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Bombala. Bobundara. Billilingra. Cootralantra. Gunningra. Jincumbilly. Murrumbucca. Murranumbla. Merriangaah. Myalla. Nimmitabel. Wullwye. Yarrandoo. The place where I live, like the whole continent, is overlayed with place-names in the languages of black Australia, or corruptions of those names, but most times I hardly hear them.

One day I’m driving through this place and a program I like called Word Up comes on the radio. Someone is reciting a string of Indigenous language words, and at the same time I’m looking out through the car window at grass and sky, treeless conical hills and rocks, and the whole landscape suddenly looks utterly foreign. Like another country. The strange thing is that this feels right. As if it were waiting to be made inexplicable.

Notes
ABC Radio: Word Up shares the diverse languages of black Australia from Anmatyerre to Arrernte, from Bidjara to Bundjalung, from Nyungar to Ngaanyatjarra, from Yankunytjatjara to Yorta Yorta—one word at a time.
(I think the language from my part of the world is called Ngarigu.)

Looking at these beautiful objects makes me want to immediately build a 15 metre long wall to hold a few of them.
Down to the wire —
new work by Alison Coates
Shapiro, Sydney

While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is ‘filled’, it touches the individual directly, envelopes him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence ‘the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light’; the feeling of mystery that one experiences at night would not come from anything else.
Jacky Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy

The river in winter is a poetic transmitter. Particularly at nightfall — as a liminal place of melancholic beauty and stillness as much as a time of transition. Bowring talks about sites of spirited sadness that have the ability to slow things down, defamiliarise, allow for percolation, and facilitate ‘solitude and solice for imagination.’

Photography, GS, Snowy River at Dalgety, New South Wales

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The elegant lines of Dalgety Bridge, Snowy River, New South Wales.

Photograph, GS

Maffra, New South Wales, 6:30am

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Best wishes for Australia’s new (only?) independent voice in newspaper publishing. The Saturday says, ‘We promise to be a small but handsome mongrel, a blue heeler cross of the press.’

It’s nice to be asked once to design an arts magazine but a rare thing to be asked to also do the subsequent redesigns—two in all—the latest being June/July 2013, which is a fresh look at the design produced by Monika Domaschenz and myself in 2006. All page layouts shown are by Gail Priest.
RealTime: a critical guide to the art of now.

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Beautiful bag by Sione Falemaka, who learnt traditional weaving from his grandmother.

Xu Zhen
For In Just a Blink of an Eye, 2005

Damien Hirst, 1992

Damien Hirst, 1992

Simon Fujiwara
Future Perfect, 2012

Simon Fujiwara
Future Perfect, 2012

Allora & Calzadilla
Revolving Door, 2011

Clark Beaumont
Coexisting, 2013

Laura Lima
Man=Flesh/Woman=Flesh–Flat, 1997

13 Rooms
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach
11–21 April 2013
Pier 2/3, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, Sydney