Artists, My Story

Taking a shine to silver

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“You could be my silver spring
Blue green colours flashin’
I would be your only dream
Your shining autumn, ocean crashing…”

Apart from these lyrics by singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks in her song Silver Spring, silver didn’t really factor in my life until the weekend I undertook a two-day ring-making workshop with my parter in February 2007.

Under the guidance and encouragement of Sondi at her bushland studio in the Blue Mountains, Richard and I learned to cut, forge and connect this precious metal into lasting keepsakes.

The sterling-silver ring I made for him remains the only piece of jewellery I’m ever likely to create, whereas Sondi saw an innate skill in Richard and invited him back to learn more technique. This began his transition from chef to artisan.

Years later, when we started trading at artisanal markets and events, I picked up some of the language of silver jewellery in order to assist buyers. I came to understand the investment value of sterling silver, its enduring attraction as a precious metal, and the ancient art of transforming it into pieces that last a lifetime.

Now, ahead of Silver Spring, an entire season of silver jewellery workshops at The Makers Shed (the open studio Richard and I run at Deepwater in northern inland NSW), I’m revisiting what I’ve learned about this beautiful material.

A sterling job

Unless they’re transformed into an alloy, precious metals tend to be fairly soft and malleable, unsuitable for everyday use. In the case of silver, when it’s refined into an alloy of 92.5 percent silver and 7.5 percent other metals (usually copper), it becomes sterling silver, one of the world’s most durable combinations, stamped with a 925 to denote its chemical makeup. The price for this strength is tarnishing, so one of the handiest extras to buy from your jeweller is a silver polishing cloth!

You get what you pay for

There are plenty of jewellery products on the market professing to be silver, particularly online. “Designed in Australia, made by hand in (insert country of your choice)” is a very common descriptor of silver jewellery that appears to be more affordable. As always: buyer beware. What you think you’re purchasing may not be what it claims, even if it’s stamped 925. In Australia, it’s illegal to use any precious metal stamp that does not match the chemical combination of the alloy. This is as good a reason as any to invest in local jewellery offered by a reputable artisan or jewellery business. You’ll need to pay more, but let’s look at why.

Silver stocks

Unless you’re trading in silver, you might be unaware that its a commodity listed on global stock markets. Not being an investor, I never really paid attention to the nightly market report, but across the decade I’ve co-run a silver jewellery business I’ve witnessed the dramatic rise of silver prices. Customer expectation for competitive retail prices for Richard’s work exists in the same economy as the ever-rising cost for his raw materials. It’s a testament to his love of what he does that his prices have not inflated at anywhere near the same rate as silver costs. That includes the sterling-silver he includes in the cost of his regular workshops.

Ethical source

Another reason for higher costs for silver jewellery created by Richard Moon is that he purchases raw sterling-silver materials from Palloys, a company that prides itself on the highest ethical and environmental standards in the production of a range of precious metal alloys. Their products are mined in Australia and refined in Sydney (where workplace governance ensures proper payment to workers in the supply chain), and a large component of their range is derived from carefully recycled silver. According to Chris Botha, operations manager at Palloys, the company is, “Australia’s only jewellery manufacturer that can trace its precious metal supply directly to its primary source.” Its reputation rests on a clientele that includes royal families, religious and sporting organisations, international banks and Australian artisan jewellers.

Pieces of the Moon

Those who’ve purchased a Richard Moon original, or been gifted one, will know that his maker’s mark very much represents his name. Every one of his pieces is stamped with a crescent moon symbol and, if it’s been created in sterling-silver, the 925 stamp will be somewhere very close by.

Silver Spring

So if you’ve taken a shine to silver, Richard is offering an opportunity under the banner Silver Spring for anyone wanting to learn a bit of silver-jewellery technique. The more workshops you book, the less you’ll pay. Book one place, or book several; bring a friend or come solo, you’re welcome to celebrate silver this spring!

Silver Spring with Richard Moon Wearable Silver & Silverware at The Makers Shed, Deepwater. Book now.

Books, Rebels

Capturing the Moon on a Spoon

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IT IS A PRIVILEGE to witness someone transform their life. When he’s your spouse and you watch him take on his life’s work as a result of the change, it’s awe-inspiring.

When I first met Richard Moon in the very late 1990s, he was flipping burgers at a Katoomba fundraising event. The chef and co-manager of a popular local eatery at the time, we moved in different circles.

By the time our relationship started a few years later, Richard had become one of a community of hospitality workers who powered the renowned cuisine of the Blue Mountains during the boom of tourism that revived the region in the 1990s and 2000s.

More comfortable with his job title being ‘cook’, never ‘chef’, he was working at a Thai restaurant on Leura Mall. Within months, he and his collaborator had started a new business in the same building. 

BOLD BRAND The Red Door Café, Leura.

A hallmark of our 20-year marriage has been working together, a matter of doing what’s needed at the time. So I joined the crew who helped renovate, and put my design skills into creating the business’s branding, before The Red Door Café opened its fire-engine scarlet entranceway in 2006.

Working seven days a week while renovating our first home and garden in north Leura took a swift toll on Richard. It was therefore an easy decision for him to apply for a position as sous chef-trainer at the Blue Mountains International Hotel Management School in 2007. After years in commercial kitchens, the thought of stepping into a vocational training environment threw him a little, but Richard is a natural teacher (from a family of educators), and the new role gave him the opportunity to fall in love with food all over again through sharing his skills.

It was during this period that Richard and I began another business collaboration, when I got my first editing job for Blue Mountains Life, the region’s lifestyle magazine. We decided to visit food producers, from beef, oyster and truffle farmers to chocolatiers and orchardists, in order to impart the message of going to source wherever possible.

For a pair of farmer’s sons, this was a taste of our origins.

I’ll never forget the love and admiration shown to Richard from students on his final day at the hotel school. He’d never been an aloof teacher in an office somewhere, he’d worked in the trenches alongside these young people from across the world, and they were thankful for the camaraderie and the inspiration. Richard is still in touch with many of them.

In 2012, not long after moving to Queensland, Richard and I were dining at a winery at Mount Cotton when I asked what he really wanted to do if it wasn’t cooking. He’d struggled to get a chef’s position in his home state, and his courageous answer was that he was keen to try jewellery making as a career. 

SILVER STYLE Richard Moon at his workbench.

Not working in a high-street eatery had given him a few years of headspace to pick up a bit of silver-working technique at Sondi’s Studio in Wentworth Falls. I’d seen from his experimentation that he had a natural ability.

He set up a small jewellery workshop in our outer Brisbane home and has rarely looked back, until the process of putting this book together.

Doing so, we were amazed at the arc of our collaborative  creative life, the ingredients and method that went into it.

It delights me that Richard often uses chef’s tools for silver-working: his oyster shucker is still employed at his workbench, and he relies on a brûlée torch for soldering during his regular mobile jewellery workshops.

His jam-making spoon has quite a history. At a business contents sale in the early 2000s, when Bodds Café Katoomba was closing, I snapped up a well-loved wooden spoon which the vendor told me had been used by the former chef/owner. As we moved into our first home, we realised Richard had inherited that very spoon in 1996 – ends burnt, bowl well-worn, and stained orange from years of being used with spices – when he and his former Bodds colleagues took over the premises of an Indian restaurant. This beloved implement has been in our lives for three decades and is still used for jam making, the perfect symbol for this book.

BUY NOW

Moon on a Spoon is part-memoir, part-cookbook, a means of explaining how Richard adapted to changes in cooking styles and shifts in the hospitality industry. It’s also an account of how to alter the trajectory of a life by taking new pathways and giving dreams cooking time.

An extract from Moon on a Spoon: Recipes from a creative life, out now from High Country Books.

Books, Reviews, Screen, Writers

Postcards From Armchair Travellers

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LITERARY ADAPTATIONS FEATURING plenty of yearning, unresolved romance and resilient creatives rising above the odds rank amongst my favourite movies. No surprise that they’re usually about writers and our work, one of the most elusive practices to effectively commit to the screen.

The tropes of cinema’s wordsmiths are well-used: chewing on the ends of pencils while gazing at the ceiling, screwing up pages and tossing them into a bin (usually a wire basket surrounded by plenty of scrunched paper), long walks in wild places, angst.

Overused, perhaps, but all based on truths that wordsmiths recognise.

Common threads and themes run through these films: America and Europe, past and present, queer and straight, Hopkins and Streep, readers and writers, love and loss, success and failure.

The use of unusual type-key symbols in the titles of these works (digits, ampersands, question marks, etc.) is also resonant of the old typesetting language that literature lovers understand.

Welcome to my list of guilty screen pleasures…

84, Charing Cross Road

Adapted from Helene Hanff’s 1970 epistolary memoir, this tale by the mother of all armchair travellers rode into the literary scene on a post-WWII nostalgia wave. Headed up by Anne Bancroft as struggling New York writer Hanff and Anthony Hopkins as reserved London bookshop manager Frank Doel, there is perhaps no better example of a genteel story that is “just” a collection of real-life letters, unfolding over decades via simple acts of human kindness. Hanff and Doel are literature-loving denizens separated by the Atlantic, helping each other through austere years with the soul food of literature and ration-busting hampers. Along the way they find shared humanity and unrequited love. The divine art of humane correspondence.

Julie & Julia

A food writer (Julia Child) and a food blogger (Julie Powell) embody the creation and purpose of Child’s 1961 culinary classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Meanwhile, their separate relationships are tested by the impacts of WWII and 9/11 on Paris and New York. In the hands of Meryl Streep, this is a raucous Julia Child counterpointed by the more subdued Powell (Amy Adams) as she cooks her way through the weighty tome decades after all the obstacles of its publication. Like Hanff’s story, food plays a pivotal role, but as a conduit for passion and a metaphor for commitment. Through cooking, Child and Powell find purpose in this call-and-echo tale on satiation, nurture and never giving up. The life-enlarging art of describing food with words.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

When her career as a biographer stalls in 1980s New York, writer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) decides it’s easier to pay her bills from the takings of forging type-written letters by the city’s artistic icons, from Dorothy Parker to Fanny Brice. All seems harmless until the FBI picks up the trail, and Britain gets roped in with Israel’s partner-in-crime Jack (Richard E. Grant, although the real-life Jack was American). Apart from being a glimpse of how writers survive New York (not too far removed from Hanff’s experience), the beauty of this plot, taken from Israel’s 2008 confessional memoir, is that of course we forgive a struggling writer forced to pretend to be someone else in order to stay afloat in the book trade. The art of making believe.

{The} Hours

Michael Cunningham’s most beguiling premise springs off the page of his 1998 novel onto the screen in the hands of Nicole Kidman (as Virginia Woolf) pushing through demons to write her 1923 novel Mrs Dalloway; a suburban housewife (Julianne Moore) in 1949 Los Angeles, reading vicariously between the lines of Woolf’s classic; and a successful editor (Meryl Streep) in 1999 New York, embodying Mrs Dalloway’s brittle independence while throwing a party for a doomed poet. Taking viewers well beyond Hanff’s armchair, this time-travelling rumination on memory and regret weighs up the costs of liberating oneself from expectation instead of staying put. The art of making meaning.

Shadowlands

We fully cross the Atlantic in this counterpoint to the unrequited love of Charing Cross Road, to explore what happens when writerly penpals – quiet Brit C.S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) and boisterous Yank Joy Davidman (Debra Winger) – become the unlikeliest of star-crossed lovers. Their initial meeting of minds leads to a marriage of convenience, but when disaster strikes, it blossoms into a passionate betrothal. Several source materials went into this epic romance, none so visceral as Lewis’s own reflection on the experience in his 1961 book A Grief Observed. This screenplay wraps love, loss and literature into an icicle of fire shot straight from Narnia into your heart. The art of enduring love despite the odds.

Please tell me in the comments the examples I’ve overlooked…