Amazing, actually that staircase is just fantastic. The colour is wonderful. It’s one of the outstanding things of the eighteenth century … Imagine what fabulous theatre it would have been to stand here in the eighteenth century, with all the people coming up and down that grand staircase, all the flunkies at the side. Looking at the ceiling, looking at them. It would have been incredibly splendid … The drawing is astonishingly ingenious.
The Chinese scroll, the Versailles panorama, Tiepolo’s staircase …
The Versailles panorama!
Suddenly I remembered my long-forgotten high school art project.
VII.
I was always hopeless at art—the actual doing of it as opposed to the art history component—but something made me persist with the subject right through to my final year. I chose photography as a way of getting around my lack of any other practical skill, but I wasn’t even particularly good at that. Technically, photography was all a bit fussy for me; and I didn’t really know what to take pictures of. Macro lens shots of flowers or fern leaves—yawn. But then I had an idea. How it came to me I no longer recall, but my idea was to empty out a small, almost square room in the school’s oldest building and photograph it. The room was then a storeroom, but years ago had been a boarder’s bedroom. It was upstairs. It had one window, which overlooked a courtyard. A dark wooden picture rail ran around the walls, which were painted white but were bashed about. I decided I would stand in the middle of the room taking multiple pictures until I had turned 360 degrees and captured the four walls, floor to ceiling, in overlapping frames. Then I would build a circular structure, a bit like a massive lampshade. The lampshade would be about 3 metres in diameter, its walls a metre and a half high. I would mount the photos inside the structure, thus reconstructing the room, only now, physically, the room would be circular. The structure would have to be suspended somehow and the viewer would need to duck under to enter. Once inside, the viewer would stand in the middle and turn, just as I had when taking the pictures. Just as David Hockney had when viewing the Versailles panorama.
This was 1978. I was a schoolgirl. In those days no one got involved with kids’ projects—not the parents, not the teachers—so I didn’t expect any help. But neither did I have a clue how to build my big lampshade. I didn’t know how it could be suspended (it would be heavy), or how to make it transportable. I wasn’t even sure if the photos could be coherently joined together. And I had no money.
What did others think of my big idea? I don’t remember outright scorn, just indifference, as if it wasn’t worth the bother of thinking about because it was already obvious I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Nobody asked what it might mean, which was just as well because I didn’t know that either, although it was never a matter of just being clever—fitting a square space into a round hole. There was something about the original room that was important. It had an atmosphere of austere weariness that was not unpleasant; that invited stillness. In order to see all the stillness of the reconstructed room, the viewer had to move inside the lampshade, and that paradox, between stillness and movement, was probably key. The cell-like nature of the space, in a monastic sense, was surely in play too; this was a place of refuge and restrictions—which is psychologically interesting given it was once a boarder’s bedroom, and that I was waiting to leave school and go out into the world. But that’s all hindsight talking. All I knew at the time was that my idea made me feel buoyant. It’s a feeling I would recognise now as a pretty good indicator I’m on to something worth pursuing.
I tried to think of structural designs and lightweight materials for construction, but the scale of the thing, the logistics, the mathematics of it all defeated me. All I succeeded in doing was wasting a good deal of time. There was nothing for it; I had to give up. But what would I do instead? A lethargy settled on me. No other ideas appealed. For months I procrastinated. The deadline for submission approached.
Eventually I took a few urban grunge photos to go with one I’d taken of a supermarket, the side wall of which had been graffitied with the words White Machine. On the weekend before the Monday deadline I stuck the photos onto pieces of cardboard and tried to hang them from a mobile made out of coathangers. As soon as I began the task, a cavern opened up in the bottom of my stomach. I already knew my artwork wasn’t going to be much good, but I’d been so uninterested in it for so long, I wasn’t prepared for the fact that in truth it was abominable.
I panicked.
I had trouble stopping the strings from sliding on the hangers; the weight distribution was impossible to organise; strings broke; hangers tipped. Strings pulled out of photos. It was all so tin-pot, so homemade, so flimsy. I would never get everything attached and balanced, and even if I did, my humiliation would not be over. In the cold light of the last day there was no getting around it: the photos were poor, the whole thing was rubbish. I deserved to fail. And the worst thing of all—it was my own fault. I might never have been capable of creating art, but I could have avoided this last-minute debacle.
Surrounded by cotton reels, coathangers and cardboard, I wept.
In the end, my brother could no longer bear my distress. Home for the weekend from teachers’ college, he stepped in to help. Somehow, piece by piece, the hanging contraption was cobbled together then carefully folded into a cardboard box for transportation.
In the car on the way to school the next day, I could not bear to look at the box on the seat beside me. My stupid White Machine. How the examiners would keep it in one piece as they lifted it out, I did not know. I did not care. All I wanted was never to see it again. And I had my wish.
I must have blitzed the art history exam, because somehow I managed to scrape through the subject overall, though I could never think of the experience again without cringing. In fact, I did my best to suppress every memory of it. Forgotten, too, was the artwork behind it; the one that never was. Because I was ashamed of that as well—my big idea—the hubris of it, the overreach. The pointless dreaming.
But the Versailles panorama prompted me to recall my thwarted seventeen-year-old self and feel kinder towards her. Thanks to the baroque and going fallow, I now know that the pleasure of thinking a big idea is not to be dismissed as nothing. Even if the idea is never realised, the thinking is real, and enlarging and sustaining; as much a part of art and the life of inquiry as actual production. But most importantly, thanks to Tiepolo, I finally understand the impulse behind my grand folly. My lampshade. My circular room.
While I was attending to the silent speech of the original room and re-presenting the experience of being in it all those years ago, I was also, surely, trying to step inside the frame.
Life wanted to meet Art.
Up in my coastal holiday place I have experienced this.
VIII.
Several times in recent years I’ve seen windless days up the coast that are in every way so perfect, I have stood beside the bay and wished I could cram it all into my mouth. The glass of the water, floury blue body of sky, the scents in the air, the boats, the shore-edge trees: the very poise of all things.
Days like these only occur in autumn or spring. My encounters with them begin with the normal enough wish to breathe them in, but as the day goes on and I stop what I’m doing to look and look again, the impulse grows to throw my hands out wide to somehow grab the day and drag it to my lips.
When a spring bushfire burnt out the coastal ridge that protects the inlet from the sea, I went up to survey the aftermath. The obliterated heath was shocking, but also grimly beautiful: only black sticks were left, standing like abandoned spears in acres of ash. How strange it was, to see the Pacific Ocean carrying on with its usual blue business beyond this newly stricken foreground.
On either side of the gravel road on which I walked, still-warm powdery drifts of ash looked like beds to be lain down upon. I wished I could. I would sink into that softness, letting the ash cover me so that when I rose I would be coated in the finest dust, wearing it as I
walked.
Leaving the ridgeline at a fork in the track, I veered away from the sea to travel on the inlet side of the hill through a small angophora forest, also burnt. The trees, which in normal health were goitred and twisted, still stood, but now were charcoal. Many had been hollowed out. Some trunks were split open at their base like blackened skirts. I could see how flames must have poured and roared through inner tunnels to triumph from the throats of trunks and from the ends of amputated branches, as if the fire was dressing itself in the fluid shape of the tree, thrusting arms of flame through sleeves. Everywhere stood these empty black evening gowns, each one sophisticated and original. Why hadn’t some haute couture designer made dresses modelled on these? The lines, the cowled folds: elegant beyond anything ever seen on a catwalk or in a magazine.
In every way the scene challenged the senses as I moved through it. The charcoal was aromatic, and the urge to pick up a chunk and bite into it became overwhelming. My mouth watered—and does so now as I recall it. I wanted to put my face to a cob of that burnt wood and take a big bite the way a kid takes a bite from a piece of watermelon. I could imagine the crunch. And my black saliva.
In a way that was wholly celebratory and about relish, I wanted to wear, I wanted to eat, I wanted to take that day into my body.
I wanted to be that burnt-out land.
In its extremity, I suppose this could be called a baroque impulse.
IX.
My fallow period lasted five months, coming to a close sooner than I thought it would and undramatically. An outside prompt got me thinking about the essay, a form I’d never considered, and before I knew it, I was writing one.
I have begun to think of the essay as my new frame. In wielding it I feel closest to my camera days. I didn’t realise how much I missed it, that restless frame: alighting, adoring, inquiring; ignoring noise and distraction; widening out, zooming in. And moving on.
The viewfinder of the essay may well help me find the missing thing I need to bring back to the novel, but even if it doesn’t, it’s been useful. It’s made obvious to me the tension of the frame, and I find that interesting. Thinking about what it includes, what it excludes; the way the frame nags: by its very existence making us long for a borderless place, where landscape, life and art are indivisible.
•
Back at the football, and still in that first quarter, there’s a stoppage in play. I swing my camera back to follow up on the smashed boy, who’s been lying on the ground nearby. Kneeling beside him is a trainer.
The van takes my shot.
The trainer gets up and extends his hand. Grasping the man’s forearm, the player rises to his feet. Shakes himself off.
The trainer wrenches him to stand still and, with the brusque attention of a rough mother, wipes away the dirt on his temple. The boy spits. Turns. Jogs back to rejoin the action.
The van holds, and as the boy gets further away his form diminishes. My picture, which was filled with his figure, progressively, naturally, becomes a wide shot, showing the far play, the goals, the grandstand. I don’t make any move to follow the kid. Leave it wide, this time, to keep everything in.
Then, because it must end the way it always ends, the red light blinks off.
From the Deep, it Comes
The salmon are in. Along the beach the other day rods bent in succession as fishermen reeled them through the waves and up the sand. A pair of young men clutched their strong, kicking fish for photos, excited grins offered to the camera held by a friend. When done, they put their salmon straight in a bucket, not knowing they’re a fish that should be bled. If you don’t bleed them they taste terrible. If you do bleed them they taste marginally better.
On internet fishing forums advice varies on the best methods for preparing and cooking Australian salmon, but three suggestions are common. 1. Cut salmon into slices, put it on a hook and feed it to a flathead, then eat the flathead. 2. Make salmon into fishcakes, incorporating many other ingredients and serving with chilli sauce so you can’t taste the fish. 3. Give it to the cat.
But sharks like salmon. And there’s a big possibility that one will be near when there’s a school. The other day, just before I walked along the beach to see what the fishermen were catching, I had been swimming.
For many reasons, it’s good not to know exactly what’s out there.
•
When I was a little girl we went on a family outing to Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney. I remember the elephant but not much else—except the aquarium. I was perhaps six years old, and even then, even to small me, the design of the place seemed foolish.
Raw, knobbly concrete pillars and sculpted, low-arched ceilings were meant to give the appearance of a system of underwater caves, but it was clumsily done, as if someone’s uncle had taken up the trowel. Set into the coarse walls were small illuminated tanks which one supposes were intended to look jewel-like, shining out of the gloom, but people had to crowd in close to see anything, and for a child standing well below the required height, glimpses of light and colour were few. When lifted up for a turn at viewing, I could see that the tanks, too, had a homemade appearance: some were empty; some were fogged up; thick gloops of sealant were visible, the efficacy of which was doubtful. This place, which was meant to be so exotic, was already familiar to me: it had the gritty, dank feel of a surf club shower room.
Although I must have seen some fish in those grotto tanks, I don’t recall a single one. Maybe an octopus … suckers on a reaching arm. But in another section of the aquarium there was a fish that was unforgettable. Unforgettable because it wasn’t so much a fish as an observable circumstance—a phenomenon.
It was in the shark pool but it wasn’t a shark. The shark pool—the only place big enough to hold my creature—was in a strange building all of its own, the interior structure of which resembled Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The upper level was a viewing gallery, made of timber and enclosed, except for the balconies that overlooked, and overhung, all four sides of the square pool, seemingly far below. The gallery was supported by piers going down into the water to the floor of the pool, forming a watery cloister. As with the Globe, the centre of the pool was left open to the sky, but despite this natural light, large parts remained in shadow. It was a pit of chiaroscuro.
The pool, which was not very deep, seemed at first to be empty. And then it emerged. From one of the recessed corners it came: a giant stingray. Gliding. Under the overhang of the gallery, past the pilings, it circled the square pool at an unvarying pace. Nearly 2 metres across its disc, it was all black except for a few mottled spots near the raised holes of its eyes. Hardly a lift of its great flaps was required for it to proceed, only an occasional curl—a fluting along the edge—which afforded a glimpse of its snowy-white underneath.
Around and around it went, direction unchanging.
Scattered across the bottom of the pool, like some gypsy mosaic, greenly glinting, were copper and silver coins. Tossed for luck.
Up on the balcony, sitting cross-legged, I watched through the railings, and in one sense would do so all my life.
Magnificent and black and gliding. Into the shadows and out.
Elegant, mad, prisoner.
•
Memories may be potent but of course they can be unreliable. From time to time over the years I have idly researched the history of the zoo to find out about the aquarium, but photographs are few, and I’ve seen none of the shark pool, so my childhood recollections are hard to check.
The aquarium was built in 1927, and as it turns out the design has been acknowledged as poor, over-influenced by the aesthetic of the Hon. Frederick Flowers: unionist, Labor politician and chairman of the zoo’s trustees. The grotto concept, the execution of which Flowers personally supervised, was implemented with remarkable disregard for practical consequences. Plumbing for exhibits in the mock rock of the cave area was located in a crawl space behind the tanks, and small manholes in the concrete above provided the only access for servicing. So
tight were these spaces only a little person could use them, and the zoo had to employ an appropriately sized worker to fit.
Structural problems soon surfaced and the roof leaked after only two years. Almost every decade one section or another was shut down for safety reasons, or renovated, or demolished. In 1991 the last of the old aquarium buildings closed.
Stingrays of enormous size certainly were exhibited in the shark pool when opportunity permitted: that is, when someone spotted one in the harbour, where it could feasibly be caught. The first two were captured in 1952 at the Captain Cook graving dock at the naval base on Sydney’s Garden Island. Locally they became known as Captain Cook rays, but their more general common name is the smooth stingray (Dasyatis brevicaudata). Distributed around three-quarters of the Australian coastline, they are one of the largest stingray species in the world. Offshore they are found down to depths of 170 metres, but they enjoy the shallow waters of harbours, estuaries and coastal bays. It’s a thought to lie with in bed at night: while the city of Sydney moves unknowingly above and all about, the big rays are there.
At the graving dock, the rays were found when the water was pumped out. With the aid of a wharf crane, they were lifted out and put on a truck for the zoo. Sir Edward Hallstrom, the zoo’s director, was pragmatic about their chances. ‘We do not expect them to live for very long,’ he told journalists. ‘But when they die they will make a grand feed for the zoo’s polar bears.’
Hallstrom, who in his professional life manufactured refrigerators, was another enthusiastic zoo amateur with a big personality who treated the place as his own Disneyland.
Despite initially refusing to eat, the largest of the two stingrays survived for several years and was eventually joined by another from the naval base. But the ray I saw was probably one found in the early 1960s in the harbour pool at Clifton Gardens. A local woman, surmising it had got in under the shark net and couldn’t find its way out, reported it to zoo officials. Years later, remembering its lonely existence in the shark pool, she said she regretted her intervention.
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