Saturday 4 May 2013

Dam It part 2 – George Turner’s Castle



The bit I didn’t mention in my last post is that when Ollie bounded across the mud to meet George, shouting “You made us a desert and the white cliffs of dover!” George replied, “I think you’ll like my castle. I’ve got witches and dinosaurs and all sorts of things. The kiddies love it.”

And then he invited us to have a look, and promised to turn the lights on for us. “There are forty thousand lights,” he said.

So we invite some friends and make a night time expedition five minutes up the road. When we park the car I'm sure we’ve entered an alternate reality.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - Even the car park is bizarre

 
George’s castle is a folly of staggering proportions. Rumour has it that he’s a member of a strange religious sect called the Cooneyites, and they’re not allowed to celebrate Christmas; instead, in joyous defiance, it’s Christmas all year at George’s. However, the various so-called “Cooneyites” I’ve encountered are ordinary, honest, generous people, who contribute to the community, treat everyone with respect, and manage their money well. It’s no sect, but a slightly conservative home church; wives tend to wear skirts, husbands are teetotal; but there are no horses and carts or barn-raisings here. Only 20-ton excavators and single-handed castle raising.

And whether George is of this persuasion or not, the sheer exuberant kitsch of his castle shows an irrepressible creativity which nobody can help but admire.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - One man's hobby


Iron crenulations, sturdy timberwork, precarious stairways, lavish (but faded) decoration, bizarre metalwork, hidden passageways, great looming mounds of vegetation, and a wonderful gluttony of tacky decorations. This is like an almost grotesque fairyland, bizarrely carnivalesque, but delightfully upbeat. A model train chugs past dusty model cottages of all different scales; above hangs a giant red baron triplane, a small plastic jumbo jet, some faded silk flowers. Blobby glue combats the efforts of possums, trying to hold things in place. Nothing’s tidy except the undulating lawn, where a big echidna has wandered in from the adjacent bushland and is trying to bury its head to avoid us.

There are sculptures made of welded scrap, giant rusty towers of cogs and bars, choked in fairy lights. Pump casings seem to be a favourite, with their curving forms somewhere between a brass band and a seashell. All the crenulated metal facades are painted in George’s favourite federation cream.


George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - The penny kangaroo


“From the dollar shop,” he says of the Armoury, where hundreds of plastic swords and shields and axes are nailed around the walls inside a tower room. “I got a lot so that the kiddies would come in and say, ‘Wow’!” Hamish does just that. He stares at the walls and even though they’re the same cheap weapons he’s owned and broken several times before, it’s still making his child’s imagination explode (and his birthday list get about a page longer). There is such an overload of kitsch and fading plastic, festooned with multicoloured and sagging Christmas lights, that it is, truly, magnificent.

And then he shows us the Magic Faraway Tree which is an old, leaning pine. It has a sturdy but precarious staircase gradually embedding itself into its trunk, leading up to a platform many metres above at the very edge of the torchlight. The boys want to climb, but thankfully there’s an iron gate across the steps. I’m itching to climb too, but I can’t in front of the boys or they’ll want to come too.

Two days later, the boys are at holiday care, and George has finished digging and wants us to help him take his digger home. He works out the quickest way to his quarry is the back way. So we go for a drive, Stu driving George’s ute, me in our four wheel drive, and George in a 20-ton excavator.

Driving across paddocks full of sheep beside a huge, juddering excavator isn’t something I do every day, and the experience is joyfully surreal. We lift our back fence posts out and lie the fence down for the digger and cars to cross, then lift it back into place. Fence posts lift out easily in this soil-cracking dryness. We drive across the Tyleys’ back paddock, up a hill and into the Griffiths’ back paddock, through another cockie gate, over a dead sheep, and into George’s property with its particularly altered landscape (because he owns an excavator and can). He has chains of marron ponds, a huge quarry, and more dams than anybody really needs.

Half way, I drive a little way ahead, park by a creek and breastfeed a complaining Poppy against the steering wheel while the excavator catches up. I watch it approach in the rear view mirror, its looming elbow against the sky.

After a tour of George's quarry, we decide to exit via his quarry road rather than back through the maze of cockie gates and paddocks. This is a superb excuse to go to the castle in daylight and climb the tree with George’s blessing and no children. Except, of course, Poppy, who by this time is becoming interested in another feed: in this account I’ve skimmed over a lot of time spent of talking to George. When George happens to your day, don’t expect to have time for much else. The trouble is he can talk for hours, but it’s interesting stuff, damn it, so you let go of everything else to make time for it.

We negotiate the very secure treehouse safety gate:

At your own risk...


I climb first. From the bottom, it looks fun, but at the top of the first ladder, I realise that I actually am scared of heights. Not because it isn’t sturdy, but because it isn’t straight. 

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - It's once it chages direction that it gets disconcerting


Half way up there’s the old, now abandoned treehouse, which gives me a wave of vertigo just by being there and looking precarious. It's like a jetty, reaching out into dark waves of cones and matted needles.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - the old treehouse. Thankfully you don't have to go on this bit.


I swallow my fear and make it to the top, via some very haphazard stair landings in tree forks and a vertiginous trap door.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - looking down isn't recommended.


The true purpose of this treehouse is to give the appearance, from North Coast road, of a giant tower reaching above the treeline. 




While the view from the top through little slit windows is impressive, the piggybacked power plugs and adaptors and cables for the fairylight display are even more so. George has weatherproofed his electricals with dangling asbestos shields and a caking of silicone globbed around each plug.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - the view from the top.


Possibly the worst part of the climb is getting back through the trapdoor and working out which way around you should be to make a safe exit onto what can loosely be called the ladder below. I take the descent very slowly.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - looking down the trapdoor.


George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - thinking I might be up here permanently.
Stuart takes the next turn while I sit on the lawn below and feed the now insistent Poppy. She gets fed in some of the oddest circumstances – why live a dull life just because you’re feeding a baby? The joy of breast is the complete lack of preparation involved. I am not organised enough to bottle feed. 

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - thinking I might be up here permanently.


Stuart of course is manly and courageous and has no issue with heights, and enjoys taking photos.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island, the Treehouse - Federation Cream


When the boys find out we’ve been up the treehouse, they’re furious. But without a complete safety harness and anchor points, there’s no way they’re going up. Chances are they’d be far safer than me, being little monkeys, but I might suffer life-threatening apoplexy seeing them up there. We tell them it’s nailed shut, which is, technically, true.

But we do go back, when it’s time to pay George for his digging. We make it there at twilight, and the boys charge around in the gathering dark, exploring the shadowy tower rooms.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - evening.

George Turner's Castle Kangaroo Island - sunset


We watch a ship in Backstairs Passage from the little windows, and once again the island sky puts on a luminous sunset over the golden-dry end of summer hillsides.



I notice again that the place is a testament to creative salvage; buoys, traffic cones, pipes and farm equipment all contribute to the indescribable aesthetic of this place.

No prizes for guessing how George moulded this stylish pillar.

A post, a buoy and a traffic cone.

Tiny bats flap their haphazard flight against the greying sky, which seems a pricelessly apt touch.




The scale of this is astonishing for one man’s hobby. It’s like a whacky, slightly incomplete theme park in the middle of nowhere. All 5 minutes from my front door. Once again I remember how lucky I am to live here.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Alice, just a little family trivia for ya.... George's castle home was once the home of my great grandparents George & Mary Turner, and where my grandmother Eliza and her 15 siblings including her brother Harcourt (the father of today's George) grew up. She went on to marry Benjamin Bell and they built their home across the road and a little further east and named it "Eastwood". (now the home of Michael & Jan Pengilly) My dad and all his brothers and sister (10 in all) schooled at the Wisanger School. "Bell Manor", now the property of Mark & Joanne Griffith, was where my great grand parents Preston & Mary Bell retired to from their farm at Stokes Bay. The Wisanger area holds deep sentiment for me. Then of course the property you now own was once owned by my brother Johnny Bell! Take care, cheers, Trudi.

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  2. What a fantastic blog! Simply reading it made my day much happier! Keep up the good work. JPT

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