My Year with Bluestone: Elvis's Birthday

When I used to live in North Carlton, I walked through the cemetery every morning, and in the old days (the last few years) when I used to ride to work, I would sometimes cycle along its paths. It's on highish ground, surrounded by low houses and parklands, and to the east you can look right across the suburbs towards the Dandenongs.

It is of course like a little city: its own roads, avenues, grand street frontages, ghettoes and slums.

But one of the most extraordinary monuments is that which was assembled in honour of Elvis Presley in 1977.  It was opened by 'Johnny O"Keefe.'  On anniversaries of Elvis's birth (today) and death, I have often seen people laying fresh flowers or bringing tape recorders or guitars and playing soft music.

I have enlisted Paul into this project, and his hi-res photos will appear in the book, but here are my quick snaps.

The astute observer will point out that the actual monument is not bluestone at all but conventional black marble or granite (note to self: do quick course in stone identification), and as we wandered around the cemetery we realised it's only the older nineteenth-century tombs that are based on bluestone (more on this in another post). But the grotto that surrounds the monument is made of very uneven bluestone rocks, stuck together with cement, and at several points, the cement has been dribbled down to resemble limestone stalactites. 

For the first time I noticed there is another similar grotto (without memorial) on the other side of a big bluestone mausoleum (again, for another post). We took many, many photos of bluestone tombs and buildings today: I am going to have no trouble finding images to post each day this year. 

But here is indubitably a place of pilgrimage. Not many people there today, but we saw some laying fresh flowers, and placing cards. And while I don't have a photograph to prove it, as we were standing by the memorial, an old, bright red car cruised by. At the wheel, a man wearing a large plastic Elvis wig, dark glasses, and a bright orange leopard-skin shirt or jacket. Too fast to photograph. He drove around a bit but didn't stop to get out. I said "beautiful" to one woman who was laying pink and red carnations, and carefully arranging some red glittery butterflies, and a picture of Elvis in a plastic wrapper, but she didn't reply. Her husband (?) stood behind her, also without speaking, and a daughter (?) with high ponytail and white rhinestone boots sat quietly on the park bench and watched. 

There's a neat blog by Mark Holsworth on Melbourne shrines, that remarks on Melbourne's propensity for shrines to those who never visited here. Holsworth also comments that the Melbourne cemetery shrine is "the only officially approved Memorial to Elvis Presley outside Graceland in Memphis."

My Year with Bluestone: Memorials (1); and Questions (1) about book structure

Along the Merri Creek path there are various memorials and markers. Here are three very similar ones, all from 1985, and all using a huge boulder of local stone.

But here is a more recent marker from the same path along the Merri Creek, less commemorative and more instructional or indicative in nature. Not only are the graphics quite different, even quite cute (cute dog and cute snake, while the "carry out rubbish" makes this inner-urban park seem like a wilderness campsite) but the stone is markedly different, both in shape, orientation and quality. 

This contrast provokes me to start thinking about how I am going to organise my book. Topographically? a chapter about the Merri Creek. Thematically? a chapter about memorials. Chronologically? a chapter about historical styles? Politically? I suspect this marker isn't made from local bluestone at all, but from the Chinese bluestone Melbourne increasingly uses to preserve its local heritage styling.

My Year with Bluestone: Bridge over the Merri at Heidelberg Rd and "a most stupid man"

The second of the two bluestone bridges on one of my regular walks along the Merri runs along Heidelberg Road. The bridge is one of the oldest stone bridges in Melbourne, according to the wonderful Encyclopedia of Melbourne, edited by Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain, a book that is becoming a constant companion for this project. Ah, and I see it is also online and searchable: wonderful!!

The Heidelberg Rd bridge was built, according to a Darebin local history, between 1849 and 1852. But there is an article in The Argus of 11 June, 1868 that describes this "very substantial bluestone structure" replacing the old wooden bridge. Unlike the bridge I posted about yesterday, this is a single span bridge, made entirely of bluestone.

And here is an older photograph from road level:

I need to do some work on my architectural vocabulary to describe the fanciness along the top of the bridge. 

I have also just now spend a funny hour googling this bridge and finding all sorts of websites and documents online: local histories and other sites that will make this year's bluestone project easier, though the pdfs are often quite hard to read, and I will of course also spend time -- or ask Helen, my wonderful research assistant on this project -- to spend time, in the libraries. Local histories tell me Heidelberg road was the first to be built leading out of the city of Melbourne; and that there was a flurry of activity mid-century after the colony of Victoria became financially independent of New South Wales.

The best affective moment comes from a report to the Victorian parliament of 1852 from the committee on Roads and Bridges, with transcripts of interviews with various officials. I've just scanned quickly, but this is my favourite exchange.  Robert Hoddle, the city's surveyor, is called before the committee of December 4, 1851. (One of Melbourne's main thoroughfares is named after Hoddle; he laid out the city's distinctive grid plan in 1837.) His answer to question 116 is beautifully candid.

114. Q. Have you employed any person you have faith in, to lay out the roads? A. I have faith in all the gentlemen I employ; but the laying out of roads is the most difficult part of a Surveyor's duty.
115. Q. Is it not necessary that they should understand it? A. I invariably select the most intelligent for this work.
116. Q. As in the case of Kilmore? A. You could not have selected a more unfortunate example, for the Surveyor there showed himself a most stupid man. 

There is something completely charming about this candour. Faith is crucial, but stupidity is damning, and even engineers and surveyors and builders bring an affective charge to their work.

My Year with Bluestone: High St Bridge, Clifton Hill

One of my walks/runs along the Merri Creek I call the "nine bridge walk": I usually only think of this number when I am running home and counting my way back. Some of the bridges are low crossings made of wood, where I sometimes pause and on either side and watch the waters meander — or rush, if it has been raining — towards me; and then away from me on the other side as they head down to join the Yarra river at Dights Falls; other bridges are bricked and embanked railway crossings I pass beneath. Two are magnificent bluestone bridges. This one carries High St from Clifton Hill up into Northcote: it was build of bluestone and local brick in 1875.




And here is a photograph from 1892.

And here is a close up of where bluestone and brick meet.

Underneath the bridge, along the creek path, the bluestone is covered in graffiti and tags.

There's a wide ledge that sometimes shelters the homeless: I've sometimes walked by and seen a swag on the ledge.


As a sign of the times, though, I did one day walk past here without the camera and saw a middle-aged man practising his climbing techniques, clinging on for dear life, all of half a metre above the ledge, to the uneven protusions of bluestone.

My Year with Bluestone: returning to the labyrinth

I went back to the labyrinth this morning to take some of my own photos. It had rained overnight after two very hot days and the creek smelled of fragrant eucalyptus. The labyrinth sits between the path and a cliff.


Close to the entrance is a sign, surrounded by bluestones. It respects Wurundjeri custodianship and invokes ancient, Biblical and new age discourse, concluding with a slightly strained inverted subjunctive. 

Here is the pock-marked bubbled basalt block that marks your first turn in the labyrinth.

And here is the rough, very irregularly shaped rock that is the first one you pass on your right as you enter.

And here, as if in answer to my desire to trace our affective relationship with bluestone, is the smooth square rock I talked about two days ago, on the left as you enter, but on your right as you emerge, having walked the labyrinth, on which someone has carefully scattered birdseed.

 
A form of homage? Just this stone and no others. At the very least, a sign that someone else has come to walk this labyrinth and make connections with the creek and its inhabitants.

Daily pleasures

I see and touch bluestone everyday, and clearly I am not the only one!  Alison posted on my facebook page today: 

Lovely book project! And bluestone - such a huge part of the daily pleasures, for me, of living in Fitzroy: sometimes I pat it as i walk past, sometimes I just like to rest my hand on it... I vividly remember the keynote given at your Hearts of Stone event a few years ago (Jeffrey Cohen?), which was so brilliant on affect and matter and stone....

A few people -- well, Melbournians -- have responded in this way when I mention this project. It truly does feel like the local stone (as sandstone is to Sydney, I think). And indeed, the project takes much inspiration from Jeffrey Cohen's work on stone. My project will be much more local, and even incidental than his, but I cannot wait to read his new book, out in a few months: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/stone

We have written together on fire, and will be sharing a panel on the elements at the London Chaucer conference in July with Sophia Wilson and Hetta Howes. We have not worked on stone together, but I'm sure his book will be a guiding spirit to this project. 

Merri Creek Labyrinth

It's the second day of the New Year. High temperatures are predicted, so I decided to go for my walk early in the day. But I don't leave the house until after 11. I'm recovering from a broken arm and my shoulder and neck are hurting. Nevertheless, I manage to run about 2 km and then walk as far as the Bluestone labyrinth along the Merri Creek, constructed by a community group around 2001, according to a Cretan design.  It's not a puzzle, but you are invited to walk around its winding track. Perhaps there will be healing benefits, according to one of the notices. I head off, trying to focus on my breathing, counting 10 breaths then starting again,  and  feeling the rhythm of my footsteps,  and observing the bluestone cobs that have been used to indicate the paths.  There are all kinds of  plants and weeds growing up between the bluestones,  and tan bark  has been laid along the path.  the sun beats down and  I try to  feel the heat come through into my aching bones and muscles. After a while I get a bit dizzy, in the confusing counterpoint of breathing, counting, walking, turning, and trying to observe the stones. I reach the centre,  face the sun, and take a deep breath before turning out again. On the way out it is easier to observe the difference between the stones. Some are almost perfectly square, and I realise they will have been taken from laneways and kerbstones around the city.  Others  are more chunky and irregular in shape. Then I notice a rectangular stone that is  marked all over  with little holes where the  boiling, bubbling rock has been cooled suddenly in water.  One more turn  and I am out.  I turn and stand at the entrance again. On my right, where you turn to enter the labyrinth, is one of the most irregular shaped rocks, jagged and pointy, and covered with the white traces of lichen. On my left is one of the smoothest square blocks. The symbolism is obvious: you enter feeling ragged and jagged and uneven and you emerge smooth, even and serene. As you enter, the bubbled rock is your first obstacle: turn right here...

I start my walk home, feeling overheated and as if I have walked too far. Then I have an idea. My plan this year is to write a book on the affective history of bluestone in Melbourne and Victoria. I had always planned to blog my progress on the book as I go, so this is the first installment for 2015. But then I recalled the brilliant work of Philip Thiel, who for several years kept a series of wonderful blogs: mini entries each year: "A Year with Lemons", "A Year of Kissing People", "A Year of Stopping." What if I could do the same thing with bluestone, charting my encounters with this very characteristic Melbourne stone I walk on and past and through every day?

Well, let's not promise to do it every day. But let's see what happens. So set up your feeds, kids, and we'll see how we go.

Talismanic rock: next year's writing project

Every project on stone needs a talismanic rock object. This is a piece of volcanic bluestone I picked up yesterday from the path along the Merri Creek that runs past my house. It's going to sit on my desk to remind me to finish my two other essays before I can get started on my new project, my affective cultural history of Victorian bluestone. Most of the bluestone we use for building is smooth, and has presumably cooled down slowly. The bubbles here were presumably formed when this clump of lava fell into water. I have a lot to learn about geology. But I do like this little lump. My first impulse was to wash it, but I'm going to keep it as it is, with the detritus of suburban/urban passing.

The reef tank: building a world

Because we have too much to do, and because Paul is now commuting between Sydney and Melbourne, we have a new hobby. Yes it takes a lot of time and money. It is both a present to me and a desire fulfilled for both of us.

After several months (ordering, waiting, then installing the saltwater tank, and some live rock and letting that settle) we started observing several little creatures who'd stowed away on the rock (a sea cucumber, a sluggy trilobite-looking thing we saw once and never again), and a few little centipedy/wormy things. Then we moved in the clean-up crew (snails, hermit crabs, shrimp, trochus shells), whose job it is to keep the glass and sand clean.

By sheer chance, I was videoing one of the snails when it decided to procreate on its second day in the tank (0.18, 0.26, 0.37)

More on this later.

Finally, a few weeks ago, we put in our first two corals and an anemone.

The anemone is my favourite. It has a pink/red base and a crown of wavy "bubble tip" tentacles. Sometimes you cannot see the red base; other times this pink fleshy stem creeps up and encloses nearly all the tentacles.  This creature also moves around the tank, though it seems settled for now. There is now another pinkish one, though it sometimes appears green at night. Also, our first two clownfish went in. Little black and white ones, with orange chins.

We have been doing elaborate water testing to make sure everything is ok. Paul set up a small generator so water filtering could still go on when we had a 6 hour power blackout a few weeks ago. Various folk have come and given advice and fitted up more filters and processes, and yesterday Paul also bought a machine that will convert ordinary tap water to RO (reverse osmosis) water for top-ups, and thence to sea water with the addition of (sorry!) salt. So not so many trips to buy water from the aquarium. But yesterday he also came home with another pale pink anemone, a donut coral (glows slightly green in the dark and also pulsates), and this fabulous little red coral tree, which is surrounded by sunburst coral.


During the day these are just little pink tubes: at night they blossom into miniature sunflowers.

Most of these creatures and plants are softly, fleshily seductive as they wave their tentacles back and forward, or pulsate in and out around little slits for the movement of air and water, or as they sheath and unsheath themselves. It is all incredibly sexual. No one really knows whether the corals are plants or animals.

The whole world here is utterly absorbing. We pull up chairs and watch as the snails and shells move around cleaning up the sand. I sit on the little step down from the kitchen and peer in. I wheel my bike down the side of the house and see the green anemone draped beguilingly down the side of a rock, waving and glistening in the dark. The back of the tank is developing a lovely mossy patina that traps silver bright bubbles. Things move and float around in the currents. The two little clownfish (French and Saunders) hover around each other and flirt with settling in the anemones, but not yet.

And today, la pièce de résistance: a tiny white snail, stuck to the front of the tank, a thousandth the size of its huffing parent, starting to make its way across the reef. We have a made a world where snails are happy to breed!

On stuff, infrastructure, and beauty

I’m just back from a whirlwind trip to Sydney. We hired a van and drove up on Tuesday, taking up some furniture from the house, as well as a pile of stuff Paul had bought to set up the flat he is renting until the flat we are buying is finished. He is planning to be in Sydney only every second week, but there is still a lot of stuff you need to start out a residence from scratch. And because he will not have a car in Sydney and is also travelling a lot overseas at the moment, he had chairs and bed delivered here, while he also stocked up on kitchen stuff, an ironing board, and a pantry full of food to get him started. He also packed up about 24 boxes of books. Some of the kitchen things he bought are really beautiful, and it was a bit seductive to be unpacking them all and seeing his new crisp bedsheets, and shiny kitchen saucepans and the sharp knives and the green enamel bakeware and the green toaster and the pretty blue cups and teapot.

And also to sleep in a brand new bed when ours at home is so old it … well, you don’t want to know. The temptation of new stuff. But of course all the glasses and plastic boxes had sticky labels and paper wrapping and other boxes, and all the kitchen utensils were wired into cardboard, and had stupid little silver chains that attached their instructions.

I’ve been thinking about the big piles of rubbish in the oceans, lately; and we certainly made our sad contribution this week.

We shared the Hume with big trucks, all hauling stuff up and down between the cities, too. We arrived about 8 and went out for pizza, but then had to unload the truck so we could carry the bed and all the bedding upstairs, propping open the security door and waiting for the single, slow lift. And even with the lift, there was still a lot of lifting and carrying. The building’s a bit run down, but the bathroom in the flat has been recently renovated and the whole place is quite big and light.

On Wednesday we hauled boxes of books to Paul’s office on the UWS campus. By the end of the day my arms were a bit trembly with the weight of carrying big boxes of books upstairs. But we changed and headed off to our luxurious night out. We will have to pull in our horns financially to pay for this Sydney accommodation, but we treated ourselves anyway to the outdoor performance of Madam Butterfly. Should be easy, we thought. A pleasant ferry ride to Circular Quay, and there you are.

But.  The ferries don’t go all the way to Parramatta past about 5. So we ended up sharing a taxi with a woman we met at the dock. We drove ten minutes to Rydalmere dock, trying to persuade the taxi driver we didn’t want to go all the way in by taxi. So we paid $20 for a ten minute ride, but then only $6 each for a 55 minute ride on the Supercat. It was just beautiful.  

It went slowly at first, steering between the mangroves, I guess, but gradually speeding up past blocks and blocks of houses and apartments: so many people in Sydney must have a water view. It was dusk, and the sun was glinting off the water and the city as we approached.
 

As the harbour bridge came into view, the catamaran sped up, like a horse heading for its home, and docked at Circular Quay on perfect time. We then had to walk across to Mrs Macquarie’s point, through the Botanical Gardens. But the gardens were closed, and we found ourselves wandering around in the dark, wondering if we should get another cab. Surely there’d be signs pointing the way, we thought. But there was nothing. Maybe Sydney folk just drive everywhere or go by taxis. Maybe Sydney institutions don’t care about visitors. We were not the only ones getting lost and anxious. We ended up walking down a tunnel towards Woolloomoolloo (I’d learn to spell it if I lived there, I promise), where the narrow footpath actually gave out at one point. Honestly, Sydney: just a few signs for visitors would help. It can’t be that hard. Afterwards, we were directed to a water taxi, and did a quick trip around the point and back to Circular Quay for $10 in 5 minutes. We'll know next time. 

However, once we got there, we had time enough to buy edamame beans, almonds in soy, gyoza, and champagne to see us through the first act, which was astonishing. We were five rows from the front in the middle section. The seats looked west across to the opera house and the bridge, so the performance took place with the water and the sunset behind it, and then on the left, the tower blocks of the city, but with the darkness of the gardens intervening. There were a few flying foxes still in flight; and the crescent moon turned more and more orange as it sank into the water. You can just see it, pale and white, between the trees here:

The set is an exercise in engineering excellence. The first act is lit for dappled sunlight through the trees on a steep green hill. We were exhausted and so stayed in our seats at interval and watched as two cranes built Butterfly’s house and the unfinished block of units behind her (Pinkerton’s abandoned strata title), not a little like our own not yet finished Sydney apartment. The stage hands were more like builders, and indeed throughout the second act, these other folk (builders? Stage hands? Chorus?) hovered around and lit their little fires and walked on and off: the chaotic everyday world sitting behind this intense drama. As Pinkerton says, the Japanese house design is very simple, and you can change it as you go – like Japanese marriage.  The opera set was not simple, but its mutability was powerfully underlined through this “performance” of house-building at interval.

Hiromi Omura was simply extraordinary as Cio Cio San. A strong and lyrical voice, and a commanding actorly presence. I’d seen this opera before and the singer seemed abject and desperate all the way through. But this woman was playful, and defiant. The chronology of the opera’s setting was a bit confusing, but the symbolic force of this young Japanese woman loving her little rhinestone encrusted denim shorts and her American flag singlet, and draping them in her diaphanous white wedding gown in the final scene was heartbreaking.

It really was a highlight of my opera-watching career, on a par with Parsifal at the Met in March. It was both emotional and beautiful, and also intellectually smart, somehow. The simple beauty of two lovers against a bit white artificial moon? But it had also been a day crowded with stuff. Moving things here and there; setting up our own real house; seeing a fictional "marriage"disintegrate. Such beauty and stillness, but made out of such an expense of energy. Can it really be sustainable, what we do? What we give ourselves?