Golden Orbs and Jade Flowers

Remember the afternoon I spent watching the golden orb spider catch and devour a butterfly? Well I finally got my act together to post the photos I took of that gruesome event.

In the past three days all the golden orb spiders I've seen, and some that I've heard about from other people seem to be letting their nests fall apart. And this morning the big spider that was hanging over the barramundi fish pond off the dining deck here at the Rainforest Hideaway had disappeared, presumably fallen to her death and the barramundi's breakfast. conversations with locals about this phenomena are hypothesizing that the golden orbs are dying off for the winter, and that cold weather or another trigger in the past three days has sent them all into decline. I'm personally finding the weather very mild so I'm not convinced that the temperature is the trigger, but then I'm not a spider and I'm not a local so I can't really judge.

Golden Orb spider catching Green Spotted Triangle butterfly and starting to wrap it in silk ( right)

Golden Orb continuing food preparation ( left)

One morning Alison, my WWOOF host at the Exotic Fruit Farm took me to visit her neighbour Dawn at Gray's Farmstay, also a tropical fruit orchard and where I happened to stay when I visited Cape Trib in January. Dawn showed us her jade flowers in bloom, and they really are the most extraordinary and beautiful flowers. The vine is growing all over a big tree and the flowers hang down in long bunches taller than me. Close up each blossom is exquisite, with the stamen hidden inside a little pouch so cunningly concealed that I can't imagine how this plant ever gets pollinated. Aren't the colours unusual?













Jade Flower in situ (above) and in detail (right)

Dressing the Mangosteen

Mt Sorrow from the Cape Trib Exotic Fruit Farm orchard

My first WWOOFing task at the Cape Trib Exotic Fruit Farm has been dressing the mangosteen. Mangosteen are considered the queen of tropical fruit, with a hard purple-brown skin and flesh that looks like garlic cloves and tastes like heaven. As they have proven to do particularly well in this orchard, less satisfactory types of trees (and there are over 150 different species of tropical fruit grown here) are gradually being replaced by baby mangosteens which can take 12 to 20 years to start producing fruit.

Mangosteen in need of a makeover

My first evening here, before I had even seen the orchard, Alison and I watched the movie, The Devil Wears Prada, which is why I came to interpret my orchard job in fashion terms. Dressing the mangosteen involves firstly (while the rain is pelting down) cutting up a roll of weed gunnel which is a black cloth with a surprisingly nice drape into sections with an x sliced in middle of each one.
Then when it stops raining, you find a baby mangosteen all overwhelmed with weeds and first kick back the weeds to see that there is a nice circle of bare earth around the little tree, thanks to the work of the last WWOOFer. If any naughty weeds have started to infiltrate the clear circle, you squat down and hack at the roots with a pick axe, avoiding any of the many rocks studding the ground. Then take a double handful of chicken-shit pellets (not as disgusting as that sounds though they smell of ammonia) and sprinkle those around the base of the tree.

Mangosteen half-dressed in gunnel-burqua

Then take the square of weed gunnel and gently slide it over the mangosteen so that the tree emerges through the x-hole in the middle. Pulling each little branch through is like dressing a baby, but a baby with eight or ten arms, perhaps the baby Hindu goddess Vishnu. After I started reading Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire about women in the Islamic world this black cloth started reminding me of a burqua.
Eventually, the gunnel gets pegged down at each corner and then you look around for some mown grass clippings to pile on top of it as mulch. Then you set up a wire frame around the mangosteen and finally drape a netting over the frame like a ballgown over a hooped petticoat and clip it on with staples. Finally you stand up straight, stretch and look up at the looming peak of Mt Sorrow and see whether it is shrouded with cloud or (rarely) clear.

Mangosteen fully dressed and awaiting only a layer of mulch to finish it off

Retreat

I've been off line in more ways than one since my last post. My first WWOOFing gig has been at Prema Shanti Yoga and Meditation Retreat Centre. Almost as soon as I got there I came down with a cold (caught off the snotty baby I was dandling in Cairns) and so had little energy for anything other than my WWOOFing work and yoga classes.
WWOOFing was pleasant enough in my mucas-addled state: I fell into a trance as I swept and mopped the temple floor and verandas, feeling as though each swipe of the mop was a gentle sponge across the baby Buddha's bottom. The most energetic thing I did was attack the overgrown gardens: hacking weedy shrubs and pulling down huge garlands of vines. As always such clearing leaves an ugly hole (which will no doubt be grown over within a week of rainforest vigour) that offended my eye. I tried to compensate by weeding the gravel path, and was able to leave that looking nice. As I got sicker, my energy for doing even light work declined and Suzanne, my host, was extraordinarily kind and generous in letting me stay on an extra day to just lie around resting. So I barely ventured off the Retreat grounds for three days, and spent most of my time lying on a sofa on the veranda watching the rainforest and dozing or reading. Nonetheless, it was not boring!
I spent an afternoon watching a huge golden orb spider catch, subdue, wrap and consume a green spotted triangle butterfly while the tiny red male on her back clung on through her exertions. I saw numerous musky rat kangaroos which are the size of large rats, the shape of wombles and the colour of rust and which are the oldest type of kangaroo. There were further spider adventures when one of the other guests with a spider phobia found a large huntsman in the shower with her and shortly afterwards got herself locked in the bedroom with an even bigger one! My own loudest squeal was while I was weeding and felt a tickle on my leg. When I looked down a stick insect about half the length of my calf was clinging to my bare leg, camoflaged for sitting on bark not skin. The most amazing camoflage though, was a little brown frog which looked almost exactly like a dead leaf sitting on the lawn among nearly identical dead leaves, only the frog's shiney eyes in their beautiful dark mask giving away its true identity.
Yoga was great, and I will keep on doing classes with Suzanne while I'm in the Daintree. The meditation was challenging as always and an opportunity for self-awareness. It seems I am more addicted to modern communications that I would have liked to think. Cut off by no cellphone coverage in the Daintree (Telstra lied about NextG) and my low energy keeping me from going out in search of landline and internet opportunities, I gradually became obsessed, in my meditation time, with the calls, texts, emails and posts I wasn't getting or sending. Monkey mind couldn't stay away from worrying about that during the practice, even though in the non-meditation times I could easily let go of any concern or urgency.
Anyway, I am mostly recovered and hardly blowing my nose any more now. I have moved on to my next WWOOF host (Cape Trib Exotic Fruit Farm) where I am able to use the dial-up (thank you Allison and Digby!). But I still don't have cellphone coverage and will not for weeks or months, however long I stay up here in the rainforest. So, dear reader, if you are one of my texting or phoning buddies, I'm sorry but we will have detach from that method of communication for a while. I do have a snail mail address, so if you are inclined to send me a real letter or care package email me for the latest.

Slow train from Cooroy to Cairns

When I boarded the train at Cooroy I was excited about the 28 hour journey ahead of me to Cairns. I settled in to a little berth which I was pleased to discover I had all to myself. But within 45 minutes we were pulling into Gympie Station (a twenty minute drive from the farm where I've been staying for two and a half weeks) to the announcement that we would be delayed there for 'two or three hours'.
Gympie Station is nowhere near Gympie town, and is one of the least interesting railway stations I have had the misfortune to wait at. The platform was sandwiched between the train and a steep cutting so there was no view, except of the other 160 passengers getting increasingly irritated. I had been informed by several people of the phenomena in Queensland where pensioners get free train travel, so the trains are all full of old folks. Our train was no exception, the under 60s numbering less than a dozen at that stage of the journey.
Every couple of hours another announcement would confirm the swirling rumours that we weren't going anywhere soon. Eventually, the beleagered train people told us that they'd organised 'a coach tour of the gold mines and complimetary afternoon tea'. You've never seen such a stampede to the parking lot, where we spent another 30 minutes waiting for the promised coaches.
The tour of the gold mines consisted of hurtling past a single open cast mine on our way to Dingo Creek winery, where the complaining crowds were saited with cheesecake, scones and wine tasting. Back on the buses we took the long way back to the Station via Traveston Crossing. I got to show off my local knowledge of the proposed dam to my seat mates on the bus. But back on the train, we still weren't going anywhere!
Seven hours in Gympie. Seven hours waiting for a bridge to be fixed. It didn't really worry me, as I have no particular timetable to follow for my travels. But other people were running out of patience, and/or food and money. But eventually we rattled off over the bridge and up the coast into the night. I made the most of my private berth, playing music and dancing in the dark watching the stars and silver eucalypt trunks spin past. When I got tired, the nice porter pulled my bed down from the wall and I fell into a broken sleep, rolling around as the train hurtled along much faster than it had gone at any point during the day, trying to make up some of the lost time.
At 3.00 I woke to find the train stopped and my new berth mate knocking at the door, boarding at Rockhampton after a 7 hour wait. Next day, it was interesting to have her local knowledge of a lifetime in Queensland as the landscape subtly changed from rolling pastures to flat sugar cane interspersed with rainforest.
QR managed to make up two hours of the delay and we pulled into Cairns Station only five hours late, at 9.30pm instead of 11.30pm- a much more civilized hour to arrive to stay at a CouchSurfing host's home. This is my first CouchSurfing experience and its lovely. Anne and Kerry are relaxed hosts with a big house with so many people staying that I'm hardly worth blinking at. I helped feed a grandbaby this morning, and had a good chat with Kerry about art- he is a talented painter who directed me to an excellent art supply store (Art Barn). Anne gave me a huge pawpaw from one of their trees to take away with me.
I've spent the day in Cairns stocking up on supplies for going into the forest for a few weeks. It's my last day in a city for a while so I went to the Regional Gallery and saw a stunning sculpture exhibition by Ben Trupperbaumer. His exquisite 'Little Dwellings' will stay in my mind as I go into the bush hoping to imagine exquisite books.

Travel dreams and book shelves

You know how when travelling you often dream of home? My dreams lately have been populated by New Zealand family and friends but the setting is usually in oversized white stone buildings like Brisbane's Southbank.
I spent a couple of afternoons wandering around Southbank when I first landed in Aussie three weeks ago (and I spent a memorable week at a conference there about five years ago) which was obviously enough to impress the the architecture on my psyche. I wonder too, if their empty white spaciousness is appearing in my dreams because I have been staying in a little farmhouse that is chock full of things. It is a lovely and facinating home, with museum-like displays of antiques interspersed with delightful objects collected on travels in Asia and Europe plus all the usual bits and pieces that accumulate in a lifetime of being interested and creative.
Continuing my bookshelves documentary project here are some photographs from around the Hill's home. This morning I dreamed that my friend Helen, the New Zealander I stayed with when I first arrived in Brisbane, had organised a huge gathering of parents and their preschool children. They crowded into a steep stepped ampitheatre of white stone, creating a chaotic cacophony.

I stood up on my step to give the opening speech of the event, having absolutely no idea what I was going to say and was surprised to hear myself boldly starting with 'Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoua. Nau mai haere mai. Ko Meliors toku ingoa*'. The crowd of children and their adults fell into an instant hush except for a whisper of 'more more more' from someone nearby. But then I suddenly realised I was speaking Maori and lost my confidence so totally that I woke up!
Tomorrow I move on from the Hill's farm where I will have spent two and a half weeks. I'm catching the train to Cairns which is a 30 hour journey! I expect that once I am staying in the rainforest, I will start dreaming about the rolling farmland of the Sunshine Coast and this cosy house.

* Rough translation: greetings everybody, welcome to our place, my name is Meliors.

Big Hairy Bananas and Little Peach Pellets

The antique book press so beautifully restored by Helga and reassembled by Victor

Helga and I have been making lots more paper back at the farm. This time we used pulp that Helga had prepared earlier and stored in the deep freezer. Victor's been on at her to use up the pulp so he can fill the deep freeze with a naughty cow, thus he was willing to let us push his sign-painting activities to the back of the shed and take over the table with troughs and cloths and water and pulp for a few days.
As we undertook this over the first really cold days of winter, I discovered that making paper is infinitely more pleasurable as a summertime activity, but that having one's hands immersed in cold water for hours on end is less pleasant on a chilly day. By the second day we'd decided to include buckets of hot water in our trough, and to time our actvities in the warmest middle of the day. And in between I booked a train ticket to Cairns where the daytime highs are consistently around 29.

Victor and his cows

We defrosted bags of agapanthus, mystery garden mix, bamboo, banana and native peach pulp. On the first day we bleached agapanthus and the mystery mix and pulled those plus the unbleached bamboo. We made them into fuzzy edged A4 sheets plus a few little squares (with the cutest little mold and deckle) and after pressing out most of the water, we stretched them onto the smooth concrete floor of the shed to dry over night. This ensured that they came up completely flat and smooth, unlike all the paper I helped make at Wallace House last week which had been taken up too early and is irredeemably rippled.

Agapanthus, bamboo and mystery garden papers drying on the concrete

The agapanthus makes a thick fibrous mat of opaque golden paper which is so tough and strong that I couldn't tear it once it was dry. The mystery garden mix made a lovely versatile paper, smooth and easy to write on, strong and flexible and it bleached to a creamy beige while retaining a pleasant brown fleck. What a shame we don't know exactly what plant(s) went into this pulp because it is so nice.
The bamboo had been pulped complete with the tough green bark and leaves and hard core and came out like a bran biscuit: rough and textured, almost sandy in many shades of brown. Helga says that on their trip to Thailand in January, when they visited many different Thai paper makers, she learned that proper bamboo paper is made using only the part of the stem that lies between the green outer coat and the hard inner core. (She also saw at the Brisbane Craft Fair this week they are selling bamboo wadding for inserting into quilts (instead of nasty dacron) and she reckons that must be made of the same part of the bamboo as good paper).

Helga pulling big banana paper in the wheelbarrow

Next day, we decided to make some of the banana paper into A3 sheets, which required using the wheelbarrow as a trough as it is the only thing big enough to take the A3 mold and deckle. We had a bag of long fibre banana and a bag of short fibre banana both of which we bleached but pulled separately. The short fibre banana was made into the big sheets which came out hairy (strong) and translucent (fine). The long fibre banana which we made as A4 sheets was (unsurprisingly) even hairier. In fact it was so hairy that the edges were often compromised by fibres hanging over the edge of the deckle so persistently that they pulled away chunks of the wet pulp from the molded sheet. And when it came time to remove the paper from the cloths by rolling it onto the concrete, the fibres clung to the cloth and tore rather than stick to the concrete like most wet paper.
The banana paper which Helga had made in the past (and used to make a stunning big paper parasol for an exhibition) had also had a shiny glossy quality, almost like it was varnished, but the banana paper we made this week was mat. We have speculated about whether the freezing process might have removed the glossy quality from the banana pulp or whether harvesting the banana at different times of year may create different kinds of paper (shiny when the sap is rising?), but we just don't know. If any readers have insight into these banana paper mysteries, your advice is welcomed! I am very interested in making more banana paper as I have plans which require its combination of strength and translucence.
We started putting bleached native peach pulp to the trough while there was still some long banana in the water, and the peach added strength to the wet paper being pulled around by the long banana fibres. Gradually the banana disappeared and we were pulling peach alone. The native peach is not a peach at all, no relation in fact, being named solely on the resemblance its leaves have for the original. It actually bears tiny little fruits like peppercorns which the pigeons adore.
Peach paper pulp is made out of the inner bark only. It makes a thick soft creamy smooth paper that I anticipate will be a joy to print on, so I am very interested in making more of this paper as well. As we pulled we noticed tiny balls of peach fuzz in the pulp, which couldn't be broken up by stirring the trough. Helga reckons these are the result of spending too much time in the beater (back before the pulp was frozen). It seems that beating for too long will begin to reconstitute fluffy pulp into a solid mass. Luckily the presence of the little balls of peach are unnoticeable in the dried paper.

Botanical papers handmade on the Sunshine Coast, April 2008

After all the paper was dried it made quite an impressive pile on the dining room table. I went through and tested a sample of each type of paper with different pens and pencil, and for its folding qualities. With these samples and notes in my journal I am only taking as much of the paper as I could squeeze into a single plastic file box for the next stage of my journey.

Pink tongued lizard

Yet another wild animal inside: this pink tongued lizard (about a foot long) was hanging out in the ironing basket.

Save the Mary Flotilla

Last Sunday was the second anniversary of the announcement that a dam was proposed on the Mary River, at Traveston Crossing, not far from where I've been staying the past two weeks.
The area is some of the most fertile farmland left in Australia, known as the food basket of Brisbane. The Mary River itself is home to the rare and endangered species such as the lungfish (a dinosaur contemporary), and the unique Mary River Turtle. Mary River flows out to Hervey Bay and the famous sanctuary of Fraser Island, home to rare dugongs as well as many other special species.
The creek on Helga and Victor Hill's farm where I've been staying will run much higher if the dam is built, and the road I've been walking along will be partially submerged. They, and many of their neighbours are outraged by the dam proposal and have devoted much of the past two years to fighting against it. One of Victor's contributions to the campaign (as well as narrating bus tours of the threatened area, ringing talk back radio and prolific letter writing) is the painting of signs. This is about a third of the signs lining the road frontage of their farm.
Victor also made this fabulous creation to demonstrate the proposed water level above currently dry land. It usually lives outside the farm gate with all the signs, but for last Sunday's flotilla, it was moved down to the Mary River.
As well as being the anniversary of the dam announcement, last Sunday was also a chance for dam opponents to join Steve Posselt for a stretch of his epic journey kayaking from Brisbane and along the Mary River. Steve Posselt is a water engineer making this cross country trip to draw attention to the significant flaws in the dam proposal and the terrible consequences if it goes ahead. As the Mary does not actually connect up to Brisbane he hauled his kayak overland across a very big hill. Luckily he has a special wheelie kayak: the wheels flip up for when he is on the water and when the water doesn't go where he wants the wheels flip down and he dons a harnass to pull it along.

Over a hundred people came along last Sunday to paddle down the river with Steve, enjoy the beautiful environment which will be destroyed by the dam and protest for the TV cameras. It was a misty morning and I helped out at the gateway to the launch site, making sure that every paddler signed the registration form/disclaimer before they got on the water. Unfortunately I didn't get to go for a paddle, but I watched from the bank as the colourful flotilla set off in perfect weather.
The dam wall is proposed for Traveston Crossing, currently a bridge where the flotilla was to finish. Upstream the Mary runs through flat farmland which would make for a wide shallow dam, perfect for evaporating (rather than storing) water in this hot dry climate. The rainfall in this area is relatively low, compared with the coastal end of the River, suggesting that the dam is unlikely to be unable to collect enough water to try and store anyway, and certainly not enough water to enable the proposed fish lifts to function (apparently the dam proposal suggests that itinerant workers can be hired to manually catch and lift endangered fish over the dam wall so they can get to and from their spawning grounds).

The scent of Lemon Eucalypt

Even more than northern Queensland, southeast Queensland reminds me, superficially, of New Zealand. The bland sprawling city of Brisbane looks like a hilly version of Auckland. From a car window the rolling pastures and wooded valleys of the Sunshine Coast look a lot like Northland or the Waikato. But this a deceptive interpretation, and one that disappointed the desire for novelty that brought me here. I wanted to see something new: strange plants and animals, yet for the first couple weeks I found it very hard to see anything that seemed very different from home (and wondered if I would have to head straight to the strange red earth of the Outback in order to really know I had left New Zealand).

Of course, my first couple of weeks here were hectic: a flurry of organising banks and telephones, as well as letterpress and papermaking. But staying at the Hill's farm has slowed me right down, allowing me to pay attention with all my senses. It also helps that Helga can spot a camouflaged owl at thirty metres and identifies every bird and plant by name, and often by origin and use.

I've fallen into a routine of an early morning solitary walk on the gravel road that runs along the valley floor then up and over the hills. Heading down the driveway, still half asleep, the air is suffused with the heady, delicious, seductive scent of lemon eucalypt, not a familiar smell, but one which I have fallen completely in love with. I pull a leaf to carry in my hanky pocket so I can keep it with me all day long. Along the road I pass through clouds of unfamiliar smells as different plants release their scents in the warm morning sunlight that gradually overtakes the crisp chill of the night.

Just after dawn the air is full of a dozen different species of bird song: from the manic cackle of the kookaburra and the quack/croak of the raven to the melodious whipbird, butcher bird and pigeons' trills. Alternating my attention between trying to separate and identify each different call and enjoying the unlikely harmony they create, my eyes unfocus, losing their attachment to interpreting what I see as familiar.

When I lift my lids again I see the landscape freshly. A kangaroo bounds across the road in front of me, its distinctive powerful hindlegs and tail disappearing into the undergrowth. I spot wallabies in the paddocks as I pass and they stand still, watching me as I watch them, their only movement is swivelling ears until suddenly they jump away with a thud, thud, thud over the tall grass.

I look out for snakes as I walk, wanting to see one, but wanting very much for my first Australian snake experience (and indeed all of them) to be benign. The snakes outside are all too well disguised for me to spot, but one afternoon Helga wakes me from a nana nap to bring my camera into the computer room. A baby carpet snake is curled up behind the printer, under the window. It is no wider than my thumb, and I know that carpet snakes are the desirable ones to have around the house as they catch rats and aren't venomous.
Thanks to Helga's directions I am becoming aware that the house and garden are teeming with exotic wildlife, including two little green frogs that sleep in the corners of the shower by day and come and go courting at night. Last night I met one at the basin when I went to brush my teeth. He posed obligingly for a minute and then, disconcerted by the camera flash, continued on his way: climbing the shower curtain before tucking himself into his corner of the ceiling.
To begin learning the language of this land, so I can hear its stories, requires dropping the blinkers of my attachment to the familiar, and opening up with all my senses. Ultimately there is much more than size and a few vowel sounds to the difference between our neighbouring countries.

Making grass into paper (II)

Hamil paper, almost dry

Making paper by hand is surely one of the most inefficient activities I have ever tried. Two huge sacks of grass, or a whole car boot-full of shrubbery, eventually some dozen or so hours of hard physical labour later (not to mention gas cooking, machine processing, chemical additives and ridiculous quantities of water), emerge as a dozen pretty pieces of A4. Madness, it is madness!
But such pleasurable madness, and I slept so very well* afterwards! Helga, Di, Glenda and I spent two full-on days of multi-tasking paper-making at Wallace House** in Noosa. I hardly know how to tell the story, as so many things were happening simultaneously the entire time we were there.

Outside to the left of the roller door there was a big copper boiling up two batches of fresh plant material in separate net bags: the Chinese Burr bark that Helga and I had prepared, and fresh ginger stems and leaves that Di had collected from a ginger root seller at the market (this area is famous for its ginger production).

To the right of the roller door was an ingenious homemade device combining an insinkerator with a hospital trolly, which when appropriate hoses were attached for input and output chewed through the moderately coarse plant matter like ginger and lemon grass, but got hairballs from the Burr bark.

Insinkerator trolly

Inside in one corner was Alph*** the Hollander beater which variously chewed its way through Hamil Grass, lemon grass, ginger, recycled paper, and of course the Chinese Burr. The Alph is horribly noisy, especially when grinding up recycled paper, and particularly in the echoing environment of the unlined tin shed in which we were working. But I can certainly appreciate its talent for fluffing up fibres. The Burr bark went into the beater as tight stringy clumps and emerged much later as a loose fibrous soggy fluff perfect for making paper.

Removing pulp from the beater is a long and labourious scooping out with sives into a bucket. I quite enjoyed this part of it, not least because the beater's motor was blessedly silent, and of course with my well-documented proclivity for long and labourious fiddly jobs. The Burr pulp came out a very dark brown so Helga added some judicious slops of household bleach. Before our very eyes the brown pulp gradually faded to an attractive honey blonde and eventually a clotted cream before we rinsed out the bleach.

Two buckets of Chinese Burr bark pulp, the one on the right with bleach added (it got even lighter after the photo).

Making the pulp into sheets of paper took place on a table in the centre of the room, where the pulp was added to a large trough of water. By the second day we had two troughs being worked simultaneously, one on each end of the not terribly big table. The ratio of pulp to water required to make a standard sheet of paper is almost undetectable to the untrained eye, though with practice I did get better at seeing what was happening in the trough.

As the new girls, Glenda and I had the honour of doing the first batches and we started with the Hamil grass which had come through its long processing still a bright beautiful shade of green. It was a light and fluffy pulp, relatively easy (I realise in retrospect) to pull into relatively consistent sheets of paper.

Glenda draining the mold and deckle with Hamil pulp

Pulling paper goes like this: first you shimmy your spread hand along the bottom of the trough to get the fibres evenly dispersed without sloshing the contents over the sides of the trough. Then your mold and deckle (two wooden frames fitted together, the mold with a screen and rails to hold the screen taut) is dipped vertically into the trough and used to scoop up some pulpy water, lifting absolutely on the horizontal and shaking very gently side to side and back and forth to distribute the fibres evenly as the water drains through the screen. Then you let the mold drain, for as long as you can stand it (or as long as the person waiting their turn at the trough can stand it), before couching (rolling) the paper off the screen and onto the piece of blanket or sheet that is sitting on top of the post (the stack of wet, just pulled paper that you are adding to).

Glenda couching a fresh sheet of Hamil paper onto the post

In the other roller doorway were two home made presses, but only one (car) jack, so we couldn't use both presses at the same time, which entailed a bit of juggling posts every time we added more. The jack exerted enough pressure on the posts (sandwiched between pieces of wood) to squeeze out all the excess water. When sufficiently pressed, the paper was then peeled off its backing sheet or blanket and spread flat on a bit of fibro board to dry. Unfortunately those bits that dried too fast buckled and puckered, but luckily most of the Hamil paper came through smooth. The bright grassy green faded with drying to a greenish yellow (see top photo of post****) which is still quite attractive.

Later we pulled paper from recycled paper, ginger, the lemon grass pulp which made a highly textured brown paper and the bleached Burr bark pulp which made a lovely soft fluffy paper, some of which we added dried (fake) saffron blossoms to, speckling the creamy white with a rich yolky orange.

We finished off the day with a collaborative effort pouring the various different pulps onto a giant mold and deckle in a sort of abstract pattern of green, brown, cream and white which Helga declared to be a representation of the ruined Mary River if the Traveston Dam goes ahead causing rampant weed and algae growth to clog up the waterway. It seemed an appropriate interpretation, and we left the single large sheet of pulp painting to dry on the mold. I'll get to see the finished product when I go back to Wallace House for the Bookmakers Group on Monday.

Glenda and I had no trouble dividing our finished papers between us: she loves the idiosyncratic character of the lemon grass and thinks the Hamil is boring. I love the smooth even surface and cheery colour of the Hamil and can't think what I would do with the coarse lemon grass. My little stack of Hamil sheets is still damp and slightly puckered so Helga, Victor and I spent some time today assembling a beautiful antique book press that Helga has restored (from flood damage). As always, the old equipment requires both respect and creativity to get back into use, and as always I have a huge amount of fun sharing the job with like-minded folk- Helga and Victor fitting the bill perfectly. The first job of the book press in 30 or more years is to flatten my Hamil paper.

Hamil Grass Pulp

*Other chronic insomniacs will appreciate the attractiveness of any activity that induces a rare good sleep.
**Wallace House is a big old homestead used by numerous art and craft groups: while I was there I saw potters, painters, life drawing, water colours, embroiderers and quilters- and every day of the week the centre is booked for these and many other diverse activities.
*** Named Alph-a-beater by Victor the inveterate punster. It's actually what's called a Critter, made by Mark Lander a New Zealander widely credited for transforming papermaking into an affordable and transportably activity thanks to his clever invention.

**** I became momentarily excited imagining some relationship between a blog post and a papermakers post. Victor's puns must be affecting me despite all my eye-rolling groans.

Making grass into paper (I)

I didn't bring any paper over to Australia (even so, my idea of the bare minimum luggage is embarrassing to haul into my hosts' homes) so I find myself in the strange position of having access to a printing press, but with nothing to print on. Fortunately, I am here on the Sunshine Coast as the guest of the Papermakers of Queensland (Inc) so my lack of paper is being actively addressed.

Right now I am staying with Helga and Victor Hill on their farm in the Mary Valley. On my first afternoon Helga and I went out along the road to harvest Hamil grass, a pasture grass which, when ungrazed, towers over us (not so impressive as we are both shorties) with wide tough blades.

Helga's eagle eye for spotting plant pests with papermaking potential found us some Chinese Burr on the other side of the road, so we collected an armload of that too. I was only slightly nervous about reaching into the tangled Australian undergrowth, but followed Helga's example of stamping my feet to scare off any snakes and kept a sharp eye out for scarey spiders. Fortunately the biggest animal we saw was one of these cute caterpillars that seems to thrive in the Hamil grass.

Once safely home with our two sacks of grass and Burr we set about preparing it to be cooked down as the first step towards becoming paper. The grass is quick and easy to process, as it just needs to be chopped small enough to fit in the giant cookpot. That's me cutting grass in the foreground while Helga starts the much more laborious task of stripping the bark off the Chinese Burr. Only the bark is fibrous enough for papermaking, and our big armful of Burr sticks was eventully reduced to a maddenly small tangle of bark strips. In contrast, one sack of grass easily filled a pot to capacity, so we put that onto cook immediately. Grass soup is stinky, and made even less appetising by the neccessary addition of caustic soda, required to help break down the plant matter and release the fibres. It was a noxious witches' brew, that we boiled outside the shed where Victor paints his anti-dam 'Don't Murray the Mary [River]' signage. The Hill's farm is just one of many in this fertile food basket of a valley that will be affected by the proposed dam at Traveston Crossing, and they are very active in their opposition. At the moment we are avidly following the journey of cross-country kayaker Steve Posselt as he paddles and drags his kayak from Brisbane to the Mary River to draw attention to the scandaloulsy flawed dam proposal.

Meanwhile our pot of grass bubbled and boiled over in a poisonous shade of deep, dark green, stinking and steaming, with Helga adding more water and caustic soda as seemed appropriate to her experienced senses. I stirred and payed close attention to every step, as there is no ready formula to follow, just an intuitive understanding of the process that I will only learn by practice. We cooked until after dark, and then left the mix to sit over night, hoping it might prove to be ready when tested in the morning.

Next day, however, Helga rubbed the broken down grass between her gloved fingers (caustic soda, remember?) and said it needed more cooking. So we topped up the water and set the flame alight again, letting it cook until the mixture felt like a slippery gel and the fibres mashed easily, but not too much. Then, and only then, did we stop the cooking and sive out the mass of green slime into an old net curtain, leaving the caustic water in the pot to cook our second batch of grass in.

The next step is rinsing out the caustic soda from the grass, a water-intensive process which in this case utilised the farm's creek water piped to an outside sink. However, the first half dozen buckets of rinse water were so alkaline that they couldn't be tipped down the drain and instead had to be hauled over to a fence line where we applied it as weed killer. Eventually however, the soil ph tester which Helga inherited from her gardening mother, indicated progress towards neutrality (and Victor had fixed up the drain pipe to go somewhere appropriate) so the work became a bit less back breaking.

I lost count of how many times we filled the bucket with clean water, opened out the net and swirled our hands through the fibres before lifting the heavy net out, emptying the bucket and starting again. The hours fly by when papermaking with Helga- I'm constantly surprised that two or three have already passed and it's already time for another cup of tea!

Once Helga was satisfied that the grass was completely ph neutral, the tester confirming the squeaking clean feeling between the fingers, we left Victor to keep an eye on the second grass brew and went off on another harvesting expedition, this time to fill up our pot of Chinese Burr bark. This was to be found on top of a hill, most easily accessed via a neighbour's farm. A heavy shower started just as we arrived, creating the perfect excuse for another cup of tea, and a chance to meet the New Zealand neighbours and have a chat about home, admire their coffee bushes and accept a big bag of passionfruit from their vines. The rain stopped as suddenly as it began so Helga and I wriggled through a barbed wire fence and tackled the edge of a big area of Chinese Burr. It's one of those exotic plants which was fashionable for gardens once (I have no idea why, since it's ugly and smells bad) and then escapes into the wild and jostles out native plants from their niches. We filled the back of the car with it, and arrived home to find the second batch of Hamil grass ready for rinsing. That took until dark, so the bark stripping had to be tackled the next morning, before I scrubbed up (with only partial success as the bark stains skin) and left to catch a bus and two trains to Brisbane for a Passover weekend of over-eating in delightful company.

...to be continued...

Birth of the Wooroi Press

After a few busy days in Brisbane I travelled north to the Sunshine Coast, first stop Tewantin. Here I’ve been helping the Wooroi* Press get started. A group of book artists on the Coast had responded a few weeks ago to my search for papermaking opportunities by offering to trade papermaking expertise for my assistance getting their letterpress up and running.

I arrived at the Stagg’s art-filled home on the edge of Wooroi Forest after dark on Sunday night following an arduous journey from Brisbane on public transport (Noosa seems determined to keep its posh resort status by making it as difficult as possible to get here). The next morning I went straight into the print shed and after a quick glance at the unbelievably tidy and well-organised print set up I dived straight into showing a small but enthusiastic group of letterpress novices how to compose. That part was easy with a cabinet of lead type including plenty of useful sizes of Gill (my most favourite font, and yet not available at Te Kowhai), a few leads and reglets and plenty of wooden furniture, quoins and composing sticks.

Reglets in cabinet with planer and mallet

Di Tait had arrived with a beautiful little book which she wanted to print a title page for so we used her two word title as the demonstration. Once that was locked up in the chase we turned our attention to the presses: a Chandler Price New Style, a funny little Chinese table press and an even smaller Remington proofing press. The Remington’s bed was only big enough for a small galley and the Chandler Price has such a huge platen that the two word title would have been swamped, so we inked up the table press.

The table press had been cleaned up from the dreadful state in which it had come into Maryke Stagg’s possession, but it still needed plenty of work, so taking a half decent print took most of the afternoon (and it really was only half decent). Meanwhile Helga began composing another block of text to try on the Chandler Price.

Maryke at the barbeque cleaning station, working on the fashion plates with kerosene (Wooroi Forest in background)

The Chandler Price has a huge platen, easily big enough to print an A3 sheet or greater, and of course a correspondingly large chase. Unfortunately, the next day when we started inking up, the rollers turned out to be too small: sitting lower than their trucks and obviously worn out in the middle where two of the three remained stubbornly red despite running repeatedly over the ink disk. Sure enough when we heaved the heavy chase into place, the rollers didn’t touch the type, not even the one roller which appeared fully inked. They are either the wrong rollers for the press or have shrunk dramatically since they were last used! With that disappointment, the workshop split into two hives of activity: one group started on the Remington, pulling prints from the collection of fashion plates of the 1920s, and John and I got stuck into fixing up the table press.

After hours of happy fiddling with the platen, the frisket bar, the lays and the roller arms (oh how I do love to problem solve on printing presses, especially in the company of a bloke with excellent tool skills) the funny little Chinese table press was reborn to take effortless, near perfect prints. After a couple of satisfactory proofs in which we discovered Helga’s paper printed much better damp than dry, she swung into full editioning mode and started churning out dozens of cards with her Martin Luther King Jr quote. It was delightful to watch another person fall in love with letterpress and its inherent gift for multiples.

Meanwhile Di had been busy on the proofing press and finding out all the ways in which it still needed to be worked on. John applied his magic touch with tools and oil can and soon that corner of the print shop was producing satisfactory results as well. Our two days of learning, repairing and persisting through numerous frustrations was suddenly exhilaratingly successful and the Wooroi Press was born (and documented with some group photos).

Wooroi Press Gang, 15 April 2008, Meliors, Di, John, Desley, Maryke and Helga with Chinese table press

We hung samples of our first prints on the notice board and the flurry of activity continued: Maryke and Di rearranging some of the equipment for better work flow, Helga printing more and more of her cards, John setting and proofing ‘Wooroi Press’, Desley experimenting with embossing, and me sitting back and enjoying the sight of letterpress passion spreading like a virus.

The scariest thing about leaving Whangarei was the risk of loosing my access to letterpress for months or longer. Instead, I was immersed in letterpress within days of arriving in Australia. I have found another print home in the Wooroi Press, and though I may travel far and wide over the next few months, I know I will return here to print again. The lure of Gill type, the huge CP platen (once the rollers are working) and most of all the good company of the Wooroi Press gang will be impossible to resist for long.

The counter on the Chandler Price New Style press

*Wooroi means place of kangaroos- and today I saw several of these most beautiful and graceful creatures on the golf course across the road.

Vandercook At Last

I spent my last afternoon in New Zealand at Green Bay Press in West Auckland, playing with a beautiful Vandercook press.

About six weeks ago I met Beth Serjeant completely by chance when my family wandered into a workshop Beth was teaching at the Ponsonby Art Station. Beth and I discovered we shared a passion for letterpress and had one of those urgent, intense conversations that MUST be continued in a more appropriate time and place. I rang her up a few days later and asked if I could come and meet her Vandercook press before I left the country and she graciously agreed.

Beth welcomed me into her garage turned print shop which is dominated by the big flatbed press from the 1950s but looking very modern to my eyes, accustomed as they are to century-plus old platens. I've been desperately keen for ages to have a go with a Vandercook- they are the favourite of many of the letterpress printers whose work I admire on the internet, especially in the United States where they seem much more common than in the Antipodes. The attraction for me is the big flat bed which can print any size paper, up to huge posters.

Beth let me pull a few prints of some type she had already set up in the press, so now I have some idea of the basics. The rollers turn on an electric motor, but each paper is pulled through manually with a satisfying full-body motion of the handle. I do like the physicality of printing. Beth says that when she first acquired the Vandercook it was like an arranged marriage and she thought it might make a good bench for her workshop. Fortunately a visit from Claire van Vliet who fiddled about with the press and got it up and running turned the arranged marriage into a love affair.

The text I printed was a Karakia mo te harakeke (Maori prayer for harvesting flax) printed onto flax paper. This seemed like a blessing on my journey, as in the next few days I will begin learning to make handmade paper with Australian native plants. Other blessings from Beth included the gift of an excellent printer's apron and sharing chocolates sent by Claire, with the surprise fortunes: 'Live your dreams' (me) and 'Be nice to a stranger' (Beth). I feel like I have found two life-long (or long-lost) friends in Beth and the Vandercook.
After we finished printing and cleaned the press we had a show and tell of some of our own work and some of Claire's that Beth has in her collection. I had seen a page of Beth's book Visionary earlier in the exhibition at the Auckland City Library- now I got to leaf through the whole big work, reading the poems by various New Zealand poets illustrated with Beth's colourful lithographs. It was a luxurious afternoon of book arts indulgence, pleasantly serenaded by Beth's son, Andrew, playing guitar in a nearby room.

I was exhausted and overwhelmed from my intense preparations for the huge journey beginning the following morning, so we spent our last half hour together quietly drinking tea and listening to a tape of Claire being interviewed by Sharon Crosbie when she visited NZ for a symposium in 1993 (the fateful trip that awoke Beth's Vandercook). Two descriptions from Claire leapt out for me, articulating my own feelings about artist's books in a way that I haven't been able to before: "the book as a stage setting for the content" and "the book as a physical facilitator of the meaning of the text".

Counting Down

In less than 48 hours I am flying out of New Zealand on a one-way ticket. I am almost ready. I have sold my printing press, my car and my few pathetic sticks of furniture. My books and winter clothes are in storage. I have farewelled Whangarei and now I am farewelling Hamilton.

With just a few tasks left to do I am starting to normalise from a level of stress so extreme that I had no interest in comfort eating- an almost unheard of experience. The tenuous hold I had on sanity finally unravelled when my carefully packed and weighed suitcase broke in not one but two stress points. My finely tuned schedule had not timed in luggage shopping, and I had to over-ride my inner control freak to make the purchase without intensive prior research.

But with the support of some of the people who love me most in the world and who accept me at my most crazy, my pretty purple new ultralight bags are ready to jet off to Queensland for a winterless winter of paper-making, printing, forests, fun and of course, books!


Among the various projects I have in mind to keep my travels creative is to document bookshelves- those inherently attractive items in any homely home. As a taster, here are just a few of the beautiful books decorating Jo and Cam's colourful Hamilton home, including one of my own Mobius strip books (top).

Daylight Savings Has Been Extended

Daylight savings has been extended this year,
news celebrated with barbeques and evening swims
until the end of March.

But my lark's spirit
cannot contain her sorrow
as she struggles with
dark wakings that stumble into
yawning, sluggish mornings.

Oh, I miss waking at dawn
My spirit rising with the sun.