About

This blog started to isolate content from HA, my first blog. Various reasons exist for wanting this and some had to do with avoiding upset and in parallel to privilege the work of 'The Yellow Bin', an art project I began thinking about on 16 January 2024. I couldn't seek out a URL so instead chose to reuse (hence "yellow" bin, ie recycling container) one URL that I had secured in about 2006. 

It's a bit chaotic, but I will work with the material. And I'm a Leo, yes, and yellow is the colour for this star sign (says my daughter who knows about these things). With 'Leontography' I'm working to make my personal space more like me, more Leontified. I'm recycling 800,000 words of correspondence between my father Peter William da Silva and his friends and relatives. 

Having spent a good deal of my life doing what other people thought best, it's my time now.

Leontography is our title, dad's and mine, and this is a joint project. We'll both make this together. When he sent me his memoir 'Growing' in 2002 he never thought I'd put it online but I did put it online. Leontography is the only thing we ever did make together apart from a smoothly-varnished hull on a boat I owned when I was small. Dad with his crafstman's eye made a point of using the brush to pick up what he called "holidays"; drips that haven't dried into clumps yet, and that can be wiped away.

For people coming from non-Anglo countries I have put a translate function at the bottom of the page for each post. Family members can be assured that names of living persons won't be included in any post; the dead can't care. If you have any particular subject you care to learn more about in the light of the correspondence released, please do feel free to send me a note, I'll be sure to take it seriously enough to read it at the very least. 

This very personal blog is a meditation on caste and the patriarchy, as seen through the lens of one family, a family now banished from the Fatal Shore: my own brother lives in the US and my family lives in Japan. So the blog is also a reflection on Australia and its inability to value the important things because so easily distracted by plain wealth. I'm the last of my line to live in the Land Down Under, giving the lie in a most emphatic way to my grandfather's search for a receptive home.

The Lucky Country? For some not others.

My art practice since beginning to make paintings (cf HA for more info) has - right from the very start - involved recycling. As yellow bins in Australia are used for recycled waste, much like the rubbish that passes for friendship in my father's correspondence - with him every relationship was transactional, there was no real display of personal feelings - in my use of textual collage I give new life to old and unwanted things. Things like me. I make it a point to value what other people find distracting because it takes them away from simpler pleasures. 

Using dad's MS-Word files as content for an art project is another form of recycling. Look at Japan, where they place a good deal of importance on conserving the old, even though, when they do so, as in reconstruction of temples etc, they usually use new materials. 

Welcome to The Yellow Bin.