I’ve been thinking a lot about sustainability lately. The other day I left the car at home and caught the train into town with Sophie to do some shopping. For a toddler, a train is both exciting and frightening; her intense emotional reaction to an everyday experience changed it for me too. A bit like the scene in Rain Man, when the autistic Hoffman notes to the blinkered, urbane Cruise that the train is ‘shiny’. Cruise had not noticed, and he stops for a moment to consider, viewing the train with interest for the first time; it’s a small vignette of character transformation that tells you much about his changed inner life.
I suspect this is going to be a boring story, when people talk about their kids it often is, but bear with me. We arrive in town, walk to a second hand store where Sophie gets ‘new’ jeans and a nice pink top. Then head to the library to find that Sophie’s favourite Mr Chicken Goes to Paris book has been borrowed by another reader. We console ourselves with a Little Princess dvd. Then it’s off to the bank for cash, supermarket and back to Vinnies where I collect a massive iron candelabra that I’d left behind the counter earlier. By this time I’m carrying a heavy bag of shopping, a bag of second hand clothes, a candelabra, and dragging an increasingly fractious toddler by the hand.
'Mr Chicken Goes to Paris' by Leigh Hobbs
We head towards the train station, miss our train by ten minutes, the conductor tells us the next one won’t go for another hour, and bitches at Sophie for walking in front of the yellow line. So we wander off to the nearest park, swing for a while, decamp to a café for milkshakes, and then stagger back to the station with all our stuff. Arriving home, Sophie goes to sleep without a peep and I luxuriate with a peaceful, sleeping child cup of tea. In all, a fairly simple shopping trip has taken about three hours.
When people talk about sustainability, and how it intersects with community, they often don’t articulate the human dimension. One of the reasons that church and community groups in my area have been so keen to embrace sustainability principles is they sense how closely related the two sets of ideas are.
Here’s a diagram of the saving money/reducing resource use/building community relationships trifecta.
It works best with a concrete example: I take a train, saving me money, keeping one more car off the road. We’re walking, so I notice stuff about my town that I don’t normally see because I’m travelling too fast or looking for a place to park. We buy second hand stuff, which also saves me money, while supporting a local charity and reducing the resources used to make new stuff. While we’re in the store, we talk to the lady behind the counter (her daughter in law is about to have a baby, and the lady’s worried because both mother and baby will be Aries. ‘Constantly butting heads?’ I ask. ‘Exactly’ she responds).
Missing the train means that I go and explore the park next to the station, a place I’ve never been before. While Sophie’s happily balancing on the park’s sole concrete lion, I start mentally kicking around ideas about community art projects that would work well in the space. Finally, to fill in time before the train, it’s off to a locally owned café, thus keeping money in my community. Sophie gets a chocolate milkshake, I get to sit on my butt and watch her drink it, it’s a win-win for us both.
What really struck me about the day was that, mundane as it was, how much I enjoyed it. In many ways everything was a hassle, a lot less easy than just jumping in the car and popping into the shops; it’s really not fun to carry heavy bags while trying to keep your grip on a squirmy toddler. It also struck me that because it’s not normally something I would have done (I’d only left the car at home because Sophie’s car seat was unavailable) sustainable living is something that most people need to be pushed into. It makes things slower and more difficult. But I expect it also has the potential to make people happier.
Other than a lingering chest infection, it’s been a good week. The university accepted my proposal for some RTS funding which means that I can go to the Australian Animal Studies Group conference in in July. One of the keynote speakers is Nigel Rothfels, a key thinker in the area of my PhD topic (The human animal: the evolving role(s) of the animal in contemporary art) so I’m looking forward to that.
I flipped into media tart overdrive earlier in the week during a spruiking drive for Caelli Jo Booker and my upcoming exhibition of artists’ books at the John Paynter Gallery, Newcastle, in June. Titled Happily Ever After: alternative destinies in contemporary feminine narrative (see, there, I’m doing it again) the exhibition brings together teams of artists and writers and invites them to re-tell fairy tales in a contemporary manner. We’re really excited because we’ve just confirmed that Tasmanian novelist Danielle Wood, winner of the Australian/Vogel Literary Prize, will be working with illustrator Tony Flowers to create a book. I can’t wait to see it!
David Hampton's 'SS Great Eastern'
For the exhibition, I’ve written a short story that will be illustrated by Newcastle’s David Hampton and made into a book by my Aunty Pam. The story, Whalesong, is based on last year’s Ady Gil incident, where a New Zealand protest vessel and a Japanese whaler collided in Antarctic waters. It’s a kind of homage to Moby Dick, one of my formative texts, a book that still fills me with desire. My story is written in the first person from the whale’s perspective. I’m currently playing with this idea of writing the animal voice, trying to avoid the common slide into sentimentality or romanticism by making my main character a bit obnoxious and a little histrionic.
Another image by David Hampton
An odd coincidence: after I’d emailed the story draft through to David, he responded to say that he’d just finished watching a documentary account of the sinking of the whaling vessel Essex, the true story that inspired Moby Dick. A couple of days later I was in the country village of Wollombi, browsing in a small, second hand store, and picked up a novel with a picture of whale flukes on the cover. It was In the Heart of the Sea, an account of the Essex tragedy by Nathaniel Philbrick. I brought it because it had a pretty cover and a positive blurb by Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News, on the back.
(A brief digression: if you’re up that way, Café Wollombi does really nice food. Imagine the worst roast vegetable focaccia you’ve ever had: a few miserable pieces of eggplant, a scrape of rancid pesto, bread as stiff as stale cardboard, an anemically thin slice of grilled fetta, the alleged vegetables as brown and slimy as compost. You probably paid $7.50 for the thing, $10 at the airport, and when it was plonked down in front of you, the person rushed off in case you yelled at them. Later, you hear them yelling at the chef. Add bad air conditioning, a greasy napkin, plastic wrap and the sound of traffic and you’ve got your average vegie focaccia. As a vegetarian, I’ve chomped my way through many such travesties.
In Wollombi, you sit out on wooden verandah, the sun on your back, watching birds scoot past and a line of ants tackling the Everest of your chair leg. A trendy, funny girl with knee socks takes your order and returns with food in an admirably short time. Big fat foccacia, stuffed with roast vegetables and annoited with pesto so fresh that it hasn’t had time to oxidise. Why would you go anywhere else?)
Although I’m only a bit of the way through, In the Heart of the Sea is proving to be a fascinating read. Philbrick talks about the island of Nantucket: the way the society came to embrace Quakerism, what this meant to the island’s culture, economy and financial management. There’s a few scurrilous historical anecdotes about the Nantucket women, rumoured to be addicted to a morning dose of opium and marital aids, ‘he’s at home’ being the polite euphamism for the plaster cast dildos of the era. As the whaling industry expanded across the globe, Nantucket husbands were often away at sea for years, home for a few months, then gone again.
'Lighthouse' by David Hampton
It’s interesting to speculate about the social pressure, the sheer claustrophobia, of being left alone on an island in a close-knit society of Quaker women. The knowledge that, if rendered desperate by your cold lump of plaster, you f***ed another person, the news of it would be all over the village by morning, even before your sheets had time to dry. An ensuing trial of ostracism, bitter judgement and fraught female relationships. It’s the dark side of community, the thing that we were all running from when we left our villages and moved to the anonymous cities. And it’s probably one of the reasons why people like the connectedness that sustainability implies, but also shy away from it.
A few months ago, my Aunty Pam, cousin Jules and I were sitting around talking. It was a cold Tasmanian night, we’d just eaten some very fine cake (Jules had brought it for his Mum) and were curled up in leather chairs, drinking hot cups of tea. Jules and I grew up in Hobart, Aunty Pam was born in New Zealand but the family moved to Tasmania when she was a little girl. They settled first in the northern industrial town of Burnie and then moved south to Hobart. I was blithering on about how I hadn’t decided where I wanted to bring Sophie up, the pros and cons of an urban existence versus a rural one, educational opportunities in different areas, my experience of growing up on an isolated island like Tasmania, and on and on. ‘Well, what do you want?’ asked Pam patiently. I thought about it for a minute and then replied: ‘what I want, doesn’t exist. I want to live in a village full of cultured, sophisticated and intelligent people… who mind their own business!’ We all howled with laughter.
Helen Hopcroft: an artist's life 
