12th June 2013
I write this from my table at Ridgeline Pottery, which looks through tall glass windows across Pipeclay Lagoon. A thin-blooded BrisVegan, I am swaddled in wool, cashmere, and whatever synthetic fibre they make thermals from, and I have the heater on. My feet will not be warm regardless of how many socks I pull on. It was bucketing in Brisbane when I left, and the rain followed me, which is good, I’m told, because Hobart is the second driest city in Australia. The rain washes in from the coast and blurs the promontories and peninsulas. Bright green lichen grows beneath the gums, rabbits bound through the tall native grass and sometime a jenny wren flutters by. I can’t remember the last time I saw a wren, having lived in cities since I was 18.
All I knew of Tasmania, before the plane began its descent over brown sloping hills surrounding Hobart, I had absorbed through reading. There was a snippet from a 19th Century letter (the reference to which I failed to write down and I’ve rued it ever since), its writer disapproving of a woman who hadn’t covered her shoulders well enough in a male-dominated town; the first half of Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves, in which Ellen Roxburgh visits her brother-in-law and is both attracted and repelled by his physicality; one of my favourite novels, A Child’s Book of True Crime by Chloe Hooper; Griffith Review’s excellent edition on Tasmania, which is worth buying for Cassandra Pybus’ essay on the Chinese tin miners and their fabled connections alone, although many of its other essays are well-executed and absorbing; pieces from Island magazine about writers Geoffrey Dean (whose story in the Review of Australian Fiction I still think about from time to time) and Amanda Lohrey; Cate Kennedy’s The World Beneath, which I thought lacked the density of her short stories; and, recently, Lady Jane Franklin’s journals, edited by Penny Russell.
These are but a smattering of stories, and already I’m collecting more of them from Ben and Peta of Ridgeline Pottery, who established this residency in collaboration with The Inglis Clark Centre for Civil Society at the University of Tasmania and Island. It’s supported by Tasmania’s Department of Economic Development, Tourism and the Arts and by Griffith Review.
I’ll use my time here to write an essay on 19th Century botanist Georgiana Molloy, who emigrated from England with her husband to south-west Western Australia in 1829, and began collecting specimens for an amateur botanist in England, Captain James Mangles, who was the cousin to the wife of the governor of Perth.
I’ve been writing about Georgiana for 13 years (some things never let you go), but have never had the time to focus on the materiality of her collecting. This essay will be about how well-adapted she was, as a lady of leisure in the 19th Century (at least until she arrived at Augusta, WA) who had been taught botany, the craft of collecting the tiny Western Australia flora, and how her skill gave her access to the world of science from which, as a woman, she was barred.
Ben and Peta are craftspeople. Ben makes pots and Peta glazes them. Ben also teaches about glazing. I followed them to the studio last night, shivering in the night, and watched Ben stack pots in the kiln. Stored under a long bench were buckets of his glazes, and the colours of the room were creams and browns, all muted, and all one tone, at least at that time of day. Peta pays great attention to the meals she crafts, and her food is exquisite. Even a salad with lettuce, raw corn, radish, capsicum and chicken (smoked by herself) flourishes with flavour.
It’s wonderful to be among artists. Writing is such a lonely business that I told them I was happy to be interrupted. If I was writing fiction, I wouldn’t want to be talking to anyone, but non-fiction requires a different kind of thinking, one that is slightly less intense. Ben mentioned that working on his pots was similar – that the method and energy required for wood-firing was different to that of electric-firing. It’s the same material, but a different form.
This morning I walked with Peta, wrote in my journal and scribbled down the opening of the essay, which begins in an archive. Much of the essay is about opening seeds, boxes and packages and the subsequent expansion of their meaning, so it seems apt to start in a place that is about unpacking the past from archival boxes. In the afternoon I battled with Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space to source his thoughts on the miniature. I don’t know if my frustration with abstract writing is the problem, but his prose is slippery and hard to grasp. I shall persevere.
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