Word: shire
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...knowing where to find it allowed Sturt's nomadic ancestors to flourish for tens of thousands of years in an environment so hostile it might have been some divine practical joke. While her painting is not a map in any conventional sense, Geoff Vivian, community development officer for the shire of Halls Creek, speculates as to its provenance. "I think scientists will one day find," he says, that there's "sophisticated hydrographic knowledge" embedded in Aboriginal myth. Maggie Long, another Jaru painter, has popped into the arts center to chat to manager Meg Norling and catch up with other artists...
...main street menzies these days, drive past the graceful Western Australian gold-rush town's lone pub and petrol station, and travel 50 km west along a gravel road to Lake Ballard. It's here, on a 70 sq. km lake dried to a shimmering salt plain, that Menzies shire president Kath Finlayson likes to meet and greet her townsfolk. To an outsider, the 49 metal sculptures appear almost extraterrestrial, with their pointy heads and pixie feet. But to a Menziesite, each is uniquely human. "This is one of the tribal elders," says Finlayson, 56, by way of introduction...
...sell up. "It's an experience I wouldn't have missed, living here," says Earnshaw, who also runs the town's power house and water board. "It's just that Chris and I are getting old and tired, and seven days a week is starting to kill us." Shire president Finlayson, whose family sheep station was recently sold after 30 years, admits that since the decline of the local pastoral industry, it's been a problem getting people to stay. "People start drifting away," she says. "And you don't want to drag them back unless they've got employment...
...that question countless times since gold ran out nearly a hundred years ago. While making the town's existential crisis stunningly clear, the sculptures also offer an answer. In a place where employment opportunities are, as Finlayson puts it, "zilch," Gormley's Inside Australia is a potential tourist goldmine. Shire plans are already underway for a $A175,000 development of the site, making the sculptures more secure, and improving visitor facilities. Meanwhile on a billboard in Perth, a Kalgoorlie promotion features one of the sculptures, with the words: do you want a close encounter? Perhaps even more crucial than...
...might expect from a scholar who has written wittily on Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti's obsession with the Australian wombat, Trumble saves much of his best material for the story's marginalia. There are the early 18th century "gurning" competitions of York- shire ("The frightfull'st grinner/ Be the winner") and the various cosmetic condiments that have accompanied the smile over the years, from the 18th century English vogue for wearing mouse-skin eyebrows, to the Japanese tooth-blackening practice of ohaguro. How the author manages to connect the 16th century European habit of dog turd-throwing, Dutch painting...