What I cooked last night.

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The smell of ink.

A blue-and-white sky afternoon. An impatient autumn breeze searches for leaves. I am lying on my stomach in the school playground, gazing at the small seeds, like tiny dimpled bullets, in the stalks of the unmown grass, and imagining the stalks are trees, and that I am in an aeroplane. The school building is an L-shaped angle in the south-east corner of an oblong bounded by Muriel Street to the north, Teague to the south, and Garnet to the west. Half the playground is paved in bitumen, embedded with screenings designed to prevent children slipping in the wet - the ground is on an incline - but which result in dreadful knee and elbow grazes when children fall at speed, often. The rest of the oblong is the field it has always been, and forms probably the best kind of playground, despite play experts later recommending steel swings, multi-coloured plastic climbing pyramids, or forts made from treated pine, all of which remove perspective and the sense of clear distance. I can s...

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Time travel.

After the film was over, we walked out into a curtain of Ballarat darkness. I was reminded yet again of when I had been taken to a cinema at age nine in the city on a hot, sun-drenched afternoon. Afterwards, we had exited after 174 minutes of The Sound of Music into a darkened 1966 Collins Street streetscape lit only by the yellowish headlamps of ranked taxis. I had felt somehow cheated, as if the sun outside should have held still while I was in the grip of the film’s illusive progression of time. We walked back to the railway station where the enormous canteen was still open. Shelves loomed behind tall counters and bain maries, and a swirl of round tables and attendant chairs on the floor overlooked Platform One through vast glass panes, designed in the early twentieth century to allow partakers of morning or afternoon tea to see the Melbourne train arrive - as if they hadn’t heard the engine’s shrieking whistle from miles away. We ordered chicken schnitzel rolls and sat at one...

Tilting at windmills.

The train curved up through the hills, diesel engines a distant busy hum against the gradient. Sitting in carriage three of four, we passed the outer suburban flatlands of Bunnings- and Kmart-encircled Melton, where the houses sit on volcanic rock and reverberate. Tom was reading Shirley Jackson; the short stories, not the one about the castle. I was dozing. The train slid through the Bacchus Marsh valley and tilted up again towards Gordon. We were travelling to the Regent cinema in Ballarat where Était une Fois: Michel Legrand was screening, its short season having already finished in Melbourne. I woke when the train pulled into the nineteenth-century station, tall enough to allow dispersal of the cindery engine smoke that once filled its cavernous interior, which was now drenched in shade. We walked the few hundred metres to the cinema, where only a handful of seats were occupied. In two screen hours, Michel Legrand grew from a child abandoned by his musician father to legendary Fre...

The writing on the wall.

That summer I saw two words scrawled on the brick wall of a commercial building (shop? accountant’s office?) somewhere in Moonee Ponds, probably around Queen’s Park. The two words were stacked one above the other, like the headline over a side column on the front page of the newspaper. The words were Elvis Presley. I was in a car with my parents driving along Mt. Alexander Road, and one of them made a disparaging comment about Presley, or the graffiti, or both. They were in their late thirties then, with four children yet to reach the complexities of -teen age, complexities which generally either relax their parents’ steely rigidity, or confirm them in their uncompromising stubbornness. God forbid they took the latter course in the late sixties. In time, my mother would disrobe herself of whatever puritanical coat she wore, and overcompensate, like so many of her middle class contemporaries, eventually to play Victor Jara and U2 records and serve wholemeal garlic bread at family occasi...

The lemon tree and the passion play.

The lemon tree had had a good summer. It had surreptitiously reached six feet across the fence - I hadn’t realised - and into the neighbour’s yard. To support the weight - it was now fully laden - its almost horizontal leaders, like giant elbows, were resting on the palings. The fence nails were unnailing, vertically distended gaps were showing light; and gratingly clichéd aphorisms about good fences were repeating themselves. Scene one: the church. Three o’clock. I had walked the half-mile or so towards the slate-encased red brick spire, still strainingly visible above the rising skyline of new apartments. It was a warm afternoon. The silvery sky tinged with red had suggested either a medieval painting of Calvary, or a 1950s Hollywood biblical epic. I sat in the south transept as the truncated passion play was read to an half-empty church. Everything is open on Good Friday now; the congregation has diminished with the zeitgeist, if that term can be applied to rushing aroun...

The silver Jaguar.

The Mark II Jaguar, silver, red leather, flew across Moreland Road and straight through a red light. It was seven in the morning. I was driving blind into the rising sun. I saw nothing else, let alone a couple of peripheral red orbs. I should have been more attentive. I should have driven slower. I should have been dead. Plenty of crooks in swinging 1960s London used Mark II Jaguars as getaway cars, and crashed them, and ended up maimed or worse. I kept going. The maternity hospital was a faint brutalist silhouette in the distance. Last day of January, 1977. I’d stayed awake the previous night with a Haig on ice and the late movie - Vertigo - on TV, waiting for the phone to ring. It was good. I had stared at the screen without wanting to throw a brick through it, and even the ads were kind of acceptable, corny but with none of the sanctimonious rationalisations that sell everything from cans of tuna to cars these days. The television itself was a chunky four-legged mid-seventies model...

Bacchanalia.

We drove down from the artists’ colony and headed south west through the foothill-underpinned and heavily treed suburbs of Montmorency (which always reminded me, when I drove through it, of the fox-terrier in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat ), Macleod and Rosanna; and then the road flattened out and we were back in the inner-city grid heading for a warehouse in the back street of a used-to-be working class suburb, where once men hacked and sawed and planed and amber-shellacked, and made things of lasting beauty and utility that would never be placed on the street for the hard rubbish collection. And there it was: an old sawtooth-topped factory of red brick. It was such a caricature you could almost see it breathing in and out, cartoonishly, along with the let’s work soundtrack, and workers inside putting tops on jars in hundredfold unison. Now, endless decades later, the sun dropped below the building's zigzag roof making a glowing halo around its jagged perimeter. It was se...

Scenes from a wedding.

The couple emerged from the darkness of the great medieval hall and stood together on the sandstone threshold. Their faces, flushed with heat and relief, bore the jubilantly weary expressions of the just-wedded: of having accomplished a great task, as if the thirty-minute ceremony were a four-year work-in-progress, a continuum from first making eye contact in a street or a lecture room or a supermarket or a shoe shop, to signing their names - finally ! - with an ostentatious pen on parchment in front of a breathless, grinning celebrant. Of course, the great stone building was not medieval; in fact it was less than a hundred years old, parts salvaged from city buildings demolished during the Depression; windows and beams and doors and staircases, ghosts of the gilded era, rising again on a hill in the rolling acres of an artists’ colony in the far northern suburbs of Melbourne. * Cloudless early autumn Sunday. Four in the afternoon. On the forecourt in front of the great recl...

Radioactive time.

Eventually I knew that time was not on anyone’s side, let alone mine. It was not, as the human mind imagines, a kind of subterranean stream following along in parallel, a happy bubbling compliant brook. That year, time had broken out of its former muzzled existence as a sequence of languid forty-minute school periods. I slept during those lessons. I read Tolkien. I dreamed of white foam creaming on a beach. I ate coffee scrolls at the back of the classroom. Now, only months later and school finished for life, time ran my life rather than accommodating it. A Copal clock radio sat by my bed, its rectangular face shedding eerie green light and its mechanism infinitely flipping numbers, like a slow-motion poker machine. It had a wood-grain pattern trimmed with plastic chrome around the edges, like a Cortina’s dashboard. It woke me in darkness with the faltering but carefully enunciated syllables of the early morning Learning English program on 3AR. Or it wove bits of song into m...

The golden window.

I was enduring the effects of a potentially fatal accident, yet forced to stand in the capricious moral light of acknowledging that I was alive. Unlike the other three occupants of the car, I had not been wearing a seatbelt when the car crashed headlong into the pole: the seat in front had stopped me, rather than the windscreen, the road, or the telegraph pole itself. Missing lectures and deadlines, I had to make some adjustments. I converted to part-time study, and found a day job. This only increased my hours but I figured, correctly - or as a precocious eighteen-year-old - that a lowly but paying office job bore fewer mental rigours than full-time academic study. And so began - as Tennessee Williams once wrote* - ‘a short career in the telephone business’ (he was referring to his father). The telephone business - mine, not the playwright’s father’s - was in the London Stores building, a 1925 cube on the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth streets. It was one of those buildings arch...

A tale of two films.

Thanks to my own impetuosity I had to confront studying film as an academic subject. For me, this was like studying Australian politics without knowing who were the last ten prime ministers. On the first day, a February dragon, I rode a tram, one of the old solid green ones that rumbled with dignity over the points instead of reverberating like an enormous tin can, down the long Mt Alexander Road hill towards the city and got off at Latrobe. I sat alone in a crowd of new students, probably equally alone in their first-day anxiety, and we watched a film by Sydney Pollack called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? This was followed by a lecture in a room scattered with plastic chairs and rhomboid-topped tables in the old Building 6 in Bowen Lane. These lectures, discussions really, were to become journeys into dusty locations and long-abandoned sound stages and other cinematic archaeology, where the eyes of forgotten actors told flickering stories of sadness and love and tragedy. The su...

Year of the cyclone.

In that year of the cyclone that destroyed a city, I had finished school, underperforming; not that anyone had been pushing me. One subject saved me in that final year of floods and impeachments and cyclones; and that was down to D. H. Lawrence. The Virgin and the Gypsy and Sons and Lovers were both for some reason on the English study list. In the former the daughter of a straight-laced rector has an affair with a gipsy while her repulsive grandmother drowns in a flood; the latter concerned a boy’s relationship with his mother and girlfriend in a dreary English mining village. Lawrence wrenched and wrung masterpieces from the bleak shaft-riven hills of northern England, and proved that genius or at least great artistry can emerge from the strictures of anti-intellectual provincialism. I wrote something along those lines for the exam, and after a post-examinations interlude at a relative’s house in a small town called Birregurra overlooking the Warrnambool train line, I returned...