Slow Magazine issue 9 - PREVIEW

TREE CHANGE, SEA CHANGE, ME CHANGE.

OFFBEAT & OFFSET

MEETING JANE HALL, URBAN ARTIST, CHOOK FANCIER AND LOVER OF HER OWN SWEET TIME TIME TO CHILL?

ASH GRUNWALD

PUTS THE BRAKES ON

ITALIAN FEAST

ONE FAMILY’S SUNDAY GATHERING

AUS

$8.90 + GST

LESS IS MORE JEFFREY BOOTH ASKS, DO WE NEED GRAND DESIGNS?

AUD $8.90 (inc.GST)

ISSN 1836-4446

www.slowmagazine.com.au

ISSUE NINE 2011

www.slowmagazine.com.au

WE AVOID THE SHORT CUTS IN SPA COUNTRY

DAYLESFORD & HEPBURN SPRINGS PLUS

MUSIC, BOOKS VILLAS IN VICTORIA COMFY SLOW COOKING THE DIRT ON SMALL GARDENS BURMA BY TRAIN, WHAT’S THE HURRY? WIN BOOKS, SKINCARE AND SEEDS

PHOTOGRAPHY SIMON ANDERSON PRODUCTION/STYLING ANTHONY JARVIS HAIR/MAKE-UP APRIL ROBINSON

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Hall’s mark

CAN YOU LIVE A ‘SLOW’ LIFE IN THE CITY? SUE PEACOCK TALKS TO AN ARTIST WHO AVOIDS FRIDAY AFTERNOON TRAFFIC AND TOO MANY APPOINTMENTS IN ONE DAY. 3 SLOW MAGAZINE

T THE END of a pristine row of carefully renovated cottages sits a house with a working outside dunny, a nanna garden and a brood of mongrel bantam chooks.

This is artist Jane Hall’s house, squeezed in at the end of what looks like a dead-ender, until you get close and spy a bluestone-cobbled laneway typical of Melbourne’s inner suburbs sneaking off to the right.

I am a little surprised to find her here in Seddon – a former working-class suburb just seven kilometres west of the city.

Surprised because, unlike some of her neighbours, she managed to stay out of the way of the gentrification juggernaut which rolled through the area a few years ago, ripping up many of the area’s working class roots and squeezing a number of small businesses and low income earners out.

The street’s cottages, painted in various shades of off-white and finished with delicate lavender and white iceberg rose gardens, mark

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the shift to the new demographic.

Unlike many of her newer neighbours, city workers who scurry off early to get a seat on the train and avoid the peak hour squish – she rides her bike or walks to her workspace.

When I arrive on Jane’s doorstep I smile. The front door is fire-engine red and hidden by a sturdy brown security screen.

Old birdcages hang from the verandah beams while below plants spill everywhere.

When she opens the door to greet me, she realises her (non-vintage) apron is still hanging loose around her neck.

Slightly embarrassed, she laughs as she whips it off and balls it up in her hand before beckoning me inside and through to the kitchen at the rear.

“Come in, come in,” she urges.

“Are you hungry? Is it warm enough in here?” she adds, with reference to the mid-winter weather.

I’m here for lunch and to talk about her work and forthcoming exhibition, but before we eat she shows me her garden, and her beloved brown silkies and Japanese bantams.

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» As we meander about I feel secretly delighted to find such an urban bastion of ‘slowness’. “I just love watching them,” she says, referring to the chooks.

Many of the plants in her garden are special, she later explains, because they have come from people she has loved. There are annuals from her old next-door neighbour – 94 year-old Viley – and a couple of roses dug up from her folks’ place. There is also a slipper orchid, which flowered on the anniversary of her mother’s passing.

“She said it wouldn’t flower but it did after she died,” she says. A lime tree was a birthday gift from friends who also gave her some gin and tonic to go with it. It took a few years but the tree is now prolific and more than capable of keeping up with the demand for G&Ts. ‘Nanna cannas’ from another friend unfurl against the high corrugated iron back fence while salvias fight for space and sun.

Back inside we retire to the warmth of her lounge room to discuss her art and her work as an English teacher with migrant workers.

Jane is a painter and award-winning printmaker who has exhibited her work over three decades as far afield as Canada, the United States, Finland, Korea and Japan. She describes her work as abstract, intuitive and organic.

Unlike most printmakers who produce limited editions, she creates offset monoprints on an old lithographic press. This is a rare form of printing where each work is unique and cannot be repeated.

“I don’t make editions,” she explains, leaning back on the couch with her feet up on the coffee table. “One is enough.”

This ‘less is more’ belief was instilled during four years living in Japan studying papermaking and printmaking.

“The Japanese have this wonderful attention to aesthetics which is taken to every aspect of life,” she explains.

“For instance on a summer’s day, they might serve food in a bowl which resembles ice in order to soothe and make you feel cooler,” she adds, before hopping up to check the pumpkin soup she’s prepared for lunch.

When she returns she talks about her approach to her work.

“It may not be obvious but my work does come from the immediate experience around me,” she explains.

Her teaching of English in factories or businesses has often provided inspiration for her abstract prints.

“It might be a sign or something as simple as brightly coloured earmuffs,” she says. “Or a big square vat of pigmeat.”

Hall has worked with migrant communities on the payroll of many of the city’s manufacturers including the now closed Arnott’s biscuits and SAFCOL fish cannery, plus meat producer Don Smallgoods and car-maker Holden. She once got a class to title her works.

Over lunch in her cosy kitchen – where one wall is completely covered with notes, photos, aspiration sayings and topped by an eclectic row of clocks – we discuss everything from travel and working as a nude sculptor’s model to tea cosies and renovating. » 7 SLOW MAGAZINE

When making art I need time to reach the zone in which to create then time to maintain it. » We share the table with an architect’s model showing her modest renovation plans to improve the cottage’s passive solar capabilities while at the same time retaining a lush garden.

She’s just not sure how she’s going to cope with an inside toilet.

After enjoying soup – we walk the streets to her studio, an old pipe-making factory she shares with a puppet-maker and a trumpeter, among others.

Once there, she unveils whole sets of prints she is currently working on.

For some, the building of layers using “lozenges of colour” as one reviewer put it, has only just begun while others are almost finished.

“When making art I need time to reach the zone in which to create then time to maintain it,” she says.

“I don’t think you can rush into an intuitive response to stimulus.” She pauses before adding, “Well, perhaps the making can be immediate but the steeping of ideas and emotions takes time.”

Jane had a lot of time to observe and absorb during the year she watched her mother dying. She produced a body of work about the close proximity of death from the experience.

She describes what she does as making marks on paper. She then works to reveal the relationships between the marks. Emotion is in the colours and combinations can change.

Far from being a miasma of grief, the works are emotional drawings or depictions of people including loved ones she came across in her mother’s nursing home and palliative care unit – like the fellow who would sing from his deathbed for everyone bar his wife, or the petals trailing across the floor as a family member carried a bunch of past-it flowers out of the hospital.

It requires discipline and a slow consciousness to create work which appears simple and sparse, yet, which can also convey emotion.

She even titled one piece ‘Failed To Die’, or FTD, the acronym for the palliative care patient who just won’t lie down and die and instead has to go home.

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These works are full of deep blues, sea greens and pinks – some are bold and heavy and some are almost translucent.

Jane is working towards a colour works exhibition entitled Pictorial Haiku at the MARS gallery in Port Melbourne in November, continuing a biennial tradition of shows. She will also be part of the western suburbs’ Big West Festival ‘larger than life’ group show in Newport with an installation of black and white works entitled Uncontained Sound.

“I want to go and listen to the sounds of what living in the ‘west’ is like, for me that means the sounds of manufacturing and machinery, and take that experience to create sound provocation works,” she says.

In the meantime she plans to continue to live ‘slowly’ which means not making too many appointments in one day and thus allowing events to evolve or the spontaneous to unravel.

“These moments are often most inspirational, where material for reflection is found.” www.janehallartist.com

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B OT TLE NE C K

I’ve found you cannot preserve bubbles by dangling a spoon in the bottle.

RESERVE BRUT PINOT NOIR CHARDONNAY (NV) RRP $17.00 Currency Creek Estate, Currency Creek, South Australia Winemaker: John Loxton His notes: A blend of pinot noir and chardonnay this wine exhibits fresh, lively fruit and produces a stylish, soft sparkling wine. Aged on lees for approximately four months to imbue creamy, cracked yeast characteristics. The natural salmon blush comes from contact with the pinot’s red skins, and is enhanced by minimal extraction. The strawberry flavours from the pinot, and the peach and stone fruit character of the chardonnay, combine with the complexity of a full malolactic fermentation to result in a wine of great elegance and length. It has a fine persistent bead that melts into a creamy mousse.

For stockists, log onto www.ballaststonewines.com

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WELCOME TO BOTTLENECK IN EVERY ISSUE OF SLOW MAGAZINE WE MEET UP WITH A NOVICE (THE ONE WHO KNOWS ZIP ABOUT WINES) AND AN EXPERT (THE OTHER, WHO JUST HAPPENS TO LIVE AND BREATHE THE STUFF). IN SEPARATE LOCATIONS, WE PRESENT A WINE FOR A BLIND TASTING – SO OUR GUESTS CAN DESCRIBE THE WINE THEY SAVOUR, WITHOUT THE LABEL TO INTERFERE WITH THEIR INSTINCTIVE PALATES. HERE’S HOW THEY FARED …

Brut Pinot Noir Chardonnay NOVICE

EXPERT

A deadline for a wine review creates pressure like no other.

The fancy bottle suggests a premium product aimed at the quality sparkling market. The ‘Zork’ plastic tear-off stopper suggests a progressive rather than traditional producer, and I unwrapped its skirt with difficulty and a trepidatious fear of shooting somebody.

I don’t usually require an occasion to drink – as a parent of too many young children (seven with wind-chill factor) any evening is cause enough – but sparkling wine seems different, somehow.

Sparkling (I’ve had to resist calling it Champagne) needs an occasion, mainly because the stuff doesn’t keep till the next day.

This, of course, is especially relevant if you, like me, are inclined to enjoy drinking responsibly, and in moderation, on your own.

(By the way, I’ve found you cannot preserve bubbles by dangling a spoon in the bottle. Believing in that is like believing pizza tastes better the morning after – it’s a student thing.)

Anyway, back to my dilemma: I’m given a bottle-tree-shaped bottle, a deadline within days, and the only thing I have to work with is National Eosinophilic Gastrointestinal Disorders Week. Still, I figure there are worse things than drinking to your gut, and it is Tuesday afternoon, after all, so I un-plastic-stopper the corky thing, pour a lovely pale salmon-coloured drop into two glasses, and, clinking lustily, propose a happy toast to gastric reflux sufferers everywhere.

As is my custom, I sample the glass in my right hand first, then the left, then the right again, just to be safe. The unanimous opinion is that the aroma is of fruit syrup, that it’s very easy on the palate, that the finish is crisp and that it goes sublimely well with a corned beef sanga, with pickles. Put another way, this sparkling is not a dinner party number, more a bubbly that is perfectly suited to watching a recording of last Friday night’s football. Indeed, the bubbles last all four quarters.

The light pink ‘blush’ hue said straight away ‘pinot noir’.

BUT... the bead was on the large side and I found almost nothing on the nose. What there was, was very faint, very dry.

The palate had a ‘brut’ dryness but little or no fruit or yeast lees characteristics. It could almost have been soda water with a tiny dash of blackcurrant juice and citric acid. But am I being too hard?

Yes, but there is an upside, because its saving grace was the clean dryness, and the fact that it became more enjoyable as I drank. A refreshing sipper, I think there are several sparklers at a price point of $15 that give me this much pleasure.

A pinot (blanc de noirs) from a climate too warm for quality sparklers perhaps; picked at the right baumé for sparkling, but in a climate where the flavours are not there by then?

(Rating: 86 points / low bronze medal, because there’s nothing wrong with it, but not a lot to highly recommend it).

Eat it with … oysters or any delicate and subtle seafood that doesn’t want to be drowned in over-the-top sweet fruitiness and needs a clean fresh palate for the next mouthful.

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COUNT E R CU LTURE

Three getaways to make you feel like you got away ECO-LUXE Nestled in vineyard territory, stay at these eco-savvy, smartly-designed villas, and you’ll enjoy not only a soak in the divine spa, a sun on the deck, but you can peruse the estate’s plantings through the bedroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

A short stroll away and you’ll be at the cellar door … where you can sip anything from shiraz to sauvignon blanc. And when you feel like venturing further, visit the charming and historic streets of the Avoca township … and dine at the newly refurbed Avoca Hotel.

Mount Avoca Winery, Moates Lane, Avoca, VIC Tel: 03 5465 3282 www.eco-luxe.com.au

BOROKA DOWNS Supreme sophistication with pristine views and absolute privacy (except for the eyes of a curious kangaroo or two) is what Boroka Downs is all about. Situated on a former sheep property, this revegetated, wildlife-friendly address is the perfect place to slow down and just enjoy the natural environment while you lap up the luxury. Salubrious spa bath, fab fireplace and stylish simplicity all create a big, warm welcome. With the villas mostly designed for couples – it’s an ideal spot to explore and take some slow ‘twosome’ time out.

The Halls Gap Zoo is only a cooee away, with exotic animals and a beautiful habitat for the quirky meerkat. Local wineries, and the indulgence of Aveda beauty treatments are also not far away.

51 Birdswing Road, Halls Gap, VIC Tel: 03 5356 6243 www. borokadowns.com.au

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MOUNT STURGEON COTTAGES

HO W S L O W I S S L O W ?

There’s no phone, no television, and your mobile won’t find any range at all. However the upside is, (if that wasn’t already an upside) there are stunning views to soak up, and all the comfort you’ll need to sink into a sofa with a good book … for a very slow stay. Visit these beautiful little refurbished cottages, used as accommodation for the property’s shearers and cooks back in 1840 … and you’ll be sure to deposit it in your bank of lifelong memories.

The self-contained facilities make you feel at home, but if you’re feeling ultra laidback, let the barbie have a rest and dine out at the nearby Royal Mail Hotel, to experience its acclaimed ambience and outstanding cuisine. (And you’ll be relieved to know the hotel has access to all telecommunications, if your addiction symptoms persist.)

Royal Mail Hotel 98 Parker Street (Glenelg Hwy), Dunkeld, VIC Tel: 03 5577 2241 www.royalmail.com.au

THE SLOWEST PLANET in our solar system is Saturn, which moves through the zodiac in 29 years and 157 days. Its average speed is two minutes and one second per day. And that sounds pretty slow to me.

The World’s Slowest Comeback isn’t a comeback at all, it’s a ‘hot new band’ from Indiana. Band members are Derrick ‘Beardface’ Bailey on drums, John Bauer on guitar, Tyler ‘Gooch’ Burke on bass, Matt ‘Matty Ice’ Hollen on guitar and Will Furr on vocals. I have seen and listened to one minute and 20 seconds of a clip of one of their performances on YouTube and I have no reason to believe they will be successful.

You may find this hard to believe, but there’s a website called disneyinsidersecrets.com and on it, among other things, is a Disneyland Resort Yearly Attendance Chart.

Immediately below that heading, for reasons which escape me, a headline exhorts me to Buy Cheap Cialis (sex-enhancer drug) online. I decline and keep reading.

And I discover that there is no actual Slowest Day at Disneyland. There is however, a Lowest Attendance History Throughout The Year (Disney’s initial capitals, not mine). And the times to go to Disneyland, if you hate crowds, are these: January (except New Year’s Day) until just prior to Presidents’ week in February. The week following Labor Day until just prior to Thanksgiving week.

And the week following Thanksgiving until the week prior to Christmas.

So if you want people to think you’re a complete nerd, you now have the means of convincing them.

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