The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

The Grim Reaper's sickle has been busy slashing events quite close to home.


After several aborted attempts to visit Sculptures by the Sea this week (due to rain or being simply too knackered) I finally made it there today.
The Grand Plan was to visit the display of small sculptures before they close at 6pm and then spend the next 2 hours slinking around the beach watching the sunset and looking at the main event

I had been there several times already but always too late to see the small stuff. I had noticed that they were no longer in the usual specially erected marquee conveniently on the corner because the marquee was simply not there. So I just assumed that they would be upstairs in the Surf life saving club where they used to be before they got the marquee.

This was around 4pm last Friday. So I asked one of the volunteers. She said that they did not put up the wheelchair and walking frame friendly marquee this time because it costs $60,000 just for 2 weeks and they just don't have the funds like they used to. Likewise, the surf life saving club was also too expensive. So they chose a new venue. The Seaview Golf club.

It was too late to potter up the hill there last Friday so I went today instead. But there was no signs pointing visitors to the place. Just a sign on the door saying that while the venue was open for meals, booze and coffee, the small sculptures exhibition had been closed

So I ordered a coffee and sat in a spot overlooking both the sea and the cordoned off sculptures where I could watch as the crew wiped down empty display stands and put objects into packing crates. Since many of them had little red dots on them, the odd buyer turned up now and then to collect their latest acquisition.

It was a most surreal experience indeed. I have been going to Sculptures by the Sea ever since it first came to Cottesloe Beach in 2005.

Consulting the Oracle of Google, I soon learned that the whole event had been closed down as of yesterday. However since most of the sculptures were in an open public area on the beach and the decision was made only yesterday, the artists have not yet had time to arrange the removal of their masterpieces

It turned out that about two thirds of them are still there. The inflatable Homer Simpson was already gone and there were quite a few empty spots and wooden packing crates with workers using hammers and screwdrivers to seal them.

It was very strange and surreal. There were no buses from schools or senior centres. Having worked in several senior centres for years, the annual seaside sculpture exhibition always gets scheduled on the events calender. Especially on the days especially set aside for folks with mobility issues.
Today was originally scheduled as the second day where they put down special long mats on the sand so that people in wheelchairs could get up close to the art works that are right on the beach. Many of them are on grassed terraces with foot paths so are accessible all the time.

Several garden shows are gone, the annual Buddha's birthday festival in April has also been cancelled and quite a few councils have already closed their public libraries
Everything has moved just so fast in just the last week.

But we are still lucky in Oz in that we are still very low on the exponential curve. Any day now we will start moving rapidly upwards.

And yes indeed. Australia can thank trump because that is where nearly all the overseas cases of coronavirus here have come from. Seeded. I think was the word he used.
What started as the Chinese Coronavirus has mutated and turned into the American Moronavirus.

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.