What I Cooked Last Night

It was a long time ago. A warm night in 1975. I was driving my first car, a white XP Falcon four-door, to the Mornington Peninsula where my family had a holiday house at Somers. I had just turned into Coolart Road, that long stretch that always seemed to take forever. 1975 had not been a good year in music, unless you liked disco ducks or Barry Manilow. As usual, I was punching the radio buttons to find something decent with which to drive past endless pine plantations. I hit a button and a new song came on and by the time it had finished I was most of the way down Coolart Road without even noticing. A kind of haggard vibrato was dragged along by an insane chop of a beat that sounded like a Harley Davidson ticking over and then, near the end, a sax break blew the whole thing out of the water. In fact, it almost blew the speakers out of the car, which would have been a shame because they were only new. That year they were calling Bruce Springsteen the new Dylan. * The other day I was ma...

'Usually,' began the doctor, carefully feeling Thomas's forearm between his thumb and index finger, 'They bounce.' But this time, Thomas hadn't. The doctor sent us off for x-rays that revealed a greenstick fracture of the lower forearm. That was two weeks ago. Thomas adapted to the half cast perfectly well. He wore it like a vambrace, often taking to William with it. An excellent piece of armour indeed. Food was a problem. Fifteen-month-olds play with it. His bandage was covered in mash after each meal. Then Tracy hit on the brilliant strategy of wrapping it in a plastic bag at mealtimes. As well as at the beach and at bath time.

Hardware store owners always look like hardware store owners and newsagents always look like newsagents, but the people who run motels never look like they run motels. I wonder why. The woman in the office was in her fifties and tall, and had intelligent emerald eyes and a sensitive mouth and long hair stacked up in a kind of two-storey nest with a tortoiseshell stick the size of a chopstick separating the two storeys. She could have been a folk singer or a psychoanalyst or a society page editor, but here she was running a sleepy motel in a sleepy town on the northern slopes of the Great Dividing Range. The woman looked up from behind the counter as I entered and I asked her if there was a room and she said, yes indeed, there was, in an Irish lilt. She gave me the key to room two and would I like any milk? Yes, I replied and she disappeared and came back with a small ceramic jug. I got back into the car and handed the jug to Tracy and drove the car fifty metres to room two and wondered...

I lifted the sash window in the loungeroom and a blast furnace came into the room. I closed it again and the blast stopped, but the room was about ten degrees hotter than before. The loungeroom faces north and the wind was a northerly and it was a big wind and it was an angry wind. The temperature topped out at 42 yesterday. The overnight was to be 30, about the same as Tennant Creek and Broome and a degree or two lower than Port Hedland. Why so hot down here, then? The wind sweeps the country from top to bottom, across the dead heart, sucking heat from burning rock and molten sand and dumping it on Melbourne before blowing out across Bass Strait and on to Tasmania, the full point to the mainland's question mark. * The night swam by in a barely-remembered swelter of black heat. The boys slept surprisingly well. Tracy, not so well. I slept like a log. The heat doesn't bother me. William had stood on a bee in the late afternoon. I had set up a small pool on the lawn beneath the s...

7.30 p.m. Still 38 degrees. I was in the bay, a few hundred metres off shore. Tracy was on the beach in the shade of some ti-tree with Thomas, who was snoozing on the big white and blue beach towel. I was playing with William. The water is still only knee-deep here. Another few hundred metres farther out, timber depth markers indicate where the shelf drops off; and beyond that the jetskis go smack-smack-smack one way along the gentle swell and then smack-smack-smack the other way. You'd think they'd tire of it but they never do. Like mosquitos in the night. William and I looked back towards the shore. You know what I miss about the beach? Canvas unbrellas. Espcially the old ones designed in alternate concentric circles of colour and white with fringed edges. Or segmented into primary colours between the ribs; green, red, yellow, blue, etc. You see them in pictures of the beach printed in photogravure magazines of the 1950s; delicately poised on the sand over canvas deckchairs a...

One day, he wore a hole in his trouser knee. The next day he walked, and he hasn't stopped since.

He rang me the next day from a hotel on the other peninsula. He had completely forgotten. I said not to worry about it, we'll catch up later. I might even visit Alice Springs this year, finally. * Back to food matters, Food Nazi posted this culinary summary of the year the week before Christmas. Here is my version, a little shorter, I'm afraid. I don't get about much any more. Dish of the year: Flash-fried steak, a minute each side and topped with a thin slice of blue cheese and warmed, thinned home-made pesto. Rich but stunning. Served with fine chips and a simple green salad. Best eating experiences of the year: 1. See above. 2. A plate of glistening, quivering seafood dumplings at any number of the new Asian cafes that make the old sesame toast, sweet and sour, fried rice places look like something out of the 1950s. Which is what they usually are. 3. Barbecued salmon steaks under a setting sun. Favourite cafe snack: One man's journey through a world of foccaccia an...

In a large bowl, I tumbled quartered peeled potatoes and chunks of pumpkin in olive oil, salt and pepper, set them in a baking tin along with a whole head of unpeeled garlic and some rosemary and placed the tin in the oven. It had been a cooler day. My brother - the vague one from Alice Springs - was coming to visit. He would arrive some time in the afternoon or early evening. He couldn't be specific. Things change. He might see something interesting on the trip from the city to the Peninsula and be diverted. A lot can happen in ninety minutes. The rosemary was starting to get fragrant and I was chopping some more garlic. The radio on the shelf was broadcasting the cricket. I used to listen to the cricket just to hear the voice of Alan McGillivray. Now I listen to it to find out who is winning, if anyone. A five-day game that ends in a draw is a marvellously Victorian thing, like a steam omnibus. Cricket should be heritage listed. Half an hour later. I made slits in two pieces of l...

QANTAS couriered my brother's lost case to my mother's house - where he is staying - 24 hours after they lost it. Where was it for 24 hours? Had it remained in the spot the baggage handler mistakenly placed it, surely suspicions should have been raised. In all likelihood it was diverted to a subsequent flight. An implanted GPS chip might have been interesting. Meanwhile, I had packed up some assorted clothes and delivered them to my brother. We are much the same size in clothes and shoes. * On Thursday we packed up a simple picnic, placed the boys in their double stroller (we are occasionally asked if they are twins), strolled to the station and caught an empty train into town, got off at Flinders Street, walked down a sunny St Kilda Road, crossed at Nolan Street, entered the Botanic Gardens at the cactus garden gate and found a spot under the impossibly large canopy of an ancient tree in a spreading lawn overlooking the lake. We ate turkey sandwiches. The boys tottered and rol...

They used to be called merely, and possibly kindly, eccentric; but these days, people who display somewhat odd behaviour are apt to be labelled with some medical description, even by people who are not doctors. However, the 'A' word came into even my mind when, on arrival at my mother's house for Christmas lunch, I found ten cellophane packs of patterned paper plates stacked up on the sideboard. Thanks to my late father's career as a sales representative with a catering supplies company, my mother has the world's largest collection of fine crockery. So what was with the paper plates? I don't want anyone washing up on Christmas Day, she explained, which had a certain grim logic to it, but have you ever tried to cut roast pork on a paper plate? Of course, I had wondered, when she returned from Turkey earlier this year with a badly gashed leg which had landed her in an Istanbul hospital for stitches. What happened? I had asked. Oh that , she had said dismissively...

The drive to Gippsland was a whole new experience, as if Pakenham had never existed. The bypass is open at last. Now you don't get thirteen sets of traffic lights, just a view of the town from the south - a sea of red orange roofs and a shopping centre tower rising out of the middle. Once it would have been a church steeple. The tower was painted with a red Coles logo that could have been seen fifty kilometres away if not for the occasional drifts of heavy rain. It rained most of the way and the wind whipped. Clouds hung low and black. The boys dozed in the back seat. Music makes them sleep. A golden oldies station was doing a retrospective of 1972 and it went from a six-minute Argent progressive rock piece with a Hammond organ solo in the middle, to a Rod Stewart hit, to early Eagles, to the late Billy Thorpe, and then Led Zeppelin's signature song. When was that a top 40 hit? I wondered. It wasn't. Stairway to Heaven was an album track never released as a single; but re...

Back in town. It has rained intermittently for two days; yesterday morning heavily enough to stop traffic on Bell Street as I ploughed west and onto the freeway. I circled Essendon Airport and pulled off at the next exit. By the time I pointed the car down the long, sloping, winding driveway to the school, the rain had passed. Schools on the edge of holidays always have that same tired atmosphere. The year's work of pictures, drawings and posters stuck to classroom windows were already yellowing and curling and odd items of left-behind clothing hung on hooks or on the backs of chairs. The students had finished earlier in the week, and the few remaining teaching staff wandered here and there, tying up loose ends and looking forward to lunch. Then they were gone and I spent a lonely day in the staff room working on the book. There's something kind of melancholy about an empty school. At least you don't get interrupted. I locked the place up at four o'clock. It echoed. * ...

Sometimes you forget to look at the scenery. I was driving south on the Nepean Highway out of Mt Eliza and behind Mt Martha towards Safety Beach. The road bears inland for a short way and then dips down and curves around in a wide arc, so that the view opens up like a curtain in a theatre. And you see the water. Endless blue stretched away towards the southern peninsula. In the haze, a ship trudged up the horizon towards the city. Here the road turns back towards the bay along a ridge parallel with Martha Cove. This was the old way into Safety Beach and Dromana, before the freeway came; and houses hung on the cliff on both sides of the road enjoying the unchanging view. Now some of the older houses on the lower side are gone, bulldozed for the new development. A few cling on, like elderly aunts who refuse to go into the nursing home. Two years ago, Martha Cove was just a long scar in the earth of an undeveloped section of the peninsula. Last year it heaved with excavators, and earthmov...

It was hot and humid well into the evening. The sun hadn't broken through the haze all day. Late in the morning I had had to drive to East Kew, commonly referred to as Far Kew, because it stretches almost to North Balwyn; and the roads were choked with traffic, the kind of traffic that doesn't know quite where it's going, like Christmas shoppers torn between Chadstone and the City and ending up at Northcote Plaza. Something should be done about Christmas. Three million people (or is Melbourne four millions now?) swelter in traffic jams on their way to marathon shopping trips at plazas the size of suburbs and emerge hours if not days later laden with iPods and DVD players and home theatre systems and other necessities of life for anyone older than six; and then when the day arrives they sit down at midday in forty degree heat (but that's OK, the air conditioner's on; just don't tell anyone we voted for the Green Party) to a table of roasted turkey, glazed ham, ro...