MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

On Monday my sister and I took the train from Kent to Nîmes in the south of France to stay with a friend and former work colleague, in his home in a village about 15 minutes drive from the relatively small provincial capital with around 146,000 inhabitants.

It's nearly three decades since we worked together and seven or eight years since he moved here to his wife's native region after their marriage seven or eight years ago. Life is good when you're in wine and cheese heaven and we've felt especially privileged that they've shared theirs with us.

Aside from the heavy duty hospitality, we've had the unseasonal warmth and sun of a successive pre-summer 29 degree days. Weather is like a game of chance but if it's good it always puts a stamp of satisfaction on a travel experience.

We've acquired a good sense of family life and village life. It's a sleepy but vibrant village with a population of around 600 in a setting that is dominated by small vineyards. Every village has a wine co-op which has usually been set up more than a century ago to make and distribute wine.

The economics of winemaking has changed a lot and these days some co-ops are viable and some are not. On our first day we took a ten litre plastic container to a local co-op and paid 14 euros for the attendant to fill it with what seemed a very good rosé.

There are no shops in the village but regular visits from various small business people such as the butcher and the baker. On our first morning we met the Lyne the baker.

There's always politics to be talked about, and I was interested to hear that the elections to the village council had been quite hotly contested with some unexpected candidates putting their hats into the ring and doing well.

But not surprisingly, most of the talk was about the recent national elections and the success of the new president Emmanuel Macron. When we had guests, I was not anticipating a variety of opinions.

I'd assumed there would be overwhelming relief that France had rejected Marine Le Pen and dodged the chaos and bad energy of a government playing to fear with promises to fortify borders. But there was also cynicism about Macron's winning the day with his consummate ability as a political chess player.

Yesterday we enjoyed a leisurely walk around the UNESCO World Heritage listed Pont du Gard ancient 50 kilometre Roman aqueduct. We were lucky to have the peak tourist season weather without the peak tourist season numbers.

The same was true on Tuesday when we walked around Nîmes, which was the destination for the water flowing through the first century aqueduct.

Nîmes has a lot of constructions surviving from Roman and later times. Many of them are fortifications, some built or adapted by Napoleon.

I was struck by the need to fortify cities and villages to protect their populations from outside threats, from ancient times until the present, with the current day prevalence of terrorism.

Our friend took us to the gate of a campus of the University of Nîmes. It is located in an old fort built in the 17th century by Louis XIV's military architect Vauban, who is best known for his advice on how to consolidate France's borders to make them more defensible.

In what is quite a recently imposed restriction, we were not allowed inside the university compound. At the gate there is now a presence of officers in military uniform using Vauban's fortifications to protect students from the present day terrorist threat.

Food is one of the highlights of travel for many people including myself. Some travellers meticulously research and plan where they will dine. Others simply choose where to eat at random according to what is available at the location they're in when they feel hungry.

Nearly always I'm in the latter 'hit or miss' category. Some might consider this lazy. But I'm pleased to say that in my experience, eating randomly usually makes for a more satisfying experience than faithfully submitting to the recommendation of a guide book.

Frequently those who plan will discover that the restaurant they've spent an hour or more trying to locate is simply not what they'd hoped for. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. In other words, it's every bit as hit or miss as my random selection approach.

These travellers are trying to replicate the experience of somebody else. That could be the author of the guide book or travel article, or perhaps another traveller who had a very satisfying meal at the particular restaurant at some other time. Travel is about your own experience of the moment.

For example, I was walking along the Brighton beachfront yesterday and came upon a shellfish stall selling cockles, whelks, mussels, prawns and jellied eels. I always love eel but have mostly had it smoked. The 'jellied' aspect seemed like a leap into the unknown. But I took the plunge and found that the jelly was every bit as flavoursome and satisfying as the eel itself.

However I don't always stick to my principle. A few minutes earlier I missed an opportunity to experience fish and chips with 'mushy peas'. I'd never heard of mushy peas and assumed that it was just another of the trashy British comfort foods that I sneer at and condescendingly dismiss.

That is because I pay more attention to received wisdom of what good food is rather than my own curiosity,  judgment and pleasure on the spot. This morning I did some reading and learned that mushy peas is quite a thing in British regional cuisine.

For Wednesday evening in Brighton, I'd received a restaurant recommendation but decided to take my chances and select something at random. I discovered another traditional dish that I'd never heard of and probably wouldn't have sought out.

Gammon steak. It was served with pineapple and we'd probably just call it ham steak. But it is not simply a thick slice cut from a whole or half ham, which I understand is how ham steaks are produced in the US and Australia. It is cured like bacon and has to be cooked.

I saw 'gammon steak' on the menu. I didn't know what it was but I ordered it anyway, trusting in fate and hoping for the best. That is the way to experience the best as a traveller.

I'm spending just over a day in Brighton. Last May I spent two days here. It's the month of the Brighton Fringe and the Brighton Festival.

I first came here last May when I was alerted to the festivals by my niece's one hour performance piece 'The Daddy Blues', which was about growing up with a difficult father.

The timing didn't work out for me to see that, but I came here and enjoyed other performances and events. So a return May visit to Brighton was always on my agenda.

Yesterday's surprise was a nice sunny day. I also enjoyed the contrast in culture and outlook from my rural Kentish base of Faversham, which in itself is a beautiful town. Faversham voted decisively for Brexit, while Brighton was overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the EU.

Brighton has a lot in common with Newtown in Sydney, so in some sense it's like returning home. It was a pleasure to walk the streets and investigate what I might sample from the hundreds of festival offerings available, including cabaret, circus, comedy, dance, spoken word, music, theatre and visual arts.

What I ended up experiencing was really quite random. Two blocks from my guest house, I came upon an exhibition of body art by young French artist Charly N'Doumbe. It was not tattoos, but photographs of coloured light creations projected on male and female nude bodies and printed on aluminium. They looked like whole body tattoos.

Next I walked up Grand Parade to the University of Brighton, where last year I'd seen a book art exhibition. This year it was doll sculptures, some of which were presented as if they were participating in a life drawing class.

Last Saturday the artist Cathie Pilkington held a 'Corpse workshop', so I guess you could call it corpse art. There was quite a variety of exhibits and forms, and they seemed to be peaceful rather than macabre. There was even a work of taxidermy, a stuffed dog restfully lying on a mat.

Finally, in the evening I attended an improvised electronic jazz music and contemporary dance performance titled Ahtuf Kontrol. It was members of a local family, including father on the keyboard accompanying his dance school graduate son, along with fellow musicians with electric guitar and trumpet.

The experience reminded me quite strongly of the Interplay workshops I've done several times a year in the Newtown parish church in Sydney with the parish priest Peter Maher. It's about acting out feelings and stories in body movement, often to music.

The Interplay reminder had me wanting to rise from my chair and move my body according to how I felt about the performance. But it was still England, and all members of the audience were politely restrained in their seats for the duration. In control of their emotions, even though they were viewing a performance titled 'Ahtuf Kontrol'.

Yesterday I visited the British Museum for the first time. I was aware that it is one of the largest museums in the world - with some eight million artefacts - and that I could only sample a handful of the exhibits in the two hours I had to give to it.

But much more than that, it is also one of the most controversial. Many items in the collection - perhaps most of it - are ill gotten in circumstances of exploitation such as colonial plunder.

It's well known that there is a long list of disputed items in the possession of the British Museum, including the Elgin Marbles. Greece's claim for restitution is backed by UNESCO and other organisations.

There's the Rosetta Stone - the pride of the collection - which is claimed by Egypt. There are also Australian Aboriginal remains, some of which were returned to traditional owners a few years ago.

For me, there's no question that we are talking about thousands of incidences of theft that the British authorities are justifying or concealing through their posturing and intellectual arrogance and bullying.

However my feelings about this are mixed and contradictory and no doubt confused. And they are feelings. I am conscious that the preservation of cultural heritage is an emotional issue for me. I am upset and find myself wanting to switch off when I hear news of the destruction of cultural heritage by groups such as Islamic State.

In this respect, I would like to see many threatened artifacts extracted from their locations and bundled up and sent to the British Museum and similar institutions for safe keeping until the current wave of cultural barbarism passes.

But of course that is a ridiculous proposition. Cultural barbarism will not pass. It is itself a part of human history that needs to be recognised and validated, no matter how abhorrent it is. Islamic State will deserve a place in history.

Perhaps we just need to take a cold shower and get over it. No. But yesterday I wanted to momentarily put to rest my feelings and convictions about the back story of the British Museum's collection so that I could simply enjoy some of the stories it presents.

I did this to some extent, appreciating for example the depiction of Alexander the Great as a master self-publicist. He is said to have carefully controlled the numerous representations of his portrait presented throughout his empire. Certain anointed sculptors had to portray him 'with a youthful, clean shaven face, long hair and a dynamic turn of the head'.

I did enjoy that and a few other exhibits. But I would have felt better about it if there was an overlay in the museum's presentation that included an acknowledgement of plunder and an element of contrition.

I visited the seaside town of Margate for the second time in a week, on this occasion with my sister. From time to time she goes there for work and knows it well.

She told me that central Margate contains areas in which the residents are in the top five per cent of socially deprived populations in the UK. I read that a study by the End Child Poverty charity revealed that 47.5 per cent of under 18s are living in struggling households. Many have a history of abuse and there is a very high rate of offending and reoffending.

Margate is also a beautifully laid out Victorian town with a magnificent beachfront. It is ripe for gentrification, and that is in fact happening quite rapidly. The deprived areas are in the centre, and the houses occupied by the privileged stand side by side with those of the deprived. They are easily identified as the freshly painted ones with plantation shutters and neat front gardens.

My sister said she sees further signs of gentrification every time she visits. Gay couples arrive in a street and set a standard and they are soon followed by the straights. The change has been accelerated by the prominence of the Turner Contemporary art gallery, which was established there in 2011. Indeed that was what attracted me to Margate.

As we walked along one of the streets close to the gallery, we spotted a hand written sign at the front of one house. It was requesting fellow residents not to disturb the children by slamming the door. The sign attracted my sister's attention because earlier in the day she'd been listening to her daughter telling of her struggle with being woken regularly by a 5:00 am door slammer.

My sister photographed the sign, and the resident who'd scribbled it immediately appeared on the door step. She was a struggling single mother whom my sister had anticipated would swear at her for the invasion of privacy.

Instead we heard the resident's story of how the challenge of raising young children in such circumstances was exacerbated by the door slammers' insensitivity. My sister told of her daughter's struggle with the door slammer at 5:00 am. It was an unexpected and moving expression of mutual empathy between privileged and underprivileged.

Later in the day I was listening to a podcast of a recent long read article in The Guardian titled 'Confessions of a reluctant gentrifier'. It was written by a US academic who was suggesting that we build walls of attitude between differently privileged groups of people living in the same neighbourhood.

This fosters unnecessary caution and irrational fear. She says we're more likely to be hurt by the cars we drive than the people we live among. Further she argues that this fear induces self-loathing.

'We are afraid, my husband suggests, because we have guilty consciences. We secretly suspect that we might have more than we deserve. We know that white people have reaped some ill-gotten gains in this country. And so privately, quietly, as a result of our own complicated guilt, we believe that we deserve to be hated, to be hurt, and to be killed.'

If my sister's experience is any guide, there are grounds for hope that unexpected encounters with the 'other side' might short circuit our guilt and break down the walls of attitude.

On Wednesday I went to the Turner Contemporary art gallery in the famous seaside town of Margate. My sister and I have plans to visit Margate on Monday, as she has a work commitment there. But I wanted to visit the 'thread art' exhibition which ends on Sunday.

Turner Contemporary is part of a vision to make Margate a cultural hub. Clearly it has a long way to go. For a start, the building's modern architecture does not sit well with the 19th century seaside resort and 'seen better days' ambience of the rest of the town.

That's not to say the gallery does not have a special affinity with Margate. Margate is where the renowned landscape painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) came many times to produce work.

He was drawn by the unique quality of light in this part of Kent, and the skies that he called 'the loveliest in all Europe'. Turner Contemporary is built on the site of the boarding house where he stayed when he visited the town.

I was speaking with a woman who'd come all the way from Devon to see the exhibition. She described the building as a monstrosity. I imagine that impression will change as takes shape as a cultural hub in the coming decades and more modern architecture appears on the landscape.

That is what happened at St Ives, the isolated fishing village in Cornwall I visited last May. It is the site of the Tate St Ives, a satellite gallery of the London Tate, and many other art activities and enterprises.

Turner Contemporary first came to my attention as the gallery from which the 2016 Grayson Perry exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art had come. I had a thought that the current exhibition - Entangled: Threads and Making - might also come to Sydney. But the staff at Turner Contemporary told me that many of the works were too fragile to travel and Sunday would be the end.

For me, the appeal of 'thread art' is that the piece of art I commissioned two years ago to preserve an aspect of my family's history was from that genre. I've come to appreciate it since then, though I was not especially attracted to it beforehand.

A local university historian had given me a hand drawn map of a housing subdivision on our farm that had an interesting story I wanted remembered. I decided it would form the basis for a piece of art. The artist I was put in contact with happened to be a textile artist, and I came to love the form of the work she produced (below).

Entangled is the work of 40 international female artists from the mid 20th century to the present. It includes sculpture, installation, tapestry, textiles and jewellery.

I found it mesmerising. It was easy to lose myself in many of the exhibits. It's difficult to single out any particular work, but what lingered for me were two quotations that were on the wall in one area of the exhibition.

One suggested to me that thread art - and art in general - is akin to meditation: 'Being creative is not so much the desire to do as the listening to that which one wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.' (Anni Albers)

The other presents this style of art as a kind of mental massage: 'A lot of my work is just repetitive activity. I find that calming and free.' (Kiki Smith)

When I return to my house in Sydney on 1st June, I will look at the artwork on my wall with an elevated appreciation of 'thread art'.

Yesterday I visited the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, Canterbury's main museum, library and art gallery.

It is no ordinary municipal museum. In the style of the presentation of its collection, it perhaps reflects the flamboyant personality of Dr James Beaney, the man behind its establishment at the end of the 19th century.

I was intrigued by his connection with Melbourne, where he migrated in 1852 in order to deal with a health condition that required a long sea voyage.

Beaney was a surgeon, politician and notorious self-publicist. He was born in Canterbury and maintained a link with the city for the rest of his life. And for posterity, through his endowment of 'The Beaney Institute for the Education of the Working Man', which he named in his own honour. He had himself risen from the working class after managing to acquire an education.

In Melbourne, Beaney shook up the medical establishment. An article in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) describes him as 'a bold surgeon, perhaps rash and rough at times, without the finesse and skill of [his contemporaries] Sir Thomas Fitzgerald and E. M. James, yet often successful when others less daring would have failed'.

He was recognised as a pioneer in the specialisations of child health, family planning and the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. But he was just as well known for his fondness for showy jewellery, which he wore even while operating. This earned him the nickname 'Diamond Jim'.

His controversies included four inquests on patients who died after surgery. One led to his trial and acquittal for the murder of a barmaid who died after an alleged illegal abortion. According to the ADB article, he was 'rightly acquitted', in light of 'a regrettable element of professional animosity'.

Beaney had a demeanour that lent itself to caricature. His detractors described him as a 'short, podgy man' with 'pale blue, rather shifty eyes', with his hair curiously upswept to either side of his head 'like a pair of horns'.

He was posthumously criticised for not providing for surviving relatives in his will, instead favouring vanity projects like the Beaney Institute, which had to display his portrait in the main hall of the building (above). In addition, he provided £1000 for repairs to Canterbury Cathedral on condition that a memorial tablet was erected (this led to the Cathedral Dean and Chapter banning such tablets in the future).

My own view is that it can be amusing to judge people whose vanity has overshadowed their achievements but it's important to look at what their legacy has produced. In Beaney's case, a quite remarkable regional museum with quirky and creative exhibits such as the current temporary exhibition of photographs of Canterbury taken by the city's community of homeless people.

For most of May I'm in England, staying in the old Kent market town of Faversham, a few stops north of Canterbury on the train line from Dover to London. It's also on the line that proceeds from Dover towards London along the coast, through a number of seaside towns including Deal, Broadstairs, Margate and Whitstable.

While I was here last May, I discovered that it's perfectly legal to buy a return ticket from Faversham to Whitstable - one station - for just £3.90, and travel in the opposite direction, taking in the long scenic route around to Whitstable through Canterbury, Dover and all the other coastal towns, breaking the journey a couple of times along the way.

That's what I did yesterday. My stops included Broadstairs, where I visited the Dickens House Museum.

Charles Dickens would spend his summer holidays in Broadstairs in the 1850s and 1860s, in a cliff top house named Fort House, which is claimed to be the Bleak House depicted in the title of Dickens' 1853 novel.

The Dickens House Museum is in the beachside home of the friend of Dickens who was the inspiration for the character Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield. It contains items that once belonged to Dickens such as his writing box and a mahogany sideboard that he owned from 1836 to 1855.

But what I found most interesting was the portrait of Dickens' London. This included his experiences as a 12 year old child working in a boot polish 'blacking' factory after his father was arrested for debt and sent to Marshalsea prison.

He was clearly traumatised by his experience of the rat infested workplace - 'the dirt and decay of the place rise up visibly before me as if I were there again'. His loneliness deepened his despair. 'No advise, no council, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone.'

It's probably fair to say that he suffered from what we now call post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and that this formed his outlook on life and gave him the basis of many of his novels. Later in life, Dickens used his writings to offer a social commentary that improved the lives of the poor.

The other quotation that caught my attention was from Our English Watering-Place, Dickens' 1851 eulogy to Broadstairs. It was about welcoming outsiders.

'We are a little bilious sometimes, about these days of fraternisation, and about nations arriving at a new and more unprejudiced knowledge of each other ... but it soon goes off, and then we get on very well.'

This could have been wishful thinking on the part of Dickens. Or perhaps the locals' attitudes have changed over the course of the past 116 years. In the Brexit referendum, the Thanet local government area that includes Broadstairs voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU, by a margin of almost two to one.

Moreover the local council is dominated by UKIP councillors, and former UKIP leader and vocal Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage stood for election in the local South Thanet constituency in the 2015 parliamentary elections.

On the stairs above the beach a few metres from the Dickens House Museum, I noticed a group of teenage boys speaking what seemed to be Polish or some other Eastern European language. A sign of the times that are soon to change.

During my brief visit to Paris last year, I tried and failed to find my way into the Pompidou Centre, one of the city's most visited tourist attractions. It was not clear how to get into the building, and there were many layers of security. Nothing had changed, but yesterday I was successful, even though I had time to see a only small part of the collection of modernist art it contained.

I had not even been sure of what all the fuss was about. Last year I wondered whether it was really anything more than a shopping mall, as I tried to negotiate my way through the retail outlets that seemed to obscure the major public institutions it houses. These include the huge Public Information Library and the National Museum of Modern Art, which is Europe's largest and the world's second largest after MOMA in New York.

The Pompidou Centre celebrates its 40th anniversary this year and has an interesting story itself. Being inside and riding the tubed escalators to the top is like being inside a piece of modern art. When it opened, an article in Le Figaro declared: 'Paris has its own monster'. The writer clearly did not appreciate the modern beauty of its exposed skeleton of brightly coloured mechanical system tubes.

One of the three architects was the Italian Renzo Piano, who has recently designed the three 'crystal' residential towers of Barangaroo's One Sydney Harbour building, with their elegant skins and highly transparent glass facades designed to highlight harbour's 'constant kaleidoscopic motion of colour and sparkle'.

When you finally get to it, the Pompidou Centre's contents are just as revolutionary as its form. One of the most famous works in the museum's collection is Dadaist Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal artwork Fountain. The first room I visited was devoted to a large artwork celebrating its centenary this year.

In what's called the Fountain Archive, 'post-conceptual' contemporary artist Saâdane Afif collects and archives every single publication in which he finds a reproduction of Duchamp's urinal. The pages are torn out and carefully framed, for the purpose of both preservation and decoration.

All the big names are in the museum, including Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky. I'd been introduced to them long ago when I bought a season ticket and made repeated visits to the Masterpieces from the Guggenheim exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW 1991.

But the artist that most caught my attention yesterday was one I'd never heard of - František Kupka, one of the pioneers of abstract art in the early 20th century. He sought to capture the 'essence' - or fourth dimension - of the subjects of his artwork. Works such as Plan par couleurs (1910) - below - penetrated their subjects to reveal an extra layer of truth, in a way that drew from technical and scientific advances of the time such as X-ray.

It had me thinking of people claiming psychic powers, whom we perhaps unfairly trivialise and put down. Or animals that have a higher degree of sense perception than humans. It all goes to suggest that reality is far more than meets the eye, and that is the point of iconoclasm and challenging convention. Which is what these art movements of the early 20th century were about, and indeed the architects of the Pompidou Centre.

After an overnight stop in Seoul, my flight arrived in Paris early afternoon yesterday local time. I'm here for three nights on the way to Kent, England, where I will spend most of May staying with my sister.

I came to my airbnb, a tiny maid's room on the top floor of a building near the Luxembourg Gardens on the left bank. Then I went walking for a couple of hours to familiarise myself with the surroundings, as I usually do when I arrive in a new location.

The most interesting attraction I came upon was Autophoto, a new photography exhibition at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art. It was, as The Guardian put it, about 'how photographers fell in love with cars'. Or, as the Foundation's website says, the car's reshaping our landscape and radically altering our conception of space and time.

It was the most captivating photography exhibition I can recall visiting, perhaps with the exception of the 'selfies' of the American photographer Cindi Sherman in Wellington in January.

I thought of my father, who never showed any interest in art. But he loved cars. In 1923 his family was the first in his north-east Victorian district to acquire a car. We still have the blanket that was bought to insulate the family from its draughtiness.

He would identify periods of his life by the particular car he or his family owned at the time. In a way, I do the same. I am not exactly anti-car, but I got rid of my last car in 2012 and now consider not owning a car as part of my identity. I sometimes wonder what my father would have made of that.

It occurred to me that this would have been the perfect art exhibition for him, although what would have interested me is unlikely to have been a highlight for him.

The exhibit I liked most was a very literal rendering of the exhibition's theme of cars merging with the landscape. It was from the 1990 visit to New Zealand of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose three works appeared to be pieces of dark abstract art, despite my description of them as 'literal'.

Sugimoto explained: 'One day I came across an unusual cluster of things strewn over a beautiful beach. Vaguely familiar looking, they turned out to be hundreds of car parts... Someone must have junked a whole fleet of cars there... The sight of crafted objects rotting away is at once dreadful and beautiful.'

That summed up for me the impact of the car on our society, and Sugimoto's works were a perfect complement to the more photogenic works in the exhibition, which I enjoyed as well.