Pt Lonsdale/Queenscliff

         

life is long

JANUARY 19TH

What to say about my  long-dead father who died on this date all those years ago? A sudden heart attack at the age of forty five. It was a Friday morning and he had parked his car in the usual carpark and was walking down Collins Street  in Melbourne, on his way to the office  where he worked. He collapsed on the pavement among the rush hour crowds. 

He was not a happy man. Though my story about who he was changes and shifts as the years pass. He was full of contradictions: a stockbroker who thought he was a socialist, a man who valued honesty, but deceived his wife and had extra-marital affairs. An outwardly successful man who felt like a failure to himself. A writer of tortured poetry. An intellectual with a high IQ, who lacked practical  wisdom and ‘emotional intelligence’.

The hundreds of sympathy cards which my mother and I sifted tearfully through on the kitchen table told us he was kind and generous, charming, witty, and  good looking, the life of the party and a lover of life.

I knew him as a moody, unpredictable parent who told me when I was thirteen that if I didn’t tidy up my messy bedroom, no-one would want to marry me. My brother was warned that if his school reports didn’t improve he would end up sweeping the streets. 

‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions’ and ‘Life is not fair’ and ‘ Out, out, brief candle...’

Dad often passed out drunk in front of the tv. at night, but next day he’d be off to work in his suit and tie. He felt trapped in his life of 9 to 5 monday to friday, trapped in the domestic world of family life in the suburbs. Unhappy in his marriage with my eager-to-please mother, who he grumpily complained was ‘all sweetness and light’ . I doubt whether he would have been happier with anyone else.

Over the years I have, at different times, felt sorry for him, angry with him, and judgemental towards him. I’ve thought him cowardly and abusive and  hypocritical: If it was that bad, why didn’t he leave? Why didn’t he pursue his creative dreams? 

Now I’m older than he was when he died, and  I have some understanding of depression, of midlife crisis, and of the compromises we all make to keep our precious families together. I also think of all the help that’s available to my generation, but wasn’t to his - things  like psycho therapy, personal growth, Buddhist teachings, meditation etc. 

My January 19th 2011 was a pleasant school holiday day. I had an early morning swim and a cafe morning coffee with Noosa friends. F and his friend who slept over last night lounged around  at home,  listening to Cat Empire and Flight Of the Conchords, reading Simpsons comics and  playing cards. Being almost-teenagers. Life is a long journey.

weather

sunday

We are at the beach house for a couple of weeks till the end of the school holidays.

I have to talk about the weather because there is nothing else. It has been dark all day. The bruised penumbral gloom of dusk on a winter’s evening. Except this is mid summer. There is so much water falling and blowing and hurling out of the sky its a wonder there is any air left in between the water, for us to breathe. My old fibro house is leaking in half a dozen places where it never leaked before. 

The wind rattles the window panes and there is a constant watery roar and rush - the sea, the rain a great merged turmoil of wetness. Most of the time you can’t even see the ocean, the rain is so thick. The world out there is white and grey and shaking. When you catch a glimpse of the sea, it is black. The rain has not stopped for a moment all day. Inside the house every surface is damp. The carpet feels sticky. The power has been off. It’s on again now, except for one kitchen circuit which keeps blowing the trip switch. 

The kettle and the toaster are plugged in in the bathroom, until the electrician can get here, in about a week’s time.

It was a good sunday morning for lying in bed and reading a book. I am ploughing through Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Not quite sure if I really  like it, thought I’m hooked into it now. And I agree with lots of things he seems to be saying via his characters, re capitalism’s unhealthy obsession with ‘growth’; the environment etc. He nails things, people, & our petty insecurities and strategies etc. He’s awfully clever, but...I dunno, so fast talking, so sure of himself, something in me recoils slightly.

I’m comparing Freedom with the previous rather strange novel I read, in Melbourne “The Last Report On Miracles At Little No Horse’ by Louise Erdrich. Totally different thing. More soul, tenderness, ambiguity, more love in it, and more poetry...

Anyway, by midday we are sick of reading. We have cabin-fever. F & I go for a walk on the beach. We get drenched despite our raincoats. Our wet hair whips our faces. The sea is a wild creature snapping its foaming jaws. After half an hour we dash back to shelter. 

We hear on the radio that rivers are flooding, roads are closed. Our house smells mildewy. I light candles and incense. A few hours’ drive north of here there are real floods, houses and towns under metres of water, real suffering, as opposed to our slight discomfort.

It is scary and sobering to be buffeted around by elemental forces. To be reminded that Mother Nature is a mighty force and that we are very puny. 

Jonathan Franzen reminds us in ‘Freedom’ (it is worth reading) that there is not only climate change to worry about, but also the mind-boggling  problem of over-population. I heard someone the other day say that the Earth is like a big creature trying to shake off parasites, or fleas. That’s us, the fleas. Hmm.

Monday

A whole different feeling now because people have actually died , drowned in a freak floodwater tsunami in Toowoomba. Tragedy, disaster, emergency, and huge floodwaters heading down the Brisbane river towards the city.

In the appliance store where I went to buy a food processor today, people were crowded around the tv showing footage of the floods, the evacuations, the rescues,  the cars and houses swept away, flotsam and jetsam on brown torrents. I stood there glued to the screen for ten minutes. 

The tv aerial at home got blown away by a storm a while ago and I didn’t bother fixing it yet again. I hardly ever watch tv anyway. Don’t listen to the (so-called) News much either - all those infantile politicians  bickering with each other. But when it’s Nature, that’s different, it’s real. I want to know. It’s probably lucky the tv at home doesn’t work, I’d be glued to it. 

Some of the stories brought tears to my eyes - children rescued by strangers. A man who while rescuing someone, saw his own son’s empty car swept past in the torrent. 

Some of the the other people standing there under the fluro lights among the flickering tv screens in the store were moved too,  and we exchanged a few words about how frightening it was, and those poor people.

Even the politicians have stopped their tedious point-scoring and are expressing shock and sympathy. Why can’t we all be more in our hearts everyday, without there having to be disasters?  

The moisture-absorbers you can buy in the supermarket were, I discovered all sold out weeks ago - the ones you put in cupboards so your shoes won’t go mouldy etc. I also tried to get some clove oil  because someone told me it’s good for getting rid of mildew. I gave up after finding it out of stock in three places. It all feels very trifling somehow.

Got completely drenched dashing to the car from the cafe. I met Z there. we had coffees and talked about The Floods. Felix went off  with them for a sleepover. Driving home there was so much water over the road I was a little scared I wouldn’t make it.

Back to the damp, leaking house, and sudden solitude. D is up at the rainforest, where he says ( on the phone) that the sound of the creek is deafening. This morning, F discovered a mushroom ( non-edible) growing in the kitchen!! 

Today’s highlight: standing out on the deck showering in fresh cold  rainwater falling straight from the sky.

And now I can’t post this because the mobile broadband URL thingy isn’t working. Probably has moisture in it. 

Thursday

Whole shelves  at the supermarket are empty - no carrots, no potatoes, no lettuce. Because the wholesale markets in Brisbane are under water. I think, briefly, about places in the world where there are food shortages every day. I wonder if I should stock up, but I don’t. 

Apart from that, life here is pretty normal again. The sun has even shown its face. I did two loads of washing and hung them out. Flung open the windows . Meanwhile, in Brisbane, just an hour and a half down the highway, hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes. Places we know well are now part of the vast brown lake in the aerial photos on the front of the newspaper. The whole of the CBD is shut down. A State Of Emergency has been declared.

Terrible tragedy ( rescue workers are saying some of the bodies will never be found) cheek by jowl with mundane daily life.

Our friends due to visit from Victoria next week have cancelled their trip.  

St Kilda revisited

Impermanence, again. 

Suddenly, back in noisy St Kilda. Back in town for one last night before catching the plane home in the morning. F says, “I could never live in the city”

D, F and I all feel the same. We didn’t want to leave our little mudbrick house among the gum trees thismorning. 

I went for a walk by myself in the long, luminous southern  twilight, down Acland street, along the Esplanade, onto the beach and out onto St Kilda Pier, then back to M’s apartment via the back streets past half a dozen places where people I knew used to live twenty years ago. 

It’s my old stomping ground. Memories ambush me at every turn. The first kiss with N, at the end of the pier. 1981?  His dingy Deco flat up behind the Esplanade Hotel. Rooms full of wire sculptures and old newspapers & views of sunset over the ocean. Downstairs there was a Hungarian hunchback and a wild-eyed Czech astrologer and an ageing burlesque queen.

All vanished now, replaced by shiny architect-designed apartments with security gates and no mystery. Interminable cafes, hubbub. 

The 1940s flat where K lived - you could hear the Big Dipper roller coaster at Luna Park rattling up the tracks to the top of the hill, then plunging down in a rush of clattering wheels and screaming  passengers - all this while you drank tea in her kitchen . 

The Sea Baths, pre-renovation, where you could have a Turkish steam bath then dash out and plunge into the sea. The ancient, unnaturally-tanned old Jewish ladies who use to flick through magazines there,  while lying on dilapidated sun-lounges.

...Etcetera. Too many wearying memories of  times & people long  gone.

Acland Street in ’my day’ was a meeting place - old Polish men in cloth caps chattered in Yiddish outside their shops.  Often you glimpsed a blue concentration camp tatoo. Art students and filmmakers ate at The Red Rock. Now it has become a rowdy strip of bars and sunburnt backpackers and cheap clothing shops. 

Though the  European cake shops are miraculously still there! Earlier, we ducked into “Le Bon”, seeking refuge from the pumping music and jostling summer crowds, and discovered the same family behind the counter, still making the same spinach pies I used to buy  twenty years ago. The son looking middle-aged now. The mother still peroxide blonde. The same buttery smell. 

I must be getting old. I’m getting nostalgic - for green trams and St Kilda’s old arty grunge, and  the days before every surface was covered in advertising . 

And the days when the pier was made of chunky grey timber planks, and there was a cavernous wooden shelter, a waiting room for ferry passengers. All gone now. Another ( less hospitable, nowhere to sit down)  shelter has been and gone since then. I’ve lost track of dates. Mirka Mora’s mosaic  - it was part of the new shelter  - now exposed to the elements, cracked and discoloured. 

Down along the waterfront, a whole new ‘vibrant’  scene. People sitting at new outdoor cafes as if it is the only possible thing to do.

I think of the word ‘dispossessed’. The St Kilda I knew is gone. These new people think it is theirs. Actually, it is theirs now. As much as it was ever ‘mine’, anyway. No doubt previous succesive  generations saw their  versions of the place swept away too. 

Which of course leads me to think about the original, indigenous occupants of the land, and how their timeless ancient world with memories and stories sunk deep into the earth, was obliterated.

Everything changes.

All roads lead to thoughts of  impermanence....

P.s. I also must mention that other parts of Melbourne have changed in good ways - diversity and originality look to be thriving in Fitzroy & High St Northcote. 

taken too soon

January 2nd 2011

Taken too soon

We are staying in the little mud brick guest house behind B & G’s house, where we often find ourselves at this time of year. I always sleep well here in this womb-like room with walls of earth. I dream of living in an earth house, colours of ochre and clay and rust.

Such a contrast to our rain forest and ocean place of damp greens and blues.

Yesterday G took us - D and me -  for a walk.  This property is 300 sprawling acres, mostly bush. Re-growth eucalypts with rough grey trunks grow out of yellow earth scattered with white pebbles and brown fallen leaves. Hardy little wild flowers flash blue purple and pink among the stubble and shale. Prickles and grass seeds stick to your socks. There is nobody around under the vast ringing silence of the sky . We spot the occasional kangaroo grazing in long grass. 

The topsoil here, once metres deep, was washed away by miners in the gold rush of the 1850’s. The land for miles around is pitted and lumpy  with the remains of their diggings. Every bit of dirt here, says, G, has been disturbed, turned over by humans. There are sunken mines everywhere, mounds of dirt and rubble, channels and ruts in the heavy clay soil. 

Nature is doing her best to re-clad the ravaged land, and in the hundred or so years since the end of the gold rush a forest of sorts has grown back.

It is harsh country, a hard dry place under cloudless skies, hot in summer, cold in winter. This year it’s greener than usual - It rained here last year after ten years of drought. Silver grey leaves shimmer in the cool sunlight. Tree roots grow down deep crevices in the quartz and sandstone reefs.

A cluster of our dearest old friends live here, and its where we’d live too if the climate wasn’t so awful.

Strange to think that this place, now home to a handful of reclusive artists and permaculturists, was a tent city swarming with people scrabbling in the mud, labouring and sweating and freezing and burrowing and jostling and dreaming of  gold, toiling in the hope of riches. 

Often, walking in the bush around here you see a pile of stones, the remains of some old structure - a wall, a house, a storeroom, a chimney.

Yesterday on our walk through the bush  with G, I noticed a clump of stones by the track. It was half covered with weeds and sticks.  I verbalised some vague speculation about long ago times and people who lived here, then D said ‘I think it’s a grave’ 

Yes, a protruding headstone, and a low rectangular wall of rocks around it. Perhaps the grave of a child.  

I squatted by the roughly hewn piece of  local sandstone and cleared away the debris of twigs and leaves. ‘MARY’ had been carved into it. We used  sticks to dig away more dirt, and found the words ‘TAKEN TOO SOON’,  chipped out in neat , slightly irregular letters.

Who was Mary? Probably not from the gold rush era, but from a little later when pioneering settlers ran sheep here.  Back at the house drinking tea round the table we make up stories about hard lives, children dying of typhoid, diphtheria.

Five year old H hears us saying about Mary’s grave that it probably was sad, and H wants to know why and we say well actually all the people who were sad about Mary dying back then would be dead by now so it’s not really sad any more. Or maybe it is? H keeps saying ‘But we aren’t dead’

H & her mum walk up to the grave with us and place a bunch of wildflowers on it. H in her little pink hat, sunlight catching her hair. Was Mary her age when she died? Was it her heartbroken father who chiselled  the rustic gravestone?

We are all somehow touched by the discovery of the grave. Perhaps because it is a reminder of the fleetingness of our own time upon this earth. 

everything's relative/unexpected art

December 21st Melbourne - Summer Solstice

These bleak grey Melbourne days remind me of why I left here sixteen years ago. Cold and mean under a leaden sky when it’s supposed to be mid summer and you’ve been longing for sunshine all dark winter long.

Our friends here apologise for the weather (as if it’s their fault) and say it has been warm and will be again soon.

And we say “But we like it!”

Yes, coming from hot and humid Northern NSW, we now welcome this exact same weather which used to depress us. It’s refreshing. It’s cosy and nice to not be sweating. 

We walked from Fitzroy down to the NGV ( National Gallery of Victoria) but discovered it was closed on mondays,which was disappointing. Then we found an unexpected art gallery in a nearby alley way.

frolic

At the end-of-primary-school celebration F’s teacher spoke about each child in turn, then handed them a farewell gift and shook hands with them or hugged them. She acknowledged individual children not only for excelling at music, sport, or maths, but also for their personal qualities such as inclusivity, sensitivity, a strong sense of self, quirky sense of humour, courage, generosity.

In summing up F she said he was “ a lovely young man”. It’s funny but now I can hardly recall what else she said - creative, friendly etc. What sticks in my mind is “young man”.

Looking at all the children that night - it was a big performance/party - I saw how they were on the threshold between childhood and adulthood. They will be kids for quite a while of course - yet in the last year most of them have changed and you get a glimpse of the sort of grown-ups they will become.

After every one had sung and danced and played music (F played ‘The Baby Elephant Walk’ on his clarinet)  and eaten and said kind words about eachother, we went home with full hearts. F said in the car on the way home “Thanks for sending me to such a great school”  This from he who has in recent months been protesting about going to school at all.

I woke up the next morning from a dream: I lost F in a big amusment park  like Disneyland where we went in Paris in July. I sort of wandered off and when I came back there was a huge crowd and I couldn’t find him.  I woke up in tears.

I realised that in the dream he was a small child, maybe 4 or 5. He was wearing a burnt orange polar fleece top that he loved when he was small, a hand-me-down from Ollie. 

I thought about how we all carry around inside of ourselves the little children who we once were, and how it is important not to abandon them. And I also reflected that that my little son IS indeed gone, has now grown into the “young man”.

I got out of bed. It was the final this-is-it, very last day of school and F’s teacher had very sensibly decided to spend the entire day at the local swimming pool. I got ringed-in rather reluctantly to be one of the parent helpers. I had a million things to do at home - like laundry and washing up and packing to go away. But once I got there I remembered how pleasant it is to sit around under the shady palm trees on the grass, or at a picnic table while the kids frolic happily in the pool. It was miraculously blue and sunny after all the rain.

A couple of other parents were there to help and a couple of others dropped by and we all sat on a blanket on the ground and chatted and watched the kids having a fabulous time on the ‘Inflatable’.  

One of the parents brought her two small children aged three and five. I played with them - chasie, tiggie, horsie, hidey, run-around-the-palmtree-giggling-and -squealing until you’re out of breath. It was a moment of innocent delight. I’d forgotten about that simple fun. Forgotten about that part of me that wants nothing more than to run around trees giggling with children. It was a good day.