Melbourne with Tao

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On Wednesday we rode back up into the cold drizzle and fog to visit the William Rickett Sanctuary in the Dandenong Mountains where we found Rickett’s amazing ceramic sculptures blended into rocks among huge eucalyptus trees. Then rode down into Fitzroy, the artsy inner-city neighbourhood just north of downtown Melbourne where Tao has a two month artist-in-residency at the Gertrude Street Gallery. It is certainly good to see him and to see all that he is doing and thinking about. He told us about an important Aboriginal tree ignored and dead in the middle of Victoria Gardens, which he warned us not to see unless we wanted to get depressed about race relations in Australia. We did though, and got depressed. Fortunately, tonight we managed to pick up our spirits having dinner with Catriona MacLean from Beca and Andrew in an Ethiopian restaurant after spending much of the day in the National Art Gallery.

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