Notes of Substance

Fitzroy Streets make me cry.  Jasmine scents, basil plants, fried coffee grounds on the gas stovetop. Purple love-bites wander downstairs, smeared mascara, bruised thighs. Paperbacks strewn on the dusty carpet, threadbare runners on the stairs. Overflowing gutters and fragile drainpipes, smashed-in cars and broken hearts-these are the days that float back on the warm air. Cornflowers in a metal vase, Jonathan Richman and Billy Bragg playing from a tinny stereo. John Berger's Ways of Seeing , Karl Marx, Terry Eagleton, Helen Garner's Monkey Grip and Susan Sontag's On Photography . Pasta pots and ashtrays, tumble-down dunnies and creepers hanging low into the lanes. Dark night lights on the cobblestones. Sunday night sessions at The Standard, with a roast cooking in the oven as the pedal steel wails. Heart strings playing, lurching gut, blushing over the beer order. A deep bass vibrates across the bar. These Fitzroy street are filled with fever, tears and rage. Ornam

For a person who had paid scant attention to fitness, food intake, fatness or not throughout most of my life, this past year has been confronting. In the year that I turned a ‘significant’ age, I found myself struck down by a black grief, but on top of that, a string of injuries.   The loss of my father hit right on my birthday week, while I was away celebrating in New York. On return to real life a few months later, after the blackness slowly lifted, I found myself dealing with a progression of injuries which opened the door onto a life of limited mobility. The horror!   First, there was the leg injury, sustained after my excited attempt at two five kilometre runs. So pleased was I after my first run, that I headed out again the next week, solo, inspired by my newfound love of running. Shelve that idea. The pain in my lower leg became acute, the leg swelled full of fluid, and before I knew it I had a suspected DVT requiring an ultrasound. The injury is still an undiagnosed

As soon as I saw it, I wished I hadn't. There was something deadly ominous about the darkened room. Bare wood floors, panelled wood walls, slices of weak light coming in through the long, autumnal windows. Funereal. I could hardly process it.  A sign. The room was empty, the service cancelled, the food and drink all dried up. Finished.  It was our last day in New York, and we had returned to the Oak Room at The Plaza to toast Dad with a negroni. At this stage, when we knew he was fading, e ach negroni seemed like a communion .  The Plaza was one of the places him and mum had honeymooned. The last time we'd been in NYC, with kids in tow, we had blown a couple of hundred dollars on fancy burgers and lemonades for the kids, and champagne and wine with dinner for us. Spending mum and dad's trip gift money.  That was nearly 5 years earlier. We had taken our girl to look for Eloise , the little literary inhabitant of the Plaza Hotel. The doorman played along, tel

Womankind  Magazine's Nature Challenge Day One Head out into the air this morning on my engaging challenge. My first encounter is with possum piss, its frothy stench hitting me as I walk out our front path. I hose it away, cursing the urban wildlife. The wattle is out, the scent bringing back my dad and making me cry.  After some lovely meandering down the canal, watching birds and holding my 'in memorium' sprig of wattle for dad, I take my tears down to the salty water of the bay.  There I walk out on the rocks, go that bit too far, slip on invisible moss, smash various parts of my body and end up almost in the water. Thankful that I haven't busted my head open, I fling my little sprig of wattle towards the water, where it falls short and lies on the rocks like me. Ready to be picked up when the waves come in.  I reach for my phone, make sure not to drop it, take a photo of the wattle as it waits, as I wait. I have wrenched my shoulder, and I

The rain is sporadic, but the stream peeling off the roof is constant–an insistent pouring onto something plastic, not the comforting spattering of drops. It jars with my yearning for a certain type of rainsong. While the room warms up, I sit in beanie and overcoat, coming to grips with my space. The blue car in the old shed has not moved. Some days there is washing on the line. The Hills Hoist carousel has three pieces of baby clothing on it today, hanging, sopping, in the rain. One day there was a free-wheeling pink sheet, fresh and joyous. It sang like a flag. My room is my own. Unadorned. The desk has piles of books, some propped open on pages.  Topographical maps for placement, location, anchoring in space.   Significant letters: S for studio.   Turn the page. F for freelance.  I have been paid for my writing. I am out there in the world, selling my words. Making a mark as a writer of sorts. Feeling allowed to own this identity, this voice. Inhabiting that place

[My daughter cried when she read this. It's just a moment in time, not for ever. Read the postscript...] ************   The last time I received mail from the Collingwood Football Club, it was a package from beyond my father's grave. My 2016 season's cap and scarf arrived in a padded envelope in early November, 2015. Meanwhile, my dad's ashes sat in a box in a funeral director's home. He had paid for my membership as a present before he died. But suddenly, this last week, I'm just not sure I can stick it out with the 'Side by Side', and this is truly disturbing, on a very personal level. The recent behaviour of Collingwood President Eddie McGuire, in the now infamous MMM commentary segment about Age journalist Caroline Wilson, has made my Maggie loving blood run cold. Ice cold. It's not just the disgraceful comments made by McGuire, and others, about holding Caro underwater and rallying the crowd to join them, but the way the Club has handle

It’s always a bonus to win something. Whether it’s a book, or a raffle, or a movie ticket. I recently won myself a ticket to a masterclass at the Emerging Writers’ Festival , thanks to the crowd at Writer’s Bloc . A chance to indulge myself in a world where I could learn about owning my own words, and selling them! I was so keen, that I gave up a day’s paid work to attend, even though this made me financially worse off. I don’t care! I won a writing class! And anyway, I can now see this as my ‘enjoyment tax’-more on that later. The Masterclass-Freelancing for Life addressed how to make a living out of doing what you love, with topics such as finding your voice, avoiding pigeon-holing, balancing corporate and creative work, invoicing, using internship opportunities and marketing. Here are a few take-outs from the day. Reflecting on the freelance life, Emerging Writers' Festival, image (C) Anna Sublet Keynote First up, we had Clementine Ford, who spoke to a room fu

(I'm walking with my glasses on, writing. Don't look up cos the world is not clear. Head down, emotions contained...)   End point (c) Anna Sublet All that remains is packaged in a box, tied with a ribbon and adorned with a fresh apricot rose.  That's beautifully presented, says mum as we navigate the box sideways into a funeral home bag.  It's heavier than we expected it to be. Like a brick. The funeral director guy tells us it's like a 2 kg pack of sugar. In a suction package that you need to break open. That's if we want to divide him up... I have visions of him exploding like flour, flying over clothes and disappearing into parts of the room where the substance will lie, unaware, insentient, ever-present but diminishing from view, slowly. When they burn the body, most of it vapourises, I'm told. Back into oxygen the body goes. There must be a chemical reaction I could reduce this to? Something plus something equals something. X2

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

People say newborns and sleep are mutually exclusive, but I can say that the horror of house hunting with babies on board is a close contender for doing your head in. In the back of an old notebook, I recently found notes which recorded the time and duration of each breastfeed for my newborn baby. Which side I fed from, and for how long: 10.31am L 15 R17 12.45am L22 R15 And inevitably 1.33am, 5.04am etc. At the front of the notebook, I had recorded the upcoming inspection and auction times for houses for sale: Thornbury, 15 Wales St 12.30-1 Northcote, 23 Derby St 1-1.30 Fairfield, 9 Gillies St 1.45-2.15 North Fitzroy, 35 Miller St etc etc repeat for 18 months of Saturdays. Weekend after weekend, we drove tired, hungry, poopy-pants babies in concentric rings around our northern suburbs, in search of a home with more than a lean-to for a kitchen, and a curtain for a bathroom door. In those days, the budget was sitting around $600-$750,000, and those prices were realistic. Although the No

'It feels like riding on a tiger!'  So said my five year old, when he stood up and caught his first wave many years ago. It was one of his most natural outbursts. Pure elation.  At that stage, I had never surfed, and his descriptions seemed so vivid and pure:  ‘It feels like being in a tree, and getting blown all around.’ ‘It feels like the (window) blind, when you let go and it flies up, really fast.’ ‘It feels like riding on a bird.’ ‘It feels like you’re running away from a car going really fast.’ Now we are a surfing family, with some of our best times together spent waiting for and chasing waves.  'Mum, you dropped in on me!' my daughter admonishes me some days. As if she hasn't caught a thousand more waves than me in her life. My son takes wave after wave, as I paddle onto another face, only to be brushed off by a 12 year old.  I am a late starter, a post-forty mum in a steamer. A few Christmases ago, the kids and bloke got me a