"Fang-cam" and chopper cam

Life would have been so much easier if I hadn't discovered that one of my neighbours had sent up a tiny helicopter behind my fence, to film me watering my garden. I had heard the noise a year before and thought that it was a little go-cart, riding up and down the fence-line. 

Seering wind...

A small bird with a slender, curved beak, sat on the sill outside my window. It was panting: holding it's beak open as it struggled in the 40 degree Celcius heat. This is the harshest of places, sometimes. 

dheborah

"Special Star", by Mango Groove, released almost 25 years ago...during terrible, terrible times:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4HJfcecgos

Bats and stuff...

After driving a few hundred kilometres home, after work, I had set up a small table in my lounge with some Halloween things but it was getting late.  It was starting to get dark. I opened my front door to remove the tarantula from my letter box. Two little ghosts stood on my porch with their backs to me, facing their dad, standing a short distance way. "Oh, I am so glad you are here. I was just packing up. I've just got home and I was really late this year. I thought no-one was coming. Would you like some spider webs?" the ghosts nodded at me politely and I packed some bags with "ghost-stuff". An eyeball, some fimo bones, a ring , some spider webs and a spider should do, I thought. I forgot to put in some plastic flies. Ghosts are great to have around. Earlier today, I had leaned out of the nurses station window a few times  with a large brandy balloon filled with sour pink ear-shaped  jubes and asked, "Would you like an ear to suck?". I had given the kitchen staff and the nurses a bottle of West Australian wine each.This was the first time in years that  I hadn't received a pumpkin or a set of rotten, green witches fangs for my birthday. 

Angiographics

As a stent/graft production assistant, I used to spend hours sewing tiny, solid gold beads onto delicate aortic aneurism graft prototypes. 

Dheborah

Shiver wing, shiver....

The Room with the Blue Feather

The Pie Shop, Apparently...

The Serpent's Egg.

At work.

The most sacred.

I took three roads to get to the rock. The Ballardong Nyoongar people know it well. I drove past a Wedge-tail eagle balanced on the flank of a sheep's carcass, moments before I reached a dirt road that eventually brought me to this place. When I filled my tank at a neighbouring town, the storeman said that he hadn't heard of this place: perhaps I had only dreamed of it. The day was 'Makuru' but the season was 'Djilba'. 

Despite the wind and the rain,when I got here, I felt happy. Climbing Dingo hill, the vast area of cracked rock became more immense and I could feel a presence on the expanse of stone. Between the pools were small moss-filled areas and patches of tiny, wild flowers... small sheets of butterfly food.

Pondering the purpose of the larger, carefully placed stones in the shallow rain-filled water pools, I imagined a child collecting water a thousand years ago, using the stones to stand on for safety, then throwing the smaller stones to scare off  wild dogs. I had never been here, yet I had been here a thousand times before.

I stepped over three little droppings as I left the rock... I had been watched.

Leda's Facet of Dioscuri

Pumpkins and Pin-cushions.

                                                                                                         pin                             

                                                                                         paper

Things that You Won't Find in your Soup....

photograph from Marcos (the "Venerable")

This beautifully crafted work is by Marcus of Melbourne.

Taboo - as - Tattoo.

t

Recently, it was proposed that an Australian tattoo register be made: this has led to varied reactions; mainly disbelief. Why would someone with a discreet tattoo wish to be linked to criminal social elements on a register that is obviously meant to be a tool to assist in the prevention of crime?

Looking at the changing face of tattoos, this version of adornment or beautification is creeping a little too close to a deliberate act of maiming and disfiguration. My recent exposure to non-mainstream tattoos on young females, sometimes by "famous" artists, has revealed a hideous side to the art. If the intention is not to beautify, according to an individual's personal taste, is the intention to disfigure?

Thirty years ago, a Point Road tattoo artist, in the red-light district of Durban, told me that the best tattooists had a code of ethics, which included not tattooing faces and hands. 

Yes, a tattoo register could be a useful social tool but not for the tattooed...I think that every owner of a tattoo tool, tattoo kit, or tattoo business, and any person performing tattoos, should be on a register with  a code of ethics and national regulations.

Tattoo crimes are happening today, but it is as taboo as the tattoo.

Faith in Our Maker : Dutiful Daughter.

Children have so much faith in their parents. In the order of heirachy, they are at the pinnacle of our lives. In our home, we just wore what we were given to wear (which included pale green knickers with a foam mushroom on the front, flared baby blue trousers and six inch platform sandals that matched my mother's); ate what was offered (mashed potatoes, boiled green beans, frozen carrots and Russian sausages) and did what we were told. 

"Doing what you are told" in my family was an inflexible option. One day, when I was sixteen, my dear mother carelessly said, "You have an appointment at the hair dressers for a perm tomorrow at two o'clock". We were living at a rural power-station village in Africa, so the hairdressing 'salon' was a walk away,  on the other side of the village. The next day, without any question and not a drop of hesitation, I walked to the salon and and presented myself for a 'perm'. A few hours later, I had been  transformed. The skinny, dark-haired kid from the convent had emerged looking like an astounding, two-legged tube with a pot scourer on it's head. For the next six months, I lived a very visible school life performing activities as a fund-raising ball waitress and reading in church for the nuns. 

Not realising that my 'perm' had reduced my invisibility, in preparation for church readings, I would sit through the boarder's two hour study session in the school hall with two pink foam curlers in my  hair, above my forehead. By the time I stood at the pulpit, I had two perfectly formed sausages above my brows, one on the left and one on the right, to supervise my biblical reading. So, every Wednesday, religiously, the nuns would ask me to do another reading…and  every Wednesday, about a hundred people, witnesses to the faith I had in my very own mother, concentrated carefully, as I stood before them, with my power-station 'perm'  and delivered the selected psalms to the cathedral. 

Digital Illustration: "Divisions"

"Divisions"

by dheborah

In 1982, while a nursing student in Durban, the first official case of Aids was announced in South Africa. Over the next decade, the nation experienced civil unrest, the threat of terrorism and the most terrible of times. Today, over 360 000 people in Natal are suffering from Aids. Somewhere in between, however, people...even the poorest of the poorest, still managed to find moments of joy and glimpses of the exquisite...which, when pieced together, could only be described as a "beautiful life". In Durban, the Durban 'Alternatives' would dance...dance in dark, unadvertised spaces; some of which were in back alleys and under-ground night clubs.

Digital Illustration: " Places Where We used to Dance".

"The Haunted Fish Tank"

by Dheborah

Digital Illustration: "Our Beautiful Life".

by dheborah

Digital Illustration: "I never knew..."

Potentially wonderful moments in Australian fashion history........

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/fashion-beauty/former-political-fixer-lachlan-harris-launches-push-to-ban-8216ugly8217-onesies/story-fnet01u7-1226677714111

Winter Pinnacles. Australia.

This photograph was taken at the Pinnacles, in Western Australia, June 2013.

I have always wondered, "Do trees move when the wind doesn't blow?"

Bright shallows...photograph of stromatolites.

I stood  between stone towers and stepped over deep emu prints on wind-rippled  white dunes today. I breathed in the air around a Stromatolite lake…I felt each one's  presence: strange particles that, before today, I never knew existed on our planet. They photosynthesise... they live...they have life.


Stromatolites are a geological and biological phenomenon. With no skeletal structure, the stony, bacterial  growths collapse at maturity, as seen in this photograph taken yesterday at Lake Thetis.

Walking on Blocks of Cheese...

I walked past a young boy trying to see behind the cheese in the "cheese-section" of a supermarket. He was kneeling on the giant blocks of cheddar cheese, inside the fridge, while his mother examined  her shopping list. As adults, we think we know what is behind the cheese, so we don't always see. 

Loaded vessels

After looking after patients on a spinal unit, recently, some of my life measurements were significantly altered. I realised that any personal  tears of frustration were indulgent, once I had discovered that I have measured my whole life by the wellness of the vessel that carried it. If I may call our bodies vessels, permit me to say that on that day, I was in the presence of two "perfect vessels"…one fat one and one with a rather extraordinary bee-hive hairdo. I was also in the presence of four damaged vessels, one who had lost the use of every limb,  and whose chest had been crushed in a car accident. Part of her mangled hand had been removed and she had a pacemaker implanted 16 weeks ago. In a few moments, she had lost her partner and, like her hand, someone's mother had her son torn from her invisible umbillical cord. She hadn't yet been home since her car accident, whle a life of tremendous  battles hadn't even begun. This was a "surviver-vessel". I was merely an insignificant little vessel that sometimes looked  for parking and a chair for my morning tea. 

Flying Nurses

Photograph taken out on a rural air-strip a few years ago, in Western Australia.

I took this picture while waiting on a small dirt runway in South West Australia while our patient waited on a stretcher in a corrugated iron shed. Emergency night transfers at the time required the State Emergency Services to set up runway lights in the dark. Today, many rural air-feilds have runway lights activated from the closest major metropolitan city, which  is  usually a few hundred kilometers away. Small, remote sites do still often rely on a local farmers's paddock (Boyupbrook have a fabulous paddock) for patient evacuations. The Royal Flying Doctor's planes will often land before us and pull up a few feet away from the ambulance. The patient is then transferred onto another trolley out in the open, on the runway, and then we load them up for their flight.

 One winter's afternoon, after a long drive through the Stirling ranges, our ambulance was diverted to an airfield in Albany. Two other ambulances were already waiting. Here, out on an icy tarmac, I met up with Val, a nurse I had worked with 17 years before. Delighted to catch up, we spoke briefly on the runway while a young doctor from Perth climbed into each ambulance to examine two patients destined for ICU and to do a ring block on a young man's badly injured hand. 

*Most of the present  Western Australian health sites are preventing nurses and  doctors from recording their experiences online and recent health department directives have made it an offence to keep online diaries of their unique work practice. 

When Ducks aren't ducks...

Midway through my second year as a fashion student, I found a black and white photograph that I fell in love with. I built concept cards around it; I made theme books to reflect ideas that came from it; I spent many weeks on a small, wonderful journey around it. The picture was of an extremely handsome, bare-chested man, seated with a large, swan across his lap. I had never seen anything so powerful nor so beautiful…it affected me. From that one photograph, which was strikingly not unlike a close friend and flat-mate, I spent hours printing pieces of textile and long pieces of silk. I imagined a world where everyone had gone, leaving behind one man: the "lawn-mower man".  For years, he kept mowing the huge lawns around a grand house, in the hope that one day someone would return.

My flat-mate had mowed the lawn once, so he became "the lawn-mower man". This evolved and by the end of the project, I grandiosely called my collection of final prints and items…"The Man With The Big Duck". I thought it was fabulous at the time and was so excited that I wanted to share it with everyone, including he whose likeness I had embodied into print.

Naively, I typed, "How is your Big Duck?" as a text message event  and sent it, so I could "show and tell" and finally share it with my male muse. Unfortunately, things may be read rather differently when you are not totally and absolutely wrapped into fashion. I think the  "U" may have been read as another letter in the alphabet and I have been deserted by the whipper-snipper person. He never saw the swan, and  I am sure he would have been rather complimented. But…swans are swans and ducks are ducks and now my life is nothing but bird seed.

The Future of Royal Perth Hospital.

The New Fiona Stanley Hospital will be an exciting but modest architectural achievement due to the considerations of the use of natural light and bird-attracting gardens...both condusive to healing and spiritual calmness. Royal Perth Hospital, on the other hand, prides itself on it' s trauma capacity and specialist services. Logistics will be the dilemma. I foresee an imminent and pressing need of planning for a permanent  "fly - in" helicopter - chapter for both facilities. 

Dheborah

You forgot something...

I spent another day doing a C.P.R course before heading home in the rain. Kwinana Freeway is fast becoming a deadly travel option. Two nine a.m smashes were still burning in my memory while travelling home in the afternoon. A half hour drive actually takes two hours on the freeway. Perth drivers often have a road-manners reluctance  so changing lanes often has a horrible sense of Russian Roulette. A hot, purple car dove slightly ahead of me to my left. Although I was in the right lane, my speed was around 45 km an hour most of the time. I glanced at the very cute purple sedan and three minutes later, with a few hundred other vehicles, found myself merging into one lane to drive around a freeway smash. A not so cute but badly crumpled purple vehicle lay adjacent to the concrete barriers, facing the oncoming traffic while a second, terribly mangled  vehicle took up another lane. Trucks with flashing "Slow down" signs with diversion lights  and police vehicles blocked all lanes except one. What could have been a nightmare in logistics became an exercise in courtesy…for a change. Almost miraculously , every driver tonight managed to "slow down" and allow other drivers into their single lane; not a single rude sign was made out of a window; every driver kept their car at a respectful snail's pace and I didn't feel sweaty apprehension moving over to the left.

Keep in mind that this was an opportunity for any doctor or nurse to offer assistance;  families could allow their children to be exposed to the perils of driving while it was an opportunity for roadside volunteers to offer a friendly gesture. Next to the safety cones, in a yellow waterproof suit, a handsome but  obviously annoyed young man stood directing concerned traffic and calling out…"Go Faster" with a touch of sarcasm in his voice. No-one cared that they were driving slowly at that moment…they were just relieved that they were not driving past bodies and carnage. The only thing I saw when I looked at him was not a demi - hero but someone who hadn't seen a  purple car tonight. The drive home is about getting home safely, not about dying to get home.

Tsubi : Sydney 2001

I tried to iron out every crease in the pants I was ironing for Tsubi. During Sydney's  Mercede's Benz Fashion Week  in 2001, as a backstage  volunteer, I had done everything from picking  up hundreds of pearls off the floor to knocking over a clothing rack while someone was being interviewed.  Mark, one of the organisers, put me in their backstage area as their "dresser". 

I thought, "Who the hell are these guys?!" All their pants had permanent creases in the crutches and I had never heard of this textile treatment…and holes…I remember finding a hole!  At first, i thought I was the ironing lady for some guys selling second-hand pants!

At the far end of the dressing room, men were stacking small cages of rats…lots and lots of rats. Two girls were sitting on the floor and were making  some kind of head-piece on a sewing machine. I thought I saw a wheelchair go past. A nice looking blonde guy handed me a tee-shirt with a big crumpled - up piece of newspaper sewn on the front and asked me, with the cheekiest of smiles, to iron it for him. I wasn't too sure whether he wanted the paper ironed or the tee-shirt so I took a chance. While I was doing this, a young sydney tech student tried to coerce me into giving my back-stage tag to him for his friend. "No way!" I said.: I' d got into enough trouble the day before when I had tried to watch a show with the ushers. 

A tall, quiet man from the group wrapped a long, thick piece of leather around the body and arm of a young blonde model and deliberated as to whether he should cut it or not. The piece draped behind her on the floor as she walked. It looked quite beautiful. 

The models went out moments after the rats were released onto the stage. Perspex stage edges were used and the audience made little squeals of both horror and delight as the show started. A male model fell through the curtain and knocked over my ironing board towards the end of the show. When I left at the end, I was still thinking, "Who the hell are these guys?"  Their clothes looked like they had been pulled out of a back-alley rubbish bin but the guys seemed quite nice.

Digital illustration: Experimenting with texture.

Little Dragons.

When I lifted my roof tiles from a pile on my porch, I was slightly startled by a little  speckled brown and white dragon. His movements were like the little flashes you see when watching scratchy old black and white silent movie shots. He adjusted his position  and waited a few seconds before flickering across my red tiles onto some  pine mulch. Before he vanished, he moved his diamond-shaped head and thrashed his tail once and then seemed to dissolve into his surroundings. He was rather regal and majestic and had a class of his own. I imagined his kingdom was great and his rule was powerful and dignified. I squashed the three little cockroaches that he had allowed to share his space. They were fat and oozed a white jelly from their bellies. Thinking of a stories I read as a child, the jelly was like the evils of the world, released from Pandora's jar, while the quiet, little wild dragon was more like the breath from the  spirit of Hope...the only thing that remained in the jar.

Wading to work...

On my first trip to the Solomon Islands, we landed on a small runway and walked past military vehicles and army tents pitched by soldiers from different Pacific nations. From that moment onwards, even when in the most remote islands, someone knew where we were. Aside from peace-keeping troops throughout the troubled region, difficult naval operations were taking place and it wasn't unusual to eat breakfast with soldiers that had spent days destroying sea mines and live bombs from WWII. We travelled between islands in small dinghy-sized motorised boats and held clinics for villagers on tiny, palm covered islands. On one island, we were greeted by a machete welding old man and had chickens walking amongst our equipment while villagers lined up to be seen. On another island, a large group of men with machetes were building canoes for the approaching Centenary  celebrations while on another, the villagers were summoned by a young male blowing into a giant sea-shell. Some of the women made plates from palm leaves for us to eat our lunch from and when we were finished our clinic, the same women watched us eat our cooked lunch inside a room with woven walls in a building on stilts. Each time we ate, after each clinic, we made sure that we told them that their meal had been better than the island before. The journey home to our base was a slow one on the first day ... partly because we were thrashed by a tropical storm and partly because we were five meals heavier than when we left. My new shoes took a beating because we had to wade through water on coral reefs to get back into our boat and I reluctantly put them into the rubbish bin before I went to bed on the second day.

Digital illustration: "Things that grow in my shoes"

"Things that grow in my shoes"

*(Everything on my site is my own work except for one photograph of the mars rover, "curiosity"...and that was because  I couldn't get there)

Pterodactyl tribe

The nearby water field had been dry for weeks and was a flat, white expanse of sand. Red-tailed cockatoos travel high  across my house in small groups every morning and every evening. I usually step outside and watch them... they look like pterodactyls flying through cloud. Following a similar flight-path, a larger group of white-tailed cockatoos (Carnaby cockatoos) occasionally fly over or feed near my house. They are easily disturbed and rarely cross over into residential areas. Two years ago, hail storms had killed large numbers of them and they were only now beginning to recover their numbers. They have large white cheek markings and are seldom seen up close.

A week ago,  a group of about forty white-tailed cockatoos landed on the tall, dead tree opposite my house. A large cockatoo landed on my fence and called the group. They were very nervous and flew over a few times before deciding whether to land or not.. It took about twenty minutes of encouragement from the courageous cockatoo  before the first bird landed on my fence above the  birdbaths. Then, in a graceful sea of kite-like sailing manoeuvres, one by one the birds came in and drank water, guarding and watching each other cautiously. Three sat on poles that small trees were tied to. One sat quietly while the other two chewed on the wood and chewed on my trees.The others lined up on my fence. One of the last birds to land, held a small, dead  baby cockatoo in it's beak. She never came in to drink. Then, as they left, sometimes coming back for a second drink, they cut through the air between the trees and over the empty road like a sea of gliders. Their characteristic cry cut through the resting sky.

For two mornings and two evenings, I was graced by their presence, almost honoured that they had chosen my garden. When the nearby lake was dry, the cockatoos would change their flight path through the trees home and drink at another recovered wetland. The two days that they came into my garden, large trucks had been parked near the waterway to do day and night roadworks. When the trucks left, the endangered cockatoos never came back to my garden, despite the heat. They had endured weeks of relentless, searing heat and been desperate for water. I had indeed been privileged. In fact, I had been visited...visited by a rare  tribe.

Digital Illustration: "Night and Hell and I"

"Night and Hell and I"

Digital Illustration: "The Gate-keeper...Servant of Artemis"

"Servant of Artemis"

Digital Illustration: "Glide"

"Glide"

Digital illustration, "Egg message from Eggflower".

"Egg message from Eggflower" 

Head-hunters of the Pacific..."they fed me chicken"...

I took these photographs on a small, isolated island after flying for a day over volcanoes and jungle. This is not in an easily accessible region and the area is malaria-ridden... sometimes the ground trembles. As advised, permission was sought from a local chief before travelling in a small, motorised boat. Eerily, a large, rusting metal bowl with trecherous-looking spikes lay on it's side, balanced on a slope leading to white beach...just an old sea mine from World War II. The island is watched over by local traditional carvers who still travel by dug-out canoe. If anyone argues that head-hunting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is merely a myth... they are wrong.  Dheborah

...about the bugs on the gate...

Driving through a small town called Wagin on Thursday morning, I passed a faded old sign with a blue Fleur de Lis painted on a rusty old background. Further along someone had hung a scrap of white cardboard with "bugs" painted on it. Another roughly painted sign, further along, said,"Brekkie at 7:30" and a hand-drawn arrow pointed to a small, lovely park. Standing next to an old red car, was an old lady drinking a cup of coffee. I almost expected to see a handful of Boy-scouts with bug-collecting equipment gathering for breakfast next to the car park.

That's strange, I thought, I had spoken to someone about a Fleur de Lis only days before. He was quite nice. Maybe those dots on the drawings for my gates were bugs...no, I bet they were soldering points or something...hot, fusion points. 

A three hour drive in Australia is considered a short one. That's not to say that it hasn't killed anyone. Longer journeys on Australian roads often call for the most basic travelling items. 

• The most obvious is a cooler bag or Eski: keep one in your car. They can be used when you purchase or carry hot or cold food items. Small frozen icepacks are "o.k" but the laws of science will tell you that large masses of ice will remain frozen longer. I freeze a couple of one and two litre containers (plastic juice bottles with handles and pancake mix bottles filled with frozen water are easy to  pack amongst food) one or two days before travelling and put them into my cooler, knowing that these will remain frozen for a couple of days. 

• A can of tyre sealant and a small $20 fire extinguisher will make you feel a bit more prepared. Some travellers carry their own car battery rechargers in larger vehicles. Solar-powered batteries are available in metropolitan areas and can be used for running some appliances in camper vans.

• A large plastic container of water is unquestionable. Various emergency situations may call for this. If you get stranded on a hot roadside it can be used for burns, to fill a cooled-down radiator, hand and face washing or  to dampen clothing or hair. Hours without shade in 38-43 degrees C heat and no fluids is a good formula for perishing on an isolated road. There is a good chance that you won't need it for yourself but to assist someone else.

• Self-heating cans of coffee (the Japanese have used these for over a decade) are available at a few petrol stations.

• A piece of "tarp" or canvas with ringed rope holes and some nylon rope as well as a small, lightweight blanket are often useful. The "tarp" can be used for a multitude of things. This can serve as a shade-cloth if need be (clamp-on shade tarps are available at camping shops)…I saw someone using one while  changing a tyre a few days ago. If you are unlucky enough to hit a large kangaroo ( in some areas, a camel)or livestock, this can be used to drag it safely off the road by folding it in half and sliding it. Animal carcasses are a danger to small cars and  motorbikes in the dark. Sheep and kangaroos go through windscreens every day...if they get thrown through the driver's cabin, they often drop pellets. You can protect your car if you end up carrying a filthy item in your boot, while it can also  be useful for sitting on for an all-day roadside wait.For very long trips, consider getting a small GPRS item (there are a number now available) to trace you if you run into difficulties. Some are small enough to clip onto a back-pack.

• $5 bags of mulch are sold at all garden shops and hardware shops and are great for packing around heavy items on the backs of utes. At the end of your trip, they can be given to someone as a gift for their garden.

Gates for Vikings...

I think I have found someone who will build a gate for my wild honey-eater....

dheborah

Digital Illustration..."Why..."

by Dheborah

(...it's too hot tonight)