★★★★★ Year of the Dragon
If 2024 hasn’t started as well as you might have hoped, don’t worry. This Saturday is Lunar New Year, so you can start fresh by welcoming in the cycle of the Wood Dragon. It is an auspicious occasion, and comes around only every six decades. The last was in 1964 when Martin Luther King Jr won the Nobel Peace Prize and Rupert Murdoch published the very first edition of The Australian. A mixed bag. What does the Wood Dragon have in store for us this loop around the moon? To find out, your editors paid a visit to the Museum of Chinese Australian History off Little Bourke St. On the first floor, there was an exhibit called, somewhat ominously, “The Dragons Amidst Us.” Inside, there was a nine-metre-long dragon mural made out of patches of denim donated by Jeanswest. “They’re upcycled,'' a volunteer told us. “We call him the Sustainability Dragon.” Eager to go deeper into dragon lore, we descended down into the museum’s basement, where we found a replica Taoist temple, complete with a divination kit that Chinese prospectors once used to help find nuggets in the Victorian goldfields. “What will become of us in the year of the Wood Dragon?” we asked, before casting the sticks and taking a poem off a nail on the wall. “As a fish is caught in a murky pond around him a heavy net is drawn,” the text said. “Here he darts, there he dashes, all the ways are blocked; each is worthless and in vain.” Hard to know what this means, exactly, but it doesn't sound great. Never mind. Nowruz, Persian New Year, is next month. Thus spoke Zarathustra.
★★★★ Book Heaven, Campbell’s Creek
A low-slung white-and-blue brick building just off the A300 in Campbell’s Creek turns out to house an intimidatingly large number of second-hand books, and then some. On the verandah, over a box of books, a sign reads “Book Heaven: Where Good Books Go!” and boasts 80,000 volumes inside. On the shelves, the spine-out books are concealed by yet more books teetering in front of them. One imagines Book Heaven as the catchment area for the run-off from arty Castlemaine boomer and Daylesford dyke personal libraries: copies of Tsiolkas, Proust, Garner, and Wright abound. We scored several issues of the now-defunct “Australian Short Stories” magazine, edited by Bruce Pascoe (“It is 1984, we are not yet clones and the book is still alive,” he writes in that year’s issue) as well as a serendipitous copy of The Ern Malley Affair. Most of all, we had a transcendent rifling experience. Do all good books really go to heaven? Maybe. But writers burn in hell.
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