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A month in Sydney during COVID
2021-2022
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Michael Kluckner
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Artwork & text © Michael Kluckner, 2022
| We booked in November 2021 for Sydney when
the Omicron Covid variant wasn't yet heard of, but by the time we
flew in mid-December both Australia and Canada were overrun with
it. We would probably not have travelled, despite being fully
vaxxed, except that it had been more than 2 years since we'd seen
our daughter and grandson and we knew we could shipwreck at her
house and spend time in her garden. So it was a very strange trip from my art point of view as we were avoiding the streets and cafés full of people, the observing and drawing of which is one of the great pleasures of travelling for me, and stayed close to home most of the time. There are many earlier trips to Australia on my travel page, which include links to art of the years 2006-2010 when we lived there.  Home was this: a 1920s cottage in the Lidcombe
suburb about 45 minutes west of Central Sydney. At the top of
the former driveway was a little "Granny Flat," as all Sydney
outbuildings seem to be called regardless of whether they have
plumbing, where I could paint and draw and where I sat to do
this.
|
The crane in the distance is building condos and apartments near Lidcombe Station – the city encroaches on the Aussie dream...
And the "Lorikeets in the pink-flowered gum tree" looked like this:
Drawings of her cats Neo and Rukia filled up corners in the Moleskine sketchbook.
On cloudy afternoons, Neo got away from the stresses of cat life by climbing onto the burlap sunshade stretched over a seating area in the back yard.
Seen from below, this composite shows him settling down for a nap.
It was an unusually wet summer. One day we went into the Art Gallery of New South Wales on the train.
There were simply too many people wearing their masks under their noses – even the security guards in the art museum! – or not wearing masks at all.
And Sydney Rail's idea of social distancing was this:
In the gallery, I was able to commune with a few works by one of my favourite Australian artists, John Brack. This is "The New Home" from 1953...
I reworked the drawing in the sketchbook above in my suiboku ink style:
| These shops were in the Haberfield suburb, a Heritage
Conservation Area with a lot of Federation-style houses – brick
cottages with front porches, tile roofs and elaborate wooden
bracketing from the turn-of-the-20th-century. You can see this
style of two-storey shop anywhere in Sydney and in most country
towns: made of brick, apartments above shopfronts, and solid
awnings to give protection from the fierce sun. This picture shows a typical house in the area, with residents' militancy against a proposed land disposal that probably will lead to a cluster of highrises (sounds familiar to Vancouverites).  |
Balmain is another area, closer in to the centre and on the harbour, where we spent a lot of time in the past.
BWS is the Beer Wine Spirits liquor chain...
Drawing there was like drawing everywhere: too quickly and socially distanced.
The extraordinary angophora gum tree in Longueville above the Lane Cove River, on the street where Christine spent her teens, didn't lend itself to photography due to the deep shadows ...
It has the most beautiful coloured bark of any tree...
We went only once to a beach, partly due to the persistent showery weather, partly due to the crowding. This was Curl Curl, the first beach north of Manly, on a day with rough surf...
Muslim women – at least, women of the Muslim faith who were sticking to their traditional dress – crowded into a bit of shade next to the surf pool on that very hot day ...
(Above) Almost across the road from our daughter's place, extending over a vast 287 hectares (about 1.1 square miles), is Rookwood Cemetery, the largest necropolis in the Southern Hemisphere,
founded in 1868 and 'home' to about a million interred people so far....
We walked regularly by this "Frazer Mausoleum," enjoying the solitude and quiet (yes, it's very quiet there) and the view of a magnificent bunya bunya tree in the background, ...
There is a huge variety of landscapes in Rookwood, of trees and bird life, and an astonishing array of monuments, the old ones in weathered sandstone...
Across the road from Rookwood near our daughter's house is a mansion from the 1870s called The Gables, long-used as an entertainment venue but now abandoned.
Other than the pubs near the railway station, it's the only substantial 'heritage building' in Lidcombe...
...although there are a few small timber cottages like this still on the streets. Most of the houses are recent and rather stark brick bungalows...
Everybody is trying to keep dampness away from their foundations and flooring and on the lookout for termites ...
The stinkbugs are huge (that's my thumb) ...
...and this is the body count (with the addition of a cockroach) for the month from the lime tree in the backyard.
We went to the Blue Mountains with our former neighbour Roland Hemmert to see our old triplex on Warialda Street in Katoomba,
which has had a very ugly new home built on the vacant lot beside it...
This is what is looked like in my sketchbook in 2018, and the view we had out the side and back when we lived there...
On New Year's Eve, a skywriter above Lidcombe drew our attention with this:
Alas, he wasn't writing "Trust in Science" or "Trust Vaccines." It was "Trust in Jesus."
The bird life is fabulous, as always. An Australian magpie...
Corellas (like cockatoos but without the yellow-sulphur crest) ate all the seedpods from a shrubby tree across the street...
And, a full moon and bunya bunya tree on the evening before we flew back to Canada...
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