17 December 2004 Cheri Hunter reports: It is sometimes a let-down, when a really terrific conference is over - the exhibition openings, lectures, receptions, dealers' fair, ruggie camaraderie, and carpets and textiles all wind down and are rolled up, and everyone drifts homeward. That is why special post-conference tours are so lovely; they let one linger in this exciting world for a few more days, savouring the pleasures of the main gathering with a few more exotic tidbits of amuse bouches. The ICOC Down Under's two-day post-conference trip to Canberra was no exception, and carried on beyond the main part of the conference at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum with more Australian hospitality, spirit, fun and textile treasures.
Early on Monday morning, a group of mostly international participants boarded the bus from the two conference hotels and started out to Canberra. About four hours southwest of Sydney on the road to Melbourne, Canberra is an artificially contrived city, in the same vein as Brasilia and Washington DC. It was created both as a compromise national capital between the two main Australian metropolises, as well as being located inland and therefore safe from attack by sea (in the days of more primitive warfare.) We had been promised kangaroos along the way, although none were to be seen in the morning hours as our bus travelled up through rolling hills and countryside covered with 'gums' (eucalyptus.)
Upon arrival in Canberra we went directly to the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), where we consumed our box lunches in the museum's sculpture garden. Huge contemporary sculptures were scattered like giant's toys across a lawn along the edge of a large artificial lake, which was surrounded by trees overloaded with white springtime blossoms in mid-September. Then, in the National Gallery's auditorium, Curator of Asian Art Robyn Maxwell presented an orientation slide lecture on the museum's textile collections, primarily from the Holmgren-Spertus Indonesian collection. Altogether, the museum holds 4,000 to 5,000 textiles, including Southeast Asian and Indian trade textiles, Australian decorative arts textiles, plus an extensive collection of Russian Theatre costumes and textiles.
After a refreshing tea break, we were divided into three groups, and taken behind the scenes to the storage and conservation facilities. Conservators Michelline Ford and Charlotte Galloway had laid out several projects on which they had recently been working in the conservation lab, which appeared to be spacious and light-filled, and equipped with the latest scientific instruments. However, the NGA's conservation procedures still include intensive hand work, and one Indian trade cloth had received more than 800 hours of conservation!
Public Education Assistant Ben Duval showed us examples of very early Indian trade textiles, including batiks, block-printed sarongs imprinted with gold, and 14th century Jain double-ikat silk patola cloths, especially unrolled for us from their storage boxes and spread over large tables in a basement corridor. Next it was upstairs into storage, where Robyn Maxwell herself unveiled various costumes and textiles, showing how they are carefully stored and labelled in the museum's textile archives. These included a beaded vest, a Toraja cotton, a silk and cotton South Sumatran cloth (without ships!), and an exquisite 19th century blue batik from the north coast of Java.
I took a few minutes of free time to peruse the NGA's bookstore, especially to pick up a catalogue of their recent exhibition 'Sari to Sarong' and dashed through a forest of Aboriginal totems and the surprisingly rich painting and sculpture collection, rife with works from the 1950s, 60s and 70s New York School.
After a quick check-in to our hotel, we were off again to a wine and hors d'oeuvres reception hosted by the Asia Bookroom, an extraordinary shop filled entirely, as one might surmise, with books on Asian history, culture, art, and geography, including rugs and textiles. It was almost painful to be dragged away from this treasure trove, but our elegant dinner at The Boathouse by the Lake Restaurant continued in an international vein, and a lively evening ensued at my table with conference participants from Australia, Iran, Poland, Tadjikistan, Ukraine, the UK, and the USA.
Given a free morning, some of the group elected to visit 'Xanadu: Encounters with China', an exhibition at the National Library of Australia. Drawn from the Library's collection of Asian maps, pictures, manuscripts and ephemera, the exhibition of 150 items focused on how China was perceived by Western observers since Marco Polo. Others of us took a tour of Canberra, which included cruising amongst the international legations on Embassy Row, a visit to the architecturally innovative New Parliament building with its sod and grass roof and pyramid-shaped tower, and a quick run through the ground floor of the equally imaginative National Museum of Australia. We drove to the top of Mt. Ainsley for a fabulous panoramic overview of all of Canberra. As we looked over the Capitol city, with its sophisticated, geometrically ordered avenues and boulevards, and ornamental fountains, pools and the lake, multitudes of bright red and green parrots shrieked exuberantly and flew from tree to tree on the hilltop around us, a reminder that we were really still out in the bush in the Land Down Under.
Then it was down the mountain to lunch in the Members' Dining Room at the Old Parliament House, and a quick stop and walkabout in the tourist village of Barrima, one of the best-preserved colonial Georgian villages in Australia. By the time we were on the road again to Sydney, it was just the right time of day to see "mobs" of kangaroos, which had finally emerged from the eucalyptus forests for a late afternoon graze in the roadside paddocks (pastures.) All-in-all, the Canberra tour was a pleasant, gentle glide back from the excitement of Rug-Conference Land down to the banality of Real Life, and a suitable wrap-up to a wonderful trip. |
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