The candle maker.

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 brutal factories, and occupied by a lone overloaded freight truck leaning toward the vanishing point. The familiar car is my father’s; I am in it.

The literally familiar car, a year or two earlier or later, had driven off a winding country lane beside a creek somewhere north of where Melbourne Airport would be built. Children fled the car to climb banks while he plumbed the ripples for smooth stones; later rolling them for hours in a motorised cylinder, a kind of turbo-charged evolutionary shortcut to polished preciosity.

He had a year to go, maybe less, when he flew, unwell, into Rome, on a kind of pilgrimage. Possibly he merely tired of his fellow travellers, seeing no difference between their obsessions with Padre Pio or the lady of Medjugorje, and those who, a half-millennium earlier, had paid priests for indulgences, and had been chased out of town by Martin Luther. Either way, my father turned his back on the transverberationists and bilocators, caught a plane back to Melbourne, and died within months.

As a candle-maker, a decade or so earlier, he had produced fat, round, gloriously orange, lime green and deep purple orbs that burned slowly down through their hemispheres, their waxy fluorescence illuminating early-’70s nights in open-windowed Carlton share houses, the summer breeze soughing the optimistic curtains of love-making students.