barrangal dyara (skin and bones) Jonathan Jones

I had a rather unexpected, almost obsessive response to Jonathan Jones' installation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney last year. 

It touched me in ways that I'm still finding hard to catch and define.

My fascination kicked in at several levels:

the fire

the architecture

the history

the cultural aspect

the loss

the healing

the blending of histories

the time & place....

In 1879 Sydney hosted the International Exhibition. 

A specially designed building was erected on the edges of the Botanic Gardens to house the exhibition. It was grandly called the Garden Palace.

Tragically the Garden Palace and everything inside was destroyed by fire in 1882.

Stored inside was a huge collection of Gadigal artefacts of cultural and historical significance.

Over a hundred years later, Jones went searching for some of the cultural material from where his family came from. He discovered that most of it was destroyed in the Palace Garden fire.

The sense of loss and forgetting around this event spurred Jones on to find a way to reconnect and understand what happened here.

" Perhaps the fire was a kind of cultural burn, regenerating the site for future generations."

The outline of the Garden Palace depicted in white shields.

The project put together an information booklet for visitors.

In it Jones said,

"as I've worked on the project, the garden palace has become a symbol for the repercussions of forgetting. So many people I've spoken to about the project hadn't known the history of this enormous building that once dominated Sydney's skyline both physically and conceptually. I've begun to question what else we can forget as a community, if something so grand and visible and spoken about has disappeared from our vision. Aboriginal communities have often been the victims of Australia's ability to forget. In this way the Garden Palace became a fault line in the nation's memory, which has enabled the project to bring to the fore other forgotten histories."

Barrangal dyara means 'skin and bones'.

The project consisted of three components - a native meadow of kangaroo grass, thousands of white shields and several soundscapes.

The four different types of shields marked the boundary of the original building.

They also "echo the expansive rubble that remained after the fire."

These shields are "void of unique markings or personal designs, speaking to the erasure of cultural complexities through collection."

The exhibition ran from 17th Sept - 3rd Oct 2016.

I visited it three times, as well as the concurrent exhibition at The State Library.

Shortly afterwards I spotted this lovely cloth bound book commemorating the exhibition.

I knew that I had to have it!

It combines photographs and archival information from the Botanic Gardens site and the Library exhibition as well as essays from various people involved in the project, Aboriginal elders, architects, artists and historians.

It was utterly fascinating and absorbing.

The exhibition felt like an important moment in our Australian consciousness as well as a personal journey that I'm still exploring.

#AusReadingMonth

#NonFictionNovember

Readathon Reads

Part of the feeling of success and enjoyment that I had with this year's Readathon was mostly reading junior fiction, short stories and essays. It allowed me to switch between genres and feel that I was getting through books and pages. In previous readathons I would read through the pile of half finished books by my bed. I ended up reading a similar amount of pages, but maybe only finished one book. This year actually finishing books felt like a big deal and kept my enthusiasm keen until the end.

But now I have a stack of book responses to write #postreadathonblues!

To make my life simpler, I'm going to combine the junior fiction books into one post. I saved my two junior reads for the end when I was getting tired eyes and a smushy brain.

I read Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden and The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd.

Miss Happiness came to me thanks to a recommendation within another book. Chasing the Sky is a book about twenty Australian women architects and utterly fascinating in it's own right. However, one of the architects mentioned that she had read Miss Happiness as a child and that it had been one of the inspirations for her to become an architect. I was intrigued.

I knew that I would enjoy Godden's writing style as I had thoroughly enjoyed The Greengage Summer unexpectedly last year. And I knew that it would be the prefect choice for late in the readathon as soon as I opened it and saw the big font, generous spacing and black and white illustrations.

The Japanese theme also appealed to me thanks to our planned trip to Japan in 2018.

The story is aimed at the 8+ age group and features a young girl sent to England to live with her aunt, uncle and cousins from India. She is unhappy and shy and not fitting in, until a great-aunt sends her two little Japanese dolls for Christmas. Miss Happiness and Miss Flower are also aliens in this very English world.

Young Nona sets out to make them more comfortable by making a Japanese doll's house for them. She befriends the local librarian who helps her pick the right books and gradually the rest of the family get involved in building this miniature home complete with niche, bonsai and tea ceremony.

The real delight for any budding designer though are the detailed drawings and instructions at the end of the book showing you how to make your very own Japanese doll's house. A quick google also revealed a whole world of people who have made their very own Japanese doll's house inspired by this charming book.

Miss Happiness and Miss Flower was published in 1961 and has a few cultural clangers relevant to it's time, but the universal themes of belonging, tolerance and friendship make it all worth while.

Jump forward to 2007 and The London Eye Mystery. Siobhan Dowd's story is set in a very modern London with characters who also share a love of architecture and design.

It would be easy to call this book A Curious Incident of the Dog at Night Time for 10 year olds, but it probably shares more in common with the feel-good Wonder by R J Palacio.

At it's heart is the mysterious disappearance of cousin Salim, who went into a pod on the London Eye, but didn't come down. His cousins, Ted and Kat spend the book working out what happened using logic, patterns and inductive reasoning. Ted is high functioning on the autism spectrum whilst Kat is a young girl of action.

The mystery is fairly simple to work out, but there's enough tension to keep young readers second guessing for a while. The part that appealed to me the most, though, was the love-letter to London feel that infused the whole story. Having spent quite a bit of time in London over the years, I was able to picture myself walking the same streets, riding the Tube, hearing the accents and experiencing the weather along with Ted and Kat.

My copy of The London Eye Mystery is a new edition (2015) with an Introduction by Robin Stevens. She says,

A mystery writer must play fair, but also play tricks: all the clues must be laid out in plain sight, while at the same time the reader is persuaded to ignore them until it's too late.

As an adult you can see how Dowd has done this, but there are enough distractions along the way to keep even the most critical reader a little wrong-footed at times.

Sadly, Dowd died in 2007 leaving behind one unfinished book idea (which Patrick Ness turned into A Monster Calls). Robin Stevens has now written a follow-up book about Ted and Kat called The Guggenheim Mystery published last month. I'm keen to see how the transition works.

David Dean's iconic retro covers may look familiar as his work has been used for many of Michael Morpurgo and Lauren St John's recent editions as well.

Chasing the Sky edited by Dean Dewhirst

Chasing the Sky: 20 Stories in of Women in Architecture was a surprise read for me. Let's face it, the cover is not that enticing, but in my role as Non-Fiction editor at the Australian Women Writer's Blog, I'm very aware of the dearth of AWW non-fiction titles being read and reviewed at the moment. So I decided to lead by example!

Inside this plain cover was a treasure trove of magnificent full page glossy photos of the twenty women's work, complete with their bio's and thoughts about architecture in general.

Their passion was obvious, as too their dedication, creativity and hard work. They were concerned with environmental factors, social justice issues and the role of aesthetics and functionality.

The book is truly beautiful, full of fascinating and inspiring women. But is it wrong of me to still wish that it had a nicer cover to entice more people to open it up?

My only other beef with the design were the photo blurbs that were turned sideways on the page. It was annoying and awkward turning the soft cover book around every page to read them.

Image: Jessica Lindsay / Maven Publishing

Maven Publishing is a new Sydney-based publishing house who focus on storytelling and documenting about the built environment - financial, design and construction.

The book is a successor and companion to Dewhirst’s earlier work, From the Ground Up: 20 Stories of a Life in Architecture (2014), which adhered to a similar format but contained only five women architects. Research published in 2012 by Gillian Matthewson found that only 20.6% of registered architects were women. In a lecture on equality in architecture delivered in 2011, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design at the University of Melbourne Dr Karen Burns said: “Examination of gender representation in the architectural profession reveals [a] curiosity: only very small numbers of women occupy senior positions […] The statistics from the architecture profession confirm a broader social trend within professions and business. Many of these areas report a gap between women’s access to education and subsequent professional achievement.”

From Architectureau.com.

The book is edited and introduced by Dean Dewhirst with a foreward by Maryam Gusheh. All twenty women then tell their own stories within a generous 10-12 pages spread. A small 'Life Lessons' tab in the middle section highlights a number of their key points for quick reference.

Each woman was obviously given a brief about the kind of content required for the book with a few key areas to cover. We learnt about their background and introduction to architecture (I was interested to note that the majority had a parent or family member already involved in architecture, design or creative pursuits somehow). They talked about their education and any challenges they had getting started. Passion, reward and ambition were three words referenced by nearly all twenty women.

Gender parity was discussed; most agreed that they had not really experienced any disadvantage by being a women, except for when children were born. They were all fortunate that their partners embraced the concept of shared parenting, but it wasn't easy for the men to do this with our society's current model for work. As Abbie Galvin said, 'work/life balance simply cannot be a woman's issue. It must be an issue that faces men, women, the old, the young, those with family and those without.'

The twenty architects were: Emma Williamson, Camilla Block, Hannah Tribe, Rachel Nolan, Stephanie Little, Tara Veldman, Penny Fuller, Sarah Ball, Debbie Ryan, Rachel Neeson, Sue Carr, Melissa Bright, Lisa-Maree Carrigan, Clare Cousins, Abbie Galvin, Ingrid Richards, Annabel Lahz, Christina Na-Heon Cho, Kerstin Thompson & Virginia Kerridge.

Image: Jessica Lindsay / Maven Publishing

I think I must have a frustrated architect lurking inside of me as my obsession with this book became a little OTT. I found myself jotting down quotes from nearly every architect on Goodreads - a few of which I will share with you below.

Penny Fuller - It wasn't important to know everything, that is impossible. However, you need to develop a process to find out what you don't know from day one.


Tara Veldman - Throughout history, people have built environments that simply provide shelter. Function does not deny good design in fact they are symbiotic. Architecture is both the process and the product of planning, designing and constructing....The built-environment has a physical impact on everyone who experiences the space for generations to come.


Emma Williamson - I am always very conscious of the fact that a building will last longer than I will. Once the project is over the buildings needs to have a full and happy life with its users. For that to happen the building needs to reflect the client's aspirations not just an idea imposed by an architect.

Image: Jessica Lindsay / Maven Publishing

Sarah Ball - The moments of visiting site and realising the drawing come to life is like an injection of pure wonderment. It goes beyond the physical realisation of if it looks exactly how you hoped it would. It is more a feeling of place - it gives me goose bumps.

Melissa Bright - current standards of building...are not good enough. Apartments are built for selling, not for making the homes for residents of our cities in the future....If we are to live more closely to one another, good innovative design is essential to ensure the living quality is not reduced.

Kerstin Thompson - This involves encouraging even the most private projects to provide a public benefit and support community life. Broader questions need to be asked about the way buildings are designed. How does this building contribute to its neighbourhood?Is it kind to its neighbours? Does it increase the quality of the street it's in? Is what's being proposed better than what's already there?

I so wish a few more architects, developers and home owners asked themselves these questions before embarking on a project or home renovation!

Chasing the Sky is a coffee table book, despite it's soft, nondescript cover. Inside it is elegant and informative and feels quite luxurious as you're reading it.

Highly recommended to anyone interested in creativity, design and building.