Caravanning with Wep – Friday, 2nd April 1937; Life around Kurrajong with the locals.

Good Friday – a pretty sight. Both of us. Started 2 finished 8:30. Gather from the wreckage that we had tea and broke the lamp globe. Have been trailing around since today with piece of glass in foot. Met couple camped next to us on Good Friday morning. G.F.S. Donaldson, Duntroon Rd Roseville and wife Ede. A pleasant sporty couple & most matey with them. Saturday blew a snow less dusty blizzard. (Wind howling beautifully in minor key through pines tonight. Real Movie stuff.) Saturday, a dead as-well-forgotten day. Sunday, pub day – What again! And Tuesday! But a most pleasant hostelry. A country heart beating beneath a suit by Sydney architects. The Pecks, Daddy Nana, Frank and Jack. A family offshoot of John Haig, Peter Dawson & who or what have you. Daddy 73 his hand, handily heavy with age and whiskey. Jack, bird faced, fruit eye. Frank a ‘shouting’, bar-sitting mine host with marine life lips pouting figures of eight, he turns & the evolutions of the dance. Mobile & statically frozen forms, gum showing. Taken a frenzied fancy to Dawn, rechristened Tiny. Our daughter now most popular young lady in Kurrajong. Her home from home licensed by Frank Carl Peck. They’ve been here 100 years, his great great grandmother settled on the timbered slopes, earning a life and generations of country souls out of the air, water, dust and sun. Have I the pleasant soul or merely the tortured city nerve sensuously wooed by country beautide? [beatitude ?] The wonder of the bean; growing green with life out of the linear earth. The whole macrocosm within the microcosm. The back yard lacking the magnitude & the fitness of natural growth. The wonder of the pattern of the ferns, the life, the art. The peasant as the artist, nurturing the whole, i.e. life in general, within the part, the bean, the orange. The elegance of the pattern, the utilitarian beauty of efficiency both in machine and scientific cultivation. PATTERN! Staccato stops of orange green on undulating rhythm of the hills. The music of it. Brown red passages counter point to scherzando theme of orange groves against background of tenuous tawny blue. Enough!