Just had a very, very strange evening. After we’d both got in from work, Steve suggested we visit Rosemary in hospital. Rosemary has just had three operations for appendicitis and complications. We got to Bathurst Base and discovered she was actually in the intensive care unit. She looked frankly terrible, with a plastic tube running into her nose and a maze of other wires and tubes everywhere, and even her legs from the knee down were in support-hose. After a while she started to throw up into a light green plastic bowl. I half hid behind the curtain, thinking she might want to vomit in private. Steve stayed close by, trying to be helpful, passing her a tissue. Then he began to say he was feeling light-headed. He was sitting in the chair beside Rosemary’s bed, holding his head down to get blood into it. I said, if you’re really feeling faint, put your head right down between your knees. But then he suddenly went into free-fall, a dead weight, dropping to the floor. I was trying to stop him from falling but I was in the wrong position and his dead-weight was too much for me, and his head clonked the floor as he went down. I was not particularly perturbed at this point. Steve had fainted before. I motioned to the nurse to come but not frantically. But then Steve was stretched out cold face down on the floor, not coming round at all. He was going blue. Did I see with my own eyes that he was going blue, or is this something I’m picturing in hindsight, after the word had gone round that Steve had gone blue? I got really scared. I remember dashing over to a nurse and saying, “My boyfriend’s completely collapsed!” But everyone was already doing all they could. None of this seemed quite real. Then Steve made a snorting noise and suddenly he was entirely back with us, lying on the floor, looking up at us all, talking perfectly lucidly. He’d completely gone and now he was completely back. Now that he seemed himself again, I stopped feeling scared. Steve had obviously just fainted, triggered by Rosemary’s vomiting, the way he’d fainted last year when he got his bandage removed at Orange Base hospital and he suddenly saw blood. And he’d fainted as an altar boy on a sweltering day during Stations of the Cross. And he sometimes feels light-headed when he smells the disinfectant in vet hospitals. He’s obviously a bit of a fainter. I thought we’d just be going home now. I imagined myself driving, not Steve, in honour of his recent faint. But this was only the beginning of the evening. Having set alarms ringing and medical machines in motion, it was impossible to back out. First there was the puffing young Asian doctor who literally came running, thinking there was a cardiac arrest on his hands. He checked Steve out, touched him over different parts of his face, “Tell me when you can feel this.” The story of Steve’s momentary disappearance from earth-plane was now hardening into its final form. He’d stopped breathing, there had been no pulse, he had gone blue. I even heard the words navy blue. For me these things were no longer true the moment Steve snorted and opened his eyes and went pink again. But for the nurses who had taken vital signs during those out-cold seconds – how long, exactly? impossible to say – this was now what Steve was: a man who had stopped breathing, stopped pumping blood, and had gone blue. A wheelchair came for Steve. Suddenly, he was an invalid. He’d been visiting someone in hospital and now he was caught in the tentacles of hospital himself. Downstairs, an ECG (normal), more testing of reflexes (all normal). Everything in pink good health. But he’d gone blue, so he was to be monitored overnight. He wasn’t to be let out. I drove the National Parks fire truck home to get his toiletry bag, photography magazine, spy book and a few other things and some Coca Cola, lolly snakes, Caramelo Bear and other treaties from the BP service station. I was aware that the attendant might think I was going to have a private late-night binge, but I brazened it out. I drove the VW back to the hospital. I ate the cashews from the bag of treats. Steve had one of the nasty “meusli bars” – it was made of rice bubbles and sugar and artificial strawberry flavour, I could smell it from where I sat. Eventually, after a long wait, the sort of listless wait you do in hospitals (we had waits like this last year at Orange Base when Steve put an axe through his foot), he was wheeled back upstairs INTO THE BED NEXT TO ROSEMARY’S! “Now you can visit Rosemary all night,” I said.

A lot of mice are losing their lives in our traps, sometimes two at a time. Today, Steve asked, “How many mice do you think we’ve got? Fifteen, twenty?” I said, “It’s definitely a whole village.” We’ve got four traps out tonight.

My Fair Lady: Spectacular production by Orange Civic Theatre on Sunday. But I prefer the Pygmalion ending. It’s unendurable that Eliza goes back to fetch Higgins’s slippers.

We let out a possum the other day – took it up to Boundary Road in a cage, let it out, shone the torch up the tree as it went up. I wonder how it’s getting on. We looked back down to the lights of town. Steve said the possum would either make its way into town, or die.

This morning Steve got up to find Bertie had brought the spatula and other kitchen implements down off the kitchen bench and out into the “wasted space” (a nameless territory between the old part of the house and the kitchen) and he’d knocked over the vegetable oil while he was at it, and because I hadn’t tightened the lid of the vegetable oil, it had gone everywhere. And there was a bloody young mouse in the trap.

The Western Advocate didn’t use Steve’s photo of the mandala dissolution ceremony down at the river.

Yesterday Steve and I got to the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery late (Steve getting his clothes off the line so Bertie wouldn’t trash them) to find the place packed, art gallery as festival. Crowds and crowds of people, the sound of chanting, couldn’t see a thing. I passed my video camera to a tall man, who held it up high over his head, pointed down – this worked – two or three of us peered into the tiny flap screen, seeing what the Tibetan monks were doing. They were sweeping up the mandala, destroying it in deft strokes. Impermanence. They put their hats on, those yellow hats that look like 1980s punk hairdos, and rang their bells, clashed their cymbals and generally created a spectacle. They walked out of the gallery, followed by their fans, all the way through the streets of Bathurst to the Macquarie River. We went past Ellie’s cafe, the ANZ bank, past Red Rooster, past the old people playing bowls, and across the expanse of green grass. I kept darting out in front to get footage, way too much footage; all we’d ever use is a few seconds here and there, but I find it impossible to stop recording in situations like this – Just in Case. Down at the river, we photographers and videoists took our shoes and socks off and rolled up our jeans and went into the shallow water to get a better vantage point. It was a wonderful scene in the autumn sunshine: the horns, the cymbals, the chanting, the men in robes, with a big crowd of curious and swept-up Bathurstians behind them. Geshe Sonam Thargye poured the sand mandala (actually bits of coloured, ground-up marble – I called it “sandala” by mistake – I quite like that word – it takes in the sandals, the sand, the mandala) into the river. Then it was over and people started walking back.

At six o clock, the opening of the new exhibition at Warpstanza Gallery: Marinka Kordis and John Lethbridge’s The Art of Saying Sorry. With an exhibition title like that, I’d been expecting something more explicit about John Howard and the stolen generations, but there was nothing immediately obvious in the work itself. When I interviewed him for WARP TV yesterday, John Lethbridge said his work was in tune with the spirit of Aboriginal art, it was concerned with the “ground” and a connection with the idea that we all come from the primordial slime of nature, we are not above it in the Christian imposition sense. (Very rough paraphrase). His most striking work was a massive red and black Mambo-like piece (painted in the 80s before Mambo) which he said was referenced by Leger, only pointier. One of Marinka’s paintings was of a “black boy” (grass tree) with the image of a white woman sensuously reclining behind it – to her, a reconciliation image. The most beautiful of her paintings was “Vanishing Point”, a long landscape going all the way across the back wall of the gallery. Bathurst Regional Art Gallery director Richard Perram was there, and said the monks had attracted 2000 visitors through the week and 1000 people came into the gallery for the mandala dissolution ceremony. I ran out of battery before I could get footage of Marinka and John talking to each other. Steve had to stop making spag bol and come out on a rescue mission with battery.

Back at home finally having the spag bol with Helen, Ray & Dominic. Renovations are driving them mad. Pongo, their rabbit, apparently likes to play. I didn’t know pet rabbits played with humans. Dominic gets rabbit books out of the library and is quite an expert in rabbits. He wore a handsome set of red Mickey Mouse pyjamas which looked even more striking against Bertie’s glossy black fur.

It’s a lot harder to be a sports photographer than I thought. On tv you see all those fabulous close-ups of faces as they go to kick a ball, and then the magnificent wide-shot as it sails over the field towards the goal… well, Steve & I were pretty shite at capturing the Tibetan monks’ soccer game at the indoor stadium the other day. The light was dull, I kept missing key moments of play, and the zoomed-in close-ups are all shaky and horrible. It was good to see the game, though – monks in long maroon skirts kicking a ball around with friendly young Bathurstians. A highschool girl approached me and said, “Are they real monks? Or is this just a joke?” I said, “Oh, they’re full-on monks!” I now have about an hour and a half of mostly awful footage which I’m handing over to WARP TV member Tom Bannigan for editing. There might be a minute or so worth using.

National stage: Barry Healy emails to say he’s been helping to organise a Stolen Wages campaign, and that there was a contingent in Fremantle’s May Day rally

Home front: There’s little squeaking sounds behind the wall near the toaster. Maybe we’ve orphaned a nest of baby mice.

Seasonal information: Autumn leaves raining down. Sitting in the courtyard at Zeigler’s cafe, autumn leaves landing in your coffee.