Snapped in the Botanical Gardens this afternoon. Isn’t he peaceful. Bet he moved about half an hour after this picture was taken, however, at the point Brisbane was hit by another rather heavy rainstorm. I like the various symmetries and near-symmetries of this shot.
Clare and Joe’s last full day in Australia before the end of their break here, so let’s feature them on today’s picture. Taken with the old Fujifilm camera with which I took the first 366 photos on this blog: it still takes a decent shot but the zoom is half-dead so I do need to repair the other one.
At the conference dinner of THETA 2013, the gig that has got me to Hobart. These guys also turn up, do their thing, go away again and presumably get something out of it all. There are plenty of people watching them – even if you can’t see them in this photo.
One of the world’s more well-known cricket grounds, but Joe and I were not there to see cricket – the Lions are Brisbane’s local AFL team (Australian Rules Football) and we were both making our debuts there as they hosted the Adelaide Crows. AFL – yeah, an interesting sport, better than rugby, more flowing, but still gives you the opportunity to see large Antipodean men climbing on and hitting each other. I did get a couple of reasonable pictures of the action, but I like this shot: the kid seems to be wondering why his hand isn’t like the big red one to his right. It also encapsulates the fact that there were many family groups there, far more than you’d see at a football match in England.
Clare’s, to be exact: imprinted on the sand of Home Beach, North Stradbroke Island.
Being as this is one of the world’s great beach countries it is perhaps a reflection of my own tastes in activity that a beach has not featured on here since February 28th: but let’s bookend the beachless month of March with a return to that environment for a few days, here at Ballina. This girl is collecting shells off the breakwater. I like the strange pose that she’s been caught in, a sort of sense of discovery about it.
Joe, doing his cool dude act, as we have a drink after seeing a show at the Opera House (Frankenstein: a brilliant version). Mind you, whoever thought that the bland apartment blocks of Opera Quays would benefit the classic view of Sydney harbour from this point is an idiotic philistine of gargantuan proportions. Doubtless that gives him a role to play in the urban planning department of many a municipality around the world.
This is a tree that grows in the Botanic Gardens, and was planted in the 1870s. It is a marvellous tree, which sends creepers down from its branches to seek more sustenance, these eventually growing into substantial new trunks from the top down. The biggest banyan tree in the world is in India, and covers more than 1.5 hectares, with more than 1,000 distinct trunks. This one isn’t anywhere near as big but if you ask me is still the coolest tree in Brisbane.
And, oh yeah, the family turned up this morning… for three weeks 🙂
Light Render is an art installation by Caitlin Franzmann, currently on display at the QUT Art Museum. According to the blurb for this exhibit, in which a video camera is pointed at a mirrored cube and the image displayed on the wall behind, the point is to allow visitors to the gallery to insert themselves into the art work in various ways by interposing themselves into the camera’s line of sight and/or the feed itself. So that is what I have done here – the two man-shaped shadows you see here are both me.
And seeing as this blog is my own ‘work of art’, an extended record of my life, here Ms Franzmann’s work of art inserts itself into my own work of art and everyone’s work of art becomes a small part of everyone else’s…. in some giant recursion. Or something like that.
Irony warning…. I don’t mean to suggest it was like this all day, just this one heavy shower, but this is the only place I have seen rain in the whole 8 weeks I’ve been here, including in New Zealand.
