Anzac memories (from the girl with the insanely long hair)
Saturday, 30 April, 2005
Contrary to my best intentions, last Friday I did not finish Assassin's Quest, I managed to avoid any mention of Greek (thus rendering my holiday a complete Greek-free zone) and I packed reasonably swiftly and compactly for Canberra, making sure that I could actually carry all my luggage in one go (otherwise the train trip would really have been interesting!)
I caught the train to “Pendo” (and managed to finish half the base of the drawstring bag that I was going to make Deb knit to teach her how to knit in a round) and met Ben A and Lorien at the bottom of the ramp (recognised from wedding photos). It wasn't as weird as I thought it would be—it was a bit like seeing friends you know only in dreams in waking life for a change. Perhaps I exaggerate. But it definitely wasn't as weird as some people think it is.
Anyways, we filled up their nameless car (they did tell me that it sort of had a name but I've forgotten it) in a very badly-planned petrol station before hitting the road. Along the way, we stopped for a fast food dinner and then we were on the highway again, rolling through the dark in the midst of giant trucks and B-doubles, listening to the Lucksmiths, Tracey Chapman and the soundtrack of Amélie.
Conversation was rather sporadic in the car. Lorien and I spent most of the trip knitting and I managed to finish the rest of the base, counting rows with my fingers. Deb called at one stage to find out where we were (“We've passed the turn off,” I said cheerfully, “but we haven't reached Lake Burley Griffin yet.” “You mean Lake George?” “Yeah. That's the one.” Geography, as you can see, is not my strong point, though I like to think that, unlike many members of my sex, I am fairly good at reading street maps.) After taking a rather convoluted route, we ended up at her place at about 11 pm.
She took us out in her car to see the lights and we went up Mt. Ainslie and saw the capital spread out at our feet. It was very pretty. We also tried to go to Parliament House but the security people there scared us off and anyways, we found out later, you can't just walk up the hill anymore.
We were all pretty tired and so went to bed. We woke late in the morning to Deb enthusiastically laying out breakfast. Canberra was gorgeously sunny and Deb took us on a tour through the suburbs, pointing out all the pretty oak trees changing colour.
We spent quite a bit of time walking through them, tossing them up in the air, kicking them around and, of course, burying Ben:
Because of NTE last year and the year before, my street map knowledge of Canberra wasn't too bad. We went to Manuka where Ben and I saw Hero and Kingston where Ben and I had really yummy Pad Thai at some restaurant which had really cool cutlery with curly handles. Then we went to Fyshwick to buy lunch (pizzas!) and the Salvos store where I found a sleeveless black velvet dress for $7 which might be worth wearing to the Continuum 3 maskobolo. We ate our lunch by lake Burley Griffin (with the swans) and I started knitting a scarf out of feather yarn to auction off for FEVA's Supporters' dinner in July.
In the afternoon, we went to the National Gallery which no one had been to before except me. The Grace Cossington Smith retrospective was on and I left the others to go wander around it. I love the way she uses light and colour and those very choppy brushstrokes which seem to have been one step further on Cézanne. I used to really love going to art exhibitions and buying, on my pithy student wages, little postcards as momentos which I now have to keep in boxes because we cannot stick things on the walls (and anyways, if I did, it would drive Ben crazy). I love how, looking at art, opens up a new way of seeing the world. It fascinates me that, when someone else would have seen beige on a person's cheek, Cossington Smith saw turquoise and orange. She gave life to inanimate objects and found such joy in her surroundings, even though they were only quietly domestic and not the stuff of great drama or angst (contrast her to James Gleeson, Australian surrealist, whom I've never liked). I have to say, the modernist era of the first half of the twentieth-century is probably my favourite for Australian art.
I caught up with the others upstairs where we wandered around the Margaret Preston printmaking exhibition (she was a contemporary to Cossington Smith and was heavily influenced by Aboriginal Art. I love her woodcuts) and Whistler's etchings and lithographs (having done a bit of etching for my HSC, I really appreciate the time and skill it takes to produce something good. Ditto with lithographs). We stayed right up until closing time.
It was back to Deb's for tea and knitting (via the Lyneham secondhand bookshop where Deb picked up Gerald Manley Hopkins, Lorien found the complete Chronicles of Narnia and Ben found a D.A. Carson book). We had dinner at Fekerte's where we feasted on Ethiopian cuisine at Table 22 and went through each other's wallets (much more fun doing this in person than over the internet). Then it was back to Deb's where we stayed up talking while teaching Ben to knit and I taught Deb how to pick up stitches along an edge and knit in a round.
Another 1 am bedtime ruled out morning church. We went to Parliament House to look around and roll down the hill. Unfortunately, with all the fences and security guards, you can't really roll down the hill. Deb's flatmate had told us that morning that Parliament House had been built into the hill because they didn't want the government to be higher than the people. She said, “There's something very Australian about the fact that you can jog over the top of our Parliament House.” I think she's right.
We didn't spend too long there before going to Old Parliament House where we spent most of our time wandering around the Portrait Gallery (there was a very interesting portrait of Nick Cave as well as a Charles Blackman oil of poet Judith Wright, JP McKinney and Meredith McKinney) and the World of Thea Proctor exhibition (which I highly recommend if you're in town). Thea was another Australian modernist and contemporary of Cossington Smith and Preston. Of the three, I think Thea is my favourite. I think I slowed everyone down because I was looking so intensely at everything. The exhibition has her lithographs, her woodcuts, her painted silk fans, her watercolours, some of the articles she wrote for ladies' magazines, a reproduction of a room she helped to decorate (with Roy de Maistre who, incidentally, was probably a synesthete), some of her old clothes (including a gorgeous velvet coat!), her old earrings, paintings that used to hang in her flat, paintings by George Lambert that she modelled for, portraits of children that she drew to make a living ... it made me sad to think that such a vibrant woman who was quite brilliant and beautiful for her time, was never really able to make a decent living for herself in this country because we didn't appreciate her. She spent most of her years shivering in some squalid room in England, winning prizes but not commissions, restitching her grandmother's old clothes until they fell apart. I wanted to get the exhibition catalogue however they were sold out. “We didn't think it would be that popular,” said the lady behind the counter. I stared at her incredulously and then put my name down for one. (It is very gracious of them to post it to me for free!)
We went to Café in the House for lunch (at Table 22 again!) where we ate yummy toasted sandwiches and drew portraits of each other on the paper tablecloth (well, at least Lorien and I did). Deb kept them when they were finished, though I was vastly unhappy with mine and I think I would need to work very hard indeed in order to be halfway decent at that sort of thing. Perhpas a career in comics is not for me after all ...
The National Museum was next. Deb went off to have a hot chocolate while Lorien, Ben and I wandered around. The three of us did K-Space (which resulted in very interesting houses!), clambered over the Garden of Australian Dreams and wandered around the rest of the exhibits.
There was one called Behind the Lines: The Year's Best Cartoons—some of which were very amusing. You could vote for your favourites so I voted for this one but this one and this one were very clever too.
It was closing time. We went straight to Deb's church, the Reformed Church of Canberra. I enjoyed hearing different members of the congregation singing harmonies during the hymns. The sermon was on John 6 and the guy who was preaching was a lay member of the congregation. He neatly sidestepped the whole bread/body blood/wine issue and talked instead about the sovereignty of God in drawing people to himself:
“No matter how difficult our evangelism is and how many we see fall away, you and I must not because Christ alone has the words of eternal life.””
It is refreshing to hear such a bold assertion about God's sovereign control in evangelism—something which, I fear, often gets left out or downplayed in Sydney Evangelical circles—but on the flip side, I didn't feel that there was enough emphasis on the role that we have in participating as fellow workers in God's plan for the salvation of the world. Perhaps that's just the Sydney Evangelical in me talking. And, anyways, compatibilism is a hard thing to preach since you're making two big points instead of just one.
Ben and Lorien were going out to dinner with a friend so Deb and I stayed in and made noodle stir fry which we shared with her flatmate. We spent most of the evening talking. At one point, I wondered whether I should have taken the opportunity and entered into a gospel conversation with her but perhaps she gets enough of that from Deb and their other flatmate. Anyways, I went off to have a shower and returned to watch NCIS and knit. Ben and Lorien returned and we spent most time sitting on the couch, knitting and talking. We went to bed later than we should, given that we were going to have wake up at 4:30 am the following morning, but it was certainly earlier than before.
The alarm went off at 4:15 but I couldn't get myself up until quite a while after that. Deb's friend Matthew showed up at quarter to five and drove us to the Australian War Memorial. There were more cars on the road that morning than I'd ever seen before outside of peak hour. We parked at CSIRO and walked over. It was quite brisk, though not the sub-zero weather that Deb promised. I was wearing thermals, my polar fleece jacket plus a duffle coat, gloves, scarf and hat so I was pretty much okay. Deb had a very chic black cloche hat (a bit like this though more bell-shaped. There are some really gorgeous hats on that site!)
There were booths giving out free programs. We made our way through the crowd and found a good spot on the grass where no one was sitting because the grass was wet. I was amazed at the number of people who were there—the bleachers were packed and there were people everywhere, many of them holding candles. Matthew had the foresight to bring a couple too. We wait for a little bit and then the service began. It was by far the strangest service I've ever been to—mainly because it was so “religious” (if you can be religious with hardly a mention about God). We stood up to sing old hymns that no one really knew the melody to (we were straining our ears to hear the mens' choir singing on the PA), the last post was played, officials laid wreaths on the “Lest We Forget” stone, there was a minute of silence, there was a sort-of prayer and there was a short 10-minute sermon by the Anglican Bishop to the Defence Force which lacked substance and left a lot to be desired, and then it started getting light and it was over and people started leaving.
Matthew (who impressed me by wearing cufflinks to church and a fedora hat to the service) had brought bacon with the intention of going back to Deb's and cooking breakfast for us. But instead we wound up going to his place and he cooked up a veritable feast of fried bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions and toast. We ate ourselves silly and then went back to Deb's for pancakes. Matthew had to go soon after (he was going to a church bell-ringing conference) and we sat around again, knitting (I finished my scarf) and sort of talking (because we were feeling rather tired) and then we put on Spirited Away because Ben and Lorien hadn't seen it (I fell asleep during the last half hour).
It was getting close to 4 pm and we decided we really ought to leave in order to get back to Sydney at a decent hour. Lorien took the first shift driving. I could hardly keep my eyes open. About an hour and a half out of Canberra we encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic because one of the lanes had been closed on the Federal Highway. That added another half hour to our journey. We took the Picton exit and came back via Helensburgh/Waterfall/The Shire (which the Atwoods had never been to before) and they dropped me home at about 8:30 pm.
So there you have it. Spending the weekend with people I haven't really met before (I've seen Deb twice but this was the first time I'd ever laid eyes on the Atwoods, despite being in the same room as Ben during Ignite) wasn't as strange as some people think it was. It was nice to get to know them in person instead of in pixels. And you discover all these little things about them that you'd never find out on the Internet (like the way Deb drives with no shoes, Ben's perfectionism in knitting, Lorien's love of musicals [and she let me look at her sketchbook!] and me ... well, I brush my teeth with two toothbrushes [one small one for the back teeth; one for the others]). It just adds another dimension to their personalities.
Current:
Bible: Isaiah (ESV) 28/09/2010
seen: Tropic Thunder 26/09/2010
seen: The Life of Mammals 24/09/2010
seen: What a Girl Wants 19/09/2010
seen: Jerry Maguire 19/09/2010
seen: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 06/09/2010
seen: Tomorrow Never Dies 05/09/2010
seen: Nanny McPhee 28/08/2010
read: Mercury (Hope Larson) 27/08/2010
read: Spellcheckers Vol 1 (Jamie S Rich, Nicolas Hitori de, Joelle Jones) 16/08/2010
read: Solipsistic Pop Vol 2 (Solipsistic Pop) 16/08/2010
read: Chiggers (Hope Larson) 15/08/2010
seen: Josie and the Pussycats 14/08/2010
seen: Mr & Mrs Smith 14/08/2010
seen: Step Up 2 13/08/2010
Blinks:
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
Online magazine that publishes fairy tales that are not reworkings of old tales.
Journal that publishes fairy tale writing.
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You brush your teeth with two toothbrushes?!
I suppose it’s better than perfectionism in knitting
I have lots of other odd habits, too, but perhaps they should be saved for another time.
Great summary of the weekend, and top photos! It’s nice that you didn’t think Lorien and I were completely strange (and it’s nice that you didn’t say anything nasty about our car, though it would be warranted).
Yes, I have to brush my teeth with two toothbrushes. Normal size toothbrushes are too big to reach my back teeth so I have to use child-sized ones. However, it’s too frustrating to brush the rest of my teeth with the child-size one so I also use a normal-sized one. I discovered this a couple of years ago when I started going to a new dentist in Wollongong and he pointed out all the black bits on my back teeth that, if I wasn’t careful, could quickly become cavities. He was a good dentist; he convinced me that flossing was a good thing. Before that, I never flossed either.
In defence of the sermon, I found it a helpful rejoinder to a sermon two weeks previous on the text of James 1 where there was next to no emphasis on assurance. The Reformed approach tends to consider the “fellow workers” theme in the context of God’s sovereign control, rather than considering it separately. In addition, it’s a bit unfair to say that this bread/body/wine/blood issue was “neatly sidestepped”, when that wasn’t an issue related much to or part of the thesis of the sermon.
It just surprised me that he didn’t talk much (if at all) about the body/bread blood/wine thing since it’s one of the great potholes of John 6 that other denominations (eg. Lutherans) use to defend divine presence in the bread and wine at communion. Not that you need to preach a right perspective on communion every time you preach on John 6; it’s just that a proper understanding the body/bread blood/wine metaphor helps you to understand what Jesus is on about and what’s happening in the passage. He makes it clear what they must do to have eternal life in verse 29 but they don’t get it and are completely lost by the end of the chapter. Many turn away from following him but others choose to stay. I thought that the “why” of the going or staying dovetailed nicely into what the preacher was talking about. But he chose to talk about the fact of the events without mentioning the why.
See email.
It does sound like you all had a wonderful time. I didn’t see the Thea Proctor exhibition when I was down there - perhaps it hadn’t started. I saw the Preston exhibition, though - I love the bold lines and colours.