The past, again.

Because my trip to the USA was a diversion on my way to Mexico, I think I was quite focused on the Hispanic heritage of Texas. San Antonio in particular displays its Mexican associations in many ways – street names, Tex/Mex food, lots of Spanish spoken in the streets, mariachi music – all remind you that Texas was part of Mexico until the mid nineteenth century. I was particularly interested to visit the Spanish missions that had been established along the San Antonio river in the first half of the eighteenth century.

The missions were established by the Franciscan order to christianise native Americans. They were the northern reaches of Catholic New Spain (Mexico) and in these sparsely populated regions each mission had only a couple of hundred inhabitants at any one time. The friars encouraged the inhabitants, who were mainly hunter-gatherers, to develop farming skills and settle within and around the missions.

The first of the missions, San Antonio de Valera, was established in 1718. It’s now much better known as the Alamo, and that’s a whole other story.




Just as the Australian defeat at Gallipoli is popularly portrayed as a ‘coming of age as a nation story’, so too is the 1836 defeat of Texan troops and volunteers at the Alamo by a far superior Mexican army led by infamous General Santa Anna seen as ‘a place where men made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom’ (to quote the official guide pamphlet). The site is maintained by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas who, under Texas law, must preserve the site ‘as a sacred memorial to the heroes who immolated themselves upon the hallowed ground’. With a cast of characters such as famed frontiersman David Crockett and renowned knife fighter Jim Bowie at the siege of the Alamo, the Franciscans and native Americans who inhabited the site more than a hundred years earlier become merely a footnote in history.

The other four San Antonio missions had a less notable later history. The next mission after San Antonio de Valera and the best known, was San Jose, established in 1720, where the large chapel and cloisters, and remainders of ‘native ‘ houses within a well-fortified compound are evidence of a successful community.




The missions of Concepcion,




San Juan




and Espada (my favourite)




were transferred in 1731 from East Texas, end each set up communities specializing in various forms of farming and brick-making.

Over time the effects of European diseases, intermarriage and acculturation rendered the missions too difficult and unproductive for the Catholic church to maintain across the distance from Mexico City and by 1824 their lands were redistributed among the inhabitants and the churches given over to the secular clergy.

It seems to me that one of the USA’s strengths is the diversity of its history. Long before the western frontier was ‘settled’ as part of the modern USA, the influence of Mexico was strong and widespread. It’s been interesting to have a small glimpse of this influence.

A couple of days later I visited a museum of history of a much later period - The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. The Museum is located on the sixth floor of the (then) Book Depository from which the shots were fired that killed President John F Kennedy in November 1963. At least, that's the official version of what happened, and the version to which most people now subscribe.



The shots were fired from the window on the right-hand end of the sixth floor. Within the museum the boxes of books behind which Lee Harvey Oswald is believed to have hidden and upon which he rested the gun have been recreated as they were discovered after the killing. The museum is wonderful. Everybody is issued with earphones and you progress around screens of photographs and images, while listening to voices and commentary of the time. Somehow it manages to be both very informative and very moving at the same time. I confess that there were several times that I, like others of the many visitors to the Museum, was very teary. You can see the view of Elm Street, that the shooter had from the corner window:



The final shot that killed President Kennedy struck just beyond where the three people are standing at the right of the photograph above. After I left the Museum I walked down Elm Street to view the 'grassy knoll' so beloved of conspiracy theorists who believe there was more than one assassin involved in Kennedy's killing.



I'm old enough to remember President Kennedy's assassination and its shock to the world. This Museum is a very well-researched and balanced recounting of the event. It takes great trouble to remind or inform visitors of the events and attitudes of the early sixties and the complexity of the politics of Kennedy's era. I found it absorbing.

As a footnote, President Obama visited Dallas the same day I arrived. It was a much less public event than Kennedy's 1963 visit, but I imagine the fear of presidential assassination must now be even greater than ever.

Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer...*

I didn't have my 'ham and eggs in Carolina' as the old song continues, but I did have my breakfast pancakes in Arizona and my dinner salmon and veg in Texas. When I told people I was intending to take the train from Los Angeles to Dallas I received mostly surprised and incredulous responses - particularly from Americans. I subsequently discovered there are two types of people - those who use the trains and universally think they are wonderful, and those who have never travelled by train and are horrified by the idea.

After my trip I'm definitely in the 'think they are wonderful' category. The trains are comfortable, clean, cheap, and you can watch the vastness that's the USA unroll past your window. They provide wonderful service from staff you imagine have been working for Amtrak for decades. I guess the downside is that the trains are a very leisurely form of transportation, but as long as you're not in a hurry that can be an advantage.

Late one evening I left on the Texas Eagle from the rather grand Los Angeles Union Station - built in 1939 in vaguely Mission revival style.



I slept comfortably in my roomette, where every square inch of space had been designed to serve some useful purpose, and woke the next morning in Arizona.



During the day we moved through Arizona to New Mexico to the huge state of Texas. We passed through a few larger towns and cities such as Tucson, but mainly the landscape was of the vast plains, often with distant rocky outcrops, and occasional small rural settlements. We saw lots of poverty and tough lives in the trailer settlements and restaurants that have grown up around the railway in these smaller towns




and there was occasional evidence of farming, which must be so marginally viable in this kind of landscape, particularly in the present drought conditions.



Towards the end of the day we reached the large border town of El Paso where mounted guards could be seen patrolling the Mexican border that runs close to railway line at this point. We stopped at El Paso for a smoking break. I'm sure there were other reasons for the stop, but the train attendants made regular announcements about when the next opportunity for smoking would occur.



I had another night in my roomette, and very early on the second day arrived in San Antonio. I just wish the trip could have been longer, or that we could have had two days and a night so that I could have seen more of the landscape. A couple of days later I took another train north from San Antonio to Dallas - this time in 'Coach class', as it was a day trip. There had been much-needed rain the night before in the area through which I travelled, which must have come at just the right time for those who had ploughed their land:



Just before leaving on this trip I read Don Watson's wonderful 'American Journeys' in which he recounts his travels by train and car around the US hinterland in the mid 2000s. He'd prepared me for long delays on Amtrak services (which didn't happen) and lots of conversations on sometimes predictable, but often bizarre topics with fellow travellers (which did happen). Most of the conversations happened around the communal tables in the dining car - where proper meals of adequate but uninspiring quality are served by bossy but very amiable waiters - though Americans are so friendly that you end up having chats anywhere - in waiting rooms, during the 'smoke breaks' and in the coach car on my way to Dallas. I spoke with a retired couple who always spent their holidays travelling around the country with Amtrak - they'd been almost everywhere in the USA that's accessible by train, but still were surprised to find that Australia's seasons are the opposite of those in the USA. I had a long conversation with a kind and helpful man who was convinced Obama is a communist and bringing the USA to ruin. I met a rancher (dressed in beautifully ironed jeans, striped shirt, jacket, cowboy boots and cowboy hat) who said it was no longer profitable to run cattle on his Texas ranch and that a significant source of his income was renting his property to film-makers. He told me parts of 'No Country for Old Men' and "There Will be Blood' were shot on his ranch. I had a conversation with a woman who was taking her elderly demented mother to live with her. She was admirably kind and patient with her mother and told me she had recently bought a gun to protect herself in case of home invasion. I met an ethnomusicologist who studied the traditional musical forms of the San Antonio region, a woman who managed a charitable foundation to enhance adult literacy who thought the anti-Obama rhetoric was racist and wanted to know why Julia Gillard had disappeared from the Australian political scene, and a young Texan man who told me that his generation was the last for whom the work of a cowboy was viable.

I think I'll have to plan another cross-American train trip.

* Chattanooga Choo Choo Unfortunately, Amtrak no longer travels to Chattanooga. What a pity!

Moments of good fortune

Sometimes when you're travelling you have moments when you just stop and marvel at your good fortune. I had one of those moments earlier today in Dallas, Texas when I visited the Nasher Sculpture Centre. The Nasher had been mentioned by various travel guides, but had also been recommended by some locals when I asked what I should visit in Dallas. But I hadn't envisioned that it would be probably the best collection of twentieth and twenty-first century sculpture anywhere in the world. The Centre is housed in an elegantly simple Renzo Piano building whose galleries open to a most pleasingly designed sculpture garden. I wasn't able to take photographs inside the galleries which brought one pleasure after another - Miro, Noguchi, Matisse, Picasso, not in ones and twos, but multiple pieces. Most exquisite of all were the Giacometti works, particularly a series of busts of the artist's brother.

Today in Dallas was crisply cool and clear - perfect for the sculpture garden.



That's a Barbara Hepworth sculpture in the foreground and a Henry Moore work from 1968 in the left backgound. [There's a story about Henry Moore that I love and may well have told previously on my blog - I have a limited number of stories and I expect I tell and retell them! When my friend Marea Gazzard, whom I wrote about in my last post, was developing a work for the then-new Parliament House, she wrote to Henry Moore to ask about the patina he had used for a piece that's now outside the Art Gallery of NSW. Moore wrote back in the kindest terms and gave the recipe for the patina. I think such generosity becomes a great artist.] There are many wonderful works in the garden, but one that I particularly like is Magdalena Abakanowicz's 'Bronze Crowd' from 1990:



The artist has written of her work 'A crowd is the most cruel because it begins to act like a brainless organism'. I also liked Antony Gormley's 2000 sculpture, 'Quantum Cloud XX (tornado)':



There's actually a human-shaped figure at the centre of the delicate welded steel bars - Gormley says most of his work explores the fine balance between people and their environment. You can see the glowing golden stone of the gallery's built structure surrounding this work.

I've has other moments of wonder earlier in my brief trip to the USA - at the landscape, its history, and its people. But I've started this post with the delight of artworks I've seen (and heard) so I'll continue. In Los Angeles I wanted to see the Walt Disney Concert Hall which was designed by Frank Gehry and is just celebrating its tenth birthday. It's one of those buildings that fills you with joy - all sparkling, intersecting shapes, at one point all angles, and at another soft, rounded folds.




I'd planned to go on a tour of the building, but was fortunate enough to have my brief visit coincide with a concert in which eminent violinist Itzhak Perlman was playing two of the Vivaldi 'Four Seasons' pieces and then conducting the LA Philharmonic in a grand symphony by Berlioz. The Berlioz required eight double basses, six percussionists, four harpists, ranks of trumpeters, trombones and French horns and innumerable other instrumentalists. It was a huge sound that filled the grand hall and thrilled me.



Thanks to the practice of a number of wealthy Americans of making bequests and adding to the collections of public galleries, LA is the possessor of a number of wonderful art galleries. I visited my favourite, the eclectic but astounding Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)



which you can't miss if you take the 720 bus along Wilshire Boulevard (a most interesting travel experience in its own right - almost deserving of its own post) because of the serried ranks of old LA lampposts that are ranged outside its front facade



I was delighted to find a corner of the modern section of the galleries that had a luminous Rothko painting flanked by some small Jackson Pollock works.



As I had found this pleasurable, imagine how gob-smacked I was when the following day I visited the lesser-known Museum of Contemporary Art and found myself in a room surrounded by no fewer than eight expansive Rothko paintings:



Finally, what's the best way you've ever travelled to visit an art museum? I know what mine is. In San Antonio I took the river taxi to visit the San Antonio Art Museum. It's not really a taxi but a passenger barge that travels along the San Antonio river, which is now edged by a wonderful Riverwalk. The barge chugs along gently, picking up and setting down passengers at destinations along the river, and even occasionally stopping to exchange passengers with a barge travelling in the opposite direction. If you're not in a hurry it's the perfect way to travel.



By the time I'd finished my visit to the gallery (whose best collections are of ancient Latin American art and artifacts) it was early dusk, and the 45 minute return river journey was magical. By the time I'd reached my hotel the cafes that line the Riverwalk were filled with people and mariachi music from roving bands ebbed and flowed as we passed restaurants.



Another of those moments of wonder at my good fortune.

A timeless appeal

My good friend and neighbour Marea Gazzard died yesterday. She approached the end of her life with the same dignity with which she'd lived it - as she had wished to do. Marea was a ceramicist and sculptor of international renown, who had also played an active and most productive role in closely linking art and craft in Australia. I loved chatting with Marea. As well as hearing her talk about art and aesthetics more generally, I loved her stories of travel, and of Sydney in the 50s and 60s when she seemed to know all the people who went on to build the cultural life of our city.

Today I watched the brief interview with Marea that was done for the ABC in 2010. She's surrounded by her work in her living room, that was also her studio and gallery. I was very moved when, towards the end of the interview she speaks of her wish that some of her work might have a timeless appeal - that it will be appreciated into the future.

It's fitting that the Art Gallery of NSW recently acquired one of her works - Selini 1 - and that it has featured in the main entrance hall over the last few weeks. A most appropriate way to acknowledge her work.



Like so many of Marea's many friends, I will miss her presence in my life.

(minor) knitting troubles

I seem to have another troublesome knitting project on my hands. This time it's not the knitting itself, as the project could hardly be simpler. I'm knitting Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne's Moderne Baby Blanket, which is all neat-edged garter stitch. Easy-peasy. But so far the blanket has been surrounded by (admittedly minor) difficulties.



So far I've knitted nothing for my grandson Joshua, who's now two and a bit. He lives in the Philippines where it's just too hot for knitted garments of any kind - even those from cotton. But I've really wanted to knit for him, and for knitters, knitting is an expression of love and attachment, so I've finally decided to knit him a cotton blanket. It can be used for him to lie on, or to cover him if he sleeps in air-conditioning. Or it might not be used at all, but I will have had the satisfaction of expressing my knitterly affection.

In a moment of madness I decided I could complete this project in the two weeks leading up to my most recent visit to the Philippines. Perhaps fortunately, fate and Australia Post conspired to make this impossible. I'd ordered 8ply cotton from Bendigo Woollen Mills and it just didn't arrive. And didn't arrive. [Bendigo cotton, by the way, is perfect for a project such as this. Reliable quality, washes well, relatively inexpensive. It would be good if it came in some more exciting colours, but maybe that's a trade-off for its reliability]. I checked that Bendigo has sent my yarn promptly, but then had no way of finding out what had happened to it once it was in the hands of Australia Post. Frustration. Eventually, as I checked my mailbox on the way to catch my plane to the Philippines I found a final notice to collect the parcel from the post office. This is not the first time I've received a final notice without ever having received an earlier notice. Double frustration. Fortunately I was able to phone the post office and arrange for them to hold the parcel till my return. I couldn't bear the thought of the parcel being returned to Bendigo and then having to be resent.



Now the only problem is how to complete the blanket and send it to Joshua. The Philippines postal service is even less reliable than Australia Post. Things not only get lost - they are never found. If I finish it by Christmas time I can send it with a friend who is travelling to the Philippines. Normally, this would be an easily feasible schedule, but I will be travelling in the US and Mexico for five of those weeks, and a cotton blanket is not a sensible knitting project when doing lots of plane, train and bus travel. So, I'm hurriedly making a start on the project, and hoping to complete the acres of garter stitch between my return home in early December and Christmas time. I'm telling myself that I always work best when I have a deadline. Let's hope my slightly arthritic hands get the message.

Rather gratuitously - here's a pic of the intended recipient. I can't imagine he'll appreciate the blanket, but his parents and I know it will come with lots of love.

Depicting the world around

I really enjoy reading the newspapers when I'm in the Philippines. Not only do they make life in Australia, where news can be made from politicians misusing hundreds of dollars of public funds (only hundreds of dollars) seem (thankfully) very dull and uneventful, but they present a range and diversity of opinion pieces that I find entertainingly unpredictable. There's lots of religion and pious advice, there's cultural and artistic comment, and often expert political, historical or sociological analysis. A few days ago I read a thought-provoking piece in the Philippine Inquirer by Maria Ceres P Doyo titled 'Poverty Porn' in which she explored the way that graphic images of poverty are used. She sees 'poverty porn' as

the use and display of stark images of persons in extreme poverty that border on the exploitative and intrusive, in order to generate sympathy and donations, to increase newspaper circulation and TV ratings, or even to gain fame.

In her view, even noble ends do not justify exploitation.

A day or so after reading this article I saw a small exhibition of photographs by an English photographer, Justin James Wright. He'd spent many months photographing the inhabitants of Isla Pulo, a precarious water's edge squatter community on the northern side of Manila Bay. The photographs were arresting - mostly black and white, with every detail of both the back- and foreground perfectly clear. Though the people depicted were very poor, the photographs didn't seem exploitative. I wondered why... Clearly the photographer knew well the people he'd photographed, and they trusted him. But that's not enough. I think the answer is that all the subjects were captured in dignified situations where they were active participants; working, studying, playing, just getting on with life in ways they and the photographer valued. I liked the work so much I bought one of the photos:



Many of the most striking photographs were of children, but I was taken by this photograph of Loretta, a woman in her seventies who still works at recycling discarded items to survive.

The matter of how to depict the world around you came up again in a different way. While I was in Manila we decided to visit Corregidor Island - a rocky island within the entrance to Manila Bay that has been used to fortify and protect the Bay for many centuries. Over time it had been inhabited by the Dutch, the British and the Spanish as colonial dominance of southeast Asia and the Pacific ebbed and flowed.



At the end of the nineteenth century the island, along with the rest of the Philippines, was ceded by the Spanish to the USA after the Spanish-American war, and across the first half of the twentieth century Corregidor became a significant military base for the US colonial victors. There are reminders of the American presence in the extensive ruins of barracks, guns and mortars across the island.



Corregidor is best known as the last heroic stand of the American and Filipino troops against the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in the early stages of the Pacific phase of the second world war. In 1941 the Japanese invaded the Philippines from the north, until the allied troops retreated to Corregidor. Even after the formal surrender of the mainland trooops to the Japanese, and the infamous Bataan death march, the troops on Corregidor continued their resistance until in May 1942 General Wainwright surrendered to the Japanese forces. For the last phase of resistance, around 7000 troops sheltered from constant Japanese bombardment in the Malinta tunnel - a main tunnel about 200 metres long with lateral tunnels forming barracks and hospitals.




We took a tour of the island on a 'tramvia' - an attempt to recreate the trams that once joined the various sites of the island - and went to the sound and light show that described the experiences of the Malinta tunnel. Our visit raised the usual questions of how best to represent the past to those of us inhabiting different times and different cultures. Coming from Australia I have no difficulty in accepting that we need to memorialise defeats as well as victories, and, in this case, Corregidor is also a site of victory as there was a battle in 1945 in which the island was re-taken from the Japanese. Inevitably, history needs to be simplified for casual tourists, and in a country where many of the inhabitants, including some of the still most powerful families, either were forced or chose to cooperate with the invading Japanese forces, 'history' can be a divisive force and is best dealt with delicately. One of my greatest regrets is that a visit to the island isn't possible for more people, as the 90 minute boat trip to and from the island and cost of the tour is prohibitively expensive for most Filipinos.

War history isn't my thing at all, but I'm always fascinated by people's stories in challenging circumstances. How did General Wainwright cope emotionally with surrender after resisting so valiantly and fruitlessly? What were the stories of the female nurses who chose to stay on the island through the worst of the bombardment and nurse the injured? How did the US and Filipino troops relate to one another when forced into close proximity? What risks were taken by residents of Bataan in smuggling supplies to the island?

Inevitably, there were lots of stories we weren't able to hear.

Happenstance

Somehow, a pleasure that occurs through happenstance is doubly pleasurable. I'm in Manila, Philippines, for a brief family visit. Yesterday we filled in an afternoon by visiting the Pinto Art Gallery in Antipolo, an old area of Spanish settlement in the hills that surround Manila. The Gallery - and even more so the Silangan Gardens that surround it - were a delightful surprise. The complex of Mexican style buildings and galleries descends the hillside, with winding paths, shady trees, ponds and fountains, half-hidden sculptures, rustic benches, and arrangements of tables and chairs for lingering and chatting.



We wandered through the gardens and galleries - my small grandson particularly delighted by the steps and open spaces. The spacious, inter-linked galleries are hung with Filipino art from the early 1990s to the present.



There's a strong focus on figurative paintings and sculptures, and many of the large earlier works are reminiscent of Mexican painters such as Diego Rivera. The later collections are more diverse, and some of the works are more to my taste. As often happens, I was attracted to works with references to domesticity and textiles, such as 'Elisa and Laura's pink dresses' - a 2010 work on canvas by artist Marina Cruz that combined laser printed images of children's dresses with overlaid areas of hand embroidery:



The galleries and garden are the creation of neurologist and art patron Dr Joven Cuanang - and there's the first happenstance. Several years ago Dr Cuanang treated my son for a serious spinal condition, and, fortuitously, he was in the gallery yesterday for the opening of a new exhibition. I'm not really sure that he remembered Michael, but if not he gave a most gracious impression of doing so. My favourite part of our conversation was Dr Cuanang's response to my heart-felt compliments on his garden. When he told me it was all his own work I must have looked very astonished as he hastened to elaborate that he had given all the instructions to the workers. Inadvertently, we had gate-crashed the exhibition opening, though I'm not sure if it can still be considered gate-crashing if you converse with the host of the occasion. There were glasses of bubbly, and politicians, telenovela stars, and a sprinkling of ambassadors in attendance. I even got to chat with the Australian ambassador, and there were lots of opportunities to brush with local fame. Happenstance that we chose to visit just at the time of the exhibition opening.

We didn't feel sufficiently at home to stay for the food that followed the opening and so we took our merienda at the garden coffee shop. The food took ages to arrive, but I think the delay was forgivable when we discovered that the yema pastries that accompanied our salted caramel ice-cream were literally freshly baked. [Yema, by the way, are filipino sweets made (nowadays) of condensed milk and egg yolks. Our pastries had a most refined version of yema as the filling between the delicate pastry layers].



After many of the more famous guests had drifted away we went to view the works of Daniel de la Cruz, whose exhibition was the occasion for the gathering. Many of the works were quite delicate feminine figures, often in precarious positions, but still in graceful control.



A fun afternoon. Wonderful gardens and well-displayed art, lots of space for my two-year old grand-son to run around, and opportunities for celebrity-spotting for the locals.