoughts I have decided that you can't be comfortable with ignoring things like injustice and be placid about today's challenges as well as the regrets of the past that still haunt. About the future, well, there are nagging anxieties there too I guess! Also I've been thinking about songs like Thank you for the music and Yesterday. When Peceli is away I listen to the radio a lot more - nostalgic pop songs - a radio station called Magic that plays songs of the 60s, 70s 80s. I know most of the songs it seems.

Fractals and mandalas

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This week I read an article about the time mathematicians got excited about fractals and chaos theory and produced art-like pictures which look like 70s psychedic days. I have always liked patterns created in kaleidescopes and the ever-changing pictures when I looked down the mirrored tube of a kaleidescope in childhood days. I hadn't heard of mandalas then, not until I saw a group of Tibertan monks creating a coloured sand mandala at the Geelong Art Gallery. All of these have one thing in common, repetition and order. If I only had time, as the song goes, I would like to create mandalas, but I am too impatient. Probably there's a shortcut way of making them using a computer program?

Two websites of interest are as follows: escrappers and exentropy.

Geelong Ring Road

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At last the computer room is tidy - tops of shelves neat and I've thrown out half a bin of paper! I found a very good photo cut out from the Geelong Advertiser a few weeks ago of the new Ring road and I altered it - as usual. The urban sprawl is obvious with every family wanting their own little castle on a small block of land. Melbourne suburbs and Geelong surburbs are just spreading out wider and wider though there is some infill and high density housuing as well.

Chucking out the clutter

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With Peceli away I have time to do some uncluttering of the junk we collect in the household - too much paper, too many clothes, paintings, music, etc. When tackling boxes of poems, stories, cuttings, I found one ten years old entitled Unclutter your life! How useful. The writer said if you didn't use it the last 12 months, out it should go. No, NO. Some of my drawing go back many years. I still have folders of my ethnomusicology thesis in progress. I have poems that need fine-tuning! Oh, well, many of the clothes can certainly go. A Fijian lady once said, 'I have three dresses - one white for church, one coloured to go out, and one old one for the house. That's enough!'

The Geelong Council gives us three bins - yellow top - paper and plastic (fortnightly), brown top - rubbish (weekly), green top -garden cuttings (fortnightly).

Here are some tips:
I. Break down the task into small units - maybe one hour then give yourself a treat - a chocolate, or coffee, or ten minutes on the internet.
2. Remember your home is not a museum, a library or a recycle depot.
3. Get rid of old linen and enjoy the best.
3. Divide into four boxes - a. rubbish b. recycle to Op shop or somewhere c. recycle it yourself into scrap-books, etc. d. keep it.

Now I'm doing my ten minutes on the internet, then it's back to decluttering again. But I found a stack of fairly good poems that need to be fixed a little....

When they saved the Franklin River

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Instead of doing the household tasks I'd listed for today, I just finished reading Law's wonderful book, The River Runs Free, on the saving of the Franklin River in Tasmania ovr twenty years ago. It was an almighty battle between the 'Greenies' and the Hydro-Electric Commission dam project that almost devastated a magnificient wilderness area of Tasmania. This photo by Peter Dombrovski of Rock Island Bend was used at the time as a promotion of the protest. When it appeared as a full-page advertisement in the Herald just before the 1983 federal election, the caption was "Would you vote for a party that would destroy this?" The Franklin River was saved with federal intervention.

Peter's Poetry Reading

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This afternoon I went to the Geelong Library to hear Peter Bakowski read some of his poems, particularly from his new book which involved portraits of real and unreal people. The event was put on by the Geelong Library and Geelong Writers. Peter has been to Geelong several times and I like his poems as they are accessible but deceptively simple. He is of Polish/German descent and lives in Melbourne. He emphasises the uniqueness of the individual and doesn't like the word 'we' which generalises. He also said that art/poetry is to tell the truth of what it's like to be alive. He has wonderful musician's hands and if he wasn't a poet he could probably play Liszt! Some of his recent poems are on his blog site.

The saga of Samantha the koala

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Unfortunately many female koalas in Australia become ill with chlamydia and this has happened to the world-famous koala, Sam, who was rescued in the bushfires six months ago and photos of her drinking from David Tree's water bottle was sent around the world. However there is a bizarre twist that I think is rather unnecessary. Australia's most loved koala will be stuffed and displayed in the Melbourne Museum! What are they thinking! Can't they bury her body in the forest...

from a newsite: Sam's bushfire injuries had healed but the four-year-old animal was put down on Thursday during major surgery to remove cysts associated with chlamydia, a life-threatening disease that causes cervical infection and has ravaged Victoria's koala population. Victorian Premier John Brumby confirmed on Friday that Sam's carers had accepted an offer by the museum to preserve and display the koala to the public, News Ltd newspapers report.

A game

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I was messing about with the three items from a game 'rock, scissors, paper' after placing the items into the scanner. I miss 'my' camera which Peceli has taken with him to Fiji! Here are a few results. More on the babasiga blog.

More orchids

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Though some of you will think if quite wrong to mess about with a photo of orchids, well, I am having a go at making new shapes, textures, etc. Now that the camera is gone to Fiji, I'll have to go back to doing direct sketches for a few weeks I suppose! Today has been very restful after the last three hectic days. Only a casserole luncheon with a group of women, then visiting my friend up the road for a talanoa. (yarn). Later I'll write up something on the Babasiga blog about our splendid theological lecturer from last night's program at East Geelong Uniting Church.