Cairns

18 March 2010
A quiet day spent in and around Cairns doing a little bit of shopping; we found a shop selling clothing and other stuff which carried designs by an Australian artist named Ken Done – his quirky drawings appealed particularly to Gregg who bought no fewer than three T shirts, but as the shop was closing down and everything had 70% off it didn’t break the bank. Of course Chris bought a T shirt too but hers was far more of a fashion item than his. We also went along to a commercial art gallery selling Aboriginal art and bought a painting – we have been admiring Aboriginal art since our visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney but have never found one to buy that we really really liked as many of them seemed to come with an awful lot of mythical baggage and symbolism but today we found some paintings that, whilst still having symbolic meanings, had strong abstract tendencies, so we bought one!


In the afternoon we went along to one of Cairns two cultural venues – the Centre for Contemporary Art (CoCa) which had two shows one was paintings by north Queensland CoCa-member artists and the other was a film called ‘Them’ by Artur Zmijewski a Polish visual artist, filmmaker and photographer. ‘Them’ reads like a parody of an art crit-session. It documents a series of art workshops Zmijewski held with members of four Polish extremist groups. First he met with them separately, and had them paint a picture that portrayed their beliefs. Then he bought them together to ‘correct’ one another’s paintings. Conflict erupted as the Catholics and neo-nationalists united against the left-wingers and the Jewish youths. It started quite mildly with the left-wingers cutting open the church doors of the painting by the Catholics to show nothing inside. Then they started painting over, cutting and eventually burning each others’ paintings, clashing over the body politics of the Polish nation. Despite their radical differences, those on the far right and those on the far left behaved similarly, speaking on behalf of the social whole while ignoring the other. The part G found most chilling though was when the Catholics and right wing nationalist united in their sheer hatred of gays and Jews – and it is that same right wing Polish political party that the UK Conservative party has aligned itself to in the European Parliament. It does not bode well for the UK if Tory Dave gets elected later this year.

We leave Cairns early tomorrow morning to head for the Daintree Forest, a 1200 square kilometre area of tropical rainforest that is the oldest in the world – more than twenty times older than the Amazon. We are certainly not ‘roughing it’ though as we are staying at Bloomfield Lodge which has no internet or mobile phone connection so a few days of blog silence will ensue, however if you are interested a look at http://www.bloomfieldlodge.com.au/ will reveal the little bit of indulgent luxury for Christine’s special birthday.