never work with children or animals....

Whilst working in the creek last week I had a visitor....

Swamp Wallabies are a common sight down by my creek - Sams Creek acts as a valuable wildlife corridor, linking the Kooraban and Gulaga National Parks (and more!) to the Batemans Marine Park - and isolated populations of all creatures are able to mix and move with relative ease and safety. Generally Sams Creek is a reliable water source (not so during the worst drought recorded - 18 months ago my creek ran dry for the first time in European settlement - good rains in February this year meant my creek has returned - albeit in with a very different look - one I'm still learning)

but I digress

whilst I was moving to and from the house up the hill one swamp wallaby made its presence known...

and I thought its appearance and gift to me deserved a return gift...

In the spirit of my previous wombat interactions, I decided to gift the swamp wallaby an encyclopaedia opened to the entry on kangaroo (sub-section wallaby)

I think of this as a reverse of my wombat work (that time I was acting as the initiator of the interaction) in this case the wallaby 'spoke' first..... and quite definitively too I must say....


(sigh..... all the world's a critic...)


....

back to the creek

Recent rain has meant the creeks are flowing again in the area.... and one little stream here at the sams creek property only runs for a few days after very heavy rain (which means it can be years in between appearances). Last week was one of those rare times - so it was time to take an encyclopaedia out for a walk.....

or rather, for a dunk in the soon-to-be-gone-again stream....


(naturally the page is opened to the entry on the water cycle)

preliminary paddock work...

I'm posting these without much comment... they are my initial book/land interaction (shot a couple of months ago) - in this case working with part of the beef herd - at the height of the drought our young vealers (and their mothers) required hand feeding twice daily.... I wondered if taking a book to this action might come to something....







I won't be pursuing this further - not only am I unconvinced that this is the direction I want to follow - just days after taking these pics the heavens opened and we had a flood, followed 10 days later by a second (bigger) flood.... the troughs were filled with water, the surrounding area became a quagmire of mud and despite not having adequate green feed growing, hand feeding the animals became impossible.

book remnants...

Yesterday when out and about thinking and playing with books in the landscape I stumbled over remnants of an early book/land interaction.... and spying the piece was quite a surprise – it certainly has me caused me to consider specific aspects of my forthcoming work – but perhaps a retrack is in order.........

I've long pondered the differences between 'book' knowledge and 'lived' knowledge... (or tacit v/s explicit knowledge) and particularly (given my agrarian heritage) how this relates to life on the farm

In late 2008 I picked up a 'W' volume from my collection of old Encyclopaedia Brittanicas.... I strolled over the paddocks here on my farm at Sams Creek – and presented the volume to the entrance of a wombat burrow (opened to the entry on 'wombats' of course)

this silly, mostly off-hand action was captured in a digital still that I later gave the thoroughly intentionally pretentious title 'beneficium eruditio' (gift of knowledge)

I wondered what a wombat may make of book knowledge about wombats.... I didn't have to wait long to find out....

'restitutio beneficium' (return of the gift)

but I had given such little thought to the artistic merits or possibilities of the initial action as an ongoing interaction that I only recorded the 'results' on my tiny digi camera (not the 'big' digi SLR)..... it was only many weeks later that I realised that my action/interaction and the digital record may indeed be something of enduring interest....... so from the initial interaction sprung alternate book/land action/interactions.......

that brings us up to current times with me and my books out in the paddock... again

and that's when I stumbled over this.....

the remnants of that 'W' encyclopaedia... about 25m from its initial point – it had been out in the weather for over 18 months, had been moved (twice) by flood waters (that had washed rocks and stones and branches over the same territory) but there it was.... looking like a little iceberg washed up on the rocks..... (despite the very different material and scale, I immediately thought of David Nash's 'Boulder” work.... )

There's something in this enduring fragile/strong remnant – and it's a something that I'd like to pursue further.....