Ironically I was just this weekend past at a Conference on Art & Nature at the Nevada Art Museum in Reno. Among the 185 attendees were a number of Australians working in various art and scientific mediums to explore the nature of Rivers - including a big focus on the Murray - on the continent. A group of 5 - and architect (Richard Black) , 2 artists, Mandy Martin and John Reid, a scientist, Gerald Nanson and a curator,John Carty.It was splendid stuff to hear and see the work. The Murray River, flowing 1800 or so miles inland, and expanding and contracting wildly depending on the season (Richard Black was working with very interesting design solutions living on such a river). Those sessions and conversations gave a good sense of non-urban Australia - which seems a huge version of Nevada with its rivers flowing backward, dry lakes, deserts, heat et al.
How could not all that geo life effect the literarture in profound ways if one was open to it? Obviously have to get there one of these days, as well as follow up on some immediate new friendships.
Stephen V
Stephen V
((
--- On Tue, 10/4/11, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Tasmania
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Tuesday, October 4, 2011, 5:36 PM
fatal impact, fatal shore, the last phrase coming from the old folk songs, I
think.
and Moorehead doesn't go on to treat the introduction of the rabbit to
Australia, etc.
Mind you, we (ie aussie white settlers) never had buffaloes to hunt down in this
part of the world...
Max
Quoting Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>:
> Well, it was definitely pretty fatal, Max....
>
> Sensational? My reading of Aussie history was mainly Robert Hughes's The
> Fatal Shore...
>
> Doug
> On 2011-10-03, at 7:41 PM, Max Richards wrote:
>
> > While Andrew Burke is in Tasmania, I just happen on this, in The Fatal
> Impact, by
> > Alan Moorehead (Penguin, p.267 Penguin]
> >
> > There were still in Tasmania at this time [1820? maybe he means later]
> great
> > unexplored rain-forests with tree-ferns said to be a hundred feet high,
> and, at
> > the other end of the scale, plants so minute and sensitive that the closed
> at
> > the sound of a passing butterfly. Like the aborigines, the fauna was
> already
> > vanishing. The Tasmanian devil, an untameable cat of nocturnal habits, was
> on
> > the way to becoming extinct, and the flocks of parrots that were once so
> thick
> > that Flinders found he could not take the altitude of the sun at midday,
> were no
> > longer to be seen.
> >
> > Hmmm, copying this out makes it seem a melange of the dubious
> sensational...
> >
> >
> > Max in melbourne
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
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> >
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-
press_10.html
>
> Why poetry? And why not, I asked,
> my right brain humming sedition.
>
> Phyllis Webb
>
>
>
>
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