More Bruny art - sculpted by the sea

I have many more photos of Nebraska Beach's natural formations which I have to share. The textures are so amazing... Thanks, Heather and Mikhala, for my Christmas present last year. For such a little camera, it takes fabulous photos!

 

 

Two days in Bruny

 

 I’d been hearing about Bruny Island for almost as long as I’ve known Pete Hay, which was 1998 when I met him on the bus going to Souris for the “Viking Hunt.” We’d organized a pre-conference event for “Message in a Bottle: The Literature of Small Islands,” with Icelandic saga scholar Gisli Sigurdsson leading a voyage from Souris to Montague in search of the elusive Vinland. I plunked myself down beside this man I’d never seen before, and found out that he was fromTasmania of all places! He was a professor of Geography, although he was a political scientist by training, and he was a poet – his book, The View from the Non-Members’ Bar, was to come out in 1992; I remember him reading for us on one of his later visits in the UPEI Faculty Lounge. His youngest daughter was the same age as my oldest. And his favourite place on the planet was his “shack” – what we call a summer cottage - at Bruny Island, an island off Tasmania. We didn’t find any Vikings that fateful, fog-filled day, but I did find a new friend. And little did I know that 12 years later I would be seeing Bruny for myself.

We set off for the island on Wednesday morning with a carful of three white dogs and one grey one – Flossie and Ollie are Pete and Anna’s, and Zephyr and Billy were borrowed, giving their owner a break for a couple days. The woman behind us in the ferry line-up noticed the dogs in the car, wondering what eccentrics owned all these dogs – turns out Anna P. and her husband – Duncan Kerr, a just-retired MP in the Australian government - were joining us at the shack, and she had brought along her little white chihuahua named Butch.

The ferry ride from Kettering to Bruny takes about 15 minutes. Locals get a break on the ferry toll; if you don’t have a shack there you pay about $30 return, and if you do it’s about $10. There’s a spot along the drive to Kettering where the island looks like you could swim to it. (The author Richard Flanagan has been known to canoe across from Tinderbox, on the “mainland,” to his shack just down the road from Pete and Anna’s.) Apparently there’s been talk about building a bridge. If they had a plebiscite, like Prince Edward Island did before we got ours, I wonder what the results would be…

Here’s an article about Bruny – I particularly like this line: “…because it is an island it can be tricky and forbidding and should be approached with proper respect and awe.” Let this be a rallying cry for all islands!

Bruny is made up of North Island and South Island, joined by “the Neck,” a sliver of land that looks like a long tongue of saliva (no wonder they call it “spit”).

Pete’s shack is on the North Island, near Dennes Point, a small village inhabited now by a number of retired art teachers. Anna’s gorgeous silver jewellery pieces can be found in the sales gallery there.

The roads on Bruny reminded me of the backroads of Cape Breton, but the trees and other vegetation were from another world: the grass trees, the gums…

The first thing I noticed in the shack was the old piano; the last time it was played was by Bill Holm, the (now late) author of Eccentric Islands and fabulous player of ragtime piano (we got to hear him onstage at the Carrefour as part of the Islands of the World Conference VII in PEI in 2002). Given this instrument’s illustrious past, I’d need a few drinks in me before I’d even attempt to go there! The shack was filled with all the stuff a summer cottage should have: lots of beds and blankets and dishes and chairs and tables, a woodstove, a composting toilet, an old wash basin for doing dishes and brushing your teeth; and all the things you no longer need at home but which are too good to throw out. The view from the deck down to the water and across to the mainland was spectacular – nothing like being able to see where you’ve come from to really appreciate where you are.  It reminded me of the idyllic days and nights we spent with Claire and John and the kids at Mucky’s cottage on the Montague River – life was so much simpler then: picking raspberries and blueberries and baking pies, reading detective novels in the middle of the afternoon, sharing a glass of wine and the odd puff of cigar, sleeping the sleep of the dead because the fresh air and river water have soaked into your pores…

Going to an island off an island always makes me wonder: how small an island do we need anyway? I think of David Weale spending his summers writing on Entry Island, off Île du Havre-Aubert in the Magdalens. Or all those wonderful artists in their enclaves on the islands off Vancouver Island. Or staying on Herm Island off Guernsey… What is it about going to smaller and smaller islands that is so compelling? What is being that much closer to the edge answering in our own psyches and souls? And, in Tassie, what is it about Bruny Island that makes it so many people’s “place” – the one spot in the world where you feel utterly at home – a place you know and are known – and the place where both Pete and Richard Flanagan do so much of their writing and the artists in Dennes Point make their jewellery and glass and paintings?

 

Our two days at the shack were filled with walks and food and drink and lots and lots of talk. Pete and the dogs took me on a tour of the most amazing rock formations along Nebraska Beach – the layers give you a sense of the age of the island and the power of the waves as they create yet another piece of art…

On one of my walks I spotted a bird nesting in one of the mailboxes. It barely moved a muscle while I marveled at its ingenuity. I tried out “Moo brew” (my new favourite beer) and some great Tasmanian wines. We were invited to supper at Gerard and Shayne’s shack just down the road: Jerrod is famous for his paella, cooked on the outdoor fireplace that was specially built for his gigantic paella pan.

And there was lots of talk about politics, given the recent Australian election: speculation about whether the independents would line up with the Labour party or the Liberals, and whether the Greens would hold any sway fed my hosts’ political fires. (Nancy Murphy, Ms. Political Junkie: you’d fit in perfectly!)

Speaking of fire, Anna has a hate-on for boneseed, an invasive plant species that has been declared “a weed of national significance,” and she’s trying to eradicate it – seemingly singlehandedly – from Bruny. While driving to a pond where she’d planned to use her borrowed hip waders to get at some hard-to-reach plants, she spotted one that had grown to the size of a TREE in the middle of a field. Chainsaw in one hand, a spray bottle of blue poison in the other, she set off over fences and through waste-deep bush to fell it. I felt compelled to follow, in case there was SOMETHING I could do, and there in the middle of the field I spotted my first jumper: a wallaby. But one boneseed led to another to another…  until the chainsaw ran out of juice and the bottle was empty…

 But that’s the thing about come-from-aways and islands… there’ll always be one more…

In Tasmania

My first glimpse of Tasmania was a strip of sand running west along the Bass Strait, before it disappeared again behind the puffy white. We flew on for what seemed like forever before the clouds cleared and barren hills became visible. As we got closer to Hobart, more lines of white edged the blue of ocean; I could make out trees against the washed landscape. Pete says that the early landscape painters from the European tradition had a hard time painting Tasmania at first - colour contrasts here are that subtle…

Denbeigh met me at the airport – so wonderful to see a friendly face after such a long journey to this end of the world! Thank you, Denbeigh! A sniffer dog went after my kitbag, which had held apples from Sweden before I was forced to toss them in Sydney…  There are no fruitflies here, nor do they want them here! Both my suitcases arrived safe and sound – although I am still cross that JetStar charged me $10 a kilogram for baggage over 23 kilos – I had 36. I had been assured that I was okay for 2 bags at 25 kilos each through Qantas – but the regional carrier had other ideas. Grrrr…  

 

I was in a bit of a daze – 24 hours of travel will do that to a person… But Denbeigh and Stewart’s house was a welcome port. I’m now firmly ensconced downstairs, where from my window I see the Durwent River and the Tasman Bridge that crosses to the Eastern Shore. Mount Wellington is behind us, where the ever-present communication tower (and phallic symbol) draws your eye wherever you go. (I suppose I’ll learn to ignore it after a while!) We have a spectacular view of the city from up on the hill, and the garden out my back door is a wondrous spring scene, with trees and daffodils in full bloom, and the rhubarb patch thickening up. Three-year-old Maddie’s red swing is there, too. 

My very first night I went to an art exhibition opening at the Carnegie Gallery here in Hobart, where photographer Christl Berg’s images of the shoreline were complemented by Pete Hay’s poetry. His words were a wonderful reminder of why I’m here – capturing what it means to live on the edge, on an island, yet be part of an age where I can travel half-way round the planet and yet feel so much at home.  I think it’s our shared ancestry that makes things feel so similar. The hills, the smells – particularly after it’s rained - the look of some of the vegetation (though not much – the trees really are different!), and the light reflecting off the water remind me of Victoria, BC, where I went to university the first time. Or maybe it’s just that feeling of being away from home at age seventeen to go to university that is haunting me so vividly…

Everyone has been so welcoming, from the people in the School of Geography where I now share an office with an Antarctic scholar to the woman at the bank who so cheerfully opened a new account for me. On my first full day I met the fellow who organized a very popular “Mountain Festival” and a chemist whose specialty is beer. Pete took me for lunch with the homeless, cooked by James Boyce, author of one of my required readings, Van Diemen’s Land: A History. Sharing our table were a couple authors and musicians, and the king of Tasmanian publishing, Ralph Wessman (publisher of Walleah Press and the literary journal, Famous Reporter - in which some of my poetry appeared years ago, thanks to Pete). On my second day I bought a raincoat – totally necessary all weekend… And on my third day Stewart and I cruised some Salamanca Place art galleries in the morning and in the afternoon I attended my first poetry reading at the Republic Bar & Café – a monthly offering – where I saw Ralph again, and met Chris Gallagher of the Tasmania Writers’ Centre. On my fourth day I attended a poetry workshop led by poet Anne Kellas, where Pete read some of his long poems and we talked poetry for 2½ hours straight. They’ve even invited me back October 4 to read and talk about some of MY prose poetry!

 If this is what life in Tasmania is like, every waking moment (and some of my sleeping ones as well!) will be my PhD project. I can’t think of anything better – unless my sweetie and all my friends were here, too!