Walk. fly. be.
Melbourne City of Literature’s writers in residence
Lockdown Day 1
Friday 28th May, 2021
Social Media Takeover
We were delighted to be one of Melbourne City of Literature’s writers in residence. From 9am until 9pm, we posted to their instagram, @melcityoflit.
Here is a summary of what we shared on our day. But first, a little bit about what was, for us, and is a wonderful writers in residence merriment on social media.
Melbourne City of Literature:
It is day one of our social media take over #CityofLitWriterinResidence
Over the next 7 days our Instagram and Twitter will be taken over each day by a different writers and/ or storyteller each delivering a uniques day content and connection for your delight and distraction.
There will be no “You’ve got this Melbourne”, comments about 5 km radius and reflections on the COVID Normal here! Just creation and commentary and some conversation!
Today on Instagram we have @gracialouise
They’ll be taking over shortly and introducing their day.
In the meantime here’s a sneak peek of some work they did for the Office already, a little snippet of their wildlife postcard. We love them and their work and are ! so excited for today!
10.10am
Post One
Hello there. We’re Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison. We’re delighted to be here, and looking forward to conversing with you all the day long. Thank-you for having us, Melbourne City of Literature, as writers in residence, and for this marvellous opportunity.
We will be sharing how our walks have inspired our forthcoming artists’ book, a collaged, foraged forest, and how our walks also inspired us to become wildlife carers. We are foster carers in training, learning to look after Grey-headed flying foxes, so today, alongside collages from our artists’ book in progress, you can expect to see bats eating bananas.
To those of you whom we have yet to meet, the two of us have been collaborating for over twenty years, making artists’ books, zines, collages, prints, and drawings. Besotted still, it appears, with paper for its adaptable, foldable, cut-able, concealable, revealing nature, using an armoury of play, the poetic and familiar too, with the intention of luring you into our A(rtists’ books) to Z(ines).
On the first day of Lockdown IV, here is a look at a wonderful project we were involved in during the first three (Naarm/Melbourne) lockdowns. We created this collage especially for Genevieve Lacey’s Bower, which she describes as “a project inspired by bowerbirds’ obsessive collecting habits, and their ability to build magical architecture out of fragments”. This commissioned artwork features in Bower, by Genevieve Lacey and Marshall McGuire, released as an album by ABC Classic (@abcclassic).
12.35pm
Post Two
We work from our home-based studio. In the company of a menagerie. Our space, utterly domestic and with animals in mind, their comfort paramount. Alongside Lottie and Lenni, and an RSPCA foster, Arthur, who decided he was moving in permanently the moment we met him, we are also looking after a foster cat named Gingerbread. Gingerbread is currently residing in the front room, where we bind most of our artists’ books. She is our ninth foster cat (with the @rspca_vic, through the East Burwood shelter, Victoria), and so far, she has revealed to us that she likes lap cuddles and head ‘boops’. Between administering her daily meds and changing her litter, which is 1, 2, 3, easy, we are working on a new artists’ book. It is a memory of a walk, sparked by a lyrebird encounter. But it is also about the loops we have walked during lockdowns. Loops which lead us to the Yarra Bend colony of Grey-headed flying foxes. To wildlife on our doorstep, previously unbeknownst to us. We are based in North Fitzroy, close to the city. We are also close to a pocket of what wild remains.
So, in addition to being foster carers for the RSPCA, we are learning how to care for bats from Bev Brown so we can be wildlife carers (under her shelter, Nature’s Miracle Orphans Australia). So even though we are urban, and our space heavily cushioned, we can reciprocate with nature. We can look after nature, so nature can again look after us. Yes, everything is interwoven.
Images:
Our dog, Lottie, resting on a pile of pillows, and our cat, Arthur, sitting on the armrest of our couch, in our lounge room: a domestic interior.
Our cat, Lenni, rolling on the sun-warmed tiles of the front verandah. The sun casting strong shadows of his happiness as he appears to rest on Lottie’s shadow.
Our current foster cat, Gingerbread, resting in her safe-house, our studio.
A still from a stop animation made in the very room now given over to Gingerbread. The collage pieces are both found and water-coloured. The scene: a green vibration.
Arthur, walking through where we create stop animations.
Louise, bookshelf-flanked, at work, at home.
3.20pm
Post Three
From books to bats, by a walk? Yes. From books to bats. Books and bats. Bats and books. Our walks to the Yarra Bend colony (Bellbird Picnic Area, Kew) lead us to take steps to work with and learn how care for Grey-headed flying foxes. Standing beneath the colony, listening to bat chat, restored then, and restores now, our happiness. It is a mutualistic relationship.
To us, bats are that beautiful mix of softness, intelligence, flexibility and strength. Things we admire, and aim for in our own ways and movements.
In helping to protect these gardeners of the sky (through advocacy to care), we all benefit.
And now, something cute for your afternoon. A bat contentedly mushing on a single piece of banana, as promised. This is Nalah, she is currently in the care of Bev Brown.
“All bats belong to the order Chiroptera, which comes from two Latin words meaning hand-wing.”
(Dave Pinson, The Flying-fox Manual, third edition handbook for wildlife carers)
(Please note: we have been vaccinated to handle bats. You need to be a qualified, vaccinated carer to handle bats. If you find an injured animal, call Wildlife Victoria (03) 8400 7300, or your local wildlife group.)
4.10pm
Post Four
Here is a look at a work in progress. A forthcoming artists’ book. Inspired by a walk. A walk within the boundaries of roads. A pocket of the green bits allowed, still holding on. The bits we can’t develop, or have yet to develop. The bits close to what was, before we laid down our directional pathways. Slicing our way through, as we rolled out the urban carpet. Sometimes, on our walks, we think of the web beneath asphalt and concrete and imagine peeling it back. Sometimes we think of a line in Mary Oliver’s work, Upstream: “Deep in the woods, I tried walking on all fours. I did it for an hour or so, through thickets, across a field, down to a cranberry bog.” As we work on this book, we are pondering all of these things: green areas flanked by roads, peeling back the roads and seeing what’s beneath, and what that world looks like from a different vantage point. This is early days, this work. It will change its form. It will be become layered and its levels altered. These four details are not whole pages, but peeps at parts. A frog may be added. A frond further unfurled. A lyrebird’s call, somehow. Now, what does that look like?
6.40pm
Post Five
A quick scan of the list of plant material such as flowers, nectar, fruits, and leaves Grey-headed flying foxes eat tells why they are referred to as the gardeners of the sky.
From the Native blossom species, the Grey-headed Flying-fox (Pteropus poliocephalus), according to The Flying-fox manual (Dave Pinson, third edition), enjoy:
Smooth-barked Apple
a Spotted Gum
White Mahogany
Narrow-leaved Ironbark
Pink Bloodwood
Large-leaved Spotted Gum
Cabbage Gum
And many, many more
From the Native Fruit Species: Trees and Shrubs, make a bouquet from:
Davidson’s Plum
Featherwood
Brown Beech
Sour Cherry
a Lilly Pilly
Blunt-leaved Steelwood
Shining-leaved Stinging Tree
Blueberry Ash
Riberry
Plum Pine
Red Ash, and more
Scroll further. Of introduced Exotic Fruits:
Persimmon
Apple
Grape
And as we’ve seen today, banana.
“Flying-foxes have an incredibly short gut transit time of around 30 minutes. This means that anything going into the bitey end of these animals is going to come back out the other end (minus available nutrients) around half an hour later. This is simply an evolutionary adaptation for flight; allowing the animal to extract readily absorbed nutrients from its diet — without having to fly around with a gut full of heavy food.”
They are our forests.
In the video posted here, you can see Nalah (in the care of Bev Brown) eating a piece of apple, alongside the cover and a detail of our artists’ book, Seen and Later Forgotten (Souvenir of Niagara Falls), from 2009, and scenes from our walks with the Yarra Bend colony.
8.15pm
Post Six
All of our walks lead us homeward. All of our work with animals, and time spent in their company, in one way or another ends up in our work. One big loop. All in a bid to help convey:
“.... nature is much more complex than a clock. In nature, not only does one cog connect with another: everything is connected in a network so intricate that we will probably never grasp it in its entirety. And that is a good thing, because it means that plants and animals will continue to amaze us. It’s important for us to realise that even small interventions in nature can have huge consequences, and we’d better keep our hands off anything that we have no pressing reason to touch.”
(Peter Wohlleben, The Secret Network of Nature)
Deep breath. Clear head. Pictured here, further details from our forthcoming artists’ book for you to stroll through, alongside photos of several pups we helped care for over the summer.
8.50pm
Post Seven
Before we depart, if you’d like, as our gift from us to you, you can download four free zines from our online store.
Two were created as part of our Remote Library Residency (Bower Ashton Library, UWE, @uwelibrary, with thanks to Sarah Bodman).
In the MET there is a “Pit from a Balanites tree with a hole caused by a rodent”, ca. 2381–2323 B.C., Old Kingdom, on view in Gallery 100.
(2020)
We have been looking at you the wrong way round. We still do. To the gardeners of the sky.
(2020)
One is a zine about rodents, for amusement, and the other is a zine about bats, for discussion. We were inspired (then) by our Stage IV walks, more circular than our A to B days. We were inspired by early scientific drawings of bats the wrong way round for them and the ‘right’ way round for human eyes. We were thinking about how much we, as humans, encroach on the natural world to our collective detriment. We were thinking about the anthropogenic pressure on our most precious wild habitats.
And, while walking in a loop, a proposition: what if?
What if we saw, while out walking (I)
(2021)
What if we saw, while out walking (II)
(2021)
Both zines were created for the 2021 Sticky Institute Festival of the Photocopier (@sticky_institute).
Thanks so much for having us in this space today, Melbourne City of Literature. Roll on, day two. Stay well, friends.
Please follow #CityofLitWriterinResidence to see more throughout the week, and head over to their twitter too. We shared our giddy twelve-hour shift with the incredible Jess Knight (@tinywhirlwind_82) on twitter.
Thank-you for this wonderful opportunity.
Image credit: John Arthur Guy, from an album of drawings, ca. 1859–1862, State Library NSW (@statelibrarynsw)
