Illawarra coast with ruined temple, 22 April 2020

Today, another encounter with the real world when I visited a medical centre. On the sunny path at the gateway lay a young woman collapsed in a faint after having an injection. The prone figure with two nurses bending over her, one supporting her with her arm, was like an ancient relief carving. Remembering my time in Athens as a student, I thought of how I had lived looking every day at the Acropolis looming over the city in all times and seasons, always turning my eyes to the ruined Parthenon with its uncanny proportions. Students then were allowed to visit it at the full moon, with no other lighting.

Now  a lifetime later, in a place unimagined to the builders of the Parthenon, those impressions linger. Le Corbusier the eminent modern architect put it forcefully. ‘It is the Acropolis made a rebel of me. One clear image will stand in my mind forever: the Parthenon. Stark, stripped, economical, violent; a clamorous outcry against a landscape of grace and terror. All strength and purity.’ The antithesis really to the much older Australian ethos, so it is as well to put the tiny simulacrum of the Parthenon in the scope of this shimmering country. 

Diana Wood Conroy 'Illawarra coast with ruined temple' watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 22 April 2020