Winter is for women
Just ask the bees ...
Dear wild and wonderful readers,
Since I last wrote to you, school has returned and so too the daily-ness of raising a young family. Watching the Paris Olympics has been my means of survival — evenings and mornings spent around the television. We are converts to the cult of sport and worshipers of muscular heroes. Oh, how I love the delightful dreams of my children — ‘I want to be a gymnast in the Olympics’. The littlest still too young to know the way of the world.
What have you been up to?
I’ve had a little fun writing this story for you. It was inspired by a visit to a museum exhibition and a poem. I hope you enjoy reading.
Thank you, as always, for all of your lovely comments and messages of support. If you are new here, hello and welcome!
With love and kindness,
Kate xx
Winter is for women
After Wintering by Sylvia Plath1
After Ladies Lounge by Kirsha Kaechele2
When at last the air grows teeth, sharp enough to gnaw your bones, the bees throw out their men.
Every last one.
The cold draws inside their black and gold stripes like a knife. And in the morning they are dead.
Such is the natural way of bees. The queen closes her legs for winter. And the men are no longer wanted.3
It seems fair. After all, the women — the maids and a queen — do most of the work in the hive. They know what they want.
Three things —
A home with a garden and a view; long evenings with their homegirls; and on their pointed tongues, something sweet like honey.
All they need to survive a cold hard winter.
I know what I want.
In the depths of winter I throw a party, in a boat shed, by the edge of a River — timtumili minanya, Raagapyarranne, Nibbalin, Derwent River4 — not far from my home in Nipaluna, Tasmania.
Three things —
Ladies only in lace, velvet and shimmery jewels; pink gin cocktails served beside a roaring fire; and the silvery sound of the violin in our ears.
All I need for wintering. Save one man (my husband). I dress him in a tartan skirt (did I say how much I love a man in a kilt) and use him as our butler. He showers us in affection, serves dinner, washes up.
This sounds a little dreamy, I hear you say, like a mid-winter night’s dream— slow as a snail, long as any mothering night, lazy as the sunlight at the tip of the earth.
Allow me to entertain you a little —
Behold, dear readers, the most beautiful girls in the world sipping from shiny cups, a violinist bowing her fiddle, the light of the moon dancing across the river water and washing under our feet.
A few bends upstream, on a grand peninsula, there is a museum called Mona5 — a world renowned art collection that could have had its home in New York or Paris — those big cultural centres of the world — but for a few other reasons, some accidental, Mona lives Nipaluna / Hobart, Tasmania.
Its halls are carved deep into the bedrock — so it resembles more of an underground temple than a gallery.
Inside there is art for everyone. Including a poo machine and a wall of vaginas. All matter of things to make you feel — something. And a Ladies Lounge, just for ladies6 —
a tremendously lavish space […] in which women can indulge in decadent nibbles, fancy tipples, and other ladylike pleasures—hosted and entertained by the fabulous butler.7
A space which is meant to challenge, and bring attention to, the historical and societal exclusion of women.8
A space that no longer exists. And by this I mean, it is no longer open, because of a complaint made by one man after he was denied entry, and a gender discrimination Court ruling.9
*
I visited Mona a few months ago with my family. We wandered the vast labyrinth of underground galleries unaware of the time or the sky. And my ten year old daughter and I slipped behind a green velvet curtain and into the Ladies Lounge.
While my boys — husband and two sons — waited outside, we lay on a long twisting velvet lounge — the colour of chartreuse, the shape of a serpent — and gazed at artworks by Pablo Picasso hanging on the wall in golden frames and cabinets filled with glittering jewellery. And all the while the River slid its muscular body past the headland above.
*
The River10 — that body of cool clear water that trembles down the wild mountains in the heart of Tasmania and slips and glides its way through farmland and settlements, before courting with the salty waters of the Tasman Sea. A journey of 200 kilometres or more.
It has watched a ‘tidestream’ of desires and disasters — the gentle songs of whales, that once knew these waters as a safe place to rest on their migration south to the waters of Antarctic.11 And the songs of the people that lived for thousands of years on its shores — the Mouheneenaa on the western shore, and the Moumairrmenair on the eastern — under towering eucalyptus forests. Both gone now, after the arrival of ships with men and women from another world.12
Within its ‘rippled roiling’ waters, spotted fish walk on their hands;13 elegant ships and discarded supermarket trolleys lurk in a tangle of weed and rust; mercury, lead, zinc and cadmium — heavy metals from a legacy of pollution14 — sleep at the bottom in a bed of sand and mud; and children find treasures to line their window sills — feathers, shells, smooth glass bottles, a plastic smurf missing his legs.
Rising above the widest part of the River is a Mountain — Kunanyi, poorawetter, Table Mountain, Mount Wellington. On its forested slopes are two stacks of wooden boxes, honeybee hives, entrusted in our care.
*
While the bees are busy preparing for winter, I send my invitations —
Ladies, you are cordially invited to an evening at the Boatshed …
A hatted chef is harvesting the finest produce for you to indulge in and the fabulous butler is dusting and shining the glassware.
Come dressed in your lace, velvet, fur, and shimmery finery; a lady always looks the part.
Elegantly yours,
Kate, Lady of the Boatshed
*
On the eve of the party, I rang a dear friend. I hope our husbands don’t take us to Court, she joked. And we both laughed.
*
I swirled my long red skirt inside a circle of my favourite girls. Lady of the boatshed, they cooed. Why don’t we do this more often?
And the River water swirled too, taking the Ladies Lounge controversy with it.
There is to be an appeal. Artist Kirsha Kaechele and Mona are fighting for ‘the right to make some men uncomfortable’.15 The priceless Picasso’s have been revealed as fakes.16 And it is rumoured that the Ladies Lounge may reopen as a church, a toilet, or a school.17
*
As the evening lengthened we threw off our beautiful clothes and climbed into a wooden sauna.
Sweat and dreams. Skin and desires.
Afterwards we rinsed our bodies in a shower on the deck, shrieking and shouting under the cool clean water.
And the bees?, I hear you ask.
They are buzzing. They smell the spring, those first green shoots bursting along the edge of the River.
A ladies poem
How to Triumph Like a Girl By Ada Limón I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass. I like their lady horse swagger, after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up! But mainly, let’s be honest, I like that they’re ladies. As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood. Don’t you want to believe it? Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see the huge beating genius machine that thinks, no, it knows, it’s going to come in first.
In two weeks I am flying to Alice Springs, in the heart of Australian desert, to run 82 kilometres (km) of the rugged and remote Larapinta Trail, with a girlfriend. We are taking part in a staged race — Run Larapinta. I’ve been training, mostly in the early morning. The date is drawing closer and I am beginning to feel excited, about the run, and also about 6 days under a wide open sky.
The next edition of Wild and Wonderful will be posted from the red dusty landscape of the Larapinta Trail.
Until then,
may the winter (or the summer) be just for you,
Kate x
Ladies Lounge, Mona
Male bees are called drones.
The River has known many names, Indigenous and European.
The Museum of Old and New Art. From the Mona website — Mona is the playground and megaphone of David Walsh, who grew up in Tasmania, played cards, won, did some other stuff, and opened a small museum of antiquities. He declared it a triumph and decided to expand. The result is Mona, a temple to secularism, rationalism, and talking crap about stuff you really don’t know very much about.
Anyone who identifies as a lady is allowed entry to the Lounge.
Ladies Lounge, Mona
Inspiration for this River passage came from Australian author
’s novel — The Hummingbird Effect.In the 1800s a whaling industry was established in Nipaluna / Hobart, Tasmania. The last whale was seen and harpooned in 1856. It took almost 100 years for whales to begin to return.
The Spotted Handfish is a critically endangered species that lives in Tasmania.
As a result of past industrial practices, the Derwent River has an unenvied reputation as one of the most highly metal polluted estuaries in the world.
You can read more about the appeal here. “Given what [women] have been through for the last several millennia … we deserve both equal rights and reparations, in the form of unequal rights, or chivalry-for at least 300 years,” Kaechele said.
See footnote 7.
Your beautiful words have taken away mine
This was a delight to read.
Fuck yeah to ladies night in the Boatshed