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 ...
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.