Daily Archives for November 11, 2018
The Unconformity festival embraces the power and peculiarity of Tasmania’s wild west
The Unconformity festival
Asher Warren, University of Tasmania
Of the many festivals dotted across the island state of Tasmania, The Unconformity is particularly well named. It is an inherently unique event, responsive to the particularities of the western town of Queenstown’s unique geology, ecology and culture.
Queenstown is nestled in Tasmania’s mountainous West Coast Range, between Mt Owen and Mt Lyell, with an infamous reputation for inclement weather. And it is remote: at least three hours of winding drive from both Hobart and Launceston.
On a sunny day, the views are spectacular; some for their natural beauty, others for the demonstrable effects of over a century of mining, smelting and clearing. However, after three days of immersion in the town and the festival, I began to feel that Queenstown was somehow better evoked by the moments when the clouds hung low, only to occasionally break open, revealing unexpected and surprising views.
A central ethos of The Unconformity is the curatorial commitment to site-specific and locally engaged work. Many of the works are unique to the location and the people of Queenstown, and developed by artists through multiple visits to the town.
Note must be made of the exceptional diversity of gallery-based works, including Lucy Bleach’s enigmatic Variations on an Energetic Field and the overwhelming scale of Raymond Arnold’s survey, 100 Etchings/35 Years in Tasmania. But I was particularly struck by the use of performance within this festival, as a model for engaging with the place that is “Queenie”.
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The power of listening
The pedestrian bridge over the town’s Queen River became a makeshift stall for audiences wearing headphones for Tasdance’s Junjeiri Ballun – Gurul Gaureima (Shallow Water, Deep Stories). Using the banks and the river itself, the bodies of five dancers explored the Indigenous history of the area and this waterway, which mine tailings and effluent once turned silvery grey and which remains, despite the remedial work to date, stained a remarkable shade of orange.
The Unconformity festival
Across the bridge, Prospect brought Dylan Sherridan’s deft and thoughtful engagement with sound together with Sam Routledge’s knack for engaging dramaturgical structures. Using hacked metal detectors, and again wearing headphones, prospectors walked through Passion Park, searching for sonic treasures. The dynamic score was a delight, and the uneven experience for participants (some struck it richer than others) an interesting counterpoint to the otherwise even distributions created by works for headphones.
Another work experienced with headphones, A Score to Scratch the Surface (Opening Scene) by momo doto (Tom Blake and Dominique Chen), offers a markedly different take on the roaming soundscape.
Beginning in the dress circle of the 1933 Paragon Theatre, looking out at the projection screen, we hear an assemblage of recordings taken in and around Queenstown. Curious sonic artefacts are woven with brief snippets of conversations with locals, which slip in and out. The audience of three is ushered out of the theatre, into a car, and driven on a meandering tour of the town by a local resident. These stories, like the sites on this particular tour, don’t cry out for attention, forcing the ear and the eye to search for details. It’s a subtle and meditative work, which engages deftly with diverse reflections on the value of Queenstown’s natural resources.
As artist Tom Blake explained to me, the work was built slowly, over a number of visits to the town: “We were fortunate to have a development period that provided an opportunity to visit and revisit places and people over an extended period. We wanted to avoid being a flash in the pan – dropping by to make a work, then disappearing into the night.”
A Score to Scratch the Surface gestures toward the surprising paradoxes of Queenstown. It’s a place of riches, of devastation and resilience. With the mines closed since a tragic accident in 2013, and uncertainty about their reopening, the town sits in an uneasy limbo and faces difficult decisions. The challenges of regeneration – economically, environmentally and culturally – loom large. There are no easy answers, but the festival offers an opportunity to listen, to share and to understand something of this complexity.
The Unconformity
While not explicitly noted as a theme for the festival, the act of listening seemed to be a particular focus. This was most explicit in Jill Orr’s durational performance Listening (made in collaboration with sound artist Richie Cyngler), staged in an old limestone quarry on the edge of town. This work asked audience members to record three wishes, while Orr, with characteristically otherworldly endurance, stood still and listened as these wishes were broadcast by loudspeakers and echoed around the quarry.
In the Medical Union building, Babel, directed by Glen Murray, allowed audiences to roam freely, exploring a panoply of other languages. While a remarkably simple conceit, the experience of wandering and listening to the diverse cast of performers was surprisingly compelling.
Starting with a bang
On a grander scale, the festival opened on Friday with Tectonica, a collaboration between Ian Pidd, Martyn Coutts and Dylan Sheridan, which closed down the main intersection to host a nine-tonne rock and some “bloody big speaker stacks”. The tremendous, visceral soundscape condensed some 500 million-odd years of geological activity into an hour of epic, quadrophonic sound and, in the distance, an ominous red fissure opened up in the mountainside. Not content to lie dormant, the speakers rumbled sporadically throughout the weekend, felt and heard throughout the small town.
Unconformity festival
The Falls, by Halcyon Macleod and Finegan Kruckemeyer, tells a story of young love, separation and return. It is a moving work, quite literally, as the audience dons headphones and climbs aboard a bus. The narrative of the play unfolds from a series of perspectives while journeying from one end of the Queen River – the Horsetail Falls – to the other, its confluence with the King River. It’s an ambitious and expansive work – and neatly staged – but at times the poetry of the script seemed to overextend, attempting to translate the narrative and connection to this site perhaps beyond its specifics.
Unconformity
Local works
For all the innovative contemporary work in this festival, and the influx of city slickers who pour in from Hobart (vying for the title of Australia’s new centre of hip) and the mainland, it would be all too easy to alienate the locals. But the festival does a remarkable job of keeping the West Coasters not only in the frame, but at the centre. While there was a palpable but subtle sense of reservation on the Friday night, by the closing Sunday the town seemed to reach a comfortable equilibrium.
Around noon on Sunday, after the ute muster took off and before the marquee football match on Queenstown’s notorious gravel oval, the bloody big speaker stacks gave a last hurrah and belted out a locally curated playlist of AC/DC’s greatest hits. An homage to the band’s 1976 performance in the town, the music slowly drew a crowd. It grew, as more joined in and danced around, and on, the rock left in the centre of the intersection.
This festival, which began as the Queenstown Heritage and Arts Festival, and more recently reimagined as The Unconformity, has carved out a unique position in Tasmania and in Australia’s cultural landscape. It will next run in 2020, and its growing esteem and success raise an important question about growth and sustainability. One of the key features of this festival is its scale, which allows it to balance the influx of visitors and locals; they meet, rather than being overwhelmed.
Under proud West Coaster Travis Tiddy’s direction, however, the festival will hopefully approach its growth with the same focus and thoughtful reflection on place that made the 2018 version such a memorable success.
Asher Warren, Lecturer, University of Tasmania
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Stringybark is tough as boots (and gave us the word ‘Eucalyptus’)
Cowirrie/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Gregory Moore, University of Melbourne
Few eucalypts are as versatile, varied and valuable as messmate stringybark. It was the first eucalypt to be scientifically named, and in fact gives us the name “Eucalyptus”.
Gum trees had been seen and collected on earlier expeditions, but a specimen collected on James Cook’s third expedition to Bruny Island off the Tasmanian coast was sent to the British Museum, where the French botanist Charles Louis L’Heritier de Brutelle named it and then published it in 1788.
Read more:
Where the old things are: Australia’s most ancient trees
L’Heritier named the specimen Eucalyptus obliqua, and so messmate stringybark is the first named and now type specimen for all Eucalyptus species. Because of the little caps covering the buds of this specimen, the name eucalypt was derived from the Greek eu, meaning “well”, and calyptos, meaning “covered”. Meanwhile, the asymmetrical or oblique leaf base gave us the description obliqua.
The name stringybark comes from the fibrous stringy bark that grows on the trunk of the tree, but no one knows the origins of the name messmate, which is also applied to several other eucalypt species.
The Conversation, CC BY
Humming with bees
The flowers are small and white and often go unnoticed – but not by bees, which are often attracted to the trees in such large numbers that the trees seem to be humming. The fruits, or gum nuts, are also small at about 8mm across and usually occur in clusters of three, four or five. The juvenile leaves are quite large, almost heart-shaped, and up to 70mm wide and 100mm long, but the adult leaves are about 50mm wide and up to 200mm long with a sharply acute base on one side.
E. obliqua is also commonly known as messmate, stringybark, browntop, Tasmanian or Tassie oak, or browntop stringybark. It is widely distributed through southeastern Australia, growing in Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and much of New South Wales, almost to the Queensland border.
It is usually a tall straight forest tree that can reach heights of 80m or more, and girths in excess of 10m. It grows in higher and wetter habitats and often grows around other eucalypts such as E. regnans, E. delegatensis, E. viminalis or E. radiata.
Read more:
Mountain ash has a regal presence: the tallest flowering plant in the world
The specimens that Cook’s expedition encountered on Bruny Island were huge forest trees, and there are still such specimens growing on the island today. They are well worth a visit along easily accessible tracks. Such giant specimens can also be found on the mainland in places such as the Otway Ranges. However, you can also find examples of E. obliqua growing in the coastal heaths of Victoria that are no more than a metre high and will maintain their short stature regardless of where they are grown.
Pete The Poet/Flickr, CC BY-NC
A tough customer
One of the great things about messmate stringybark is its environmental resilience. The species is renowned for its adaptations to stress, particularly fire. Its thick stringy bark protects the trunk during bushfires, and under the bark are dormant (or “epicormic”) buds that allow the rapid establishment of a leafy canopy after fire or other stresses such as grazing. These buds often sprout very soon after a fire and are the first sign the forest is beginning to regenerate.
Many of these new shoots will not last very long, but usually enough will survive to reconstitute the tree’s canopy. If all the shoots fail, most specimens have a lignotuber (like a mallee root) that allows new stems and trunks to develop after very severe stress. So E. obliqua is truly a tough customer.
During the most recent ice age, Tasmania and the mainland were connected by a land bridge that subsequently disappeared under Bass Strait. The populations of E. obliqua in Victoria and Tasmania were then connected but in the 10,000 years since they have been separated by the strait, the individual trees growing on the mainland have retained a lignotuber, while those in Tasmania did not. This reflects the better growing conditions in Tasmania for messmate stringybark, and less need or stress adaptations.
Read more:
A fresh perspective on Tasmania, a terrible and beautiful place
Good wood
The timber of E. obliqua is highly prized. It was used by Indigenous communities, as scars on some surviving trees indicate, and its fibrous bark could be used for making fibre and in fires. Today, it is a fine quality hardwood that can be used for building house frames, furniture making or, of course, for wonderful Tassie oak wooden floors.
It is not the densest or hardest eucalypt timber, but is hard enough to make beautiful and durable flooring that polishes to a rich honey or golden colour. Properly installed and maintained, these floors can remain in good condition for well over a century and many Australians will have fond memories of dancing on them.
Read more:
Unravelling the mystery of eucalypt scribbles
Messmate stringybark is one of the great trees of Australia for a variety of reasons. It has links to Captain Cook, is an economically important timber species, and is a great survivor in the harsh Australian environment. With its wide distribution and adaptations to fire and other stresses, it is a species likely to cope well with climate change. After all, it is as tough as boots.
Gregory Moore, Doctor of Botany, University of Melbourne
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Kevin's Walk on the Wild Side 