Melbourne

The evening after all this busy day at Erasmus, we were again most kindly and elegantly entertained with our hosts at John and Philippa  Street's house.  This was a lovely event and so interesting to meet John and his camera which is in the photograph, and to see his exquisite photographs of particularly flowers where he catches the life in them somehow.  We were presented with a most lovely book which the Erasmus children had illustrated, a poem about the beauties of Australia, with each page illustrating the words.  This was/is a most moving account and certainly one of the things which has most struck us has been the art in Australia.  Partly this is because it is easy to follow the progress of ideas which were the backbone of settling the country through the art.  There is now a great interest in Aboriginal Art so that tends to feature strongly but in addition, there are realistic illustrative paintings from the earliest settlers, and romantic painters who added the noble savage into the landscape, and then the emerging new world, natives not in evidence, and then the emerging art of the culture which includes the ancient myth and method of aboriginal art.  As visitors, we are always gulping in the newness of places through the eyes, and it takes time for the images to settle and to produce a coherent vision of what makes a place what it is.  This has rather digressed from the evening but the evening was very much part of the picture which is building our memory of Australia.