Rock groups often try too hard to be different. Music from the alternative rock group ‘The smashing pumpkins’ never really captured my interest musically, but their videos are wonderfully pythonesque. Their existing web site appears to have been marinating in some strange chemicals, suffering from trying too hard to be different.
Their lyrics however are as creative and imaginative as any anthology of poetry . In the album Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, they start their song Muzzle with an observative line “I fear that I am ordinary, just like everyone”. Why should that be a problem? Perhaps they were trying to be ironic. After that admission to ordinariness they promised that album would be their last ‘conventional’ music. Their music seemed to go into decline from there, and they became very mundane- in the sense of being less than ordinary.
The book Jackson’s Track: Memoir of a Dreamtime Place, by Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon, is a story of ordinary Australian people—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—living together under difficult circumstances, and worth a read.
The book tells of Daryl Tonkin’s life at Jackson’s Track in the Gippsland region of south-eastern Victoria. He and his older brother Harry arrived there in 1936,The theme is a rural adventure covering about four decades, a story of family drama and conflict, inter-racial love and prejudice, the decline of an Aboriginal community, and the deliberate destruction by white officialdom of a culture and a way of life
Since being published in 2000, Jackson’s Track has sold more than 60,000 copies.
Co author Carolyn Landon has come back to the events of the story to examine them again.
In Jackson’s Track Revisited, the voices of Aboriginal people who lived at the Track mingle with those of the White Australians who tried to ‘improve’ their lives in the 1950s, an era of assimilation.
As of September 2008, Jackson’s Track Revisited has become “open access”, meaning that the online version of this book is now available for free. To read Jackson’s Track Revisited online, go to MonashUniversity. Please see accessing content for further information.
There’s also a good interview with Carolyn Landon about both books at the State Library of Victoria web site
I like slow dancing. Slow cooking is good. I am a slow learner. I like people who think before they speak. Lingering sunsets are worth remembering. The slow movement of a symphony is a respite from all the bang and brass. Shaggy dog stories are the funniest.
I get a thrill watching grass grow or paint dry. Sitting on a park bench in autumn is really my speed. I enjoy puddling along at 40 mph. Even traffic jams have good moments.
Photography that needs a long exposure is an art. Mature wine can be savoured. Ripe bananas have more flavour than hard firm ones.