Perth 3
The high-decibel music and consequent raised voices as people try to talk over it can be a bit much when you’re out anywhere. Saturday night Diane Slade (my boss, the head of the ad program at ECU) invited us to a 21st birthday party for her daughter Annabelle. Beautiful girl, cool place, great fun evening, but I found it hard to have a conversation with anyone except the person I was sitting next to, and even then I missed words and phrases. Somebody had a bright idea though – between the entrée and the main course the ten of us switched places around the table, so each of us did get to talk with a couple more people than we might’ve otherwise.
Among the dinner guests were a couple who run a winery in a place called Denmark (!) way south of here off the Albany (!) highway. They talked about us maybe coming down when the grapes are ripe for picking, in March, I think, or maybe early April. That would be fun. Meanwhile, they invited us to an event they’re having a couple of weekends from now to introduce a new sparkling wine. Though Sylv’s not keen on bubbly drinks, we thought the event itself would be an experience. Unfortunately, it’s on a Sunday. We were game to rent a car and drive the five hours down there on Saturday and stay over in a B&B; that sounded like an interesting adventure. The problem, though, is that because I teach on Mondays I would have needed to drive five hours back to Perth right after the tasting. Not on. Maybe there’ll be another time.
The more I got into the preparation for this teaching assignment, the more terrified I got. At all the other schools around the world where I’ve taught, I just put together a syllabus for their approval and showed up to perform to it. It’s not going to work that way here.
The school uses the tutorial format, to which I’ve never had any exposure. Before and after each of my hour-and-a-half lectures to a class of 130 students, two other professionals and I will each take 20-25 students apiece for another hour and a half and expand on what I’ve said, answer questions, maybe do some exercises to drive home the main points, assign homework, et cetera. We’ll also assign the major papers and projects to our individual groups and grade them individually. I wasn’t sure how all that would work. We met for a couple of hours the other day and there are obviously differences in our relative experiences and perspectives. Complicating that are the school’s own much more particular policies about exactly how things must be organized and done, even how things must look.
I’m also used to being able to change the order of when I talk about stuff, depending on what may come up in class, or drop in things I may not have planned on talking about at all, again because something came up in class. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do those things as freely here either, because all the tutorial sessions have to be planned in advance in great detail so that we’re all on the same page.
We had some technical problems, too. The operating system on my Mac Book Pro is so new that the software that would allow me to use the school’s printer hasn’t been written yet. I didn’t know how to upload readings or whatever onto the school system, either. We’re obviously not going to run 130 hard copies of everything to hand out, much as that might have benefited my International Paper Company stock! Oh, how I was missing my teaching assistants and my secretary Nancy who insulated me from most of these kinds of problems. I’ve been spoiled all these years. Fortunately, perceiving my angst, Diane got that stuff done for me, bless her, so I could concentrate on content. I was still scared until I actually went through the process the first time and wonder of wonders, it suddenly all made sense to me. I love the idea of tutorials, of our being able a week later to go over in small groups what I’d said in the previous lecture to make sure the students actually understand the stuff and answer all their questions. It’s hard to remember what I was worried about!
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It’s always interesting to look at the residential housing when you come to a new country. We’ve observed on our bus rides around the city that Perth has retained most of its historic stock of one-story Victorian bungalows. A good many are faux Tudor and most have some fancy trim on roof eaves and railings. The predominant color is desert sand, with green or brown trim. The roofs themselves are shallowly peaked and made of either tin or burnt orange tile. We saw some houses like this in other parts of Australia when we were here a few years ago and some in Auckland, but nowhere near this much of a concentration.
Actually these houses remind Sylv of the two-room bungalow she was born in, in Wales. Not surprising, I suppose. There’s a lot here that makes her harken back to her childhood – customs, food items, what things are called, place names, all seem very familiar to her.
We’ve done a little clothes shopping here but mostly just clothes looking because we’re shocked at the prices. For example, a big sale on ordinary men’s dress shirts might bring the price down to $70. (I told one sales guy I wanted a suit for that!) In fact, I did find a nice linen jacket on sale for what I thought was a more nearly reasonable $99. Fortunately I already have a couple of pairs of slacks that will go with it, because the pants on sale in the same store would have set me back another $79. The prices in ordinary stores are Brooks Brothers-level and there don’t seem to be options. Even the Salvation Army store is expensive, relative to Chapel Hill’s PTA Thrift Store! We also hate most of the fashions we see, men’s and women’s. Everything seems to be designed for teenyboppers. We won’t need an extra suitcase when we go home this time, that’s for sure.
Speaking of the high cost of living here, the Perth International Beer Festival was on this weekend down near the river, so eagerly down I walked. The entry fee to the grounds, however, was $29 (no senior discount) and that wouldn’t even entitle me to a free pint of beer. Once you’re inside, they said, you’ll pay full price at the various tents. I thought about it and figured I’m really only going to be able to drink about two pints, three at the most. For $29, I can walk across the street to The Lucky Shag (no kidding, that’s the name of the pub!) on the waterfront and get three pints for that with no entry fee. So that’s what I did. I only had one, in fact, a very nice guest beer for $10.50 (still a bit much, I thought) and sat on the dock watching the boats come and go while I savored it.
Later Sylv and I went to a play at PICA – the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. The play was part of the Perth International Arts Festival. The author was advertised as “one of Australia’s most original young writers” and the director was said to be “fast establishing his reputation as one of Australian theatre’s most exceptional talents.” It was imaginatively conceived, all right, but almost nothing actually happened on stage (which was a raked plot of grass, representing a backyard) and every other word was the “F” word. Not necessarily out of context, mind you, but the context was a modern Australian retelling of Euripides’ “Iphigenia In Aulis” which I vaguely remember reading in a Humanities lit course at Columbia. I’m sure the story was told then without resort to an latterday litany of swear words. We weren’t sorry we went, but we also aren’t going to tell everyone we meet that they’ve simply GOT to go see this play.
A curious thing about “the alley behind Bally” where we live: everybody who gets married in Perth seems to come here to get wedding party pictures taken right outside our gate! Weird. We keep hearing these voices and when we peek out, there’s another wedding party being arranged by a photographer. We can’t imagine why. It’s just an alley, with iron rail fencing mounted on brick pillars semi-protecting the ground floor apartments. Three- or four-story buildings on either side and at both ends. What can possibly be the attraction? Whatever, our little place is immortalized in a whole generation’s wedding albums.
The West Australia newspaper had a feature the other day on what stores in the Central Business District like Bally’s are paying in rent: $1200 per square meter. No wonder prices are high.
We went off to the Western Australia Museum of Art today – like the PICA theatre, only a 15-minute walk – to see an exhibit of “the last of the impressionists.” Frederick McCubbin was born in 1855 and painted more or less conventionally with a limited palette until he went to Europe for seven months in 1907 and came back an impressionist. His work evokes Turner, Constable, Monet – he absorbed what he saw pretty well. He painted mostly his own backyard, though, so there aren’t a lot of thrilling themes among the 76 hangings in the show. He does well enough with the sky and even better with the bush (which seems to be the Australian word for “woods”) but he’s not very good at evoking the sea and his depictions of people are downright amateurish save for three startling exceptions where the people (his wife, his daughter, and especially a drover down on his luck) are the focal points of the respective paintings rather than ancillary elements. Perhaps I’m prejudiced, but Sylv’s best paintings seem to me to be every bit as good as most of his work and in some aspects better.
On the way to the museum we came across a little street market, but it only had a dozen vendors and the mostly they were selling overpriced art jewelry and used teen-type clothing. It wasn’t a flea market per se, the kind of thing we love to prowl through. I did buy a book from one of the stands though by a Western Australian author I’d never heard of, Robert Drewe. Halfway through it he’s become one of my new favorites. I’ll probably read everything of his I can find, as I have with a couple of other Australian writers, Tim Winton (also from WA) and Richard Flanagan (a Tasmanian).
My dislocated finger (a souvenir of our trip to Berlin last November) hasn’t healed properly and probably won’t. In normal use it doesn’t give me any trouble and there’s no pain, but functionally, while I can play the piano, I can’t make a fist. There should be some clever thing I could say about that, but I haven’t thought of exactly how to phrase it!