None of us can travel at the moment, but if you like travelling come and enjoy a series of documentaries on ways of life very far from suburban Australia. Come to the jungles of Sumatra, the steppes of Mongolia, the savannah of East Africa, and the ice of the Arctic, to witness ways of life of the traditional people of these places. Most of the documentaries were shot on 16mm in the 1970s, and even if you could visit the same places today many of the people you would meet would now own smartphones and in some cases have moved to cities. This will be a monthly series.
November’s film takes us to the world of the Yanomamo of the Amazon basin, and follows their relationships, socialising and storytelling, and hunting traditions.
I’ll be speaking to the Western Australian Naturalists Club on changing cultural views of the natural world in Western Australia 9 July, 7pm. Members of the public are welcome to join.
Humans have been telling stories about nature for millennia. We look at some of the most significant and imaginatively compelling books that do just this, in poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Discover, or re-discover, works of Wordsworth, Thoreau and Powers, and the poetry of Wang Wei, Mary Oliver and others.
Location: 42 Glyde St. East Fremantle // Members $24 / $16 conc. Enrol here.
(The above image is an excerpt I’ve taken from ‘Home by the Lake’ by the Hudson School artist Frederic Edwin Church from 1852. I’ll be touching on the American essayist Thoreau in my talks and Church’s painting of a wooden cabin alongside a lake in New England was made around the same time that Thoreau immortalised such a vision in Walden – 1854.)
