By JANENE CAREY
(Published in Seasons magazine, Spring 2012, The Armidale Express)
THE New England Regional Art Museum in Armidale has an enviable problem - its permanent collection is so large that only two per cent of it can be hung on the walls at once.
Featuring more than 4500 works, it's one of the biggest and most significant art collections in Australia outside a capital city, with an insured value of around $42 million.
The jewel in the crown is the 1500-strong Howard Hinton collection, which spans the decades from the 1880s through to the 1940s, and includes masterpieces by Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Margaret Preston, Norman Lindsay, Elioth Gruner, Lloyd Rees, Sydney Long, Nora Heysen, William Dobell and Margaret Olley.
The Chandler Coventry collection of 1960s and 1970s Australian art, and the NERAM collection of more recently acquired works by major contemporary artists, make up the remainder of the holdings.
A selection of 70 or so Hinton pieces is always on display at NERAM, usually in the Lalor Harris gallery, and an important part of Phillipa Charley-Briggs' job as curator is devising fresh, thematic ways of cycling through the collection, choosing which ones to put up next.
"As curator, I work with Caroline Downer, the director, and we plan the program of exhibitions together," said Philippa, who came to NERAM almost four years ago with two decades of experience in art galleries and historic houses behind her.
"Every year we try to have a good spread of touring exhibitions appealing to different age groups and interests in art. Those then complement the exhibitions that we plan for the permanent collection. We like to make sure that we're exhibiting works from our permanent collection all the time so visitors can always see a selection of them."
A recent Hinton exhibition theme was "The Grand Tour", featuring the iconic and exotic locales that Howard Hinton and his artist friends would have visited while journeying around Europe and the United Kingdom.
It was even arranged in the normal order of progression from country to country.
"We start here in London, so there's Fleet St, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and St Paul's," Philippa said, pointing to a series of pictures, "and some of the docks - because of course they would have all gone by ship - and here we are in Paris. More of France, then Brussels, Bruges, Vienna, the Danube, Italy. Lots of Venice - here's a beautiful Streeton and these lovely etchings - and then here are the Spanish works. So it reflects the full traditional tour of the late 1800s and early 1900s, if you walk around it the right way."
She noted that these works, which Hinton collected while living in London and Europe, were typical of the pieces that Australians of that era tended to bring home.
"They're not by significant European artists, but they are the kinds of things that would have been collected by travellers at that time," she said.
Another 2012 display of works from the Hinton collection, titled "The Fashionable Hinton", showcased portraits of men and women in a variety of clothing styles and included the well known Yellow Gloves painting by Esther Paterson.
The task of finding pictures to suit a particular theme is made easier by a searchable database containing detailed descriptions of the works, said Philippa.
A new Hinton exhibition is rolled out every three months, which means that over the course of a year about 20 per cent of the collection comes out of the storeroom and goes up on the walls.
It's a very physical task that involves hauling huge wheeled racks to display the pictures mounted on each side and climbing ladders to access those at the top, so changeover time sees a dedicated "hanging team" of experienced volunteers swinging into action.
Philippa, who grew up in Armidale and moved back here with a young family, said she loves the breadth and variety that her 14-hour a week position encompasses.
"I feel very lucky to have a part-time job like this where I can be working with such a fantastic collection. And it covers all aspects of planning and mounting exhibitions, which makes it extremely interesting," she said.
At the end of June, NERAM announced a $400,000 fundraising drive to augment the Hinton Collection with a masterpiece by the much-loved Australian artist, Margaret Olley.
The Yellow Room Triptych, which is on loan to Armidale until October, will eventually join Mosman's Bay by Tom Roberts as the only Hinton Collection paintings on permanent display.
Not relaxed in Vietnam
...highs and lows of a family trip
By JANENE CAREY
(Published in Seasons magazine, Winter 2012, The Armidale Express)
HOME to 90 million people and more than 20 million motorbikes, Vietnam is a lively, noisy country that packs extraordinary geographical features and a fascinating heritage into a long, skinny strip of land bordered by China, Laos, Cambodia and the South China Sea.
This rapidly modernising Asian dragon is a popular holiday destination - most people will tell you that it's on their list of places to see, or that they've already been there and they loved it.
For our Armidale-born teenage sons and ten-year-old daughter, who'd previously gone no further afield than New Zealand, this holiday was their first experience of a very different way of life.
They took it all in their stride: the fragrant noodle soups sprinkled with fresh herbs; the women in conical hats carrying market produce swinging from bamboo poles; the scooters with improbable loads (from live pigs to double-bed mattresses); the dragon's-teeth limestone mountains; the acres of rice paddies dotted with buffalos and electricity pylons - along with the pestering hawkers on the streets; the 24-hour gastro bug that struck during our overnight cruise; and the infernal honking chaos of the traffic.
Not wanting to cram too much into two weeks, we confined ourselves to northern and central Vietnam, visiting Hanoi, Halong Bay, Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, Hue, and Hoi An.
Most package tours would include all of these places bar one - and throw in steamy Saigon, the Mekong Delta, and an overnight train trip to the northern hill-tribes town of Sapa too - but the place they don't include was, of course, the absolute highlight of our trip.
The karst mountains of the UNESCO world heritage-listed Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park are cloaked in rainforest and riddled with a vast network of spectacular caves.
Many were used as hospitals, bomb shelters and ammunition depots during the American War, but some have only recently been mapped by explorers, including Hang Son Doong cave, currently thought to be the world's largest, and the majestic, awe-inspiring Paradise Cave, which was discovered in 2005 and opened to the public in December last year.
We spent three nights at nearby Phong Nha Farmstay, a comfortable, friendly, backpacker-style place set amid rice paddies and rustic villages, run by an Australian and his Vietnamese wife.
It received rave reviews in the latest Lonely Planet guide, which the owners say has been a mixed blessing, because now travellers turn up expecting all the usual conveniences, despite the rural location.
We did their full-day tour of the national park, including Paradise Cave, which was as beautiful as we'd been told, with wooden staircases cascading into cathedral-sized spaces full of sensitively-lit stalactite and stalagmite formations.
However, it was a raw, undeveloped wet cave that made the biggest impression on us, because exploring it felt like such an adventure.
You reach Dark Cave by kayaking along the turquoise Chay river to the entrance, and then you wade inside until the water becomes so deep that you have to swim. The only illumination is your head torch (which you have to keep dry) and the squelchiness underfoot when you are walking through the water is, the guide tells you, bat shit.
I don't think my teenagers will ever forget clambering onto a "beach" hundreds of metres inside the pitch-black cave and shining their torches on the ground to find a scorpion as well as a spider sharing it with them.
With hindsight, I wish I'd included more of rural Vietnam in our itinerary, and spent less time in cities. I did love the bustle of Hanoi's old quarter, and the beautiful streetscapes in Hoi An,
but could happily have skipped the imperial city of Hue.
Hue's main tourist areas feature particularly wide, busy streets, and as pedestrian crossings don't exist in Vietnam, getting across involves walking slowly and steadily into the non-stop cavalcade of motorbikes, scooters, cars, minivans and cyclists, trusting the drivers will weave their way around you.
I was okay with this strategy if only a few lanes of traffic were coming at me from each direction, but I did tend to freeze like a rabbit caught in headlights when there were more.
Usually my family forged ahead while I dithered, leaving me stranded on one side of a busy street while they waved impatiently from the other side.
On one occasion, a pair of cyclo drivers took pity on me and appointed themselves as my escorts: one walked in front, flapping his arms at the 12 lanes worth of vehicles, while the other grasped me firmly by my elbow and hauled me across.
My kids thought it was hilarious.
And although in my twenties I spent a year in South America, skidding around mountain bends on "chicken buses" packed to the rooftop with people and animals, I enjoyed being a passenger on the roads of Vietnam even less than I liked being a pedestrian.
During the three-hour trip from Hanoi to Halong Bay, I made the mistake of picking a seat in the minivan that had a good view of the oncoming traffic. Our kamikaze driver punctuated every overtaking manoeuvre, and every near miss, with a blast on his horn. On the return journey, I sat further back, plugged my ears with my iPod, shut my eyes, and slept. That was much, much better.
My assessment of Vietnam, overall?
It's exotic, it's cheap, and the food is fantastic - but it's not what you'd call relaxing.
Armidale’s Japanese community
By JANENE CAREY
(Published in Seasons magazine, Winter 2012, The Armidale Express)
PROWLING the Armidale Mall in search of lunch, I notice a Japanese food place, Ten Koo, has opened where Feeling Groovy used to be. As I dab soy sauce, wasabi and ginger on my salmon sushi, I fall into conversation with Ken Scott, a wiry-looking horseman from Uralla sitting at the next table.
Ken says his wife is from Japan, and then surprises me by adding that he and Hiroko are one of about twenty Japanese families in the local area who meet up regularly for social events and belong to a group called the Armidale Japanese Association.
Those with young children have even organised a Saturday afternoon language school to encourage their kids to practice speaking, reading and writing Japanese, Ken tells me.
Intrigued by this information, I decide to ask a few members of the Japanese community in Armidale some questions about their lives.
Ten Koo, Armidale’s first Japanese café, belongs to well-known ceramic artists Kiyo and Kumi Hashimoto, who have lived here since 1991.
Despite operating a catering business from home for many years, supplying sushi to the Markets in the Mall, Food for Thought, Knight’s Store, SportUNE and other places, they are finding the early days of running a popular retail outlet very demanding.
For now, it is subsuming their other great passion, which is, of course, ceramics.
Kiyo and Kumi both trained as traditional Japanese potters in Tokyo and had their own ceramics studio in Japan for more than a decade before deciding, in their late 30s, to emigrate to Australia with their two young daughters.
Their friends were astounded: why would they want to abandon their successful lives in Japan?
“It was mainly my dream,” Kiyo says. “Living overseas in a new country. A close friend of mine married an Australian and he told me about it. Also, ceramics in Japan has a long history and I was interested in doing artwork with more freedom. So I decided to change my life.”
To get permanent residency the family needed a sponsor, and the reason Kiyo, Kumi, Kyoko and Momoko ended up in New England was because a potter from Uralla answered their advertisement.
By sheer coincidence, they flew into Armidale airport on the same plane as the mother and daughter from the only other fully Japanese family living here at the time – the Fujimoris.
Kiyo and Kumie Fujimori (the names were another coincidence) moved to Armidale almost forty years ago.
Kiyo taught Chemistry at the University of New England from 1974 until 2010, and Kumie started the Japanese language class at the New England Girls’ School in 1977, and in 1991 she established UNE’s Japanese department.
Their daughter Kana, born in 1986, was the first Japanese baby to be born in Armidale Hospital.
“Kana and I were on the way home from visiting relatives in Japan when the Hashimotos first arrived in Armidale,” Kumie says. “I was very happy to see their two daughters were close to Kana's age, as she is an only child. They played happily together as they grew up in Armidale."
Unsurprisingly, given that it is the town’s largest employer, with an international reach for its staff and students, most of the Japanese families in Armidale have a connection to UNE.
Dr Keita Takayama, a senior lecturer in the sociology of education, came here four years ago to take up his first academic appointment.
He and his wife Mayumi, who works part-time at the Ten Koo sushi shop, have daughters aged seven, five and three.
Like many of the Japanese families in Armidale, Keita and Mayumi are trying to encourage their children to be bilingual, but are not finding it easy.
“We try to speak Japanese at home as much as we can, but we notice it is getting difficult,” Keita says. “The kids have started speaking back to us in English."
The difficulties are compounded when only one of the parents speaks Japanese, which is the case in about three-quarters of the local families.
Keita knows of several Japanese-born mothers married to Australian men who go back to Japan every year with their children, enrolling them in school for two or three months to immerse them in the language.
“They can't speak Japanese at home as much as they want because their husbands would feel left out,” Keita says. “But they’re really trying hard to make the kids bilingual.”
Paleoanthropology professor Peter Brown and his wife Tomoko are one local couple who ensure their children spend extended periods of time in Japan in order to keep their language skills and their connections to family strong.
“They have no other relatives in Australia and their Japanese grandparents speak only limited English. It’s important that they can communicate,” Peter says.
Keita, who has both a professional and a personal interest in bilingualism, thinks it is a great pity when parents and children raised in different cultures end up linguistically estranged because they are not fluent in the same language.
Despite having an excellent command of English himself, he says there are subtleties of emotional expression he could only communicate to his children using Japanese.
It was concern about the language issue that prompted the community to initiate Japanese classes for the children more than a year ago.
They’ve called it Terakoya, after the temple schools run by monks that created widespread literacy among Japanese commoners in the 1800s.
“We decided to get together every Saturday afternoon at Armidale City Public, who kindly allow us to use their hall,” Keita says. “We take turns to teach our kids the Japanese language. Generally it’s for about an hour. They play games, they do singing and dancing, but they do some drills as well. They’ve been learning how to write Japanese characters.”
When I visit the Japanese language school on a Saturday afternoon, the children are doing craft activities.
One of the mothers, Kazumi Knight, explains that this day is traditionally celebrated as the Boys’ Festival in Japan, so they have been making samurai helmets and flags in the shape of Koi-Nobori, a fish that symbolises courage and determination because it can fight its way upstream.
The flags are designed to fill with wind when hoisted high on a bamboo pole outside houses, so the carp look like they are swimming over the rooftops.
The Armidale Japanese Association was initially formed to support the relief effort after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck north-east Japan in March 2011.
Keita, who is the president, says the AJA exists to provide a supportive network and also to formalise the group as a cultural resource for the wider Armidale community.
"After spending several days being glued to the TV news on the earthquake, tsunami, and then the nuclear disaster, there was a strong sense among many of us that we would have to do something," he says. " We began a series of fundraising events in association with Australia Red Cross and were able to raise nearly $16,000 in three months. We knew each other before, of course, but it was probably the first time that all the Japanese families came together for a common cause. In a sense, it was the tragic disaster back in our home country that really connected us all here."
PHOTOS
Shikoku, Japan, taken by Momoko Hashimoto during a recent visit
TEN KOO: The name chosen by Kumi and Kiyo Hashimoto means ‘sky close to heaven’, and refers to both the altitude of Armidale and its special character compared to other towns
Dr Keita Takayama
TERAKOYA: From front left - Kairi, Michi, Chiyo, Clio, Kazumi Knight, Saho, Sophia, Bradley, Michiko Jordan with baby Kotaro, Yuho and Laura
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