Barn for Sale Low Road Burwell

This 1872 Burwell Barn was completely cleaned out By Scarlett Mark and John in the 1950s

The roof was repaired by Peter Gregory with the help of London Fireman Lenny or Maurice Reed

Scarlett adds I also recall digging ancient manure with you and John! 

My cocker spaniel discovered rotten eggs to roll in during the dig. Memories! 

Ruth Gregory recalls jumping her highest from the rungs of a ladder

Tunbridge Farm Burwell Circa 1903

Australian Galleries – Peter Neilson Staring into the Middle Distance

PETER NEILSON Staring Into the Middle Distance

Exhibition Dates: 25 June - 14 July 2019 35 Derby Street Collingwood VIC 3066 Open 7 days 10am to 6pm

 MEDIA RELEASE

Twelve months after exhibiting a table full of small, abstract, Pretty Delicate cardboard and paper sculptures in 2018, Peter Neilson will exhibit a series of charcoal and chalk landscape drawings from country and city.

To the range of mediums and variation of subjects he employs in his oeuvre, Neilson says: “I sculpt for reasons other than I draw and I draw and sculpt for reasons other than I paint.The lack of an ‘obvious’ relationship between my art arising out of, and within, the different mediums, its heterogeneity, is an insistence on the singular, the individual, the hand made; in other words, an insistence on the individual mark in a world of diminishing possible futures, imposed by predictive analogues, and, therefore, a subjugation of individuality by stealth. One of the influences I hold high is Walt Whitman, the great Nineteenth Century American poet when he writes:

Do I contradict myself? Very well,
then I contradict myself, I am
large, I contain multitudes.”
From Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, 1855.

Of the landscape drawings, Neilson says: “I have been visiting a particular and particularly beautiful part of the Gippsland Lakes district for the past twenty years but it’s only over the last four years or so, having gotten to experience it beyond the sketch form, that I felt I could attempt an art that was more than making ‘another picture of another particularly beautiful piece of landscape’. I mean, the world’s got enough of them.

In trying to find a way into ‘landscape’ drawing, I discovered that, for me, the attempt was not to make a faithful ‘root and branch’ recording of what was presented, it was to make ‘a drawing’. That is, not just a ‘record of place’ in front of the artist but was built in sympathy with the “agreeable constraint” of the art materials brought on to the work-site.

There is also something mysterious and vast about making art in the ancient wind and the weather with the easel having to be tied to the fence post for fear of it being blown away, or the sunny and languorous and able to return to the place easy and slow for days; or the deciduous, foggy, bare, and barely moving days of the autumn/winter months.

All good, all beautiful, whatever the outcome.

“The drawings from the city,” Neilson says, “came about after many years of walking, driving and riding bikes past scenes that “purred their way into my heart”. A couple of the inner-city drawings are of sacred sites of the café latte/ chardonnay drinking elites, a proudly-worn attempted disrespect given to us by no less than our then creaky, old-before-his-time leader, John Howard. Waiter! Another bottle!”

Staring Into the Middle Distance is current until 14 July 2019.
For more details or images contact: media@australiangalleries.com.au australiangalleries.com.au
03 9417 2422
AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES M E L B O U R N E

Vale Les Murray –– The Bard of Bunya

Jane Gleeson--White

Following the death of poet Les Murray on Monday I’ve been recalling an afternoon I spent with him sitting on the edge of the pier at Walsh Bay talking about poetry and life, his obsession with words, his bouts of depression, his experience of ‘erocide’ and abhorrence of mobs. We met up after a session at the 2005 Sydney Writers’ Festival so I could interview him for Good Reading magazine, but our conversation ranged far and wide until the sun was low in the sky, well beyond the assigned hour. He was on song, ebullient, overflowing with words.

Here’s the story I wrote for Good Reading, August 2005.

Read More at

https://www.janegleesonwhite.com/new-blog/2019/4/30/vale-les-murray-the-bard-of-bunyah-valley

Les Murray and Frank the Poet

The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell. Before any terrestrial cities existed in Australia, the convict poet Francis McNamara describes a tour he was given through the infernal one. This jaunty Dantesquerie, dating from 1839, forms the high point of a set of poems that came out of a personal crisis in the last years of that decade.

All are fresher, more varied and more adventurous than the Irish ballads he mainly created' before and afterwards, though the latter can be very moving when sung according to contemporary tunes. They are often credited as the foundation of Australian bush balladry, which is still practised and loved in the bush, though its forms, its subjects and even its attitudes tend to be set in concrete.

Although McNamara always claimed to be a native of Cashel, in County Tipperary, at his trial in Kilkenny in 1832 for stealing a plaid he was described as coming from Wicklow. He was literate and had no previous convictions, but he drew seven years' transportation, and sailed from Cork on the Eliza on 10 May that same year. Arriving in Sydney in September, he would have gone straight to the large Hyde Park Barracks, which still exists under its later designation of the Mint in Macquarie Street.

In his contemporary Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, James Backhouse reports that: One of the officers who had been there [at the Barracks] only about fifteen months, said, that upwards of one thousand men had been flogged in the course of that period. He stated his opinion to be, that how much soever men may dread flagellation, when they have not been subjected to it, they are generally degraded in their own esteem and become reckless after its infliction.

This, we have found to be a very prevailing opinion in the Colony. McNamara was flogged no less than fourteen times over the next eight years, receiving a total of six hundred and fifty lashes. His witty rebellious attitudes also brought him spells in solitary, three months on the treadmill and repeated bouts of hard labour on the gangs made to work in leg irons. It is a near miracle that his turning-the-tables poem “A Convict's Tour to Hell” is so lightly done, free from sadism or rage.

By early 1838, McNamara had been assigned as a shepherd to the Scottish-owned Australian Agricultural Company, still remembered as the A.A. Co. This firm was set up in 1824 to cultivate the frontiers of settlement. The Peel River, on which the Country and Western music capital of Tamworth now stands, was then far out on the very edge, in Kamilaroi tribal country, but loneliness and the off-chance of a spear probably seemed a good bargain when compared with what the poet had endured.

In October 1839, however, he was reassigned, to the Company's coal mines in Newcastle, where men worked naked underground in choking heat and lung-destroying dust. At this, he absconded, and was recaptured with a band of runaways, some of them carrying firearms. This could have got then he was sentenced to the awful Secondary Punishment Station at Port Arthur, in Van Diemen's Land, where the intent was to break the recalcitrant, not reform them.

There, you could be flogged for not giving your towel to the laundry to be washed, or having a crust of bread in your clothes. Van Diemen's Land seems to have subdued the poet, though it didn't stop him making further rebel ballads for his mates to memorise and sing.

Released in 1857, a year after the island colony's name was changed to Tasmania, the poet wandered back to New South Wales and thence into obscurity, with only odd sightings of him over the next two decades. The curious gallimaufry of Irish stereotypes titled “A Dialogue Between Two Hibernians in Botany Bay” was the only work by McNamara to appear in print in his lifetime, in the Sydney Gazette of 8 February 1840.

Doubts have been expressed as to its authenticity, but some believe it is a set of coded messages for Whiteboys and Ribbon Men, members of Irish secret societies opposed to English rule and to the exactions of the Protestant Church of Ireland in the period after Catholic emancipation. McNamara may have been involved in this movement, and it is known that passwords in it were deliberately clownish and ridiculous. The rest of his work was carried in memory until 1861, when he wrote out the best of it in fine copperplate in a home-made book for the Calf family, of Windeyer near Mudgee.

Some of his balladry was collected later in the nineteenth century as folk material, and only ascribed to him after careful detective work. McNamara may have been bilingual, and connected in some way with the McNamara bards of County Clare; he is clearly aware of Irish-language models and alludes to some of them, notably in the emblem of refusal in “For the Company Underground”. He also seems to have admired Burns and Swift and Oliver Goldsmith, among English-language poets. His practice as a poet closely mirrors that of the hedge-poets of penal times, and he is the only poet whose work conies down to us  it from within the convict system as it existed in Australia, though its quality ranges far beyond the merely documentary.

Les Murray was a great admirer of the convict poet Francis MacNamara

In 2013 eagerly Les joined the ABC team who researched and broadcast Frank the Poet: A convict's tour to hell

Download the audio program using the link below

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/hindsight/frank-the-poet/4432142

Les was especially pleased when this program was broadcast in Ireland returning Frank to his birthplace at last:

This Tipperary man's songs and poems were spread throughout convict Australia by his fellow prisoners - Today a new generation of musicians regard him as giving Australia a tradition akin to the Mississippi blues.

https://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/2013/0314/647370-podcast-radio-documentary-frank-macnamara-the-poet-convict-australia/

Pete Seeger Centennial Celebration - New York - May 4, 2019 (Peoples' Voice Cafe)

Pete Seeger Centennial Celebration - New York - May 4, 2019 (Peoples' Voice Cafe)

Saturday, May 4, 2019 at 8 PM – 11 PM
Peoples' Voice Cafe
Community Church of NY
40 East 35th Street
New York, New York 10016

 This year’s celebration of Pete Seeger will be an historic one. It’s Pete’s 100th birthday! So in addition to having a rollicking good time, featuring many of Pete’s favorite songs, sing-alongs and compositions, you might also discover something you did not know about Pete’s amazing and inspirational life. We will attempt in a two-hour program to cover many, if not most, of the different phases of his career, from his upbringing in a highly musical family and early influences through more than 75 years as a performer. Artists include Piedmont Blüz, Bev Grant, Hudson Valley Sally, Lindsey Wilson, Mike Glick, Vincent Cross, and others – maybe even a surprise guest or two! This concert will be a benefit for the Peoples' Voice Cafe.

School Children and Action for Climate Change

School students who want action on climate change will target Tony Abbott’s office in Warringah and Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong on Friday, as the two senior Liberals face tough re-election fights.

After staging two national days of protest in the past six months, the school strike movement is turning its attention to key seats in the upcoming 18 May election.

On Friday, students will also protest outside the offices of Labor’s Anthony Albanese and Jason Clare, prime minister Scott Morrison in his southern Sydney seat of Cook, and Liberal MP Trevor Evans in the seat of Brisbane, among others.

Warringah and Kooyong, two formerly safe Liberal seats, may be at risk of falling to climate-focused challengers.

Abbott is up against the independent Zali Steggal, and Frydenberg faces the Greens’ Julian Burnside, Labor’s Jana Stewart and independent Oliver Yates, a former head of the Clean Energy Finance Council and former Liberal member.

Fatima Kidwai, 18, who lives in Kooyong, said she felt frustrated that Frydenberg, who was environment minister from July 2016 to August 2018, had “not made much of a difference”.

“I’ve been living in Kooyong ever since I lived in Melbourne,” Kidwai said. “I once ran into Frydenberg at the train station. He has been in the seat for nine years, he has been environment minister, he had a lot of time to make a difference and advocate for change and we feel like he didn’t do as much as we’d like him to do.

“For the first time climate is such a big issue in this election. It’s a climate election – and [that’s] kind of thanks to all the students and all the work they have done.

“This time people are talking about how Kooyong is becoming a marginal seat. That’s why we’re so pumped to have a rally going outside the office just to keep up the pressure, to show him that we’ve had enough. You’ve had it pretty easy for a couple of years and now there is a change coming.”

In Warringah, Vivienne Paduch, 15, said she would be attending the protest against Abbott, describing him as “one of the most destructive climate deniers in Australian politics”.

“My whole life he has been my federal member, and it is a huge source of shame and disappointment,” she said. “He has proven time and time again that he doesn’t care about climate change. During his time in power, he abolished the carbon tax, which was successfully bringing down emissions at the time.

“He needs to know and he needs to see that the actions he has done are not OK and we won’t stand idly by.”

Paduch said older people were very receptive of the school student strike movement.

“There has been a lot of support especially from older generations, who are really concerned that one day we might not be able to have grandchildren of our own,” she said. “There has been a lot of support not just from our parents, and our grandparents. And adults are invited to come along and they have been coming to the last two climate strikes as well.

Bomaderry high school students Zara Podmore, 16, and Cedar Podmore, 15, took part in the last climate strike on 15 March and will strike again on Friday. Photograph: The Guardian“The outcome is to have as many people as possible and to really get the message across that he either has to change or he will get voted out.”

In the NSW seat of Gilmore, Bomaderry high school students Zara Podmore, 16, and Cedar Podmore, 15, took part in the last climate strike on 15 March and will strike again on Friday. They estimate around 200-300 students took part in Nowra.

“Last time there was a march across the Nowra bridge, yelling stuff,” Cedar said.

Zara said: “I think on Friday we’ll be marching through the town.

“But on the last one – it was interesting – there was a Liberal meeting across the road, we were yelling very loudly to get to them. I think Scott Morrison was even there.”

Cedar said: “He didn’t even come to the protest – he was in Nowra and he didn’t even come to say hi, which was rude.”

Asked what her message for the prime minister would have been, Cedar said: “We probably would’ve told him to get better policies on climate change.”

Zara said climate change was “not as real” for politicians because “they’re not going to have to deal with all of the consequences we have to deal with”.

Their mother, Sue Cuninghame, said she accepted the opinion of parents who did not let their children out of school and noted that other parents let their children skip school but did not disclose it was to attend the strike.

“We really wanted the girls to be able to be honest so we signed them out, to say it was for the climate change strike ... We were strong about it – that if you want to take action, you’re proud of what you do, and you’re happy to put your name to it and say that is what is happening.”


School climate strikes: 1.4 million people took part, say campaigners
 Read more
Stephanie Liow, 15, lives in the electorate of Chisholm, and will be attending a central Melbourne protest.

“Both major parties are quite frustrating given neither party has an effective climate policy. Us young people were hoping that Labor would fight Adani, except they haven’t taken a clear stance against Adani and they even just introduced a 1.5bn gas pipeline that is clearly not in support of urgent climate action.

“It matters to young people so much. It will be our futures, and we’ll suffer the consequences of the government’s poor decisions.”

Kidwai, in Kooyong, said she was optimistic.

“It’s my first time voting in an election,” she said. “I’m pretty excited. The pre-polling booths will be on the way, I am probably going to be voting before the rally starts.

“Kooyong is really stepping up their game. The people are really explicitly talking about how they want climate action. It does make me really happy.”