Skullthorpe's Blog

Contemporary government policies and the new budget in particular have not been kind to the arts. We can no longer rely on funding bodies to supply us with arts content. Big Screen is gone and the other programs funded by Arts Victoria like Cafe Culture will be going. This is a great opportunity.
We find ourselves back in the days of the sixties when there was no arts funding and we had to do everything ourselves. In those days all arts organisations were volunteer and grass roots. They were not dominated by beuracrats and boards of management comprising the unimaginative, the stuffy and the self important. The people doing the organising were doing the creative work. The whole enterprise was participatory, no sitting around waiting for someone to do something or for something to come on offer.
With all this in mind we have decided to launch South Eastern Solar Events. This was precipitated when Mallacoota Arts Council decided to no longer to support our Solstice celebrations. So, what’s happening?
We are staging four events per year set around the four
solar events – The Winter and Summer Solstices and the Autumnal and Vernal Equinoxes. These are spread evenly throughout the year dividing it up into convenient quarters. The solstices are when the sun rises at its extreme north and south ranges and are the longest and shortest days of the year. The equinoxes are the dates when the days and nights are of equal length.
So what is happening?
In each quarter of the year we will celebrate a different art form. This cycle the Winter Solstice celebrates Dance and Food, the Spring (vernal) Equinox will celebrate Writing and Performance, The Summer Solstice will celebrate the Visual and Plastic Arts and the Autumnal Equinox (2015) will celebrate the Digital Arts. All of these events are an opportunity for you to participate.
For the Winter Solstice we have the Briagalong Bush Band coming to town to host a bush dance on Saturday June 21. The quality of this band is legendary as is their hosting of bush dance events. There fiddle player just won The Golden Fiddle Award at Tamworth. We are working on the food component. There will also be the usual Family Fun Day on the Sunday afternoon featuring a ‘Paint In’ focusing on painting family portraits.
The Vernal Equinox (around September 22) will include writers workshop culminating in a performance of local writing. Food will also figure prominently.
The Summer Solstice will celebrate the visual and plastic arts with a community arts exhibition at the School (dovetailing into the school’s Arts Week) over the school holidays. This will be an opportunity for you to exhibit your work and offer it for sale to locals and the thousands of visitors in town at that time. Locals and visitors will be encouraged to participate in the construction of an arts installation over the period. Maybe something set in the Betka River!
Finally in April 2015 at the Autumnal Equinox we will be focusing on Digital Poetry and short videos where we will celebrate our local history and our stunning natural environment.
All this will be done with the absolute minimum of official financial assistance and the maximum of local participation and creative activity.
We are looking at the new arts environment as a positive opportunity to reclaim community arts from the beauracrat and to make our local arts our own. The wheel has gone full circle, it’ s time to begin again and you can be part of it.

There’s a lady whose sore and  knows something for sure
That she’s wearing a bucket on her head.
Now she’s just lost  her bits and her gizzards are stitched
Now she can’t seem to get where she wants to.
Ooh ooh and she’s wearing a bucket on her head.

She’s going up the wall and she knows she is sure
That vet’s going to get a demeaning.
A big bite on the nose and a mouthful of clothes
Are bound to cause her misgivings.

Ooh it makes her blunder.
Ooh it makes her blunder.

There’s a feeling she gets, that is really a pest
That her head  is crying for rescue.
Out of sorts she has been with her head stuck in trees
And the laughter of those who stand looking.

Ooh  it makes her chunder.
Ooh but  it makes her chunder.

She’ll be a doggy loon if it’s not fixed up soon,
That vet she is guilty of treason.
Now she knows she looks just like some weird kind of prawn.
Mallacoota will echo with laughter.

Can’t move a muscle in the hedgerow,  being harmed now.
It’s just a big pain, she’s a has-been.
There are no paths that she can go by to have a long run.
She can’t see to change the road she’s on
And it makes her blunder.

Her head keeps jamming and it won’t go where she wants you know
And even eatings a  big pain.
Now listen, it’s not fair, a low blow, and don’t you know
Her bucket is just so boringly yuk.

And as she blunders down the road,
And clumsy falling on her nose,
She trips and stumbles side to side,
To try and find a path to go,
But everything just bumps along,
And if you listen very hard,
You’ll hear her singing to herself –
‘If all were one now, I would like
To be a dog with out a cone’.

But she’s wearing a bucket on her head.

Sunsharp
greysmell
woodburn
pastlook
Birdshere
Birdgone
Thickfur
Feathers

Icemoon
Windshadow
Wetscent
Drip-ping
Roothump
Rootstump
Bleakbark
Leaves.

Sunslow
Suns-slow
Sunspark
Stark.

Gold ore tumble
Light stick crumble
Vitality
Mortality
Cloistered dreams
Magpie screams.
Senaseance.

Dog moon howling
Scar cat prowling
Distance
Persistence
Sumptuoius feasts
Famished beasts
Hecate

There were wings over the city. No one could see them. But people felt the shadows. Uneasy. Something was making Time fly. Time did not like it.
Jack clattered down the metal treads of the spiral to the stage floor. Gloom hung in webs from the darkness that was the grid. Ready lights gleamed from controls swung on droppers on the offstage edges of the legs and exit and no exit signs pooled light from corners and alcoves.
With the confidence of many years Jack hurried across the stage mouth towards the prompt corner. The huge space of the auditorium sucked at the stage. Reaching the corner he reached up and jerked down the stirrup handle. A dull thud heavy and muffled followed by a descending grinding rattle heralded the arrival of the ‘iron’ – the fire curtain. With a thud the leading edge met the stage. The quality of the acoustic changed. No longer a step up into wonder the stage had become closed and secret.
Not an imaginative man Jack headed upstage to the pass door that led through to the dock and the lift to the top storey staff bar. It had been a long difficult day that required a quantity of liquid compensation.
Silence settled on the stage, drifting down from the grid like soot.

What price for the
Razor wire, the balm,
The eye-wells of love?
The coming together,
The walking away.
Island hearts joined, sundered
By tides swayed by crazed moons.
How big the hand
To cup that coinage?
No counting the sand grains
On that beach.
World time could not tick so long.
Cats in a bag, kittens in the sun.
Children casting long shadows
Into futurity.
A scatter of straws
Telling enigmatic ideograms.
Hung headed and splay-legged
like an old horse.
Standing,
Mazed.
What price for a love life?

Plentiful
Reasons
Organised
Gleefully
Regarding
Environmental
Social
Situations

Music currently playing – Kronos Quartet – the Cusp of Magic.  This is a coincidence…

Ok, for no particular reason, I have made a list of the top 20 of my favorite fantasy writers (writing in the English language).  No particular order.

Here is my definitions of fantasy.

•  On the face  of it – All fictions are various sub-genres of fantasy – this is however not helpful.
• A more specific definition of what is commonly regarded as fantasy –   ‘The fusing of language, folklore, myth, religion, historical and contemporary notions of spirituality, the occult and imagination into a sub-creation that strikes sparks off the heel stone of the mundane.

Here we go …..

1. Russel Hoban
2. Alan Garner
3. JRR Tolkien
4. James Branch-Cabel
5. Susan Cooper
6. Mervyne Peake
7. China Meiville
8. Robert Holdstock
9. Robin Jarvis
10. Terry Pratchett,
11. Fritz Leiber,
12. Jack Vance
13. Jasper Fforde
14. Lord Dunsany
15. E.R. Eddison
16. Joan Aiken
17. Lloyde Alexander
18. E. A. Poe
19. Gene Wolfe
20. Ursula K Le Guin

 

The rocks played hide and seek in the sand that shifted and was sifted by the tides on  this far corner of a tired and worn out continent.  The land was broken by gully and deadfall.  The forest fell into the ocean in a tangle of tree roots and driftwood. Looming, the littoral forests – severe verticals of silvertop, untidy understorey and  mysterious casaurina did not welcome white men.  Black men, who had not been welcomed either, were finally tolerated. Rubbing together side by side for thousands of years, black man and forest, each had changed the other.  Once the forest had been unbroken in a long coastal strip from tropic to temperate, one great Gondwanaland green breathing mass.  Careful use of fire  opened up the country,  glades twinkled brighter green where ‘roos could graze and from cover be stalked and killed.  Here and there were children and dogs and small farming.  Here and there were fish traps and mountains of empty sea shells.  There was not the pressure or the leisure for war.

Suddenly there were boats with sails like the wings of great white birds.  The white men came with horses, gold pans, cattle, guns, axes and death.  For the first time for many thousand years there were strangers in the strange land. The black man died and the forests, first tree by tree and then stand by stand, began to fall. 

The inventor of religion and slavery and later employment – the owner of the horses, gold pans, axes, cattle, guns and death found a use for wilderness.  A use other than as feed stock for the manufacture of toilet paper.  Seeking diversion from an existence rendered pointless by a spreading and pervading illusion of choice – a man, with first a train timetable and later  motorcars and airplanes  invented tourism where the strange and the alien, the frightening and the dangerous were safer, being not so close to home.

We who go south
In the asylums of the mind,
Slipping through the dunes
Into the byways of the whale road
Glean what pleasure we may
Drawing our small maps.
Scribing small secrets overheard
From the faceted fractal colloquially
We eavesdrop from
The sleep talking head voices
Of our silently roaring, rattling universe.
Constantly waking into nested moments
What else can we do but wonder,
Or rail, laugh, or cry, luxuriate or suffer?

In trickles and routs the wind
Whips the trees and saws the sky.
Seeping and drizzling wet clouds roil.