Lemon Eucalypt

Looking through my poetry folder for something else, I found this, almost forgotten, poem from my short stay on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland last year. We were making paper out of native peach, among other plants.

Lemon Eucalypt

In transit

through a window

this land looks

like home.

The human eye

was bred

to focus

on the familiar

I understand

the impulse

of European settlers to give

Northern names to native plants.

But a native peach

is not a peach,

bearing tiny hard bitter berries

so I close my eyes

and let my ears open

to the kookaburra’s manic cackle

and my nose open

to the scent of lemon eucalypt.

Big Hairy Bananas and Little Peach Pellets

The antique book press so beautifully restored by Helga and reassembled by Victor

Helga and I have been making lots more paper back at the farm. This time we used pulp that Helga had prepared earlier and stored in the deep freezer. Victor's been on at her to use up the pulp so he can fill the deep freeze with a naughty cow, thus he was willing to let us push his sign-painting activities to the back of the shed and take over the table with troughs and cloths and water and pulp for a few days.
As we undertook this over the first really cold days of winter, I discovered that making paper is infinitely more pleasurable as a summertime activity, but that having one's hands immersed in cold water for hours on end is less pleasant on a chilly day. By the second day we'd decided to include buckets of hot water in our trough, and to time our actvities in the warmest middle of the day. And in between I booked a train ticket to Cairns where the daytime highs are consistently around 29.

Victor and his cows

We defrosted bags of agapanthus, mystery garden mix, bamboo, banana and native peach pulp. On the first day we bleached agapanthus and the mystery mix and pulled those plus the unbleached bamboo. We made them into fuzzy edged A4 sheets plus a few little squares (with the cutest little mold and deckle) and after pressing out most of the water, we stretched them onto the smooth concrete floor of the shed to dry over night. This ensured that they came up completely flat and smooth, unlike all the paper I helped make at Wallace House last week which had been taken up too early and is irredeemably rippled.

Agapanthus, bamboo and mystery garden papers drying on the concrete

The agapanthus makes a thick fibrous mat of opaque golden paper which is so tough and strong that I couldn't tear it once it was dry. The mystery garden mix made a lovely versatile paper, smooth and easy to write on, strong and flexible and it bleached to a creamy beige while retaining a pleasant brown fleck. What a shame we don't know exactly what plant(s) went into this pulp because it is so nice.
The bamboo had been pulped complete with the tough green bark and leaves and hard core and came out like a bran biscuit: rough and textured, almost sandy in many shades of brown. Helga says that on their trip to Thailand in January, when they visited many different Thai paper makers, she learned that proper bamboo paper is made using only the part of the stem that lies between the green outer coat and the hard inner core. (She also saw at the Brisbane Craft Fair this week they are selling bamboo wadding for inserting into quilts (instead of nasty dacron) and she reckons that must be made of the same part of the bamboo as good paper).

Helga pulling big banana paper in the wheelbarrow

Next day, we decided to make some of the banana paper into A3 sheets, which required using the wheelbarrow as a trough as it is the only thing big enough to take the A3 mold and deckle. We had a bag of long fibre banana and a bag of short fibre banana both of which we bleached but pulled separately. The short fibre banana was made into the big sheets which came out hairy (strong) and translucent (fine). The long fibre banana which we made as A4 sheets was (unsurprisingly) even hairier. In fact it was so hairy that the edges were often compromised by fibres hanging over the edge of the deckle so persistently that they pulled away chunks of the wet pulp from the molded sheet. And when it came time to remove the paper from the cloths by rolling it onto the concrete, the fibres clung to the cloth and tore rather than stick to the concrete like most wet paper.
The banana paper which Helga had made in the past (and used to make a stunning big paper parasol for an exhibition) had also had a shiny glossy quality, almost like it was varnished, but the banana paper we made this week was mat. We have speculated about whether the freezing process might have removed the glossy quality from the banana pulp or whether harvesting the banana at different times of year may create different kinds of paper (shiny when the sap is rising?), but we just don't know. If any readers have insight into these banana paper mysteries, your advice is welcomed! I am very interested in making more banana paper as I have plans which require its combination of strength and translucence.
We started putting bleached native peach pulp to the trough while there was still some long banana in the water, and the peach added strength to the wet paper being pulled around by the long banana fibres. Gradually the banana disappeared and we were pulling peach alone. The native peach is not a peach at all, no relation in fact, being named solely on the resemblance its leaves have for the original. It actually bears tiny little fruits like peppercorns which the pigeons adore.
Peach paper pulp is made out of the inner bark only. It makes a thick soft creamy smooth paper that I anticipate will be a joy to print on, so I am very interested in making more of this paper as well. As we pulled we noticed tiny balls of peach fuzz in the pulp, which couldn't be broken up by stirring the trough. Helga reckons these are the result of spending too much time in the beater (back before the pulp was frozen). It seems that beating for too long will begin to reconstitute fluffy pulp into a solid mass. Luckily the presence of the little balls of peach are unnoticeable in the dried paper.

Botanical papers handmade on the Sunshine Coast, April 2008

After all the paper was dried it made quite an impressive pile on the dining room table. I went through and tested a sample of each type of paper with different pens and pencil, and for its folding qualities. With these samples and notes in my journal I am only taking as much of the paper as I could squeeze into a single plastic file box for the next stage of my journey.

Making grass into paper (II)

Hamil paper, almost dry

Making paper by hand is surely one of the most inefficient activities I have ever tried. Two huge sacks of grass, or a whole car boot-full of shrubbery, eventually some dozen or so hours of hard physical labour later (not to mention gas cooking, machine processing, chemical additives and ridiculous quantities of water), emerge as a dozen pretty pieces of A4. Madness, it is madness!
But such pleasurable madness, and I slept so very well* afterwards! Helga, Di, Glenda and I spent two full-on days of multi-tasking paper-making at Wallace House** in Noosa. I hardly know how to tell the story, as so many things were happening simultaneously the entire time we were there.

Outside to the left of the roller door there was a big copper boiling up two batches of fresh plant material in separate net bags: the Chinese Burr bark that Helga and I had prepared, and fresh ginger stems and leaves that Di had collected from a ginger root seller at the market (this area is famous for its ginger production).

To the right of the roller door was an ingenious homemade device combining an insinkerator with a hospital trolly, which when appropriate hoses were attached for input and output chewed through the moderately coarse plant matter like ginger and lemon grass, but got hairballs from the Burr bark.

Insinkerator trolly

Inside in one corner was Alph*** the Hollander beater which variously chewed its way through Hamil Grass, lemon grass, ginger, recycled paper, and of course the Chinese Burr. The Alph is horribly noisy, especially when grinding up recycled paper, and particularly in the echoing environment of the unlined tin shed in which we were working. But I can certainly appreciate its talent for fluffing up fibres. The Burr bark went into the beater as tight stringy clumps and emerged much later as a loose fibrous soggy fluff perfect for making paper.

Removing pulp from the beater is a long and labourious scooping out with sives into a bucket. I quite enjoyed this part of it, not least because the beater's motor was blessedly silent, and of course with my well-documented proclivity for long and labourious fiddly jobs. The Burr pulp came out a very dark brown so Helga added some judicious slops of household bleach. Before our very eyes the brown pulp gradually faded to an attractive honey blonde and eventually a clotted cream before we rinsed out the bleach.

Two buckets of Chinese Burr bark pulp, the one on the right with bleach added (it got even lighter after the photo).

Making the pulp into sheets of paper took place on a table in the centre of the room, where the pulp was added to a large trough of water. By the second day we had two troughs being worked simultaneously, one on each end of the not terribly big table. The ratio of pulp to water required to make a standard sheet of paper is almost undetectable to the untrained eye, though with practice I did get better at seeing what was happening in the trough.

As the new girls, Glenda and I had the honour of doing the first batches and we started with the Hamil grass which had come through its long processing still a bright beautiful shade of green. It was a light and fluffy pulp, relatively easy (I realise in retrospect) to pull into relatively consistent sheets of paper.

Glenda draining the mold and deckle with Hamil pulp

Pulling paper goes like this: first you shimmy your spread hand along the bottom of the trough to get the fibres evenly dispersed without sloshing the contents over the sides of the trough. Then your mold and deckle (two wooden frames fitted together, the mold with a screen and rails to hold the screen taut) is dipped vertically into the trough and used to scoop up some pulpy water, lifting absolutely on the horizontal and shaking very gently side to side and back and forth to distribute the fibres evenly as the water drains through the screen. Then you let the mold drain, for as long as you can stand it (or as long as the person waiting their turn at the trough can stand it), before couching (rolling) the paper off the screen and onto the piece of blanket or sheet that is sitting on top of the post (the stack of wet, just pulled paper that you are adding to).

Glenda couching a fresh sheet of Hamil paper onto the post

In the other roller doorway were two home made presses, but only one (car) jack, so we couldn't use both presses at the same time, which entailed a bit of juggling posts every time we added more. The jack exerted enough pressure on the posts (sandwiched between pieces of wood) to squeeze out all the excess water. When sufficiently pressed, the paper was then peeled off its backing sheet or blanket and spread flat on a bit of fibro board to dry. Unfortunately those bits that dried too fast buckled and puckered, but luckily most of the Hamil paper came through smooth. The bright grassy green faded with drying to a greenish yellow (see top photo of post****) which is still quite attractive.

Later we pulled paper from recycled paper, ginger, the lemon grass pulp which made a highly textured brown paper and the bleached Burr bark pulp which made a lovely soft fluffy paper, some of which we added dried (fake) saffron blossoms to, speckling the creamy white with a rich yolky orange.

We finished off the day with a collaborative effort pouring the various different pulps onto a giant mold and deckle in a sort of abstract pattern of green, brown, cream and white which Helga declared to be a representation of the ruined Mary River if the Traveston Dam goes ahead causing rampant weed and algae growth to clog up the waterway. It seemed an appropriate interpretation, and we left the single large sheet of pulp painting to dry on the mold. I'll get to see the finished product when I go back to Wallace House for the Bookmakers Group on Monday.

Glenda and I had no trouble dividing our finished papers between us: she loves the idiosyncratic character of the lemon grass and thinks the Hamil is boring. I love the smooth even surface and cheery colour of the Hamil and can't think what I would do with the coarse lemon grass. My little stack of Hamil sheets is still damp and slightly puckered so Helga, Victor and I spent some time today assembling a beautiful antique book press that Helga has restored (from flood damage). As always, the old equipment requires both respect and creativity to get back into use, and as always I have a huge amount of fun sharing the job with like-minded folk- Helga and Victor fitting the bill perfectly. The first job of the book press in 30 or more years is to flatten my Hamil paper.

Hamil Grass Pulp

*Other chronic insomniacs will appreciate the attractiveness of any activity that induces a rare good sleep.
**Wallace House is a big old homestead used by numerous art and craft groups: while I was there I saw potters, painters, life drawing, water colours, embroiderers and quilters- and every day of the week the centre is booked for these and many other diverse activities.
*** Named Alph-a-beater by Victor the inveterate punster. It's actually what's called a Critter, made by Mark Lander a New Zealander widely credited for transforming papermaking into an affordable and transportably activity thanks to his clever invention.

**** I became momentarily excited imagining some relationship between a blog post and a papermakers post. Victor's puns must be affecting me despite all my eye-rolling groans.

Making grass into paper (I)

I didn't bring any paper over to Australia (even so, my idea of the bare minimum luggage is embarrassing to haul into my hosts' homes) so I find myself in the strange position of having access to a printing press, but with nothing to print on. Fortunately, I am here on the Sunshine Coast as the guest of the Papermakers of Queensland (Inc) so my lack of paper is being actively addressed.

Right now I am staying with Helga and Victor Hill on their farm in the Mary Valley. On my first afternoon Helga and I went out along the road to harvest Hamil grass, a pasture grass which, when ungrazed, towers over us (not so impressive as we are both shorties) with wide tough blades.

Helga's eagle eye for spotting plant pests with papermaking potential found us some Chinese Burr on the other side of the road, so we collected an armload of that too. I was only slightly nervous about reaching into the tangled Australian undergrowth, but followed Helga's example of stamping my feet to scare off any snakes and kept a sharp eye out for scarey spiders. Fortunately the biggest animal we saw was one of these cute caterpillars that seems to thrive in the Hamil grass.

Once safely home with our two sacks of grass and Burr we set about preparing it to be cooked down as the first step towards becoming paper. The grass is quick and easy to process, as it just needs to be chopped small enough to fit in the giant cookpot. That's me cutting grass in the foreground while Helga starts the much more laborious task of stripping the bark off the Chinese Burr. Only the bark is fibrous enough for papermaking, and our big armful of Burr sticks was eventully reduced to a maddenly small tangle of bark strips. In contrast, one sack of grass easily filled a pot to capacity, so we put that onto cook immediately. Grass soup is stinky, and made even less appetising by the neccessary addition of caustic soda, required to help break down the plant matter and release the fibres. It was a noxious witches' brew, that we boiled outside the shed where Victor paints his anti-dam 'Don't Murray the Mary [River]' signage. The Hill's farm is just one of many in this fertile food basket of a valley that will be affected by the proposed dam at Traveston Crossing, and they are very active in their opposition. At the moment we are avidly following the journey of cross-country kayaker Steve Posselt as he paddles and drags his kayak from Brisbane to the Mary River to draw attention to the scandaloulsy flawed dam proposal.

Meanwhile our pot of grass bubbled and boiled over in a poisonous shade of deep, dark green, stinking and steaming, with Helga adding more water and caustic soda as seemed appropriate to her experienced senses. I stirred and payed close attention to every step, as there is no ready formula to follow, just an intuitive understanding of the process that I will only learn by practice. We cooked until after dark, and then left the mix to sit over night, hoping it might prove to be ready when tested in the morning.

Next day, however, Helga rubbed the broken down grass between her gloved fingers (caustic soda, remember?) and said it needed more cooking. So we topped up the water and set the flame alight again, letting it cook until the mixture felt like a slippery gel and the fibres mashed easily, but not too much. Then, and only then, did we stop the cooking and sive out the mass of green slime into an old net curtain, leaving the caustic water in the pot to cook our second batch of grass in.

The next step is rinsing out the caustic soda from the grass, a water-intensive process which in this case utilised the farm's creek water piped to an outside sink. However, the first half dozen buckets of rinse water were so alkaline that they couldn't be tipped down the drain and instead had to be hauled over to a fence line where we applied it as weed killer. Eventually however, the soil ph tester which Helga inherited from her gardening mother, indicated progress towards neutrality (and Victor had fixed up the drain pipe to go somewhere appropriate) so the work became a bit less back breaking.

I lost count of how many times we filled the bucket with clean water, opened out the net and swirled our hands through the fibres before lifting the heavy net out, emptying the bucket and starting again. The hours fly by when papermaking with Helga- I'm constantly surprised that two or three have already passed and it's already time for another cup of tea!

Once Helga was satisfied that the grass was completely ph neutral, the tester confirming the squeaking clean feeling between the fingers, we left Victor to keep an eye on the second grass brew and went off on another harvesting expedition, this time to fill up our pot of Chinese Burr bark. This was to be found on top of a hill, most easily accessed via a neighbour's farm. A heavy shower started just as we arrived, creating the perfect excuse for another cup of tea, and a chance to meet the New Zealand neighbours and have a chat about home, admire their coffee bushes and accept a big bag of passionfruit from their vines. The rain stopped as suddenly as it began so Helga and I wriggled through a barbed wire fence and tackled the edge of a big area of Chinese Burr. It's one of those exotic plants which was fashionable for gardens once (I have no idea why, since it's ugly and smells bad) and then escapes into the wild and jostles out native plants from their niches. We filled the back of the car with it, and arrived home to find the second batch of Hamil grass ready for rinsing. That took until dark, so the bark stripping had to be tackled the next morning, before I scrubbed up (with only partial success as the bark stains skin) and left to catch a bus and two trains to Brisbane for a Passover weekend of over-eating in delightful company.

...to be continued...