AUSSIEMANDIUS - "HOLDING THE LION"
(BEST SEEN ROAMING AT LARGE...)
Caged before the Fall.
The stone lion roared and there was no one to hear it.
All gone to their ancestors now.
After the Fall.
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One of the Rui Shi (“auspicious lions”) outside the Melbourne Chinese Museum in Cohen Place, off Little Bourke Street, during renovations in July, 2008. This is the male of the pair, with his right paw clutching the flower of life, an item of complex mythical symbolism, but of course to me, being a cheerful atheist, amounts to no more than a particularly ornate squeaky cat toy. The Asian lion was not native to China, and it is said that Chinese sculptors, who had not seen specimens from India, based their characterisations of the beasts upon dogs.
How singular. A Chinese interpretation of an Indian animal sitting in far Australia! What a diaspora of mythology!
My father was born a few hundred metres from this sculpture, in the aptly named Celestial Avenue....
The ‘caged lion’ aspect of the chain link fence immediately drew my eye to the normally unfettered sculpture and the thought that the noble creature would stay imprisoned forever after an Aussiemandius holocaust saddened me.... until I realised that the fence would rust away long before the sculpture eroded to dust and that the lion would be free again some day.
AUSSIEMANDIUS - "HOLDING THE LION"
(BEST SEEN ROAMING AT LARGE...)
Caged before the Fall.
The stone lion roared and there was no one to hear it.
All gone to their ancestors now.
After the Fall.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the Rui Shi (“auspicious lions”) outside the Melbourne Chinese Museum in Cohen Place, off Little Bourke Street, during renovations in July, 2008. This is the male of the pair, with his right paw clutching the flower of life, an item of complex mythical symbolism, but of course to me, being a cheerful atheist, amounts to no more than a particularly ornate squeaky cat toy. The Asian lion was not native to China, and it is said that Chinese sculptors, who had not seen specimens from India, based their characterisations of the beasts upon dogs.
How singular. A Chinese interpretation of an Indian animal sitting in far Australia! What a diaspora of mythology!
My father was born a few hundred metres from this sculpture, in the aptly named Celestial Avenue....
The ‘caged lion’ aspect of the chain link fence immediately drew my eye to the normally unfettered sculpture and the thought that the noble creature would stay imprisoned forever after an Aussiemandius holocaust saddened me.... until I realised that the fence would rust away long before the sculpture eroded to dust and that the lion would be free again some day.