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Showing posts from 2021

Twisted Strands

It was October 2000, and I was in New York, contemplating working in Manhattan. I was sleeping on a couch bed while attorneys checked out my visa. 'Brian' said I could do website maintenance and client accounts for his Lexington Avenue finance company.  From the Staten Island Ferry, October 2000 I walked the streets, feeding myself on Coke and trips to galleries. In the evenings, we ate late, danced in gymnasiums, did group art projects and drank in bars. Deep Dish Cabaret, punching and drinking. The thing is, I was 35, not 25. I had just lost my job, and in shock, had taken this leap to New York City to recalibrate. Manhattan rents were high, and while the idea of finding an affordable cell-like room in a convent or sharing a floorspace with strangers had some appeal, I had a sense that my life might have already put down roots back home, and that transplanting myself could see me, well, come unstuck.  Back home in Northcote, there were nasturtiums tumbling across the garden b

Charting a Course

Inside the pages of the old school atlas, the small boy holds the pencil, angling it as he edges around Australia’s shores. My father’s hand has been here, tracing the coast, the grey lead pencil pushed down hard into the paper. My father’s atlas appeared in the family house pack-up after he died and somehow made it home with me. ‘Could I take it? Just to look at,’ I had asked my mum. I held it tight to get it home. Few of the family records had ever left my parents’ house, and this felt like contraband. Along with the atlas, I took some of dad’s tracing paper; a lined grid book; and a ledger notepad, pages torn out and numbers gone. Things which speak to me of finding a way. For some time I did not dare to open the atlas. His name alone, scrawled across the torn brown paper cover, was enough to suggest what I might find in its pages. A sort of journey. A charting of a life. A discovery. Now I’m tracing back, beyond my time, to see the boy of ten, a 3-D image arising from a 2-D format,