Hope

Last night I dreamt a lot. I dreamt I was lying in a field staring at the sky and telling a companion how ridiculously wonderful my life is.

It's true.

I have been through many cycles in my life. Cycles from happiness to sadness, from stupidity and desperation through to determination and downright pot luck. I guess life is just like that. If I go back and read what I have written over the years, to me it is like a diary of my moods. A diary of sadness, because it seems the only time I can actually write properly is when I am sad.

Tomorrow I am going to Stradbroke Island for a whole glorious week. I am not taking my laptop. I am taking my journal, pens, pencils, pastels and a stack of books. I hope I can break my invisible, self diagnosed writer's block of happiness and bring something worthwhile back to post for you. Hope is a lovely word.

Happy New Years Resolution!

That's it! My new year's resolution is to be happy! I wish this for anyone who still reads this blog too. Please, be happy and have a fantastic 2008! I have figured out a few things that I need to do to achieve this so I guess these are my new years resolutions: 1. Sit at the computer less. (You may have noticed that I have been doing this already. I now have a handwritten journal that S got me for Christmas. In there I am writing things occasionally and if I ever write anything even marginally reasonable I shall attempt to post it online. I also can draw in my journal which is rather difficult to do on a blog so I am really enjoying that. Actually, so far it is mainly just drawings and very little writing, but I love to draw and it makes me happy, so there you go. One resolution is already working) 2. Get a job. (I have finally come to accept that I am not motivated enough to make a good living running my own business and working by myself all the time. This failure has infact been one of the main reasons I have been feeling so discontent in recent times. Working alone is also dreadfully lonely and although I have my doubts as to whether I am even capable of getting a real job, I really have to give it a go. Please wish me luck and courage. I really need some courage.) 3. Stop giving in to everyone else's demands. (I have started learning to stand up for myself. In the past I have always been such a pacifist that I tend to just do whatever people ask of me even when I don't agree with it, simply to avoid any form of confrontation. I have come to realise that I cannot do that anymore. It simply isn't healthy and it costs too much as well, sometimes in both time and money.) 4. Walk on the beach more, eat smaller meals at night and drink less. (i.e: get fit) 5. Be a better friend. (I am not so good at being a friend. I don't have many, only a few who are extremely important. I don't really think people want to hear from me anyway so I tend to keep to myself. I'd like to have more confidence.) 6. Extend my vege garden. (Ok, that's enough sitting at the keyboard. I am off to dig in the garden....) PS. It would have been M's 48th birthday today, instead, it is about 1 month short of the 5th anniverary of his suicide. I don't dwell on thoughts of him as much anymore but he still lives on in my head and in this blog, for which after all, he was the inspiration.

Why it's great to see him go....

I grew up in rural Australia, in conservative country. A few months before I met the waiter, aged 18, I voted for Malcolm Fraser and I still, looking at the mettle of the man now, do not particularly regret that. It was John Howard's first rise to prominence, when I shared a house with students of politics in Melbourne in 1987 that forever opened my eyes to the shortsightedness that became the calling card of the recent Liberal party in Australia. Perhaps I am just a socialist to the core, I make no apologies, I believe that one is simply born that way, but I am not interested in what John Howard's government did for the individual (or claimed to have done), I am interested in what it means to be an Australian in a country run under his regime. While living in the UK in 1998-1999 and discussing the direction in which Australia headed I found myself deeply ashamed. That was the time of Pauline Hanson and it was clear that Howard was taking advantage of and encouraging her racism to advance his own political mandate.

I'm back!

It might sound a little corny to say that I just had the best holiday of my life but there you have it.

Tonight my skin is browner than it as been for over 19 years (since Mexico 1987/88) I haven't yet washed the southern salt from my hair as keeping it there might just somehow make the holiday last that moment longer. I won't lie that I am not tempted to bore you with a blow by blow account of every perfect moment in the last week but instead I will just give you these disjointed sentences.

Friends are wonderful. Cute old ramsackle hotels are the right place to stay between friends houses. The beaches in Northern NSW are the absolute best in the world. I want to move down there. I like fishing and I adore headlands. While I was baking in the sun and swimming in the ocean SS was winning the most improved skier award at his school snowy mountains trip and finally finding a sport he loves. I can never spend enough time with S.

Thats's about it...for the moment.

The Scalpel

It's been a hectic week around here. On Thursday WD had surgery on her nose. That involved a general anaesthetic and more than 2.5 hours in the theatre. Sitting outside in the waiting area I kept going over in my mind what I might have been able to do to stop her going ahead with this operation. It wasn't essential surgery although it will probably help with her snoring problem, the real reason she wanted this done was for cosmetic reasons. I have never really agreed with the concept of plastic surgery. The idea of having oneself cut open in the name of beauty, basically it completely terrifies me and as I sat there in the knowledge that some doctor was cutting into my beautiful daughter I felt nausea, fear, horror and most of all, powerlessness. I started thinking about her as a baby and the distinctive shape of her nostrils in a photo I have of her when she was eight days old. I felt like shedding a tear at the thought of her changing something almost so intrinsic about herself. How dare she try to tell me my beautiful baby isn't good enough? If you have seen my daughter I am sure that you would say that she did not need any surgery, that she looked just fine the way she was. I think the truth is that her obsession with her nose is purely 100% my fault. I have always been obsessed with my nose. My father had an absolute 'honker' and as from a very young age I was always told how much like him I was I was completely convinced that every time anyone looked at me the first thing that they would notice was my enormous proboscis. Now that I am post 40 I rarely ever think about my nose at all. I don't think it is particularly small but I don't think that anyone else notices it either. Still occasionally you will catch me looking at my profile in the mirror and wondering what I would look like without it. My daughter would have seen me doing this from a young age and when she announced that she was going to have this surgery done part of me understood. I was, after all, a teenager once too. I tried to talk her out of it though. Her father was mortified and furious at me for planting such a seed in the mind of our daughter. Still she is 18 now and the fact is that I was powerless to stop her. She booked the doctor, she booked the surgery...she went ahead and did it. I did, and am doing, what I always do. I am supporting and assisting her in her decision. I am driving her where she needs to go, buying every medicine and vitamin I can can't afford to aid healing and nursing her back to health to the best of my ability. I think she is shocked by how major the surgery really has been. I don't think she expected to feel as dreadful as she does and she really has been quite contrite. I suspect she won't be lining up for any more surgery any time soon anyway, at least I hope not! Today we are going back to see the doctor and having the stitches removed. I don't think the cast comes off today but along with WD I am impatient to see the results. Her nose definitely looks smaller even with the cast on so I am just crossing my fingers that it is straight and even underneath the bandage. If she needs any follow-up surgery I will be so disappointed, not only for her and the further pain and discomfort she would need to go through but also for me and for the extra stress and the extra time and money that would need to be spent on her. As it is WD promised us that she would fund this operation herself. Alas, she has had to 'borrow' the money from us at the 11th hour. I suspect I will never see this money again. Luckily she got the operation under medicare at a hugely reduced rate due to her breathing problem, but still... Next week WD starts a new job at a high end boutique in the city selling designer clothes. She will be working full-time for the first time in her life so I am looking forward to seeing how she copes with it. She also wants to keep her weekend niteclub bar job but I am doubtful that she can handle both. We will see. Assuming that WD heals quickly and perfectly this week I am due to drive out to my Mothers on friday and spend a week nursing her back to health after she has eye surgery on Wednesday. I never imagined myself as the nurse type before but I actually think I am quite good at it. Perhaps I should consider a career change? If people didn't actually die in hospitals, I would seriously consider it.

Autumn Afternoon

There is something about the afternoon light in autumn. I love the feel of winter on the edge of the breeze, like a promise of warm roast dinners and mugs of steaming hot milo. But there is something else too, the dark creeping up on you early and a new quietness as people withdraw inside their homes that bit sooner each day leaving behind a still, sad loneliness that reaches deep inside. It makes me want to cook and bustle in the kitchen, make noise and light that will reach it's fingers out of my windows and fill that cold sky, streaked with lonely afternoon bird calls, with warmth and music and human energy.

Moment.

The 4WD was big and new and shiny, you know the kind, one that has never left the bitumen and probably never will. I was sitting at the table in the park while S slept. I was still sipping my second beer while he had downed his in the usual minimal number of gulps. The view in front of me was laid out in a patchwork of greens and blues; trees, fields, towns and forests all laid out like a checkered tablecloth leading out to sea. I was allowing myself to relax and soak it all in when the vehicle turned off the road and rumbled urgently past me. Doors slammed and the sound of childen laughing rang across the bright green grass. The childen ran past me, laughing, wrestling. A boy of about twelve, a girl of ten or so, their mother herding them, camera in hand.
"Get over by that tree." She ordered, and they laughed, obliging, caught up in their own happiness and in the game they played. "No, not there! By the side, off to one side." The children tussled again, the boy pushed his sister, laughing, she pushed him back, then he hugged her and the camera clicked. Two laughing faces framed by pink frangipani flowers on one side and the distant carpet of the greens hills fading into the ocean on the other. Perfect.
The children ran back past me and I glanced up to catch the mother's eye. She shook her head, flustered, tired out by their energy and volume. I smiled. I wanted to say, "Stop! Enjoy this moment. In two years those children won't run and laugh like that. They will scowl at you when you ask for their photo if they even deign to sit in a car with you on a Sunday afternoon in the first place." But I just smiled. And she herded them back into the car and in a spin of rubber on the gravel they were gone. Children's laughter fading into the exhaust fumes of an oversized 4WD leaving a hurry on a Sunday afternoon.

I am glad they have the photo.

April 1973 - AM

Like in any home almost anywhere in the world the kitchen was the life of the house. In the centre of the narrow room, under the windows, was the ‘Everhot’ slow combustion stove. I can still hear the creak of the firebox door, and my memory can feel the emanating heat, in summer, in winter, early in the morning and late at night, the constant unwavering soul of our home.

Until I was about thirteen I was awoken every morning to the sound of my father chopping kindling to stoke up the fire. I didn’t have a bedroom; instead I slept in the ‘sleepout’, which was basically an enclosed verandah. It had a door that opened onto stairs leading into the side garden. Out there the lemon tree, the orange tree, the peach trees and the plum crowded against the louvered southern wall. The door was weathered though and rather than strain it against the torn green linoleum to force it to a shuddering close each night, it was just left open. As I woke each morning to the sharp splintering sounds of my father’s axe work the open door afforded me a view of the woodheap and the child’s timber and chain swing alongside it. Of the wattle trees and the ironbark silhouetted against the white early dawn of the western sky. I would lie there as my eyes gained focus gazing at those dancing leaves. I saw them filled with creatures and faces. Laughing dancing girls and stern pipe smoking grandfathers. Yapping excited fox terriers and proud contented cats. In centre, facing me, cross-legged I saw an aboriginal man, holding his didgeridoo and staring hard into my face as he made his silent tribute to the beginning of the day.

All this as I listened to the firebox-ready wood crash and tumble into the woodbox by the back door, then the squeak of the firebox door and the scrape of the stoking tool as my father searched for still-warm embers amongst the ash and then laid out a few torn sheets of newspaper with the splintery tinder over it. In moments I would hear the roar and crackle of flames followed by the decisive slam of the firebox door as my father deemed his task as complete, a job well done.

It was wise to wait for a moment until the kettle was boiled before throwing on the warmest clothes I could find. Scrabbling through my ‘lowboy’ for any ill-fitting hand-me-downs from my three siblings and five cousins, the legacy of being the youngest in the generation. It is well that I was not concerned with fashion then, as I must have looked quite lost and unkempt. I rarely wore shoes, so I would run to the warmth of the kitchen before my hardened little feet had time to feel the cold.

Up above the high cupboard was where the ‘Milo’ was kept and I was allowed two teaspoons of the malt chocolate mix in hot water, one sugar and milk if we had any. If not, I would top it with tablespoons of lumpy powdered milk that became a treat in itself, sweet chewy globs of milky goodness. I would have to hide to eat that though, sneak out to the cold front verandah where my mother could not snap at me for being wasteful and greedy. “When I was a child.” Her voice would drone on endlessly.

We lived in the same house that my mother had grown up in. She reminded us every single day how lucky we were to live in such comfort, in a house with running water and painted walls. With fresh bread delivered twice weekly instead of damper made on weevil infested flour, with an actual kerosene refrigerator instead of the air-cooled ‘meatsafe’. According to my mother, everything was better when she was a child. Living on corned beef and unsweetened cocoa, believing that cheese was a treat as wonderful as chocolate and teeth could only be cleaned properly with charcoal was some form of utopia that she seemed to be forever guilty of depriving her children of. Meanwhile I spent my every waking moment straining to hear the sound of a vehicle or an aeroplane, dreaming of what it would be like to have a neighbour that lived closer than 10 miles away or a shop that was closer than sixty miles away. Civilisation called to me like some shining beacon in the far distance, on those cold mornings around the stove in that tiny kitchen my utopia was a land of homogenised milk in a bottle instead of manure laced in a bucket; of electric lights and doors that closed; and most of all of other people. It seemed that even then, my mother’s idea and my idea of the way life should be was somewhat different.

After I had swallowed down the last sweet chocolaty drops of my morning Milo and my mother and father were leaning, smoking cigarettes over the stove and sipping their hot tea I would carefully pour a cup for my Grandmother. She had a favourite cup and saucer and she drank her tea white with none. My feet would feel their way across the wide worn cypress pine floorboards through the dining room across the gold linoleum in the sunroom and to her door.

“Good morning Sunshine” she would say as she unhooked her sliding door and let me in. I loved the mornings in my Grandmother’s room. The “His Master’s Voice” radio and her dressing table top drawer filled with exotic earrings and untouchable pills. My cousin took one once. I always imagine it was one of the little red ones. They bundled her into the car and rushed her to the hospital. An hour and a half of stressful dirt road driving all the way to town. I assume they pumped her stomach when they got her there because she lived to climb the rafters in the shed another day and swallow some strychnine so that the whole panicky process could be repeated. Another survival to add to the family story archive, told and retold until nobody can remember exactly how the original story transpired.

As she drank her tea my Grandmother would tell me stories. Answer my questions about her childhood in Scotland and traveling to Australia by ship to grow up in Brisbane. She would allow me to gaze at my reflection in her magnifying mirror so I could imagine what I might look like when I was all grown up. So there I would be, perched on my grandmother’s bed, with my mismatched hand-me-down clothes, my chocolate ringed mouth, excruciatingly painful screw on drop earrings reflected in that mirror into the future while I thought about Scotland, castle, cities and ships. A world away from the morning bellow of the cattle in the yards, waiting to be fed and milked and drafted in a ritual that comforted and infuriated me all at once.

Grandma would shoo me away while she got dressed for her day and I would race across to the yards with the others. Most mornings I rummaged through the old shoe box by the back stairs, hoping against hope that my feet may have grown enough during the night that one of the pairs of dusty old riding boots might fit me. My mother would snap at me in her panicked voice to check for red-back spiders before I put my feet into danger. So I would use my hand to check as she insisted. That logic still baffles me? I never found a red-back and those boots never did fit, so I would stay barefoot, running across the sharp spiky dry grass as fast as I could so it wouldn’t have the chance to hurt my feet.

The yards were warm with animal respiration and busy as we worked, mixing grains, filling troughs with water and feed drums with hay. Mucking out the bull stalls, milking, letting calves in and out and. It was all hands on deck and conversation was king as we performed our tasks by habit. An hour or so of teamwork every morning and evening without fail. Back at the house Grandma would have a cooked breakfast ready on the table when we returned. We always came into the house through the kitchen, leaving boots outside or scraping the manure from our feet. The kitchen would be warm and filled with the smells of cooking as we crowded through to the bathroom to wash our hands and feet then quickly dress in slightly better clothes for school.

I never remember having to rush yet even after that leisurely two-course breakfast every morning where we delved into the cornflakes for the hidden toy and argued over how many omelettes we each had eaten, we seemed to have time to burn. We helped Grandma clear the table and wash up. Four kids fighting over who was wiping and who was putting away and my brother gleefully flicking me on the bottom with the wet teatowel. The drive to school was eleven miles. We always drove seven but my parents took it in turns with another family to drive the last five. So we met at the “Black Gate”, a gate thus named after it began its life soaked in Linseed oil but had long since grayed in the weather and the sun. We played hopscotch in the sand there as we waited for the other family and then for our parents to stop talking about the weather and the government and the price of fuel.


Then it was time for another day of school.... I hope you have enjoyed waking up with me on some unremarkable day in 1973?

Dad

It is twenty years today since my father died. Well since I found out anyway, he died sometime during the early hours of the morning.

The last time I spoke to him I called him from a phone box somewhere on the Southern NSW or Northern Victorian coast. I don't remember where we were or how long before he died it was. Perhaps 3 weeks or a month. That might sound odd now, that I would speak to him so seldom but with communication not so readily available then, as it is now, that was just normal for our family.

I remember he told me he was giving up smoking and that he had had a cancerous spot cut out from near his eye. "Give up smoking Love" he implored. It took me another ten years but I did it in the end. So there is some symmetry for me in today isn't there? It's hard to believe I can measure these huge milestones in my life in decades now and in a strange way realising that it is 10 years since I stopped smoking makes it seem less time since I lost my father. Those first 10 years went mind numbingly slower than the second, such is the age induced speeding up of time I suppose?

My husband went fishing on a friend's boat last night. Boat fishing always makes me miss my father most keenly. He would have loved coming to visit us here on the coast and going out fishing with us. He always dreamt that in his retirement he would be able to do these things. In the end his retirement was only 1 year long. He died aged 61. I feel ripped off, my kids feel ripped off, I think he was ripped off....Dying sucks.

I haven't spoken to my mother or my siblings about my father yet today. I suppose I should and yet my relationship with him was different from theirs. So sometimes talking to them about him takes him away from me and I resent that. I am my father's daughter. As a way of abusing me my mother thinks she is putting me down when she reiterates about how much like him I am. She couldn't be any more wrong. My father was friendly and accepting, loving and generous. I couldn't be more proud than to be told I am like he was.

I miss you Dad.

It is Hot.

Finally summer is here.

There are storms tonight and it feels like November. It feels as if we have been cheated out of summer but, in all honesty, I haven't minded at all. Christmas wasn't the sweat fest that I have come to expect. On New Years Eve the heat hadn't wiped me out before the alcohol did and I actually have a tan this year as it hasn't been too hot to venture outside.

This summer has been very different.

I have walked on the beach every other day. My dog has frollicked with joy down there. If there was ever need to be reminded of how great living near the beach is I only need to look at his eyes. He is my introduction and the other walkers on the beach know me because of him. He takes his stick to everybody(anybody) and they throw it for him because he asks with such sweet innocence.

He gathers smiles for me. I have a fine collection :)

Home on the land....my mother would be proud.

This trip has been exactly what I needed. Out here I am so completely at home, all the bits of me seem to fall into place and I feel truly happy. There are of course so many memories, happy and sad. I can feel my father in the un-renovated rooms, down by the shed where he fiddled with machinery or by the empty creek where we used to sit together and fish. My grandmother is in the air, in the crisp sheets that we carried in from the line together or in the garden where she traced the teddy bear rhyme around my palm. Four generations of my family have now called this home, have let their feet become caked with mud while catching huge lobster sized yabbies from the dams or let the harsh dry scrub scratch their arms as they trekked up the the aboriginal cave in the hills. I had been told the hand paintings were gone, but it wasn't true. They are still there and I felt like singing with joy when I found them. It was enormous fun to show them to my Japanese guest, sharing something often makes it better I think. Super Son has enjoyed it too, I can tell, as slowly the tension of keeping his 'cool' face on eased and he has relaxed. He ran over the rainbow coloured rocks, the sheets of dry gum bark cracking crisply under his converse. He's going to need a new pair after this trip. I feel like I haven't seen him so animated in months.

I also found an aboriginal axe on the first morning here. I have been looking for one all of my life, I had just shown Ink the grooves in the sandstone down by the water hole and tried to explain to him that these grooves were made as the stone axes they used were sharpened, as we walked back towards the house over the ridge where I played so much as a child and felt such peace as a teenager an axe just lay on the ground in my path. Perhaps a cow had kicked it out of the soil, anyway it almost feels as if I was meant to find it, as if the land finally accepts me as it's offspring. Ha, that sounds stupid but thats just how it is.

Today is our last full day out here. I hope to catch some more yabbies, maybe climb the highest mountain so we can see one hundred miles around us (almost), perhaps we will go and collect nuts from the huge Queensland nut tree in the 'park', right now I am taking the binoculars and checking the water tanks for my brother. He is happily on the coast with his family so perhaps for the first time in over twenty years, this place really does feel like my home. I feel lucky.

On the phone my daughter tells me that she is moving to Sydney very soon. She is going down in a few weeks to try and find a job, I feel a little sad but resigned that maybe this is something she feels she has to do. Maybe I will come to Sydney for a visit soon? I can't think of any greater contrast than this place and Sydney.

My arm is Aching

It is winter in Paris in early 2000. We take this day to walk the cold, cold air and visit the true tourist spots in this famous city. We line up with hundreds of others as the breeze rips through our insufficient clothing. There is a mist of moist cold enveloping us; our faces burn with it as we stamp our feet like horses, to be warm.

A mime has come by to entertain this unhappy queue, as we are waiting for access to the tower. My son is enthralled by him and walks nearer for a better look. The mime begins blowing up an invisible balloon; it stretches out in the air before him, my sons eyes widen as if he fears that it may burst. The mime checks the size of the balloon, it isn't quite long enough yet, it is a sausage balloon. He fills it some more, and then checks it again. Satisfied, he ties the end and then starts the intricate process of making the balloon into a dog. He makes the ties and checks it then continues, finishing by adding a piece of invisible string. Then proudly he hands his masterpiece to my patient boy. My son returns to us his eyes glistening with pride. He holds his prize aloft and smiles warmly at the admiring crowd.

We move slowly up the queue and finally after what has seemed like hours we take the stairs and then the lift to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Like cattle we are herded up and on and up. Finally we are there, the light mist blankets the city pink and white and pretty in this bright winter light. We gaze out across the miles, triumphant in having reached this height.

"Mummy, can you please hold this? My arm is aching." My son hands me his invisible balloon.

I dare not let it go.

Sugar Flower

In the kitchen opposite the wood stove was a leadlight kitchen dresser painted white. It had panes of glass, green, burgundy and clear. On the centre door which curved outwards the glass was cracked and the design slumped inwards. I used the wonder if the heat from the stove opposite had melted the lead and imagine that one day the whole panel would drip to the floor.

I stood next to the dresser that day and the ledge where the key was kept was very high. If I stood on my tiptoes I could feel it there with the very tips of my fingers but unless I dragged the stool across, there was little chance I would ever reach it.

I considered the moving of the stool and the noise that it would make. My parents took their midday nap just behind the dresser in the other room. If they heard me I might get the "flapper", a piece of bamboo about 20 inches long, with a folded strap of leather bound with "catgut" to it's end. Mum and Dad would threaten me with it what seemed like every day, but perhaps it was only when I was naughty? It was kept on the front veranda high on the coat hooks above the rifles. All those terrifying items dwelt there at our front door. I wonder now what people thought when they called in, to be greeted by that armoury?

The stool was too heavy for me to lift quietly but I remembered there was another outside. I slowly opened the rattling back door knob, it was dented brass kept shiny from many hands and the sound of that doorknob is more keen in my memory than any other sound I have ever known.

The back stairs creaked slightly and the small yellow stool, made from an apple crate is there.

On the way back my hands are full, the door slams in the breeze and I freeze....
All stays quiet. I carefully place the stool and reach the key. My footsteps through the dining room are swift and sure. I sit down cross-legged in front of the china cabinet and the key moves easily in the lock.

I am not allowed in here. In the very back is a small tin, slightly rusted. Carefully I move the breakables aside, fine china teacups and antique figurines. I grasp my prize. The lid squeaks a little as I pry it loose.

The hard sugar melts slowly in my mouth. I close my eyes in bliss. They won't notice just one more wedding cake decoration disappearing, surely?

dusk

the slamming of the screen door
the koel calling in the dusk
a child's name, a few times in ascending volume
dinner is almost ready

a dog barks and the noisy hum of traffic in the distance continues

this might be the only time of day that I cannot separate the sound of the surf from that of the traffic

it is almost dark

an owl? i could swear i just heard an owl

echoing across the gully I can hear the clatter of dishes in the neighbour's kitchen

i stand and add my kitchen’s own clatter to the evening chorus

Dorm

Along the wall on the left are the wardrobes, my memory exaggerates and I see forty of them or something, but there are problem only a dozen or so all lined up and when I think of them now I wish I had taken a photo. It would have been an arty shot, the peeling old white paint and the doors all ajar in differing degrees of dissarray. In my memory I walk towards them at the head of the pack, footsteps rumbling and stumbling down the winding staircase behind me. I head for mine, my footsteps racing in a panic that I don't want anyone to see. I grab the door and lean into my cupboard it's door a shield for me and for a moment I feel safe. In here they cannot see my tears, they can't see my shaking hands as I pretend to search for some misplaced item. They cannot know how weak I am.

Behind me there is a double sided row of drawers. My two are labelled with my name and number. Across the other side of this long narrow room are our beds. They are metal framed with wire bedsprings supporting our "horsehair" mattresses. They are not really horsehair of course, they are probably coconut husk or some coarse fibrous material like that, I can't remember them as being that uncomfortable as they were pretty much the same as what I had at home. A bed was a bed.

There was a story in the dorm about a ghost who came every fortieth night or so. She was said to drift above one bed and then below the next, stabbing the knife she killed herself with into every second mattress from below. Apparently her knife was snapped so you had to be pretty unlucky to get knifed, I still lay there at night waiting for the sharp pain in my back or closing my eyes incase she was floating above me and leering down at my face. Our boarding house was full of stories like that.

It was usually the seniors who passed these stories on, telling the gullible year eights then watching their eyes widen in fear before they slipped back to their twin rooms snickering with glee. My sister was my dorm prefect when I was in first year. It wasn't a good thing. My dorm scoffed at me for getting preferential treatment while my sister treated me extra harshly so that she would not be accused in kind. She found it wonderfully convenient though, having me close to run her errands and also to wake at five am so she could train me to swim as well as her. She desperately wanted to be proud of me. Alas I was a disappointment and in the end I rewarded her by getting suspended and shaming her name. Given that it was her stupid boyfriend that dobbed me in, I say serve her right.

Remembering the milking yards

I can hear the Happy Families chattering as I hold my arms outstretched either side of me.
The timber beneath my toes feels almost shiny, small bumps where splinters used to be, worn smooth now from the hands and thighs of many bodies, sitting, waiting, watching the daily ritual of "doing the cows".
I look at the beam in front of me and let my feet find their way along with confidence. I am confident, I tell myself, I am I am....but always, as soon as I query my confidence I start to waver and I look at the ground below instead. I choose a spot to place my feet when I have to turn my fall into a jump. I look for a place deep with mud and manure; I know below that mud the gravel is sharp and cruel on my cold bare feet.
As I jump I think of myself as light like a bird and bend my knees quickly to break my fall and then spring up again before the soft skin in the arch of my foot can find the gravel. I am safe.
I hear an order barked from one of my parents.
'Let in that calf.'
The clunk and scrape of the timber gate latch then the squeak of the hinge, in need of oil again. I know every calf by name, they bunt their heads against me and their warm animal aroma is like a balm of contentment to me. I block the others and let the called-for calf in, to feed from it's mother. She lets out an appreciative bellow from above her finished grain bin. The calf knows the ritual and runs in behind the bail, behind the cow.
The cow begins to relax now, and she lets her milk down and we scramble for it. First the young bull then he is led away and I practice my knot tying to keep him aside until the next cow is brought through for him. Then my father sits on the three-legged stool. I watch the muscles in his chocolate brown arms flex and relax as he hand milks the cow, her teats slippery from the saliva of the young bull, I see him fight the calf for the best teat. The bucket fills quickly when my father milks. The deep foam on top, proof he milks well. Whenever I try, my arms get tired before the foam begins to build and I pass it on to him. Yet still now, thirty years later my hands are stronger than anyone's I know.
I pull myself up and sit on the rail where before I walked. In my memory now I can hear the rustle of the animals and the rumble and scrape as the cows lick their grain bins, the rip of milk as each stream hits the foam in the metal bucket. The meow of the yard cats, frantic for a taste of the hot frothy milk.
I can hear the sad desperate bleating bellow of the hungry calves still waiting, the deep bellow of the bulls in their stalls, my mother's voice, talking about this animal or that. I can hear the Happy Family's chattering together.
I can see my father's boots, caked in mud and manure and hay.
I can watch his lips move, but I cannot hear his voice.
In four days it will be seventeen years since anyone heard his voice.

Reposting again - First posted Mar 2004
In fact tonight it will be nineteen years since anyone heard his voice. And excuse that picture, I drew it with the mouse in Corel, and I am not that great at mouse control. Also excuse the slightly morose postings. I just miss my Dad and although I always promised myself I'd try to remember him more on his birthday than on the day he died, it's a hard thing to do, I rememeber him every day.

Sprint Training

In the mornings, after I would wake with that crisp cold air burning my cheeks and the sound of my father splitting tinder at the woodheap, we would crowd around the wood stove fighting for a turn to toast our thick slabs of white bread over the hot coals. My father would lean across the stove, his cup kept warm on the white enamel stove warmers and the ash from his cigarette sometimes landing in the ironstone thunder egg he used as an ashtray and sometimes landing on the floor where he would hurriedly spread it out on the mottled pink linoleum to hide his mistake before someone snapped at him.

The kitchen was crowded and stuffy, the yellow painted vj boards that lined the ceiling, black with grease and soot.

My parents voices starting softly, discussed what would be done that day; the fences to be checked, the cows to be preganancy tested and the performance of the new bull. It seems always that the volume would rise and my mother would begin to speak louder as she sensed my father was not agreeing with her, not bending to her will as she believed then and still believes is the only possible conclusion in all her conversations. Finally my father would dump his cup on the sink, stub out his cigarette and shuffle, sock footed, to the back stairs where his oldest heeled RMWilliams boots would slide over his boot shaped feet and his stained and holey second-best Akubra would land in its familiar groove upon his forehead.

Sometimes I would rush after my father, squeezing my backside onto the stair beside him, working my way through the box of old boots. Always hoping my feet may have grown enough to slide into them like his did but always, in the end, chasing after him my pattering feet wearing shoes of hard skin and painful cold.

His gentle silence and firm brown hands would guide me out past the woodheap, past the feedshed and the utes. Out there, just us in the front paddock, he would spring it on me suddenly. "Race you to the yards?" And I would run on my toes to avoid the sharp frostbitten grass, prancing like Bambi down the hill, reaching out in strides as long as I could make them.

My father never let me win though, he would stay just ahead. He made me try so very hard but when I held out my arms out to stop myself against the rattling hayshed gates he was always already there, slowing to a stop beside me, laughing and puffing and telling me how good I was and how hard it was for him to beat me now.

My athletics coach, my father: 24 January 1926 - 25 March 1987

Barefooted Brats

It started the night before my ninth birthday. Dean and I found the chrome plated cylindrical contraption in the sideboard drawer, all spinning notched disks and fluted brass rods. It had a hinged lid along one side and a scalloped end wheel, which when you turned it would set the fluted rods all spinning. "Here", Dad said, "You lick the cigarette paper and place it in the slot, then lay a measure of tobacco along the length, not too close to the ends or it ends up in my mouth, then you close the lid and turn the end."
So we sat on the floor at his feet, Dean and I and rolled him cigarettes with varying degrees of success, we laughed at our attempts and became loud enough that we were sent the the spare room where we were always allowed to sleep when we had friends to stay. I know it would have been Dean's idea, but there we were hidden by the wall with my father's pouch of drum tobacco and Dean, being the natural ratbag that he was; it was inevitable really.
"Let's roll some for ourselves." he said "We can take them to school and see what it is like to smoke."
I agreed, I always agreed with everything that Dean said, he was bigger than me. He was being nice to me. I would do anything for Dean to be nice to me.
At school the next day we whispered to the others at little lunch and Dean led us all to the chicken coop behind the hit-up board at the far end of the tennis court. We climbed through the wire netting gate into the little pen and found old feed tins and water containers to turn over and plant ourselves on, small relief from the dusty dried out chicken poop, still smelly even a year after all the chooks were gone. Kent demanded the best seat and set himself up as watch peeking between the boards to be sure the teacher was not coming. So we lit the small bent half squashed "rollie" passing it around we puffed clouds of smoke out from our faces.
"That's not really how you do it" Dean told us" You have to suck it right in."
We just looked at him dumbly and kept puffing. Ann held hers elegantly, legs crossed at the ankles. Evelyn swaggered provocatively at eleven years old, swore and spat the bitter tar from her pink perfect lips. I knew I looked stupid doing everything I did, so there seemed little point in trying to be anything other than an untidy little tomboy. At least I was good at that. Little Beth stood defiantly, threatening to tittle-tale to her parents, he carrot red hair stark against the shocked white of her freckled skin. She wouldn't dare, would she?
It became a ritual after that, every day we brought stolen cigarettes to school. We graduated to climbing the tree behind the coop, a better look-out we thought. As if the teacher couldn't see us out the small square window, those little puffs of smoke wafting from between the branches of the whistling pine athol trees.
I remember that time with a feeling of elation, six small children on top of the world. Untouchable.
I can still feel the dread as we watched from our perches that day when he finally stood up from his desk and walked that long 100 metres towards us. I wonder that he left it so long when in honesty he must have known that whole week. Perhaps he simply hoped that we would stop by ourselves. I think a school with six pupils was more than this first year teacher, posted to the back of beyond and an empty classroom of barefooted brats, had ever bargained on. Six defiant, strong minded rebels were harder to control than a normal class of twenty-five.
Watching his slow steady steps towards us that day, we knew that we were caught. I saw Beth's pale white cheeks flush red with fear and defiance, so, she had told on us.
His decided discipline was that we should tell our parents or he would tell them for us. It was the worst punishment of my life.
In time I forgot the punishemnt but I remembered that feeling of elation. The thrill of being naughty and more than any nicotine addiction. That memory took hold of me like a drug. The thirst for that elation has never really left me.
After all, we never inhaled. (Originally posted 27.8.04)

Thank you Waiter

Looking back I still cannot understand what it was that you saw in me. Just the same, I will be forever grateful that you did see something, whatever it was.

I utterly adored you. You came to me when I was at the lowest point in my life and you made me feel worthwhile again. It is true it did not last and you broke my heart but what you took away was nothing in comparison to what you gave me. I wonder if you know this? I suppose reading the letters that you wrote me afterwards it is obvious that you did.

We had so much fun that summer didn't we? At least I did and I am pretty sure that you did too. I have a few highlights that I keep in my favourite memory bank, I wonder if you ever revisit those times? I know you used to because you did mention the pool once....ha!

I remember catching a cab over to West End after work one night, getting the cabbie to drop me in Sexton street and then walking up the back path and hearing your harmonica as I drew nearer. You were sitting up on the windowsill of that sliding window above the kitchen table, your long legs folded up, your knees a support for your harmonica holding hands. You were silhouetted against the light walls of that room and framed by the green and purple panes of glass in those windows that later I spent so many hours beneath. I loved those windows and that night as I walked up to the house I loved you. I don't know if you deserved my love or not but the reality was that I just loved you for being there. At that point in time, that was enough.

You introduced me to intelligent people. It might sound strange if I were to say that I had never met any before and perhaps that would be a lie anyway but I suppose I had never noticed any before and suddenly here you were talking to me about everything and anything and being idealistic and passionate and most of all, making me listen.

You forced me out of the mould I thought I belonged in and proved to me that my life could be whatever I wanted it to be not whatever I thought was expected of me. For that I thank you more than you will ever know.

In my dream I am speaking to my family but it seems nobody is listening. It is then I realise that although I am turning purple screaming my words out in a desperate attempt to attract the attention of anyone who’ll listen, there are no sounds emanating from my gawping mouth at all. Am I mute? I wonder this before I see my hands waving above me, fists clenched, punching the air in anger. My fists? A babies fists, fat and pink, useless and weak. What?

I want to wake up from this infuriating dream but instead I notice the dribble on my chin, cold and wet on my hot angry face.