Australia day double - and quilts

This year we got two Australia Days, because the real one fell on a Sunday, and today, Monday, is a public holiday: to not have a public holiday would be 'unaustralian' (I'm not complaining...)

Yesterday  we went to a 'Survival Day' gathering organised by Benarrawa Community Development Association by the Benarrawa, or Oxley Creek, which is a tributary of the Brisbane river at Graceville.

This is the second time we have attended this community event: last year it ended in torrential rain and floods. Interestingly, the emphasis has shifted this year from Invasion to Survival, which I guess is a more positive reframing.

There is a bronze canoe on the riverbank, which commemorates co-operation between the local Indigenous population and white people many years ago. Two convicts where given a lift across the river by the local Aboriginal people, to help them escape their fate.

I used to bring my sons here when they were younger, to play on the 'pirate ship' playground, not knowing the historical significance of this venue.

I just read a fascinating, and related, article in the Courier Mail Weekend magazine, about a forthcoming Museum of Brisbane exhibition called Many Lives of Moreton Bay, about the social history of the Bay's islands.

The article makes a link between the prior use of Peel Island as a leper colony in the colonial era, and Nauru and Manus Island in the present to detain refugees. Islands are a convenient place to dump people we don't want to think about, in other words. There are parallels here with the institutional treatment of people with mental health issues, and the segregation was often based on fear. Fascinating and shameful stuff.

I just came across the term 'Depression Quilts' via Google, referring to quilts made in America between 1920 and 1930, which forms a nice segue to the next bit, or piece.

The photographs are of quilting blocks I have been making, out of precut printed fabric strips, which are sewn together into stripes, then cut again across the stripes, reconfigured and resewn (alternating different strips) into a sort of chequerboard design. Hard to describe, that process, but its another form of reframing...

This is another pattern that I can't remember how to do. Again, it involves sewing, cutting, reconfiguring and resewing. I'll eventually figure it out. The moral is, don't abandon projects for too long.

Saw the movie of the Book Thief the other night, having read the book...I appreciated it in a different way to reading it. It was very evocative of war, in a more graphic way than words can convey, which is ironic, as the book is all about the power of words.

more later