Notes of Substance

Here are the hands of Thomas, delving deep into the belly of the fan, coils cast out, covers ripped asunder. They work amongst scattered mouse poo pellets and spanners. Discarded surgical gloves give the scene a slightly sinister air. But that’s before I have really settled in.  I have entered a room packed full of workers, the repairers, and expectant repairees at the St Kilda Repair Cafe. Held at the EcoCentre on the second Sunday of each month, the repair cafe exists to promote repairing and recycling of household goods, to foster an appreciation of ‘making good’, repairing to restore functionality, rather than throwing away. Thomas picks up a mouse poo pellet using a scrunched up latex glove: it looks like he’s holding a tiny turd with a condom. Flick. Away with you, mouse poo! A necessary output of the disassembled toasters, brought to bare their innards to a community of fixers. Fixer-upper-ers. Or nerds. Earnest workers. Carers. People who care. Possible carriers o...

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...

Fears are not rational. But growing up, in my mind, it made perfect sense that a dog could bite me, and moreover, most likely would, given the chance.  My fear was born of repeated backyard encounters with a mauling, snarling dog. We shared the yard with tenants who lived in the other side of our grandfather's house. This meant our sandpit was contested territory, my dolls were easy targets, and my young mind was easily imprinted with the image of slavering jaws crushing heads. Dolls' heads, true, but that had implications. Sure, it wasn't me who had to contend with the bitzer terrier going for my dangling doodle-my brother seemed to emerge from that encounter mentally, and thankfully physically, intact. For me, bearing witness to the dolls' destruction and the attack on the tiny penis, the outcome proved more traumatic. Perhaps being that year older, my mind could seize the sense of threat? What it meant for me was that my space in the world became curtailed. Bo...

X-ray showing growth plate fracture, right little finger. In the days straight after the federal election, I stood in a doctor's waiting room, with a sad, soon-to-be panicked child. As I looked around the reception area for notices regarding bulk billing eligibility and restrictions, I had the strange realisation that this small regional medical centre did not bulk bill. Not for kids or pensioners. It seemed, not for anyone. The election had brought Medicare into sharp focus, and here we were, city dwellers, usually with a choice of medical services at our doorstep, at a small town GP, shelling out $80 for a consult. A consult which had been conducted by a nurse, in fact, with the GP doing only a brief pop into the procedure room. $80. Money wasn't the main focus for me, luckily, but I was aware, in this post-election mess, that for many, such a trip to the doctor for a kid's school holiday injury could break the weekly budget. After the GP, there was the X-r...

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...

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 und...

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...