20 Feb    The Music and Dances of Ancient Egypt

20 March    A Thousand Treasures of the Tomb

Sunday Seminars cover Music, Dance, Temple Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Wisdom Literature, Cosmic Astro-Archaeology, Philosophy of Living, Counselling by Eye and Light, and Star Wisdom Therapies for Healing Body and Mind.

And it was illustrated with two photographs of Cheryl – the first entitled, ‘Cheryl performing a Dance of Adoration of the Light before a Sacred Lake in Australia, 1985’ (I couldn’t place the lake but was sure I’d seen Cheryl’s nightie on sale back in England at British Home Stores); the second, ‘Cheryl leads Temple Dancers from the Sanctuary of AMUN in KARNAK, Upper Egypt, during Meditational Arts Nile Cruise, 1981.’ Interested parties – and who that had read this far could not be? – were invited to visit the Perth Centre of the Academy of the Arts of Sound and Light on Adelaide Terrace, where they would find an atmosphere of peace and much intriguing literature. Alternatively, you could write, enclosing an A4 stamped addressed envelope, for an illustrated (more diaphanous snaps of Cheryl?) FREE NEWSLETTER.

Something made me think of Ian and Olive. I wondered whether they’d ever bumped into the Stolls on their Middle Eastern holidays. I might have been wrong but I had a suspicion that in Olive there was a Temple Dancer trying to get out. And I remembered how often, when I first came to Australia, I had seen posters outside church halls or social clubs or even university staff rooms, announcing that there would be a slide show that evening, put on by some couple who had just returned full of stories from Majorca or the Isle of Man. I was pleased that the tradition continued, even if in a more unorthodox form.

Then I meandered back to the wharf and jumped aboard the ferry which appeared to be on the point of pulling out, only to have to sit bobbing on the water for a further fifteen minutes while an intending passenger exercised her dog.

Later that afternoon I met Ros at the Western Australia Art Gallery, a proud, spruce, pleasing modern building with plenty of space around the exhibits and an atmosphere almost as relaxing as that which prevailed on the streets. The gallery possessed though, to my eye, a more than usually melancholy collection of Australian paintings. Here were the familiar depictions of fragile, fleeting moments – twilights, memories, aching distances, unpeopled landscapes – but almost wilfully unrelieved, it seemed to me today, both in themselves, and as a group, of one disposition. Perhaps wistfulness was, after all, the dominating spirit of Australian art. Or perhaps I was feeling excessively rueful myself. Or maybe there should just have been a few more people looking at the paintings.