Sometimes a day of slightly aimless meandering can unwittingly be very fulfilling. Having no specific purpose or target for the day means that you achieve all you set out to do and today was one of those days! We didn’t rush, but headed off mid-morning to walk up to Holman Park ferry stop. This should have been very relaxing until Anne shouted belatedly – snake …. Now as a sufferer of ophidiophobia (a fear of words with too many syllables … or fear of snakes) this is never a great thing to hear and it turned out I had nearly stepped on one on the pavement. To make it worse, it turned out that this was a Common Tree Snake, so what on earth was it doing on the pavement anyway! We watched as it showed no signs of amaxophobia (fear of driving) and slithered into the engine bay of a nearby car. Whether this was deliberate and it was just looking for a change of scenery or it just wanted a quiet warm break, we never found out as it vanished completely into the car.
After that little bit of excitement we walked (a bit more carefully) to the Holman Street Pier and caught the Cityhopper ferry down to South Bank and wandered along the front past a singing gospel group (as you do!). We then made a beeline for GOMA – Gallery of Modern Art. The building itself was impressive – an airy, open and modern space but the exhibitions were also fascinating. We bypassed the one called Fairy Tales which we figured was a different target audience, but had quite a long look at one called Seeds of Civilisation and another which picked out various elements of Pacific Island art.
Seeds of Civilisation was very focused on Aboriginal Art, but also spanned a considerable time period and had art across various media. This art often had the information people needed to care for the land and identified locations of plants which were safe to use and how to collect them sustainably.
One piece in the Pacific Island exhibition particularly caught my eye. It was a pile of skulls (!) cast in CSR sugar. It represented a mass grave that had been discovered of people who were almost certainly victims of ‘blackbirding’. This practice was undertaken by unscrupulous ships captains to feed the demand for cheap labour on the sugar plantations in Queensland as well as cotton and coffee plantations elsewhere. Most were recruited (with no real idea of what they were letting themselves in for) from islands in Melanesia and they were known as Kanakas. The mortality rate for these workers was very high – probably around 30% which meant that around 15,000 of them died in Queensland alone.
From GOMA we made the short walk across to the main art gallery which has the permanent collections and spent a very enjoyable hour or two looking around the Australian and European Collections. The wildlife encounters continued over lunch with some fairly cheeky ibis wandering around (and trying to nick chips from other tables) and a couple of fairly large lizards getting in on the act.
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