Author: Hilary Burden

The onboard airline announcement went on forever. Instructions in Malay, followed by an English translation – the Australian Government’s requirements for entering the country. Two forms to complete including a lengthy Travel History Card “to help us protect you, your family and other members of the community” requiring a signature “to ensure you’ve made a truthful declaration”.

The woman sitting next to me turned and said she hadn’t seen this degree of bureaucracy in all her travels. “What’s Australia coming to? This is the welcome home we get – in our own country!” she exclaimed so anyone could hear. A young man on the other side who’d spent nine weeks travelling around Europe on a Contiki tour was trying to work out whether he was expected to squeeze in 21 countries on the three rows allocated.

Contrast entering Brunei: just a one-sided transit form asking if you’d visited an Ebola country, and in Britain and Saudi Arabia: no forms, just smiles for my EU passport and “Welcomes”.

If how airports greet you is a reflection of a nation’s personality, then Britain now has it down pat, while Australia is fast undoing everything Hoges ever made happen with his ‘Come ‘n say G’day’ campaign. On first impressions, you get the feeling that Australians don’t want to put on a BBQ for anyone these days.

First impressions count. At London Heathrow, billboards featuring smiling Londoners – a police officer, a busker, a Beefeater – greet you even before you hit Duty Free, with a handwritten “Welcome” sign. They’re not selling anything other than a big friendly hello. And the country itself seems to measure up. The English are friendlier than I remember because they seem to be enjoying who they are more than they ever have. Leftovers, perhaps, from a successful Olympics and a London Mayor who seems to hit the right note of fun and civic pride.

Contrast Melbourne airport where the billboards are sponsored, selling luxury lifestyle brands, and you’re greeted by a bank of E-passport booths and customs officers (re-branded “Border Force”) who observe you from a distance. There was no “G’day” on the day I arrived back in Australia. But I did meet a Tasmanian coming home.

I hadn’t bumped into Becky Shrimpton in Tassie for a few years. Like me, she’d spent August holidaying with family and friends in England, her birth country. And she was glowing as we compared notes over a coffee in the Brunei transit lounge.

Becky had also noticed how friendly the Brits were – more so than she recalled. “I did a lot of travelling on trains in southern England,” she explained, “and on every journey the rail staff and fellow travellers were extremely helpful and friendly – not just because there was an event on.”

Later, we exchanged emails about our Arrivals experience in Melbourne.

“I always thought that 20 years ago I’d made my home in a place that prided itself on a warm welcome,” wrote Becky, “but it was quite a contrast coming back into Australia. At Melbourne airport I kept hearing less than positive conversations between staff and customers and wondered what kind of welcome this really did give visitors to Oz.

“Clearly our stance to date on refugees is not sending out a very welcoming message either. I heard lots of negative comments about this in England when I said I was from Australia. I’d never had negative comments before – saying you’re from Australia used to produce a very positive reaction.”

Home a couple of days and Australia’s attitude is the subject of a New York Times editorial: “Australia’s brutal treatment of migrants”. Thanks to a boy washed up on a Bodrum beach like driftwood, and open protest in our capital cities, Australia is now offering Syrians asylum.

Just because the former Prime Minister’s first and automatic response was to defend the nation against people escaping desperation – rather than go to their aid – shouldn’t make the rest of us appear inhumane. Regardless of whose side you’re on, it’s a relief to hear the new PM say  “there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian”.  Now time to prove it.

We know that good people doing good things rarely make the nightly news. So it’s up to us to remind ourselves of the stuff of life that pops up, gives us hope, shows that regardless of the havoc mankind wreaks on the planet, there are positive acts going on in communities.

For example, in that airport café in Brunei, Becky told me her husband Art is now Tasmania’s first appointed ‘Emergency Response Team’ member for Shelterbox. The international Rotary-affiliated organization is headquartered in Cornwall in the UK and was set up, initially as a one-off Millennium project, to help aid go directly to the people who need it in troubled areas like Nepal, Greece and Syria. Each box supplies an extended family with a tent and essential equipment while they are displaced or homeless.

Art, a former oceanographer, told me he found out about the job through an old Cornish school friend of Becky’s who’d been in touch while holidaying in Hobart last year. It turned out he was the Australian manager for Shelterbox and just happened to be looking for someone to join the organisation in Tasmania. Art put up his hand, flew to Brisbane for an assessment, and spent nine days on an intense training course in the UK.

While also working as a teacher at Tarremah School in Hobart, Art loves his role with Shelterbox. Says it’s helped people in a total of 90 different disaster areas, including residents of Dunalley who received 18 Shelterboxes during the 2013 bushfires.

“It’s hooked up with Rotary, we fundraise, and many people bequeath funds to us,” explains Art, “so we don’t have to get involved with government funding and all the associated red tape. We deal with people on the ground, through Rotary and Red Cross, where you really get to see results, fast.”

Now that’s the kind of welcome the world needs. From a group of people seeing a need and just helping.

First published in Tasweekend, September 19th, 2015

     Do you think leaning on a tree is better than leaning on a friend, or is it the other way around? Seeing friends from the past lately I’m inclined to think they’re on the same par and more precious than money in the bank.

     We worked out, Deb and I, that we hadn’t seen each other for almost a decade. She gave me my first freelance commission on W magazine when I moved to London in the late 80s. That makes her one of my oldest London buddies. When we were single we holidayed together in European cities from Budapest to Nice. More often than not the places we chose revolved around food. For a farewell holiday, before I left London a decade ago, and after seeing Diane Keaton in the movie Something’s Gotta Give, we decided to spend the weekend in Paris – just so we could dine at Le Grand Colbert.

     So when we met up again in London recently, Deb chose Brasserie Zedel in Piccadilly Circus, good-valued elegance in the same Parisian brasserie style we’d enjoyed in Paris. We talked over the Prix Fixe menu and the Samedi Plat du Jours featuring Celeri Remoulade, Lapin au Cidre et Pâtes Fraîches and trolley of cheeses. Classic French dishes are like drop pins on a map – you know where you are, even when it’s not your language. Hours’ of conversation had passed without either of us realising until we noticed the Saturday night tables and banquettes had emptied around us.

Although we weren’t expecting to truly catch up because there had been too much time in between, in the end we agreed we made a pretty good job of it. The next day, I told Deb it had been like visiting St Paul’s Cathedral or Uluru for the first time in 10 years. Our friendship was still there, little changed, despite its lack of presence in our lives. Deb thought we were “the same but even better”.

There’s a kind of listening that goes with old friends, and why they should be cherished at all cost, re-visited as often as possible, not for any purpose or intent, or out of duty or due. Years can go by with very little exchange but it’s the true friend that will find a way of turning up eventually like a memory of perfume. It’s a way of taking the temperature of a life, measuring the distance, of how far you’ve come and where you might still go.

Friendships don’t or shouldn’t make headlines. They are the pursuit of a kind of nothingness, a ramble along a path with no particular destination. Then, pause for consideration to stop at this seat, or that, in that pub or the next for a drink that’s not the point of it… And returning only when the balance is in favour of it, signaled by a nod, an eyebrow, a gentle question raised: shall we head back now?

Visiting quintessentially English gardens on this trip, strolling through woodlands and meadows, has brought back memories of Winnie the Pooh and a thought that evokes the best of friendships:

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.

“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

 With new friends I discovered English Sparkling Wine and the South East Wine Route that certainly wasn’t celebrated, and I’m not sure even existed, when I lived here a decade ago. Thankfully, some things do change. Seems it’s not only our Tasmanian Sparkling challenging the dominance of French Champagne. Prosecco and Cava are giving it a run for their money, and it seems “Reef, Beef and Bubbles” is now the up-scaled English version of “Surf n Turf”.

But who would have thought you could taste English vintage bubbles at an English pub? And be spoilt for choice. On the wine list at The Cat Inn in Sussex are six very local varieties alone. Appreciating my interest, Andrew the barman promptly handed me the South East Wine Route map (launched for the first time in April this year), circling his top choices of Sparkling vineyards in Surrey, Sussex and Kent, all a short radius from the pub. He explained that, with warming English summers, acidity levels had been steadily improving, favouring the production of méthode champenoise Sparklings.

Our favourite came from a small vineyard in the folds of the Sussex Downs, first planted by pioneering vigneron Peter Hall in the early 1990s.   One thing the French will always have over the English, though, is a sense of romance as opposed to bald innuendo. Ordering a second glass of our favourite English Sparkling (good value at £6.50 a glass) we found ourselves stifling a giggle asking for another ‘Breaky Bottom Cuvee’.

Our taste was vindicated over Classic Afternoon Tea at too-posh Sketch in Mayfair, where London’s class system (these days based on foreign wealth not just English aristocratic lineage) is thriving. A glass of Pommery added £11 to the set price of £39, while a glass of 2010 Breaky Bottom Cuvée added an astounding £21. Per glass. At that price, you’re compelled to make afternoon tea last the whole day, and would sit there, too, if you weren’t pushed off the table by waiters with attitude after your exactly allotted 90 minutes.

If Brits can’t afford the price of an old-fashioned afternoon tea in an iconic place, they are making do with watching people baking cakes on the telly. One of Britain’s most watched TV programs of the year attracts nearly 10 million viewers a week (almost as popular as the top rating final of Britain’s Got Talent). Series Six of The Great British Bakeoff stars hot British baker Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, former cookery editor of Housewife magazine in the Sixties, whose mission in life this century is to “get everyone baking” – even though why would you when it’s the height of the English summer.
First published in Tasweekend, 29 August, 2015

The best artists make hearts and minds do cartwheels – and that’s what happened for me last Friday night at the opening of Tara Badcock’s Hunt Nature Birth, a Solo Commission at the Devonport Regional Gallery. Tara invited me to speak at the launch and I was subsequently asked by a number of those attending if my words might be published. Do make a point of seeing Tara’s exhibition if you can. It continues in Devonport for the next few weeks and tours to The Barn in Rosny in 2016.

“One of the roles of an artist is to give birth to the unknown – regardless of whether it has an audience.  But it’s a hard road in a world increasingly being driven by questions like: ‘Who is this for?’, ‘What’s your audience?’,  ‘How will you reach them?’ and ‘What’s your USP – in three words?’.

These are so often the questions asked of creative people these days. It’s not where Tara Badcock plays. But Tara has conjured her three words with Hunt Nature Birth.

My astonishment at Tara’s talent began when I first moved back to Tasmania and saw photographs taken by her friend Alan Moyle: a dress in a barn, a chair in a paddock with her cushions on it. And the name of her business? Paris+Tasmania.

For someone who had just moved back to Tasmania after nearly two decades living in Europe, wondering how I was going to make both sides of the world come together, Tara’s vision was a revelation. Here was someone practicing at the top of her game, boldly saying that she could, and in the process turning it into a label.

Paris+Tasmania seemed to say to me two places could matter and work. But, more than that, how the artist might have a duty to make it so.

With our history of colonisation Tasmania is two places. It is a familiar struggle. The struggle of being a migrant in your own home. Of forever trying to make the other relevant, matter, gel, co-create… I believe this is an area where Tara Badcock leads. Like many of you I’ve observed her sharing of the frenzy of her creation of Hunt Nature Birth.  On one occasion, early on, Tara posted on Instagram:

“I was trying hard NOT to make work with any relation to this subject (birth experience) and it was all going pear shaped until I gave in and all the artworks started appearing very naturally.”

How sweet that sounds.

For those of you who know Tara, or if you’ve been following her progress on Instagram, you’ll be familiar with her sense of madness, her self confessed silliness, her vulnerability, how she admits to being wracked with doubt… And love her all the more for it because she just keeps going.

And when Tara first told me over cake (gluten free) on her dining room table, how she was working on this Solo Commission which featured a ‘marsupial mummy’, with a baby in one hand and heart with arteries in the other pulled from the pregnant dress – my everything tingled at the clever madness; at her gumption; at the visions she left in my mind.

When Tara asked me to say a few words this evening she wrote,  “I hope you don’t find the subject matter unpleasant, it’s a very personal expression of the confusion I felt having children – in my mind it was supposed to be a very natural, essentially biological experience, and it turned out to be an estranged one, surgical even, which left me feeling divorced from the whole process.”

What I revel in here, and you will too, is Tara Badcock’s  infinite energy to explore and create, and the absolute insistence on growth and fulfillment, despite the unravelling of identity that motherhood can bring.

I’m filled with admiration for her achievement. And just as much for her ability to maintain consciousness, self-awareness and objectivity of the birth process and being a mother. I have a small feel of the sense of ‘madness’ she may have been going through during these years, but only infinitesimal,  because I’ve never been a mother. Most mums I know seem to necessarily ‘disappear’, and Tara has done the opposite. That’s what’s genius.

She won’t self-congratulate – that’s what we’re here to do for her. Tara, it’s a joy to share a room with you and your artwork in front of your family, friends and peers. All together we congratulate you.

You thoroughly deserve the attention and every honour.”

Hear Tara Badcock  in conversation at the Devonport Regional Gallery, Tuesday September 15th, 11am, admission free. The artist’s exhibition continues at the Devonport Regional Gallery until October 18th, 2015.

You know when you meet someone and you just click?

Well that’s what happened when I interviewed Lisa West, host and proprietor of Stanton B&B for Country Style magazine. She served lemon cake and coffee in front of a roaring open fire and we could have chatted all day except I had to get back on the road and head north.

We live at opposite ends of the state, so our conversations continued on email, but if we’d been closer we might have been sharing each other’s kitchen tables putting the world to rights, or taking a few tours around each other’s gardens, swapping cuttings, seeds and growing tips.

So a while back, when she suggested I hold one of my writing workshops at her beautiful country property in Magra, not far from New Norfolk in the Derwent Valley, it seemed a natural fit.

If you are a traveller, blogger, journal keeper, memoirist, feature writer or just love where you live and the places you visit, why not come along to one of my writing workshops and stay? They’re designed to fire up your creativity, help you find your own voice, and develop your writing style among fellow travellers in a place that truly inspires.

Reserve your spot for Saturday, November 14th in the morning or afternoon. We’re keeping the groups small [maximum 6] because it’s nice not to get lost in a crowd.

To book, follow the link to Stanton B&B and have a chat with Lisa. Make sure you say hi from me!

     A wilderness festival was held in Oxfordshire at the weekend. It’s funny to come to London and discover how wilderness is a thing. In Tasmania we seem so often hung up on debating the concept of it, yet in reality live next door to some of the wildest places in the world. We seem so fixed on discussing the boundaries of our world heritage area, we forget how we might be part of it.

     “Wander often, wonder always” is one of the mantras of the three-day posh hippy festival west of London where people gather to go “wild swimming” in a spring-fed lake, forage for food, learn butchery, go on wild medicine walks, canoe, listen to artists like Bjork … You get the picture. Run annually for the past five years on a private nature reserve, The Guardian reviewed it as “a place where art, intellectualism and fantastic gastronomy share equal billing with music”.

When ‘real’ wild is so far away from most people’s experience on this densely populated island (more than 80% of Britons live in towns or cities), urban dwellers are learning to appreciate finding and accessing the wild and natural in where they are.

I’m lying jetlagged in a berry patch in the middle of Barnes while my friend Lizzie weeds her allotment plot. It’s a peculiarly English view. Elegant four-storey apartment buildings and houses (one bedroom selling in the vicinity of £750,000) surround the 2ha allotment that lies beneath the Heathrow flight path. At this time of the year, the gardens are at their productive best, and a seasonal feast for the senses for this traveller who left Tasmania in a snowstorm.

“You Australians have your space but this is a people’s heaven in the middle of a concrete jungle,” said one of Lizzie’s fellow gardeners tending his plot.

The waiting list for a plot at the Barn Elms allotment – one of around 30,000 in London – is 90 long. Over 100 gardeners pay £30 per annum rental, signing up to site maintenance rules that include: no fruit trees over 3 metres and garden sheds to be maintained respectably. If your plot is judged neglected by the Plots Committee, you’ll receive a letter from its Chair requesting the weeding be done. Three letters and you’re out!

I’m not sure I could cope with the all the rules and overseeing, and suddenly have a renewed appreciation for how lucky Australians are to have the space to grow what we want, how we want.

Either way, in city or country, localized food production and smallholdings are increasingly important for our survival, a point made by Prince Charles in an interview on BBC Radio Four’s version of the Country Hour.

In a week when one English supermarket chain cut the price it pays farmers for milk to 23p (48 cents) a litre for milk – below the cost of production – the Prince’s call for more to be done to help small farmers stay in business is timely.  “It can’t all be done by gigantic corporations and agribusinesses,” he told On Your Farm. “Some of them try, but a lot of them are not interested in biodiversity or culture or rural communities,” he said. “We witnessed in the UK the depopulation of the countryside, the disappearance of so many family farms, the effect it’s had on the countryside, the wildlife, everything. I happen to think the small farmer, the smallholder, is absolutely crucial to the maintenance of food security.”

To this end, a couple of programs in England also stand out.

Grow Wild England, supported by the Big Lottery Fund and run by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is a flagship mass participation outreach program, inspiring people to do something positive for where they live by sowing, growing and enjoying native plants and wild flowers. It’s important because the UK has lost 98% of its wild flower meadows since the 1930s – which means less butterflies, bees, bugs and birds. Less places to lie in and watch the clouds go by.

There’s also an impressively organized grassroots campaign to turn London into the first ‘National Park City’ and celebrate “our great outdoors”. Here’s the argument:

Fifteen National Parks in England – protected areas that include mountains, meadows, moorlands, woods and wetlands, as well as towns and villages – host over 80 million visitors each year and contribute as much to the economy as the UK aerospace sector. Taking inspiration from the successes of National Parks, the campaign aims to transform Greater London into a new kind of National Park that sits outside of current legislation.  A Draft Charter has been developed, based on advice from the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, and consultation opened last month to turn London into a ‘National Park City’ for which no precedent exists. The campaign’s efforts are based on gaining the support of at least two-thirds of London’s 649 local electoral wards, as well as the Mayor of London. Instead of seeking government leadership, it’s hoped Londoners themselves will turn the vision into reality and declare the capital a National Park City.

On the Thames footpath at Barnes (a 294 km walking trail following London’s famous river) a man has stopped his bicycle to forage for wild blackberries, startling a wood pigeon from its nest. On the other side of the river two cranes are busy building a new lifestyle development where 2-bedroom apartments are selling for over £2m. The two seem happy bedfellows.

I wander and wonder how in Tasmania we might be more caring about clearing wild blackberries and native verges from some of our country roads. My Karoola corner, once profuse with wild blackberries along the fence line, is now sprayed and kept cleared by council workers. A refuge lost not only to us but all species with whom we share this place.

First published in Tasweekend, 22nd August 2015