queenstown

Dear Kelly

(see comment for this post)

I'm sorry if I upset you with my comments about Queenstown.

If anything, my feelings about Queenstown are coloured by arriving at 5pm on a dark grey afternoon and my memories of last time I was in there, many eons ago, on a family trip around Tasmania. (You have to admit it is a slightly eerie place.)

I have always, even as a child, been slightly spooked but that time of the day. It goes back, once again to being a kid, out on family drives (which in my memory seemed to happen every weekend with full thermos and home made biscuits) and coming home late in the afternoon and just wanting to be safe and warm and tucked up tight in a glowing house. Bacchus Marsh was especially one of those places that for a long time just made me get home quick smart. I can not explain it. It took me years of going to BM on sunny shiny days to lose that sense of dread. We always seemed to drive through Bacchus Marsh when it dreary and drippy and getting dark. It's funny how we carrying those irrational things and feelings from childhood with us all our lives.

I like that to you Queenstown is safe and warm and loving. And that part of those memories is about 70s craft. As we moved into the eighties unselfconscious craft somehow died in a way. Consumerism took hold. I have no desire to go back in time, be a fifties housewife hitting the Bex, a thirties woman stirring the washing in the copper, but I do wish we could embrace the fact that 'making stuff' was just what people did, it was a way of life not something fashionable and 'oh so po-po-mo' (post-post-modern!).

I do bet that Queenstown was one of those places you had to make your own fun and that, as is so often, 'Isolation can be the Mother of Invention', craft isn't always about running off to the supply shop to buy the latest kit.

All the best

Pen