Fabric of the night sky, 17 April 2020

The sky can be a dark shroud. The medieval  Greek Easter chant has it "oh light that gives my eyes light, my gentle son, my sweet child, why does the tomb now hide you?" Lamentation is the oldest artform of women. I had never really heard a full bodied lament until I heard Tiwi women mourning the dead iin a highpitched ululation that would have been understood in Mycenaean times. What a relief to weep for all the lost ones. The sighing wind blows clouds so that the night sky is thick with darkness. I dream that everyone is contagious.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Fabric of the night sky',watercolour on Canzon pape,r 15 x 21 cm, 17 April 2020

From the edge of the sea, 16 April, 2020

A quiet overcast day, with all the life of the city held in suspension. A dried piece of twisted kelp stalk suggests a natural weaving. It was picked up with a cockle shell and cuttlefish bone  in the summer on a vast North Coast beach. 

The  edge of the sea was considered a magical border zone by the Celts. In this place between water and land you could suspend your ordinary pattern and make changes and promises that might transform everything. Kelp covers beaches after storms, torn up by fierce seas from the great forests in the ocean. Tasmanian women have always made water carriers stitched  from a flat piece of bull kelp. This contorted strand  looks like a sign or message from another world.

Diana Wood Conroy, 'From the edge of the sea',watercolour on Canzon paper 15 x 21 cm, 16 April, 2020

Rose with theatre, 15 April 2020

Radiant light all day, with no clouds but a slight smoke haze where someone is burning off.

The quietness of the suburb is like childhood when there were fewer cars and you heard the voices of neighbours walking up and down the road, and children calling. And dogs barking in a sudden cacophony. Flowers are often a memento mori, a reminder of things passing. The little Greek theatre speaks for all the anonymous vanished people who once thronged the theatres for the great festivals. Although they may have had to sit high up, a long way from the action in the orchestra, the forgotten ordinary people were integral to life in theatre and town.

Here are some of the lost occupations of people who came to the theatre, occupations gleaned from inscriptions.  There were wool-workers, seamstresses, weavers and spinning girls, as well as sesame-seed sellers, grocers and salt vendors, horse-tenders, perfume-vendors, musicians, honey and frankinsense sellers, and gilders of helmets. Also represented were concubines, procuresses, wet nurses, harp and lyre players. The garland-weavers were in constant demand for fresh garlands every morning using different flowers for different occasions.

When our country gets back to normal, perhaps all the usual occupations will have changed. Perhaps we will once more need garland-weavers in a slower world. 

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Rose with theatre', watercolour on Canzon paper 15 x 21 cm, 15 April 2020

Flowers with moufflon, 14 April 2020

The untended flowers in the garden that keep blossoming are a great comfort - uriops the yellow daisy, geraniums and blue sparaxis, zinnias and salvias, pineapple sage. I used to take a little bunch of such flowers to my mum when she was old and faint and losing her memory and we would slowly name each one, her eyes lighting up with pleasure, lifting a bent hand to touch the petals. What a garden she created, searching out rare flowers and always extending the garden beds to have more blossoms. I remember her tiger lilies as a child, as tall as I was, staring at me as I gazed at them. She and my grandmother had a dictum: if there is a desirable plant drooping into the public space of the footpath you may snip a small cutting. They both carried scissors in their capacious handbags as they walked the streets to the shops. 

I am glad everyone is gardening in these luminous autumn days, so that Bunnings is almost out of seedlings and seeds. Laying down memories for children. Her garden has gone, but I remember every plant and tree. 

People pick those little bunches everywhere. i remember being in Ephesus in Turkey, where the guide who took me around the ruined basilica of St John was an old weathered man. He kept picking flowers and giving them to me, red roses, hyacinths, clustered together like an Ottoman embroidery.

Diana Wood Conroy' Flowers with moufflon', watercolour on Canzon paper 15 x 21 cm,14 April 2020

Parrot at table with tamarind pod, 14 April, 2020

 Three weeks of self-isolation have passed but it seems longer because the world keeps changing. Australia is even more cut off than it was when as a child my family travelled to England on a P&O passenger ship, taking six weeks. A torrent of deaths in Britain puts older people on a wartime footing. A well-travelled friend does all her meeting in Europe by Zoom, and has one early morning walk to the promenade at Hastings via a park where there are suddenly robins. She can't see her mother in a nursing home, which has become enclosed like a Trappist nunnery.  Exhausted travellers from many countries struggle to get charter flights back to Australia, returning to two weeks quarantine.

People on the Tiwi Islands were used to being cut off. The tamarind pod with its double bulge comes from a great shady tree  seeded by Macassans from Indonesia who came each year to harvest sea slugs for the Chinese market. An artist friend there said as we talked about Covid 19, "well we could just go bush again like we did in the war". The antiquity of the Tiwi people, who have lived on their islands for possibly ten thousand years, makes the ancientness of Greeks and Romans look recent. 

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Parrot at table with tamarind pod', watercolour on Canzon paper, 15 x 21 cm, 14 April, 2020