A Letter from Cedra

As a means of bringing other voices into the fold, the following is an account from Cedra about her Australian experience so far:

After our brief stay in Sydney, we headed to the Kioloa Research Station, a large sloping stretch of property (donated to Australian National University many years ago) which connects rolling eucalyupt forests to the shore. Living in New Mexico, my experience with the sea is limited and infrequent, so it has been an otherwordly experience to be able to roll out of bed and pad a quarter mile down to the shore to watch the sun come up over the massive swells. The birds in this area of the country are outrageous. I don't know if I've ever heard so many different cries or seen such a variety of colored plumage. The tiny bell birds send their beeping voices bouncing off of the water like sonar emitters, and the sulfur-crested cockatoos scream and swoop like pterodactyls.

Our lodging at Kioloa was primo. The research station had a series of small houses, and I was given my own room (sometimes it pays to be the only girl in a group of six travelers) in a beautiful little cottage with an old-fashioned kitchen. When the weather was favorable, I spent some time by the sea, painting, and the rest of the time exploring the nearby woods (always carefully guarded against ticks, which were microscopic and ubiquitous); the days that it rained I curled up to work in front of the wood-burning stove with a china cup full of cowboy coffee.

The recurring theme of the trip seems to be how bizarre, almost dreamlike, it is that everything is so familiar, but off just by a tic. A slightly different name or inflection, a slightly different color or flavor, the leaves a slightly different orientation. The language is the same, but hard to understand at times. And I've started to see the ghostly silhouettes of deer floating around the bodies of kangaroos, as they mirror the herd behavior and tentative approach of the animals I'm more familiar with. There is a bird that has a long, moaning, sighing call, as though resigning itself to something but wanting to make sure you know it's not happy about it. It makes me laugh every time I hear it--and when I'm alone I can't help but try to imitate it back. Surrounded as we were by a seemingly endless and exotic avian parade, I wasn't sure our host John would understand which call I meant when I tried to describe it--and was absolutely sure he'd misunderstood when he replied that that was a crow. A crow? No. Of all the birds in the world, perhaps the one bird I am familiar with is the crow. I tried imitating it again for him as we walked down to the beach. He confirmed: crow; and was puzzled by my inability to accept this identification. Eventually, I heard one flying overhead and looked up; and yes, there it was, the same body, color, flight path I knew, but that funny, melodramatic, drawn-out moan.

After four nights, we left Kioloa reluctantly--it's funny how quickly it became home!--and turned our sights and van toward Jigamy Farm, a semi-remote campground situated on an estuary near the town of Eden. Another beautiful place, though less sublimely dramatic. The highlight there was meeting our field studies counterparts from ANU, a trio of enthusiastic, friendly girls who help to organize the trips for their program. We were in tents, at Jigamy, and it rained, without fail, almost every hour of every day. Things got soggy and close and cold over the course of the week--we clustered around huge smoky fires and cooked group meals in the dark under a tarp--and while everyone in the group was too good-natured to get irritable, it was a huge relief and a chance to be more productive when we were offered the chance to stay at a historic whaling station owned by the National Park Service. The station was a drafty, rambling old wooden cabin dating from the 1880s. Sometime in the last fifty years it had gotten some limited electrical wiring, which could be brought humming to life for a couple of hours at a time by starting up a generator in a nearby shed; and there was a tap connected to the cisterns full of rainwater that got channeled off the roofs of the buildings, and a drop toilet just a few seconds' walk down the hill; and there was a wooden couch and a gas fireplace. In other words, it was complete luxury compared to our previous days' conditions! More importantly, though, it was beautiful and creepy and strange, and a great place to photograph and wallow in the history of. There were black and white photos of the families that have inhabited the place over the years, and of slaughtered whales; and there were wild profusions of rambling gardens, and frogs that sang exuberantly all night, their voices bubbling up through the cracks in the floorboards; and there was a long series of steps that led down to a little sheltered stretch of beach, where everyone was drawn to do performative actions and documentation.

It was another place that was very hard to leave--but since we packed up there two days ago we have arrived in the capital city of Canberra, where we've been put up in little flats that are nestled into the actual academic buildings of the art school--the mattress-loft in which I've taken up residence overlooks the ceramics courtyard, where students throw and carve and fire from dawn til dusk--very inspiring and energizing to be around.