My Year With Bluestone: Guest Post, in which Grace finds bluestone everywhere

My colleague Grace Moore discovers the wonders of bluestone...

The Ground Beneath My Feet

In my memory, there’s not a lot of bluestone by the beach.  I may be wrong, of course.  I now know that other beaches in the Melbourne area boast plenty of it—Stephanie has blogged about Williamstown in a previous post [Ed. here and here], while the walls that run between Brighton and Beaumaris contain bluestone that may once have rested on top of Ned Kelly and his gang of outlaws.  Probably, I should go back to ‘my’ beach to check, but I’m not quite ready to do that.

Until a few months ago, I’m not sure that I’d ever really given much thought to bluestone, but infectious collegial enthusiasm can change these things very swiftly.  While my younger self wouldn’t have described it in this way, I’ve probably always had an affective relationship with stone.  My father was a keen amateur geologist and my happiest memories of him involve sitting by the hearth, while he proudly displayed and described a variety of rocks that he’d dug up here, there and everywhere. 

There was a piece of volcanic rock, which may have come from Pompeii, although I may also, through the distance of time, be romanticizing its origins.  I remember being intrigued by the little grey piece, with its small bubbles and extraordinary texture.  As a child, I was fascinated by the idea that it had one been molten lava, spewed out of the ground.   As a teenager I was rather less respectful, surreptitiously borrowing it from time to time to smooth my feet.  It’s probably my closest childhood connection to bluestone, and decades later I can feel the memory of its contours on my fingertips as I think back to how it felt.    There was probably more than one piece of basalt in the collection, but it’s on the other side of the world and there is no way for me to check—a single specimen made it to the Antipodes with me, and that’s a flint axe, which sits in my office and occasionally serves as a prop in class. 

In my twenties, I lived for a couple of years in the beautiful volcanic landscape of the Palouse (http://idahoptv.org/outdoors/shows/palouseparadise/geology.cfm  ) not too far away from Mount St Helens in neighbouring Washington State and with a basalt rock formation which I imagine is similar to that which underlies Melbourne.  Beyond the occasional anecdote from residents who’d lived in the region during the major eruption of 1980, I still didn’t think that much about what lay beneath the ground.   The soil was rich and if I’d dug down, I’m likely to have found rock similar to that which I would discover in my back yard today, were I to dig deeply.

Having grown up on the coast, I disliked being landlocked in Idaho and was thrilled to move to Melbourne where, although I never took to the long commute, I loved living by the beach.  For nearly a decade my enormous American dog and I pounded along the sand between Carrum and Seaford twice a day, usually racking up several miles.  If there was bluestone around us, I was never conscious of it, and the outer suburbs tend not to contain the cobbled stone laneways that were built close to Melbourne during the nineteenth century.  Then, just over a year ago, I moved much closer to the city, leaving behind both my beloved beach and Seaford’s glorious wetlands.  Having been spoiled by the great open space by the bay, we struggled a little with the park-based dog culture in the inner north--appreciating it, but still yearning for the sense of intrepid expedition which had been such a feature of our twice-daily jaunts.

At around the time Stephanie began her ‘Year of Bluestone’ blogging, a series of curious bluestone coincidences began to emerge in my own work, and I also discovered the Moonee Ponds Trail.  I’m primarily a Victorian scholar who works with ecocriticism, so it’s unusual for my research to intersect with Stephanie’s, but suddenly there was bluestone everywhere.  As I wrote up a piece on Ned Kelly and fire in the sweltering heat of early January, I was amazed by the number of fleeting references, both in contemporary accounts and modern histories of the outlaw and his gang.  For instance, in 1871, sixteen-year-old Kelly—serving time in the hulks for horse theft—was part of a gang of convicts who built the bluestone sea wall by the beach at Williamstown.  His family home at Beveridge (built by his father when Ned was four) included a bluestone chimney which one recent report describes as having ‘dominated the house’.  I could keep going, but you get the idea.

While I was reading about bluestone, I was also encountering it more and more in my daily life.  In West Brunswick, where I now live, that’s not a particularly remarkable observation.   Bluestone is very much a local material.  One of the first industries in the East of the suburb was the quarrying of bluestone, although by the early 1850s there was little left in the ground, so great was the demand.  Yet bluestone is everywhere and I walk on it every single day.  It forms the gutters and roundabouts, the rickety cobbled side streets are fashioned from it, and one local park even boasts a bluestone barbecue.  These days it comes from quarries far beyond the city limits, perhaps brought in as a tribute to Brunswick’s less metropolitan past.

   

It’s the Moonee Ponds Trail, though, which has consolidated by new-found enthusiasm for the stone, partly because it offers a space for the serious dog-walker and partly because it is trying so hard to bring the country to the city.  The pathway runs alongside what locals call a creek, but what I think of as a canal, and it extends from the northern suburbs to Docklands.  Stretches of it are relentlessly concrete, while other parts (including my own entry point) are quite beautiful, reflecting concerted efforts at (re)vegetation, through the planting of grasses and native trees.  At times, the expanse of cement is almost blinding, yet every so often small patches of bluestone offer relief from the brutalism.

To date, I have no idea whether the bluestone is embedded in the canal walls for structural reasons or aesthetic ones.  My suspicion is that it’s probably a combination of those two things.  In West Brunswick, for instance, the perimeter to the canal is framed by a delicate but sturdy edging strip of the stone, reflecting great care and attention to detail.  Further down the track, though, things look rather more industrial.  While the huge side walls lend themselves to graffiti, for the most part urban artists leave the bluestone alone.  Possibly, this is through respect, although it probably also makes a much rougher canvas than the smooth expanse of concrete that seems to go on for miles.

Noticing bluestone is about learning to appreciate it, and also to love it.  My son, who is eight, and who often accompanies me on dog walks—whizzing along on his scooter—now has an expert eye and will often stop to show me a new piece, or to ask if what he has found is the right stuff.  We peer into people’s gardens, stop outside civic buildings, and occasionally pin down startled neighbours to ask them about their stone.  As I try to intellectualize this process, it seems to offer a thread back to my childhood, whereby I talk to my little boy about rocks, just as my father did to me.  But it’s more than that.  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes at the beginning of Prismatic Ecology that ‘an ecosystem is an oikosystem, a dwelling system’ and that’s what bluestone and the long, dog-friendly pathway are offering to me.  An often un-lovely area, where nature and artifice come into direct confrontation, this path is bridging my move from the country to the city and helping me find a new space to love.   Dwelling isn’t always about the four walls of the immediate home—sometimes it’s about the ground beneath our feet and the emotions that environment can foster.

Such is Life

Amongst the things we Australians remember on November 11 are Remembrance Day, and the dismissal of the Whitlam ("Well may we say 'God Save the Queen', because nothing will save the Governor-General") Government.

Here's the ABC broadcast of that fateful day: my act of cultural and political homage:

Kellyana — images and reprises of Ned Kelly — is a rich cultural field in this country. I'm only scratching the surface of it in my Ned Kelly and medievalism project, but here's a gorgeous example my sister sent me... As she says, must be a cultural first: Kelly and the burka...

Unlikely connections and textual spirals

Today in Chaucer class we were looking at Troilus's apostrophe to Criseyde's empty palace. Troilus is waiting for Criseyde to return from the Greek camp, and goes through the streets of Troy to look at the house once adorned with Criseyde and now empty; the lantern whose light is extinguished; the ring without the ruby; the shrine without the saint.

Than seide he thus, "O paleys desolat,
O hous of houses whilom best i-hight,
O paleys empty and disconsolat,
O thow lanterne of which queynt is the light,
O paleys, whilom day, that now art nyght,
Wel oughtestow to falle and I to dye
Syn she is went that wont was vs to gye.

"O paleis, whilom crowne of houses alle,
Enlumyned with sonne of alle blisse,
O ryng fro which the rubie is out falle,
O cause of wo that cause hast ben of lisse,
3et syn I may no bet, fayn wolde I kisse
Thy colde dores, dorste I for this route;
And far wel shryne, of which the seynt is oute."

Of course we talked about the difficulties of "queynte" here, but for the life of me I could not remember the Greek name for this figure until now, when I've just looked it up in an article I've co-written (!), which quotes Larry Benson discussing "the most beautiful example of paraclausithyron [the poem before the closed door] in our literature". He argues that Chaucer would not have introduced that obscene pun; and that we err if we are always on the lookout for the double entendre.

But instead of being able to remember this word (I got the "claus" bit but not the rest), I could remember most of the lyrics of "I have often walked down this street before/ but the pavement's always stayed beneath my feet before", from My Fair Lady and I'm sorry to say I sang a couple of stanzas, with a little help. I've also been singing this lovely song all afternoon.

So. Yes. Songs are more memorable than Greek rhetorical terms. No surprises there. And no, it's not exactly the same situation, though I can't remember at what point Freddie sings this song. But it was, all the same, one of those historically impure moments that helps us read the medieval text, I think. Are Chaucer's characters medieval? or timeless?

Another lovely circle has been playing in my mind, too.

Last night we watched Tony Richardson's 1970 film of Ned Kelly starring Mick Jagger. I liked this much maligned film very much indeed. I especially liked seeing Jagger singing the Wild Colonial Boy.

And the Waylon Jennings soundtrack has some great Kelly ballads. One of them is called "Blame it on the Kellys" ("I think I'll steal a horse myself and blame it on the Kellys"). This also has a Robin Hood moment: "bread and milk on the windowsill? Blame it on the Kellys".

At the film's end, though, Kelly is staggering down the railway tracks in the morning mist, wearing the iconic armour and long coat, reeling as more and more police climb down the embankment and fire at him. He staggers and keeps going, and I have the irresistible image of John Cleese as the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The film recovers itself, but I'm then driven to think about the resemblance between Kelly and the Knight. I mean: look at them!



It's a pretty distinctive shape for a helmet, and I reckon it's not implausible that the Python team had seen the Jagger film.

These are both lovely examples, I think, of the way medieval studies and medievalism both set up these spirals of reference and allusion.

Ned Kelly's boot and other relics

As part of my work on Ned Kelly, Joel and I rode down to the State Library. We walked through part of their relatively new permanent exhibition, past the medieval manuscripts, and early Chaucer prints, and took the lift up to the fifth floor. I had never actually seen the Kelly armour, but there it was in a glass case, complete with his rifle and ... a single, tall, cuban-heeled boot. The armour I had seen in a hundred reproductions and images, but this single boot is particularly haunting. It looks as if it has been cut open. It was probably pretty-much blood filled by the time they captured Kelly, who had, despite the armour made of plough-shares, been shot twenty-seven times, mostly in the leg.



The boot is on loan to the Library from the descendants of Jesse Dowsett, to whom it was awarded as a trophy for his role in Kelly's capture. Unlike the extraordinary and iconic armour, shown below in Joel's dramatic floor-view shot, this boot is both an ordinary item of the everyday, while also a semi-sacred relic.

If the armour seems unreal (poised, as I think it is, between influences drawn from medieval romance, the Chinese armour the gang would have seen at the Prince of Wales' birthday parade in Beechworth, and an enchantment with an industrial modernism), the boot belongs to a different order altogether. It's a bushman's riding boot that has been kept as a souvenir of the notorious outlaw, but unlike the armour or the death mask, hasn't been replicated a thousand times. I've only started my work on Kelly (and his associations with Robin Hood), but this is the first time I've seen the boot. Its preservation speaks volumes about the iconic status of Kelly, and the mystique and veneration in which he is held. "Oh yes," said our landlady in Milawa a few weeks ago, "Saint Ned!" And indeed, it looked very much like a saint's relic.



It was a day of firsts, actually. That thing about touring the world and not seeing the things in your own city? One of Melbourne's great tourist attractions is the old Melbourne gaol, where Kelly was hanged in 1880. I must have passed it a thousand times without going in, but today we did. It's a most creepy place indeed, so much so that I forgot to take photos, really, apart from this image of a perspex woman's silhouette that I think is supposed to haunt you; and this three-tiered belt they would considerately strap around you to protect your kidneys while they flogged you.


The gaol has three levels of cells, arranged along either side of a long corridor. The cells are of course tiny, with enormous bluestone flagstones on the floor. Most of them were open; many with displays about the various men and women who'd been imprisoned there: the two Aboriginal men who were the gaol's first hanged men; the Philipino; the Spaniard (who realised he was going to be hanged only ten minutes before the executioner came for him); the Chinese; the women accused of baby-farming and infanticide, and of course, Kelly and his mother, Ellen, who was allowed to visit her son shortly before his death. She was working in the prison laundry when he was hanged. As we walked in and out of these cells, I got quite jumpy. It was bad enough seeing a life-sized figure of a prisoner standing or sitting in his cell; but the spookiest moment was walking into a cell with a narrow mattress on the floor and a grey blanket, not folded up, but in a heap, as if someone had just got up. I found myself almost apologising for intruding, and backing out again.

There was also a two-actor show, dramatising scenes from Kelly's life, that was surprisingly good.
After this we did the tour of the old watch-house, that was used as recently as the 1990s. A young female sergeant marched us in, separated men from women, and locked us up in a cell and turned out the lights. Even with the good-humoured women and children in my group, it was still pretty scary, as was the large padded cell they showed us, too.

Hoping for a good night's sleep tonight, then.

Holiday photos

We took heaps of photos on the Great North-East Victorian Bike Ride: these will give an idea of the celestial blue skies; the sumptuous meals; and the historical immersion into the 1870s we accomplished in five days.

The bike paths are built over disused train lines. Occasionally, they have built bike-oriented rest stops in the shape of old trains.


Mostly the paths are through open country, but sometimes the bush has closed over the tracks, and this is when it was most beautiful.



Sometimes the path went alongside farmlands, and we stopped once to feed long juicy grass to horses. All you St Louisians will recognise my St Louis Cardinals World Series Champions 2006 t-shirt. Go Cards!


We saw other animals, too, though they were often too quick to be photographed: a little lizard; an Aesopian crow flying off with a big wedge of cheese in its mouth; and two snakes. One was black with a red belly, slithering serenely across the path; another mottled one that Joel rode over, and that then reared up as we passed by, shuddering.

As we came into Bright, we saw this irresistible sign:


And at Beechworth, the buildings are made of silver white granite that goes golden as it ages.

Here is Ned Kelly's death mask in the Burke Museum at Beechworth:


And from the sublime to the ridiculous:


And here is the magnificent breakfast Joel ate at the old Butter factory at Myrtleford at the beginning of our last day's riding.


You would think it would keep him going; and so it did: all the way to Everton, where he had a meat pie for morning tea.

Recipe for holiday happiness

Three people. Three bikes. Six panniers.

A three hour train trip to Wangaratta, then a rush of instant happiness as we collected our bikes and rode away from the station, with no accommodation booked, and no sense of how far we'd be able to ride. I think this was the freest I've ever felt on a holiday. I love my creature comforts as much as (if not more than) the next woman, but I've just unpacked my panniers and realised how much I liked living out of them. Next time, I'm going to take even fewer clothes.

We did just under 250 kilometres in five and a half days, mostly along the Rail Trails east of Wangaratta. The disused train lines have been ripped up and replaced with bitumen bike paths through King Valley and the Ovens River, around the wine and food paradise of Milawa, the historic goldfields town of Beechworth, and as far as Bright, base camp for Alpine skiing. Because these were train lines built by hand and horse, slopes were only mild, though I struggled very slowly up the long slow gradual climb to Beechworth on the second day, and sometimes riding west into the wind was tough, too, especially the 60 kilometres we rode yesterday from Myrtleford to Wangaratta. Joel found the wind tough, too, but he rode like a warrior-poet (sorry: please excuse Braveheart reference) the whole way.

We spent one night in an ordinary motel, a night in the family chapel of the old priory at Beechworth, two nights in an enormous and very run-down family apartment above the bar of a pub in Myrtleford, then a night in a grand "town-house" of a motel in Wangaratta.

We slept in, ate enormous breakfasts, and bought muffins, fruit, cheese and focaccias to eat on the road, and would typically arrive at the next town mid-afternoon, and sleep or read till it was time to go out for dinner. A local pub; a fancy restaurant in the old bank at Beechworth; a typical goldfields-town Chinese meal; an Italian pizza place; a motel restaurant with home-made gnocchi.

My head was filled, most of the trip, with thoughts and stories of Ned Kelly. We didn't get to Glenrowan, site of the famous last siege: I'm saving that up for a separate trip. But I did a Kelly walking tour of Beechworth, and collected lots of stories that wove in and out of my reading of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. This was the second time I had read it, and I found it totally compelling this time.

This is my favourite Kelly story at the moment: on his voyage back from Glenrowan to Beechworth for the initial hearing before he was sent to Melbourne to be tried and hanged, he had been wounded many times in the arms and legs, and could not walk, so he was lain on a pallet and brought back by train. My walking tour paused at the corner where he would have been brought up from the station and turned past the Imperial Hotel where Aaron Sherritt's wife stood watching (Kelly, lying on his pallet, is said to have doffed his hat to the widow of the gang member-turned police informant he had killed). Apparently the dray was followed by lots of kids running and pretending to shoot at Kelly with their hands pointed like guns. And he returned fire, in similar fashion. So there are scores of people now who report their grandparents were shot at by Kelly. This seems to me such a wonderful moment of self-consciousness: Kelly performing his own theatrical last return.

More to come, and much more to read on Kelly; some photos to post, too. But for now, time to prepare for my trip to Wollongong tomorrow for a postgraduate seminar: "Early Europe in Contemporary Media: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Film, Television, Computer Games and Internet Studies". I'll be up at dawn for an 8.00 flight. Brr..