What I cooked last night.

The city was designed radially, its outbranching main roads like spokes in a wheel. I grew up on a north-west spoke that impaled the blunt mercantility of Moonee Ponds and Essendon on its way to Keilor's thistle-infested basalt plains, where the wind cried nothing. Not that it was a cultural wasteland. At school as a seven-year-old I used to gaze at the face of a smiling whale as it surfaced in the Southern Ocean on a giant world map pinned to the wall behind Miss Burns’ desk while she played Tchaikovsky on the mono record player I had carried, boxed in its case, laboriously from home. The basic timber church across the schoolyard, a half-acre of knee-ripping gravel embedded in asphalt, still practised Benediction, that most aesthetically and psychically rewarding of Christian rituals. Later, having bought a car, I discovered a new spoke, a new vector in the broken circle of Melbourne. This new trajectory, pointing north-east, pierced suburbs aroused by the semi-rural Heidelberg sc...

The uncle was not a real uncle but a second cousin, adopted by my grandfather as a seven-year-old after his mother had died in his infancy. His father, post-war, had been too busy or couldn’t be bothered; or was drunk, or syphilitic, or both, or just disappeared. Now it was the early 1960s, and the uncle was a proto-hippy with a dark clipped beard and Buddy Holly glasses. He could have been a folk singer of protest songs, but instead took a successful career in finance and married a tall dark-haired beauty with eyes like deep pools and the kind of freckles that spoke of past summers on endless beaches.  For all that unlocked vault of luck, or Calvinist pre-destination if you prefer, the uncle was not pretentious. He drove a blue Volkswagen, and he drove it like a Porsche. On Sunday afternoons he threw it around hairpin bends on the road up to Mt. Dandenong, at the top of which we fell out, dizzied, laughing, cramped. We gazed at the map-like monochrome spread of Melbourne way down ...

The underside of a car loomed above me; it looked, up there on the hoist, like a stuck beetle seen from underneath. I made out a Volkswagen, its headlights half-shut eyes in the garage gloom. The office window, variegated with Castrol, Visco-Static, Penrite, and Marlboro stickers, opened on the apron where the sun was dropping bombs of heat. It made silhouettes of bowsers and humans and rendered the houses on the other side of the road colourless. Beyond the houses a faint line, an eye-shadow, of low distant hills held its midday trance. The garage attendant became a tall thin stooped cut-out of some dark animal pointing a gun at my unseen father, a sitting duck in the driver’s seat of his black cardboard car. Heat-driven waves of fuel vapour rose, refracting the Shell sign behind the attendant as he dutifully tap-tapped the nozzle on the car’s tank outlet. Every last drop. I slunk out into the swimming atmosphere and climbed onto the hot vinyl. We slid smoothly out of the Shell se...

Three right angles took me to school, thanks to the1920s cartographers who, in their grid obsession, turned geography into geometry. I started school early; four. From the front gate, two hundred gently rising yards of cream and red brick houses crouched behind shrub and lawn, neat, ordered, tidy. Left turn. Fifty yards. Still a gentle ascent, fewer houses; bigger, quieter, somehow richer. Must have been the east-west orientation rather than my north-south.  Right turn. Main road. Careful: Frank in my grade two class, who lived on this road, was knocked down here once. Never the same. Ran across desks, molten anger. (Alcoholic father didn’t help; much older lawyer brother the same. Mother was an angel; dark eyes uplifted in some kind of accepting grace behind which lurked an infinite sadness. Also, two beautiful flaxen-haired sisters like muted divas.) Twenty yards. Left turn. Thirty yards. School gate.  Three right angles: a square peeled open into a zig-zag line on a map, as...