White sunlight shattered and scattered into its rainbow parts, reflecting from blood red Waratah blossoms, framed by translucent copper sprouting along a plum twig, amid shadow-dappled, chlorophyll-glossed leaves breathing verdant life and beauty into the garden.
See how that flower calls to the eye, even from a distance, surrounded and almost hidden by a tangled quilt of branches, twigs, leaves, needles, and shadows. It wants to be seen, no matter how thoroughly the other plants may try to conceal it. Such beauty cries out for a story, and I have encountered several stories explaining the vivid colour of the Waratah.
In one, the flower - once white - is stained red with the blood of a Wonga Pigeon that is wounded by a hawk while seeking its mate. In another, the red is given to the flower by the blood of a Black Snake that is wounded defending a human child of its totem - while a third story has the flower coloured red by a fiery cataclysm of falling stars.
How old are such stories? For how long have our ancestors being weaving words to pass on to their descendants the stories of the beauty of the world we all live in? What is it that drives us to record and describe the world we see - to pass our observations on to those far away in space and time?
What exactly were they trying to tell us with those stories?
Now cameras are now ubiquitous, and many people use pictures with minimal captions or no words at all, allowing the picture to tell the story or ask the question. Are cameras displacing descriptive writing? Often, yes - or so it seems. But what does a picture tell us if there is no story accompanying it, or embedded in it, meshing into a wider culture that the viewer knows and understands?
Before cameras there were other images - before written or printed words, there were images - paintings on cave walls, carvings, images on wood or clay or stone or bark - representations to assist in the remembering and telling of stories. Such methods are still in use, and just as DVDs failed to eliminate vinyl records from the world, and ebooks have had to live along side the paper-leaved books they were supposed to be replacing, modern technology will not eliminate our need to create images with our hands and our tongues.
For, in the end, what do we have with which to show others that we were here, thinking and feeling and loving, but the images we offer in the words we speak or sign, or the images we scratch or draw or paint? And will they understand what we offered them?
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