The Gorge in Flood

Whenever the Cataract Gorge is in flood Launcestonians, and their friends, turn out to feel the power, and to listen to, of the water surging through the gorge. It is almost like moths to the light and thankfully many take their video cameras and put their recording on YOUtube for us all to share. This is an act that is both celebratory and respectful of a place that Launcestonians share an interest in and have a sense of ownership for.

Click here to go to the PONRABBEL IMAGE GALLERY

WANTED: The Fisherman

If one lives near a waterway and there are fish in it, then there'll be someone, no lots of people, with fish and fishing on their mind. On the Tamar, and along the two Esks, there is a multitude of these people who chase fish to pass time and to stock the larder. Many of these fishermen are pretty careless about whether or not they catch fish as they are there for the meditation really. So they say!

OK, given all that and that we know that bit of the story there are lots of stories that only fishermen know and tell each other – sometimes somewhat elaborated upon. Also, we need to know that there is a difference between anglers and fishermen. Anglers have rules and you are only an "angler" if you use a rod and reel and they are reputedly deliberately devious in their scheming to catch fish. They are however a part of a much  bigger club who'll do all manner of things to 'catch fish'. 

Fishing can be a bit like all-in-wrestling or gentlemanly boxing. Whatever, they are the world's 'fishermen' and there are supposedly 38 million people out there 'fishing' for food, profit and for fun.

Humans have been fishing since the Mesolithic period and that probably means that by now fishing is a primordial urge. But here PONRABBEL is looking for one person, a man or woman, who actually caught this fish. Apparently this fish was caught on the Tamar and apparently from the shore – and apparently that is very important. The story goes that its virtually impossible to catch this species of fish from the shore anywhere else in Australia – but you can on the Tamar apparently.

So at PONRABBEL we think that someone out there knows who this particular fisherman, or fisherwoman, is (was?) and probably they even know what bait they used and maybe even what gear they used. The chances of discovering the place it was caught are not all that good but we would like to know and better still we would like to tell everybody.

There is one clue that might mean something to someone. There is someone known as "BEEV" in the story somewhere.

If you do not know who this fisherman was BUT you do know something, preferably a lot, about someone else who has caught a big fish on the Tamar, or even one of the Esks, or a tributary somewhere, just tell us about him or her. Since PONRABBEL is new we haven't got the cash available to offer anyone a prize just yet but we are working on that.

IF you know who this person was who caught this fish, and you wish to spill the beans, please email ponrabbel@7250.net and we'll "get back to you" as they say in the world of advertising interesting things.

The Geese Have Gone

I'm Joanne and I share my life with Dennis, who after thirty years is still telling me new stories over an early morning cup of tea in bed. 

His Chinese Geese are our morning alarm clock. We sell our hand printed greeting cards at the monthly local market. I was approached by a local fellow poultry keeper who mentioned he needed to cull twenty white Geese. 

This Winter Dennis purchased a poultry plucker and we had processed some ducks with the help and expertise of a local Chef and Printmaker friend. 

So my life as a Goose Broker began when our local poultry friend arrived on time with bags of geese to process. 

I would call it Experience Geese Day if we were to approach the venture in a commercial manner. 

We worked hard for several hours with a temporary shade over to clothesline where our Chef friend worked with great skill. 

The goose sausages we await may be as good or better than the duck sausages we relished after the Duck Day we experienced previously. 

My digital photographs are the continuation of a Series of recent Self Portraits I have been making on our land in Northern Tasmania over all four seasons. 

The goose wing images here utilize the exquisite wings of white Geese which I am told were once on Tamar Island. 

This afternoon Dennis told me in 1977 he and a friend bought thirty three white Geese from the Tamar Island area to take back to Meander where they lived on a commune.

Joanne Wild 2014

MAIREENER MUSINGS

FOREWORD: At the end of January each year there is a conference at Low Head where 'the locals' gather to talk about their 'placedness', their Tamaresk stories, their imaginings and more still. This kind of conference doesn't happen in many places but in Low Head there is a longish tradition for people in Low Head for their summer break to attend, catch-up and ponder their placedness. To be invited to give a paper and share an imagining is something of an honour but the paper introduced here was an opportunity to both glean and share information that Low Head people had special knowledge of and enthusiasms for. 

"Introduction: As any New Tasmanian will tell you, every New Tasmanian needs an induction into being Tasmanian. They need to know about:

• Food – Apples, Lamb, Cheeses, Mutton Birds, Scallops, Trevalla, Abalone, Leatherwood Honey, Pink Eye potatoes and more recently cool climate wines
• Tasmania’s Colonial history – Georgian buildings, convicts, some bushranging, etc.
• Things endemically Tasmanian – Huon Pine and The Piners, Blackwood, Tasmania Devils and the Thylacine
• Tasmanian Hot Issues –Forest debates, The Hydro, Lake Pedder and ‘The Wilderness’.

Up there with all of this is Tasmania’s Aboriginal history, 'The Truganini Story' and Tasmania’s ubiquitous shell necklaces.

This is the kind of crash course that takes place over morning coffee, at barbecues, over dinner tables, at parties, over a drink at exhibition openings, etc. It all comes with ABSOLUTE authority and based on irrefutable evidence. All this is especially important if you have been imported to, among other things, write speeches with cultural messages for politicians and others who are trying to appear‘erudite and informed’.

Somehow the TIP (Tasmanian Induction Process) is more intense than similar inductions seem to be almost anywhere else.

About the first thing a New Tasmanian [or as a Tamaresk resident], or a visitor who feels somewhat obliged to feel connected, needs to do is get some Huon pine. It is that quintessential thing to be sending friends and family back ’home’ to prove that you have indeed moved to, or have been, elsewhere. A little bit of Huon pine carries so many stories. [On the Tamar now it'd probably be wine and once it might have been fine wool]

Very high on the list of must-know-abouts is Tasmanian necklace making. To anyone who has lived in Tasmania for any time, they would know something about shell necklaces, Truganini, her necklaces and other necklace stories. Truganini seems to be the usual starting point.

Almost like ‘white noise,’ apple stories proliferate in Tasmania. Again, anyone who has lived in Tasmania for any time will know someone who was, or is, or whose family is/was involved in 'the apple industry’. Along Tasmania’s highways and back roads apple trees have gone feral. It is not for nothing that Tasmania is known as the Apple Isle... Click here to read the paper

POSTCARDS: Placemarkers & placemakers

CLICK ON AN IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Postcards once told us how the people who lived somewhere imagined their place. They were as important to the living somewhere to send to people elsewhere as they were for elsewhere people to send home and share the placedness of the places they visited.

COMPROMISED: Not Rotten

When something is contested all manner of stories emerge relevant to, and irrelevant to, the contest. However the contest is always lingering there somewhere despite the apparent end to the contest or no. Stories are dredged from memories and there are reminiscences, rumours, crazy assertions, speculations, skulduggery, politicking, convenient memories, indeed inconvenient memories and more still.

If a building is abandoned it never really is. Someone will move in and squat, play and live out some aspiration or other. Yet other will always, well usually, have other ideas and the abandoned never really is abandoned and left alone as it delaminates and fades from the front of mind awareness of so many. Yet it becomes front of mind for others to the distress of those with plans. 

Here, this abandoned floor became occupied by others who employed its qualities, exploited the opportunity to be transgressive and leave their marks upon the world, albeit temporarily. They rather casually prove a political assertion unsustainable but no matter they are nobodies being looked down upon by somebodies.

The fact that this floor is not actually "rotten" is of no account
if one is an OUTranked underling!

CLICK HERE FOR A SET OF 11 IMAGES

CLICK HERE FOR A NEWS STORY

Notes to,Authors

CLICK HERE TO  SEE THE DRAFT THUS FAR

If you have suggestions for information that should be included in these note please email art@7250.net OR LEAVE A COMMENT in the comment section below

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Bob McMahon: The Swans are Dead

Bob McMahon, author of the 2006 paper "The Swans Are Dead" passed away at home in his sleep on April 17 2013. Bob is an exemplar of person who truly exuded a Tamar 'placedness' and someone who embraced his 'Tasmanianness' with gusto and unfettered enthusiasm. Bob's life touched many people's lives in many ways and he has left his mark on the world simply by being here which is why he was a legend.

His paper.was written early on in the campaign to stop an inappropriately sited pulp mill being built on the Tamar. Thinking back on that campaign today if Bob was still with us he wouldn't be triumphantly punching the air in celebration of the demise of the 'pulp mill proposal'. 

No, he'd be quietly reminding us that "it was never a goer" and reminding us that on the evidence it should never have been built, so to paraphrase him, what should have happened did, just a bit too late." 

Bob McMahon was passionate, creative, opinionated, rogue, historian, climber, walker, wine-lover, teacher, grandfather, activist, writer – are all words that could be used to describe Robert John McMahon. Bob's place was the Tamar Valley where he worked as an outdoor instructor. However he was also a social activist and the spokesperson for TAP into a Better Tasmania, a community-based organisation that was formed in response to the proposal to build Gunns’ controversial pulp mill. An avid reader and writer, Bob approached life with the kind of zest that you can only admire. His last project was a walk around the coast of Tasmania, a journey he was about 1200 kilometres into. He was also well under way in achieving this goal but he had completed his walk around the shoreline of the Tamar.

Of himself, Bob said "I was dragged up in Tassie. I think I clambered ashore in 1950. My oldest brother is English, but the all rest of us – the other seven boys – were born in Tassie.

What formed me, as for my love for the outdoors, was my first 15 years in a little town called Stanley in the far northwest of Tassie – that little peninsula sticking out into the Bass Strait. 

The big cliffs of the Nut were our playground, surrounded by the wind and the sea. Wildness was in my blood from the very first. Back then, no one had cars or telephones or television sets. I remember being taken for a drive along the north coast of Tasmania. I was probably 11, and that was my first sighting of mountains, the snow-covered Western Tiers. It had this electrifying effect on me. I had not been exposed to anything like that before in my life. I was hooked.

When we shifted out of Stanley to Devonport. We would hitchhike out to Cradle on a Friday night, just my mate and me (Michael McHugh), and we would climb some mountains and then hitchhike back again on Sunday. One night, when it was snowing like mad, we were shuffling along in our Yakka Can’t Tear ‘Ems and we got picked up by some hunters. They sat us up on the trailer on top of the dog cage – leaving us holding on in this raging blizzard as we were hurling along the gravel road. It was a good laugh.

I have poked around Iceland and I’ve been down around Tierra del Fuego, on a charter yacht through the Beagle Channel and up all the fjords and, you know this sounds a bit funny, but I think I know what wilderness is – I think I’ve looked it in the face. 

It was a moment in one of those isolated fjords, tucked in behind Mt Darwin. We’d moored the yacht – you run these lines ashore so that they wild weather doesn’t take you – and at the end of the day this grey fox came down to the water’s edge to look at us. I am thinking "This fox has never seen a human before". At that moment, as I looked at the fox, I thought, "I know what wilderness is." ..... For more on Bob click [here] • [here] • [here]

Bob's paper, "THE SWANS ARE DEAD", is in seven parts. It came out of experiences, and an issue of contention, in Chile that had resonances in Tasmania and the Tamar Valley specifically. It was published in the hope that:

1. People would spread the word and use the information freely; 
2. Tasmanians would think seriously about what’s at stake when all too little attention is paid to the ways natural resources are exploited; 
3. Tasmanians would also think seriously before allowing others to take advantage of their resources; and
4. in the whole process, pay more than scant regard to Tasmania's resources and their true value.

"THE SWANS ARE DEAD: Like many detective stories this one had a scene in a taxi. While it would be false for me to claim a detective role, I did travel to Chile especially to investigate an incident of death on a grand scale. The detective work was done by others. With few expectations, and with only one possible contact in the country, and with no facility in the Spanish language, it was a surprise when the first person I met after I got off the plane began talking passionately about the incident which had brought me here. Luis, the diminutive taxi driver, began waving his arms and shouting: “Los cisnes mueren. Los pajaros mueren.” He shouted because I was foreign and he wanted me to understand.

It was an electrifying moment. I knew those Spanish words and not many others. I was here for the ‘cisnes’ after all. The swans. The iconic black-necked swans of South America, Cygnus melanocoryphus. ‘Pajaros’, I knew meant ‘birds’. The word ‘mueren’, from the verb ‘morir’ like the French ‘mourir’ – to die.

Luis took both hands off the wheel of his beat-up taxi and flapped his arms like a bird flying. Something awful had happened here. .... CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE PAPER

The Cataract Gorge: Bob's playground
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

Some additional references:

• Gunns  in Administration .... click here
• Gunns  in Voluntary Administration .... click here
• The Man Who Pulped the Pulp Mill .... click here
• Bob McMahon: My Tasmania .... click here

TAMAR WATER

Tamar Water sometimes gets a pretty bad press and its true we do not look after it as well as we might. We empty our sewerage into it, yes we do, and when Launceston was the heart of Tasmanian industry, toxic waste fond its way in. And, that waste is still there in the mud. After that, the city's stormwater all ends up in the estuary one way or anther. That water arrives with a catalogue of contaminates such as dog pooh, oil and anything that finds its way into drain and onto roadways and paths. In the end the water is pretty toxic and not recommended for swim. Looks can be deceiving!

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KRAP & SHADE

The ordinary is all so often extraordinary. If you take a walk to Tamar Island along the way you'll be invited to inspect the BIRDkrap on the boardwalk and bridges. Why? Well the idea is that you'll be able work out what they have been eating. Chances are that you might not find much of that evidence but if you look closely enough you'll some rather beautiful small oronthicACTIONpainting. It is the kind of thing that begs to be recorded for the benefit of all wherever they may be!

 CLICK ON AN IMAGE TO ENLARGE