Aussie Bloggers

One of my favourite places around Sydney and Canberra is Jenolan Caves.  These are probably the most famous, and best, tourist caves in Australia.  Of the several hundred caves in the area, there are 10 cave tours you can go on.  There is also, as of about a year ago, a self-guided tour where you get an audio guide which plays commentary as you follow the path.

The caves were discovered by Europeans in the 1840’s.  They became a popular tourist destination from about the 1880’s, with tours being done by candlelight, and requiring visitors to use ropes and ladders in some cases.  Development of the caves, and the surrounding area, began and in 1887 electrical lighting was installed.  More caves were discovered and opened as show caves in the early 1900’s.

Jenolan is the most popular tourist destination in country NSW, with over 250,000 visitors annually.

I’ve been there several times, as a kid with my parents and also I’ve taken my children there.  Its quite handy to Canberra, roughly 3 hours drive up through Goulburn and Oberon. From memory, its a similar driving time from Sydney.

In my opinion, the best of the caves is the River Cave.  It features the Minaret formation pictured at the left, which is widely used in Jenolan Caves advertising and promotional materials.  Be warned though, you need to be reasonably fit to do this tour, its got 1298 steps, including a few iron ladders, and is nearly 1.3 km long.  But it is well and truly worth the effort for what you get to see.

Another good cave is the Temple of Baal, which is essentially a single large dome shaped chamber, with beautiful decorations, and great acoustics.  On a tour of this cave the guide will play some recorded music to demonstrate this.

All these caves are full of formations, stalactites, stalagmites, columns, shawls, flowstones and helictites.  No matter which caves you go through, you won’t be disappointed with what you see.

Something which is very unique about Jenolan is that (if coming from Sydney) you actually have to drive through a cave to get there.  The main road from Sydney passes through the Grand Arch, which is 127 m long and 24 m high.

Jenolan Caves is on the far side from Sydney of the Blue Mountains, so there is plenty to see and do in the general area.  You can easily spend a few days in the mountains, visit Jenolan and do other things.   You can stay and eat at Jenolan, although I think the choices are limited and overpriced for the standard.  I think you’re better off staying in the Blue Mountains or Oberon, or even Bathurst, all within 30-60 minutes drive.

Muppets. Marionettes. Shadow puppets. Glove, finger, blacklight. You’re immediately expecting this to be about some other country don’t you? Puppets in Australia? Not likely. So I’m betting that if I told you Australia had a strong and vibrant puppetry industry, you’d probably not believe me. But we do.

When I talk to people, even in the professional theatre scene here in Melbourne, they’re always surprised to realise that there are puppet makers and performers in Australia. The funny thing is, they couldn’t be more wrong. We’re not just here; we’re large and internationally known. Australia is home to some of the best puppetry in the world. Heard of Walking with Dinosaurs? It’s a huge animatronics dinosaur display, and the puppets were built and designed by an Australian. Do you remember the cult TV show Farscape? Produced right in Homebush, Sydney, with puppeteers and builders from our own country. Ever see Richard Bradshaw on Sesame Street with his shadow puppets? Yep, another Aussie. (I’m not even mentioning a particular Aussie show that is a hit overseas… it has to do with genitalia)

Yet you never hear about the puppetry community here. You’d never know it existed. And I’m starting to change all of that.

I became interested in the art of puppetry while studying theatre at university. After graduating, I started up a small blog, really on a whim, and posted some pictures of an experimental puppet that I was building. I wanted to share with people how I made my puppets, and learn along the way. It’s been a few years now, and I’ve found out a lot. In particular, practically everyone in America who’s into puppets is online. American puppetry companies don’t just sell their products online, they perform online, teach online, everything. It made me think: where’s all our puppet blogs? Where are our puppeteers? Why aren’t they online, talking about their work?

My best guess is they’re too busy; but most Aussie puppet companies, builders and performers don’t even have their own website. To fill this gap, I started posting informational articles on my blog about where to buy puppets, or where to find a puppet show for your kid’s birthday party… I’ve collected and collated information on a range of topics, from finding a puppetry festival to where to learn about puppetry in Australia. You’d be amazed at how many people are actually out there working professionally in this craft; and even more amazed at the number of people who want to know about it. I get emails all the time asking for help, someone’s looking for materials, someone else is wanting to buy or sell a puppet…

Over the past year or so, my blog has become more than a blog. It’s become one of the few places online for Australian puppetry. I’m now one of the few Aussie puppet makers to sell parts and patterns online (hell, I’m close to being the only one!). And my site is becoming a vast resource for the overseas community too. It seems I’ve found a niche.

In March this year, Perth was home to the world’s biggest puppetry festival: a biennial event run by the oldest theatrical organisation, UNIMA. UNIMA is the puppetry union and is made up of branches around the world. Everyone who is anyone attends the biennial festival, and delegates came from South Africa, Korea, Japan, America, the UK… and of course, from around Australia. I was lucky enough to attend the festival, with a small travel grant. I was the only attendee to do a liveblog from the event, and one of only three attendees discussing it online at all (the other two were Aussies).

You wouldn’t have known that for two weeks puppeteers from around the world swamped Perth’s halls. There was barely a sign anywhere. Until open day. In the middle of the two-week event, a large free open festival was provided for, and everyone gathered to see the Million Puppet Project, the largest gathering of puppets in the world. The hope was to break the world record. (I think we did, but missed out on the million puppet mark) Students from schools, people from around the world, all submitted their puppets; all of which went to needy children afterwards. It was hot that day, but the festival was packed, with children, parents, adults, delegates and performers pouring into the Perth Concert Hall. Free shows were presented, along with workshops, displays and other activities.

It was my first time in Perth - being a Melbourne girl - and I spent the entire two weeks taking part in masterclasses, seeing shows, meeting other puppet makers, checking out exhibitions, and enjoyed all of it. I only wish more people would realise that puppetry isn’t just for kids, and isn’t just a classroom activity. We’re a vibrant and nutty bunch. We’re not muppets; we love what we do and do it well. It’s time for Australia to start accepting puppetry as an artform on the same level of traditional theatre, or of film and TV. And it’s time for Aussie puppeteers to start getting online and opening themselves up to a wider audience: we should hear more about their shows, builds and activities. Australia has some of the best puppeteers to offer. So why does no one know we exist?

Just recently my wife and I went to Nimbin in NSW for a weekend. Nimbin is about 2 hours 45 minutes drive from Brisbane, inland from Byron Bay.We stayed in the YHA Youth Hostel which we find no quite to our taste. Really there is nothing wrong with the youth hostel in Nimbin but I think that my wife and I are just a little past finding a youth hostel comfortable.The view from the youth hostel was quite spectacular though.The main drag of Nimbin is abut 500 m long with brightly painted buildings.Following are some other visual impressions I capture on my mobile phone camera while walking through Nimbin. All in all I got the impression that Nimbin was the weed capital of Australia and was quite happy to be seen as such. During our walk through the main drag of Nimbin around lunch time I was asked 5 times if I wanted to buy some cannabis, which I found a bit disturbing.I have been to Amsterdam, by many considered the weed capital of Europe, and wasn’t approached as often than I have in Nimbin.Nimbin itself is located in a beautiful valley surrounded by high mountains which makes for spectacular views, the shop fronts are very colourful and seem very inviting. It is a pity that a large part of the messages and products on sale are dedicated to marihuana and their attempt to legalise it.

I’ve written before about the blog-niche of blog fiction, and the specific troubles and travails it can involve.

(For the purposes of clarification – by blog fiction, I mean something in blog format, and containing mostly fiction. There are a lot of different definitions floating around there – mine is very
general)

Recently, I read a post by a fellow fiction writer. He was asking – why have a personal blog, as well as write fiction? While composing a long and rather windy reply, I happened upon an interesting insight.

I originally started my personal blog with the intention that it would be an adjunct to my fiction blog, read by friends, some fans of my fiction blog, and few others. Months later, the fiction blog still gets the lion’s share of my time and focus.

Guess which one’s in the Top 100 Australian Women’s Blogs list?

Yup. The sideline personal blog. Weird, huh? Not really, come to think of it. See, looking back, I think that I made a crucial but not fatal error in my logic process. I thought like a vaguely successful writer with a fan base. I’m not a vaguely successful writer. I didn’t have a fan base. And the important thing to know about fiction blogs is this - <b>most first-time visitors won’t come back</b>. The story they read – or skim – won’t be captivating enough, or it will be the wrong genre, or there’ll be a personality mismatch. On the other hand, people visit my personal blog because it’s, umm, personal, and often amusing, and then sometimes they get hooked on my fiction because it’s got the same sort of amusement factor as my personal blog. There are, no doubt, personality mismatches – but people find my personal blog
via links, or comments I’ve left, on blogs belonging to people I get along well with. Which means far fewer personality mismatches.

From this accidental experience, I’ve come up with a new theory of fan-base-creation.

The internet can be used to find people of like mind, and it’s people of like mind who are most likely to read and enjoy a person’s fiction.

There. Bleeding obvious, wasn’t it?

One warning, though. If you’re considering starting a personal blog merely to attract people to your fiction blog – think hard. It requires a genuine effort at sharing yourself – a fake exterior or a simple intellectual discussion is unlikely to help. A personal blog must be exactly that – personal – or it will hinder you more than it helps.

I’m still fairly young at 25-years-old and I only owned about one or two mobile phones before predictive text became ubiquitous in mobile devices so I didn’t really get into the whole SMS language thing with messages like “c u soon” and “wat time u ova” where saving individual letters meant shaving half the time off writing a text message. I admit I’m no master of the English language but I like to spell my words properly and completely with capital letters where appropriate and punctuation - so it’s good to see that SMS culture slowly died off with the introduction of predictive text, mobile devices with full QWERTY keyboards such as Blackberries, web-enabled devices, the availability of email on mobile devices and uptake of short message micro-blogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk.

Why the ACT Government has only in the last year or so decided it was cute to try and use SMS language on anti-DWT (Driving While Texting) awareness signs like the “DRIVE N TXT U B NEXT” is beyond me … they missed the boat by about 10 years and is embarrassing.

I wonder how many people still use SMS language and shortcuts given that technology nowadays means its no longer necessary. From what I’ve observed people in general want their messages to be well-formed, correctly spelt and appropriately punctuated and formatted - and that applies to phone SMSs and other short messages such as those posted on Twitter.

What are your thoughts on SMS language? Is it dead? Is it cute? Does it have its place still? Was it a temporary travesty of the English language?