Moona Perrotin - Aspiring writer
Moona was born in Bremen Germany 1 March 1964 and christened Annelen Tappe. Her father Erwin Wolfgang Tappe was a loving creative man who worked as an artist and set-designer exploring the many new media that came onto the market in the second half of the 20th century. Her mother Traudlind Tappe nee Wittschen was a teacher and trained Lutheran educatork.She excelled at anything she put her hands to, crafts, gardening, sewing, cooking and baking.
Moona finished high school as dux of the year in 1983 at the Schulzentrum im Holter Feld, in Bremen, majoring in Chemistry and English. She then embarked on an earlier desire to travel and see the world. Firstly, she went to France to enhance her career as an art conservator. There she gained an apprenticeship with Monsieur Marechal in Paris and rented a top floor room in Montparnasse. Moona also studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre, for 18 months and painted 3 copies of paintings in the Louvre. She undertook life drawing at the Ecole du Montparnasse and the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
Moona's French had improved when her Australian boy friend arrived, (they met in London two years earlier). He brought a breath of fresh air and after his departure Moona aimed to further credentials in her vocation in art by moving back to Germany to study at the Duesseldorf Conservation Centre for a year. This enabled her to apply and be accepted at the Art Conservation Institute in Brussels for her final year of training.
During the summer break in 1986, she flew to Australia for the first time, armed with contacts in the conservation scene and a ticket for an international conservation conference in Sydney. Meeting her boyfriend in Melbourne they travelled the Great Ocean Road together to Adelaide, - a stunning introduction to a great continent. Her boyfriend was partner in a strawberry farm in the Adelaide Hills.
In Adelaide she introduced herself to the conservator in charge at Art Lab and was offered the opportunity to restore the damaged self-portrait of Col Light, recently purchased by the curator of the Art Gallery of South Australia for the jubilee celebrations. Moona's boyfriend accompanied her to Brussels for her final year of study in art conservation. On completion she was offered a job as paintings conservator at Art Lab in Adelaide.
Her work at Art Lab was what held her together after her marriage breakup. There she made new friends, created more art, and found a new lover. She was savouring life with reckless abandon, until one night of the full moon, the eclipse of the moon, on the birthday of her first love, she had an accident that almost killed her.
The return journey was extremely painful but powered by the light she had experienced and of which she wanted to tell her lovers. For three year she tried in vain to find back into her old persona. Finally she changed her name, her needs, her desire to control and followed the flow.
Moon tides took her to hear the Dalai Lama speak in Adelaide, and to form a no-alcohol-no-TV- Buddhist housing cooperative with a white Aboriginal. They bought a house in a remote country town and began planting trees, she painted mythical artworks tuning deeply into the stories of the land. The housing cooperative did not develop and after a year he moved back to Perth.
She stayed and painted and started writing her story (herstory). Her lovers came to visit one by one. The first with his nine year old daughter, the second with a BMW sports car. Her brother also visited, she stayed alone for a long time, painting, writing, planting, meditating.
The series of mythical artworks won her prizes. She produced them as a set of art cards and showed them as a mini exhibition at fairs and markets. That way she met Dominique who wore a Buddhist T- shirt and spoke with a French accent. They did not meet again until three years later, the year 2000, after she had finally opened up to computers and the internet. Dominique was a practising Buddhist and invited her to a 3 day Tantric retreat during which Moona took refuge and learned a visualisation practice which transformed her mind, brought about greater clarity of thought, reactivated her memory and many other facets of her mind that had been lost in the accident.
They worked together for awhile and Moona took up study of web design. They travelled back to Europe to meet their elderly parents. Dominique's mother died soon afterwards, and Moona's father passed away 6 months later. But the parents had been happy to see their grown-up children once more and to celebrate a Franco-German friendship which had developed into a marriage. The celebrant was the young Lutheran pastor of the country town where Moona had lived her secluded life. His son and close friends and many of her friends and members of the community were there to celebrate the union.
They continued to study web design and networking/programming, a great new challenge. But Dominique came home with a urinary blockage one day and had to have a prostate operation. He recovered while watching the soccer world cup and the tour de France. They decided to go to spend a year with Moona's mother in Germany, as they had planned to do during their first visit.
On the way there they stayed with friends in Vietnam and visited Zen monasteries. On the way back they considered retreating into the newly built Thien monastery in the north. But Dominique wanted to live life, not retreat!
So they returned to a scorching summer in South Australia during which Dominique had a visions for the lusher environments in Cairns, Far North Queensland. He applied for a job and got it. Within two weeks Dominique and Moona had left everything behind and started again with two suitcases only and each other.
Moona won an ABC Short Story competition in 1996 and studied professional writing by correspondence from Robertstown. She has also performed some of her poetry at functions and festivals. Moona intends writing her memoirs and to continue producing poetry. She has recently joined Toastmasters Kickstart in Cairns and intends using this skill to help her in promoting herself and her writing. |
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