What I cooked last night.

Dead quiet on a heat-heavy afternoon, around two o'clock, except for the almost imperceptible shush of movement from the trees; an almost-audible shimmer of movement, mirrors of light, from the full-leafed shrubs; and some faraway grind of a bus on a hill. Far, far away. That was a week, three days, two days, before Christmas.  I had finished school days before. The world was mine; the world being the garden, the street, the hill to the river, in another direction, another hill to a creek that wound, anyway, down to the same river. Another direction, around two corners to a small strip of shops that seemed asleep under the sun's oppression: side street; milk bar; haberdashery; newsagent; chemist; butcher; greengrocer; bakery; Four Square grocery; fish shop; another side street. The haberdashery was also an agent for the bank, a curiosity I found perfectly normal; the grey-haired cardiganed middle-aged woman who ran it seemed perfectly suited to taking one's money, putting i...

Nine hundred kilometres south, early in the evening, after a  warm, overcast Sunday I had spent at Lakeside, I was on a train heading to my home in the northern suburbs. During the afternoon, in between sporting events, I had taken a book to the sun-drenched lawn high up behind the bleachers (plastic bucket seats these days, powerfully sprung so that they won’t even support your bag of running gear without flipping up and flushing it onto the dusty concrete below). The novel was Philip Roth’s Nemesis (Jonathan Cape, 2010). The grandfather, Sam Cantor, had come alone to America in the 1880s as an immigrant child from a Jewish village in Polish Galicia. His fearlessness had been learned in the Newark streets, where his nose had been broken more than once in fights with anti-Semitic gangs. The violent aggression against Jews that was commonplace in the city during his slum boyhood did much to form his view of life and his grandson’s view in turn. He encouraged the grandson to stand up...

In a 2017 interview Tom Stoppard recalled the crowded solitude of his writer’s block: ‘  … there are so many things that ought to be written about, and could be written about, that the contents of my head appear to be mostly white noise, a buzz of all the possible things’.  While not making any comparisons with the playwright, I can empathise. Stoppard : ‘I’m a bit oversensitive about the ideal conditions that I desire or require for doing proper work. They tend towards the extreme, isolation. It’s as though I need to be the only person in the house before I can completely let go of everything around me’. * (Quotes from obituary published in The Times last week and reprinted in The Australian on 5 December.)

‘That’s nice! What is it?’ Or: ‘What’s for dinner?’ She of an earlier generation might - and did - dismiss the impertinent questions with a kindly but sarcastic culinary neologism. But the next generation - the abundant post-war offspring (whose parents feared, after two wars in a few decades, will we lose these as well ?) grew up into a cossetted mid-century middle class that wanted answers. Newly cosmopolitan, and hearing the siren call of airbound silver jets roaring across airport boundaries and up and down the streets and avenues of the suburbs and banlieues, they crossed becalmed oceans, freshly ridded of U-boats, to hunt for foreign dishes, just as their safariing grandparents had hunted game. The names of such captured dishes would be practised in front of pre-dinner party mirrors and tripped off tongues with the syllabic facility and pronunciation of a first language - bouillabaisse; onigiri; cacciatore  - and the resulting culinary exotica would be displayed - and announc...

It rained all Saturday. Not unusual for the third month of spring, but rain that goes on for days is a Melbourne fixture; a festival of sopping misery and cancelled sporting fixtures in a Mediterranean climate that is supposed to follow its seasonal script. I’m exaggerating, of course. It’s not Innisfail. But it’s not tropical either. In childhood I hated enforced confinement. I was an outdoors child. Not the hunting and fishing type, I just did not want to be in the house for days on end. You can’t go outside. It’s raining. I can see that. It’s been raining since Wednesday. Don’t be sarcastic.  That’s not sarcasm, I replied, it’s observation. I went from room to room looking for another climate. I found several in books. Then back to damp reality, in the days before I learned a harsh forbidding beauty could be found in the ever-changing skies thanks to the winds from the oceans at the bottom of the world. Through the louvred panes of a window overlooking the back garden I stared ...

I spent that year removing seventy years’ worth of flashbacks from the house in gaffer-taped or open-top boxes, and black plastic garbage bags half-filled like under-inflated giant balloons. The flashbacks - old teapots, Leon Uris novels, a pressure cooker, an A-line dress in yellow and orange polished cotton that still had some 1950s sunshine stuck to it, a Gem razor, a wooden-handled chisel - trooped gaily to the car and got in like children going off to a summer camp; rattling and shushing and flipping and clunking on their way to the opportunity shop. Then it was done. Three fourths of a century of junk, each piece with its own little micro-climate of memories, gone. Freed from driving endless boxes of ornaments to second-hand shops (the provenance of much of the junk, it should be pointed out; my mother was an incorrigible collector and hoarder), I relished the freedom of being on foot, diverting the route of my occasional runs to pass the house while it was unoccupied but still u...

The health food store near the Fawkner Street corner closed for ever one afternoon in the early 1970s. The health food boom had begun. Begun? With a closure? The paradox was simple. Whereas the original health food store sold bulk grains, dried fruits, nuts, flours, unwrapped loaves and cheeses to first-generation eastern European migrants, the health 'boom' left staples in its wake. Amid the new-found mobility of the 1950s, post-war children tired of their migrant parents' villagey habits, and turned to supermarkets and shopping malls, often walking greater distances across endless acres of car parks than had their forebears to the corner shop. It was yet another age of progress, not to mention irony. Snake-oiled with health claims verging on promised immortality - e at yogurt and live to 108 like the Bulgarians -  manufactured food products made anything not so produced look like the quaint output of some gnarled grandma in a bucolic stone cottage surrounded in the unpav...

Beethoven, back on Earth in the twenty-first century and reincarnated as his hearing self, was walking along a street when suddenly from the speakers of some passing open car came sufficient notes of  Cantata on the D eath of Emperor Joseph II  that he recognised his own unpublished composition. He was horrified. A sudden terrible thought struck him, already confused by the motorised monsters (albeit that a late-eighteenth century mind could reasonably deduce that self-powered vehicles, already more than a mechanical chimera, may have advanced). The more dreadful thought that struck Beethoven was that perhaps the music of the spheres had always been there for the taking; that time might even run backwards, and that he had merely been a medium, a conduit, for plucking a series of notes from this hellish place and time and transtemporising them to a reverse future residing in the urbanely familiar eighteenth century. He had defeated time, apparently. But the cacophony, notwithst...

The dressing for the gnocchi was merely a leek, cut very finely from the middle, where it is not white nor dark green, but a colour most accurately described as chartreuse.  This brilliant yellow-green tone is rendered almost fluorescent when cooked very gently. I sautéed the little flecks of leek, curved like minute sections of E-type Jaguar front wing, or small arcs of the lime-green patent leather knee boot of a 1960s Carnaby Street model, in a generous quantity of olive oil, keeping a careful eye on it so that it wouldn’t brown but merely absorb the oil via a kind of reverse oleaginous osmosis.   It had been a busy day. The weather hadn't turned. One or two warm days; the rest had been wet, windy, cold. Second month of spring. I had found a book in that shop where people throw out their unwanted clothes, old pictures off their walls, kitchen pots and pans and utensils beaten and greyed, and broken crockery sets (broken as in incomplete if not actually chipped) left over fr...

Coffee tastes better outside, I thought. Could be the fresh air. I was sitting in the pale sun of late winter with a coffee, a book, and that eternal latter-day yoke, a phone. The wind was skittering the chairs and tables, like dried leaves, and lifting the fine-beaded foam on my coffee, the colour of a palomino’s mane. The mall was a rectangle of concrete broken up by large whorls of broken bluestone, like cross-sections of giant fossil snails, or had that been somewhere else? Cafes, a smoke shop, and a post office looked out from under their eaves on six or eight tall thin eucalypts that gave too little shade in summer and too much against the scant sun in winter.  In the past the strip was greengrocers and barber shops and continental butchers and an Italian cobbler and salami shops crowded with young mothers; and suddenly appearing among the ant-like busyness to talk and enquire solicitously after their husbands was the priest who strode black-cassocked five hundred yards ...

My father, his life upturned and then flipped upright again like a fibreglass canoe, rode the passing years silently, serially taking on hobbies. Freelance photographer, gem collector and polisher, horse race predictor, painter in oils, student of quasi-religious phenomena, candle-maker.  Some of his photographs still exist in an old corrugated box that I found beneath a shelf when I was clearing the outhouse he built as a darkroom in the forgiving late 1960s. A grimacing baseball hitter at Ross Straw Field, mid-strike bat caught forever in the horizontal, stands in black and white infinity, his body curling with the chemical-spattered photographic proof paper. A rider, red-coated and tall in the saddle, wafts a grey across a fence, towards camera, at an Ascot Vale equestrian event, the horse’s eyelashed protuberant eyes frozen in time as if from some medieval painting. A familiar sedan is parked outside a store, ‘pies, sandwiches, cigarettes,’ on a main road steeply shadowed by br...

They extended the house because of more children, and kicked me into the new room. It faced east and was built over the front lawn. I imagined the grass turning brown and dying slowly beneath me while I slept.  On those incendiary summer mornings, the sun, one thing in life you could depend on, would hoist itself above the cream brick house across the street, and smash like a ripe peach into my dark green blind, its fragments making pin-holes of light in the canvas, and throwing blurred circles like hot dancing snowflakes onto the opposite wall.  I would jerk the blind up, drowning the pin-hole light show in a solid cube of dazzling white. Across the road, the cream brick house always looked like a square crouching animal, silhouetted until midday beneath its eave ears.  The new bedroom absorbed the original front door. Now I used it as an exit, which I used at night with unscathed dignity - instead of clambering, novel-style, out of the sash window - on my way to an...

Everything is -'friendly'. Eco-friendly. User-friendly. Reader-friendly.  Objects, concepts. What happened to human-friendly?  Vegan-friendly , trumpeted the package, which contained wheat germ. Long-term readers might or might not recall that I have had something of an ongoing  semi- obsession with the over-earnest, ungrammatical, or sheer moronic label claims that plague manufactured food products. Clearly, either the general population - the consumers of these goods and their verbal assaults - or the marketing industry - their illiterate authors - has become stupider. Or both. Probably both. Irony aside, what madness is it that the consumer needs a printed assurance that a bag containing 100% ex-vegetation has no animal content? Or that its processing has not knowingly been associated with members of the animal kingdom throughout its journey from grassland to four-colour-process-overprinted crude oil-based plastic packaging? Which, in any case, means what? A process w...