Skip to main content

Arterial road

My little reflection on Punt Road was published today by The Punt Road Project. That's a treat. The project has been collecting stories, musing, ragings and reflections on that big north-south road which plays such a part in Melbourne's life. 


The famous clock on the silo, 'high on the hill...'






I gave it a bit of a push too:


Here's the text:

 Punt Road is not just a major arterial. For a time, it was for me a lifeline to my mind, an artery to my heart. It got my blood pumping, my mind whirring, my heart singing.

I lived a decade in the north, but each month crossed town for a southside bookclub, born of bayside friends. I had one baby, and then another, and Punt Road was my escape route from the intimate, beautiful yet terrifying world of full time parenting.

Words swam as I shifted gears down the multi lane, glistening dark road. Across town, across grid. The rhythm of road and drums, bass beat, music loud, my hands drumming on the steering wheel, I swept across a world to read between the lines.

That highway was a bridge, a way out, a conduit to reconnect with the world of words, the spaces of the mind, the things beyond reality. That arterial road gave me a blood transfusion, with its pumping streams, and even with its blockages. It promised me more. Punt Road, you saved my sanity!
For more reflections and stories see Punt Road Project 

Here is Kylie Northover's story in The Age which first put me onto this project.





















Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A morning too early, a morning too late

Sensing  the  future It was our last morning in New York City. It was a morning too early to be leaving, and as it turned out, a morning too late. Dad was on his final lap of life, and we were making a dash home to cheer him along as he hit the home straight .  I went down to breakfast with a heavy heart. The bar was buzzing. Halloween scenes were already playing out in the streets. A kind waiter asked me 'have you got your costume sorted for tonight?' To which I stumbled, 'no...I I I have to go home. My dad's sick...' and began to cry. The dear boy was shocked, 'Oh, I'm so sooorreeee. Do you wanna hug?' I could barely breathe. NO, I managed. I ate cereal alone, and had grapefruit juice. Dad loved grapefruit. I packed the last of my things, and stumbled out through the lobby, past glamorous girls in fabulous costumes. Mark had already run off to explore the neighbourhood after checking out of the hotel early. It didn't seem...
5 comments
Read more

Coming of Age

The bricks were always cold underneath my bum. Cold and hard. I could feel their sharp edges. In the nights we sat and talked, my brother and I and the neighbourhood boys. The smells of sour smoke and saliva on one, body odour on another, and menace on the other. The fluorescent globes hummed from the train station platform across the road, and the street lights pooled at the corner. Inside was out of bounds to these boys, so we met on our side stairs. The frosted glass door between us and our home. These were the kids we didn’t trust, the boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Where were their parents? Absent fathers, unsighted mothers, these boys roamed the streets and set me on edge. The attraction to the dirt, to the smell of one’s mouth...I can still feel it now. It was an urge, but not an infatuation.  The hearts of these boys remained hidden. It was as if they walked in costumes, played their parts, and kept their distance. One day, my mum greeted me at...
4 comments
Read more

Weaving my own way

In my first weeks of University life, I unzipped a heavy blue bag and found myself bent over a skinny cadaver with a scalpel in my hand. Smelling the formaldehyde. Over the course of the next year, we carved flesh from his buttocks, separated muscle from cartilage, and pulled and probed his ligaments. Lab sessions with the stiffs were fascinating, but I didn’t really want to be doing Medicine. I had never liked biology and was not at all interested in seeing patients with medical needs. So how did I get to be there? Surgery days, pic Anna Sublet It was always expected in our family that we would attend University, preferably to do medicine or law. Coming from a family of parents and grandparents who valued tertiary education, who had been lawyers, doctors, engineers and inventors, this was an unquestioned path. Of course, at the Catholic school, there was also the option of becoming a wife and mother, something seemingly so appalling to me that I rejected such a notion for ...
2 comments
Read more