On Tuesday Maisie and I met up with Sally and Iggy at the Melbourne Museum, our winter rainy day activity destination of choice. They have a well-designed children’s gallery with building blocks, costumes, drawing, mammoth lego (I’ve never seen any so big!), outdoor games etc. I liked this old tram traffic control (which was in use in Melbourne before they introduced traffic lights) – the arrows on the various dials spin round the different coloured segments showing when it’s safe for different road users to use the junction.
Neil flew off to Hong Kong in the evening to take part in an expert forum on Discourse, so Maisie and I were home alone for most of this week.
On Wednesday, without Neil to wake us(!), we had a lie-in till almost 9am, followed by an hour in the park chucking pebbles into puddles. In the afternoon we went to the Linden Gallery to see an exhibition of works by various artists inspired by the irreverent attitude of a well-known (dead) Australian artist called Mike Brown. There were some fun pieces – one was a huge chaotic room-sized construction made of a rainbow of brilliantly coloured plastic tat – children’s toys, flowers, fruit, dildos etc. with little motors spinning things around and making bells tinkle, and lots of f*** this slogans, some carefully tapestried with lots of shiny beads. Maisie was really enchanted! She spotted a clock-face with a penis-shaped hand spinning round it and excitedly shouted out ‘cock’ (her word for clock). There was also a nice canvas covered with smears of plasticine, and Lynne (the gallery attendant) was telling me how we could attempt to reconstruct it with home-made playdough!
We walked from the gallery up along the pier to see the diggers busy building the new harbour walls – one of them is operating pretty much in the sea, it was very precarious! We saw a Crested Tern perched up on the railing and it posed for a portrait. Unusually, perhaps because it really was quite a chilly day, Maisie was happy just to sit in the buggy and take everything in, which made it a very pleasant afternoon.
In the evening I watched a pretty bad film called ‘Elles’, with Juliette Binoche playing a monied glossy mag journalist researching a piece on pretty young female students resorting to prostitution to pay their way through college. Really, it was just soft-core porn, all very clean and stylish, with Binoche, bored with her husband and brattish kids, drawn to the glamour and excitement of it all. It was by a female director too, so somehow particularly disappointing!
Swimming was chaos on Thursday – they’d merged two classes so there wasn’t the time or space to do any of the activities properly, but Maisie didn’t seem to mind. In the afternoon we met up with Sally and Iggy at the National Gallery of Victoria to catch a couple of new things. In the foyer they’ve installed a large circular blue pond filled with white china soup bowls, that a gentle current sends spinning around (see picture). When they collide they chime softly – it’s a beautiful, peaceful sound. Sally and I agreed that we need one at home to instil some daily moments of calm.
There was an exhibition of new work by Robin Rhode, a South African artist who draws on concrete floors and walls. His are wonderfully playful pieces – in chalk he’ll sketch a see-saw, roundabout or bike, photograph kids to pose as if they are riding it, then redraw it at a slightly different angle and get them to pose again, photographing each stage, and putting the images together in a stop-motion animation, so it looks like the kids are on a moving object. Sometimes he puts the stills together in a series, with himself as the focus interacting with the drawing – in one he wields (and draws with) a giant comb, in others he releases as flock of birds or a fleet of ships. Maisie loved an animation of a snapping crowd of pegs on a clothes line advancing on the artist and grabbing his hooded top and pulling it off – she watched it several times over shouting out at the evil pegs and sadly proclaiming ‘oh dear hoody’ at the end. One half of the exhibition was a nicely designed children’s room full of crayons and lined with wall-vinyls which children were encouraged to draw on. It was well thought out (designed by the artist), and there were lots of kids there enjoying it. Maisie was mainly into re-arranging all the stools, but she did a bit of scribbling. We’ve just introduced drawing time at home, and she always goes for the orange and brown pens (the other colours just don’t interest her!).
Friday was all about Maisie – morning storytime at the library and an afternoon running around at Playgroup. I had a nice chat with a mum who I haven’t spoken to before, Kellie, who had a very cosmopolitan life before her baby arrived, having lived all over Europe with her musician husband. She’s still not come to terms with the idea of settling down!
On Saturday Maisie and I went to the zoo, and fortunately the weather was lovely, mild and bright. It was definitely Maisie’s best zoo experience yet, and she worked hard at pronouncing all the names of the animals.
She was very excited by the leaping lemurs (‘lemur’ she shouted at the top of her voice – she has a favourite toy lemur) and other monkeys, including the orang-utans who were as scarily human as ever – you can see them plotting as they stare unflinchingly at you.
The seals in their glowing aquamarine tank were a hit, as they always are, and she enjoyed peering into a lovely pool of rays and tiny sharks.
All the Australian animals – koalas, wombats, kangaroos and emus went down well too. The giraffes were amorous today, the male just wouldn’t leave the female alone – it’s quite an odd thing to see giraffes mating! I was rather taken by this wonderful Common Iguana.
On Sunday Maisie and I saw two new exhibitions at ACCA. The first one celebrated urination/defecation as some sort of masonic ritual – we moved swiftly through it! The second one, by an artist called Daria Martin, was a collection of elegant shorts shot on 16mm film (the darkened gallery was full of projectors whirring away in a very satisfying manner), featuring brightly-clad dancers exploring spaces including the wonderful De La Warr Pavilion, and interacting with abstract shapes and odd little robotic creatures. Maisie was very engaged and chose to sit down on my lap and watch one of the films in its entirety.
sophieinmelbourne 