Category: Oceania
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Katoomba
or: nature sold as amusement park Come and discover the Scenic World of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains! With the Scenic Skyway (photo) one moves at 270 metres above the floor of the Jamison Valley in the highest cable car in Australia! If next you don’t go down into the valley with the Scenic Railway…
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Waitangi Day
On the 6th of February 1840 representatives of the British Crown and some 500 Maori Chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi (after the place where it was done), which guaranteed the Maoris right to their land and gave them the rights of British subjects. This sounds nice and generous, but the main thing was of…
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Gimcracks and knickknacks
or: a girl’s paradise An entire shop full of trinkets against a background of pink wall cloth and a tiger-like stripe pattern on the floor: a truly mouth-watering temptation! In Dutch we have the nice word ‘snuisterijen’ for this kind of trinkets, containing the two vowel sounds ‘ui’ and ‘ij’ that non-native speakers always find hard…
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Moloch horridus
This ‘grotesque Australian reptile’ – in the words of my Oxford Dictionary – is popularly called thorny devil or thorny dragon. I think its official name – Moloch horridus – sounds more horrid than the popular one. Here’s what I read in my friend Jane’s reptile book: “the Moloch horridus is the sole member of the Genus…
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Desert art
Drawings in the sand through the interplay of wind and sturdy desert grass. Using the grass-stalks as a compass, the wind has drawn circles around each plant. At first they must have been very faint, but after days and days of strong wind from different directions they are now clearly visible, engraved in the red…
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Kata Tjuta
or: What’s in a name? Looking from the red planet Mars at the red continent Australia on planet Earth we may be able to see, with the best available telescope, an image like you’ll find here (please click), on a picture made by NASA. From that far we perceive a group of heavily eroded bulges in the…
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My Red Homeland
It’s not easy to write sense about art. I tried my best in last week’s post regarding another work by Anish Kapoor, but I’ll take it a bit more easy this time and quote some lines from the booklet that was distributed at the exhibition in Sydney in 2013. “My Red Homeland is a monumental wax sculpture…
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Please do not touch
Anish Kapoor calls this work of his “Laboratory for a New Model of the Universe – 2006”. This sounds intriguing, maybe a bit over the top, although maybe with a touch of humour too. Who will tell us? Anyhow, it is what it is: an acrylic bloc of 123x134x132.7 cm, with an air bubble caught…
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Before sunset
A catamaran blocks my view of the sun that is about to set in the Indian Ocean. But the very last rays manage to pass under the elevated bottom of the boat, producing a faint reflection on the gently rolling waves. Similarly, but differently, in the photo below the rays of the setting sun penetrate a…
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Cheers!
This large steaming lake probably owes its name of Champagne Pool to the bubbles caused by the escape of carbon dioxide at the surface. The water is hot, about 75° C., and contains many minerals like gold, silver, mercury, sulphur, arsenic, thallium, and antimony. Their deposits on the sides of the lake, just under the…
καιρός remembered 