Castaways

[izmeina]

Izzie has been a bit of a culture vulture lately. It's time to stock up on lots of new experiences to feed the inner serpent which is going to be busy around the time of the witching hour of All Nano's Eve.

So it's just as well that one of the regular features on the culture calendar has been moved from May to October to take advantage of the mild and not so wild weather (since a bunch of sculptures on the beach were seriously trashed by storms last time)

Some samples of the sculptures

There's something wonderful about lurking around the beach on a sunny day and when there's lots of beautiful art to look at, it's even more magical.

The constraint of being required to recycle source materials keeps the works grounded and actually makes the art far more creative and quirky than the increasingly pompous and pretentious efforts that dominate its rival Sculpture by the Sea

Further up north there is another sculptural offering commemorating the Dutch sailing ship that dropped by for a couple of days exactly 400 years ago.
The skipper Dirk Hartog who was working for the VOC (Dutch East India Company) later got sacked by the evil VOC goblins for being such a snailish sailor.

But Izzie's hanging out for the commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the sinking of the Batavia which was the Titanic of its day. That will be in June 2029. If the ship had been grounded off the coast of California, there would be a Hollywood movie about it every five years.

Comments

[ozfille]

Well our Sculpture by the Sea this year inadvertently ended up mixing the wreck theme with its usual offerings. The seas were running a bit high and rough this week and some of the sculptures were actually on the beach and a few got wrecked while others got buried in sand and had to be dug out.

[izmeina]

Please don't tell me that they actually had Wrecks as a theme for the exhibition? Talk about tempting fate.
So how many got damaged? It's sad but at least it is a more dignified fate than theft or vandalism which befall a few sculptures on this side of the Nullabor a few years back.

[ozfille]

No the wrecking of some of the works was entirely the result of some high seas and a high tide coinciding with a bit of a storm. I was surprised that they actually were on the beach in the first place. Most of the sculptures are usually on the hill beside the Bondi to Tamarama section of the Bondi to Coogee walking track.

Talking of wreck-related matters, there is a film being released next week based on the novel, The Light Between Two Oceans which is set on an island off the south-west coast of WA, though I think they might have actually filmed the thing in New Zealand. It was probably cheaper. It stars Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander and it must be a British production as it is getting a showing at a British Film Festival before its formal release here next Thursday.