The people in Melbourne kept trying to express the difference between Melbourne and Sydney. Maybe it’s like the difference between Philadelphia and New York or between San Jose and San Francisco. Not that either of these comparisions really does justice to the urban charm of Melbourne. Each city is unique.

It’s nice that Melbourne is on a slanting slope, and that it has so many old buildings—in that sense it’s a bit like Seattle, only minus the all-important factor of the ocean. In any case, I’d say that Sydney feels a little more sophisticated and happening than Melbourne—and, like San Francisco or Seattle, Sydney is on the ocean instead of on a muddy river or bay.

Speaking of my fair home city of San Jose, in a Sydney department store I saw a Chinese-made T-shirt saying, meaninglessly, “Western Conference. California. Ten Years. San Hose, Calif.” With an “H” instead of with a “J.” San Ho, yes.

We stayed in the Russell Hotel, a relatively inexpensive B&B in the Rocks district of Sydney, near a bunch of ferry slips along what’s called the Circular Quay, with the famous Sydney Opera House just a short walk along the waterfront from our room.

The Opera House is one of those rare buildings that lives up to one’s expectations. I never quite understood how it was shaped until I got to be here and walk around it. It’s roof is made of a bunch of cusps or horns or pairs of sphere-sectors. They look a little like sails or claws. Although cast from cement, the roofs are covered with white and beige tiles, so they’re pleasant to the touch—you can walk all around the outside of the building, and in many spots the roofs come down to the ground.

We had dinner—roast jewfish(!)—in a restaurant near the Opera House with a full moon rising over those Mohawk white roofs, the Sydney Bridge all lit up, tall buildings reflected in the water, and the lights of the Luna Park amusement park in the distance, it’s entrance a huge face with an open mouth. You can take a ferry to Luna Park!

[Great view of Sydney from the quay near the Opera House.]

I’d like to see a show at the Opera House—but the big halls are sold out, and the shows in the small halls aren’t so inviting, like, a one-man show of a British guy lamenting about losing his apartment of twenty years (seriously), and a show of drag queens singing Christmas carols. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…but instead we went to see Les Claypool at the Enmore Theatre, also getting to mingle with hipster Sydneysiders (they really call the natives that).

[Squirting turtle in the lovely Archibald Fountain in Hyde Park. (Thanks for the ID, Paula)]

The Enmore is an old movie theater in the Valencia-Street-like neighborhood of Newtown. A quartet: an eclectic cello, a drummer, a vibes player, and Les on various kinds of bass guitars or bass-guitar-like instruments. The musicians wore tuxedos and masks.

Les rocked, at one point the vibes player switched to drums and did a dual drum solo with the main drummer, incredible, like a conversation, and near the end, Les came back onstage, dressed up in an ape suit and playing a one-string instrument by whacking it. The lights were beautiful colored cones, filled with stage fog.

[Random scraps of ornamental stone from an old building, arranged at the edge of the botanical gardgen in Sydney.]

It was good to see the grungers at the concert and in the neighborhood. We overheard a woman on six-inch platform boots telling a friend, “I’m angry at everyone all the time.” I saw a guy in a T-shirt saying “Dag Nasty” with a picture of a sheep’s butt (remember that a “dag” is a sheep’s dingleberry).

[Lots of didgireedoo players on the Circular Quay, a great sound all day.]

In the train back from Newtown we sat near a weathered Aussie couple, drinking a half-pint of gin, the woman maundering on and on, the two of them somewhat fitter-looking than their US counterparts. Looking out the train window I saw an excavating machine at work beneath an underpass, one of those jointed arms with claws, and had the sudden feeling of being on another planet.

[The Sydney Tower.]

The next day I happened to start talking to another American in downtown Sydney, a guy called Mike, with tattoos on both arms. He said he came from New Orleans, and that he was in Australia as a musician, with some gigs, moving from town to town. “You’re playing with Les?” I said, as a long-shot.

And, yes, he turned out to be the vibes player for Les Claypool’s band. He was a little surprised that I’d seen him playing the night before, but maybe not as surprised as I was. For me, it felt like meeting a mythic shaman or a cartoon character. He seemed glad to talk to me. They’re playing the Fillmore in San Francisco on New Years Eve, as they’ve often done before.

[An artist who’s currently calling himself Tatuz Nishi made a site-specific work by building little houses around two large sculptures of men on horses in front of the Gallery of New South Wales.]

I’m feeling some literary inspiration for my writing from the input here. The platypus beak, the fake-autobiographical novel True History of Ned Kelly, the Les Claypool band concert, and the Aboriginal art.

[Okay, I took a LOT of pictures of the opera. The ferries are cool, we rode them a lot.]

Leon and Yolande taught us some Australian slang, and we also learned some from our old Melbourne friends Robert and Margaret Mrongovius, who had us over for dinner at their house. They lived in the neighboring apartment when we were in the University Guest House for a year in Heidelberg in 1979, thirty years ago.

[Reading room in the Melbourne main library, where we went to do our email for free.]

Here are some tidbits I gleaned from the locals.

A buff jock type guy with short hair drinking beer with his friends is “boofy” or a “boofhead.” A redneck is a “bogan” or a “westie.”

A nap is a “kip.” Food you find in the woods is “bush tucker.”

[A quaint corner of Williamsport, near Melbourne.]

A group of kangaroos is called a “mob of roos”?

A “dag” is a clot of crap on the wool near a sheep’s butt, so “daggy” means “gross or gnarly.” Yet sometimes, “dag” will be used fondly, like “nut”, as in “You are a dag.” I mentioned this to Leon, and it turns out he used to date a woman who’d say that to him, “You are a dag,” and it annoyed him. So of course I started saying to him, and even loudly declaring on the Melbourne night sidewalks, “I am a dag!”

“Shonky,” means sleazy, shoddy, sneaky.

Cockney rhyming slang is used here. “Have a butcher” means “Have a look,” as look rhymes with the hook in butcher’s hook. A “porky” is a “lie,” as lie rhymes with the pie in pork pie.

For more, see the Australian dictionary of slang.

We visited young Alice Mrongovius—the daughter of our old Heidelberg friends—we last saw her thirty years ago, when she was two or three. She’s just gotten an art degree from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), and is paying the bills with a job as a barista in a cafe. She’s very cute and lively, a cartoonist, with work at her site, www.banditfox.com. She and her sister Martina have done several comic books together.

[Tower of the Contemporary Art Museum in Melbourne.]

Yesterday, Sylvia and I actually looked through a group show by Alice’s graduating art class at the VCA, which happened to be near the building where I gave my talk. Alice was showing some drawings and a pair of milk cartons with slip covers.

Not many of the young people seem to be into painting—it’s mostly photos, videos, collages, or assemblages. Maybe painting is too hard, too slow, too much trouble. Another factor is that it’s easier to tell at a glance if a painting isn’t very good. If someone puts a pile of dirt on the floor, then it’s not so clear if this is worse than or better than the other piles of dirt on the floor that one has seen in museums and art galleries. With a pile of dirt, the artist is less exposed.

Speaking of dirt, there was one dashed-off work in the show that was kind of witty, it was a cheap oriental-patterned rug with a lumpy surface—the lumps are the result, the viewer slowly realizes, of a great deal of random paper trash having been hidden under the rug. The work, by Ilie Rosli is called “Swept Under.”

Another assemblage that I liked was a pair of doors connected by an accordion-like corridor—“Limbo” by Carmen Reid.

Today we hit the botanical gardens—I saw some unfamiliar Australian trees like the banyan-like Moreton Bay Fig and the Ridge Myrtle with its ridged bark. We had a bland British lunch at the public tea garden there, with mynah birds fighting over the scraps.

And on the way back, we happened upon the Malthouse Theater, a modern complex that was showing, among other things, an hour-long modern dance performance: “Structure and Sadness” by Lucy Guerin.

[The West Gate freeway bridge near Melbourne.]

“Structure and Sadness” is a great piece. Unlike most contemporary ballets, it’s about a specific historical event, to wit, the collapse, during construction, of a part of the West Gate freeway bridge over the Yarra River near Melbourne in 1970. The six dancers acted out abstract notions of stresses and force vectors, while building a very large house-of-cards bridge-span which collapses near the end of the performance. While listening to Joan Jett singing “Crimson and Clover,” a woman learns that her husband, a bridge construction worker, has died. At the very end, four of the dancers lie down under a metal plank—another lies down to one side, and the final dancer walks over the plank into the darkness. Using the bridge. This could come across as being over-literal, but it was done with great subtlety. It’s an interesting mixing of levels, and beautiful dance.

[Marker in the Yarra River near Melbourne.]

I’ve also been reading the Australian writer Peter Carey’s 2001 historical novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, written as if by the Australian outlaw—or “bushranger”—Ned Kelly (1854-1880). It’s a wonderful book, written in dialect, as if transcribed from papers that Ned left behind.

What inspired me to read this book was that we saw Ned Kelly’s armor on display at the Victoria State Library—Ned had it made from quarter-inch-thick steel for his final showdown with the cops, or “traps,” as he calls them. We go to this huge old stone library nearly every day to check our email and cruise the web—it’s always soothing, on a trip, to get back into the familiar bath of your online personality.

[A “time-ball” signal in Williamsport, near Melbourne.]

We went to an SF-related party on our last day in Melbourne, which was great fun. It was nice to meet some more SF people—the encyclopedist Peter Nicholls was there, as was the expatriate American (now Australian) SF novelist and anthologist Jack Dann. Both of them were really enjoyable people. Finally I was talking to some locals who’d heard of me!

[One more picture of the cool building in Federation Square.]

The party was at the house of Jenny and Russell Blackford, stalwart members of the Melbourne science-fiction scene—for a time they helped edit and publish a zine, Australian Science Fiction Review, which included SF essays and (often) squabbling letters in the back. They’d heard of my visit through Damien Broderick, the once-Melburnian SF writer who’s now working in Austin, Texas. I got to know Damien a few years ago when he was writing his non-fiction book, Transrealist Fiction—a study of the realistic-SF genre that I myself named.

We settled into the Casey House in Melbourne. It was an elegant 1864 townhouse near Fitzroy Park, owned by an 80-year-old woman who lives in Sydney, in another of her properties. This place was originally built by an eminent Melbourne painter, and passed into the hands of Lord Richard Casey (1890-1976).

[Spooky front hall.]

He was born rich, and active in Australia politics—in the 1960s he was the Governor-General, that is the representative of the Queen of England. The present owner is Lord Casey’s daughter. She hasn’t removed the family furniture, books, art, and knickknacks.

[Lord Casey’s shaving mirror.]

The property manager is instructed to rent the rooms only to artists, on a short-term basis. Leon’s partner Yolande knew an artist who’d roomed here, and she had the idea of getting us in. The rent is only about $70 per night. It’s very cool to be living here, it’s like being in an old movie. I have a great shaving mirror.

The bedroom doors don’t lock, and in the bedroom next door is a who’s here for the same conference on media art that I’ve come for. It’s like being in a grad school dorm.

[Lord Casey’s lighter and a “Kanga Crew” pin from an airline.]

The cupboard in our room has a shelf filled with various personal possessions of Lord Casey. And ivory handled hairbrush, a case with small mustache brushes, a silver egg cup, a marvelously intricate brass cigarette lighter with green lizard hide wrapped around it. I’m half-tempted to take a souvenir, but I feel it would be too risky to taunt the spirits of the dead. The house does have a haunted feel.

[Icon-like stove in the old kitchen.]

I can see using this place in my novel-in-progress, Jim and the Flims. I want to put in a scene where Jim’s not-really-a-friend Skeeves finds the golden sarcophagus of Amenhotep I with the bodies of Weena and Charles inside it. I figure the sarcophagus could be on the locked third floor of the Casey house, in an abandoned painting studio, beneath a skylight, it’s polished surfaced reflecting the slow play of the sky.

I had three talks scheduled in Melbourne, each one different.

The first two talks were at the Burwood campus of Deakin University in Melbourne, and the third was with Leon Marvell at the “Re:Live” conference on Media Art at the Victorian College for the Arts.

Talk 1: “My Life as a Writer”. I was more than prepared for this one, having just finished my third draft of my autobiography, formerly called Nested Scrolls and currently entitled Rudy the Elder.

Talk 2: “Life is a Gnarly Computation,” was a talk I’ve given before. I connected with a fractal artist fan of mine online who lives in Melbourne, Mark Townsend, and he met me to ride out to the talk with me. He worked on a fractal flames program called Apophysis, based on another fractal program by yet another friend of mine, Scott Draves, who used to hang around San Francisco doing shows, he called himself Spot. The worldwide network of SFictional computer pioneers!

Talk 3: My conference talk with Leon, called, “Lifebox Immortality … and How We Got There.” I spoke extemporaneously and Leon read a paper aloud. We had two Q&A sessions, one after each of our talks, it was good. Leon’s talk had a passionate, mystical tone. I should also mention the Melbourne SF fan, Tony..who came to all three of my talks. Good on ya, Tony!

[Old board game in Lord Casey’s house.]

I got a couple of SF ideas while answering the questions at the Lifebox presentation. Like, what if your lifebox becomes so good at emulating you that it starts getting hired for your speaking gigs instead of you? And what if your lifebox becomes corrupted, seeming to reveal unsavory (and heretofore unknown-to-you) details about your life. And then maybe there’s a blowback effect whereby you in fact begin making those nasty aspects of your re-edited life come true.

[Pro-life demonstrators outside a Melbourne fertility clinic.]

Sylvia pointed out that a lifebox would be more engaging if it remembered the individual interlocutors. This would be feasible—the lifebox could create mini-lifebox models of the people it talks to, remembering their interests, perhaps interviewing them a bit, and never accidentally telling the same story twice—unless prompted to.

[Pro-choice demonstrators on the other side of the street, outside the same Melbourne fertility clinic.]

By the way, I don’t think it would be that hard to train a computer program to act as a reasonably good interviewer. It could start with data on the interviewee, and mine a list of topics. As the interview progressed, the agent could hark back to things that had been mentioned, or create questions pairing together things that had been mentioned. Now and then the interview agent could throw in a somewhat random or even dadaistic question. As often as I’ve been interviewed, I well know that the interviewers often don’t bring much intelligence to bear upon their questions.

As I’m going to reprint some Aboriginal art images in this blog post, I need to caution that some Aboriginal people prefer not to see art by their people reproduced, particularly if the artist is deceased. So be warned, and don’t view this post if you’re sensitive to these issues.

The heart of Melbourne holds a large art museum complex in what’s called Federation Square. All the buildings in the complex are patterned with irregular Penrose-like tiles on the outside. We saw some galleries of wonderful Aboriginal (they often say “indigenous” as well) paintings inside the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) here. Many of these are super-pointillist and somewhat abstract-looking, they’re made from dots which are sometimes painted on with sticks or with Q-tips with the cotton torn off.

Many of these pictures have a story or a “Dreaming” associated with them, although the story isn’t at all apparent to the untutored eye. Many of the pictures are also in some sense topographical, mapping out the geographical patterns, the practical uses, the spiritual vibes, or the mythic tales associated with regions where the painters live.

[“Rockholes and Country Near the Olgas,” 2007, by Kumanara “Bill Whiskey” Tjalpaltjarri. Click for larger version.]

One topographical picture that I liked was by the artist commonly called Bill Whiskey Tjalpaltjarri (1920-2008), “Rockholes and Country Near the Olgas,” painted in 2007, when Kumanara was 87 years old. So far as I know, he used this same title for all of his pictures. A rockhole is, I believe, a water hole. In this work, The dots bunch up here and space apart there, like windblown fog, several layers deep, and he does subtle things with the colors like having dark blue dots upon black ones. It was a very long picture, and reminiscent, in its own way of David Hockney’s “Mulholland Drive.” I worship this picture by Kumanara Tjalpaltjarri, I went back to look at it three times—my patched together photo doesn’t do it justice.

It would be fun to make a topographical map of my own neighborhood and home town as seen from above, using patterns and colors to show some of the things I’ve experienced on this familiar home territory. I don’t think I’d have the patience to use dots, but maybe I could use some other kinds of small patterns.

[I didn’t manage to get a photo of Yirawala’s work, but I made a rough pocket sketch of his “Mardayin Ceremony” of 1979, seen in the National Gallery of Victoria.]

I was also stuck by some large drawings done with “earth on stringy bark” in Marrkolidjban, in the Northern Territory. Stringy bark is bark from a peeling eucalyptus tree, somewhat like the euc we happen to have in our yard back in CA. The artist, Yirawala , is one of the most famous of the Aboriginal bark artists, and is sometimes compared to Picasso.

[“Two Tunmirringu Fighting,” Bark painting by David Malangi, Arnheim Land (an area on the north coast of Australia), seen at the Gallery of New South Wales.]

It’s interesting how hard it is for most of us, as adults, to draw in the diagrammatic style that we used as children. And then we labor to get back to that clarity. It’s like the Aboriginal artists have short-circuited the whole process of primitive-to-advanced-to-primitive. Artistically speaking, they’re still in the Garden of Eden.

Long story short: in the West, we started with ideograms and abstractions, got realistic, and tried to get back to the ideograms. In Australia they stuck with ideograms…and got really good at it.

[“Thunder Spirits (Birimbira)” by Munggurrawuy Yunupingu , 1861, Arnheim Land, seen in the Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. Dig those jellyfish with the dangling tendrils.]

During our trip, Sylvia and I also went to some commercial galleries selling Aboriginal art. One of them, the Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne, was particularly good, up on the third floor of a downtown building like a classy New York gallery. Check out the “Paintings” section of their “Online Gallery,” I have a screen capture below.

The pictures were selling for about $10K; many of their painters live in the middle of Australia, east of Ayers Rock. One work, by Kim Napurrula, who paints with the Papunya Tula art movement, impressed me particularly, although I don’t have a good photo of it. It was like a great abstract painting, but with a vital sense of there being an underlying story. Wonderful colors, all in shades of red, orange, beige, yellow, brown, and black. Kim is from a family of Aboriginal painters, it seems to be a kind of passed-on craft, as painting was in Europe in the Middle Ages.

[“Tingan Motifs and Snake,” by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, who’s very popular. Seen in the Gallery of New South Wales.]

In Sydney we visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a museum which lies in a huge city park. Their display of Aboriginal art was just amazing. I’ve learned that the Aboriginals of Australia are maybe the oldest continuous civilization on Earth—they went along doing more or less the same thing for 60,000 years, the Aborigines, and they have some very elaborate belief systems. The art is still very much alive—I’m still having trouble understanding the sociology of how it’s created—it’s quite different from in the U.S.

[Painting by Simon Hogan, 2009. Shown as part of the “Tracking the Wati Kutjara – Spinifex 2009” show, photo (C) Cooee Aboriginal Art Gallery. Here’s a link to page with all the pictures in the show]

We saw some more Aboriginal art in the wonderful Cooee Aboriginal Art Gallery in Bondi, near Sydney. I was quite interested in the work, and the owner, Adrian Newstead, talked to us for a long time. He showed us pictures of the artists at work, he goes out to Western Australia to hang with them. Their current show is from the “spinifex” region of the desert—spinifex being an Australian plant—Adrian showed us a picture of the artist Simon Hogan working on the picture shown above. .

[Rover Thomas, “Dreamtime Story of the Willy Willy,” 1989, a painting of the path of a desert whirlwind, at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.]

I find it so cool that the Aboriginal art pictures, which look abstract really are, in a sense, representational, depicting, as I mentioned above, specific home territories of the artists. According to the notion of the “Dreaming,” supernatural beings emerged (and are still emerging), and these creatures follow specific paths across the length and breadth of Australia. These paths are called songlines, in part because different tribes at different spots along the line will have a song about a part of the supernatural being’s history. As the Aborigines used no written language, the songs and the graphic designs they make served as their recorded history.

[Kids on a school tour in the Sydney Gallery of South Wales.]

The whole deal of Aboriginal Art is really different, and I’m still figuring it out, reading three books on it right now. One of the books is art-historical: Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, London, 1998). The second is a journalistic account of the recent uptick in the market for Aboriginal art, and about the odd ways in which it’s produced and marketed: Benjamin Genocchio, Dollar Dreaming (Hardie Grant, Australia, 2008).

[Antoher painting by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, in the Gallery of New South Wales. Ronnie’s work is easy on the Western eye, it’s at a nice funky nexus between Aboriginal art and Op art.]

As I understand it, in the 1960s some enlightened forces within the Australian government had the idea of giving the Aboriginal people art materials and promising to buy any and all paintings that they made. And, as happens, some small percentage of the people have turned out to be great artists. Of course any number of the painters are not all that artistically gifted, and the more touristy art galleries are showing art that’s not so good.

The third volume I’m reading is a memoir or travel book by Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (Vintage, London 1998), and is the most literary of the three. It’s beautifully written and has some profound theories about Aboriginal culture.

One minor flaw I found in The Songlines is that the white female characters seem rather bland and interchangeable. But the the white males and the Aborigines are quite sharply limned and colorful. Another odd thing about the book is that, about half-way through, Chatwin seems to run out of material—and fills most of the second half with pasted in excerpts of his old writing journals. And the old journal entries don’t have any obvious relationship at all to Aboriginal culture. But I suppose Chatwin would have compared his compositional trick to intersecting two mythic songlines in the Australian outback. In any case, it’s a wonderful book.