vision

A few weeks ago my good woman meets me in the city just after five and in the growing dark we visit a shoe shop, an eye-wear shop, and a tea shop.

After trying on spectacle frames all over Melbourne, Sydney and Darwin I return to Little Collins Street and purchase a set of blue Dolce and Gabbana frames. Even the savviest technology and snappiest design cannot justify the outrage of charging me $360 for less than 15 grams of plastic and two sprung hinges.

I admire the specs that perch on the pert nose of my manager in a former job. She tells me she picked them up at the airport in Kuala Lumpur for $20. Unfortunately I can’t afford the ticket for Malaysia. Instead I tether the Red Rocket to a tree in Croydon’s main street and enter my local optometrist’s shop.

“What can we do for you?” asks the bouncy receptionist in a contrasting laid-back Australian drawl.

“I’d like you to make me a pair of glasses,” I reply, doffing my helmet and unstrapping my backpack. “Not you personally, but you have my prescription. I’ve brought my own new frame.”

“Well, aren’t you a good man,” she says. I tell her that I do my best. “The technician will be back in a minute. She’s just popped across the street.” 


In the 13 years I’ve come here to have my sight seen to, grumpy old Wilfred has been the technician. The new tech arrives almost immediately and she’s got freckles and curly orange hair and looks about 17.

“Take a seat and let’s have a look,” she says. It’s obvious to both of us that the new frame slopes down from right to left. She places the frame upside down on the bench and it fails to sit flush. “There we go,” she says.

“My head’s not symmetrical either; one ear in lower than the other,” I point out. When she takes the new frame away to adjust it, I check my head in the mirror. The left ear is definitely lower. She returns and places the warm frame on my face.

“You tend to tilt your head to that side,” she observes. Must be the weight of my heavy left ear.

We talk costs. Multifocal lenses (with the new better peripheral vision), with transitions (they turn into sunglasses outside—$120 extra) , and scratch and glare resistant coating, will set me back $680. Add the frame cost and mandatory $30 fitting fee and we’re talking a pair of glasses worth $1070.

When I gulp, the young technician counters with, “But you wear them all the time.”

“I’ll wear them in my sleep,” I tell her, “so I can see what’s going on in my dreams.”

The glasses with lenses will weigh about 25 grams. That’s $43 a gram. Cocaine would be cheaper and more fun.

Rock on. 

dreaming

On the rare occasions I get to wake up with her, my good woman likes to ask me about my dreams, as in, “Did you have any dreams last night?” My answer is usually in the negative, or along the lines that I might have, but can remember nothing.

My good woman is a psychologist—have I mentioned that?—so her interest in dreams is entirely understandable. I’m a bloke, so my lack of interest in dreams is understandable too. To my good woman a dream is full of symbols; to me dreams are the unconscious brain’s equivalent of emerging from your hotel in Paris and picking a direction, any direction, at random, and stepping off, then heading down any alley that catches your eye along the way.

Some people see portents in dreams, images of things to come in their lives. Fortunately, neither my good woman nor I subscribe to this nonsense.

On the occasions that she asks and I can remember what I dreamed, I know I’m in for a grilling. “What do you think this dream means?” (Nothing.) “Is this dream telling you something?” (Nothing.) “Is anything worrying you at the moment?” (These questions.)

Occasionally I have an absolute doozy, a dream so bizarre as to be almost unforgettable. Last night, for instance.

Last night I dream that my 61 year-old cycling buddy Rock wins the Tour de France. In his nonchalant winner’s speech he tells an adoring crowd how good it is to win in his home town, Melbourne. I’m sort-of, slightly pleased for him, but amazed and a bit miffed too. He’s done even less training than I have, which is close to none at all, and neglects to tell me he is riding the event.

I ask him when the celebrating hordes have moved on how he managed to do it. Just hang in with the bunch, he says, and make no mistakes. I imagine him Bradburying the field, staying upright as 188 other riders go down in un chute, a crash.

My dream then does what dreams do: takes me somewhere else. I’m moving into a dilapidated caravan full of gravel and a mouldering mattress on the floor. I have to sweep it and scrub it clean with a toothless old brush, and so on. Rock is nowhere to be seen.

As a boy and adolescent I have erotic waking daydreams but none in the dead of the night compromising my sheets. As a late middle-aged man I’ve had some marvellous nocturnal erotic encounters, though no emissions. I’d like to report these to me good woman, but she is not in any of them.

It’s best to keep dreams to yourself, if you have any.

Rock on. 

wager

Carey, former team-mate, lives in Gembrook, nurturing bees, plants and the people around him. He feeds the forwards at the Greta Footy Club all those years ago. Recently, after I express my disdain for the gee gees, he takes me aback by revealing that he likes a punt, then confounds me by saying he bets on nags schooled by “trainers I like”. 

He reads that Cranbourne trainer Wendy Kelly once lived at Emerald and rode her horse to work at the vet’s as a girl. She breeds dogs and meets her husband at a dog show. He has a couple of racehorses and she decides she’d like to have a go training them.

He hears a race-caller talk of Terry and daughter Katrina O’Sullivan. They always win at Stawell, their home track. He starts backing their horses at home, then wherever they run. By going with the trainer he doesn’t look at the odds, so there’s less umming and ahing, less time spent.

John Ledger’s charges pop up now and again on his home track at Wangaratta. Aaron Purcell at Warrnambool gives him a good winner so he follows him. Alan Peterson, same town, described as a small boutique trainer. Brian Cox of Wodonga has horses going round at Wang and Benalla and Echuca. Carey enjoys a good strike rate on him.

His maximum wager is $1 and simple maths tells him he can’t expect to win. He has no rules; the jockeys influence him and he likes the lady hoops. Sometimes a name, like Candy Rain, gets his attention, and sometimes a number comes into his mind.

A keen punter he meets sometimes on his walks says he should try running doubles, two races in a row, hard to get, but good odds and a good payout. His best return is on his first running double: a dollar on two roughies picked at random as he likes the names brings in $600.

If he has a bet, he always takes a couple of trifectas on the last two races, same numbers, drawn out of a hat, till they come up. Might take a year, pay $50 or $500, then he goes back to the hat for new numbers.

He loves rural Victoria, a legacy of his time with ‘the Department’ as an apiary inspector. Listening to country races romances his day. If the races are at Swan Hill, he pictures the Murray and the river red gums, the horses and colours, hears “the thundering hooves as the magnificent powerful beasts give us all they’ve got”.  

He doesn’t lose much and it adds a little excitement to tending bees and pruning camellias. He hasn’t found a horse trainer who was a former beekeeper. If he did, he’d back his horses.

Carey turns 60 the other day. Welcome to the club, and rock on. 

hotel

I’m at Darwin airport, leaving this place for the third and final time. I hope not to be back, unless it’s to pick up a hire car and escort my good woman direct from airport to Kakadu.

For a person who likes home, I’m amazed at the number of hotels and motels I have now slept in. Ten years ago I can count them on less than five fingers. Now I need twenty hands.

The serious hotel-hopping begins with long-distance bike rides: Bourke to Melbourne, Adelaide to Melbourne, and three times round Tasmania. Three sojourns in France add international perspective. My new job ticks the numbers over.

The three worst hotels leap out even in distant memory: the lumpy mattress on the floor at the Coleraine Hotel to avoid the stifling heat, mozzies and sagging bedsprings; the lampshade perched on my bonce at the Sea Lake Hotel as I read in bed; the mystery plumbing—toilet, basin, bidet?—under my window in the utterly shambolic Moderne in Clermont, France. In defence of each I admit that the tariff justified what I got for my money.

There is no best place. Whether in Cobar or Hobart, hotel rooms are bland and charmless, no matter how shiny, no matter how management dresses them in spin, no matter how many complimentary blandishments are on offer. The miniature toiletries, sachets of hot chocolate and pillow menus are recouped by the tiny six-dollar bag of mini-bar peanuts the famished traveller wolfs down at midnight after a long flight and no sustenance till breakfast.

Hotel breakfasts never vary: they’re universally awful and breakfast in the Waterhole Restaurant at the Darwin Central is no disappointment. Usually I break my overnight fast with the not-the-slightest-bit Continental breakfast. This morning I vary my practice and go for the ‘full’ breakfast—scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. 

The Australian Continental consists of cereal, toast, out-of-season fruit, with a gelatinous ‘product’ called yogurt thrown in to provide a European touch. As little as a bowl of corn flakes and a small glass of tinned pineapple juice will relieve you of $15 to $20.

The better option by far is to stroll up the street and invest less for the big breakfast at a café, where you’ll probably score a decent glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice, and your scrambled eggs will come out of a chook, not a tin.

My driver this morning is Satya, from Nepal. I ask if he’s a doctor or engineer whose qualifications are not recognised here. No, he says, he’s an accountant, and can’t get a job because he has no experience. No experience, no job. No job, no experience. I wish him well.

The day’s training at the Darwin Sailing Club passes and I am where I said at the beginning: Darwin airport. Flight DJ1464 lifts off on time and somewhere over the dead heart of the continent I swipe my credit card through the slot in the back of the seat and watch the Blues beat Freo.

Rock on, Blueboys.   

darwin

The work phone buzzes me awake at 4:45. No lazing under my thin doona this morning; my flight to Darwin lifts off at 7:10, the midday service too expensive. At 5:15 I’m out the door with vegemite toast in one hand and an insulated mug of tea in the other. It’s 8 degrees in pre-dawn Croydon; thick drizzle keeps the wipers swishing the length of the freeway.

Qantas load us onto QF671 for Adelaide then leave us on the tarmac for an hour because their Sydney computers are down and they can’t prove that our baggage load is ‘balanced’. The voice-over guy has the most annoying manner and pretentious turn of phrase. Our flight becomes QF754 from Adelaide to Darwin.

I chat with Michael Long—he came down to Melbourne for the Anzac Day game—as we straggle down the airbridge, tell him I met his brother in a tinnie on Darwin harbour two years ago, a trip I make with my good woman to attend a wedding that doesn’t happen. Eight years ago I come here on the Ghan as my then 78 year-old father’s carer.

I eat a second breakfast on the plane; it would be my third if had I taken Qantas’s offer on the leg to Adelaide. Half a continent passes beneath me while I watch a comedy called Carnage on my personal screen. Then we touch down.

The weather in Darwin is fine, 30 degrees, and no humidity smashing you like it does during the build-up in October. My taxi driver from the airport to the hotel is Do, Vietnamese. The receptionist is reluctant to let me have a room at 1:40 when check-in is at two. I feign royalty, stand mute, wait for the key.  

Room 613—same number I had in Parramatta two days ago—is at the top corner looking over the intersection of Knuckey and Smith. No car park. I set up my little eyrie—computer on the desk, button-up shirt in the wardrobe—and go hunting. I bag two samosas, then track down a few necessaries—panadol, teabags, chocolate, orange juice—at a supermarket.

Darwin is the place for sandals, a size ten pair of Keens on special from a sporting outlet. Back in 613 I answer work emails, return missed calls, sort paper. I read the news, then pull back the sheet—there’s no blanket on the bed—and kip for maybe an hour.

Darkness comes. The price of restaurant food here is grossly inflated, so I put on my new sandals and make for the halal Indonesian takeaway in the food court adjoining the hotel foyer. It’s closed, despite a sign, and the woman running it mid-afternoon, telling me it’s open till 8:30.

Darwin is booze culture; patrons spill out of the bars onto the footpaths. The restaurants are closed, closing or all but empty. I have my choice of any table at the Garam Marsala. The presentation of my kofta is ordinary—white bowl, no table-cloth—but the dish is plentiful and tasty, my glass of apple juice large enough to drown a small animal. Cardamom pods and cloves litter my finished plate.

Rock on.     

anzacs

I buy a tin of anzac biscuits at the supermarket the other day. I need a nice biscuit tin—this feels robust enough—and I like anzacs. It’s a win-win transaction. But when I open the slatted pantry door and my good woman’s eye alights on that tin, the image on the lid of a wounded digger being assisted from the trenches by a mate elicits a snort of derision.

Rock goes to the dawn ceremony today. His daughter wants to attend. He does not, but is happy to accompany her. She’s not passionate about anything much. His father and mine both fight in the second world war but Rock and I are of a generation that places less value on Anzac Day than the generations either side of us. My own daughter has seen two dawn services with my father.

Being a returned serviceman is all the identity my father has left to him. For 50 years he eschews the Anzac march, but now, at 86, he marches, sometimes in a car, last year a Roller. My mother will have no truck with the whole business. As a pacifist and conscientious objector to the Vietnam War (the court certificate is in my filing cabinet), I don’t care for the day much either.

  

I salute young men who go to war for whatever reasons—King and country, conscription, adventure, stupidity—and don’t come home. But the belief that Australia ‘came of age’ at Anzac Cove—a monumental British stuff-up that cost many Australian lives—is lost on me. Neither April 25 nor Australia (Invasion) Day cut it for me as appropriate national days.

I like the idea of calling the Queen’s Birthday holiday Wattle Day and making it our national celebration. (The British queen’s actual birthday is 21 April, and what the fuck does she have to do with us anyway?)

Here’s the recipe for Anzac Day. Whack a cup each of rolled oats and plain flour in a nice big mixing bowl. Add three quarters of a cup each of raw sugar and desiccated coconut. Meanwhile a small saucepan with 120 grams of butter and a big dollop of golden syrup should be merging on very low heat on the stove.

Now for the action. Pour about 30 millilitres of boiling water into a teaspoonful of bicarb soda and pop it into the molten butter and syrup. As it fizzes to the top of the saucepan, pour the lot into the dry ingredients. Mix the lot and spoon three-centimetre diameter rounds onto a greased baking tray. Slide it onto the middle shelf of a preheated oven at 160 Celsius. Twenty minutes should do the job.

Enjoy, and rock on. 

sydney

For most of my life Sydney is a brash, cultureless place up north that I have no desire to visit. As a child Sydney means the funnel-web spider, atrax robustus, a thick, black, hairy, nasty brute of an arachnid that frightens you to death long before it gets a fang near you. Sydney is a place to drive through quickly on the way to somewhere better.

  

Last year and this I come to Sydney with Liz and Sandy to train teachers and psychs to present the SKIPS program in North Ryde.

I’ve no idea where I am in Sydney, whether in Ryde, Chatswood or Parramatta. Trains leave the airport or Central and rush into tunnels, emerging in unknown locations, before delving into other dark places. North Ryde Station is deep, deep underground. For food we trip back to Chatswood and traipse around what could be any metropolis in China.

On this trip I’m in Parramatta, a famous place name but otherwise unknown to me. I’m with my Victorian colleague Sasha, and Cathy, the national MM project officer from Adelaide. We travel in taxis and live in hotels, something I’ve done lots of in recent years, but it doesn’t come naturally. Every driver is from somewhere else; every hotel window looks into a car park.

After today’s training we walk back to the hotel, this morning’s long taxi ride now a short stroll on foot. We ditch our gear in our rooms and wander back to a mega-mall. I need new spectacle frames, shoes, maybe a watch, but everything is designer this, designer that: nothing here for daggy 60 year-olds. And food-court food is about obesity, not nutrition.

The dawn from my window on the sixth level is a riot of orange filtered between high-rise towers and a multi-level car park. Stained silver trains roll by, yellow doors their only distinguishing feature. And always the rattle and hum of traffic, the blare of claxons, whatever the hour, whatever the day.

Sydneysiders seem somehow different to us from down south. The trainees in Newcastle say they prefer Melbourne to Sydney: better shopping, more refinement. The Sydney people tell us they like Melbourne. Few Melbourne people like Sydney.

Last time here I kill time between gig and airport with a ride on a harbour ferry. The harbour is beautiful enough and the ferries a charming adjunct to the life of the city, but I’m not a water person.

Rock on.   

taxi

Cathy and I step out of the Sydney air terminal onto the taxi rank. An small officious man makes us stand at bay 10. A taxi races to a halt in front of us and a cheery Chinese driver hops out, pops the lid and jigsaws or four bags into place in the boot.

I gesture to Cathy to sit in the front seat: she is senior to me in the MM hierarchy; she’s the presenter of the professional development we’ve come to Sydney for; she has a Cabcharge card and I don’t.

The driver tries to engage Drive but everything dies: the engine, the nav-screen, the ticking fee indicator and the dashboard lights. The driver apologises profusely for the death of his taxi. Cathy and I get out and into the next cab in line. The driver on our journey out to Parramatta is a Sikh.

Our driver in the morning to the presentation venue is a silent Indian, almost as much in the dark about the venue, Old Government House, as we are. We circle it twice before penetrating the secrets of its access.

Next morning our driver is Middle Eastern and in the afternoon, Barry, an Armenian who has plied his trade on Sydney streets for 35 years, chats and jokes with us all the way to the airport. He ducks off motorways into narrow suburban back streets, assuring us of five or ten minutes time saved.

Our driver in February when in Sydney to present SKIPS to school guidance officers is a Scot who has also been here 35 years, driving cabs, and never been out of Sydney. I suspect he’s never got out of the cab. His accent is as thick as a Glasgow docker’s burr.

Arriving back in Melbourne after my first interstate MM trip to Adelaide a month ago my driver is an Eritrean. He calls his base constantly but unsuccessfully on a mobile phone then tells me he cannot take me to home to Croydon: he must hand the cab over when his shift ends at five. I tell him to drop me at Southern Cross and ask him about his country.

I prefer not to use taxis. The cost seems unconscionably exorbitant even though the drivers are piss-poor. Sometimes there’s no alternative; and sometimes someone else is paying.

  

Cathy asks our Sikh driver on the way to Parramatta how many people sit in the front passenger seat. About fifty per cent he tells her. Do more men or women sit up front? He’s not sure. In fact, as he reflects longer, he’s not sure about anything.

We leave his taxi unenlightened and step into the hotel foyer. Hotels, another story altogether.

Rock on. 

exile

At the end of September 1971 the shit hits the fan. A friend commits suicide on 16 June, leaving me contemplating not whether to continue life, but certainly what to do with it. My father and I have raging arguments about my opposition to conscription and non-registration for national service.

I buy a cheap tent and a plane ticket to Tasmania, stow a loaded pack with a friend in West Melbourne, and walk out one Sunday night while my parents sleep. I fly to Devonport—cheaper than Hobart—and hitch through the centre, spending the coldest night of my life in a ditch a few kilometres out of Bothwell.

I make my way down to Dover where the fishing boats anchor, hoping a skipper will take me round to the Southwest, but my nerve fails me on the jetty. I sleep in the scoreboard at the local oval, then hitch back to Hobart and out to Cambridge airfield.

A pilot named Dave Prince is flying a five-seater into Melaleuca the next day. I pay $9—the total fare is $45, but four tin prospectors are flying out. When I climb out of the plane onto an airstrip in the wilderness, Dave asks what I’m going to eat. He takes a list from me and promises me a box of tucker when he flies the Ludbrooks miners in again.

I camp in the visitors’ hut at Melaleuca. The fabled Denny King is not about. Cox Bight is seven miles south across sodden button grass plains and frigid creeks. A sheltered campsite nestles in the final curve of the east beach under Point Eric. I set up my tent. For two months this is my home. I am 20 years young, and stupid. Nonetheless, this is the great adventure of my life.

I explore the beaches, bush and nearby ranges. I sit naked on the rocks with the seagulls above the roaring tide. At night I walk up the beach to see the Maatsuyker light winking through the dark. I live on rice and dehydrated vegies and puff on my pipe as the sun sets. I am blessed with the mildest spring weather ever turned on by the Southwest.  

Friends answer my long letters. Even my sister writes to me. My parents send books: Joyce’s Ulysses, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Lawrence, always Lawrence. Dave flies his plane down to the bight and buzzes me each time he drops a food box for me at Melaleuca and I strap on the pack and hare across the plains.

Denny no doubt thinks me a weird young man. I admire his infinite patience when we change the wheel on his front-end loader. He feeds me, shows me his paintings, and plies me with South American maté tea. I help him ferry hundredweight bags of tin ore down Moth Creek in a punt and manhandle them into the hold of his yacht, the Melaleuca.

   

After two months that seem like two years I sail out of Port Davey into the Southern Ocean with him. I am seasick all the length of the south coast but gorge on his wallaby stew when we edge through the calmer waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

I return home to Ormond, my own man. Rock on.   

ormond

Ormond is where I grow up. I am eight when we move two stations closer to the city from Bentleigh to 265 Grange Road. Thirteen years there take me from Laurie Boatman’s grade 3 class at Glenhuntly State School to walking out of the first year of an arts degree at Monash University and across Blackburn Road to enrol in physical education at Monash Teachers’ College.

No distinguishing feature sets 265 apart from other houses. Its backyard is long enough for me to play (and commentate) extended solo football matches, weaving between two apple trees to snap the sock footy through the green fibreglass garden stakes poked into the lawn as goalposts.

In grade 3 Jackie Krafcek and I have the footy to ourselves in the schoolyard at Glenhuntly. Geoffrey Gent is the only kid who can get it off us. I can name all but three of the 46 kids in my photo of Miss Rice’s grade 4 class. One day after lunch Dominique Rouvet pulls down her pants when I return a football to the sports cupboard at the top of the dark stairs. I am suitably moved by her largesse.

The next year is the first of nine riding the 627 bus to Caulfield Grammar School in East St Kilda. I am a good student who excels at football. Geoff Smith travels on the same bus and we become best friends for three years. He lives in Carnegie near Bakers Paddock where we ‘drive’ burnt-out car shells, catch tadpoles in scummy puddles, and hunt down discarded girlie magazines.

My first room at 265 is a long narrow built-in back verandah until a sunroom and new bedroom are built by one of my father’s drinking mates, Mr Kirby. My mother doesn’t like Mr Kirby, my father’s drinking, or any of his other drinking mates at the McKinnon Hotel where he sinks half a dozen pots every afternoon after getting off the 5:05 at Ormond Station.

My mother’s interest in gardening and Australian native plants begins here. This is the first of many gardens she transforms. My father runs his accountancy practice and has a heart attack at 44. My mother runs the house, plays golf at Keysborough on Tuesdays, makes cushions, curtains and lampshades, and graduates to upholstering furniture.

I’m good at whatever I want to be good at, but grapple with a painful lack of confidence. I watch girls—the 627 bus is full of them—but never approach or speak to any, not so much as a word, not even at the Friday evening dancing lessons I attend with all the other Caulfield 16 year-olds.

I get my first glasses at 12 and my eyesight deteriorates rapidly thereafter. I can’t draw but don’t want to. The secrets of science elude me. I love languages and study French for two years, Latin for one, and German for five. But I can’t see a future in languages; no one can in 1969. I fail physics, chemistry and maths, and hence my Matriculation.

Next year I pass German, English Literature and Politics with distinction and enter university. Just after the 1971 grand final I quit university, leave home one Sunday at midnight, and catch a plane for Hobart. For the next two months I live on a beach in Tasmania’s southwest wilderness.

   

Rock on.   

the space-time continuum

Apparently the space-time continuum exists. I thought it just a Doctor Who sort-of figment of a sci-fi writer’s imagination, something like the fourth dimension or warp speed. But the continuum is, and warp speed and the fourth dimension are related to it. Lord Wiki devotes plenty of space to explaining space-time, completely unintelligible to non-scientific me.

Mr Einstein postulated that space and time are relative, and that an object in motion experiences time at a slower rate than one at rest. We humans travel far too slowly to notice. Scientists have affirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity by shooting atomic clocks into space in high‑speed rockets and the clocks come down behind clocks rooted to the Earth.

Fascinating stuff … not. But I digress. What I’ve observed about space-time is that in real life time and space are relative only in that the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. The bigger the backyard a person has, the less time said person will have for anything other than tidying up that yard. Hence the attraction for time-poor people of apartment living.

My good woman is a case in point. She works full-time, cooks and ministers to her children full-time, co-ordinates the lives of every Serb in Melbourne’s east, and wonders why her garden is always three weeks ahead of her. Weeds grow at warp speed, shrubs and trees strangle paths, and lawns turn into breeze-rippled grass overnight.

Your average free-standing house surrounded by urban wilderness has perpetually clogged gutters, paint peeling off fascia-boards, mould growing in wardrobes, three cars dripping oil on the driveway, and dog droppings on the nature strip germinating a horde of deadly fungi. There’s just no time to do anything other than chase your hundreds of tails. This is modern suburban life with children.

On the other hand most apartments have one facing wall with a couple of windows. The time saving is obvious. What is not so obvious about occupying a compact space is the frustration of erecting three-tiered bunks for the children and their guests, attaching Ikea gadgetry to every vertical surface, and ducking under the bicycles hanging in the hallway.

The car is in the basement with the garbage tins, the vegetable garden is a parsley pots that falls off the balcony ledge, and pets have nowhere to go but in the shower stall. Edifying stuff.

The space-time continuum must have a mid-point, but where is it?

Rock on.   

mentors

I wake in BJ’s house in Long Gully. Her spare room is anything but spare. Two thin beds camp among piles of stuff and the Ikea shelves—still in packs—that will one day house those piles on stuff. The rest of the house is much the same.

BJ protects children on behalf of us all in her job with DHS. She buys her first house late last year and is still figuring out where to put the piles of stuff. I doubt she ever will and that things will continue to live wherever they alight when first brought into the house. Things around the house happen slowly while she’s busy living life.

She produces cereal a box of spicy nut clusters that taste like the box. I bid her farewell and point the Jazz toward Wedderburn. I’m training mentors for a youth mentoring program. Light rain falls as I park outside the community centre occupying the original Wedderburn Primary School. The place is closed but a big brick shithouse round the back is open. Thank you.

I have an hour to set up a stand-alone classroom with high ceilings built around the turn of the previous century and bone up on what I’m presenting. I shift chairs, tables and cobwebs. My friend Barb, the program co-ordinator, arrives and we catch up. She commutes each day from a Canary Island farm near Boort to Charlton.

Six mentors straggle in and Barb outlines the program. I outline the training, then for five hours we interact, brainstorm, discuss, laugh, and relate anecdotes. They’re good people, good country people, all giving their time voluntarily to spend a few hours each fortnight with a kid from the local school. They’re proud of their community’s togetherness. 

Lunch is a pot of tasty creamy pumpkin soup and tasteless sangers cut in triangles.

Their collective wisdom never ceases to delight me. Fine people make up every group of mentors I train. Today’s group contains a 75 year-old ex-farmer, a feisty retired female teacher, a local cricketer in his forties, the maintenance bloke from the school, an attractive woman in her mid-forties and a switched-on young worker from a community health service in a neighbouring town.

I drive back to Melbourne happy with my day’s work. I’ve facilitated (horrible word) great discussion, positively reframed things they said that didn’t quite hit the mark, and made sure everyone laughs and learns.

Finally at seven o’clock five days of perpetual motion come to an end when I step out of the car and the JRT walks out of the dark to greet me.

    

Rock on.   

logistics

A second day in the new office. Jill, the MM national manager is coming from Sydney to negotiate a strategic plan with her three Victorian state project officers. But first there’s public transport to negotiate.

I’m experimenting to find the best way to get to and from Collingwood. By road it’s 30 kilometres door to door from Place des Cons (my house Croydon eyrie) to Carringbush House in Collingwood. I hope never to travel to work by car, but large loads of our professional development materials might force my hand. Riding the bike on the road is not desirable. The Eastlink bike path is unlit and a fair bit of my commute will be in the dark.

By public transport I have the choice of train and train, or train and tram. Yesterday I go train-train, changing at Parliament. The knock-on effect of being four minutes late out of Croydon gets me to work half an hour later than anticipated. Today I plan to exit Parliament and hop on the 86 tram. Trouble is that commuters can’t get out of the station’s northern exit. It’s myki’s fault.

For over a year I use myki—order a plastic card, top up (your account), touch on (the card-reader) on entering the station, and touch off on exit—but most of my fellow Victorians stick to paper tickets, Metcards, and just walk out through the station barriers.

The changeover to myki-only is happening now. The fatal system flaw is not enough card-readers, slow card-readers at that, so thousands must queue to touch off and exit the station. It’s an entirely predictable nightmare. So this morning I don’t catch a tram because I can’t get out of the station.

Yesterday Cathy comes from Adelaide to induct Sasha and me. Today Jill arrives from Sydney to lead us through the logistics of what we, the Victorian MM project officers, do, and where we do it. Full-time Sasha gets half of metropolitan Melbourne and two country regions, Viv northern metro and one country region, and I score the eastern half of the state.

I reflect on my way home on how life shifts: a month ago I’m unemployed. Life is disorganised and pointing in many directions; today I’m hard-wired for action, locked into perpetual motion.

I get one hour at home to pack my mentor training materials, feed the JRT and apologise to him for abandoning him, and point the Jazz toward Bendigo where I’ll spend the night in BJ’s spare room. Tomorrow I train mentors in Wedderburn.

Rock on.   

office

I arrive home at twenty to one this morning after the trip from Hopetoun, sleep from two till five, then rise to watch The Arsenal. I switch on the box to find the game already in its seventh minute, no goals scored. In the next two minutes while I’m blinking moon-dust off my pupils, Wigan score twice and go on to win by those two goals to Arsenal’s one.

From seven till eight I hustle about the house, packing bags for my first morning in our new Collingwood office. The train from Croydon is six minutes late into Parliament. It’s a long escalator from Platforms 3 and 4 to Platforms 1 and 2. I watch my Epping train slide away down the tunnel. The next train is six minutes late.

The walk from Collingwood station along Gipps Street to the office takes ten minutes, if I catch the Hoddle Street lights. All the length of the street women’s fashion wholesale outlets are scattered among car garages, and small obscure businesses in refurbished factories and tanneries. Narrow lanes with cobbled gutters lead off Gipps Street; the odd narrow house hunkers between walls scrawled with graffiti.

The MM and KM office is in Carringbush House, a three-level retail and office development. The ground floor houses swish one-off retail outlets—no chains here—and a coffee shop frequented by the office workers from the two levels above. It’s open, bright and airy. Our office is at the rear on the third level.

The five new KM staff are in, making seven of them, and two of us, Sasha and me. A sheet of A4 paper with MM2 in huge print is tacked to the wall above my new desk, a cubicle, but spacious enough. A new ergonomic swivel chair camps under the desk and a new monitor is on top. I unpack the bags of MM materials I’ve cleared off my dining-room table and brought to work.

What will be the meeting room is full of boxes from Collins Street. Black plastic crates with orange lids line the walls, stacked three high. Cartons of trinkets—wristbands, coffee mugs, pens, key-rings and show bags—spill their booty on the floor. The KM program is flavour of the month and has dollars for giveaways.

Boxes fill the other two rooms of our suite. The only empty room is the storeroom, waiting for a photocopier, server, shelves and cupboards. The kitchen cupboards are full of white Ikea crockery, the drawers armed with shiny unblemished cutlery and crisp waffle-print tea-towels.

Cathy arrives from Adelaide with toys for Sasha me, a laptop and a mobile phone. Finally after four weeks I feel like I’m not just employed but that I’m connected and I belong somewhere.

Rock on.   

hopetoun

I pick up the hire car in Franklin Street late on Sunday arvo and we, the Victorian MM state project officers, meet in Coburg and depart at six. Viv pilots us out of town on the Western Ring and the Western Highway. We bypass Ballarat, although hungry. The only open eatery at Ararat is the dreaded Golden Arches.

Viv has a muffin and coffee and Sasha some sort of mac with fries, and an orange juice. Rather than starve I reluctantly order a fillet-o-fish burger with fries and an orange juice. The juice is fine, the chips salty, and the burger utterly revolting. How this food has captured the world is a monument to collective insanity.

On the way to Ararat Viv and Sasha, riding shotgun, talk, while I loll in the back seat, my arse buffeted by the rear axle. From Ararat I ride shotgun to Sasha, but I’m silent while Viv in the back and Sasha have an extended conversation about positive psychology.

We arrive at our Horsham accommodation at ten, agreeing to meet at seven for breakfast and be on the road at half past. In the morning I drive a straight line from Horsham to Hopetoun through wheat, barley and oat stubbled prairie. Monstrous concrete cylinders sprout in railway sidings along the road at Brim, Beulah and Galaquil.

We arrive at Hopetoun Secondary College at five to nine.

The school is a P12 with 90 secondary students and 40 primary students housed in a 1950s LTF (light timber frame). It’s the first day of term but student-free for staff to attend the MM professional development we’re here to present. A crisis is on: a new maths teacher has pulled the pin with no notice. The principal is desperately seeking Susan.

We gather in a classroom. Viv does her stuff with eighteen staff. Sasha and I suck it all in and wonder how we’ll present this PD when our apprenticeships are over.

After the gig I drive from Hopetoun to Dunolly. Darkness falls and Sasha takes the wheel. We’re back in Coburg at ten, after 12 hours together in the car. We make no pact, but the pact is sealed. For now we are solid.

Tomorrow Sasha and I will be inducted by Cathy from Adelaide, and on Wednesday the three of us will make a strategic plan when Jill, our national manager, comes down from Sydney. We will do these things in the new office in Collingwood.

Hopetoun is in the last pocket of Victoria I have not been to before, leaving only Jeparit and Rainbow, further west toward the South Australian border, for me to venture to one day.

Rock on.  

new atheism

According to Lord Wiki, New Atheism is the name given (by whom?) to the ideas of a collection of 21st-century writers—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, yoked together as "the Four Horsemen of New Atheism"—who have advocated that religion should be opposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises.

As an atheist since I gave up trying to believe in a god at age nine, I ask myself how New Atheism  differs from the old atheism I’ve practised all this time? Have I been non-believing in the wrong things, or in the wrong way?

Anyway, the faithless horsemen, minus Hitchens who is, no doubt with them in spirit, have ridden into our midst in Melbourne this weekend for the World Atheist Convention.

Yesterday’s big paper runs an editorial about the convention, saying it’s not about to decree whether or not God exists, but averring that it’s a good thing for atheists to gather and get people thinking. To get us in debating mood, a right-wing intellectual (oxymoron?) has a crack at the New Atheists in an opinion piece on the page opposite the editorial.

He says he doesn’t believe in God himself, but thinks atheists churlish to deny that religion is a wonderful thing. According to our right-thinking man, theologians gave us all the good stuff we have today: progress (undefined), the concept of human rights, and the separation of church and state in politics.

My reading of the last is that the church thought politics too grubby to touch; better to stay out of it altogether. Would that this were so. The church, of course, wields enormous political influence: try getting legislation through parliament about euthanasia or abortion and watch the church sit back and wait to see what happens.

As for New Atheism, I’m disappointed that ‘they’ (the media?) have branded atheism this way, or any other way. I’ll go on being an unreconstructed atheist, not born-again, not new, and certainly without denomination.

Rock on.   

privilege

Rock and Nicky teach at one of Melbourne’s more exclusive schools. It offers students a ride from Thredbo to their Melbourne campus. Today they’re training together.

Nicky picks me up and we motor out to Yarra Glum, bikes on the roof of her family 4WD monster. She pulls the bikes down because I can’t raise my left arm over my head 29 years after a motorbike hurled me into the earth and smashed my shoulder.

We pedal the Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, twelve undulating kilometres of crosswind, warm sunshine and green grass. A short grunt up and over Mt Rael drops us in Healesville. We join Rock and 25 student cyclists milling around in a car park. Parents stand watching beside their latest 4WDs. A mother kisses her son as though he were off to war rather than a bike ride.

A knot of five or six boys in new lycra and pristine white cleated shoes suggests serious capability among the students. Rock briefs the group and we roll out along River Road in three smaller bunches.

I have no official or other tie to the school, the group, or the event they’re training for, but Rock assigns Nicky and me to lead out the lycra bunch, enjoining us to stay together until Chum Creek primary school then climb at our own pace up the hill to Toolangi. I fear they’ll embarrass me pretty quickly.

The bunch sticks to my wheel eight clicks and two stiff bumps to the primary school. I peel off to let the bunch go but the bunch is one boy. He hares off and I dicker around waiting for Nicky and the others who are not in sight. I chat with a girl and two boys as they pass me. None is a rider, a regular cyclist. But they are riding classy machines and look the part.

We reassemble at Toolangi. A limit of 55kph is set for the descent of Myers Creek Road. I lead off because 55 doesn’t interest me. If I’m first to the bottom no one will know I’ve fanged down at over 60.

We gather again at a swanky Healesville bakery. I pace up and down the verandah while kids and parents and teachers take coffee out the back. Mothers—I don’t see one father—load their sons’ and daughters’ bikes into the 4WDs. One MILFy mum is pornographically pneumatic.

Nicky and I pedal back to Yarra Glum on the more challenging Old Healesville Road. I ask if her students realise that of all the kids in the world, less than half go to school and of those, less than half a per cent go to the privileged establishment these kids attend.

She says she thinks that although they know it, it doesn’t stop them complaining that someone has it better than they do. And whenever anything breaks or goes missing, whatever it is, whatever it’s worth, it’s soon replaced.

Rock on.

apps

Download them from the app shop, the app market, the app warehouse. Applications. Thirty thousand of them.

To me application means devoting oneself to a task. But the meaning is superseded by application as widget or e-device for an iPhone or iPad. I try a few on my smartphone but can’t overcome the feeling that they’re nothing more than time-wasters and after six months idle time I expunge them.

I’m big on apps: appliances.

My fridge dies and I replace it with a reconditioned second-hand appliance. Then my vacuum cleaner fails utterly—the hose connection to the machine packs it in; the power-head crashed on the last outing. My good woman’s coffee-machine dribbles to a halt. Her kids ask me to join them in buying her a new one for her birthday.

I plug myself into the interweb. The Germans make reliable and effective appliances. I go direct to a Teutonic vacuum cleaner company’s website and order the dog-and-cat super turbo on clearance special.

The Italians do coffee well. I find the best price online and order a fire-engine red Italian espresso machine from a virtual appliance warehouse. They promise to keep me up to the minute on its delivery status.

Meanwhile our owners corporation decides to acquire a lawnmower and delegates me to make the purchase. I research and decide, but must wait for a debit card from the bank. It arrives yesterday. I set off just after eight this morning to buy oranges and a Masport 158cc grass-cutter.

My phone zhings in the car park at Chirnside Park shops. An email tells me that the coffee machine is in a van that departed Mooroolbark at 7:51 bound for my place. I hightail it home. The van is in the driveway. I sign for the box and move my car out of the van’s exit path. But the driver alights, opens the rear door and extracts another box. My new vacuum cleaner.

The JRT and I unbox the apps and  read the manuals together over a nice cuppa. I vacuum the house and turbo clean the furniture. It’s one mean mothersucker. After lunch I’m in the carport sparking up a shiny red lawnmower. Oil, water, another manual. Pull the cord and cut the grass in front of units 2 and 4.

At five I’m in my good woman’s kitchen installing her early birthday present—the el schmicko coffee-maker. My good woman savours its product and gives it a huge thumbs-up.

Apps, eh.

Rock on.  

bentleigh

After three months at my grandparents’ house in Alphington, we move to a rented house at 31 Marston Street in Bentleigh. Neither my mother nor father has ever lived in Melbourne’s sprawling south-east. My father grew up at 551 Heidelberg Road, my mother in Best Street, Reservoir.


Surrounding street names lodge in my brain: enter from Jasper Road via London Street; Vale and Geel Streets are at either end of Marston Street; Wilma and Roma Streets run off it. I have my first fight in Wilma Street. Memory tells me several kids have a go at me but does not tell me the reason.


I am shocked at age eight by the sheer fury of my retaliation. I beat off all the attackers, frightening them and me. I realise that I might do real damage with my anger. I don’t want to feel that again. 


Having barely started grade 2 at Fairfield, I make a new beginning at Bentleigh West State School. The main building is impressive solid red brick, but I finish grade 2 in a portable. 


I catch a bus to school. Kids dribble gobs of spit down the window panes: last to the bottom wins. Each bus ticket has a number and the driver nominates a winning ticket at the school gate. Combinations like 2525 or 6111 win and the lucky ticket-holder gets their fare returned. It’s never me.


Each class at Bentleigh West lines up after lunch and marches back to its room to the rat-tat-tat of boys beating kettle drums. I so want to play those drums. My mother buys me drumsticks, my first participation in a fad. I practise on every surface, horizontal, vertical or oblique, but when my after-lunch turn finally comes, I am hopeless on drums.


At the very back of the school is a thick patch of buffalo grass alive with a frenzy of grasshoppers. Boys pounce like cats, fill their pockets, and release the dazed hoppers in sleepy afternoon  classrooms. I am one of them. 


I remember one friend: Roger. He lives blocks away in Fromer Street. Roger’s family take me to Brighton beach. My mother sews me a pair of racy silver bathers in stretchy material.


The year turns. I start a new grade at school, upstairs in the big brick building, only to be whisked away once again. My parents buy a solid red-brick house two railway stations closer to the city in Ormond.


Rock on.   

pug

I hope my sister doesn't read this. I’m looking after her dog for a couple of days. I've always described myself as a dog person, but I have to revise that to a certain dog person. Certain dogs are hard to like. Her dog qualifies in spades.

Last year she has the JRT while I’m riding the bike in France for 28 days. The JRT is all personality and hugely entertaining. But by week three, of course, he rules the house, commandeering all the dog toys and taking over all the dog bed-space.

Her dog is here for three days, so I can’t complain. I will, however, give it a shot. I’ve had enough of her dog after three hours. It doesn’t have a name: it’s just The Pug. The vowel is wrong: read pig, not pug.

It grunts and snuffles and wheezes like a pig. It’s got a silly corkscrew tail like a pig’s. The Pug is deaf and comatose until a molecule of food is produced, then, like a pig, it’s likely to remove your hand somewhere above the elbow. The JRT is a model of restraint and manners by comparison.

The Pug is devoid of personality. It doesn’t engage in any way either with me or the JRT. It defies any instruction to come, go, go outside, or get in its bed. It’s crowding the small space under my desk as I try to write. It circles like a terrestrial vulture if I enter the kitchen, hoovering up crumbs and leaving snot-trails on the lino.

According to Lord Google, the pug is a toy dog bred to adorn the laps of Chinese sovereigns. My sister is an actophilist, a teddy bear collector: it’s no wonder she has a toy dog. Some people might call a pug cute; ugly is closer. They are susceptible to overheating, obesity and pharyngeal reflex. Your honour, I rest my case.

But I must not complain. My sister and her husband are toddling round Wilson’s Prom with my parents. This is good Samaritan stuff at its finest. I escort my parents round the south of Western Australia after my grand-daughter is born in Perth 19 months ago, and it’s not’s easy.

I have the pug for 56 hours. Twenty-four down, thirty-two to go. 

Rock on.   

homework

I’m officially ‘working from home’, which really means working at home. In effect I am at home, trying to work, but being distracted by stuff.

I’m working from home because I have no office to go to, no desk to sit at, no phone to call people with, and no PC to work on. In theory this state of affairs is the result of lawyers wrangling over leases, but could just be bad management by my employer. I’ve not been around long enough to know.

I have no laptop and no mobile phone I can be contacted on should I leave the office I don’t work at. The absence of these essentials is bad management; my employer has known for months that it was about to employ someone yet the IT remains on order.

The ‘work’ I’m doing at home is reading. I’m also considering a strategic plan sent to me by the colleague who has been in the job for six years. The plan is dated 2010. I’m charged with writing a bit of a biography and informing my national colleagues of my existence.

I have a calendar for the next two months which includes travel to Sydney, Darwin, Brisbane and Canberra as part of my training. I will both observe my more experienced peers presenting professional development workshops to groups of teachers, and present some of the training as I feel on top of the material.

I receive an email today from the project manager who will fly in next week to induct me and the other new Victorian project officer. She asks if I’ve made arrangements for my trip to Sydney. I reply cheekily that I don’t know the travel process and hope it’s part of the induction.

This is my fourth week in the job, the dream job. Sometimes it feels like a dream, as if it isn’t really happening, because not much is happening. I spend my first four days in intense learning in Adelaide and Newcastle, then four days doing bugger all mostly at home.

No expense is being spared to train me, but I don’t have a chair to sit on.  

       

Rock on.