Making Friends With The Neighbours

Oh! So THAT'S where surfboards come from? (I stole this photo from my friend, Isabelle Braly - nose-rider extraordinaire!)

Hey! You should go to this exhibition - Wax On . It opens on 5th December and it's going to be amazing!! Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre is proud to present Wax On: From Cronulla to Palm Beach and Beyond, an exhibition that showcases artworks about surfing and its significance within contemporary Australian visual culture. For an example of some of the works that will be exhibited, you can check out the Wax On blog .

For the past few months, I've been staying in the bedroom that was mine as a child. My family has lived in this house, which they built, since I was 4 and sometimes it feels like it is my entire world. This is the room I first shared with my sister. This is the room where we used to play. This is the room that I vacated as a young woman leaving home. This is the room I come back to. Always. Of an evening, I look up and out of the windows above my bed. I can see the stars clear and unobscured by the small-town lights. The number of stars and the size of the night sky, never fail to dazzle me. When I'm in the city, I miss the stars and I have learnt to pay them due attention when I'm home. The view out of the the window is through fly screen and a security grill, which my mum had installed years ago to protect her three daughters from the evils of the world. It meant that we were allowed to keep our windows open through the sticky, humid summer months and it also meant that w...

And a tile too!! How lucky am I today! Thanks mum. I love you. (and Gerry again too!)

Oh my!! Look what I got given today! Tea time! Art that you can use is the best kind of all. It's my favourite new thing! Thanks Kate, Carl and Miss Leelu . And thanks Gerry !

This is a view from the walk around the headland where I live. It's a really special walk and ridiculously pretty. When I take the time to walk this track, my day is always, always better. One day I'll tell you more about it.

Drying off in the sun.

Last night, as I tied the boards on my car, I looked up.

Yesterday I went surfing with my friend, April. She just won a new board in a comp raffle and was excited to try it out. She rang to invite me to come along with her, so we met up in the carpark of a busy local break and I sat and chatted with her as she waxed it up and put in the fins. There was a guy a few cars down from us in a van. I just asked that chick over there out, but she's got a boyfriend. He pointed at a bikini-clad woman over by a car on the other side of the carpark, while staring at us and waiting for us to respond. Oh, right. Um, well, at least you asked. Good for you. I had no idea who this guy was. Nor why he was talking to us. I looked at April. Yeah, you didn't have anything to lose! We went back to our own conversation. But he wasn't done. Would've been better to wake up tomorrow morning with her in my bed but. Oh, OK. Ha ha. It was weird. It's weird having a conversation with a stranger about him trying to pick up girls, while I'm just in ...

Ok, so as you already know I really, really like the work of Gerry Wedd . What I like about it is the texture, the lines, the colours and the ceramic forms, which always make me think of the shards of eroded and smoothed terracotta I have found on the beach over the years. There is something poetic about the way he works with pottery to tell stories and say things about oceanic experiences that makes sense. One of his latest offerings particularly resonates with me, and I appreciate the thought and observations he presents in the images and structures. Wedd offers images and stories in places and contexts where they haven't yet been presented, and this seems to be especially sensual in the form he gives them in this case - as an urn . As Wedd points out in the attendant blog post (click pictures to go there!), images of women surfing in Australia from the 50s to the 90s are minimal, and this is something I have thought about a lot too. So where were the ladies then? Even if they we...

The beach and the ocean are often the setting for Australian stories of teenage romance, reflection and sexuality. And understandably so! For many young Australians the coast is a place that is a central part of our world, our lives, our friendships, and can't really be separated from the ways we have grown up. My own teenage world was defined by the beach - I would walk home from school along its length, I would meet girlfriends for weekend sun-tanning sessions, I would retreat there when I was sad or confused, I would take afternoon walks to the headland with my mum, I would avoid the town beaches patrolled by the clubbies and their binoculars, I would go there for parties at night to play and explore and make mistakes (and jump in the salt water the next morning to clear my head of the hangover). I mapped my life by the sections along which my friends and I all lived - my beach, Kelly's beach, Lyn's beach, Joel's beach, the caravan park, Ren's beach, the creek, J...

As someone who enjoys words of the written variety, I take an interest in issues of grammar. Some might argue that I don't take quite enough of an interest much of the time and, to be fair, most of my working knowledge has come from a kind of osmosis through reading. While I can find fault in the punctuation of others, sometimes this radar is a little under-used on my own work. But I try. Years ago when I was visiting a friend in the UK, she gave me a book that we both found tremendously informative AND hilarious (my favourite kind of book). It's called Punctuation by Graham King and it is genius! For example, the main chapter on punctuation is called Devices for Separating and Joining and the sections within have names like Scree-e-e- eech ! The Full Stop and The Common, but Contrary, Comma and The Serviceable Semicolon and The Seductive Embrace of Parenthesis (Brackets). Aren't they great names! Anyway, I have been spending a nice half hour reading a little bit o...