junk theory

Strange, but true. Around Sydney Harbour, during the Festival,

A ghostly Chinese junk will glide slowly along the shoreline with a series of images and portraits of people who live in the Sutherland Shire, projected onto its sails.

see: www.sydneyfestival.org.au

If you can see the picture that illustrates the event: the main drag coming down is the Kingsway, to the left is the cinema complex (see a section of this blog I haven't written yet) I saw Pulp Fiction here as a new release, on the right, hidden in the shadows is Northies, a pub I've never drunk at. Back on the left are the palms that gave a section of the beach up beyond Wanda the name Jerusalem, the palms were planted out for months, maybe a couple of years waiting to be put into place. And in the foreground there's a person on a bike, a surfer walking back up, and a couple walking down. This area, or plaza, was patrolled at night last time I knew, a security guard, or guards, moving kids on. This may've added to the sense of "this is my place, but not my place" that lead to the riot. A minor part, but something that would add. When I was young there was the Working Man's Club down here and at the very end near the beach, a run down kiosk, large and weather board white, a sand-blasted Coca-Cola ad on the side. (Perhaps.) Now there are cafes and restaurants and the area is monitored by cameras and by security, and young kids hanging out are moved on. Go elsewhere.

I don't know. My brother lived over the other side of Dunningham Park for some years. He'd complain in his own way about not being able to park his car. Eventually he sold and moved down the coast.

it's a long way to the shop . . .

. . . if you want a sausage roll

I remember singing that parody/fake line as I walked to school one morning, down Lilli Pilli Point Road, just past the corner shops, past the Roberts' house, past the shop where I could possibly've bought a sausage roll.

Now and again I dream about those shops, the Lilli Pilli corner shops. When I was small the shop was right on the corner, a shaded way in, fruit for sale, peaches in the summer. Later on that shop became a travel agent and another fruit and grocery shop opened further along - the Gum Tree Store, and between the two was a shop that sold something indeterminate, perhaps clothes, and a bottle shop. Down towards the school on the side road was a hairdresser - Rob's Silver Scissors - Rob was Roberta. Beside that was a pharmacist.

Rob/Roberta would cut my hair, or someone else in the shop, this is a lot later on. I'd got my hair cut one day and had given over the money to pay, and the assistant came back with the change, saying "Did you give a $20 or a $10?" and Mrs Roberts was sitting there and started slanging me off for not being sure what I'd handed over, but she shut up shortly. Either I'd given her a look, or she realised that it was out of place for her to comment.

Mrs Roberts had got me into trouble years before, back in infants school, I was supposed to go to her house after school or I'd told my mum that I was going to Rachel's, but then, the Smith twins had asked Rachel to their house and I'd gone along. I don't know the ins and outs. It ended up badly. My mum worried when I didn't come home, phoning Mrs Roberts who didn't know where I was either. But eventually I turned up from the Smiths.

I got publicly shamed the next day at school. Called up to the front, made to stand on the steps, made an exhibition of: "This girl went after school to a friend's house without telling her mother."

Oh, get over it!

from the station it's a long way home

An oft heard criticism of the Sutherland Shire is that people who live there don't want to go elsewhere. "The insular penninsular." And yet the bridges out are clogged every morning, and packed coming back in every evening, the railway bridge, Tom Ugly's and Captain Cook. People move in and out of the shire in droves.

It's only after I left, maybe in the last 10 or 15 years that the Shire has become known as a whole in that way. I remember in my first year of university saying that I came from Caringbah, and a boy from Mosman said "Oh, the slums of the south." He didn't say, "Oh, the Shire." Now you'd get the same sneer, but perhaps instead of ignorance, a touch of jealousy. I'm not sure, it's hard for me to say, I don't live there anymore.

The irony of "The insular penninsular" is that Sutherland Shire is made up of land jutting out into bays, people living on Turriel Bay despise people living on Yowie Bay, people on Burraneer Bay are unconsciousable, and people on Gunnamatta Bay are beyond the pale. People that live at Bundeena and Maianbar are in another world entirely, each in his own.

The most ridiculous people smuggling story I've ever read was an article in the Herald in the 90's, about a gang who'd been arrested. The plan was to take people from boats sitting off shore, via fishing boats which would land at Dolans Bay wharf in the very early morning, load the people in mini-buses and drive them away. I've written "ridiculous" but I wonder how many people were unloaded and shipped out into Sydney before the plan was exposed.

Now there's a restaurant in Cronulla called "The Nuns' Pool", and the pool of the nuns was down by that wharf, not that we ever saw anyone swimming.

Caringbah is big

My first memories of Caringbah are all of where we lived, our house, the garden. Or of Olive's house next door, or the orange cat, Soxy on the other side, and one up the Evans' house, looking for their rabbit underneath. The smell of the soil under their house, a kind of cold, dry smell. Further down the hill from Olive's was the Haste's house: Darryl and Martin. Martin was my age, Darryl was a couple of years older. I'd go and hang around there. Their house seemed darker because it was further down the hill and had trees around, shrubs in the front instead of lawn.

I don't remember the transitions to places outside of Caringbah. I remember, faintly, being on holiday at the beach, or way up in a forest in Queensland. Or being at our cousin's house in Killara, or at a friend's house in Berrara. Places far away from Caringbah but I don't remember getting there. Except for just two things; an accident in the car, my mum breaked suddenly when a truck stopped in front of her, and I fell off the back seat and hit my head on the seat belt anchor for the front passenger. I got a cut, and bled everywhere. I remember the back of the truck. I remember being on the floor in a pile. Then somehow we were at my cousins' house and my mum and Cousin Jen were talking. I've still got the scar up on my hairline, left hand side. The other memory is part of the drive to, or from, Queensland. I'd been given a Rupert the Bear Album. I was looking at the pictures, trying to tell myself the story. Wishing that dad would read it to me, but he was driving.

So when I was small, Caringbah was small, stretching only two houses on either side of ours. It didn't even make it across the road.

But when I got bigger I realised the expanse of Caringbah, a great slab of ground coming up from Botany Bay, then along the ridges to Port Hacking, North Caringbah, and Caringbah, and Yowie Bay, and Lilli Pilli, and Turriel Bay, and Dolans Bay, places and more places, all held within the same postcode, 2229.

Olive

My first memory of Caringbah is this, me standing on the verandah, leaning on the white metal balustrade of our new house, looking over into the neighbour's garden. And Olive calls out to me, "Hello Sticky Beak!"

I had no idea what a sticky beak was, and I didn't know that Olive was Olive, she was a seemingly ancient, wrinkly and skinny lady, standing down the hill, hands on hips, looking up at me. I looked around, I wasn't sure how to respond to "Sticky Beak!". What did that mean? I didn't have a beak, and I wasn't sticky, I was just looking.

Later on Olive would take care of me some mornings. My mother says now that it was to do with her "not coping with you, while your brother was a baby". I remember Olive looking after me in the morning but it may well have been afternoons as well. I'd watch Olive as she combed the sheepskin rugs, thick and white and fluffy. As she combed them out I'd play with her earrings, on her dressing table, little screws at the back, holding them up to my ears in her mirror until she told me to put them down. I'd stand behind her, very careful as she dusted swiftly, the room with the soda siphons, a red one, a bulbous blue one, and one plain glass with a chain mail cover. I wasn't allowed to touch the siphons. We didn't stay in that room. We'd sit eventually in the room near the kitchen, a laminex table and a jar of pickled oysters. Olive would smoke and offer me jokingly the oysters. I'd sit on my chair, a vinyl seat and a metal back, and wonder when I could go home. Or ask to see the siphons again.

Olive had two grown up children, Les and Caroline, at least they seemed grown up. I don't know if they were still at school, they still lived at home. Their bedrooms were down a short flight of stairs from the room with the siphons and the kitchen. The house was like two lines, one butted up against the other. The house was white painted wood. The bedrooms ran back in a line from the short flight of stairs, Caroline's room was first, then Olive and Mr Irving's, then Les'. Another step of steps went up into the back yard, there was a space between their house and our shared fence, we had a shade house and they had an aviary, beyond all that was unexplored space.

Their front yard seemed very, very long. There was a path and a flower bed, or shrub bed, between our house and their house. On the other side was a lawn and a driveway. I remember standing, unusually, at the beginning of Olive's path, near the road, overhearing a story. Les had gone away, a friend of his had come over, had said something, had tricked Olive, had stolen things. The grief was that this was a friend of Les'.

In the end Les died, and his girlfriend died, and their children went to live with Caroline, who ended up being someone who went to the Philipines to work for the World Bank. Unlikely but, what I remember as, true.

my reasoning

Today is the first of November, and November is nanowrimo month. I often begin to write for nanowrimo, and then stop. I'm no good at narrative. (Me being no good at narrative may be to do with me being somewhat less than goal driven. Elizabeth Farrelly in an essay in the Sydney Morning Herald was talking about desire driving everything, the theory of the quest driving all narrative fiction, all life. I don't have that. I think Edwin was right when he called me a peasant, in the nicest possible way, I have the drive to live from day to day, I like short term definable tasks, I don't mind repetitive work, I like to get a job done, I love watching plants grow. cf Billy Bragg "I know people whose idea of fun is throwing stones in the river in the afternoon sun") As I say, I'm no good at narrative. But I am good at observation and at remembering.

Ashley was talking the other day about a novel he was reading which was set in the town where he grew up. He said reading it was amazing. I said no one will ever write a novel about Caringbah.

A couple of days later, on the radio, I heard a Scottish writer talking about his novel and where he'd come from, that there just weren't novels about where he'd grown up - his theory being that until recently survival was all you could do, then, lately people had got through school and got to university, and only now were there people with the, I'll say, leisure, to write a book. And I thought, okay, yes, maybe this is me.

Maybe there is enough that I remember about Caringbah to make a whole lot of words. To make a thing, here on the web, that will describe to some degree what it was like to be there then.