Blue Moon

'Blue Moon'  is my latest painting. Acrylic collage on canvas.  92cm h x 122cm w.  I took a road trip to Alpha with my son Ben a couple of years ago...this image evokes my memory of that journey.

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Back to Alpha

The grey ribbon road weaves and curls through flat, drab brown terrain, then rises up steeply towards a crest that supports a big Aussie sky.  It is not such a big blue Aussie sky today, festooned as it is with bulky grey clouds…dirty grey clouds.

I want the landscape to be different this trip…not so stubbornly harsh and unforgiving, but the land is flat and dry…unfriendly…long fringed with bleached dry weeds.  Dotted with mean little bushes tamed by the relentless throbbing heat.

The land has obviously been cleared in days gone by, to accommodate the cattle that apparently  graze on these pastures.  But there is not a cow in sight. Perhaps they have found shelter from the heat somewhere on the huge cattle property that encompasses our narrow road.  The property is over twenty-two thousand acres strong.

But these can’t be pastures can they?  I once saw pastures on a train trip to the country outside of London.  Lush emerald green velvet were the ‘real’ pastures there. Patchwork pastures edged with gentle soft bushy trees lush enough to inspire fairy stories. Every now and then a magical ancient castle would pop up unexpectedly atop that divine viridian velvet quilt, like a castle from a page in a ‘Pop up’ book  of the sort that I loved as a young child.

Cows could be seen contentedly grazing in those perfect pastures, waiting to be painted by the likes of Thomas Sidney Cooper.

But I am not from the ‘Motherland’ as we once called it.  I want to love my sunburnt country despite everything.

Reaching up from the faded dun earth  on either side of the narrow road are the burnt black skeletal remains of  larger trees. Their thin, gnarled branches  stripped of  leaves plead in frozen dance. 

Every now and then, a small group of bottle trees appears, strangely fecund in this barren place.

 

From my passenger’s window I note that the clouds are travelling fast beside me…with me in fact… as if we are companions on a quest.  But on reaching the crest, well ahead of me, they are absorbed into the now thin, drab line of the landscape.  It’s then I notice a dark purple haze of smoke in the distance.

 

Silhouettes of small trees emerge once more, peaking over the oncoming crest. They wave and beckon like sirens luring us onwards.  Perhaps Alpha will be on the other side of that crest?…my son and I have been on the road for eight hours…and I have endured over four hours of Hip Hop music…a true sign of a mother’s love!

Last words on Alpha

Alpha is a town that has it's stories...no doubt, but it keeps them 'close to the chest'.

The houses here stand far apart... and silent. From brilliant blue, a powerful sun blasts down, baking the hardy weed-patched red soil of their yards. Gusts of wind play havoc with dust, dirt and leaves whirling through the gray galvanised wire yard fences that seem redundant here. Nothing holds back the dust which infiltrates everything.

There must be people behind those closed doors. Stiffly sun baked towels like colourful planks and tshirts and socks that look and feel like cardboard cutouts decorate the clotheslines. They all disappear sometime through the day, prised off the hot as hell metal lines .

Unwashed cars laze under tall leafy trees or dingey carports, recharging their batteries. Occasionally I would see a car travelling on one of Alpha's main roads. Some of these empty roads are as wide as four lane freeways.

A considerable number of the locals seem to be itinerant workers. They come and go and are forgotten. Some are teachers, like my son Ben whom I had come to visit. He is doing his 'Country Service'.

Ben takes me on a tour of notable landmarks in Alpha. It takes us half an hour. He has been here long enough now to have developed friendships and a sense of community with the locals. He has been out with 'the boys' who play hard capturing wild pigs, riding horses, shooting rifles and the like.

I visit the tourist information centre where volunteer Nola points out the marks on the building which show the heights to which three separate floods had inundated the town. She shows me a shed which houses a small collection of dusty cobwebbed museum worthy objects. Maybe one day, someone will clean them up and arrange them in some kind of display.

It's good to be home in Bundaberg tonight.




　

　

 

　

　

Capturing Alpha - Some photographs

 

 

Above: Main street Alpha (Population 400+.  630ks NW of Brisbane. Inland from Rockhampton).  I came to visit my son and his family   (Currently working in Alpha.)

 

                                                                                   Above: Railway Station Alpha

 

 

 

 Below:  Railway Station Alpha

                                                Above  Air strip Flying Doctor only. Hoon strip too by the look of it.

 

    Above: Flying Doctor's airport

 

                                                                                  

Capturing Alpha

This  evening is a dark grey veil punctuated with the sooty black smudges of the upcoming  night.

I am travelling on the Spirit of the Outback. It is midnight and the train rocks its travellers gently towards their destinations.

I sometimes wish I was more of a painter, when I am forced to engage with the landscape. This coming nightscape is quite captivating. I want to know its secrets.

Loud snores and snorts break the magic of this moment.  A fellow traveller, blissfully unaware punishes those of us who remain awake.

Oh, I hate that!

I sleep in fits and starts.

The black night  turns into a dense grey fog from which a pastel pink dawn emerges, in the company of a perfect moon.

I try  to capture the moon in photographs, but all I end up with is smeary moonscapes.  Of course the train is too fast.

Eventually the moon dissolves into an insatiable grey fog that greedily sucks the colour from all it engulfs.

The new morning finally clears, revealling  a landscape with traditional Aussie style....hard-baked, harsh and inhospitable.  (I love my 'sunburnt country'.....but I really don't know why.)

Streaking white across this bleak canvas, a dozen sulphur-crested cockatoos burn a witnessing into my memory forever...I tuck  the experience into a neat little memory box labelled 'My wonderful experiences in the landscape.'

On we go, up big hills.....or perhaps they are small mountains, covered in  'Fred Williams trees' - without the colour.

We are almost at Alpha.