May 2026
It’s started raining, a great leap forward and Winter is coming..
Mind the gap..
The photo above was taken on the last magical day of Autumn, at Safety Cove/Turrakana near Port Arthur. If you peer hard at the gap on the horizon you may see weather battered tall ships limping through to reach shelter. You will need a time machine as the last cargo of convicts arrived in Port Arthur in 1877 but the cove has been popular with boats seeking refuge ever since it was discovered. (By whitey that is. I think the First Nation’s people had the mail.)
Anyhow, this beach is truly wonderful. Sometimes when the world feels a bit burdensome we drive all the way down from Hobart just to walk it.
On this trip we stopped at the Dunalley Bakery and purchased an excellent traditional aussie style burger (beetroot, egg, all the stuff..) from the hot bar. Eaten in the car whilst driving of course. Messy but perfect. This bakery gets mixed reviews and is not for everyone but it’s quintessentially Tasmanian and gets 5 stars from us.
On arrival we paused briefly to appraise this very well located holiday block. Not as flat as we would have liked and a bit expensive, but just over the way from the cove. Then it was straight on to the beach. As per usual the beach was completely empty. There was no plastic anywhere. Happy Face emoji. We saw an interesting shore bird, cream with fawn and brown speckles and the same basic structure as a Sooty Oyster Catcher but about half the size. A pied Oyster Catcher chick! We spend quite a lot of time on Tasmanian beaches but have never seen one before. There was also lots of Kelp and dolphins. A happy couple of hours on this beach on a fine day can last you for months.
Interior May. When a project is large and complex, with a lot of different elements it can feel like progress is halting and slow but May was a good month for a leap forward. Both end walls are essentially complete and most of the side wall and fireplace surrounds are finished. Cutting a lot of finishing trim to exact measurements, then painting and fitting it is time consuming but quite easy work which allows time to ponder the next steps. We got through a lot of the lining boards in the kitchen and still had time to begin developing the panels for a series of painted works. Winter tomorrow and only 20 days to the solstice. From now on the cold sets in and the real working period of the Tasmanian year begins. Hopefully we can speed the plough a bit through the dark months.
rgbDesigner May. Google search informs us that “Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence is forecast to reach $2.52 trillion in 2026”. There has been a lot of breathless commentary on whether ai models are about to become ‘conscious’. As Andy Warhol would say, “So What?” We at gowtywood productions have been conscious since birth at considerably less cost, even counting our carbon footprint.
Our ai prediction for May? If you can afford to completely ignore it you are wearing the new black.
rgbDesigner’s May palette is a cheerful collection of pretty colours. The perfect foil to the encroaching grey of winter. We’ve included the gradient and images from the Fosslines (named for the legendary Chris Foss), Circle Lines and Line Grid 2 generators.
You can buy rgbDesigner on the Apple AppStore here. Designed for iPad
Writing (and now music!) May. Our resident writer Robert Gowty had another busy month. Some highlights include:
Mods, Rockers and Blues Brothers: a tale of Friday nights at the old Valhalla cinema in Melbourne.
https://medium.com/rock-on/mods-rockers-and-blues-brothers-friday-night-at-the-valhalla-8877b20da25d
A new song: Out on the Plains
The Basement: A Surreal Clown Tale
https://medium.com/short-and-weird/the-basement-fc3c9afaca77
The 69th and final episode of The “Insert Title Here” Series. The series going forward will be renamed The Adventures of Cucumber Man and will go back to the start to reimagine all the episodes in hybrid arts form:
https://medium.com/redemption/the-69-b6e3ec79ddc8
Heads up: the medium articles are paywalled unless you have a Medium subscription.
Our book of the month is “The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.” by Julien Jaynes. First published in 1976 this book is a plough, but a rewarding one. Some of the information in this book is very sad so you might like to confine yourself to the chapters on consciousness which are riveting.
“For if we ever achieve a language that has the power of expressing everything, then metaphor will no longer be possible. I would not say, in that case, my love is like a red, red rose, for love would have exploded into terms for its thousands of nuances, and applying the correct term would leave the rose metaphorically dead.”
“A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.”