CASAS LAUNCH

“Welcome everybody, thank you for coming.We’re incredibly humbled to find ourselves here, a mix ofmany cultures, on the beautiful shore of "Walla-mulla", which only a few days ago I found means "young male kangaroo".

Our NGO is called CASAS, or the Czech Australian Societyfor Arts & Sciences. From December, we are planning to put on an occasional series of cultural events, which will be a mix of the arts and talks, & have Czech & Aussie - in other words multicultural & also indigenous - elements.

We’d also like these events to be more like a pop ofconglomerate or kaleidoscopic experiences. There’ll be a topic & we’ll find common links that could find a surprising focus - thanks to the input of information & viewpoints from many cultures. A warning😊: we’re assuming thatCzechs will be found to have a finger in every pie.

And, much like today’s event, they’ll be a sort ofspontaneous & organic – or as Lucie says “liquid” – ‘happening’. The contributors will be enthused, flexible & sometimes available at the last minute, a bit like recent flashmobs.

These ‘happenings’ actually have a root in Czech artisticresistance events before the Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia. They would be advertised at short notice through underground channels, took place in unexpected venues, such as open fields or cellars to escape Communist eyes, & it was always a revelation if anyone managed to turn up.

Our NGO is also loosely linked to the Czechoslovak Societyfor Arts & Sciences that my father ran in Sydney between 1972 and 1992. This was quite a significant exile organisation after the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia after 1968, which tried to keep alive a cultural legacy that was suddenly banned there.

This for example included sponsoring visits to Australia bythe exiled authors Josef Škvorecký & Zdena Salivarová, who ran the ‘68 Publishers press in Toronto; Karel Kryl, a prominent protest singer, who had needed to flee to Germany, and the staging of a trio of plays by Václav Havel at the Nimrod theatre during a time when the future Czech president was still in prison.

I’d also like to alert you to the fact that we’re in the presence of some rather remarkable objects for good luck.

• The first one is the Japanese triptych of 3 courtesans – created 150 years ago in 1872 by Yoshitora Utagawa, which has been donated to CASAS by our Prague-based board members to well-wish our launch. They are beautifully preserved coloured woodcuts from a series of scrolls called ‘From the House of Goseiró‘ or ‘The Green House’. They depict 3 real & quite famous courtesans – Kodayo on the left in a Dragon kimono, Shukusho in a Tiger kimono in the middle and Ima-murasaki in a Sparrow kimono on the right.

• Our second remarkable object is an at least 4000-year-old woolly mammoth ivory tusk, delicately carved in Japan during the Meiji Period, or between 1868 & 1912. So it is possibly from a similar time as the triptych. What is extraordinary about this, is that not only is the bone lightly opalised, but the carving is of Australian fauna and flora, as interpreted by the artist, who had probably not seen a real kangaroo or wallaby. The ‘roo family is extremely lifelike however & it is possible that by that time a few specimens had somehow already appeared in the Tokyo Zoo. The snake, possums & rainforest are much more romanticised, and depict a drama in an ancient landscape as Australia could have been imagined from such a distance.

• And our third object is the beautiful porcelain vase around the corner decorated by koi or carp fish. It was made in Japan for the European market, probably in the 1920s, toward the end of the European Japonisme craze that had in fact started with the (I have to say forced) opening of Japan in 1858, and by the 1920s had influenced every significant artist in Europe - from Aubrey Beardsley to Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Klimt, Alfonse Mucha, the gender-outnumbered Mary Cassat & even architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

But what I love most about this vase is that carp are alsovery special in the Czech Republic. They are considered to be very lucky, and that is one of the reasons we have it as our traditional Czech Christmas dish. You’ll see that this vase also has some Art Deco features, a movement that was very strong in Czechoslovakia at the at time, and has been adopted by the Japanese potter.

So these objects then seem to have chosen their own journeyto be here today, at this particular meeting place – Walla-mulla, or young kangaroo country - and we are happy to share them with you for their beautiful artistry, as well as for what they represent – layers and connections of time, place and cultures, which also resonates with the spirit of what we hope to do fortuitously through CASAS.”