02-12-19

I’m out with a few hostelers at Cottlesloe Beach, a popular area just a bit outside Perth. I’m not sure why I’m here. Probably because the attractive German girl. But I leave for Veitnam in two days. So…

At the least I may write a bit. And get some sun. But what to write? It’s unplanned and without the usual impetuses that motivate me.

I thought my week here in Perth would be too long, but it seems as though it will have been a perfectly appropriate amount of time. I’ve met some very nice people at the hostel and there has been so much going on in the city that I’ve found a wealth of interesting, and even free, things to do, in addition to certain tasks I’ve set myself regarding onward travels.

There is a beautiful aboriginal art exhibition happening at the Art Gallery of West Australia that only opened a few days ago. Extraordinary paintings and sculptures that are being produced by these people. And extraordinary the way they transmute their mythology of world creation, dreams, and landscape into living artworks, canvases of astonishing beauty and abstractness.

In addition to this exhibition there was also an immense light-art installation at King’s Park that I went to twice. Again, an event of magic and magnificent beauty which nearly moved me to tears. Its message, on the destruction of the natural environment—the death of these environments that are not found anywhere else in the world, or even within Australia itself—was enormously depressing and somber, though they ended it with voices of encouragement, hope from older folk who remember when these environments were pristine and have seen their decline, and the younger generation of children in elementary and middle school who don’t want to live on a dead planet, who worry about their future.