Tom M. Wilson

Mass of twisting white spirits, frozen in their silent decade-long dance in a clearing of the south-west,

ancient lives towering from the floor to the canopy,

tumbled granite boulders, with a window in the karris out over the land and the southern ocean and the swell’s boom,

clear sight… peace in his heart.

My new gallery of nature photography can be viewed by following the link on the top right hand side of this page.

I’ve been thinking about New Zealand recently, partly because of a related essay I wrote a while back which is soon to be published. I’m not going to say much about the essay here, but I will say something about the land that is the South Island.

Looking back through my journal I find the following from my time there in 2004:

“Not only seeing nature, but also smelling the wet earth and the fast flowing stream at the bottom of the valley. Further up we passed through a high ridge and looking down on the scene below made me think: well, there is nothing left. It isn’t possible to see any more impressive topography on this blessed planet. D. H. Lawrence said he only felt a deep sense of the religious in his world travels when he arrived in New Mexico. My New Mexico.

Being here, these experiences of green mountain ringed plains, dell-filled beech woods, pine bordered, iridescent lakes, drift wood tossed shores, gives me a grounding in extra-human meaning, meaning outside the realm of human artifacts and social interactions. I’m glad to have had this time, its memory will help me persist through the knocks and setbacks that are endemic to suburban day-to-daying on my return to Perth.”

There is a way in which Wallace Stegner’s comment that ‘a place needs a poet’ is meaningful. Peter Jackson has, in a way, sung these beech woods, and given them added significance. I have a chapter in a book called ‘How We Became Middle Earth’, which is forthcoming later this year. It is out with Walking Tree Press – check it out.

I haven’t taken any good photos of New Zealand… apart from the following one of the farming country near Christchurch. The shades of green in this land are so deep compared to Australia!

Although I don’t have a great gallery of New Zealand photography, I can direct you to a few photos taken by others. These photos will give you some idea of what I’m talking about.
The river flows…

The clouds drift…

Mt Cook stands guard…

Now look into the lake, and wash away your mental clutter…

My private and unofficial Eco-Dandyist Manifesto stipulates that a gentleman dresses well. But where to from there?

Hemp is a great plant fibre, environmentally speaking, in that crops of it don’t require the application of large amounts of environmentally harmful pesticides, like the cotton you are probably wearing as you read this sentence. Hemp comes from canibis, and canibis plants more or less just shoot up by themselves. So that sorts out the kind of the plant fibre we’re aiming for (although bamboo is another one worth thinking of nowadays - even softer than cotton).

Making the clothes is next…

Most of the clothes we buy come from Asia, where hundreds of women sit in ugly and noisy factories and do boring work for hardly any money. So why not spend a little more on your clothes and get them made by someone in Australia, or whichever first world country you are probably reading this blog from?

Time to find a bespoke tailor. What’s ‘bespoke’ mean, I hear you ask? It means a tailor that makes your suit to measure your body, by hand. Well, better read the explanation of Thomas Mahon, a tailor on Saville Row in London who writes a blog called ‘English Cut‘.

So now you know all about bespoke tailoring. If you live in Western Australia you might get some hemp from the Margaret River Hemp Company and ask a local clothes designer to go to work.

So is the suit I’m wearing made from bespoken hemp?

No, it came from a local op-shop and cost seventy dollars. Even better for the environment than getting a locally tailor-made hemp or bamboo suit, is going and collecting a suit that was just sitting there unclaimed in an op-shop around the corner (as long as you can find one you really like, that is).

Time to hit play on some Gregory Isaacs and drink a gin and tonic.