It’s a very modest sign that announces the “Piccolo Zoo” just across the road behind Syracusa’s archeological park. A papyrus [Cyperus papyrus] lined gravel road leads to a gate that opens into a garden-like picknick zone operated by Angelo (and his family) who is in charge of a multitude of hens, roosters (permanently crowing), ducks and more ducks, geese, parakeets, canaries, pheasants, two swans (at least) plus a wire confinement lived in by guinea pigs, rabbits, goats and probably still something else. The garden design is enhanced by glass balloons, vases, broken plaster remants and white enamelled chairs and tables. Apart from tending the picknick area and gardening, he might even be the creator of the two giant paper-maché heads towering behind the bushes.

The “Piccolo Zoo” is at the same time one of the places where the art of making paper from the papyrus plant is explained and administered. A wooden hut in the middle of the premises serves as a semi-touristy but very charming selling point of the fabricated sheets. The town of Syracuse has its own paper museum which certainly gives ALL information about the history and the process of paper creation. But the “Little Zoo” has something “airy-fairy” about it that is hard to grasp. Last but not least the wooden hut is wonderfully climatized– an absoute blessing today!

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“Hejo, spann den Wagen an”, a very traditional canon in German language. Sung at the table on occasion of Mme Stoering’s “Salon”. Topic of the evening war “music”.

Hejo, spann den Wagen an,
Sieh, der Wind treibt Regen übers Land
Hol die goldnen Garben,
Hol die goldnen Garben.

translates into:

Heigh ho! Hitch up the cart,
See, the wind drives rain across the land.
Fetch the golden sheaves,
Fetch the golden sheaves.

The English traditional is much less garden orientated:

Heigh-ho! Anybody home.
Food and drink and money have I none.
Still I will be merry, still I will be merry.

And then there is still a strange Low-German-English(?) dialect version:

Hey-o spun den wagon uns,
Set der ven tribt regen ubers lands,
Olde folin gabin,
Olde folin gabin.

Australian Beauties reconnects to the work of German botanists travelling Australia since the 50s of the 19th century. Namely the work of Ferninand von Müller was vital for the botanic culture of Australia: Not only did he discover a great number of plants and became the renowned director of the Melborne Botanic Gardens in 1857. Even before that he started on the most extensive collection of pressed plants in Australia for a herbarium that still forms the core of the present “plant library” of the Botanic Gardens.
Australian Beauties is a “roadside herbarium” currently featuring 23 pressed plants from Australia, provided with reinvented names, but real situational descriptions and observations on the nature of the specific plant. The work draws on the spirit of discovery which forms such a great part of Western culture – and defies it at the same time in counteracting the “laws” of taxonomy, scientific soberness and order. The grit of the road still sticks to the pressed specimens. Some look ravished, some are just blossoms without stems or leaves, others have faded, unrecognizable colours… with the discoverer occasionally failing to remember the exact location (a gravelled parking lot on the A3, Tasmania). Australian Beauties hovers on the brink between the factual and the imaginary and between irony and wonder. The images are commented in text in English and German and will form a printed publication presented probably in 2017.

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