Hamilton Gardens - first working shots

After spending New Year's day travelling down South, I'm now back in Timaru enjoying a (so far) benign on-call. Since I have to be within 15 mins of the hospital, the easiest thing to do is stay in the motel, taking advantage of free broadband and my still-smooth and shiny albeit not so new Macbook pro. And update my blogs a little.

So here are some photos I prepared earlier... about two weeks ago in fact. Don't worry, marination of the ingredients for this long is intended. I made a "field trip" to the Chinese Scholar's Garden in Hamilton and took these working shots so that I know what environments I'm writing The Bone Feeder (promenade version) for. It's pretty exciting to have access to a garden, especially one as obviously wandering as this one... fun!

Incidentally I paid a visit to the new Dunedin Chinese Gardens yesterday. They too are very impressive - it's easy to see why they cost $9 million - given they were constructed in their entirety on a site near Shanghai before being broken up, shipped over and reassembled by the original Chinese artisans. Not so these gardens in Hamilton, but the same sentiments, ideals and design concepts nonetheless went into their making. These Chinese gardens on the other side of the world have a special significance to the world of my play, being made by people with a deep longing for the culture and refinements of the place they come from but nonetheless determined to make a place for themselves in their new home.