Van Walker: Healing Descent

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God awful how so many musicians were chewed up and spat out by Covid and its merciless lockdowns and frightening threats. No quarter for them in that scrap.

Curious that some said the pandemic allowed them to collaborate with their muses, to plumb their creativity. Don’t know that many actually did.

The yoke of raw subsistence living eroded a lot of artistic energy. The inequity of jobless mainstream workers receiving lucrative handouts unavailable to creatives was a sharp and bitter rejection of their import. It left many of them stranded and more vulnerable than ever.

Vandemonian musician Van Walker, however, while belted about as much as anyone, was one bloke whose artistry, individuality and fascination with the under-currents buoying the human condition soared rather than floundered in that virulent netherworld.

It was an enormously productive period for him. And for a singer-composer who regularly tips songwriting norms on their ear, it was an especially innovative era. Given the universal futility and frustration of Covid, why wouldn’t you go out on a limb? Why not break a few while you’re at it?

The outcome of Van Walker’s efforts is a bit of everything that’s intriguing about songwriting: by turns, it’s stuff that’s poetic and melodic, insightful, biting and energetic, introspective and uplifting, even supernatural and transcendental.

Healing Descent, the seventh album to date in his lengthy career, features the best of all these in a kaleidoscope of inspired verses, great hooks and a few sharp turns into unexpected vales dappled with flashes of brilliance and colour. Yeah, big call but go have a listen for yourself, you’ll soon see.

The Green Man, and Underworld queen Persephone

Much of it is delivered with the deeply moody steel guitar work of Walker’s Canadian mate Chris Altmann which, combined with Walker’s acoustic handiwork – along with violin and cello strings, banjo, didgeridoo, accordion, percussion and some superb Tele chicken-picking from a raft of musicians – makes for a clever and varied musical travelogue.

What’s curious here is where the lockdown of spring 2020 found Van Walker’s grey matter. It was a time when people were anxiously waiting for a vaccine, an antidote, herd immunity, any kind of relief to the death and darkness Covid was serving up daily.

Walker’s Healing Descent tackles the uncertainty and hopes attendant to these emotions through a prism of mythology, classicism, poetic scrutiny, catharsis and, ultimately, an over-arching optimism. As he writes:

“When the west winds are raging at your door,

“And rain is like the ocean’s roar,

Don’t go dreaming about better times or to climb,

“You must go down every time.”

Down to where the fountainhead of self is found, is what he’s saying. The vehicles with which he navigates this descent, and its flipside ascent, include the seasons and their early ties with humans, with among others, pagans and ancient Greeks.

Persephone’s Return references the kidnapped queen of the underworld and daughter of Demeter, goddess of the earth and the harvest, tipping a hat to the “subtle yet rock-steady power of nature”.

Summer Thunder, Winter’s Last Words and Hades’ Lullaby pay similar homage to the seasons and their nature, while at times also referencing poignant relationship vicissitudes.

Pan, Arcadia, primordial ancient energies, nature’s soothe and violence, spirits within the trees and rivers and streams – all dovetail into Walker’s healing balm. None moreso, perhaps, than his Green Man, for the pagan symbol of rebirth and nature’s largely patient but absolute rule.

This figure doubles as a metaphor for the artists and creatives underscoring and protecting our humanity. Walker’s efforts in this regard shouldn’t go unacknowledged. You’ll find a lot of Jung, Thomas and Baudelaire behind his ruminations.

Starseed and the cover of Healing Descent.

In many ways, Walker’s one of his own Starseeds; cue his own words, “People who believe they were born on other planets, strangers from a strange land, etc, who have fallen to this blue planet perhaps to save this world while the illuminati lizard aliens run the show herding all the sheeple up for apocalyptic dinner”.

He continues: “Too much time online will make anyone feel alien. It’s what the media and powers-that-be endeavour to do: alienate us from ourselves and each other, driving a wedge between the super-wealthy and the common people before they sell us all as mere scapegoats.

“LGBTQ scapegoats, woke scapegoats, refugee scapegoats, homeless scapegoats … all the powerless and vulnerable groups, starting us fighting each other instead of them, while they continue to haul in unheard-of profits.

“We need to get our eyes back on the ball and off the identity issues. Inequality and injustice are rife. Housing unaffordable. Wages frozen. Prices through the roof. Forget the aliens and lizard kings and address this reality or get ready for the jackboots.”

If he’s starting to sound a little sharp, take a listen to Altmann’s rockabilly Telecaster kicking arse as well. Healing requires care and soothing remedies but sometimes it takes just that bit of a kick in the clacker. And Starseed Homesick Blues is just about the perfect prescription for that.

Healing Descent is available at https://cheersquadrecordstapes.bandcamp.com/…/healing…

Life’s a Surf Coast beach and then some

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Summer’s here and it’s time to get your beach on. Whether it’s the thumping, cranking, millpond smooth, rugged cliff-faced or idyllically picturesque beach that takes your fancy, Surf Coast, Bellarine and Geelong beaches have you covered. Admirably.

While they’re in hot demand for sun-lovers, surfers, sandcastles and swimmers, for paddlers and paragliders, indeed for all manner of beach-bums, there’s also a secret life to our beaches that slips under the radar for the many visitors flooding into town. And for many locals, too.

These are stories and marvels that live quietly alongside the wind-sculpted dunes, sea-carved ochre cliffs, the sandy rocky coast and grey-green eucalypts that line the watery expanses of Bass Strait and Port Phillip Bay. Prick your ears, spread your wings a little, and you might just hear them whispering through the mists of time as you comb the beaches, sprawl yourself on the sand or take in the clouds overhead as you float offshore on your back.

Maybe the ghosts of the “yellow men” who left an oar behind at Point Lonsdale long before the days of Buckley, according to Aborigines. Or the mysterious skull found in the water at Queenscliff, and now in its museum, or tales of old Kerosene Jack wearing a tattooed map of Benito’s Treasure on his butt.

Shipwreck horrors and courage abound, the Barwon Heads pub hosted terrorists plotting the destruction of the MCG, Apollo Bay has its terrorist hermit Nobby Hill and fishermen stories of peculiar things in the sky before Freddie Valentich went missing to a purported flying saucer. Not to mention the palaeontological marvel of Dinosaur Cove.

Anglesea hosts swags of metaphysical blue vivianite, Cumberland River has geological architecture to die for and Fairhaven a terrifying shark encounter lifesavers almost died for. At 13th Beach you’ll find tales of a sunken shipwreck that lured politicians into illegal dives, whale carcasses too. At Breamlea a shipwrecked rhinoceros, more whale cases at Point Addis, nudists too, and mysterious underground bunkers dug out along the foreshore at Torquay.

Yet another whale carcass, a 70-tonne blue whale at Cathedral Rock, held up traffic on the Great Ocean Road as cranes and trucks relocated her to the sewerage farm at Werribee to properly decompose before her bones were treated and placed in the foyer of the Melbourne Museum. People still talk of the pong.

The Lorne main beach nearby once hosted the biplanes of early aviators while quicksand claimed pioneering youngsters and shipwreck salvage divers drank their own urine in the local pubs to prove their toughness. The glory days of the town’s The Arab coffee lounge live large in the hearts of locals and visitors alike. Glory-day surfing yarns, many unpublishable, are a buck a bag the full length of the coast.

TV’s Seachange and Round the Twist live on in the minds and imaginations of Barwon Heads, St Leonards and Aireys Inlet visitors, the charming Oddball flick’s penguin rescue to more again if you drift west of the Twelve Apostles down to Warrnambool.

Back around Geelong and the Bellarine, you’ll find everything from bayside tightrope walkers and wartime bathing beauty contests to helicopter crashes, 16th century Portuguese explorers and Limeburner Point’s Geelong Keys, Siberian migratory birds, piers on fire, ships shot and sunk in Corio Bay, and strange rock art only properly visible from the air.

While the beaches hold a wealth of folklore, the southwest hinterland holds a similar trove of mystery, myth and magic for the curious-minded visitor – everything from volcanoes and megafauna to secret wartime airbases and bunyips. Think floating islands, giant ferns, spotted tiger quolls, exquisite waterfalls, pre-settlement tales of sealers and Aborigines, attacks on Aborigines and you’re in the ballpark.

You’ll find subterranean gurglings beneath the Stony Rises, ancient megafauna trails across the plains, carnivorous snails hidden deep in the Otways, rain gauge crater lakes at Red Rock. It’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not territory.

Hard to beat the bunyip scare of the 1840s bunyip scare, though, after a so-called giant bunyip bone was found at Timboon. Identified by a local Aborigine, who attested to vicious family run-ins with the cryptozoological beast, the bone set off a public hysteria epidemic with people afraid to leave their homes at night for weeks on end.

Matters weren’t helped any by reports of livestock mauled by unknown causes on properties from Lara to Barwon Heads. The bone disappeared over time but is suspected of belonging to a diprotodon, a pre-Ice Age rhino-sized wombat from the region’s megafauna catalogue.

Long gone now, like the Mahogany Ship somewhere under the sand dunes down past Warrnambool. Throw yourself down an interweb rabbit-hole while you’re soaking up the rays on a Surf Coast beach and see what that turns up. Portuguese caravels, secret maps, international politics, strange visitors to Corio Bay in the 1520s and more.

Might be time to stop, though, when you hit the New York art exhibition of a few years back featuring a Renaissance painting of the Madonna and child – and an Australian cockatoo – revving up the pre-Cook Euro arrival possibilities.

After all, that water’s calling and it won’t be warm all year.

Flying kangaroos loose in the top paddock

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Couldn’t help being reminded of Maynard G. Krebs, the hapless beatnik from the Dobie Gillis Show years back, when I saw our Albo losing it in a Johannes Leak Qantas upgrade cartoon.

If you remember Maynard, he went to water at any mention of employment. “Work!” he’d shriek in a high-pitched panic.

In the Qantas cartoon, Jim Chalmers suggests a need “to shift the focus back to the economy”. Albo erupts in similar shivering, sweating, white-knuckled, wide-eyed fear, squeaking: “Economy??!”

You might better recall Maynard as the castaway Gilligan, who seems another appropriate doppelganger for someone lurching haplessly from one disaster to another and yet staying afloat if adrift.

But the many questions about Airbus Albo’s closeness to former CEO Joyce and Qantas’ favoured treatment when Qatar came knocking with new flights and offers for Aussie customers are only part of the issue.

Think also MP upgrades, Qantas selling a million flight tickets to flights that didn’t exist, Joyce’s remuneration and bonus payments, oversight by the Qantas board – which included consumer guru Todd Sampson – deplorable treatment of passengers whose flights are cancelled, generally atrocious in-flight service …

People are going on about Dutton on Rinehart flights, but he wasn’t the one keeping Qatar out of our airways.

It’s not just Qantas and its Jetstar that the Feds are letting let us down. Returned from OS last week on Branson’s Virgin, who I’ve swung across to out of fear of being stranded somewhere noxious by the flying kangaroo.

Not much better. Check-ins are a long and lengthy farce, automated or in person. Seating space is ridiculous, painful and outrageous. In-house comms don’t work and the “hope you enjoy flight” nonsense over the PA is pure insult to injury.

These flights clearly don’t need to meet anything like the health or disability regulations demanded of any other structure accommodating human beings.

Passengers are blithely told the two toilets servicing some 160 people can’t be used while stewards spend an hour doling out drinks and over-priced food you wouldn’t feed your dog.

The 12 or so happy upgraded Albos in business, meantime, have one all to themselves. Nice ride if you can wangle it.

Not so nice when, like my last trip, the two cattle-class johns are commandeered by two gastro-infected squatters who refuse to give up their tenancy. Twenty cross-legged people in the aisles squirming and moaning did nothing to convince them otherwise.

Mercifully, those in the holding pattern didn’t succumb to the same diarrhoea or vomiting. Bowels like Grenadier Guards, though, shouldn’t need to be a necessity on everyday flights.

Not that Virgin, Qantas, Jetstar or anyone in CASA seem to share this thought on what is surely a matter of basic human rights.

Funny thing, Bonza used to serve up drinks and meals to your seat individually. None of this hijacking the road to the dunny nonsense Albo and our MPs obviously think is below their station. That indiscretion didn’t last.

Nor did poor old Rex, which went belly-up for having the temerity to try cutting into Qantas’ miserable bailiwick. Seems that’s what happens when you get too close to a protected species – or in Airbus Albo’s case, an endangered species.

Speaking of different species, Virgin is looking to let pet animals on board next year. I suspect that’ll only end in tears, or howling, yelping, baying-at-the-moon mutts on a plane.

Hold on to your seats, and your noses, because they won’t worry about waiting for the dunny line to clear. It won’t be the only thing that stinks about our airlines.

 

Bushwhacked by the jungle … again

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Nothing quite like throwing yourself to the not-so-gentle vicissitudes of jungle-bashing. Never any shortage of geography, critters, climes or circumstances waiting to assail you.

The Amazon’s a nice place to start, not that I’m any kind of authority on these things. Its bushmasters, jaguars, fire-ants and piranha and non-stop rain thrumming from the dripping condensation of millions of leaves should spark your imagination. And any phobias you might  have about stings, bites, tropical diseases or being eaten alive.

Of course, you can wrangle with tigers and pythons and bugs the size of plates in the dense forests of India. Or perhaps the lion, leopard, cheetah and spotted hyena predators of the deepest darkest Congo, if you’re an Afrique tragic.

Not this armchair explorer, though. Much prefer my spot out in his backyard kennel.

I do, however, occasionally venture into the jungle, those species of jungle that aren’t a million miles from civilisation at any rate.

I’m happy to explore their waterfalls and beaches and rivers and gorges and the like. I’m big on old jungle temples. But I’d much rather avian squawkers and howler monkeys ahead of apex predators yet to understand their place in the planet’s food chain.

Matter of fact, one of the best sounds you’ll hear is the cry from a jungle bar, a shout to be precise. Nothing quite so inviting, especially when it’s attached to a pisco sour in Peru, an icy Antarctica pilsener under Morro Dois Irmaos or a chilly Bintang in Ubud.

A recent sojourn to Bali’s Gianyar regency found me scuttling down a precipitous track to revisit the famed Tegenungan Waterfall. Great way to cultivate a thirst.

 

By no means off the beaten track these days, it’s still a jungle favourite. Cliffs chiselled like something from Fred and Barney’s Bedrock, impenetrable jungle foliage, blazing sun and a stunning cascade crashing onto the heads of fools splashing about a hundred feet below. It’s a jaw-dropper.

I was taken aback, however, to realise this erstwhile primitive attraction – one of decidedly shonky stairs, rusty handrails, slippery muddy tracks and dodgy bamboo footbridges – had been concreted over, updated, usurped and pitched headlong over a cliff into the A-level rankings of knockout tourist traps.

Lord help me, even a massive, brand spanking, glass-bottomed 199-metre suspension bridge soars over the entire precinct, connecting two villages separated by the Petanu River gorge 66 metres below. The Bali Glass Bridge.

Never seen anything like it.  Yet right next door, the Omma Day Club, designed by bamboo magicians Studio 3 Bali, is giving it a fair run for its rupiah.

Perched impossibly on the edge of a cliff punctuated by smaller waterfalls, Omma is an architectural cacophony of said bamboo, thatch, outrageous mosaic tiles, swimming pools, restaurants, cafes and lounges.

It’s somewhere between George of the Jungle tree-hut, Gilligan’s Island and Pablo Luna with its mathematical hyperbolic twists and turns. Its outlook is eye-watering. and, thankfully, nowhere as vertigo-inducing as the bridge.

Tellingly, it’s an important refreshment station as you gird your loins for the exhausting, dehydrating climb back up those precipitous million or so steps. But gloriously, as a doe-eyed angel behind the jump told me, it also hosts an elevator back to the top.

Whaaat?! Of course it does. How else do the staff and everything else come and go? Brain fade moment. Curse this damn heat. Edgar Rice Burroughs never really mentioned that in the Tarzan comics and novels I was raised on.

Tell you what, though, for sheer feverish jungle intrigue you can’t go past the Boeing 737 I discovered deep in the Ubud suburb of Penestanan below the Svargo Loka Hotel.

 

Yep, giant bloody airplane surrounded a river gorge, a rocky redoubt, coconut trees and palms, and any number of monkeys, chinchilla squirrels and spa healing tragics you can imagine.

And it’s loud. Emblazoned with giant tailplane images, and fuselage wording, of none other than the uber-capitalists Warren Buffett and Milton Friedman. Straight out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

You can’t see the thing from basically anywhere except the hotel property it’s on: Villa Biyu Siyu. It comes up, however, like a priapic Roman brothel sign on Google Earth.

Coincidentally, ridiculously, the hotel room and pool I’m polluting just happens to be directly opposite this plane, across the gorgeous Tjampuhan River gorge. I can see part of tailplane through the trees a hundred metres away. You wouldn’t know what it was unless you knew what it was, to mangle logic and language.

It’s further evidence the universe is dragging me into the jungle towards those rock apes my forebears descended from several generations ago. But tracking the plane’s provenance down is proving tricky.

No-one was around with enough English to quiz when I visited Biyu Siyu. No marketing spiels or blurbs or web ads offer any clues. Pretty pictures around, sure – you can find some sharp drone footage at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDj3Sznd9-E&t=15s – but these websites offer next to nothing about the whys or wherefores of the plane’s presence in an impossible location.

Neighbouring locals are no help, repeat no help. They don’t even know it’s there, and that includes staff of two popular hotels less than 100 metres away. Fortunately, I had a surveyor with similar jungle fixations to me on hand. He discovered the thing in the first place, on Google Earth, so we knew where it was, we just couldn’t get there.

Upper food-chain apex predators that we fancied ourselves, a couple of hurdled fences and gates and it didn’t take too long. Shove over Tarzan Greystoke, we’re the lords of the jungle now.

A dying art at Warrock

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Art takes a never-ending variety of guises. Given the number of artists extolled for their drafting skills, it seems only reasonable that good drafting might itself be considered a legitimate art form.

This is especially so when, as in so many artistic representations, a tale of some note accompanies the work. It is even more important given that it is a dying skill, one that has been slowly but surely replaced by the cyber skills of computer assisted drafting.

Take the measured drawings of the Warrock farming station north of Casterton overseen by Geelong architect and former Deakin University lecturer Lorraine Huddle.

The striking plans, elevations and sections prepared by 100 Deakin fourth-year architecture students for this project, undertaken in the early 1990s, presently live within the Special Collection of the Deakin woolstores campus library.

All up, there are some 230 drawings of the past settlement’s belfry, bull shed, homestead, shearing shed, shearers quarters, lavatories and much more. The drawings were worth an estimated $300,000 some 20 years ago, and were used by Heritage Victoria to assist in the station’s restoration.

 

The wider Warrock collection at Deakin includes monographs, maps, music, ephemera and pamphlets. However, it is the drawings that really strike the observer. Most are rendered in ink, some in pencil, and display inordinate details which at times extend as far as nail holes in timber weatherboards and often individual bricks.

The measured drawings were used for the restoration of dozens of buildings on the property, a Western District pastoral station about 30 km north of Casterton built by Scottish cabinet-maker George Robertson from the 1840s onwards.

It is considered Victoria’s, perhaps Australia’s, most important collection of farm buildings and includes 57 structures mostly built of sawn timber.

The complex sprawls across a gently rolling parkland of ancient river redgums with its grainstore, dairy, bacon house, blacksmith shop, bullock byre, branding shed and numerous other buildings reflecting the life of an isolated sheep station where all the necessary essential to life and such circumstances had to be grown or stored for long periods.

Other buildings in the complex include a pigsty, privies, stable, kennel, hayshed and hay barn, branding shed, foot dip, slaughterhouse, skin shed, cow bail, duck run, coach house and a cottage.

“Some of the buildings are just marvellous, they’re gorgeous,” said Huddle. “Also, it’s a dying art. All the Warrock drawings were done by hand. The students were very, very keen. The place got them in. There was no electricity there, only in the main house and a little cottage.

“One night I went walking about 10.30 and saw some lights in the conservatory. Students had placed candles in the dirt of a garden bed and were working on the drawings. That’s how keen they were.”

Huddle says George Robertson’s cabinet-making skills were reflected in the detail of numerous buildings at the station.

“You can also see his strong Protestant work ethic expressed in these buildings,” she says. “The bell tower, for instance, looks like a little chapel but it’s just a bell to call people to work.

“Time management was a pretty important part of that work ethic and while Robertson worked hard all the time, he treated his workers very well. He gave them good accommodation and looked after them a lot – but he expected them to work hard too.”

The original version of this article was published in the Geelong Advertiser 18 March 2001.

Island of the gods, guardians and peripatetic primates

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Peculiar pre-match entertainment for a Cats-Tigers clash when you’re kicking back peanuts and Bintangs in the Bali mountain jungle town of Ubud.

A dozen or so Barbary macaques parading alongside the bar – upside-down infants clutching their mothers, cocksure males trooping the colour – suggested a peculiar cheer squad on the march. Perhaps not that peculiar in Tigerland, though.

Oh, sorry, I take that back but it’s been said now. Maybe I can’t.

Bar staff have abandoned the traditional shanghai slingshot deterrent favoured by hotels for coloured laser beams, which seems to be taking the fun out of things. When you’ve been hissed at, spat on and tackled by the little blighters and their rabid claws, sympathy levels for primates aren’t high.

The lasers send them scarpering, non-violently. My remonstration to a staffer about new tech over old tech is countered with: “Monkeys are sacred, they’re guardians of our temples.”

Oh yeah, that’s right. If only they stuck to the temples and off the hotel balconies spooking the tourists.

Peripatetic chimps are far from the only organic entertainment on offer on the Island of the Gods, though. Look closely around the place and you’ll find all sorts of oddities.

Think tourists buying satay sticks and sausages to feed stray dogs. Café tables and chairs washed out to sea by the incoming tide. Hawker knock-offs three times more expensive than home. Locals eating with ducks off the same table. Girls in dental floss bikinis practising yoga in front of beachside diners. Missile-like fireworks blasting out to sea as Boeings come out of the sunset to land in the shadow of giant deity statues.

Then there are plantain squirrels whipping through the jungle foliage, giant snails, luminescent black and yellow centipedes, koi pond fish feeding frenzies, dragonflies galore, fighting cocks, masterful bird mimics.

  

Art’s everywhere you look. In religious offerings, in signs, sculptures, gardens, temples, carvings, buildings, shop fittings, traditional clothing, masonry, paintings, furniture … absolutely everything.

Construction’s going on everywhere, too. Jackhammers next door, pile-driving down the river gorge, massive refits to old hotels, including one opposite the ‘quiet’ room I booked.

I’m especially drawn to a giant carapace bamboo structure rising from a paddock smack in the middle of Ubud. Workers line up for a 15-minute rev-up from the boss before I wander over, stupidly barefoot on the hot black bitumen path, to reconnoitre proceedings. A tall lean bloke introduces himself as the property owner, says the double-shelled, thatch-roofed design is going to be a yoga studio.

Good bet it might draw a bit of attention, too. It’s been whipped up by bamboo’s wunderkind architect, Pablo Luna  – known for blending Bali’s tri hit karana philosophy of harmony between people, nature and spirituality with environmental, sustainable and biomimicry principles into his work.

It’s a fair matrix. Almost as cross-pollinated as his background:  a Chilean-born architect of Peruvian/Lebanese heritage who studied in New York before taking his work to Indonesia and South-East Asia, Costa Rica, Mexico, India and Chile.

No doubt it will slot right in with Ubud’s wealth of health and wellness practitioners. No shortage of anything in that jungle; from soothing didgeridoo drones through fusion vegan iterations to breatharian starvation rackets, propped by a multitude of souls seeking happiness, self-awareness and more Zen in their lives. For all the healing they provide, I think Lomotil’s somehow got the jump on them.

The real thing about somewhere like Ubud, and the broader Bali, is the island itself and its natural geographical attributes. A mountain bike ride, a handful of temples and waterfalls, maybe some whitewater rafting, a few palms and a rice terrace or two are about the extent of things the punters will investigate outside the insane gridlock of Seminyak and Canggu.

 

Which is a pity. I’ve had a dog-eared topographical map of the island for a while now, a bright green-coloured thing of valleys, mountains, volcanoes, precipitous gorges, rivers, lakes – a surveyor’s paradise, or maybe nightmare. Contained within its cartographic swales and saddles are a trove of ridiculously stunning tracks and defiles, villages, waterfalls, panoramas, rivers, ravines, coastal outlooks, islands to ponder, jungle …

I’ll be happy to keep ticking off place names for next decade or two given half the chance. If the bloody monkeys don’t give me rabies, that is.

Best read with a red … or maybe not

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Review: A Mapmaker’s Dream

by James Cowan

Fra Mauro is a 16th century monk on a magnificent journey around the world without leaving the clustered confines of his cell on an island in Venice.
A cartographer devoted to drafting a definitive map of the world, he gathers his knowledge from a steady stream of travellers beating a path to his door.
Pilgrims merchants, explorers, scholars, foreign legates, ambassadors, missionaries, officers – all have heard of his ambition and want to make a contribution.
This, of course, presents Fra Mauro with a brilliantly seductive menagerie of Renaissance curiosities.
His visitors present him with cannibals and shrunken heads, turbaned Orientals, mermaids and hairy-bodied women, Borneo jungle dwellers who treat birdcalls as omens.
Together they discuss the world frequented by the thoughts and presence of Ptolemy, Solomon and Columbus, Babylon, Egypt and Rhodes, jade elixirs, Satan-worshippers, salamanders and one- legged men who wheel along on arms protruding from their chests.
Genghis Khan, Prester John, the Tartars, Crusaders, Persians, Thomas the Apostle in India – exotic characters are freely peppered throughout his cerebral discourses and peregrinations.
The problem Fra Mauro faces, however, the more he is confronted with tales that challenge the physical and philosophical tenets of his already considerable knowledge is to represent not the world’s geography but its thoughts and mysteries.
What he is trying to do is depict in two dimensions, within the margins of his maps, the three dimensions of space – a difficult task in pre-Mercator days .
He wants to incorporate the multi-layered dimensions of humour, thought, experience and philosophy as well.
Author Cowan uses phantasmagorical elements of the Renaissance as metaphor and playground for the discovery of the mind.
The experience is other-worldly. The intent seems to be to disarm the reader’s sensibilities and then usurp his beliefs – just as Golden Age discoveries of that time turned the world on its head.
Cowan has some tips for the reader. He says to treat Fra Mauro’s ruminations as a process of gradual guessing. His dream is to derive meanings from the perfect use of mystery.
And there is something of a rider, too. It is for the reader, says Cowan, to decide if Mauro’s meditations on the discovery of the world strike a sympathetic chord.
In many ways this is not difficult. For instance, a scholar, one of Fra Mauro’s visitors, finds himself inexplicably captivated by the mummified corpse of an ancient Egyptian princess.
Her death repose suggested to him that even in death her life had provided a jolt. “We do not engage in life so easily. It is not something we embrace naturally … in a sense we need to be jolted into it, do we not? he asks Fra  Mauro.
An elderly Jew from Rhodes, perturbed by his homeland’s trials, has lived in self-imposed exile for many years. These twin seeds of defeat – his Jewishness and exile – prompted him to embrace his solitude.
Says Mauro: “He  had discovered in his ruthlessness how to inhabit origin of his own mind … to redeem himself rather than allow another to do so for him.”
Cowan writes of deceptive appearances, of interpretation, of discernment and of searching. His vehicle, the immovable Fra Mauro, is yet another of many symbols.
And while it might seem self-promotion on Cowan’s part, you are left with the feeling he is correct when he says one feels that Fra Mauro has something important to say not just for his time but for always.
A word of advice. One critic suggested A Mapmaker’s Dream should not be read without red wine. Perhaps not, but I suspect a clear head would be far preferable.
This book shakes and bounces. It spins the world like a top and rocks its foundations as it negotiates a bewitching path through history, religion and philosophy.
And you wouldn’t want to miss anything on a ride ride like this.

A meteoric struggle of wills

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Two brash colonial scientists jostle for possession of an astonishing 19th-century astronomical discovery­ just outside Melbourne – the world’s largest iron meteorite.

This prodigious cosmic lump of metal is a glittering prize but at stake also are critical notions of heritage ownership in an era of nascent cultural awareness.

Author Sean Murphy’s The Cranbourne Meteorite is a long-forgotten story of Victorian scientists fighting to assert their authority and challenging hide-bound imperial assumptions of ownership and a gloves-off brawl it is, indeed.

They might have been living in the wealthiest gold province of Britain’s 19th-century empire but these scientific leaders found themselves fairly flustered not by any auriferous anomalies as much as a ferrous phenomenon.

The Cranbourne Meteorite details the mini-culture war fought over this highly-sought nugget of iron, and the relationships, personal and professional, wrought in its wake.

Murphy lives at Berwick, close to where the meteorite struck earth. His account is an effort to highlight Cranbourne’s alien visitor, the nature of meteorites and asteroids as well as Australia’s impact craters.

He reveals the scrapping over the meteorite’s ownership in the colonial milieu where his protagonists lived and worked. He relates his meteor’s milestones with a weather eye on the growth of Melbourne and its science and academia at the same time.

   

Frederick McCoy (left) and Ferdinand Mueller.

“It’s a local event with astronomical fireworks and strong personalities,” he says. “The leaders of these institutions were deeply invested in attempts to retain, or remove, the main meteorite fragment: a 3.5 tonne monster named Cranbourne No. 1.

“This arm-wrestle is largely conducted via letters, a very many letters, and in the chambers of learned societies such as the Royal Society of Victoria.”

Murphy exposes professional jealousies and how two pioneering Victorian scientists, Irishman Frederick McCoy and German-born Ferdinand Mueller, held determined but divergent views on what to do with the No. 1 specimen. Two iron wills competing for one iron meteorite, you could say.

“Cranbourne was, for a time, the largest iron meteorite in the world,” says Murphy. “And it has a colourful cousin, the Murchison meteorite, which fell on the Goulburn River township in 1969.

“Murchison’s peculiar chemistry made it a much-studied specimen and famous the world over, so Victoria has two famous contributions to Australia’s meteoritic honour-roll.”

The Cranbourne Meteorite

By Sean Murphy

Australian Scholarly Publishing, $49.95

Roadtripping and stumbling every step of the way …

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Dateline: April 2024, Cabbage Tree Creek: 37.6526° S, 148.8172° E 

Nice part of the world for a quick road-trip recce, East Gippsland, when it’s not on fire, that is. And also when you don’t have spare tyres flying off the back of SUVs and across the road at you at 100kmh.

Was standing in the Bellbird Hotel car park, a few metres off the road, when a sudden bang, crunch and whack had me scurrying for cover. The spare was hanging off the car, bouncing and crashing before shearing loose, belting the car behind and rocketing off into the bush.

Things that happen when you pull over. Need to keep an eye out. Couple of hours earlier, I was pondering whatever happened to the old Metung gas pools where bathers could capture the gas that bubbled up and set it alight through a wet beer box. Near Cantrill’s Lookout.

Shut down and replaced by public dunnies, and gaseous explosions of a different type. Lookout still applies, it seems. Which is what Zachary Hicks was doing offshore up the road in James Cook’s Endeavour in 1770 when he first sighted land.

Wasn’t the first, of course, plenty of other Europeans preceded him, even Islamic explorers going back to the AD800s. Nearby Bitangabbie Bay just over the border hosts the remains of what appears to be a stone fort commonly attributed to the Portuguese navigator Cristovao Mendonca in the 1520s. Supposedly while the Spanish didn’t have an eye out.

 

The Bellbird Hotel and a Tathra beach denizen.

Sadly, a weather eye was badly needed at the next stop, further up the coast on the Tathra Wharf, when in 2008 a young fisherman’s two little kids went over the edge; one of them in a pram many people speculated was pushed by the older kid. Dad jumped in to try to save them. None of them survived.

Ensconced in a bush pole-house at Tathra high above the Bega River, I’m reminded of the graffiti I once found outside a Bega fish shop: ‘The flake you’re eating could be Harold Holt’. Irreverent but also ironic as next stop is Tilba Tilba, once home of his widow Zara after she took up with the mutton-chopped Jeff Bates.

It’s achingly pretty with its green hills, granite outcrops, yellow-tailed black cockatoos galumphing overhead and heritage buildings, including the famed Dromedary Hotel, named for a nearby mount; a sweet stop en route to the next stop.

 

Tathra Wharf  and the Mollymook beachfront.

Ulladulla/Mollymook, with its sprawling beach, heaving surf, fishing boats, rockpools, undulating golf course and glass-encased club, and Slane Irish whiskey at ALDI, makes a nice pitstop before doubling back to Batemans Bay, which has a patina of tiredness these days, and inland along the Kings Highway.

My long-suffering better half, not a great passenger, is biding the while away watching videos sans buds. By journey’s end, I’ve listened to four series of Schitt’s Ceek, which makes for a more than curious travelogue soundtrack.

Onwards and upwards takes you over the nose-bleed Clyde Mountain Pass – great lookout to the Pacific Ocean – to the brooding historic Braidwood and its ancient architecture, to the national pitstop Canberra and its stultifyingly sterile architecture, and onto the contrived heritage Hall Village, where the only heritage to be found are pretty much the trees and shrubs … possibly.

Half an hour further on looms Yass, which greets visitors with the civil works start of a 500-lot subdivision ceding its historic regional centre status to an outer ring of the ACT.

 

The Dromedary Hotel, Tilba.

Notwithstanding, the town’s pretty stately buildings and parks, its friendly folks and their tales of cops, crooks and magistrates, its genial pub chatter and generous grub, make for a curious and charming stop.

Just remember, somewhere it hosts an armed bandit who would tick off the banks he robbed on a list stuck to his fridge. Allegedly.

Armed with local pomegranate balsamic and olive oil produce, I cut out for Yackandandah in a valley beyond the knobby hills south of Wodonga. Travelling down into the Yack valley is one of the sweetest drives about, provided the dolts coming at you stay off their phones and stick to their side of the road. Once again, keep your eyes peeled.

 

Yass Post Office and High Street, Yackandanah.

Yackandandah’s  where my grandpa Ned was born, the first of eight kids, back in 1889 before being spirited away to the ancestral homestead of Banimboola, high in the Mitta Valley. His grandparents, Edward and Mary, had married at Yackandandah in 1862 before taking up life at Banimboola.

Young Ned never got to meet his granddad. Edward the senior was returning from a potato paddock across the Mitta River in darkness in 1866, when he failed to notice a flash flood had dangerously raised the waters. His own Schitt’s Creek as it unfolded.

He and his horse and pack were swept away. His body wasn’t found for several days. One more sorry episode of the wrong place at the wrong time.

Run for your life … or your wife

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NOW girls, this isn’t an opportunity comes along every day. In fact, it only comes once in every 1461 days, to be precise. Once every four years.

It’s your chance to propose to the beau of your choice. Don’t fuss if he’s not keen. He can’t say no on February 29. Or so the theory goes.

To my addled mind, February 29 should be instituted as a Downunder Sadie Hawkins Day. Sadie Hawkins, if you remember Al Capp’s L’il Abner comic strip, was the daughter of Dogpatch founder Hekzebiah Hawkins and the homeliest gal in the hills.

Pappy called together Dogpatch’s eligible bachelors and told them he was taking firm measures “since none of yo’ has been man enough t’ marry mah dotter”. He fired his blunderbuss and the boys had a running start. On the second blast, Sadie set off in hot pursuit. First lout she caught, she hitched.

The idea caught on and became an annual fixture, feared with good cause by the men but adored by all the bachelor gals. It also helped make Capp a household name around the world for some 40 odd years.

Not sure why I’m so enamoured of this comic ritual; perhaps it’s because some men might be suckered into connubial bliss in more sophisticated a fashion that this blunt, outrageous, head-on approach is so appealing. There’s nothing like a Dogpatch hillbilly belle, unwashed and lacking sorely in the pulchritude department, rugby-tackling her hapless larrikin and carting him off to unholy matrimony. With three daughters, I watch such rituals with considerable interest.

Why not set up an Aussie version every four years? Might take some of the violence and uncertainty out of the current mating rituals. You shouldn’t land a rohypnol cocktail or a broken glass across the face when you go out. You shouldn’t find yourself assaulted while trying to catch a non-existent taxi home.

A February 29 Sadie Hawkins Day might not be so different from the desperate and dateless B&S jamborees we see around the country. It could ease the load on dating agencies, chat rooms, classified columns, gym circuits,  Farmer Takes a Wife, Bachelor  and other TV Cupid soaps. They’re just variations on the same theme but there’s nothing so simple, or arguably as fearsome, as the unadulterated real thing. You want him? Go grab him and he’s yours.

Mind you, the traditional Sadie Hawkins Day a la Capp could be deadly. The pursuit of true love was just as likely to see you mauled by a wolf-reared cannibal gal as gunned down into submission by hillbilly horrors armed with World War II ack-ack guns. If you were lucky, you might escape with a glue-pot boiling or hide out at the skunk works.

We’d need some basic rules drafted for our domestic species of Sadie Hawkins. No spiking, glassing, vomiting, bashing, dribbling or urinating. Maybe a basic legal contract, too, so blokes don’t wriggle out of their obligations; they’d probably have been hitched soon enough anyway, so why not in a controlled environment?

Other than that, it would be free market, level playing field stuff. And if my guess is right, a walk-up start major event tourist attraction, too. Might even give the Olympics a run for their money. The blokes will be moving faster than any 100-metre sprinter, that’s for sure.