SIGNS OF LIFE

My apologies. I didn't intend to drift away like that. It just happened and the longer it went the longer it went. A bit rude really; sorry.

The end of the working year was hectic, and when holidays finally came I slid into a kind of torpor.  Doing the least became the pleasure, and we spent languid times together idling through the season - swimming (Sydney is really the most glorious water city), napping on hot afternoons under the ceiling fan, and then retreats to the country where the summer was fierce but manageable.

Against that background -

K's birthday party was wonderful.

Locals will remember the Aunty Jack Show in the early days of Australian television.




On keyboard in that clip is the irrepressible Thin Arthur, an escapee from the old dart with all that ebullient inherent panto style. There he was and here he is:




It all became a gorgeous balmy night blur.

Christmas happily came and went, New Year exploded as usual in the ritual that still manages to dazzle, and January slid past as the hottest month on record. Finally the rains came.

The boat ramp by the pool shining in the morning light:

The Angophoras in the gardens by the pool glowing in the late afternoon light:

A glorious day at Mackerel Beach with the birthday boy (now all has been exposed, though a layer or two down, some discretion retained) in the water taxi back to Palm Beach, Lion Island behind:

Francis Bacon is explored in a five decade retro at the Art Gallery. We have had little exposure down here to Bacon, Irish born of an Australian race horse trainer, whose transition from interior designer to painter of the disconnected and depraved was in the company of Roy de Maistre, later also lover to Patrick White who would arrive in London some years later. Recently I read that Marianne Faithful had declared herself to be have been born depraved, or something close to that, by which I think they both mean that they are not fooled by the superficiality of temporary beauty, the things of time and space, and have come to the realisation that the/their way to the truth is to confront the ego in all its ugliness. Bacon had no time for beauty. His paintings were reality as he saw it - "a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation". It was suggested he could live in Switzerland and avoid tax - an idea he rejected because of "all those fucking views".

Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey was screened in the Concert Hall with the SSO and choir in great form - Ligetti, Strauss and Strauss fully alive and fully thrilling in a still remarkable and remarkably beautiful film. If he got anything wrong, it was the hostess's clothing, though I do love the velcro stick -on shoes, and that computers would get smaller, not bigger. We still watch it from time to time, at least once a year, and it has never looked or sounded so fabulous. The next most beautiful film to look at has to be Mulholland Drive - every frame a perfection of construction and light. We just watched it twice in as many weeks.

In the country things got bad. Sydney had a day of 46 C and while it was degrees cooler in the highlands, it was the smell of the dryness and heat, something almost approaching ignition point in the air, that prevailed. And there were no birds or animals. Nothing. Just heat.

I installed a fire safety bunker a year ago. The road out of this place, on the edge of a National Park, is a death trap, a photo on the front page of the next day's newspaper - a burnt out car in a charred smoldering landscape. The bunker is an earth covered underground concrete box and it feels like getting into a space shuttle when one climbs down and closes the hatch.

In the country, the night temperatures have dropped and there's soil moisture again. The King Parrots are never far away

and a lyrebird has been singing wildly just off the bedroom verandah.