the lay of the land

After dropping F at yet another 13th birthday party on a Saturday afternoon I went exploring. Not far from home, but driving down a road I haven’t been on before. I wanted to get to the other side of the river mouth. The wild-looking side. We’ve often  looked across from Bruns and wondered how to reach the foreign land of over there

I tried once before, by plunging down a dirt track through the forest. The track ended abruptly at a sort of overgrown carpark, with scruffy bush, a derelict building, a lot of  rusting machinery and lobster pots and car tyres; and murky mangrove-y water with rows of  oyster farming. 

Back home, D and I looked at a map and figured out that where the road ended was at one of the creeks  that feed into the river. You have to go right around, over the bridge... 

This time I got there. To the end of another rutted puddled dirt road, where I found the walking track, which led through the forest  and out to the river mouth. It wasn’t far. I walked along the breakwater  and saw a rainbow, and some silent, serious fishermen and imagined for a moment that  I was in Scotland. Or somewhere. I looked across to the familiar ( and somehow more cheerful) side. Then walked as far as I could - only a few hundred metres - along the little beach.  There were a few people pottering in boats around the mangroves, or sitting on the damp low-tide sand of the beach.   

 This fisherman’s vehicle in the car park at the end of the road reminded me it’s not all peace love and sustainability around here.

liquidambers

A mad rush to get out of the house this morning, for choir at school at 8 a.m.  F  eating his cereal in the car, and yelling at D to slow down so as not to spill the milk We picked up  K & T on the way, and all felt  for a moment like we could be heading off on a road trip, into the fog and rain, like we did in this faithful 4WD a few years back.

Then we  arrived at school early and sat  on the stairs outside the hall, chatting. D and F kicked a soccer ball on the grass. Finally we made  a call and found out  choir wasn’t on. But it didn’t matter. It was a little holiday, being at the almost deserted school, sitting around. On the way back home I asked D to stop the car so I could photograph this unexpected  glimpse of  European autumn in the subtropics.

all you need is love

My parents gave me this poster for Christmas in 1967. God, it was the most fantastic thing. It was fab! It was groovy! My  father  managed to knock together  a frame for it, and Flower Power went up on the wall over my bed. 

I was twelve, and  the pink and mauve floral wallpaper chosen by my mother a few years earlier had been all but obliterated with pin-ups of The Beatles and The Stones, and Go-Set posters of  local boy pop stars with neat fringes across their eyebrows, and names like Normie and Ronnie and Johnny.  

Crimson And Clover/it’s All so Beautiful/Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds/Good Vibrations/The Rain, the Park... Are you going to San Francisco...Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair....

Sadly, unfairly I wasn’t going to SanFrancisco, or Woodstock, or any of those mythical yearned-for places. I was going down to Ringwood station to catch the train to boring old school. I was going to Eastland shopping centre with Mum. I was stuck in the suburbs, doing my homework on Sunday afternoon while Dad mowed the lawn. Going over to my girlfriends’ place to giggle and write fan letters and read Dolly magazines.

My friends and I heard about the Summer Of Love. A year or so later, in 1968 or 1969, my father went to San Francisco for a ‘business trip’ How unjust! San Francisco - wasted on my square of a  father. He asked what I’d like him to bring back. I asked for some hippy beads from Haight Ashbury. 

Dad came back from the States, bead-less, and announced with some satisfaction that the whole ‘Haight Ashbury thing was all completely washed up and passe.

But something extraordinary really was happening in America, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just that I was a teenager at the time. There really was a celebratory throwing off of the shackles of repressive middle class values.  Ripples of  revolution reached us through the music . Righteous rage and rebellion, flowers and colours and sex and drugs and flowing hair and Dancin’ In The Street. And also in amongst it, the deep longing for peace and love and an end to racial discrimination and  war...Love, Love, Love, said the young ones.

Make Love Not War:  My parents said Darling, you shouldn’t wear that badge, it could make boys think you were,  you know....

Last night I watched a DVD doco about The Doors, which is what has prompted all this reminiscence. 

Light My Fire, People Are Strange, Hello I love you, won’t you tell me your name..

That broody spooky  sexy druggy excitement - how irresistible it all was to me and my friends back then. Though our  rock heroes - Jimi, Janis and Jim were all dead before  we finished school.

Forty years on, I’m snuggled on the sofa in my pyjamas on Saturday night. Nostalgic about my distant youth.  My own son is out,  having a sleep over at his friend’s place after soccer. No doubt they’re on Youtube, or iTunes,  getting their generation’s version ... 

Seems Jim Morrison’s parents had no understanding of their precocious brat  of a son. His father was a naval officer. He was serving in  Vietnam while his drug-addled offspring gyrated in front of thousands of hysterical girls, while ranting about love and peace and threatening to undo his pants. It looked like he would have done it too, if police and the other band members hadn’t hauled him off stage in the nick of time. 

Jim said that America was “ in love with violence”.  Watching those images from the 1960's, you could only agree with him. The assassination of JFK, then the assassination of Martin Luther King. The shocking killing by state police  of four protesting  students on campus at Kent State University. The awful blow of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. And all of this against the background of  race riots in the U.S, and America’s war in  Vietnam. 

the fragile web

For the last 24 hours I’ve been unable to upload to Blogger. I’m writing this in faith that the problem of the endless spinning circle will be soon fixed by Google - Who or whatever ‘Google’ really is. I picture an anonymous team of bespectacled genius nerds who never see daylight, floating in a cyberspaceship, out there somewhere in Doctor Who-land.

On the ‘help’ page, I discover one anguished blogger after another. Suffering ‘massive inconvenience’, unable to meet deadlines, ‘been trying to upload for eight hours’ ‘It’s KILLING me’ etc...

Yesterday arvo I went into town as usual to meet the school bus. I went 20 minutes early, so I could do a bit of shopping for dinner and mail  some letters. The Post Office door was locked and it was dark inside. 

Someone said there’s a blackout. I strolled down to the IGA supermarket. Same thing, doors closed. And a group of people hovering outside, waiting for power to return, for things to return to ‘normal’

Over the road, in the gloom of the un-lit health food store they were still struggling along with old-fashioned cash and calculators. 

Made me think about all the places in recent months where natural disasters have knocked out power supplies, and plenty of things way worse.

Made me think about how frighteningly dependant we’ve all become on electricity, on internet access, on plastic cards. How fast it’s all happened. When did cash registers stop being big solid machines, manual machines - and become, like just about everything else in the world ( from cameras to cars) - computers? And  completely useless without electricity, even though most of what we do to generate electricity is driving the planet to ruin etc

I  sometimes imagine the whole miraculous magical fragile invisible web could just disintegrate, like a spiders web in a hail storm. In fact I expect it to, sooner or later...

Fortunately - or perhaps unfortunately - the power came back on  before this train of thought was able  to go too far. The supermarket doors re-opened, We surged inside, I got my free range chicken, and made it to the school bus stop only a few minutes late. 

mothers day too

Mother’s day morning was sweet. F said ‘Don’t look Mum’, so I stayed in the office reading in my pyjamas until summoned. He and D had set out breakfast on the verandah - buckwheat pancakes, stewed apples, maple syrup, cream etc. A special drawing from F. and a little gift of handmade soap from D. 

When I was a kid we never celebrated Mothers Day. My father decreed that it was all a meaningless commercial beat-up, to be ignored by intelligent people like us. 

When actually, it is nice to be honoured as a mother, and to honour our own mothers. I feel sad that we didn’t do anything for my mum back then. Was there breakfast in bed? I don’t think so. But memory is an unreliable thing.

Yesterday was an almost computer-free day. A few pleasantly mindless chores - weed vegie garden etc. I even enjoyed scrubbing the bird pooh off the verandah. It smelt of camphor from the seeds they eat ( and spread around the countryside) Plenty of lazy time flicking through the Weekend Magazine while sipping green tea.  Plunking on the ukulele. I’ve almost mastered going from B flat to F 7.

Late arvo, D said Lets watch sunset at the beach, so we dashed down to Brunswick and walked along the breakwater and took photos of eachother in the luminous autumn light as the sun set. There were quite a few other families there, also taking photos of eachother. 

(posted on tuesday on account of above mentioned technical prob)

mothers' day

Mothers' Day Proclamation

Julia Ward Howe, Boston, 1870

Mother's Day was originally started after the Civil War, as a protest to the carnage of that war, by women who had lost their sons. Here is the original Mother's Day Proclamation from 1870,

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts,

whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by

irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking

with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be

taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach

them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another

country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From

the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.

It says "Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance

of justice."

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons

of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a

great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women,

to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the

means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each

bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,

but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that 

a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be

appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and 

at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the

alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of 

international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Julia Ward Howe

Boston 

autumn homesickness

Autumn is here. As crisp as a new season apple. Summer’s endless sweaty humidity has evapourated into bright skies. “What a cracker of a day!” says D, stepping out beneath the pink cascade of the  flowering vine over the front door. Laundry flutters and dries on the line. My body slips cosily into clothes, into jumpers and socks.

The other day I walked up the hill with my dear friend J, who was visiting from the Gold Coast. She was waxing lyrical about the rural feeling here and the  lovely lonely late afternoon autumn light filtering through the eucalypts. Said it reminded her of her childhood in South Africa. She said that remembered landscape was always somehow ‘home’ for her, even though she would never live there again. 

I told her how I’d missed the European Autumn of Melbourne when I first moved up here to the subtropics seventeen years ago. I almost burst into tears once,  when I saw a solitary Liquidamber blazing crimson against the rainforest green near Maleny.

J said she experienced the same thing in reverse when first settling in Australia, in  Melbourne. Scuffling crispy brown leaves on footpaths, then the long bleak season of naked branches, elms and plane trees, grey skies, it all made her feel homesick.