Category Archives: Sandshoe

The Castle Episode 11– An Awakening.

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Fairground

Fairground

 

Follow the story back from episode to episode and find its beginning if you want.

Story and illustration by Sandshoe.

Dog sighed, stood and padded across the floor. She was an elegant and thin ballerina on the uneven tiles of slate and each crevass she stepped over. Isobella opened her eyes to watch the quiet leave taking. The ritual at shared first light defined the barrier between them. Dog was bespoke.

Isobella sat up. She heard laughter scattering over rustling leaves and looked down through the window glass to where the hillside torn by the spear of the gully fell into its ravine. On a shelf of the base of the ridge fold opposite, neighbours were gathered on a verandah. Isobella could see their verandah top railing and glimpse the people as the wind moved the oak branches.

In homes built along the ridge by colonial developers, bankers and other invading landholders of Tāmaki, a modern gentry was in residence. The ridge road has remained witness to the domestic grace of the built environment of original bungalows and housing projects that followed. The road engineers followed a rise until past the historic site of St Stephen’s Cathedral their carriageway meets with another ridge and around that corner the modern coffee shops, places and haute couture of well-to-do shoppers, so on down into the tumult of the city of Auckland. We are time travellers. In its other direction back past the Castle’s entrance easement and neighbours the road swooped in a grand gesture like a living entity in an historic flight curve down to a tidal flat and its indigenous trees and ocean and land birds that made it their home.

The Castle built on a landward promontory of the ridge might as well on darkest nights have overlooked the darkest of seas. Its landscape was a south-east valley that had never been a built environment. A bush reserve seemed to stretch to the horizon in daylight. The illusion it and its castle had no other society was shattered only by a spectacle of lightning in those evenings when every star was obscured by cloud cover. Stormy weather made the only change to lifestyle. The windows shook in their wood frames with a ferocity that matched the volume of the loudspeakers of The Busker’s sound system.

Like a true nature’s child

We were born. Born to be wild

Sunrise on a clear morning was a mesmeric light show across the valley treetops.  Isobella threw off the bed cover to twist and turn to watch the sun’s gold rays spread across them. She could expect someone would appear on the verandah to watch it most mornings when the weather was fine. She would join them or not standing on the verandah.

The oposite side of the ridge from the Castle falls to Hobsons Bay and the original estuarine mouth of Newmarket Stream. Scholars recount every fishing ground of the Maori had a place name. English names dominate yet the Orakei Basin, place of an adorning, neighbours Hobson’s Bay. The ridge and on its leeside where The Castle’s residents were stirring is base slope of the volcanic cone, Pukekawa, hill of bitter memories.

The Castle: Episode 9 – Isobella and Suse

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

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The Work

The Work

 

Story and Illustration by Sandshoe

Isobella appeared like a tall statue on the edge of the verandah. Suse, a romance figurine, stepped out through the shaded door of Isabella’s moon-and-candle lit room to meet her. The overhang of the roof made an acute angle at the verandah’s corner junction with this moon’s remarkable light.

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” Suse said. Suse had walked through from the living room especially looking for Isobella. She heard her homecoming step on the verandah.

Nobody was responsible for anything at the squat in one sense or perhaps for anybody. Anarchy did rule. Black assumed a role of manager when nothing else could be avoided. Someone had to manage crowds on weekends. The address might well have been advertised on billboards at every city intersection within walking distance. The Castle where townies go and out-of-townies in linen suits with silk neckties and women wore shantung. When addresses in the business district closed their doors. The Castle became playground. No electricity other than to boil a jug and little furniture.

“I’m not happy Ina is spending the nights in your room, Isobella. You have my dog.”

Suse was intent with resolve. Her tone was gently reproving of a fait accompli. Isobella’s gentleness was reciprocal and kind.

“I wondered if you knew. Not that she’s there now. Funny she never comes in until I’m in bed. I’ve never fed her. I would never feed anybody’s dog.”

“Yes.” Suse in the light falling on her face looked even more fragile than usual She had thrown a fine lace shawl around her shoulders. “I’ve been down to see where she was a couple of times.”

“Did you come down with a torch or could you see like tonight?”

No-one would hear Suse in her bare feet.

“I could hear her snoring.”

Isobella chuckled. “She does snore. That was how I first knew she was there. I snore,” she added, “It might have been me.”

“I know my dog’s snore. You don’t snore like she does.” Suse, gentle, scoffed. Her words slurred however. Her focus was spent.

“You know how I snore?”

“No. I know how my dog snores.” Suse emitted a snort that was a laugh. You went out? You look nice. Very dressed up.”

“Thank you. I treated myself to a dinner at The Front Page, I usually stay in. I dance. Drink coffee. Write poems.”

“Goodnight,” Suse said, “I’m tired. I was at work. It’s time for me to go to bed.”

“I”ll be up until the others get in tonight. The moon through the window on a night like tonight fills the room, doesn’t it.”

“That used to be my room. Possum talked me into giving it up for you. It’s good. I like upstairs. What will you do until then?”

“I’ll watch the branches of the oak tree. You know how lovely the view is then. The room was once Ina’s.”

Suse murmured. “No, she’s only lived upstairs. I didn’t have her. Goodnight.”

The Busker was the first in later that night. He put his head in through Isobella’s doorway. A tracery of prematurely grey hair glinted out of the dark of his form. The aged vest he always wore with denim was rough. His rough boots were prominent. “They’re not clean,” he said, “Sorry.” He showed one and the other. He stood his guitar on end against the door frame. “G’day”. Broad and grimacing, his smile and face emitted a chortle that was a visible attack onto the moonlight. More than ever, his eyes shone as if lit by inner demons. “Went to see my parents. Something different. I’ll tell you about it if you like.” He brayed a heehaw laugh.

Isobella had been a resident at The Castle now some time. She had never known or thought of The Busker having parents. The office, the stress of her own once work and its lifestyle seemed years distant, the world itself without telephones, television or radio.

“Have you brothers, sisters? Are you the oldest?”

He guffawed and brayed he would turn the hifi on in his room and return. “Tell you sometime. The others will be in soon.” He chortled, “Maybe the party’s in your room tonight. I’m tired of it in mine. I’ll still DJ. They don’t leave for hours. Can it be? I’ll bring some cushions in. Yuck. Yuck.”

Isobella agreed. She lit new candles when The Busker returned making his strange sounds and grinning. He added cushions to the slate floor and sprawled. The music was blaring through their adjoining wall. “BUSKER! Here you are! How the fuck are ya!” resounded among the cries of the other residents’ discovery coming in and searching to establish the night in bright moonlight that took charge. In no time the room was crammed with residents telling their stories. They made a caterwauling to be heard.

“Let me tell this one. BUSKER! SHUT UP!” screamed a crier.

The Busker grinned in the centre of the fracas. He was quiet this evening, observing, intermittently stroking his beard as he did with his two hands or making a braying noise. Party making was noise. Its crescendo built.

 

The Castle Episode 8 – The Crying

20 Sunday Jul 2014

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Marble Earth

Marble Earth

Story and illustration by ‘Shoe

For readers the story so far, link to The Castle: Episode 7 – Terence

https://pigsarms.com.au/2014/04/04/the-castle-episode-7-terence/

The phone rang. Isobella supposed it was Matthias so close on the alarm.  She found the telephone in the kitchen.  Matthias was at work.  Terence and The Busker had accepted an offer of a ride back into the city.  Quiet Jack was nowhere to be seen when Matthias left. Did Isobella have everything she needed?  On the couch again, Isobella slept.

He was standing there with a cardboard box.  In the box when she looked in was an apple wrapped in tissue paper.. Who was he?

Isobella woke and stood up off the couch in a startle. In the kitchen she peered out to see between the frame of a vertical canvas awning on the exterior of the kitchen window and the window’s frame. She glimpsed empty undeveloped land through the wire of a cyclone fence across a driveway. The kitchen was an alleyway from the living room. “Is anybody there ?” she called into a hallway of closed doors offset from where the kitchen met with an entrance hall.   She listened.  There was not a sound.  In the kitchen again she filled an electric kettle with water for coffee.

Sun she saw through a gap between window curtains in the living room was low in afternoon cloud to her left hand. Both ways she looked when she pulled open the drapes their full extent, a green lawn lay flat in front of her. Angled fence tops in view over a plain aluminium back yard fence made a maze of green and silver fence lines and washing lines. Roofing scattered with aerials scudded grey and silver as clouds rolled out their shadows across a new urban landscape.

Matthias said there was no coffee she remembered. When he loped in the back door, she was tense for coffee. He said he saw Hugh and Quiet Jack at the University at a lunch time rally. Hugh and Quiet Jack were lovers.

We meet people and they are strangers. People stay strangers and sometimes we are married to them. We uphold sacred text. We keep secrets.

She offered to help Matthias with chores. He would not be long he said. She watched him from the opened back door. The wind was fierce from the ocean. He pointed to show her direction Together they made a meal of rice and vegetables and sat cross legged on the floor to eat it and drink chamomile tea. She noted there was no television and no books or bookshelves. The house was new.

She told him her dream.

“Your dreams are the only things you have that are the truth,” Matthias said. He laid claim to an intense loneliness of being. He sat forward with his head bowed and his body curved into his hands. He began to sob.

“My father is in prison.”

“How long has he been there.” She imagined the grimy walls of Mt Eden prison and the heart of Auckland.

“He left our house one day. He never came home. He went with friends. They went to free our country. They were arrested when they stepped off the plane. What did he expect.”

Her heart thudded as she saw his face raised was contorted with grief. They half looked at each other then. He looked away.

“I have felt so much shame. I am so ashamed.”

“What are you ashamed of?”

“All those years at school and my father. In prison. I have to keep my mother and my sister safe. He taught me. He left us. I could never be the same as my friends. What could I tell them. I felt so ashamed.”

He fell backwards on the carpet in front of the fire. His two hands side by side made a cover over his face.

“Where is this?”

He told her and she knew she would never say.

“Why did your father think he would save the country?”

He sat up in an awkward movement that was a casting off from shame. He wrapped his two arms around one of his knees he propped up and bent his other lanky leg away from her under it. His shoulder length hair had curled in boyish locks as they dried from the evening’s early dewfall and, later, light rain outside.

“He was a soldier. He was an important man in his uniform. His friends thought the same way. They were all soldiers for their people. For us? I don’t think his heart was here. It stayed there surely. My father was brave. He was brave in a special way. In the War, when my father got separated from his battalion, he walked the mountains thinking he was walking to his battalion. He walked into Italy. Where he was hidden from the Fascists was a farm house. The people were hiding their daughter. She fell very ill. He was hidden with her. Mussolini’s soldiers came. They left. He fed the girl soup. She was dying.”

Isobella barely wiser about detail cried out as he cried again in half light gashing his face.

“What happened to the girl?” she cried out

“It is my mother. He went back for her after the war. My parents have a great love. We have between us in our family.”

She felt a great grief for him as he wept. She knew grief of all the emotions of harm and defence.

The telephone rang. Matthias started. His tears went. He wiped his face with the back of a hand as he unfolded himself and rose to his feet. His tone of voice was sardonic.

“This will be the owners. They said they would ring me late one night.”

She listened to Matthias walk across the carpet, the length of the kitchen aisleway and the telephone stop ringing in the kitchen. She heard a singing noise like a cry.

Isobella stood up from the floor quickly and walked to the kitchen entrance from the living room to see if Matthias was harmed. He leaned in stark profile against the door frame at the other end of the kitchen’s alley where the phone was on its bench and caressed the mouthpiece in his two hands. His voice in contrast to the first sound he had made in answer to this intrusion was level and reasoned. At his feet a jostle of fowl shocked her imagination as she saw a young and strikingly handsome man in a Mediterranean farm house where she had never been far from this new house and housing estate so new and so new to her. Two more fowl stepped through the kitchen entrance onto the large white outlay of contemporary kitchen tiles towards the brood at the young man’s ankles.

‘Alright, I will see you there.” Matthias concluded his conservation. He put the phone down. His body looked a burden as he turned and walked towards Isobella.

“My father is home,” he said staring at her as he walked. They stood close in the frame of the door where she had stood motionless.

“What do you mean?” she asked, “He has been released? He will come home?”

“He is here. He walked in the house a half an hour ago. My mother rang to not shock me. She put him on.” Matthias looked around as if searching for the identity of an object he didn’t know was missed. Isobella kept her eyes on his face and his returned fixed on hers.

“You have to go then, “ she said.

“Have to. I have to go straight there.”

“Go,” she said, “I can find my way home by early public transport in the morning if you will leave me here. I feel a great deal better. Refreshed.”

“I don’t know where that is.”

“What? The bus? I will find a bus. There will be one.”

He looked at her closely and a cloud of resentment rolled abruptly across his mood. “Typical. That is so typical of him,” he said and turned away. “He turns up. Without telling us. He could have rung.”

In her office the first person the next day was Dinia, her closest colleague. He stopped her with a turn of his small and elegant frame. He shimmered with light reflections from sunshine off the internal glass walls that made their office partitions.

“Are you in love? So early today too. This is none of my business. What has happened?”

In the chaos of this bloody market place they had grown respectful of each other. Such respect was not everyone’s in this place. The lives of people they had themselves known would be lost and some measure of their own. They shared the thought in an agreeable moment. They both knew war.

“No,” she said, affectionate for him. “I’m not in love. I have been a witness, Dinia, to great love. Experience I could never imagine. I witnessed the unexpected return to his family of a prisoner out of imprisonment.”

“Who?” he said.

“I can’t say. I will never say. Not here. From outside the country.”

Dinia smiled at her. She saw his beautiful charm was intact and kindness that was its strength. “Pity,” he said, “What a story you have. I have no doubt you experienced the world itself. I can see. So nice to see you back. I missed you.”

“I truly haven’t given anyone a further thought beyond calling to say I was not well. I am very happy to see you now I’m back. No-one seemed to be here to let me in to the office the other night as I expected by the way. ”

“I wonder how long in these circumstances will we last here. How long can it hold.” Dinia smiled. “There’s another boat going in, anyway. Business as usual today,”

The Castle – Episode 7 – Terence

04 Friday Apr 2014

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youth

The Youth

Story and Illustration by Sandshoe

The Castle Episode 6

Two men side by side and another close behind them stepped into the light Isobella and Hugh stepped side by side out of into the dark. Hugh leaped with a cry of alarm. He had not recognised his friends. The latecomers made their apologies. “At least you turned up,” Hugh said to them. They stood as a group. “Didn’t matter. I had a book. I met my friend, Isobella,”

Terence , the straggler, his hair roughly cut, his fair skin weathered and feet bare, guitar secured around his back so the neck of the guitar reared upward behind his own. He was dressed in shorts and a light cotton shirt as if it was the middle of summer.

He walked directly up to Isobella.

“Who are you?” When she told him her name and he told her his, he prefaced his identity, “He’s my brother.”.He pointed to the taller of the two men talking with Hugh. “ That’s Matthias. I’m going to marry his sister, but she is not allowed.” They expressly shared surnames.

“Aren’t you cold,” Hugh insisted of Terence. Hugh wore a brown corduroy coat with jeans of sturdy quality, a scarf and a cloth cap.

Everybody it seemed was going to walk with Isobella up the hill to her office. She was invited to go on with them after she was finished. They would wait.

“You can’t do that. I’ll be too long. I can’t let you into the office anyway.”

No-one was waiting to allow her entry as she supposed at the base of her work place building on Symonds Street. Matthias was amiable they would wait. She found the public phone in working order. The telephone rang out. She doubted anybody was there in the office above her. She sensed duplicity.

Quiet Jack was their other companion. He asked if she always worked there late at night. “No,” she said simply.

“Homeless people live under the bridge.” Quiet Jack was softly spoken. She could barely hear him. *Yes,” she said.

The men asked if she had a key. They were designing solutions. If she did not have a key, they would stand on each other’s shoulders and make a human ladder to the window of the third floor address.

“You wave through the window.”

One Saturday morning she told them as rejoinder she locked herself in the stairwell at the newspaper. She exited the hatch door to the rooftop and when she waved to alert the construction crew on a neighbouring building that she needed help, they gathered, waved, and wolf whistled.

They urged her to go with them. She referenced her policy was zero alcohol on the road. Matthias, tall and thin and beautiful in the black of this night would drive. “He never drinks,” Terence told Isobella, close, respectful. Matthias was shivering. They had better walk, Isobella said. Hugh was deciding to not go. He walked back along the street with them a short distance only to where he turned down an adjoining laneway. The rest stood quietly watching him. Hugh turned. He waved silently. His companions waved and he stepped out of sight into a building. He was going to visit a student’s share unit and play Dungeons and Dragons. Isobella spoke up that she would like to accept the invitation.

Matthias was sorry they had to walk to the very end of the University where he left his car. In this moment, time held a magic proportion and might describe each to the other for they would never know themselves, the poignancy of experience of youth we only see as ‘others’. They chorused they were happy to be with him. We adore.

The Busker was walking towards them. He accepted his invitation to join their party. They were all friends. Matthias was looking after another friend’s address who was away he explained. Matthias lived at home with his mother and his sister usually, Terence said to Isobella. Terence, Quiet Jack, Matthias and the Busker asked after each other as they walked.

Matthias of rare beauty, adviser, philosopher. In a long sleeve white shirt, luminate and open at the neck and body-thin black jeans, light in a silver line gave way to him in a strobe effect out of dark and into light, in and out of pools of light outside the entrances to buildings . Terence announced it was a mistake he was not chosen as his friend’s brother-in-law. He was not wanted. He accepted that status as error. Nothing was personal sleight between close friends.

Once they were in the car, Matthias describing the lay of this land was courteous and animated. The Busker spoke of their journey as mythical. The travellers witnessed on their approach to the Mangere Bridge a massive light cone beamed skywards that was the headlight beam only of a single car at its crest . With no stars when it passed and the low cloud cover wreathing the harbour, the view was of a black reach.

Matthias at the gate greeted two raucous dogs out of his vehicle window. He released them from their run. They waited noiselessly to be fed under an external light at the back of the house. Isobella, shivering now, was bundled in a quilt and directed to the lounge couch by Matthias. She had come down with a cold. Terence, attentive, lit a fire in a wood heating stove that warmed the lounge. “There is a lovely tree of lemons out there,” he encouraged Isobella, “Lemons cure everything.” Matthias insisted he, Matthias, make the hot lemon drink. He asked Terence to play some music.

“I’ll talk”, Terence retorted and sat down on the floor by the couch, “I’ve been playing all day. I want to talk to Isobella.” The Busker wrapped around his waist in a white towel was already out of a shower he asked Matthias for permission to take. He scurried for clothes he had forgotten to take with him out of his back pack left under a table in the living room. Quiet Jack had responded to a call from Matthias for someone to help him at the run gate that needed a repair. He made himself a place on the floor with a cushion. He made room for The Busker to dry in front of the fire box. The Busker excused himself. Returning in loose cotton clothing and the full heat of a sparking fire catching lights off red and grey strands in his beard and hair, he stood staring at the flames in introspection. Where could he sit, he asked, smiling. He found a bean bag. Matthias came in with a tray. He had made a hot lemon drink for each of them. He sat in his easy armchair.

Isobella would stay with him, Matthias announced to the room in the form of an assembly. The friends nodded assent to Matthias and he would cook her a meal in the evening. Did she want anything to eat now, he asked. No, she shook her head. He loped out of the armchair and returned to her from somewhere with track pants and their pull over with a pair of thick knitted socks. He helped her to stand up out of the quilt. Behind the door of the bathroom where she changed, he had left hangers for her clothes. She was wearing a white cotton shirt, she stared at and ladies’ black cotton trousers. She struggled out of the trousers to change them. She saw the strobe effect of a white shirt in a darkened street and the silver line. Her narrow black tie she knotted around the collar of her suit coat and the coat seemed incongruous. The coat waist length not a weighted woollen overcoat, she felt the coat hanger weight drop away from her hand and test her strength as she struggled to lift the coat to secure it on its hook behind the door.

The Busker had played a simple piping tune on a recorder. “Fiddlesticks,” he said at a private joke, “Got that wrong.” He smiled with the knowing of familiarity. “Go on,” he said to Terence giving him the floor. Terence had picked up his guitar that was never far from him. Each song was new to her. They were his songs and he played an accompaniment that was raw, impulsive. She remembered later some of the words of the songs and had lost recall of context. When Isobella awoke the next morning to the sound of a clock alarm, she was alone in the house.

The Castle – Episode 6: Drinking Tea in a Cafe.

25 Tuesday Mar 2014

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Claude Debussy’s Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun.

 

Park

The Park

Story and Illustration by ‘Shoe.

The Busker threw open a door he called it. His eyes had darted side to side.

“You’ll lose your job. Everybody will. The end will come. It’ll all fall down. I’ve got a room for you where I live. It’s next to mine. Let me know.” He leaned his head half sideways and peered at her. His eyes were pin point darts in a flood of light from passing traffic.

“Capitalism.” He made an intense yukking noise that was guttural laughter and rocked from side to side on his stiffly extended legs. His folded arms hugged his chest.

They met when she still worked at the newspaper. They were workers. She knew him sight unseen  first. She heard the powerful sound of a raucous guitar and then his voice. He was playing an intersection. Night street lights flicked on. Street lighting was minimal. Some shop fronts showed no light. She stopped to drop a coin into his opened guitar case.

“Mark,” he said over the music. Yukk yukk.

“See you at 7,” he said the day his eyes darting they finally agreed they could meet and have coffee and cake if she wanted. He confided the address as if it was a front to a clandestine organisation. A haunt of down-and up-beats, a group of regular students playing Dungeons and Dragons, stayers commingling with models of insolence, young men or young women in single pairs or as alone and still as sculpture.

The Busker waved her over. He stood up from a bench seat at a long table. He was rocking and bounced towards her. He might off walls. Hair sprang free from between his fingers like wire as he grabbed and ran the length of his beard through his right hand. She was ushered.

“This one. Isobella Celente. Warren. We call him Hood. Isobella. Peter. We call him Peach. This Rita. Isobella. Georges.”

He was tapping his feet methodically. He introduced her to each of the customers at the table. The least hesitation he demanded response.

“She’s new here. Look after her.”

“Sure”. That was Georges in a grubby leather vest over a black t-shirt full of holes and his jeans legs folded into cuffs. He returned a few minutes later with a cup of tea sans milk he put down in front of where she sat next to him. “Gnome,” he said, “Call me Gnome. It’s ordinary the tea. Not fancy. Milk costs more.” His hands were soft and dirt under his fingernails was evident. The Busker made the yukking sound that was laughter meaning he was pleased. He thanked Gnome for his care.

“Does anybody want a tea,” he added. A murmur in the negative went the table length. He showed Isabella she could buy a slice of toast with a cup of tea. A well dressed man in a shining silver-grey suit came in and spoke to The Busker over their shoulders. He departed in a chorus of protest.

“That’s Reuben. He’s a bounce. He’s our friend.”

People came and left The Busker said were friends. When the others who were in that close company left that night, Isabella stayed to while time away. She was expected at midnight in her new office on Symonds only a quick climb up a grassed terrace and an adjacent park. Queen is the arterial heart of the city of Auckland from the wharf and its Harbour to K’ Road at its upper end. Symonds on its ridge that butts K’road and runs to the west through an older section was a literal High Street above it and a financial district of its own was consolidating in competition. A deregulated system was acting out a local land grab and assets battle. A nouveau riche risked money and these streets like careless fire.

A young man reading at one of the tables put down his book and came over. He offered to buy her a cup of tea. She agreed. They talked and drank tea with lemon slices they squeezed juice from no milk. He draped a satchel over his shoulder, hooking it with a grasp of fingers and gathered newspaper he handed to one remaining patron at another table. He announced he was going her way. Safer the two of us if you trust me and am I safe myself. The park was not lit. He was Hugh. She introduced herself. He had expected friends. They’re not coming. Isobella walked with him happy for the company. They crossed the exterior paving and street between the café and the dark city Art Gallery to access the edge of the park. He expected his friends to have come that night to play Dungeons and Dragons. Will we be safe walking up through this park he asked her did she think as they walked into its enclosure of sweet calm and only black shaping. The moon had no purchase on the park that night.

Australian Pubs

27 Thursday Feb 2014

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Chloe

By Sandshoe

Chloe is the most famous painting in ‘Australian Pubs’, although there are more famous pubs like, perhaps for Queensland, the National Hotel in Brisbane

that featured with distinction in an enquiry into police corruption in Queensland,  unless it’s The Hero of Waterloo in Sydney,

surely not the Wrest Point Casino in Hobart in Tasmania and so on.

The photos I have linked to were all taken by Bruce Howard, the book’s photographer and mate of the writer, Melbourne journo, John Larkins.  A little research discovered the photos in the book are held by the National Library of Australia and available for viewing on the internet. 

You can link to other views by Bruce Howard if you are interested in following up on this photographer here –   a page of links found by google search using the words ‘bruce howard image National Library of Australia’.

National Library of Australia btw is the largest reference library in Australia and says you have to tell them if you want to publish anything they hold other than for study and research.

C’est la vie. This is a study.

Chloe hangs in Melbourne, Victoria in a pub called Young and Jackson that is opposite Flinders Street Station, as famous as you betcha. Here’s the Station in 2010.

Flinders St Station, Melbourne

Flinders St Station, Melbourne

I recall happy times in that locale for the first time in 1969, 19 years old and meeting a friend there (at the station) who gave me directions he would be standing under the clock reading a newspaper (look out for a trench coat). I couldn’t have been more enchanted and wonder where Max is to catch up for old times’ sake.

You can imagine travellers walking across the road to Young and Jackson that started in 1861 as the Princes Bridge Hotel – news_08_12 – that was renamed in 1875 after the persons who took it on, Henry Young and Thomas Jackson. Max and I did (walk across the road) to put our heads in for an historic glimpse of Chloe.

 The model for Chloe, whose real name was Marie, was said to be 19. 

 As recorded in ‘Australian Pubs’, Chloe was painted in Paris in 1875 by Jules Lefebvre and won the ‘Grand Medal at the Paris Salon‘. If you see on wikipedia a photo of a portrait of a woman with a revealing cleavage and caption claiming it caused a stir at the Salon in 1884, I cannot imagine what the showing of Chloe created.

The painting was purchased by one Melbourne Doctor, Thomas Fitzgerald and bought for the Hotel in 1908 for 800 pounds.

 Anybody interested to read more about the painting, can find a history here.

Here is a wikipedia link to the artist.

‘Australian Pubs’ was published in 1973. I picked it up for a dollar at a Friends of the Library book sale recently in Adelaide. The significance of the painting on the cover could only be in my thinking – apart from the excellent quality of the photograph – evidence of the Australia-wide resistance in the 1960s and 1970s by artists against a pernicious conservatism, but corruption that publicised gatherings of artists and philosophers in Australia as anti-social and dangerous although especially if grouped around the peace movement.  Attempts using the least evidence of nudity or implication in art to bring ‘persons of interest’ into law courts on charges of moral offence allegedly caused by works of art was a standard ploy.

 Be that maybe motivation of editorial choice, the first sentence is ‘This has been thirsty work’.  The flyleaf of the front cover describes the book as ‘the result of a 25,000-mile pub crawl’.

  The text is very well written and the photos excellent that illustrate 86 hotels in all – if my counting is right as the index is not numbered.

Beautifully edited.

’Australian Pubs’ – text by John Larkins – photographs by Bruce Howard – published by Rigby – First edition 1973 and reprinted each year to this edition 1976.

FOOTNOTE:
Published. orig. at Blipfoto by Kangaroo  Friday  21 February, 2014
Sandshoe has been Kangaroo at the social media photography site, Blipfoto, since May of 2013 a.k.a. Kanga, Roo, Kay, K, and as Christina, sometimes by her full name. She says:-
I have a Blipland friend who is “Shoe”. I restrict my handle to Kangaroo as a social courtesy, but have made it known I am also Sandshoe a.k.a.”Shoe” at the Pigs Arms. I have written about Blipfoto before for the Pigs Arms when I was far less experienced a photographer and commenter.

The principle is upload a photo a day. 170 countries are represented to date on blipfoto and there have been 22 milion shared comments, those increasing as we think about it.

I have uploaded 280 images and comment on a round of photographers’ ‘blips’ most days. My own network extends across the countries of Scotland, England, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, America, Canada, New Zealand; at least 6 blippers I know of since I joined Blipfoto have embarked on strenuous travel through Europe, Italy, France, Greece and Asia while some travel between countries every day in the course of their employment.

I am currently following a blipper’s journey through Russia. Australian blippers are all over, including who live on the same railway line and surrounding districts. I write some poetry as reply to poetry, especially sometimes write prose.  Some blippers write very lengthy diaries based on their personal interests, sometimes their research and professional interests, some DJ and others only upload a photo. Some blippers meet socially, others team up for photographic projects. Professional photographers and amateurs alike meet at Blipfoto.

Bumper Christmas Edition 2013 – Santa Was a Farmer, Pig’s Bum

25 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Sandshoe

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Reindeer 7

Reindeer 7

Story and Graphic by Sandshoe

I got a cup and saucer that sat in a tiny sled that could be stood on end to display the china and was tiny like the combo. Santa gave the ornamental toy to me at a Carols by Candlelight held on the town sports oval where football and vigaro was played and a corner doubled as a circus field when the circus was in town. My association of it with tethered elephants was already romantic when Santa arrived that starry night on the tray of a farm truck or a seat of a sled trailer hauled by a tractor used normally for sugar cane haulage not sure which now. I did somehow know then the event was a co-operative undertaking organised between Santa and the Council. Our people had been talking to Santa’s. That was the town where I was born and Santa eventually came I saw it with my own eyes.

So many years later sitting at a radio sales meeting and a seriously new  employee of Rural Press in a hinterland of this place of my nascent experience of Santa, I was digging it hearing Santa was going to arrive in a helicopter. I was hearting Santa-Air. Talk turned to a recent take-over  by allegedly “us” of the only other commercial radio station in the district and far-fetched claims accompanied by warrior-style victory breast thumping regarding what the purchase meant now “we owned” that previous competitor. Whoop! Whoop!

Talk was turning further as I sat thinking about selling hay and legume seed to old tobacco farmers and ride-on mowers to doubts held by my colleagues regarding who might be expected to fly with Santa. There might be some minor adjustments to calibrate. No one was to worry. Santa would be “theirs”.

So far in my life-long days I had not yet heard anything half as silly as that dialogue between intelligent practitioners of any arts or sciences dressed up as work.

Stop me later if you’ve heard me tell this story.

Anyway it was the Christmas staff party coming up. Yes, as I was advised, it was a long way and why would I drive that far. You know you can’t drink. I won’t. So sensible. Yes, I was driving.

Ahhh.

Over a long tinsel-bestrewn trestle table I was sat at in its middle directly opposite the manager, I unavoidably watched the same harshly tell his wife seated on his left, “Behave” at that moment the flush of the excesses of alcohol began to suffuse his primal excitability. I could have died and gone to heaven not.  The nice thing was my present from under the Christmas tree was a plus large pink plastic telephone wrapped in pretty pink tissue paper and tinsel.

You see it was the one intimation I ever received that the position I was employed to implement was genuinely answerable only to the Manager who would be my assistant to set up a so-exciting and new telephone sales project. The manager made something of a fond fuss before-hand of how he couldn’t wait for me to see what ‘they’ got me. A presentation speech on the subject how special I was gulled me further bathed in a spotlight. He consistently failed to turn up to discuss or assort the project with me where instead I soon only found myself sole charge of our satellite office on the coast while the jock I worked with in it took holidays. Meanwhile it dawned he thought he could assess but not only, teach me my job and sure enough as I guessed from assessment of the tracks of what was happening, chose the Christmas drinks at the pub after work to sidle up alongside to do that (“only thing about how you’re doing is I wouldn’t use the word solicit. It doesn’t sound nice other than that you’re doing just fine”).

Earlier that day, I had purposefully addressed a client in a voice to project between our walls and using the word o, so beautifully, to test the culture once and for all. The summer was cloying hot outside, visible through the glass walls of the enclosed palm-tree foyer.

Worst thing about that drive-to Xmas party was the room was shared with another table of party goers celebrating an occasion and the behaviour of the dishevelled at ours drowned out theirs.

Some other time we may examine the proposition that all salespersons are equal.

My favourite Santa Claus I have met so far was Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas of Father Christmas Goes On Holiday. He was ‘stuck up there in the bloomin’ cold’. I feel stuck up here in rural Australia again with ghosts of Christmas pasts tugging at my jacket. My sister was real skinny and she is rushing into the kitchen in some kind of fit about 12 years old.

I, the youngest by seven years her junior and looking up at shapes and forms recall those dear people in bodies with far away concerned faces. Dad had a usually slightly sarcastic way of looking at you as if you were in on a big joke. He looked ordinary Honey was upset. She was sobbing. Her face streaked. The day was hot stands to reason and getting hotter the way you know once you don’t have it any more in changeable southern climates all those days were in the summer of North Queensland on the coast.

“He’s…” she sobbed and looked terrified, “not a he. He’s a she. We can’t eat him.”

The ensuing wail was now terrible. We rushed  outside (I simply chase the action without understanding). The shadows are falling under the mango tree onto plate-size patches of lawn grass in sunlight and scratched dirt. The turkey is clucking and gobbling, walking from one side of the cage he was especially contained in as we did not usually keep fowl. This bird allegedly masculine we were to fatten was a Christmas present  to our family from my mother’s cousin (I had not known why. I had never seen a turkey before).

My sister’s aversion to everything and everybody if the turkey was harmed, its least feather, seemed likely inconsolable. Battling with the confusion of conditions at knee and thigh level, in my sister’s case (true) close to shoulder level, I managed to work out using my agile wits the bird was laying an egg that was unexpected.

“Tell Dad, Mum” screeched my sister as if our father was approaching the cage with a knife in hand and a hangman’s noose, “how could anybody kill this now it is…”

She blubbered. The two mango trees were thriving then and dwarf everybody, the garage and house, the cage and the turkey, everything. Gobble gobble. Forth and back. Along one side of the property a dingley dell of two paw paw trees, a bush lemon tree and the spare wire of a literally one barbed-wire strand fence on a lean make another scrabble of shadows among weeds against stark sunlight revealing the spare allotment next door. Gobble gobble. Back and forth. My sister rushed off somewhere.

I truly don’t understand a lot of it. Who ate the turkey I don’t know. Our family didn’t.

Have a safe and Happy Yuletide, piglets and our readers. Thank you for keeping the pub ticking over tickety-boo, Merv, Janet, Granny, Foodge, the tenants like the indomitable Glenda at the Pigs’ Legs Waxing and Beauty Salon and its workers and wenches, Eddie O’Bad alongside whose patronage we seem wholesome, Father O’Way without whom we would be lost  plus the mob in the carpark who sneak in and out using the facilities when Merv is upstairs changing  the twins’ nappies for Janet, the Mondrian Bros. (Plumbers to the Pigs Arms), so many contributors and Emmjay who is our proprietor, Mike Jones.

Here, have a slice of pie: Gender.

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Sandshoe

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Benedict thought he was The Way

Benedict thought he was The Way

Story, Drawing and Photograph by Sandshoe

Let’s have a bit of a look at the status of women in Australia.

As of the 2008 Census 50.3% of the population was female.  In all states except West Australia and the Northern Territory there were more women than men. Home in on the single and ageing population, as if the 54.5% of Australia’s singles who were counted as females does not have a passle of work enough to accomplish to maintain that household…over the age of 65 there were 2.4 women for every single person male household.

Women will experience more resentment than they do now not less and neglect as they age. (I didn’t say men are or aren’t/don’t… whatever! This article, putting it simply, is not about men!)

My instinct rang an alert in regard of a statistic referencing education…that while women marginally outnumbered men at all qualification levels, they did not for Certificates III or IV and Post-Graduate qualifications. The difference between the numbers of women and men attaining Certificates III or IV is so large in favour of the male gender I beg that discrimination is the reason.

The deficit in this particular for women is significant, importantly because of National Training Authority imposed and legislated standards, considering the status of women’s employment in positions that exclude applicants who have not attained Certificates III or IV.  Educators at certain levels must have those.

Discrimination ought to turn victims into beggars. Instead I posit …and don’t waste time in your head on the sidelines, anybody, giving yourself dry rot that you store up and remember for years about the way I write or words I employ …  Australian women are captives of a host of cultural reasons why they will neither beg or expect men to organise to compensate women for the insidious position women occupy, however well-educated otherwise women are.

Women are among the worst offenders who harangue and bully women…who cheat, lie, steal and thieve from women (so we understand this isn’t intended to place you at the centre of the evil empire, men).

The permutations and combinations that make up men who identify as male and women who identify themselves comfortably as female is so complex, too, can we possibly pole vault the rubbish about what women and men are best suited for at any one moment or other? Equally get over citing ourselves as not like everyone else in this important regard?

I feel very sorry, but we are locked in it (together) with all its consequences.

Females are so few who undertake Engineering compared with men it is no surprise to me female engineers are paid more than men (as are female earth sciences graduates … and, curiously, social work graduates where there is no deficit in the numbers compared with men). Yet twice as many women as men completed Society and Culture courses and three times as many completed Health and Education courses. Some might suggest the under-representation of women in Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Cabinet looks distinctly discriminatory viewed alongside this insight.

Surely the principle is easily understood that a government needs a hefty complement of participants who understand the fiscal and education system in the context of society and culture. Who it works for is essential knowledge. Speaking from the collective viewpoint called social, societal or society depending on which language tool someone uses to present or talk about this stuff,  not  for our wives, daughters and our sisters is as good as remaindered knowledge for all the insight that is shone on what this is doing to our present and future. Particularly regarding how this affects social discourse.

85% of male graduates from Bachelor degree courses and 85% of female graduates were employed at the time of the survey…however women with post graduate qualifications were most likely to be only available for part time or casual work and not seeking full-time employment. One reason will continue to be the abominable behaviour a woman may be subject to in any societal environment in which men are promoted over women on the sole basis of prejudice against women. The discrepancy is considerable however comparing male and female ordinary graduates and more significant again comparing Graduate Diploma and Certificate Level graduands. The second of those statistics is disturbing viewed in the light as it is that the overall number of women accomplishing Certificate III/IV courses is so far behind the sheer numbers of  men.

Apprenticeship and traineeship numbers tell a story of blatant prejudice (I am not saying who is demonstrating prejudice in this reference or either in what direction!)

Women made up 33% of  apprentices and trainees in 2007 (telling it like it factually was). More than 61% of all apprentices and trainees were male in trades persons and related workers occupations and 16.5% were women. Women made up more than twice the number of men in Intermediate clerical, sales and service groups. Women made up just over 13% of Intermediate production and transport workers in 2007.

The concept of discrimination based on gender (this is me talking now and not a statistician; neither the statistician) will not mean a thing to anybody who hasn’t got the swing. The size of the differences between these categories is a wrecking ball. A society in which an economic landscape is differentiated so distinctly by differences in gender has a workplace communication problem. The problem in domestic environments goes without saying when we know next to nothing about the others’ work places.

No?

Funny are the naysayers. They cause me to remember being singled out for consultation that because I was “a doctor’s wife” I would know such-and-such about a medical condition. Even my reputation won for being a femme who holds strong viewpoints backed by some knowledge was discriminated against ie took on the chin a lesser status purely on the basis of my marriage and gender. Forget about my qualifications and status in society and culture. Do a mob if they thought about it honestly suppose that a non-medical man (say, a plumber) married to a female medical practitioner would be swept up at a party and manipulated ostensibly to account for their specific knowledge about medical practice?

No because our societal consequences do not run on songlines of knowledge and appreciation of human need and comfort, but on what societal tendency is in vogue or entrenched. We accept until we are challenged…and even after…things we believe on the basis of nothing but systemic manipulation and discrimination according to race, colour, culture, status and creed. Add gender.

People like to get a leg over others and get as much as others if not more of the social pie.

There is not enough of everybody (speaking statistically) employed in enough of the same or similar environments to practically disseminate information and educate each other regards what’s going on. No society needs the discrimination and penury women are subject to, but it sure as hell does not need the emotional and cultural deprivation Australia is suffering as result of the absence of a common language and roadmap based on an understanding of gender, of how to choose the tools needed for each common task and allocate basic resources.

Leaving it to hit and miss or ‘Strike!’ from the sidelines and side-lined is an abysmal method of governance. If it is not clear and if we cannot take for granted there are many shades of love and many descriptive differences between men and women … and proscriptive…and that we have to understand this language (Gender) and accept dialogue about it and its fallacies, we cannot heal the consequences of this loss and waste of the talent of both men and women that is affecting our country and economy so badly. Ask women if you have not already ….who try to tell you and you and you … how it makes them feel. Refer to your brothers, husbands and sons who are turned on to issues of gender discrimination and its saddest consequences. Think about how you feel challenged.

Who am I addressing? All of us. Does anyone honestly think I am proposing myself at a centre of a universe after the breadth of experience I have clearly had? Sitting on a sideline, come out and reveal yourself as gender challenged, but willing to concede the waste of time you and you and you apportion argument about it; argument particularly that it doesn’t happen in our place of residence, workplace and affect our very own children who are now independent and having their children.

Look at the government we’ve got.  The satirical line of The Year Of Three sung by The Axis of Awesome at the end of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s programme last night, Q & A, lays it on as thick as a layer of nothing but spreadable butter in reference to gender and the current Prime Minister: [he] put a whole woman in his Cabinet and lots of other splendid shit. SEE LINK: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3878650.htm

I may write some more if anybody shows interest that I do in reference to gender. How I came to this week was in light of current circumstance and looking out some .pdf files I saved down a while back. I cannot see from where I derived them individually . Nevertheless their contents are displayed on this website as follows:

http://www.dss.gov.au/our-responsibilities/women/publications-articles/general/women-in-australia/women-in-australia-2009?HTML

Ciccente

18 Monday Nov 2013

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Finding Form

Finding Form

Story, Drawing and Photograph by Sandshoe

No other reason why I titled this satirical line drawing ‘Ciccente’ than liking the name when I heard it. A friend who was a traveller, a singer-composer-songwriter, jack-of-all-trades really told me about his impressions on meeting Ciccente, a co-worker in New York who washed dishes to contribute to the support of his wife and extended family. We exchanged stories.

In a patisserie where I worked in Auckland, a giant of a man who was a Pacific Islander immigrant and sole support of his family washed dishes with water running off his giant arms and giant elbows making the floor slippery (although no-one said). I didn’t know his name. He didn’t speak.  I started work at 6 a.m. without question.

In the same year I lived at an address behind a rambling wooden boarding house of lodgers and my visitors were street people. I converted the walls of the shed into a display of art and writing-Primus. Audience genuinely enjoyed their viewing. I served hot tea and a steaming bowl of whole oat porridge at any time of the day when I was home.  The rent I paid was a pittance. The unit was a converted claptrap of a shed formerly used for garaging a household car.

Sometimes I visited premises up along the ridge of a decaying High Street where a coterie of youthful designers and musicians lived in vacant warehouses. They worked in menial occupations. A close friend was waiting to hear about an application for admission into an Art College. I had never thought of that. One shop front vendor I identified with because he too had worked at premises in the city where I did. I saw style reflected and recognised my own.

Meanwhile, the cost of living was soaring, yet these were heady days, made so by glimpsed roses in inner city straggling gardens and the rush of the traffic even on the overpass over Newton Gully. These are places in the city to-from where we do not usually stop a car and can barely look. I was one with knowing the city around me and sense of rush under me, walking with abandonment and abandoning a preconception given me I could not survive without support. We do generally survive arduous emotional events that we experience when we are parents. I had separated from my family to survive. We have to survive and find a way back.

Walking the Overpass, 2012.

Walking the Overpass, 2012.