(21.01.2025)
I am writing this Journal entry on Monday 20 January, six days after arriving at the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, almost 40 years since my last visit to the Bogong Village where I spent many family summer holidays as a child. It has been a strangely affecting experience returning to a place I once knew well but after a long hiatus seems incongruous, even surreal.
I am honoured to have been invited as a creative guest resident outside of the usual residency schedule to undertake a writing project which will largely reflect on my formative years through the lens of family history and personal memories triggered in the present in the Bogong/Alpine area.
There has certainly been a series of cerebral jolts as I come to terms with the distortions of memory, and the very real environmental changes that have occurred over the decades and reconciling these discrepancies with the sensory qualities and birdsong that remain consistent and crystalline as ever.
I was also delighted to be in attendance for the inaugural exhibition and floor talk in the B–CSC’s new gallery space by photographer Sara Lynch - Above the Snow Line - a beautiful but wistful exhibition about the existential threat to Snow Gums and to have enjoyed spending time talking with the artist and B–CSC co-director Madelynne Cornish over the last few days. I have also had the good fortune to meet locals who were primary school students in the building in which the B–CSC headquarters and gallery now resides, and spoken to them about changes they have seen in the village over the course of their lifetimes.
Tomorrow is Tuesday 21 January signifying the U.S Presidential Inauguration which looms over everything. I am half way through reading Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia which is as lamenting as it is compelling in its appraisal of the extraordinarily deep knowledge and skill of Indigenous land management, and the subsequent colossal losses incurred as result of colonisation for which we are now paying the price. Today I read Joëlle Gergis’ article – Beyond the LA Wildfires in the Saturday Paper which sums up all too succinctly the climate situation at hand.
The currawongs are signalling the end of the day.