I received an email this morning from a work colleague read my last post.
Shoutout to Megan! 🙋🏾♀️
Manly, it turns out, is Megan’s favourite place in the world and she offers this tip:
“It’s a great walk – better if you start at the Spit Bridge in Mosman and walk all the way to Manly (you can get a bus back to Mosman) – it’s a great walk in summer when you can stop and have swims at the beaches along the way.”
I’ll most definitely keep this in mind for when summer returns. Consider it on the to- do list for when the world regains some semblance of normalcy and international travel resumes in Australia. 🙏🏾 for that vaccine breakthrough to come through with speed.
Megan also mentioned “Snugglepot and Cuddlepie“, characters in a children’s story by May Gibbs (first published in 1918). I wanted to mention it in the previous post, but FOR THE LIFE OF ME could not remember the names of the characters.
Per my homegirl:
“The banksia are characters in her stories – the ‘Big Bad Banksia Men’. I don’t remember being scared of them when I was young, but it was fun to see them in the bush on our bushwalks and call them by that name.”
This is what the Big Bad Banksia Men look like…
Snatching sweet little creatures no less. 🗣️DISGUSTING! Megan’s clearly made of thicker stock than me and I survived nearly an entire year living in East Garfield Park Chicago.
In 1968 May Gibbs did an interview with Hazel de Berg in which Gibbs speaks about her childhood and how the “Gumnuts” pictures began; how she illustrates her books; where her inspiration comes from….
A couple years ago at the 2018 VIVID Festival–an annual festival of light, music and ideas held in Sydney (I’ll be writing about that in due course)–artists brought the illustrations to life and projected it onto the Customs House building down at Circular Quay (oddly pronounced “KEY”). I took my own shots that year, but they won’t do it justice like this video.
Let me know what you think!
Joyous Abroad 