All posts by Andrew Metcalfe

Charismatic Mammals

May 24, 2016Ecology, Human and AnimalAndrew Metcalfe

Something’s been thumping on our roof at night. It could have been the neighbourhood cats.

Something’s been eating the succulents on the balcony, even after protective wire was put around them. It could have been a rat, perhaps.

At night, something rowdy has been ransacking the camellia flowers and shaking loose the palm nuts from high up the neighbour’s tree. It could have been the flying foxes.

When I have woken in the earliest hours of the morning, and looked myopically through the bedroom window, isn’t that a silhouetted animal I’ve seen, scrambling down the long branches of the ash tree? Continue reading Charismatic Mammals →

Fungi

May 23, 2016Ecology, Everyday Mysteries, UncategorizedAndrew Metcalfe

23rd May, 2016 — 23rd May 2016 Stinkhorns

One of the delights of our garden is the wild and sudden appearance of fungi. Of course there are always fungal cords, moulds, mildews and lichen on barks and leaves and leaf litter, but in the last four months, more than a dozen types of conspicuous fungi have emerged. Having done most of their growing underground, they pop up overnight, in unexpected places, and, if not eaten first by snails, slugs and caterpillars, have often died away within a few days. Continue reading Fungi →

Borrowed landscape

May 22, 2016Ecology, Gift and Grace, Human and Animal, UncategorizedAndrew Metcalfe

This magnificent jacaranda tree is in our neighbour’s yard, but it overshadows ours, just as its roots must underlie the gardens of the neighbours further south and west. After a couple of weeks of taking photos of my garden, I realised that I had been treating it as off-limits. Unconsciously, I thought that I’d be cheating on the terms of the project if I included it. Continue reading Borrowed landscape →

Fences and bridges

May 21, 2016Ecology, Human and Animal, UncategorizedAndrew Metcalfe

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Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall is based on a tension between two attitudes to fences. The narrator, noting how his stone wall needs continuous repair, is struck by the intuition ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’. When he puts this suggestion to his neighbour, pointing out that the neighbour’s pine trees are not endangered by his apple trees, the neighbour rebuffs him: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ Continue reading Fences and bridges →

What do you see?

May 20, 2016Creativity, Ecology, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, Human and Animal, Martin Buber, UncategorizedAndrew Metcalfe

For the past few months, since beginning this photographic project, I have been uploading photos every day to an Instagram account. There are now many hundreds there. Every photo is different but every one is also the same.

Take this image. What do you see? A fist? An embryo? A fern? A mother and child? A helix? A shell? A heart in a rib cage? A mathematical formula? Continue reading What do you see? →

The Colour of Flowers

May 19, 2016Belonging, Care, Creativity, Ecology, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, UncategorizedAndrew Metcalfe

Sometimes from far away
They sign to me;
A violet smiles from the dim verge of darkness,
A raindrop hangs beckoning on the eaves,
And once, in long wet grass,
A young bird looked at me.
Kathleen Raine, ‘Exile‘

Continue reading The Colour of Flowers →

Everyday Mystery

May 19, 2016Ecology, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, Human and Animal, Time and Space, UncategorizedAndrew Metcalfe

The film Smoke centres on everyday mysteries and on the friendship between Paul Benjamin, a novelist with writer’s block, and Auggie Wren, the manager of a Brooklyn cigarette shop. One day Paul is surprised to discover that Auggie doesn’t just sell cigarettes. He also has a vocation. He takes photographs. More specifically, he has taken a series of four thousand pictures, each of them shot at the same time of day and of the same place: the corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue, where his shop stands. He cannot explain why he does this. “It just came to me”, he says. “It’s my corner, after all. It’s just one little part of the world, but things happen there, too, just like everywhere else. It’s a record of my little spot.” Continue reading Everyday Mystery →

Sitting with Failure

January 7, 2016Care, Creativity, Teachers and Students, Time and Space, UncategorizedAndrew Metcalfe

Earlier this year, I was invited to speak at a humanities postgraduate symposium held at Macquarie University. The organiser, who used to be a student of mine, asked if I would share some of my experiences of the PhD. Thinking back to my time as a student, I realised that among the most formative and character-building moments of the dissertation process were those that involved some form of failure. The periods when the research and writing progressed smoothly didn’t stand out. Instead, the most memorable points were when things weren’t going to plan and the process felt out of my control. Continue reading Sitting with Failure →

Meeting Bunny Dawn (Why Fieldwork Takes So Long)

January 7, 2016Gift and Grace, Time and Space, Uncategorizedanthropology, coalmining, fieldwork, Kurri Kurri, pit horsesAndrew Metcalfe

Anthropological fieldwork is currently under threat from university administrators who assume it is simply inefficient and wasteful to spend 6-12 months in the field. So why does fieldwork have to take so long? I think I know the reason but I don’t think the administrators will like it. It is because the researcher needs this duration to ensure the person they are at the beginning suffers, and fails, and dies to themselves, so that they can see the world anew. I think that fieldwork is slow because it requires an element of mourning and grief. These, I notice, are themes that are also in Demelza’s and Michelle’s blog posts!

So here is the argument as a story. I began my PhD fieldwork in 1980, in the coalmining town of Kurri Kurri, in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. Continue reading Meeting Bunny Dawn (Why Fieldwork Takes So Long) →

A Photo in a Wallet

December 12, 2015Belonging, Care, Ecology, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, Time and Space, UncategorizedAndrew Metcalfe

When my father-in-law died, after many years of sickness and many months in hospital, his wallet was in the drawer of the bedside cabinet. And in this wallet was a photo of his two daughters. Aged around 5 and 3, their hair in ribbons and pigtails, Anita and Ina are sitting side by side on a bench in a Sydney park, their feet unable to reach the ground. Continue reading A Photo in a Wallet →

Living in Relation

Ann Game