Travellin' Penguin

…but I wanted to tell you about the rally I went to here in Hobart on Saturday. In Australia we have Aussie Rules football that is quite popular in several states, though not all as others prefer rugby. Each state has one stadium to accommodate football, cricket or rugby. However Tasmania has two stadiums. One in the north that is currently under renovation and one in the south of the state. Several states have one or more football teams. Tasmania does not have a team. Tasmanians have wanted a team for years but usually support a favourite team in another state. We would like one.

Now the head of the AFL, Aus Football League got together with our state premiere and said we will give you a team. All you have to do is build a covered stadium for 750 million dollars. We will chip in 15 million and your taxpayers can pay the rest. Our premiere and this head guy from Melbourne went into a room and signed a secret deal approving this. No one else in parliament was allowed to learn the terms of this contract and still don’t. Then our prime minister weighed in and said, “We’ll give you 240 million dollars if you follow these redevelopment rules in this area of old warehouses, etc on your waterfront” . However all predictions indicate costs will blow out to a billion dollars and where are the engineers and builders coming from who will build it? Where will the traffic go? There is one main road that flows by the site. Not to mention it will be 10 stories high and overshadow the Cenotaph, the ground the war and veterans memorials are on. The mayor and city council don’t know the details either. It was a done deal and then announced in the media that this stadium will be built on the waterfront of Hobart. Right in town. Again, Ten stories high-highest building in Hobart. And it is on Indigenous historic land.

Well, the proverbial shit hit the fan throughout the state. Everyone wants a team but this is blackmail. We have homeless on our winter streets. We have people dying in ambulances. We have a mental health hospital closing its doors as the building is too old. We have environmental issues. We also have 70% of people in our state not wanting a third stadium in a state with 500,000 people. We are a small state.

On Saturday a protest as called for on Parliament House lawns after 7 days of organisation. 6,000 people from all over the state arrived at noon. Every branch of government was there. Two of the party our premiere belongs two resigned and became independents as they are against the whole thing. Tasmania’s liberal government is now in minority. They did have majority. For my North American friends the liberal party here is the conservative party unlike liberals in the USA being more to the left.

So now, no one knows what will happen but the protest was great and I went to it with my camera and took photos. The only book related bit of this post is that Richard Flanagan, a Booker prize winning author and homegrown here who loves this state, introduced the speakers.

I don’t get political in my blog but I want to share my photos and if this goes ahead Tasmania will have 3 large stadiums and maybe no team.

When you visit here be careful not to step over a cut down tree in the rainforest, step over a homeless person or get in the way of a ramped ambulance who cannot unload their patient for another few hours.

Members of the other political parties all sent messages that were read against the stadium by Australian actor Essie Davis.

Now a new week is underway and time will tell what the future holds. Until next time.

I will leave you with the proposed image. Not my photo🙄🙄

MONDAY: Weather here still chilly but have had sun. So good for the mood. Good session with the weights. Felt good to toss them around. Stayed in and got stuck into the book Lost and Found in Paris. A light but enjoyable read. Joan, married to film photographer Casey, works for a lovely art gallery and museum in Pasadena, California. The first few pages has Casey arriving at her work place, announcing he had twin boys with his assistant five yrs ago and would like them to all be a family. Of course he would be a proper father and live with his assistant but Joan could integrate the boys into her life. Well you can imagine how that goes over.

TUESDAY: Yesterday I streamed the film The Whale from Amazon while Mr Penguin was at the gym. I saw trailers here at our State Cinema, that has really interesting films. My sister enjoyed it. I, not as much. Online English teacher who is secondary teacher is morbidly obese. He left his family, wife and 8 yr old daughter for another man years previously. The love of his life. When the love of his life died, he compensated by developing an eating disorder of binging. He becomes completely incapacitated by his weight. He can barely move and is cared for by his boyfriend’s sister who is a nurse that drops in regularly. His angry daughter comes back into his life , now in grade 12. Failing at everything she needs help from her father to help her graduate. A young man also enters the picture claiming he is door knocking from a religious sect but he has his issues too as we later discover. The three of them develop a tenuous relationship. I thought the acting was very good especially from the main protagonist. However the entire movie until the end takes place in a living room with all curtains drawn. Lots of yelling, darkness, etc as the themes of homosexuality, religion and relationships are all thrown together. I found it melodramatic and filled with a good deal of Hollywood moralising. The movie is very dark due to the setting and with my eye sight I struggled at times to see. It did win 2 oscars at the Academy awards I’m told but don’t recall what categories. However, I take the Oscars with a grain of salt. Some will love it, others not so much.

Tuesday evening had me enjoying a meeting of Photo Club 2. Photo club 2 is the club I joined recently that I am enjoying mainly for the great socialisation and excursions they go on. Photo club 1 has more members and challenges, more instruction. I have been a member of no. 1 for 6 yrs. So I am meeting lots of new people and enjoying photography on many fronts.

WEDNESDAY: Today was a quiet gym day and lunch with a friend. So I’m going to move through Wednesday and Thursday…straight onto:

FRIDAY: We attended an interesting Fullers event this evening at the RACV hotel across the street from Fullers. We meet here for events that have more attendance. Women and Whitlam-Revisiting the Revolution edited by Michelle Arrow. We had a panel consisting of Michelle, Margaret Reynolds, former Senator 1983-1999 Qld., and former Tasmanian premiere Lara Giddings. Michelle discussed how she put the book together and Margaret is a minefield of stories of how women were treated in politics and especially in Townsville in the 1980s. It was an evening filled with lots of head shaking and laughs and “I don’t believe its” and “Weren’t they just awfuls”. The room was packed and our hour flew by with interesting questions at the end.

SATURDAY: was purely political but I will do a separate post on that as I have some photos I took to share of that day.

I hope you have all had a good week and as Arnie Schwarzenegger would say, I’ll be back!

I know, I know. Time gets away from me, no excuses. I’m just diving in with this past week. Tasmanian weather has turned quite cool. Inconsistent rain. Back and forth to doct for erratic, genetic blood pressure annoyances. Hopefully something will work soon. But exercising a lot this past week and reading again after a big slump of books in print.

Weekdays had the twice gym sessions with Daniel and the weights. I have paid for 10 sessions for a personal trainer, who has become a friend for 30 min sessions once a week. So that will get me to gym 3x a week between the two of them. Daniel does weights, Teresa who is 55 but looks 35 does PT for core strength. Then a bit on a treadmill.

I’m doing a 5 day intensive photography workshop/tour of the Flinders ranges in July . 8 people plus two very professional photographers teaching us from 5:30 am to 8pm for 5 days. I’ll either learn some wonderful techniques or lie dying in the outback somewhere. But looking forward to it. Really!

Friday I slung the camera over my shoulder and spent two hours walking around Battery Point in Hobart. It is the oldest neighbourhood here and very historic with lovely cottages, convict built walls and beautiful gardens and lovely cafes. One in particular is very good and always busy. The clouds were dark and threatening and I was sure I’d get wet. Sat outdoors, wrapped in my winter coat, enjoying the fresh air and a delicious quiche full of goat’s cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, side salad and a decaf cappuccino.

Then walked along Salamanca place, a historic area with many sandstone buildings, old trees and a large market on Saturdays. Not many people out due to the weather. There is a carriage with two wonderful horses that do rides around the area. The horses are very well cared for and beautifully groomed. Their work hours are not high. I stopped for a pat. Soxy and Rex, who is a beautiful strawberry roan. They were having lunch out of large buckets with grain. Rex got grumpy once his meal was finished. Waving his head around but soon got over it.

Saturday I went metal detecting up from our road about 4 or 5 kms near Mt Wellington (Kunanyi). It was a park with woodchips that had no lost gold rings in it. The green area next to bush and the swings had old foundations and lots of nails and junk metal. Probably destroyed in the very large 1967 bushfires that people still talk about.

That was my travel for the week. I might add, after detecting, I went to the Fern Tree tavern to sit outside in the sun and watch people walk off the hiking tails of the mountain in late afternoon. No decaf coffee (We aren’t a coffee shop! I was informed). Is there tea? Yes, English breakfast, Earl Grey, Green, Chamomile. Great I’ll have chamomile. Right, that will be $5.00. I paid and went outside, wrapped my scarf around my neck tighter, it was 5 degrees C (about 40 F) and sat at a table in the sun to wait for my pot of tea and a cup. Five minutes later out comes an old mug, filled with hot water and a teabag. I guess they are not a coffee shop, though in fairness I have had some very good meals at night time there. I enjoyed the scenery and I suppose everything balances out at the end.

Books. I have been listening to Patricia Highsmith’s diary again. It’s 986 pages! I will be listening to it for some time I’m sure. I really loved her book The Talented Mr Ripley and the play. She has quite a dark sense of quirkiness. We are only in year 1944 at the moment. No mention of the war for the past couple of years but all about her writing and love life which is quite skewed. Her love life, not her writing.

At the recommendation of a Fullers staff member I have begun the book by Lian Dolan called Lost and Found in Paris. So far I am enjoying it. The blurb states:

Joan Blakely had an unconventional childhood: the daughter of a globe-trotting supermodel and a world-famous artist. Her artist father died on 9/11, and Joan—an art historian by training—has spent more than a decade maintaining his legacy. Life in the art world is beginning to wear on her—and then one fateful afternoon her husband drops a bombshell: he’s fathered twins with another woman.

Furious but secretly pleased to have a reason to blow up her life, Joan impulsively decides to get out of town, booking a last-minute trip to Paris as an art courier: the person museums hire to fly valuable works of art to potential clients, discreetly stowed in their carry-on luggage. Sipping her champagne in business-class, she chats up her seatmate, Nate, a good-looking tech nerd who invites her to dinner in Paris. He doesn’t know she’s carrying drawings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But after a romantic dinner and an even more romantic night together, Joan wakes up next to her new lover to discover the drawings gone. Even more shocking is what’s been left in their place: a sketch from her father’s journals, which she thought had been lost when he died on 9/11, and a poem that reads like a treasure hunt.

With Nate as a sidekick, Joan will follow the clues all over Paris—from its grand cathedrals to the romantic bistros to the twisty side streets of Montmartre—hoping to recover the lost art, and her own sense of adventure. What she finds is even better than she’d expected.

It’s a bit fluffy but just what I needed to start reading real books again.

Okay, this is long. I’ll stop. Will let you know how next week goes. All the best to everyone.