via pc-rita.blogspot.com

Thanks to Rita's Bite for sending out word!

The school where I work, Moonah Primary School Hobart Tasmania is holding a
Kitchen Garden Fundraiser Dinner next week!

Guest Chef Carl Windsor
from The Raincheck Lounge is cooking

4 course set menu with matched wines
$50 per head

Wednesday 23rd November at 7pm
at Moonah Primary School

We apologise but we are unable to cater for individual dietary requirements.

Only 50 seats available. Get a table together and contact the school on 6272 9868 to buy your tickets.

Students will be assisting with preparing and serving the food. It should be a great night.

 

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Food_Swap_Flyer.pdf Download this file

This idea needs traction, it deserves our attention as a beaut example of supporting local food sources be they businesses or backyard foraging or community gardens. Maybe our Moonah School Kitchen Garden has something to swap, for more varied seeds or plant tubors?

Be there or be square! 

xRuth

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After three hours locked in a Parliament House room with journalists this morning, Don Henry and the Australian Conservation Foundation’s climate campaigners now have the details of Australia's price on carbon pollution. This agreement lays the foundation to finally cut Australia’s pollution and do something about climate change. More bricks certainly need to be laid, but today we’re moving from talk to action. Don filmed this video for you as soon as he got out of the lock-up. He explains what just happened. www.youtube.com/user/AusConservationTV If this package is passed by Parliament, big polluting companies will finally start paying for what they pump into our skies. Potentially, we’ll see some big wins for the ACF community on issues we have campaigned on for many years. You made these wins possible with your donations, your emails to MPs, and your willingness to stand up for our environment, clean energy, and a better future for our kids. We are excited that there will be a new $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation, as proposed by ACF, to drive large-scale investment in renewable energy. Our economist Simon O’Connor has quietly built support for this idea over the last two years. That is on top of the $3.2 billion dollar Australian Renewable Energy Agency to support research and development. The shift to strengthen Australia’s national 2050 targets from 60% to 80% by 2050 will provide a real shot in the arm for international negotiations and increase the pace of cleaning up our economy. There will also be a $1 billion biodiversity fund, as proposed by ACF, to help protect Australia’s special places that naturally store carbon and safeguard our biodiversity. This means a lot more money for connecting landscapes and protecting habitats. Healthy ecosystems are our life support systems. The starting price of $23 per tonne of carbon pollution, rising by 2.5 percent every year for three years, is a start, but it will need to be strengthened over coming years to help end our reliance on coal and kickstart the clean energy economy. We’re unhappy about more taxpayers’ money going to coal-fired power stations, but using money raised from the carbon price to accelerate their closure should speed up the shift to a clean energy future. Household assistance, including tax cuts and direct payments to those more vulnerable, will help people who can least afford cost increases. Nine out of ten households will receive compensation, and some will actually be better off. So the naysayers waging their disgraceful scare campaign about costs should button up. Tomorrow, we’ll explain in more detail how the price on carbon pollution works and what it means for you. We’ll encourage you to forward the information to friends who might not yet understand what it’s all about. In the meantime, watch the video, fresh from Canberra, on our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/user/AusConservationTV Regards, Say Yes Campaign Team Australian Conservation Foundation PS: If you haven't already, to get more involved in our campaign to "Say Yes" to a price on carbon pollution, sign up here.

| Visit Our Website Australian Conservation Foundation

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My 5 year old composed this piece on an old secondhand yamaha keyboard tonight. He was in the flow- twiddling nobs and peddles! I've taught him nothing except that I often sing and sometimes dance. I have been getting lots of ukelele concerts lately, mostly train shanties if you can envisage that folky mix. I've decided not to gift him official music lessons, feeling strongly that informal learning will best suit at this early enthusiastic exploratory phase- that he will just follow the sounds. I just provide the mix of instruments, a plectrum and a tuner, a few folk festivals etc. I intend to help with tuning and basic cords on ukelele or guitar when we get one. I believe we will use Youtube too for inspiration and self education.

The main thing is to get out of his way to give him a variety of experiences, expose him to others music and he will tell me who he wants to learn from and when. It's very exciting letting him lead. It's a real trust number!
And one that I want to carry over into other areas of parenting.

Harry composition keys 1.m4a Listen on Posterous

If I can get out of my students way and let them lead and trust them to find their flow how would that look?

Ruth

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The red 'beads' are cement plugs.
Whilst weaving these I was listening to ideas about how our Junk DNA is not junk- surprise! And thinking about our multidimensional identity. Only 3 % of our DNA is investigated by a majority of scientists the rest being "junk". Right. I've just returned from a meditation retreat. It was very apparent that we are each other. I saw myself mirrored precisely in my fellow meditators. There is only one of us in the room. Could that be our multidimensional identity? One being many personas? The One? The All That Is? It was an incredibly fun week, joyful, blissful too. The Work of Byron Katie. Think Tao, Buddha, Jesus but you get to live it. No texts. Just waking up inside the dream. Wow.

Ruth

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Ruth Howard

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I've had fun with this quick and dirty design brief walking into the local tip shop locating these three panels ( still no idea what their original use was?) plus red and white electrical cable within a half hours browse. I later found some red plastic cement plugs at the hardware store. I unwound the twisted cables using the white wire in the weft and the red in the warp direction. I handed them in for exhibit same day the following week.

I will bolt them to my garden fence for additional privacy as well as a decorative feature. I believe these are now sketches for further pieces if I can just scout for industrial waste I'd like to continue the architectural textile theme...

Next term I am lining up a few visiting artists to coordinate kitchen garden art projects for my students. I am looking forward to that. I'm too busy teaching the cooking side myself and I'm keen for the collaboration!

Ruth

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I've just now had a chance to put up images from my mother Naomi Howard's 'ALL ONE' exhibition itself,  it was so gorgeous. The large hanging  branches are Banksia, which along with She Oak grow profusely along the shoreline where my family live in South Eastern Tasmania.  My previous post gives more info about the artist's intentions, sensibilities and aesthetic as well as more detailed views of exhibited works. Following the success of this show my mother Naomi will study the Italian Masters for a month or so, I'm very excited for her. Hope you love the show. Photos by Sally Curry.

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My mother Naomi Howard is currently exhibiting paintings and ceramics in Salamanca Place Hobart at the Sidespace Gallery (adjacent to the Long Gallery) here in Tasmania. The show finishes on Tuesday 22nd Feb, 5.30pm.

Naomi has worked many years in the northern western aboriginal regions of Australia. Setting up native plant nurseries, silkscreen works, building and maintenance teams and many other roles within local communities. Now she returns there regularly to sit on the earth with traditional elders painting alongside them. A former hortuculturist and cabinetmaker my mother has always been a painter, studying with Paul Delprat (principle of the Julian Ashton Art School) at the age of 15. Her fellow painters instruct her to 'paint up her country'. So she does, both the desert and the cool temperate isle of Tasmania.

An essay by Erica Izett describing the artist's approach follows below.

‘Proper salt water woman!’

‘All one’ is a conversation in paint with many of the artists at the Lajamanu Community… a response to their own paintings. … There was much yelling in Warlpiri and a final agreement that we are ‘all one’. I was ordered to paint up my country.

Paths cross. Sometimes they cross twice, and when this happens something different occurs.

In 1987 Naomi Howard had the job of ship’s carpenter on a square-rigged topsail schooner participating in the First Fleet re-enactment for Australia’s Bicentenary celebrations. Like the First Fleet crew, her path was about the cross with Aboriginal Australia. The Aboriginal Bicentenary protests were massive and initiated a turning point in the White Australia consciousness and especially the art world, which from this point became intensely interested in Aboriginal art. Naomi spent her spare time on the journey reading the history of Australian colonization. Henry Reynolds’ ‘The Other Side of the Frontier’ ‘was a big awakening … by the time I reached Sydney I had gone through something of a metamorphosis….  It was 1988 and I was now ready to enter into relationship with Black Australia”. But her crossing with Aboriginal Australia would be very different to that of the First Fleet 200 years earlier.

In 1994, Naomi drove the 600 km stretch of dusty road from Alice Springs to the small Walpiri community of Lajamanu on the northern fringe of the Tanami Desert to take up the position of Council Coordinator. She and Warlpiri were about to cross paths. The Warlpiri had been on their own Long March. Forcibly trucked to Lajamanu in the late 40s and 50s they promptly walked 500 kms home only to be taken back. Those who decided to settle after several walk-backs to their Dreaming sites, fiercely maintained their heritage. Naomi was prepared for the crossing. Five years earlier, driven by her personal 1988 resolution, she spearheaded a training initiative on Bindi Bindi Community at Onslow in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. There, as the community’s only non-Aboriginal worker, she set up a tool shed and a team of men to repair houses, and secured a Noongar artist-in-residence. Over two years she also established a vegetable garden/plant nursery, and a silk-screen printing enterprise. She left with a skin name and a preliminary education in Aboriginal culture. A year at Kalumburu followed soon after, of note, inviting Martin King of The Australian Print Workshop to work with her closest friends on the community, the Karadada family of Indigenous art fame. But the Walpiri friendships she was about to cross paths with, would be binding and transform her practice.

Lajamanu painters are known for their resilience and independence, qualities that chimed with Howard’s own. They had made a ground painting at Paris in 1983, declaring that they would never join the painting movement begun at Papunya 12 years earlier. But after 1988 the art market had suddenly changed and they relented. However they painted without the support of the government art centre model. The Lajamanu women Howard engaged with were senior painters, law women and teachers. To these elders the living connection to country embodied and activated in the process of painting and ritual -make one whole – a locus of identity, to be strengthened, shared and passed on. While this was confirmation of Howard’s own sense of identity, which revolved around her connection to nature and making, the depth of Lajamanu connections to place through art only highlighted Howard’s relative lack of such connection and aesthetic integrity.

As a child Naomi had made her own bush camps along Sydney’s pockets of bush and stream. At 15 she was independent. In her early teens she admired the ochred barks in the Methodist mission shopwindow and Albert Namatjira’s signature outback colours at the Art Gallery of NSW. At 17 she was on a sea passage to chase favourite masterpieces seen only in reproductions (of the likes of Van Gogh, Turner, and Rembrandt) to be savoured in the real. She fostered her own skills as an innovative cabinet maker, builder, painter, forager and passionate bush-woman. She had caught wind of developments at Papunya and inspired by the revival of culture, she had encouraged elders at Bindi Bindi to reignite their carving skills with Acacia xiphophylla (Snakewood). But it was at Lajamanu she became versed in a more profound connection and reading of country: ‘they opened the door to a deeper understanding of being human and my relationship with my country’.

Howard’s formative years were those mid-century modernists also interested in the identity of place, like Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd, Margaret Preston and Ray Crooke, but she had not taken the conceptualist path of her generation. However her Aboriginal world opened new horizons, and she cites the liberating influence of Ginger Riley Munduwalawala and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Above all her mentor was Lorna Napurrula Fencer, one of the most innovative of the Lajamanu artists, Fencer took Howard under her wing. She was Naomi Nangala’s  Ja ja (grandmother) and took her tutorial role seriously. “She would turn up on Saturdays and demand that I paint in order

to learn the Jukurrpas (creation story imagery) appropriate to me. Howard cites Fencer as her painting teacher “She gave me confidence… Lorna and I just loved painting together… we were both outsiders…” Like Fencer, Howard’s biography reverberates with autonomy and courage. She too pushed barriers of gender and convention. Both worked outside their respective cultural institutions. ‘Outlandish and indomitable’ Fencer forged her own career using tradition iconography with bold initiatives ‘pulling off exquisite works of art’.  She also taught Howard that country is sentient and embodied with powerful forces, affiliations and potential– the substance of kuruwarri and essence of ancestral presence which links people and country.

One can see in the works of ‘All one’ (2011) what’s increasingly important to Howard - connection and interdependence with place. She paints the sea, scrub, produce, wildlife, and family (all cultures and times), acknowledged through the lens of the everyday and simple pleasures: the dogs, the beach, tides, birds, garden, changing light. A touch of enchantment, an allowance for magic, for mythology, for transformation fills the work. These are the pleasures of those who live close to the ground, listen to its beat, heed its warnings and signs. In some cases the paintings act as a pointer to a deeper consciousness. The paint dances across the canvas to ancient rhythms and sharp contrasts of flora and fauna, flight and vessel: all loaded signifiers. In Wallaby Business  ancestral Wallaby dancer/creators hold blood red-ochred coolamon pouches; Honoring  the Old Mothers : haunting bones of ancient Tasmanian blue gums ‘living when Palawa walked among them’; Howard’s boat, lovingly handcrafted by a proper salt water woman– sings of journeying, freedom, and cycles in tune with ancient technologies. There is an environmental mysticism found in these works. Above all there is an honesty to her craft, an ode to simplicity but with deference to the power of the elements, ecology and the passage of time.

‘I am aware of the people who were here before me and of the underlying intricate tracery of people and events.’

Howard paints in a very recognizable European tradition that owes much to that mid-twentieth century generation of artists who felt betrayed by the legacy of the European Enlightenment and sought an alternative way of being and belonging. However she has crossed paths with a much older Aboriginal tradition, and this profoundly shaped her art to produce work that combines elements of both. This is the connective conversation that animates this exhibition. Howard acts as witness not only to her patch but also to the land of her awakening, the secrets of the ancestors, and to the country her Indigenous friends hold so dear. From her studio overlooking the secluded bay at Murdunna in southern Tasmania, Howard makes paintings that rouse us to care for place as if it is a personal ancestor, to understand, to feel and retell its stories.

Erica Izett

Note: All quotes from interviews with Naomi Howard

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See the full gallery on Posterous

Boxing Day lunch prepared by dad, angels on horseback with cold roast veg, dollops of Dijon and a glass of Verdelho.

The humidity is muggy in Sydney so we roasted the veg last night in anticipation of this meal.

Dad grilled seeded prunes wrapped in bacon. He suggested as an alternative, almonds could replace the prune pips.

For dessert we are now eating finely sliced frozen kumquats with vanilla ice cream. The small bowls are made by Bruce Prior, Bundanoon.

Merry Christmas holidays xRuth

Dad threatening me "do you think I could have a little bit of yours if you keep playing with that?!"

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See the full gallery on Posterous

Next year I'll recommence teaching cooking in the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden program with young children, here in Hobart Tasmania. And apart from collating recipes according to season, budget and skill, I'm thinking up art projects for the kitchen and or the garden. We will be seeking local artists to get involved, you're welcome to connect if you feel to come and play!

My own family have a large sculpture garden extending an art gallery into the natural bush surrounds. Here's a few images from www.artless.com.au

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This Sat 21st August Australians elect their leader.

10% of those who arrive at Polls are undecided...here's some help.

GetUp have put together a scorecard of the 3 major parties. They also have a 'how to vote' info page to assist voters to understand where their preferences might go.

 (please ignore info on image print you will have to visit link for that)

"GetUp is an independent, non-profit grass-roots community advocacy organisation giving everyday Australians opportunities.... to hold politicians accountable. GetUp does not back any particular party, but aims to build an accountable and progressive Parliament - a Parliament with economic fairness, social justice and environment at its core. GetUp rely solely on funds and in-kind donations from the Australian public."

"These scorecards represent the policies of Labor, the Coalition and the Greens as of 15 August 2010 on fourteen important issues. It's not a comprehensive policy list, but rather a selection of issues that are important to GetUp members and show some key points of difference between the three parties. Some of the issues have been the subject of GetUp campaigns in the past, some haven't. All of them are issues that GetUp members have told us are important in the monthly surveys we conduct of random samples of GetUp members."

What are the big issues?

Healthcare

• Fully fund closing the gap for indigenous life expectancy
• A national plan for improving preventative health
• Significantly increase mental health funding

Pollution and Environment

• Stop our rising pollution within the next term of government
• Significantly increase government investment in public transport
• Significantly increase government investment in renewable energy
  
• Purchase more water for the Murray-Darling River

A fair go for all

• Oppose harmful temporary protection visas
• Process refugees quickly and cost-efficiently here in Australia
• Protect our rights in law with a 'Human Rights Act' for Australia

Jobs and Infrastructure

• Increase compulsory superannuation rate
• A fast fibre-optic broadband network
• Paid parental leave
• Keep the Internet free from mandatory filtering

Further notes can be found on GetUp site about their scorecard. 

 "Unfortunately, we are not able to show the positions of independent candidates and some minor parties on these scorecards. There are hundreds of independents and minor parties, and we didn't have the resources to properly research their positions. It's also far more expensive to print and distribute scorecards in small local runs, so these scorecards represent the party policies of the Coalition, the Greens and Labor: three parties that are contesting almost every electorate and senate race."

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Howard announce.pdf Download this file

My father has a photographic exhibition in Sydney opening tonight in downtown Surry Hills, next to Central Station. The show spans 10 years of photographic inquiry by a passionate and poetic mind. 40 photographs in all.

Here and there throughout the exhibition my father, Anthony Howard has used quotations from sources of inspiration, which nurture his poetic impulse.. .These may also act as "poetic speed humps" for viewers.

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With thanks to Andrew Churches.

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