Liz Colbert - Saloni M Liz Colbert I was born in Australia but lived overseas for eight and a half years. Flying over seas. Returning to the red continent. Walking as a child from a domestic street into the bush five minutes away. Fleeting and ingrained moments encapsulated.
Writing is a resolution.
The following are extracts are from my Recycled Sack , a book made from all the collected papers from a journey to Europe in 1996. The recycled sack holds many artefacts from our trip to Europe and just as the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam specializes in a number of plant groups, so this book contains a selected number of experiences from the human species, tourist, which are personal and idiosyncratic, and like the Hortus, which demands that new items be collected from their natural habitat, the items in the sack are in their travelled state, creased from packing, torn with use, quite unlike the path trod each morning around Vienna where the underbelly of that civilized city turned up in the form of a lone female, shoeless, pants dragging on the ground, jacket open, breasts loose, dreadlocks without intent, she raving at the silent paths which have been tempered into a high point of civilization like the cultivation of the giant water lily Victoria amizonica in the South American section of the Hortus which is the antithesis of the specimens in this recycled sack. Katriana Katriana lives in Amsterdam, above her sister and Gert, in a duplex apartment with an attic bedroom where we slept well and woke in the morning to a view across the street into another apartment where a couple were sitting in arm chairs, drinking coffee and reading the paper which Katriana said, as she tilted the slatted blinds in the living room where she was sleeping on the sofa, was not how she liked to live, no, not publicly like that she said, as she slipped on one of her many pairs of beautiful shoes for which she is noted and wore to the Artists Society where we met her for a drink and talked at the bar with a young South African man who was planning to come to Australia to work during the Olympic Games which made us feel, in spite of the high wooden ceilings and the heavy doors, in which a woman jammed her fingers as we entered, that we weren t really so distant from the discussion about event employment we had overheard before we left Melbourne where we decided to visit Katriana. Friedenscreich Hundertwasser Friedenscreich Hundertwasser believes in dancing windows, irrigated surfaces, cracks, warmth and the divine right of nature which rarely manifests itself in straight lines or regular, repetitive rows like the boards in my bathroom, or the collection of crystals in the Natural History Museum, and even the floors in the museum devoted to his work undulate beneath the feet as one walks around absorbing the patches of silver and gold, the universal spirals, the curved and randomly tiled areas where the floor meets the wall, and the tiered tanks of plants which are nourished by the water which flows through the soil before being returned to the top tank, thus carrying the nutrients from the soil and realising his belief in the spiral as a circle that never closes and equally we can never be the specimens we were at the beginning of an experience and return to exactly where we started. Natural History Natural history was once the study of animals collected and killed during grand expeditions then, in the hands of a talented taxidermist, after being stitched and stuffed, they took on a new life in a glass case, scattered amongst the severed limbs of a tree that suggested the natural world these animals came from, a natural world in which the dodo and Tasmanian tiger still lived, but oddly these creatures still exist in these glass houses, and justifiably, one could argue, with the decrease in the number of living species, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger will be joined by many others as remaining examples of such creatures, and this of course will make them suitable items for museums of natural history, and there may even be a problem, as the number increases, with selecting which from the vast collection should go on display.