Tasmania’s Derwent Valley Concert Band has cleaned up at the World Marching Band Championships.

The band was judged the winner over 14 other outfits in the open event in Germany.

The conductor Layton Hodgetts has told ABC Local Radio the award took everyone by surprise.

“And to cap it all off they decided to give me the gold medal conductor award, so we’re all feeling pretty excited over here tonight, it’s been an amazing outcome,” he said.

What do fungi and stonewash jeans have in common? What has a moss got to do with the Tyrolean iceman? What are the tallest mosses? What is a reindeer moss? How can lichens read pollution?

The answers to these questions and many more will be answered in a remarkable free touring exhibition, Hidden in Plain View: the forgotten flora, staged by the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne which goes on display in Launceston in August.

Dr Teresa Lebel, one of the organisers, says the exhibition is about encouraging people to investigate the influence of the forgotten flora on their daily lives through curiosities, rarities, and everyday items, and gain an understanding of the importance of conserving the ‘often overlooked’ in our world.

Hidden in plain view: the Forgotten Flora features over 100 objects including original botanical paintings, historical and contemporary illustrations, books and textiles, and herbarium specimens from the Victorian State Botanical Collection held at the National Herbarium of Victoria.

Dr Lebel says visitors will see many items that have never been viewed by the public due to their precious and fragile nature.

Centrepiece

A key part of the exhibition is the microscope acquired by Ferdinand Mueller, Victoria’s first Government Botanist and founding Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, from London in 1857 for the grand total of £4.4, at the time offering to ‘pay for it in books and specimens’.

“This microscope would have been an essential tool of trade for a botanist: between 1847 and 1877 Mueller collected approximately 23,000 specimens for the Herbarium, and more than 15,000 specimens were sent to him by other collectors,” according to Dr Lebel.

Another one of the historical treasures on show is Richard Bastow’s Key to Australian Mosses and the associated reference sets of specimens. Bastow, a contemporary and friend of Mueller, was forced to sell his own ‘beautiful’ microscope to settle his debts before he moved from Hobart to Victoria in 1887.

Among the other collectors, scientists and botanical artists represented in the exhibition are Henry Tisdall, a keen plant collector and teacher from Walhalla who was encouraged by Mueller to collect fungi; Otto Tepper, another of Mueller’s protégés, who sent him hundreds of specimens from South Australia and was later to move from school teaching to become an entomologist; and Ilma Stone, one of only 18 women at The University of Melbourne when she studied botany in the 1930s.

As for the answers to those tricky questions?

What has a moss got to do with the Tryolean iceman?
The presence of a particular moss species in the Tyrolean Iceman’s clothes helped scientists establish that the iceman had most probably travelled to the Alps from the south (‘modern Italy’) and not from Austria. (Dickson et al. 1996)

What are some of the tallest mosses?
In Australia Dawsonia superba var. pulchra, which looks like a pine seedling, is the tallest moss; Dendoligotrichum dendroides, which grows between 20-40 cm tall, is New Zealand’s tallest moss. This plant resembles a miniature palm tree.

What is ‘reindeer moss’?
‘Reindeer moss’ is not a moss but a lichen called Cladonia subgenus Cladina. In Europe it is used to make Christmas wreaths and for use in model building.

Why are lichens great readers of pollution?
They have enormous sensitivity to pollution; accumulating heavy metals or other toxic substances readily. The absence or presence of particular species can indicate what is causing and how bad the pollution in a given area is.

How do you get the stone-wash effect on jeans?
Stone-washed jeans are not, as you might think, produced by many little old ladies beating them on riverside rocks, but by being dunked into vats of fungal culture. The fungus, Trichoderma reesii, was originally isolated from the fabric of a decaying tent on the South Pacific island of Samoa. Enzymes from the fungus, called cellulases, partially and irregularly digest the cotton (cellulose) in the jeans, creating the ‘stone-washed’ appearance.

Tour dates:

16 August – 16 November 2008
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston

25 February – 8 April 2009
Gordon Gallery, Geelong

5 June – 30 September 2009
Museum of Economic Botany, Adelaide Botanic Garden

A cheeky portrait of the Danish royal family has won this year’s Bald Archy Prize.

Newcastle railway worker James Brennan was awarded the $5,000 prize in Canberra this morning.

‘I was vacuuming and it just popped into my head out of nowhere,’ Brennan said.”

The Bald Archy Prize was created in 2004 as a spoof of Australia’s most prestigious art award, the Archibald.

It is also the only art competition in the world allegedly judged by a cockatoo, named Maude.

Tasmanian artist Belinda Kurczok has won the People’s Choice Award in Adelaide’s 2007 Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize for her lifelike gouache painting of two white-bellied sea eagles.

Named after Frederick George Waterhouse, the South Australian Museum’s first curator, the Waterhouse Art Prize is Australia’s richest prize for natural history art.

Kurczok, 28, received her $5000 prize and a ticket to Malaysia at a presentation ceremony at the museum last night.

The top prize was won by Victorian artist Heather Marsh.

In 2003, the Devonport Regional Gallery established a commission program that sought to provide emerging Tasmanian artists with the support to develop a solo exhibition. Hobart-based Richard Wastell was the first artist invited to participate in the program.

Not far from here was the outcome — an exhibition of paintings that capture the essence of the Tasmanian wilderness, its extraordinary beauty and also its vulnerability and the desecration wrought upon it by man.

The exhibition was shown at the Devonport Regional Gallery, and then the Bett Gallery Hobart, in March 2005. It was a sell-out.

And a tribute to the young Richard Wastell’s determination to live by his art once he had graduated with a degree in Fine Arts (Honours) from the University of Tasmania in 1996. As Jane Stewart, director of the Devonport Regional Gallery wrote, after his recent exhibition in Sydney and enthusiastic national reviews, he is now getting the recognition he deserves.

The works in Not far from here are oil and marble dust on linen.

Bestselling Tasmanian author Rachael Treasure shares a quiet moment with her Waler stallion Akbar as they peruse her recently-released novel — The Rouseabout.

Rachael also writes a very popular web blog — Treasure’s Tales — where, in her own laconic voice, she documents the ups and downs of country life … its about life on a farm, not a country weekender …

Rachael has joined our team at thisTasmania and will contribute a regular Letter from the country.

Here’s her first Letter … an ode, sort of, to the humble swede which freckles Tasmanian paddocks during winter.

Our district of Levendale is famous for its swede. So much so, we have an oversupply of them in our farm kitchen.

This winter, when trying to invent new ways of eating them, I discovered the wonderful word, neeps, in my Stephanie Alexander cookbook.

With our bleak long winters in this district, we grow swedes, turnips and rape as fodder crops for our sheep and cattle. Giant things that the stock, wallabies and possums sink their teeth into while they’re still in the ground, turning them into white bowls.

The trend now in fancy-pants grocery stores in the cities is to sell both turnips and swedes as more marketable small round bulbs.

A shame, as the giant swede tastes so much sweeter.

They can be a big as a babies head … as my baby daughter Rosie demonstrates with her friend, “Sven da Svede.” (As you can see, entertainment in the country is entirely ones own responsibility. Strolls with babies to coffee shops and parks to meet other mums is not an option here!)

A downside of eating swedes are of course the prevailing ‘winds’ that result.

After trying to eat our way through ten kilos of swede it’s rather breezy in our house this winter … but on the upside, it provides more delightful family entertainment for simple country folk like us.

Editor’s Note: The Rouseabout has sold 55,000 copies [June 30 2007] and it looks as if Penguin might be preparing for a reprint.