MAY

Before I left Melbourne I strolled about Port Melbourne. Exactly in the area where my mother spent some time during her childhood. I sat on an old pier watching cargo containers, and tourist ships dock and I imagined my mother as a small girl watching immigrants arriving to start a new life and sailors leaving for war. It was also a place where she collected mussels with her father many decades ago. Now the pier looked like a grand expansive memorial site dedicated in my mind to my lovely mum. Bye Mum.. Happy travels to that very strange and exotic land that we shall all visit some day.

Islands, bridges, aliens, clouds, clubs, and clowns were all on my mind as I wrangled, beat, seduced and mixed up ideas then reformed then into something called art in the studio. As I manipulated, colours, paint fumes, film footage, words and silken threads two paraphrases keep floating about in my mind.

I don't want to belong to any island that would admit me as an inhabitant. 

No person is an Island, entire of itself, every person is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. 
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Salutations to Groucho Marx and John Donne. As I worked away on these mixed media creations I also spent time script writing or rather jumbling, deleting and drafting 50,000 words in my head and around my laptop screen. Finally some order was found then one more BBQ in La Consulta and off to the airport as it was time to fly out of Argentina. I had many things to do, places to go and many people to see on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.  In Brisbane under extreme weather conditions I managed to reconnected with many old friends while around us thick tropical rainfall, electrical storms, flooding, leaking roofs and strong rivers appeared where rivers should not be. I strolled by a Nepali temple in the middle of Brisbane unaffected by the recent awful Himalayan earthquakes but hammered by tropical rains and slowly I paddled back into Australasian culture over the next weeks. 

On to Melbourne which is always a busy blur of family as well as many faces to see while I attempt to work as well. While navigating the hometown one afternoon I passed a typical splattering of cultures. A bagpiper squeezed out Scotland, Buddha’s birthday celebration with 2000 vegetarians snacking, the roar of an Aussie Rules football match with Greek souvlaki fumes outside the sports ground, then a fantastic sound sculpture entertained me on bridge as I viewed skyscrapers, Indian tourists grabbing images with large iPhones and flocks of comical white birds screeching above the city. I observed all this while the climate moved through 3 season in a few hours. After that afternoon stroll I began to miss the quiet life in La Consulta under the mountains but I had much more to do in cosmopolitan Australia, some of it fun and some not so fun.