Weekly drawing: Wind and rain monsters

As a kid some monsters seemed more honest and friendly then some of the adults who pretended they weren't monsters. This is a drawing and poem too the honest monsters who would walk through the bush on stormy night. I enjoyed their Muppet appearance and Wild Things ways.

The wind and rain monsters

I can't sleep.

The wind is wild,

The rain is insane

The trees are alive

like never before

I want to see more.

But I have school 

in the morning.

                         by Joel Tarling

Weekly drawing: The big tree in playground

In Bermagui public school there is a grand old tree growing in the middle of it's playground. I have always loved this tree, it reminds me of the kind of tree that would grow in Tolkien's Mirkwood forrest.

When I was in year three, Scott and I played cars at it's base. We made camouflaged Batcave's for our cars by placing sticks between buttress roots and covering them with leaves and soil. In the company of this grand old tree, we were lost in our own imagination and a thousand miles from the school yard politics of footy and kiss and catch.

Weekly Drawing: Singing to the cows

This drawing is an illustration of something I mentioned in the blurb of Weekly drawing 53 

"We lived 5km out of town along the coast and my sister and I were the only kids at our school bus stop. However this didn't seem to bother us. While we waited we made a hand ball court by sweeping the clay, so there was a smooth area to play. And the property over the fence was dairy farm, I would sometimes amuse my sister by singing to the cows "Da do ron-ron- ron". To our amazement they would all huddle over to listen. These were magical days."

Weekly drawing: Message in a bottle

My big sister, Dan Scollay and I, inspired by a combination of The Police song 'Message in a bottle' and Robert Louis Stevenson's story Treasure island, decided to make our own messages in a bottle and cast them into the ocean for passing ships to find.

Our hand drawn messages were placed in old lemonade bottles and we clambered down a goat track to a small beach, only accessible from Eileen's property.
However when we tired to send to bottles out to sea we couldn't get them past the breakers. Not even our Dennis Lillee styled bowling methods helped that day. Every bottle floated back to us.
I was left feeling I would really need to practice bowling in case I was ever stranded on a desert island otherwise I wouldn't have much chance of survival.

My message was a treasure island surrounded by sharks