Moon Over Manly

No rest for the weary…Actually, we were not so weary when we awoke at 7AM for a yummy early breakfast at the hotel and then off for a jaunt through the Botanical Gardens en route to the New South Wales Art Museum.

We arrived early and waited for the museum along with about two dozen school children outfitted in forest green uniforms complete with caps for the boys and wide-brimmed bonnets for the girls. While their teachers prepared them for the visit we wandered around the grounds and conversed with the Sphinx.

Too many people seemed to heading in the same direction as we and so we spent the first half hour in the contemporary Australian artists’ exhibit. It took us three rooms to finally locate a woman artist. And then there were two…Eventually we made our way to the exhibition of original contemporary Aboriginal art. In many ways, the works we saw were, to our Western eyes, shockingly modern: abstract, brightly colorful, as much about form as content.

And, interestingly, many women have recently been in the vanguard of this art-making, which is as much about making a world through painting as representing that world. We picked up a book by Jennifer Loureide Biddle, an anthropologist from Macquarie University, to learn more about this fascinating art.

The museum was well-designed, with enough room to stand and look at the collections for a good while, but there were too many people there on this particular Friday and so we made our way out and into the surrounding botanical gardens.

Suddenly, we were stopped in our tracks by a strange concatenation of sounds coming from high in the trees above us and looked up to see thousands of fruit bats hanging upside down in the branches overhead. We watched them fighting and flying from tree to tree and stopped a ranger to find out more about them. Apparently, about 10,000 bats live in this garden and every evening they are joined by another 10,000 or so who live on north Sydney and together these 20,000 bats fly across the harbor for their evening haunts. What a sight that must be!

After a moment's rest on a nearby bench, we considered lunch, but decided instead on taking the boat to Manly again to search for the didgeridoo, one of the oldest musical instruments in the world, used by Aboriginal peoples for communication across the vast lands of the interior of Australia. Finding what we sought, as well as a painting by Julie Rose, an Aboriginal artist, we decided to lunch at a place near Manly beach and spent the rest of the evening sitting by the South Pacific, sipping a nice Australian cabernet while a magnificent moon rose on the horizon, filling the sky and lacing the ocean with glorious silver ribbons of light.

Another ferry ride back to Sydney returned us to the hotel for the night.

Tomorrow Amy flies to Melbourne and Kathy stays behind in Sydney for her lectures…and a possible Beethoven concert at the Opera House, if a ticket becomes available at the last minute.