What I cooked last night.

A hot Friday morning, oddly quiet. On ANZAC Day, everything is closed and nothing happens except a football game at three in the afternoon. Everything before that is forbidden. Odd also, given the previous Friday, Good Friday, had been chaos on the roads, a day to race around and prepare for Easter, go camping, buy chocolate rabbits to hide for the kids, whatever. ANZAC Day, no. State-sponsored faux romanticism is the new religion; the papers, what’s left of them, are full of decrepit hundred-year-olds wearing rotting ribbons and old medals, having lived five times as long as the boys of eighteen and nineteen who threw their bullet-ridden bodies, full of hope and the seed of alpha-children, into French mud, all in the cause of the King.  Nothing to do. So I went on a walk, across a valley and three suburbs.  And back again. I set off under an intense mid-morning sun, passing houses with half-drawn blinds like sleepy eyes. Through the Vale, past the football ground and diagonal...

In the beginning this weblog was a place to store improvised recipes that had (kind of) worked - given that I am no chef. Before that I scribbled ideas on scraps of paper and put them between the pages of cookbooks - a random collection that included one with blank pages framed in stock illustrations, in which you transcribed your own recipes. I had dutifully penned in a couple between the parted lettuce leaves and artful scatterings of peas and shards of cheese; and then shelved it. I could not throw the book out because it had been a gift from someone. Who? I forget. Sentimentality makes you a slave, even to the unknown. Conscripting leftovers was an early gastronomic tic that persists today, given that in this house of coming-and-going teenagers, eating might occur at all hours or sometimes none. On a good day they’ll eat like six tigers; a casserole of stuffed capsicum, the rest of the ham, a cold roast chicken, last night’s pasta carbonara.  Corned beef hash, gourmet-style. It...

The real estate agent suggested a gardener. I declined. A gardener tends gardens. This is a jungle. So I would take a hedge trimmer and a ‘lawn’ mower and make little pools of sunshine where before there was only scrub, overhang, bramble, thicket. (That makes it sound like it hadn’t been touched for years: far from it. I had been hacking away at its turbo-powered growth for more than ten years . It’s a legacy of the dear departed’s vision for a completely untrammelled garden, Alexander Pope’s ‘unadorned nature’ on steroids.) So no gardener. Nor a stylist. The house will most likely be demolished. A stylist would just be demoralised, like a make-up artist asked to work on a condemned man. So I cut and slash and the years fall to the ground along with the branches and twigs and leaves. ‘One-owner house,’ will project the auctioneer, all grey suit and sharp hair and rolled-up auction blurb to slap on his other hand at ‘sold’. I wrote copy for an estate agent at the turn of the century; k...

We had stopped at Dean’s Marsh on a late-summer Sunday drive to the surf beach at Lorne. I had been curious to see if a small cottage in the town - an early photograph of which I had seen in the autobiography of Marjorie Lawrence - still existed.  * Dean’s Marsh? The town I had passed through so often on the way to Lorne in 1978,’79, '80, '81 and '82 with two very small children - their limbs growing longer each year so that they could eventually kick the driver’s seat and cleverly, annoyingly, wind down the windows with their summer-sandalled feet. Dean’s Marsh was the gateway to the Otways - the forest that ceased to be after a Wednesday night in 1983; the night their mother came home from a Hollies concert when the stage had been enveloped in smoke, and the only reason she knew it wasn’t a smoke machine was the acrid smell of burnt eucalypt that filled the auditorium. Earlier that night I had been watching some gritty British black and white police drama on ABC Channel ...