(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher

Here is the CSIRO's crane set against some ominous-looking clouds. Naughty clouds!

Someone asked me the other day if Tasmania had a state nickname, or a state motto. My response was, "I think so". Of course, I had to look it up. A lot of people called us the Apple Isle at one time, but then Mother Britain got rid of all those tariffs protecting our apple industry, so we haven't been much of a dominant force in the world of apples of late.

Tasmanian license plates used to proclaim us the Holiday Isle, but then they were changed in the late 1990s to Tasmania - Your Natural State. I know that Tasmanian's are very proud of the complete absence of breast augmentations here, but sticking in on every number plate may be a little over the top!

Since early last year, the State have issued number plates expanding upon the theme, with Tasmania - Explore the possibilities now appearing on new plates. We are quite adventurous here in Tasmania ever since the success of the gay law reform movement, and I am proud to say that in 2009, you can see young Tasmanian men and women all over exploring the possibilities with each other pretty much everywhere you look. It's like that Blur song Girls and Boys writ large!

What all this has to do with either the crane [above], or the state motto - Ubertas et Fidelitas (Fertility and Faithfulness) - I will leave up to you imagination.

Comments

Anonymous said…

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10 January 2009 at 14:07

USelaine said…

I actually saw Rita Coolidge in person once, in a bookstore.

I'm sorry, what were we talking about?

11 January 2009 at 20:47

Kris McCracken said…

Gil, let me think about it.

Elaine, did you say hello? Did you ask what Kris Kristofferson is really like?

12 January 2009 at 13:37

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

This will hurt me...

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