Veronika Wild

Entrance to Willow Court What both Mona and Dark Mofo do rather well is to make us confront our fears and the things we would rather repress. In that respect, if that was the aim, then it was a stroke of genius to make the former Mental Hospital at New Norfolk the venue for some Dark Mofo events. The main buildings date from the 1830's and were originally built to house invalid convicts.  Until its closure in 2000, it was the oldest continously operating asylum in  Australia  The previous Saturday, Mike Parr, notable for his confrontational performance art, put in seventy two hours exploring the theme of madness. He has some acquaintance with the subject. His own brother committed suicide in an institution like this. I didn’t see this particular opus, but his video with respect to the treatment of refugees whose plight he highlighted by sewing his own lips together as they had done, was showing in one of the alcoves. That was quite disconcerting enou...

Winter has come to Tasmania with a vengeance. Today there’s snow to 400m and before that we had heavy rain and screaming winds for a week. In the north of the state they had the worst flooding in 85 years. It gets dark at 4.30 p.m. Despite the temptation to hibernate, preferably in bed to keep warm, it is our first fine evening in quite a while, so mustering all my courage and my Nepali jacket - they know a thing or two about cold in Nepal, I head downtown to experience a bit of Dark Mofo. Now in it’s fourth year, Dark Mofo is Tasmania’s winter festival inspired by M ONA ’s themes of death, darkness and sex. How better to fight the cold and the dark than in true pagan tradition with fire, food and fellowship? The Sheraton definitely looks better like this     The theme colours of red and black glow from city buildings as I make my way into town. In Dark Park, one of the venues, triangular obelisks spew forth flames at regular intervals lighting up...

Entrance to St. David's belltower - it's much bigger than it looks  It was going to be a cracker of a frost. It was already freezing when I met with the Hobart Bellringers outside St. David’s Cathedral last night. Then we made our way up into the tower. While the present Cathedral (begun 1872 with the belltower completed in 1931) has always been an imposing Hobart landmark, I had never really appreciated how enormous it was until I began climbing those narrow spiral stairs. Tonight I was being initiated into the arcane world of bell ringing or more precisely, change ringing which Wiki defines as “ The art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a controlled manner.” While many countries have wonderful church bells, this particular branch of campanology is largely confined to the Anglophone world.   Initially Christian missionaries used hand bells to call the faithful to church, but by the 550’s church bells were installed in many parishes. By the C7th a number o...