Australia

When I was younger I used to love English period novels. For me, love (and life) could only happen on gusty Yorkshire moors, over which brooding Englishmen strode to reclaim their honour (and their women). The moors, a rugged green, placed against sprawling hanging gardens of those very English period homes, came to very much inform my idea of what nature is.

My hometown of Melbourne, although at the farthest reaches of the now retreating threads of British colonialism, did little to convince us otherwise. With its sweeping avenues, crowned by bowed maples and elms, and its very Victorian achitecture, Melbourne has always been more of a desperate call to things past, then a place in its own right. Of course, there was the Australia (Australia!) of the dry and the Australia of the relentless horizon, but it was always at odds with that European trajectory of 'civilisation', and was kept in the deeper recesses of the mind.

Yesterday, Jess and I drove solemnly up to the peak of Mt Cooper- the tallest point in metropolitan Melbourne. We stood there, with light gusts of wind blowing acrid smoke our way, and dry cracks of lightning in the distance, contemplating the destruction unfolding before our eyes. After two weeks of freak heatwaves, melting infrastructure and flash blackouts, we'd been delivered into the arms of another behemoth: megafires.

That morning, we'd woken up to scrambled reports of friends without homes, or worse, families that were simply gone. Historic towns I had visited as a child, with their quaint Ye Olde Lolly Shoppes, were all but razed to the grounds. A sprawling homestead that we had all visited only a few winters earlier, was left flattened, with only a chimney rising from the black. And Australia raged on, and it raged on, unapologetic.

So, it was up there on Mt Cooper, with ominious clouds gathering above us, that Jess took that phonecall from her boyfriend. He was being sent to recover the dead from their homes and the chassis of their cars. We stood, contemplating the dust plains and the rising plumes of smoke, and we finally understood: this was Australia finally turning her back on that empire and forging ahead, mapping out a new topography.

So that I don't forget.

Harold Pinter on Shakespeare.

“You are called upon to grapple with a perspective in which the horizon alternately collapses and re-forms behind you."

(As mentioned in John Lahr's article about Pinter, published in The New Yorker.)

Content

Tell me,
when you gave the Sardinian
your shirt in 1945,
your one shirt until 1946,
Did you know that you'd write?

And when you gave the Sardinian
your shirt, in 1945
did you know that when
I moved over those same
Soviet-soldered sleepers,
That I'd be writing too?

Observations made in the top corner apartment of a Kent mansion.

It's been a week. I've moved the computer an odd-fifty times, just to feel that there is something punctuating my day.

I closed the windows after a wasp stung me, and I killed a further seven. Occasionaly I see their fat abdomens shimmying up to the glass, and as they move on I think: 'Not today, old friends.'

My sportsbra is lying on the bed, and the underwire wire is poking out at an impossible angle. The last time that happened, the friend who is no longer my friend sewed it up for me. Now it's lying there looking pathetic, and I may just have to throw it out.

The apartment can be entered from a corridor full of teenage boys. The other entrance is by way of the fire escape stairs. Both the rumbunctious bounds of the boys, and the shonky, rickety cast-iron steps make for a cacophony of shaking windows and shuddering foundations. This and 7:30am fire drills have slowly pushed me into a state of permanent anxiety, and the outside world has become threatening

James has been bringing up trays of food from the Dining Hall, so that I don't strain my ankle too much. Often I won't eat it all at once and just end up coming back to it every few hours, sometimes for the rocket, sometimes for the beetroot. The illusion of choice leaves me delirious.

I've started reading about five different books of critical theory, plays, holocaust survivor stories and a satirical novel by the New Yorker writer David Sedaris, called Me Talk Pretty One Day. Sometimes I roll over onto the other shoulder.

Years from now, I will come to see this as a formative experience.

Once, I was a girl.

I'm getting my period, so my breasts are like whoa-hoa, and even my sports bra is struggling with this new load. This morning, as I roughly readjusted them, like a breast-feeding mother, I returned to the summer of 1997; all steamy in North Melbourne suburbia. For me, it was a time of floppy-haired boybands, Leonardo DiCaprio, and backyard trampolines.

On one particular evening, after an ICQ chat, I made a run for the trampoline, brimming with pride at my launch onto the warm and softened taurpaulin. Each jump brought me a coloured still-shot of neighbouring families eating their BBQ dinners, or running stump-to-stump in ritualistic cricket matches.

I had a routine. First I would jump sky high, then I would throw myself into a tight somesault. Back on my feet, I would fall on my arse, with legs outstreched in a 'V'. Then: on my feet, on my back, on my feet, somersault round, on my feet, on my stomach, on my back, on my feet. This could go on for hours, much to the bemusement of my mother, who would then have to call me in for dinner. On this particular evening, it only lasted until the "on my stomach" part as two sharp points of pain exploded in my chest. Winded, and clutching at my new boobs, I clambered off my old friend and ran off into the house.

For a long time after, I would observe the backyard trampoline from my kitchen with suspicion and contempt. I no longer paid heed to the white-flap of instructions, frayed and flapping in the breeze. I made certain to leave the trampoline in direct sunlight and when the pigeons shat all over it, I didn't scramble over with a wet cloth before the acidity ate through the plastic. And once I took up swimming as my main sport, the trampoline was shamed and relocated to the corner of the yard.

Summer soon moved on, and I was swimming in local heats. Naked in the changeroom afterwards, I would savour the click my new training bar would make, as I pretended I needed to readjust my breasts so that they would fit better. The other girls were jealous.

It was 1998; I had gotten over Leonardo DiCaprio; and I didn't even notice when the trampoline was given away to the younger family next door, until I got a still-shot of the girl in the sky. Up she jumped. Then somersaulted. Then she was back on her feet, on her back, on her feet, and then a really good V...

Iron Deficient

I'm walking around the city, being dogged by spinach cravings and feel that everything is slightly off today. Spring has finally pushed through the relentlessness of Winter, and on her insistence, this giant organism of a place has been sent into a frenzy. The streets, in spectacular resurrection, have flung up four months' worth of dust into the sky and enthusiastic commuters, with not enough hands for the ice-creams and cold drinks they're clambering after, are riding bikes, stockingless.

The gargantuan National Theatre, with its strong sand-stone architecture, has taken on a softer, pinkish hue. For a moment I pretend I am in Rome, before, tangentially, I am reminded of the fact that Poland almost held Madascar as a colony. This amusing caprice of history does not escape me and I slowly move my tongue over the words: Pax Romana, Pax Polonia.

Spring in Warsaw offers me my own personal history too, with this vivid regeneration stunning me with accute memories. As the new sun struggles to beat its rays through the city smog, I'm reminded of that crazy 2006-2007 summer when the bushfires, encroaching in on Melbourne, shrouded suburbia with smoke. I'm in Europe, with nary a gum-tree in sight, yet I think I am on Lygon St with the very particular smell of burning eucalypts sneaking into my nose.

I cross Swietokrzyska (haha), with its tooting taxis and impatient crowds, and let the descending humidity take me back to that brief time in Vietnam. It's enough to make me want to pull up a crate to mediocre British company and have a 20 cent beer from a dirty keg. And I really wouldn't be hard-pressed to trade in the stodgy Polish diet for a bowl of crisp baby spinach with slivers of braised pork. Hell, I even want to accosted by frantically waving mo-ped drivers, yelling in tongue I could only ever hope to master. There are frantic Vietnamese in Warsaw, certainly, but this is not their home and they look sad.

The city is in a process of rebirth , but its being slightly obstinate. On Plac Pilsudskiego, an image of a messianic Pope John Paul II is eerily projected onto the wall of an old building. The Pope, somehow neon-fantastic, flickers for a few seconds before disappearing to be replaced by something that I don't quite manage to catch. Everywhere I look there are plaques commemorating dead people and finished wars; all of them directing my reluctant gaze to the bulletholes in pre-war motar. It appears that Spring is here, but Poland doesn't want to be completely reborn.

I move away from Plac Pilsudskiego feeling a bit disenchanted and disconnected from the warm fronts colliding behind me. As I enter the penetrative lighting of Mini Europa, I direct my attention to the spinach cravings, growing irksomely stronger by the minute and think that, yeah, rebrith and regeneration are good, but I really don't want to be pregnant.

Before I say anything else.

Dear friend who called me from his father's mobile (despite having rather antagonist relations with said father, and despite being a bit of a psychotic weirdo that dances funny) just to make me feel better when I said I was sad,

You are the best.

XOX