Festival of Golden Words to remember the life of RICHARD CARLTON

The writers festival set for March in northern Tasmania, will remember RICHARD CARLTON the veteran TV journalist who died on assignment while covering the BEACONSFIELD mine rescue in 2006.

Last week saw the launch of the Festival of Golden Words, a writers’ event to be held annually at the historic gold mining town of Beaconsfield in northern Tasmania. It will feature 70 well-known authors from around Australia including Nick Earls, Steve Bisley, Maggie Beer and Dr Philip Nitschke.
The event will also host the inaugural Richard Carleton address as a tribute to the journalist who died while reporting the mine disaster in 2006. Richard’s family will be present for the lecture.

Pic:Officially launching the event was Tasmania’s Premier, Lara Giddings, seen here with Mayor of the West Tamar Region, Barry Easther, and the Convenor of the Festival, Stephen Dando-Collins and his wife, Louise.
Pic 2: The historic mine with the latter-day shaft in the background. The mine is now closed but attracts tourists to its museum.

Death of a tree – Launceston, Tasmania

It was a young tree standing tall and proud on the ridge overlooking the Tamar Valley, at the time when convict and bushranger Matthew Brady was making his escape along the river in 1825.
Sadly, a few weeks ago, that tree was felled in the march of progress.

It measured 29 feet around its trunk and must have been over 200 feet high – a true gentle giant which harmed no-one.
Yet from my window, I watched it being torn limb from limb and its roots dragged from the ground by a yellow machine which had no soul.

Twenty years ago, when I lived in Western Australia, I wrote a poem to the demise of the majestic Karri trees in the south west forests.


Here are a few verses from that poem.

The Karri Tree
by Margaret Muir

What dignity, the giant Karri Tree,
Tall sentinel to years of privacy.
A thousand summers bleached her naked boughs
And yet she stoops not and stands tall and proud.

But time runs out as seasons come and go.
Man waits his chance to set upon the wood,
Debase, denature, then depart
No tear, no shame, no guilt fills his cold heart.

Hydraulic mammoths lurk between the trees
Their lethal arms, darting like snapping dogs,
Forward and back in foreboding waves
Menacingly amputating limbs.

A whirring blade wielded like a sword
Slices through myriad rings of life.
Discarded limbs tossed to a haphazard pile
Like headless matches from a broken box.

But mortal man can never emulate
The enviable permanence afforded to the trees
And in his death, man’s ashes to the soil return
Awaited fodder for the forest’s germ.


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A winter cloudscape

If you glance at this picture quickly you could be mistaken into thinking it's a scene from a snowy landscape or a picture of a large frozen lake.
Or it could be an Arctic seascape with a line of ice-covered mountains in the background.
Or that's the way I see it (with just a little imagination)!


But as the full picture below reveals, it's just cloud sitting in the valley.
And hidden beneath it is the winding Tamar River.


And finally - a few days later, an early morning without mist.
Voila!

A winter's morning in the Tamar Valley

It's mid June and winter is here.
I slipped on the frosty grass when I went to take this photo of the morning mist rolling up the valley.
It's mesmorising to watch it.
It's like the tide coming in.

I've just set up a Tasmania site with lots of pics.
If you want to look go to: My Tasmania