volume one

                                         



I remember those beach towels, the ones you are lying on. Dad’s is horizontal stripes, bright colours alternating with black. Yours is twice the size of his, a beach ‘blanket’, I think you used to call it. I remember you wrapping it around me when I came out from swimming at the beach, and it would be dragging on the ground. You would tuck it in, or maybe it was Dad, and then I couldn’t move my arms or my legs. I was stuck like a sandy towelling skittle, but of course I didn’t mind. It’s still one of my favourite feelings, to be wrapped up in a warm towel like that.

I think this photo was taken on a trip to Greenmount, in Surfers Paradise. I can’t even imagine how beautiful it would have been then, in the late 1960s before the developers rolled in and cast shadows over the sand. In this photo, it’s so white it almost looks like snow. There are three of you in the picture. Your towels are spaced evenly apart so you have colonised a section of beach that would be unheard of these days, at least in the summer when there’s barely more than a foot’s width between the beach umbrellas on any decent stretch of sand. There’s nobody else in the photograph, not even a shadow, and the white glare of the sand surrounds the three of you like a halo. Like you’re the only people on the face of the earth. The man sitting on the left was always known to me as ‘Uncle Gadge’ and I never asked why. When the knowledge was considered somehow necessary, I found out his real name was Gary. I didn’t think it suited him.

There are lots of photos of this trip you and Dad made with Gadge and his wife Doreen. She was obviously the photographer, though you all had a turn because this page of the photo album has four frames with exactly the same set-up, only different people. I can imagine you all taking turns with the camera, maybe a Box Brownie or something a bit more modern. There’s no group shot of the four of you but there you all are on one page. I just have to imagine the four of you sitting there together. The little square photographs are exactly what the Instagram generation tries to recreate - white borders and super-saturated colour with a yellowed veneer of age. There is #nofilter here, just five decades under self-adhesive film. On the facing page of the album, there are more shots of you all at a wooden table that’s covered in empty beer bottles. You are all laughing.

I remember Gadge was always making people laugh, but now I’m not sure if that’s from experience or from my memories of looking at these photos. My favourite when I was a kid is the one of him with a flash bulb from a camera stuck in his belly button. I don’t remember seeing him that much when I was growing up, even though they didn’t live that far away. He and Doreen were my godparents, which explains how close you were to them in 1972 when I was born. Because I have children of my own now, I can see how that would have changed when my sister and I came along. I can see how life and a mortgage and babies and a job can take over from drinking beer around a kitchen table in Greenmount. But I am glad you had those times.

Your hair is peroxide blonde, almost as white as the sand, and I remember you telling me a story about jumping into a super-chlorinated pool and losing your bleached hair in handfuls. You had to have it cut short, which I think makes you look like a model. Maybe it’s also the oversized sunglasses, or the way you’re lying on your beach blanket, in your glamorous bikini, not a care in the world. Dad is in his natural element, leaning back on one elbow and smiling at the camera. His legs are stretched out past the edge of the towel, feet crossed and covered in sand, and he looks as though he’s been lying there for the better part of a lifetime. Maybe just the best part.

You live near a beach like this now, you and Dad. You both seem to be happiest when you are near the water, and you have passed that on to my sister and I. Your grandchildren have all known the joy of sitting on the sand at the water’s edge with you, building sandcastles, or holding your hand and jumping over and into the waves. So much has changed since this photograph was taken, yet so much is still exactly the same.

This golden life you had, newly married and before children, glows back at me from the pages of a discoloured photo album. It is one fleeting moment, captured like a bug in a drop of amber. I turn it over in my hand and hold it up to the light, looking for things that aren’t there. But it is only one scene in one chapter, the first in this album of stories. There will be daughters born, first days of school, a sea change, a cancer diagnosis and a heartwarming recovery before the pages run out. But it’s only volume one, and life is lived in many volumes.

It seems I have forgotten my biro

I’m no Malcolm Turnbull but it’s been a fucking WEEK. 

On Wednesday I was gallery sitting for an exhibition that, coincidentally, my work also won. I entered a short story cycle I had written, as the call for entries sought work from all disciplines at the University of Newcastle. And I fucking WON. First prize. I am no longer prepared to apologise for that, even though it seems few in the art world agreed with the decision and even fewer in the writing world see it as a proper literary achievement. 

So there I was, gallery sitting, when a middle-aged white man approached the counter and asked me what I had entered. Clearly he knew that anyone with work in the exhibition also had to volunteer their time to gallery sit for at least a few hours. I could have said “Oh, I won. My work is in the corner of the gallery.” Instead, ever apologetic, I just told him where he could find it. But it seemed he had already seen all the works, because he immediately retorted: “Didn’t grab me.” Because I was so clearly waiting for his opinion on this. “It grabbed the judges,” said I, to which he looked surprised and asked how much the prize was worth. Like it was any of his filthy fucking business. But I told him. He seemed impressed with the amount, but not with the fact that I had won it. He went into the gallery and I went back to the counter, where he approached me about five minutes later and proceeded to ask what the point of my work was, with its tiny text that you had to get up close to read (he obviously hadn’t done this, because he hadn’t been gone long enough. He also confessed as much, insinuating he couldn’t really be bothered as it wasn’t a “visual” work). 

So there I was, volunteering my time to work in a gallery, proud of my achievement not only in writing the work but also in being awarded first prize by two separate judges of sound mind, justifying myself to a middle-aged white man. Again. And again. I told him the challenge was to invest the time to read the work and then perhaps you would be rewarded with an emotional response, just as you might be with a visual work of art. I might as well have been reading the phone book. He didn’t see the point, though I think I won the argument because he gave up and congratulated me before thankfully leaving the building. But he didn’t read my work and he probably still thinks it doesn’t deserve to even be hanging in a student art prize, let alone win it. He’s entitled to that opinion, of course. But why of all days did he have to choose this Wednesday between 1pm and 5pm to come in to the gallery and throw it at me? These fucking tests are doing my head in.

Today, I went to a university lecture titled Perspectives on Film, Media and Culture. I had spent the past 36 hours closely (some might say a bit obsessively) following the political clusterfuck unfolding in Canberra via the Twitter feeds of the country’s best journalists as well as some on-point social commentators. I was also following more traditional coverage on ABC News 24 both on radio and television. I spent 20 years being a journalist and I boycott all news except political drama because I can’t get enough of that. In between marvelling at the professionalism of ABC journos who had been dissecting the drama for three straight days, I also read no less than five scholarly articles about the creative industries. Because they were assigned to be read for today’s lecture. 

There were lots of things discussed in the lecture, probably lots of valid things and even interesting things, but I don’t remember many of them. What I do remember is the twenty-something (female) lecturer telling the class that women over the age of 40 don’t understand social media. They don’t understand how to use it or how it works. They think it works like life and it doesn’t, apparently. I am 45 years old and I wanted to tell her IT’S NOT FUCKING ROCKET SCIENCE. Instead I politely suggested that we don’t CONFUSE it with life, which is a different thing entirely. She tried to apologise, said she didn’t mean me obviously, not all women over 40 etcetera etcetera. Don’t fucking test me, I wanted to say. But I felt like I had already sat the test, and already failed it. 

AND I AM TIRED OF YOUR FUCKING TESTS.