The winter we had to have (and could have hoped for) finally arrived on the Southern Tablelands. We have gone back to going to the Farmers Market every week. To add to the winter sun good news arrived. For over ten years we worked to have Canberra listed as a UNESCO Creative City of Design, part of a global network of creative cities. Finally the ACT Government announced that it intended to take the bid forward – and that it had allocated funding for it, the true sign of a government being serious. It’s always a pleasure to help initiate a worthwhile endeavour, but even more of a pleasure to look back ten years later and see that it has been a roaring success in more ways than one.
‘Winter is icumen in’In the words of Old English, ‘winter is icumen in’. The winter we had to have (and could have hoped for) has finally arrived here on the Southern Tablelands. One morning recently, as I walked down to buy coffee from our local next to the statue of La Perouse, I thought I should have worn my woollen beanie.
Then I realised that the jacket I was wearing was warm but it didn’t have a hood. Then I uttered a sigh of gratitude because the Merino top I was wearing under my puffer jacket did have a hood. I had never used the hood before – and, in fact, when I bought the top, I had cursed the fact that everything nowadays seems to have a hood.
Local markets have supplied their communities for hundreds of years, especially in places like France. But there doesn’t seem to have been a similar strong local tradition in Australia. Fortunately at some stage in more recent years, a few brave souls established local markets in towns and suburbs across the country and since then they have gone from strength to strength.
If this was the sole useful contribution you made to the world, surely your place in heaven would be assured – if there was a heaven, that is. If not, your place in popular memory would suffice.
Here in Canberra, the equivalent is the Capital Region Farmers Market. Lately we have gone back to going to the market every week. It used to be ten minutes drive away, then when we moved, it became 20-25 minutes. In the scheme of things it’s not far – this is not Sydney after all. On Saturday morning the Farmers Market was such a pleasure and the produce was so good. It set us up for a week of cooking at home.
Last week I bought eggplants because I like eggplants and I wanted to cook them – even though lately they have tended to be overlooked in the fridge and spoil. I made two vegetarian dishes with them – eggplant with tomato and pasta and eggplant with lentils and barley, tomatoes, zucchini and silverbeet. It made me very happy.
In winter Canberra is chilly and icy in the morning – because the overnight sky is clear and there is no cloud cover. The pay off is that the days are beyond blue and sunny and brilliantly light. I like living in a climate with a few extremes.
Creating a UNESCO Creative City of Design
After I exited from the Commonwealth public service over 11 years ago, I found myself recruited onto the board of Craft ACT. There I helped establish DESIGN Canberra, a festival initially annual and now every two years, as a result of growing so much. It has been running now for 11 years. I used my experience in government as a program manager to help secure the funds for the first few years – and it’s just rolled from there.
As part of that work we wanted to have Canberra listed as a UNESCO Creative City of Design, part of a global network of creative cities. For example, Lyon is a City of Gastronomy – of course. This would open up enormous potential for connection with a hugely disparate list of countries – in fact looking at the latest list for the first time in several years I was prompted to ask which city is not a UNESCO Creative City.
We’d been dreaming the dream and pushing this for ten years, with an enormous number of people contributing. There were plenty of times I thought the idea was going nowhere. Finally in the budget this year the ACT Government announced that it intended to take the bid forward – and that it had allocated funding for it, the true sign of a government being serious. It’s always a pleasure to help initiate a worthwhile endeavour, but even more of a pleasure to look back ten years later and see that it has been a roaring success in more ways than one.
Walking with ghosts
‘Increasingly people I have known for a long time seem to be dying. In fact my generation is steadily starting to disappear. Who is replacing them? We shuffle along in a world that is unravelling, a world – that for both good and bad – our generation gave birth to. We are teetering in a strange balance between building on the achievements of the past and desperately trying to dismantle them. In many countries, the current generation is poorer than the previous one, upending generations of dreams by working class parents and migrants for a better life for their children. In this time of upheaval – both welcome and unwelcome – creativity is needed like never before’, Walking with ghosts.
I'm on the road again – well, on the rails again. On Monday I caught the slow train from Canberra to Sydney, and today I’ve woken up to a third morning in Surry Hills. I’m enjoying the days in Sydney – after all, I did live here for twelve and a half years. I’m mainly here to see the Yolngu Power exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, which finishes next week, but I’m also using the trip to see to other business’, On the rails again – a trip about the past and the future.
‘I see the latest report on looming climate change has some pretty dire predictions – like a future of four times the length of heatwaves, up to five times as many deaths due to extreme heat, a massive drag on productivity, 1.5 million Australians at risk of coastal flooding and a potential half trillion dollar hit to property values by 20250 – and that’s just the good news’, Looking down on dire predictions’, Looking down on dire predictions.
Essen, trinken, tanzen – aber nicht rauchen
‘From time to time my posts on ‘travelling light’ include references to restaurants we have eaten at or enjoyable places we have stayed. However, most of my regular writing about food, produce, restaurants and places we have stayed is on one of my blogs, tableland, which I describe as: ‘Food and cooking land to table – the daily routine of living in the high country, on the edge of the vast Pacific, just up from Sydney, just down from Mount Kosciuszko’, Essen, trinken, tanzen – aber nicht rauchen.
‘In winter my mind turns to food, but since it is never turned away from art, cooking and looking manage to fill in the cooler months – or maybe that’s all months. I haven’t made hand-made pasta for a while but I have made sushi and sashimi – though only once in recent memory – as I resurrect all my food traditions. Cooking, eating and cruising around art exhibitions – that’s winter for me’, Cooking minestrone in an art gallery - pineapple fruit cake, hot soup and art on a cold day
‘Where I live a statue of French maritime hero, La Pérouse, looks out over the suburb as though to say: this, too, could have been France. For a period it seemed everyone who went to school in Australia studied French. Perhaps it was a belated attempt to acknowledge how much better everything would have been if the French had got here first. As I like to say whenever I’m in France, ‘j’ai étudié le Français pendant six ans à l’école’ and I would like to have had more opportunity to use that knowledge', Speaking in tongues.