What I cooked last night.

Everything is -'friendly'. Eco-friendly. User-friendly. Reader-friendly.  Objects, concepts. What happened to human-friendly?  Vegan-friendly , trumpeted the package, which contained wheat germ. Long-term readers might or might not recall that I have had something of an ongoing  semi- obsession with the over-earnest, ungrammatical, or sheer moronic label claims that plague manufactured food products. Clearly, either the general population - the consumers of these goods and their verbal assaults - or the marketing industry - their illiterate authors - has become stupider. Or both. Probably both. Irony aside, what madness is it that the consumer needs a printed assurance that a bag containing 100% ex-vegetation has no animal content? Or that its processing has not knowingly been associated with members of the animal kingdom throughout its journey from grassland to four-colour-process-overprinted crude oil-based plastic packaging? Which, in any case, means what? A process w...

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...

You think you saw something last week in the supermarket, and you look for it, and it isn't there. Must be out of stock, you think. Then you go home and google it, and find out it was discontinued in 2008. Nuts. But I saw it not a year or so ago. Maybe two. No, you didn’t. You haven’t seen it for seventeen years; maybe fifteen if you kept a pack in your cupboard going stale for a year or two. In that fifteen years other things happened. Children were born and grew. You bought some cars. Some relatives died. Others didn’t. The house leaked for two years until you got it fixed. The house across the road sold, thank God, the owner’s subwoofer had sent earthquake rumbles under the entire street. The parish priest died.  Out-of-mind things come back as if they were there a minute ago, popping out of some elusive brain cul-de-sac, like a handkerchief in the pocket of an old coat you haven’t worn since last winter. Pro-Vita Weat-Harts: white pack, single ear of wheat graphic in ochre sil...

Of course, 3RRR and 3PBS announcers played Black Sabbath favourites all weekend; I heard ‘Changes’ oftener in the past week than I had in the last half century. Monday morning program Deeep (sic) Space concluded with the little-known Black Sabbath track 'She's Gone' (google the title and you’ll be in Hall & Oates 1970s heaven, or a 1990s stadium rock echo-chamber) from their 1976 album  Technical Ecstasy , a song that throws up a line in which perfect iambic pentameter, give or take a syllable, alchemises mere words into lyrics of otherwise  ineffable sadness and beauty: The silent emptiness of one-sided love

One day when I was a kid, I ran down a steep dune at Wilson’s Promontory that got steeper, and gravity inverted me, slamming my head through 135 degrees to hard sand. I remembered nothing until I floated home in my father's car late in the afternoon, gazing out at anamorphic scenery through the distorting glass of its 1960s curved windscreen; a psychedelic world of an unknown colour that had the taste and smell of sunshine filtered through dry desert sand. Concussion. Years later. I woke out of anaesthesia in the delirium of some drug, the one - or one of the ones - that makes you talk to anyone in your state of ecstasy, before the pain sets in and has to be worked at. A few months earlier, breathing had not returned to normal and, one x-ray later, I had found myself on the fourth floor, south, of a cream-brick hospital in Parkville. The nose had set in its broken position. No-one had noticed after the accident, in which my face had cannoned into the back of the front seat; but why...

I can’t - couldn’t then - criticise  Jaws,  the movie: I never saw it. (Although I doubted a shark could out-fright the feral truck in Spielberg’s first film, Duel . Anyone in the water would disagree, of course.) But I did read Jaws , the novel, during those strange empty months of winter 1975. I finished it one July afternoon sitting in Centrepoint, a lurid green downstairs bar off Bourke Street. I was waiting for a girlfriend, my fellow back-seat passenger who had escaped uninjured in a car accident a couple of months earlier. She worked in an office building a block away, and I had been in the habit of dropping into Centrepoint before meeting her after work.  The bar, being downstairs and a shade of green that glowed under artificial light, exuded a weirdly submarine atmosphere. I felt I was swimming through a sea of lime-green nylon carpet, laminex tables and vinyl chairs to get a drink, but maybe that was the book talking. Overhead, a circular drop ceiling simulated...

The first film of that year, 1975, was screened on a sultry afternoon in February in the old Radio Theatre, a 1940s relic in RMIT’s Bowen Lane. The film was Sydney Pollack's 1969 psychological drama  They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?  In that same month, on the other side of the world,  Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville  and Pollack’s  Three Days of the Condor  were being shot or were in post-production. As was  Jaws . Film students yet to be born would in some future or extant cinema critique those productions. The theatre door, heavy as that of a bank safe, had closed with a heavy wheeze when I entered out of the blinding sun and, feeling my way, found a seat I could barely see. In the dim luminescence of the uncurtained screen, a film lecturer called Doug who, apparently relishing the prospect of sharing his cinematic favourites with a new intake of students, was enthusiastically introducing the film before signalling the projectionist - “Roll it, Sid...

The race to the solstice had been easily won; the weeks had flown and been flung aside, bits of history never to happen again.  But then the hard part. The solstice was a chimera; the promise of daylight remaining a few minutes longer masked the prospect of a long cold wet miserable July and August. Inhabitants of other climes might jeer, and point to their winters of ten below, or their blinding snowstorms. But snow is romantic; a Melbourne winter is a bone-chilling wind-blown marathon, without the northern hemisphere’s Christmas - with its logfire-and-sleigh bells imagery - in the middle. (We get to endure that hokey European nonsense when it’s forty in the shade: Celsius.) A fellow runner - a Canadian - once admitted to me one bleak winter night that the chill wind that whipped frozen Antarctic air and dropped its cut-throat icicles onto Olympic Park, the Botanical Gardens and their surrounding pathways on which we were running, Lycra-tighted and gloved, was colder, more glacial...

Walls fall; presidents and popes are shot (if not fatally, like musicians); rockets bearing civilians drop out of the sky; clothes grow pads; music becomes a visual medium (on hearing a tune a listener, confusing senses, exclaims, ‘I remember that video!’ ); Roth/Updike/Bellow carry on jousting*. Meanwhile, you had to eat. Not everything in the 1980s was of the 1980s, such as savoury mince, an example of the kind of mundane dish that became a default meal keeping the beef grinders in business like ‘spaghetti bolognese’ does today, its reddish-beige lava bubbling over cheddar-coloured pasta mountainsides in the bowl-volcanoes of a million family tables. ‘Bolognese again?’ Savoury? That redundant word is one of the cooking clichés that never disappears. What else is minced beef except savoury? What does it even mean? The word is scattered like confetti through the recipe supplements (lift-outs, the publishers called them) stapled into those mid-century women’s magazines that sold in the...

The Pink Pussycat - as cryptic a name as I could think of to drop at the next student party - was not the only source of income, little as it was, including tips. Melbourne Airport was arguably an even better conversation starter ( what, you fly planes? - people always think the obvious) but the work here was even more mundane than pouring a ‘taste’ (a charade that even then was embarrassingly outdated) of Yalumba Carte d’Or riesling or McWilliams Shiraz Cabernet into the glass of the male half of a dining couple so that, after making a method acting impression of a furrow-browed, purse-lipped judge at Mundus Vini, he would decide whether they would drink it or not. Indeed, the airport job - money is obviously tight in this anonymous early 1980s Carltonian mise en scène - involved little more than bussing Budget rental cars from their terminal drop-off point to a depot back in the endless sun-parched acres of tarmac in the backblocks of Tullamarine, where I cleared their overflowing ...