Category Archives: Bertie

The esky in front of the post office

danger_eskyThere it was, an esky. Just a small esky, sitting on the footpath outside the Bathurst post office. Next thing you know, the whole street has been cordoned off and there are cops everywhere. The cops don’t want to touch it, lift the lid. They do a bit of thermal imaging on it, from a distance. Looks like it’s empty. It’s probably empty.

Eventually, after some hours, the all-clear. It’s just an esky.

All the way through this adventure, the police referred to it as a “suspicious package”. That sounds more important, more fearsome, than esky. Esky is a friendly little word, redolent of backyard barbies, camping, car-race watching. “We are concerned about a suspicious package,” sounds more dignified than: “We are concerned about an empty esky.”

But these are days of terror, and people are twitchy.

It would appear there’s no actual terror around here. I just went to the playing fields with Bertie, under a big blue sky with fluffy clouds. I stopped at the Visitors’ Centre cafe to grab a coffee, tying Bertie to the bike rack. The waitress ran out with a white plastic jug of water to pour into the dog bowl, because it’s a hot day. It was only in the car on the way home, coffee in the holder, Bertie panting in the back, that I was reminded about the terror. “Paris has seen terror before but not on this scale,” came the sound of a BBC reporter’s voice.

What complete nonsense that sentence was. Paris has known terror before, and on a far grander scale than last week’s atrocity. There was, for example, The Terror, the days of heads rolling away from the guillotine during the French Revolution, the same revolution celebrated every July 14. The war on Jews in Vichy France. And in October 1961, the massacre of 200 Algerians marching in favour of their country’s independence from France. Deep in her heart, Paris knows all about terror.

Terror is being perpetrated all the time, in many parts of the world, mostly affecting non-white residents of countries that don’t capture our imaginations the way Paris does. Paris is a mental home away from home, so we’re twitchy.

Meanwhile, with attention focused on the suspicious esky, Bathurst Regional Council was voting Yes to a quarry at Napoleon Reef. Local residents who had fought for eight months against the proposal – citing loss of biodiversity and negative impacts on a residential area – watched as the motion was moved by Coote, Seconded by Aubin, supported by Westman and Morse.  North abstained (non pecuniary interest) and Hanger voted against, giving a final vote of 4 to 1.  Councillors Bourke and Jennings were absent.

At the same time, the latest State of the Environment report was tabled, in which the importance of local biodiversity was underlined. Clearly, we are to process such information in different parts of the brain. Quarries are to be dealt with in the “economy” part of the brain; “biodiversity” is to be dealt with in the abstract, feel-good, environmental part of the brain. This means you can vote for a quarry that will destroy a fragile environment at the same time as you express support for biodiversity – as a concept. This allows you to hold competing ideas in the brain at the same time without falling into the abyss of cognitive dissonance.

I’m totally pissed off, to be honest. ISIS terrorists are getting everyone to play right into their hands. Paris is all about terror, now, swamping media coverage in the lead-up to the crucial climate change talks. Facebook is awash with people throwing up their hands and giving up on the human race, the sort of nihilism that makes you turn to sites like Cake Wrecks for relief (as I did last night, for an embarrassingly long time). Polls in Britain are supporting on-ground war against Islamic State. And here in Bathurst, we don’t just pave paradise, we dig another bloody great big hole.

But there is hope. Here’s Jack Black and current Internet cat sensation, Lil Bub, urging us to send a message to Paris:

 

The snow job and the murder-suicide

Snowy back yard.

Bertie in the snow-covered back yard, Bathurst, July 17, 2015.

Last Friday was strange. We were up at about one or two in the morning, standing in the pool of light just outside the back door, looking at the white dots gently, steadily, coming down out of a black sky. The black dog was being speckled with white stuff. We had white stuff on our shoulders. Snow. Snow, for most Australians, is an unusual thing. It’s something to get excited about. It’s transient. And then it was daylight. I’d hardly slept because I don’t sleep well these days and being awake for the snow had made it worse, so I was snuggled far down under the doona, but Steve was making me get up to have a look. Out of the bedroom window, everything was white. In the back yard, the little tree we’d planted over my dead cat ten years ago was half its height, branches touching the ground, weighed down by snow. Steve made snowballs in his bare hands and threw them at Bertie, who caught them in his teeth. Unlike a tennis ball, they had no resistance. His teeth snapped down over them as though they were made of nothing. He wagged his tail furiously.

Snowmen appeared all over town.

When Steve got home after work, he asked if I’d heard the news. This seemed odd – I’d been living the news of the day along with everyone else. It was Snow Day. What more news could there be? So you haven’t heard about Elie’s Cafe? No. What about it?

Elie’s Cafe is one of the town’s most popular cafes. It’s diagonally opposite the Council chambers, not far from the Western Advocate, in the main street, near the war memorial. It’s housed in the old Royal Hotel where town leaders once addressed the citizens from the balcony. That Cafe. Well, Elie Issa, the owner, was found dead in his living room today. Everyone knows Elie. He’s the jovial man in the corner opposite the counter, laughing with friends who join him at the table, poring over the day’s papers. To go into Elie’s Cafe is to also see and hear Elie, a permanent fixture. Oh. He is dead. Not only that, but his girlfriend is dead, too, and they were found in the living room with a gun nearby, and there are no other suspects, and they’re saying it was a murder-suicide.

And you go into cognitive dissonance. You hold the two ideas in your brain – this jovial, laughing man greeting his customers and friends, and the bloody aftermath of violence – and they don’t match up. This is what it is to be shocked: the world is not quite what you thought it was.

And then, in the hours and days afterwards, a narrative framework  begin to emerge that might hold these ideas together. The next day, in the Sydney Morning Herald, there’s a story based on interviews with friends and family of Nadia Cameron, the beautiful woman found dead with Elie in the living room of the ordinary house on Rosemont Avenue, Kelso. They say she’d broken up with him, and he was trying to win her back. They say he’d been jealous and controlling and she wanted nothing more to do with him, but she felt sorry for him. And now the story begins to settle around a national conversation about domestic violence and women dying at the hands of men who would control them. A new Elie Issa emerges, a Jekyll and Hyde: jolly at work, murderously jealous at home. Laughter as snow job; as a thin veneer over the darkness.

There’s a story, and then a shock. But we can’t stay in shock, in the fact of our not-knowing. As quickly as possible, we want to build a new story so that we are not left hanging in that strange space between ideas that seem to have no connection.

The next day, the sun was shining. Snow Day had vanished. There were just tell-tale patches of white in the shade, and odd white piles that had been snowmen. And the day after that, just damp ground.

Being here

Mt Panorama, Bathurst, in the middle of the Antarctic vortex, Sunday July 12, 2015.

This blog post is coming to you from the midst of a polar vortex. That’s right, we are living through a weekend of weather that is visiting us from the Antarctic. It is cold. There is snow. (Note to my northern hemisphere readers: yes, we do think tiny scraps of snow are a big deal.) Actually, here in South Bathurst, it’s not anywhere near as enchanting as it is in surrounding districts, where the snow is staying on the ground, turning everything into fairyland. It’s just dark and cold and raining on and off. Today Steve and I drove to the top of Mt Panorama to take Bertie for a run. On the way up, we saw hundreds of sulphur crested cockatoos standing in a paddock, looking cold. They – along with their cousins, the little correllas – have been hanging around town for few days, some sort of cockatoo convention. Up on top of the mountain, we got out of the car and the cold air attacked my face, freezing my sinuses. It made me think of a winter in Prague, many moons ago, when I walked across a couple of suburbs to our soviet-era flat in the dark, in December, and my face just about froze off. (That was when I was with Steve the First.) Bertie leaped out of the car and bounded about, invigorated. I picked up five vintage ring pulls for my collection. Always rich pickings after it rains.

This is where I live, now. At the foot of Mt Panorama, known for thousands of years as Wahluu, not far from the Macquarie River, known for thousands of yeas as the Wambool.

I live here, but these days I’m always cross-referencing back to Carnarvon, where I lived as a child and teenager. It’s so easy to do this, now. There’s a constant drip of information coming from the I Grew Up in Carnarvon Facebook group. Time collapses. In the middle of winter I can keep one part of my mind in the sunshine that pours down on the red earth and the glittering Indian Ocean; a place where snow is just an idea. As I write this, it’s 19 degrees Celsius in Carnarvon (it’s 3 degrees, here). At the moment Carnarvon is witnessing a mass break-out of native burrowing bees. The shire council has blocked off the road to allow the bees to do their thing. The Facebook group, made up of residents and ex-residents alike, is following along as Antoinette Roe gives updates on progress. These bees are new to me. I never knew them when I actually lived in Carnarvon. But I did know the bird flower and the chiming wedgebill (the “Did y’ get drunk?” bird), two local living things that are often reminisced about on the site.

I’ve been living here in Bathurst for over ten years. Gradually, I’m getting to know the plants and animals that live here. I’m actually on a forced march at the moment, having dobbed myself in to help organise an exhibition of local plants and animals for later this year. The other day, I went out to the launch of a new landcare group at Napoleon Reef, about fifteen minutes out of town on the road to Sydney. You turn left off the highway, follow the road to the end, and park. It’s a matter of walking down – quite a steep walk down – into the reserve. That day, cold but sunny, the white trunks of gum trees stood all around us. Aboriginal elders Dinawan Gerribang (aka Bill Allen) and Jill Bower performed a smoking ceremony and dabbed us all in white ochre to celebrate the group’s beginning.

With a little fire going, Bill said the smoking ceremony was a way of expressing yindyamarra. He said this Wiradyuri word means “respect, honour, go slow, be polite and be honorable about it.” He said this sort of respect was not just for each other but for “everything around us”.

Bill Allen at Napoleon Reef

He said Europeans came to this land and saw timber and grazing land, whereas Aboriginal people were steeped in the idea of yindyamarra.

“That’s what people have to understand,” he said. “We had two completely opposing types of ideas on how to use the land.”

He said Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people could try to work together by building a bridge. “That’s what the Bathurst Aboriginal Community Elders are wanting to do, is build that bridge.”

He said he preferred the word “bridge” to the word “reconciliation” because “there was never ever any relationship with each other in the first place. It was just, one lot was already here and the other lot come here on their boats and they just clashed with each other over the land.

“So, I can’t call it reconciliation. We’d prefer to use the term bridge- building so we get an understanding of each other so then we can connect, which is what a bridge does.”

As he used bunches of eucaplyptus leaves to create a thick, billowing smoke, Bill said it was important to do a smoking ceremony as you go into a new area in the bush. “It’s to show respect to the spirits, it opens your mind so you can see what’s around you.”

There were bittersweet moments in the ceremony, with reminders of a dispossession that wasn’t so very long ago and the vastly different socio-economic position of the small Aboriginal group standing behind the fire and the group of mostly white middle-class homeowners and landowners assembled in front of it. Bill said he loved to be on the land, but he didn’t own any. And then there was an old memory from school, of being chided for not turning up, for “going walkabout”.

“I say to people, well youse go walkabout more than I do because I can’t afford to go on holiday. You’ve got a big caravan you take it all up there wherever you go. That’s your little sacred site!”

He ended his speech by urging us to be more considerate of nature. “We want to take out all the resources and make it all for the now and make ourselves feel like we’re important more than everything else. Well, we are important, but we’ve got to remember that everything around us, too, is important.”

After this gentle lecture, we were invited to walk through the smoke and then to get three dabs of wet white ochre on the forehead. It was wonderful to walk through that smoke and to receive my dabs, so generously given. I’ll never really be a local here, but it made me feel so much more a part of this place.

The black cockies of the Blayney Road Common

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I remember Mum saying that pierced ears were common – this is a very long time ago, and I don’t think she still holds this view. This retro opinion came back to me as I wrote the title for this piece, because I quite like the word common. It’s friendly, democratic, all-in, non-snooty. And it can even be a bit trashy. The Blayney Road Common, just out of Bathurst on the road to Blayney, is all of the above. The Blayney Road Common is a bit of land on the side of the road, with trees in it, and a lot of weeds, a lot of rubbish. It’s a place where people might throw an old mattress or sit under a tree and smoke a bong (I have evidence of this – see below). Nearby, there’s public toilets that are always locked these days but are well known as a gay “beat”.

There’s a greyhound practice track there; it has obviously been there a long time. Generations of rusting old numbered dog boxes are there, as well as the current, new, aluminium spring-loaded new one. Before I got sick, I used to race Bertie to the end. He’d always win if he didn’t get distracted by a smell or a suspicious movement in the grass.

As you get out of the car, a mob of kangaroos silently hops away. The big buck kangaroo – macho chest of rippling muscles – might wait, standing there to watch your movements, letting you get quite close before turning on his thin angles and bounding away after his mates. The earth is a mass of round rabbit droppings just a little smaller in diameter than the marbles you used to play with at school. There are rabbit scratchings everywhere – shallow holes.

Lately, the Blayney Road Common has been undergoing a health and beauty regime. Weeds are being cleared, native plants planted, rubbish collected. Areas that were so thick with blackberry and other weeds that you couldn’t see through them or walk through them have been cleared, bringing the long-hidden detritus of generations to light. Some of it is just recent rubbishy rubbish; other items are so old that they’ve becoming interesting, collectable. I picked up an old glass bottle stamped with the following:

THIS BOTTLE ALWAYS REMAINS
THE PROPERTY OF
SCOTT’S DETERGENTS A(ASIA) PTY LTD

The “ALWAYS” seems brave, now. How long was always, for Scott’s detergent company? A couple of decades? A hundred years? Last time I saw this bottle I left it there, under the theory that this was the commons, and the commons are for everyone, and this includes old bottles in old middens. When I went back today, to a little spot near the black cockies’ roosting tree, it was still there. I took it. I decided it was “rubbish”, and rubbish should be tidied up, shouldn’t it?

I’m not so sure rubbish should be tidied up, or privatised. I don’t mind eyesores. So-called eyesores – abandoned houses, old industrial sites – get the imagination going. Look at this improvised bong, made from a plastic drink bottle and a bit of garden hose, found under a tree.

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I took some photos of the big old dead eucalyptus tree where every dusk, black cockies come in for landing. They come in dribs and drabs, squealing and squeaking like rusty doors.

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Probably because I have a big pile of marking to do, I didn’t want to leave the Blayney Road Common today. I wanted to stay, and to botanise.

In her book White Beech, Germaine Greer remarks that when women of a certain age fall for botanising, they fall hard. I am in danger of this. I look at all the plants and feel the vast depths of my ignorance. What is this? What is its name? I feel the urge to catalogue, taxonomise, process all these living things.

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Bertie and I arrived at the deep dip behind the Starting point of the practice greyhound track (with its hand-painted sign, Please Empty Dogs Before Entering Track) and looked down into the filthy bit of water below. You couldn’t even see this before; now it has been cleared. We heard the frogs talking. And then Bertie decided that a bit of water, no matter how lousy, was always worth a try. He slithered down the bank and sat in it, amongst the bits of abandoned things. The frogs went silent. Bertie churned up the greenish water, made it go brown. He closed his jaws over a large stick, scrambled up the bank. The frogs started up again.

Ring pulls, rabbit knees and cream of tartar

Larissas_cushion_aI’ve finally finished Larissa’s cushion: a zebra finch in the middle (she’s doing a PhD on animal personality); her four kelpies around the edges with decorative guppies (Larissa has also studied the personality of guppies). All rendered in Hobbytex. The blue and red edging is old bias binding tape found in a sewing box inherited from her paternal grandmother. That’s one for the Completion files. Completion feels good.

And there were rich pickings on the ring pull fields today. I went up to the top of Mount Panorama late this afternoon. It was all grey and gloomy. The earth was damp with fungi rising. Some hoons had been through, leaving two great circular patches of rough dirt. The grinding motion of the tyres had turned over the top centimetre or two of topsoil, bringing long-buried ring-pulls to the surface. They lay there in the poor light, ripe for the picking. I felt like one of those birds that follow tractors, going for the worms.

I struggled with my bad right knee. I bent down and rubbed at it and tried to ease the kneecap into the right spot. That seemed to help. I told Steve about the knee book I’m reading. It’s the memoir of a man who buggered his knees cycling up hills and eventually found his own way to a cure. His thesis is that a lot of light movement is better for bad knees than heavy intermittent workouts to build up the quadriceps. To support this he quotes a study in which three sets of teen rabbits were treated for bad knees in different ways. (The rabbits did not show up in the lab with bad knees; they were given them. Under anaesthetic, they each had small holes drilled directly

Rabbit knees

into the cartilage.) When they woke up from their operations, the rabbits were either in a plaster cast (immobilisation) or rigged up in a contraption that lightly, continuously, bent and unbent their bad knees. A third group was given heavy, intermittent exercise (simulating a regular workout at the gym). The group that had their knees gently bent and unbent for them did a lot better than the other two.1 This was discovered by killing all of them and pulling apart their tiny knees to examine the rates of healing of the cartilage. I told Steve about this tragedy and he said, “Well, you want good knees”, as if to say, “To make an omelette you have  to break eggs.” Or: “Cartilage research has its costs and benefits.”

Earlier in the day, I rested my knee on the coffee table as I spoke to my old school friend, Tricia Fong. She asked what the thing with the green dresses was all about. Oh yes, the Invisible Bodies performance, only a week ago but now rapidly receding in my mind. I told her about it, and she said the teal dresses had made her think of the fund-raising stalls we’d had in primary school. For one of these, Mum had made tiny teal dresses for Barbie dolls. These were simple affairs involving a bit of shirring over the ample plastic bust creating a gathered skirt. I said I couldn’t remember this at all, but as I said it, the hint of a possible memory began to awaken. These are little gifts,  bits of my own life given back to me. Which brought us around to toffees, also sold on these stalls, which I do remember. I used to love making them. Tricia said she remembered how, at my house, we added a pinch of cream of tartar, but that her own mother didn’t have any in the house and toffees made there weren’t as good. So after our phone call I went on a cream of tartar research mission. Cream of tartar is the acidic crystalline substance that spontaneously forms during wine making. In cooking it can stabilise whipped egg white and it prevents crystalisation in toffee. Yes. Our cake-stall toffees were the clearest, purest red, like thick glass.

 


1. Salter, R. B., Simmonds, D. F., Malcolm, B. W., Rumble, E. J., MacMichael, D., & Clements, N. D. (1980). The biological effect of continuous passive motion on the healing of full-thickness defects in articular cartilage. An experimental investigation in the rabbit. The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, 62(8), 1232-1251.