What I Cooked Last Night

At night the trees speak in hushed tones over the small starlight-silvered bungalow, but the river at the end of the street snakes its bends in black silence. I walk along the river’s north side at night, sometimes under a full moon, listening to the faint hiss of the upper branches of the silhouetted pines, old cypresses planted a century ago by some riverside farmer who probably lost stock floating away in its sinister flood prone flatness. Eventually the child, his auburn-haired, kaftanned and sandalled mother sometimes already in exhausted sleep, is grown enough to accompany me past twilight to climb on the tubular steel play-rocket embedded in concrete at a sky-bound forty-five degrees. He sits silhouetted like the trees, so I cannot see his astronaut’s intent frown of concentration. We return to the bungalow and he sleeps and I read, deep into the night, motoring magazines or Bleak House or the film festival program. George, the Sicilian landlord, collects the rent every second ...

It is the year of Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever , and because I am busy with studying and working and finding somewhere to live, I miss the two blockbusters, and never, ever see them. It is also the year of Annie Hall , and I do see it, but not in that year. It is 1977. My first landlord is one of several Georges. Rentals in the inner north-western suburbs are often owned by Greek immigrants, but this George is a short Sicilian; his only Greekness being a comical Thalia face. Having seen a classified ad in the Saturday Age, I push open the angled glass door of Abbot and Dean, Real Estate Agents and Property Managers, in Rose Street on the Monday morning and sign a twelve-month lease. That squiggle decides it: I'm leaving home, bye-bye : age nineteen. The bungalow is a board-and-batten square with soft green panels enframed in white timber below a raked roof, crouching in semi-seclusion amongst trees in the back yard of a house on a sloping corner block at the river end of Abe...

Things suffer by comparison. How cruel, for example to feed children, for years, a dessert of light, fluffy, golden-yellow baked white rice pudding studded with fat moist sultanas and topped with a sweet cinnamon-speckled skin of milk and egg; and then to suddenly change the main ingredient to brown rice. * The faces of my three much younger siblings are freeze-frames as they gaze at their newly-brown desserts, having experienced a taste that is closer to dusky earthiness than the honeyed sky of its predecessor. It was permanent. The family has jointly graduated overnight, as it were, to the brown revolution: bread, rice, scones, hot cross buns, pasta, cakes, pie crust (see ‘hunza pie’); everything that can possibly be brown or wholemeal, is. * Brown rice dragged its 1960s reputation through time like an aging hippie who still plays Jefferson Airplane cassettes in his Kombi. Meanwhile other grain fads emerged and retreated. Right now ‘ancient’ as a grain descriptor seems important to...