Cruising the web for some sunrise entertainment, I have just come across the information that the site in east Darling Harbour recently contentiously named Barangaroo (and not The Hungry Mile) should actually have been called Gomora.

Today I will map out an olfactory geography of my daily trajectory from Alexandria, on the rim of the airport industrial belt, to Ryde in the heart of the bordering-on-western suburbs. This is a trip of about 15 kilometres which takes approximately one hour, from the coffee-laden airs of Erskineville road to the fumes of the 506 as it squeaks and grumbles to a halt outside my office. The backstreets of the inner west give off their own affluent and slightly exotic aroma of jasmine and good living which fades to a mingling of Co2 with the clashing perfumes of the small flock of commuters waiting to cross Parramatta Rd in their straight skirts and spiky heels.

The Co2 persists, down Johnston Street in Annandale to the Balmain dockyards at the end where the City Westlink edges around the harbour. Here the odour depends on the time of day- a concentrated, powerful mingling of oil and mud at low tide, a saltier and more dilute version when the water is high. At the Darling Street intersection in Balmain, before the long rugged sweep down to the Iron Cove Bridge, there is a whiff of ammonia struggling with hospital grade disinfectant emitting from the public toilets (which are painted- appropriately- in a weak, well-hydrated yellow). Two petrol stations contribute their potent emissions to the mix as I swoop by.

The Iron Cove Bridge- more salt and, because of the exposure to the wind, a taste of distant bushfires or storms, depending on the time of day and year. On the other side I leave Victoria Rd and and cut through the backstreets of Drummoyne- more affluence, more commuter perfume, the more subtle fumes of expensive cars. The Gladesville Bridge is more impressive for its views than its odours, until - reaching the bottom end of the cycle path- there is a sudden sweet and overpowering waft of wattleflower.

And now downhill to Tarban Creek. Early in the morning the grass is still damp and smells of dew and at the very lowest point of my trip the path leads through the mangroves towards Gladesville and Hunters Hill. Here the odour is rich, organic, bordering on rotten but somehow still pleasant. The flowering shrubs and trees in the nature resrve on the other side of the creek balance it out with more honey and musk. This is the end of the trip, the last thing I smell before the steep climb where my own pungent sweat takes over and I am onto the final kilometre of my journey.

Marcin and Kuba thrive on noise, and to live they need a constant soundtrack which keeps total silence at bay. I don't suffer from this aural horror vacuii and when they aren't home I listen to nothing at all and find that it is loud enough in itself. There is a hum of whitegoods, a sporadic swish of tyres down on Euston Street, the tapping of the keyboard. I can hear a phone ringing and a fire alarm erupts as somebody fries their evening meal with too much enthusiasm on the floor below, but it is the sound of the electricity in the walls which I notice the most. It is a sort of symphonic accretion of sound, a low background hum overlaid by a chorus of erratic squeaks and a steady high-pitched whistle. I sit in front of the computer and feel myself caught in a web of invisible impulses which ebb and flow in the air around me, ripping through my cells and creating an unseen turbulence in the tranquil spaces of our flat .

It is nothing like the lively night air in the bush, province of possums and owls : in that silence and that darkness you can feel yourself expanding, released from something confining which you notice fleetingly as it disappears. The night silence of the city vibrates with uneasy human sensation that makes the air contract around you.

My Rostered Day Off is an island of calm in the month which I swim towards with growing desperation as another four weeks reaches its culmination . Yesterday it was marred by caffeine and a disturbing reread of Peter Goldsworthy's Three Dog Night- a novel about jealousy, the secret seed of destruction that lies at the heart of the empire of happiness. I have read this book before and because I know what happens, because this prior read puts me in a position to see the signs of ruin rising like a tide towards the happy love affair at the centre of things, I found it almost impossible to bring myself to repeat some sections. Maybe it's a bit too close to home.

For example: Freyja and Zaf's birthday party. We are up at her father's place at Peats Ridge, drinking around a fire under the stars- I go to bed early because I have to get up in the morning at seven, drive back to Sydney and go to work. I fall asleep briefly and wake up after an hour or so- Marcin is still not there. I am overtaken by a feeling of foreboding which I affix to a possible incipient attraction between Freyja's friend Marnie and my husband. He has expressed an admiration for her ability to keep herself in a consistent and extreme state of drunkenness without succumbing either to sleep or sobriety, and my paranoid mind goes to work on this so that sleep becomes impossible. I go outside and stumble towards to circle of firelight. As I get closer, I pull up short. They are sitting together on a wooden bench. I peer and squint in the darkness. Are they touching each other? Leaning on each other? I am overtaken by panic and can't go any closer. I lurk in the shadow of the barn, squatting on the stubble of recently-cut grass, and watch.

In Europe, Halloween takes place on the eve of the year's darkness, the time of steel - grey skies and contracting days when winter is beginning to wrap its bony fingers around the world. The spirits are released into these last possible moments of light and warmth, through the thinning barriers that exist on the seasonal littoral between autumn and winter. On November 1, in Poland, the graveyards are crowded with people lighting candles on the graves of their ancestors and taking advantage of this easy access to the other world. In Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Germany, France, this is a time to celebrate the deceased, a black festival that refuses to take death seriously and laughs at the coming cold.

In Australia, the time has just leapt forward an hour and the evenings are long and balmy. Trick-or-treaters here begin their evening in broad daylight , and cycling home from work I see that they are out in force, from three year olds in pyjamas and rabbit ears to girls on the brink of puberty, about to overbalance into the top- heavy world of womanhood. Witches and monsters, sweating inside their rubber masks, rub cheeks with fairies in tulle tutus waving silvery wands. In Annandale, an eight- year- old Grim Reaperette brandishes a paper mache scythe: a Balmain vampire knocks with trepidation on the door of a nineteenth century stone cottage, urged on by her mother who waits in the shadows by the gate.

And so Australian infants rot their teeth on the rituals of another hemisphere, transplanted and transformed into an excuse for an evening walk on the cusp of summer. This antipodean perversion of meaning gives me huge pleasure.

My workmate, R., is a beautiful young woman from the Northern Beaches. Unless you live in Sydney, you cannot immediately know what that refers to - a narrow peninsula where a final bastion of white middle classdom remains, bordered by the Newcastle freeway grinding away on one side and the sea on the other. Young women from this area are blonde and pretty with an air of the incipient housewife hanging about them - success here is a big white wedding or a new couch. R. is a recent psychology graduate with a Brazilian boyfriend and a record of brilliant academic achievement. She is also the proud possessor of a new nose.

Her previous nose (before the operation, undertaken to 'help her breathe better' )was longish and narrow and had a sort of aquiline charm, like the nose of a greyhound or a llama. It gave her a slight imperiousness and hinted at a mere possibility of cruelty. Now it is gone, replaced by a still-swollen button nose which has reduced her to perfect beauty and symmetry. In the course of this transformation she has sustained one black eye, a tiny scar, and severe nasal pain, which she considers a small price to pay for 'being able to breathe better'.
Her expensive resculpting has been, as far as she is concerned, a resounding success.

On Saturday night I went with Marcin to see Children of Men, a futuristic film based on a PD James novel about a collapsing world where no children have been born for 18 years. In this film London is a third world city, the streets choked with rickshaws and drowning in garbage, with a few enclaves where the rapidly disappearing upper classes carry out their rich white duties despite the imminent extinction of the human race. It is set in 2027, and led to thoughts of the nature of imagination, the idea of selecting one of an infinite numbers of nonexistent worlds, one of an endless set of possible configurations of actions and events and personalities. The defining factor of the fruits of the imagination is that they don't exist, and so they are only allowed as a reflection of reality, a sort of cast of the mould of the real world. Imagination is confined on one side by the facts and on the other by the limits of the human mind- rather than having no bearing on reality, it has various bearings, with reality remaining as its point of reference.

October 18

This is a post dedicated to gifts given twice, memories which have been forgotten and then returned to me by friends and by my archives, in the last couple of months.

1. A night in Byron Bay with my friend Sara, and Pablo, her landlord's manic depressive son (who had a key and wasn't afraid to use it). Pablo spent twelve hours pacing and muttering and trying to seduce a former girlfriend who- in a terrible lapse of judgment or in the throes of her own bout of mental illness- had consented to come home with him. Sara is responsible for returning this memory to me and my own records confirm, adding this priceless piece of dialogue to the reconstructed occasion:

Pablo: Women have all the power in this world. How do you think it feels to have a dick and nowhere to put it ?
Sara: That's hardly our problem
Pablo: (triumphantly) Well, if you don't like it, get a sex change.

2. A pair of ceramic teacups which my old flatmate Melanie and her Prospective Spouse Masa brought back from their prenuptial visit to Japan. I had admired these for a month or two, having forgotten that they were indeed ours in the melding of sharehouse possessions.

3. A story I wrote in Poland starring a sex tourist and a young Ethiopian man (funny how fiction and life collide sometimes).

4. This image from February 11 2004, in the bar of the Park Hotel in Addis Ababa.
Nigeria is playing Tunis in the Africa Cup semi-final and despite all the talk of the tribal faultlines that shatter Africa, the bar is fully united in opposition to the Arabs. Nuweiri men (refugees from southern Sudan) with their scarred foreheads and herons legs crouch over orange flames of Fanta and appear to be in total agreement with the Amharic speaking waitresses and the cashier in his grimy purple coat. I would like to photograph this warm geometry of intent faces, shining glasses and white chairs but -as with all my photographic fantasies, it seems too intrusive.

October 16

My friend Freyja's father is still handsome, though ageing, and never seems to get drunk though he always has a glass in his hand. He has retained most of his hair, in conjunction with a sort of shyness belonging to a much younger man, and the only sign that the alcohol is affecting him at all is a barely perceptible loosening of the tongue. When this happens the consequences are hard to predict- often he begins, in measured, quiet tones, to describe the downfall of his sons, both of whom have spent time in psychiatric wards as the result of drugs and (he doesn't say this but it is there, between his calm, unblaming lines) a rather fucked up upbringing at the hands of their Jehovah's Witness mother.

Last Friday, he recounted how, in 1969, he and two of his friends were leaving the country for the first time. The nose of the plane was lifting off the ground when the pilot realised something was terribly wrong and aborted the takeoff. The plane buckled in the middle and both engines caught on fire. It turned out that a flock of seagulls had flown into one of them and jammed the propellor. The plane skidded into the swamp which, in 1969, marked the end of the runway, and the cargo of screaming passengers had to crawl along the wing and leap off into chest deep water to save themselves. His parents had been watching from the observation deck, waving their final wave, and had just enough range of vision to see the engines catch alight before the plane disappeared from their view into its watery grave.

Seems like it's harder to have a travel adventure these days, and I have spent the morning vicariously cycling in Madagascar since this sort of thrilling event is not likely to happen to me (now there is a special seagull- scarer who comes out onto the runway before the planes take off and blows a horn to discourage mass suicide and consequent engine trouble). Anyone who would like to do the same, click here .

October 10

The end pf a long day with the mad people- I am longing to lie down on the floor and watch a romantic, undemanding movie and massage my aching legs. However, in order to do this, I need to first rid the house of Rambo, which has been imported as part of my cinematic education. The brothers Ojrzynski claim that anyone who hasn't seen it is ignorant of modern culture and cannot possibly understand the world today. I am going to take it away and get The English Patient instead.

October 5

Last week I dreamed that I was in labour, a long dream that lasted the entire night and caused a lot of pain but didn't actually lead to the appearance of a baby. Drawn to make comparisons with my constipated creative faculty which, after a lot of straining, finally produces a few unsatisfying pellets and then shuts down again. At least there is always the blog- a couple of weeks ago Jorge sent me a link to an extract from Susan Sontag's diaries and I was struck by the fact that it is considered legitimate, this most private and disjointed writing with the secret desire for an audience lying at its core, inadmissable (reading someone's diary is the eleventh deadly sin) but informing all its content. The lists, the sketches of people and events, the ruminations, all bound up with a nice picture on the front and sold as literature. There's a degree of relief in the thought: this self-indulgence is permissible and even valued. As it seems to be all I'm capable of, I'm glad.

September 18

Yesterday, on a Sunday morning at the end (or beginning) of another long week, Marcin started to wax his legs. I was sitting on the floor urgently depilating myself in preparation for the summer and he was lying in bed reading the paper : he decided that he would like to see how it felt. A few quick rips left him looking like a moulting bird and convinced that there was no way but forward, and so the process continued throughout the day- one paragraph of the weekend paper, one piece of leg cleared of its old growth. Every time I tore off the wax he squealed, stamped his feet and beat his legs with the flat of his hand in an effort to ward off the pain,and both of us watched with interest as a new man emerged from the hairy chrysalis of the old.

This new smooth creature is slipperier, harder to get a grip on than the old rough one- less likely to purse his lips with disapproval at suggestions that prostitution and drug dealing are honourable professions, less likely to call mama religiously every Sunday, less likely to take offence at homosexual advances . This week there has been a stranger in my bed, more womanly and amorphous than the man who used to be there, and the collision of waxed legs in the night reminds me that all might not be as it seems.

September 16

One of our clients at New Horizons is D. (confidentiality deprives you of his full name). He is 35, and smokes like a chimney- he is morbidly obese and by the time he answers the door when we come at 11 to watch him take his medication, he is already wheezing after his long walk from the couch. He often lets us in without bothering to get dressed in anything more than a bathrobe that falls apart as he shuffles slowly back into his recumbent position- if he is feeling particularly modest he will haul a blanket over himself with a great display of effort, before closing his eyes and reaching for his tobacco. Often there is a blue-striped glass on his table with a pool of congealed or congealing phlegm in the bottom: once, a puddle of vomit in the sink which he implied was the result of ingesting vegetables for the first time in living memory. He has pale pink nipples and ginger chest hair and a pair of strangely slanted blue eyes that he has inherited from his mother, a former junkie turned religious maniac and hypochondriac. Meeting her, it suddenly becomes much easier to understand why he is the way he is. One morning she proudly tells us that she has taken great steps in drawing boundaries with her son, by refusing when he shouted at her from his bedroom to bring him his tobacco from the living room. His case study. compiled by the hospital staff before his discharge, states: D. and his mother have a codependent relationship.

D. inspires in me the most bizarre mix of affection and revulsion. He is like a 12o-kilogram six-year-old, with a sweet smile that occasionally emerges from his red beard and a deep need for approval. Most of the time, however, he is grunting and dissatisfied and happy to blame everyone around him for the misery and squalour he lives in, and utterly unwilling to do anything at all with his time. He spends days lying on the couch, sleeping and smoking and thinking paranoid thoughts about his upstairs neighbour. ( "she knocked my shoes off the balcony, the bitch." " And what did you do?" "I called her a bitch".) When I start thinking that my life is not as it should be, I console myself with the thought that it could be like his.

September 12

Just back from Canberra, a national capital strangely deprived of life with its loose ovoid lines and box-like buildings scattered here and there on large blocks of land and connected by loops of freeway. We spent the weekend as married couples do- eating, going to the cinema, fucking and arguing- it's a shame that this catalogue doesn't really transmit the sheer pleasure of such activities. It was grey and freezing- there was an icy wind blowing off the fake lake, and we had to walk home from Manuka after the movie because the buses stopped running at 10 pm on a Saturday night. We stayed in a hotel and Marcin (ruled as ever by his iron aesthetic creed) refused to bring his clothes inside because they were stored in a large striped canvas bag of the kind pensioners and indigents use when they make long bus trips. He preferred to scuttle half-clad up and down the staircases every time he needed to get changed and leave the shameful luggage secreted in the car. On Saturday night there was a gathering of drunken juveniles in the function room and we arrived back after our marathon walk to find three boys howling in the street while an unsteady, half dressed teenage girl wobbled down the steps on high heels and tried to insert herself into a taxi that was already occupied.

On Sunday we visited Parliament House, emptied for the weekend of its cargo of politicians apart from a lineup of paintings on the wall- Gough Whitlam, all expansive hand gestures and eyebrows, in the middle of a row of his more sedate colleagues. Bob Hawke liquid-eyed and strong jawed, Paul Keating with a mysteriously augmented chin, a lounging Harold Holt. In another room an exhibition of females in politics- great pains had been taken to make them look as human as possible by adding children and dogs to the composition whenever they started to seem to unfeminine. A composed woman of indeterminate years, with flawless elocution and an air of faint, generalised disapproval gave us a tour, smiling in a restrained fashion at us and scowling ferociously at anyone who attemped to walk through our huddle or interrupt her flow of talk.

Back in the rain on Sunday night- Marcin drove while I sat in the passenger seat reading Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved with a head torch and reminding him every five minutes that his speed limit was 80 kmh. Glad, for once, to be home after a weekend away- conclusion: I would not want to live in Canberra.

meditation on sausages

In late winter, I ride down to West Ryde train station after work, the temperamental air of early spring closing in with clouds and then opening up an apocalyptic gash over the steel cables of the Anzac Bridge and the stern geometry of the city. I have forgotten my lamp and cannot see anything, only feel the road heave and dip beneath me as I pass the hollow of Boyce Street, past the park and up again to the crest of the hill. The air here responds to altitude- in the dip it is cooler, a stagnant chill that lies along the creek bed and will condense into fog as the night wears on. The warm air rises and lies like a cap along the narrow ridgetop where the road peaks briefly before falling again down into another hollow.

It is only six thirty but a suburban silence lies over everything, penetrated only by the pallid headlights and beady taillights of homegoing traffic. I am riding towards the station amongst houses that are either asleep or on the brink of waking, over the fume-laden artery of Lane Cove Road and onto another swooping downhill towards the roundabout by the Leagues Club, when I smell the sausages cooking.

It is impossible to pinpoint where the smell is coming from, without the giveaway hubbub and clinking glasses of a backyward barbecue, or a kitchen light beckoning in the empty street. It's late in my day and the smell evokes a series of complicated feelings in me. The uppermost of these is simple hunger, but underneath is a host of other things to disentagle. It's a smell of childhood, of unwilling Saturday mornings at the soccer compensated only by food, sausage sandwiches and Violet Crumble bars purchased by combing the car for coins: of evening events in Nerrigundah (usually invading my olfactory system while I sulked in my tent): of the annual barbecue on the patch of grass outside the toilets behind Potato Point beach (to be overwhelmed by another smell one year when Daniel Evans fell through the covering on the septic tank during a game of chasings). And then it's something else besides- an Australian smell, and this is a complicated thing too.

It's not an iconic, clean, nostalgic smell like the smell of eucalypts or the bruised-fruit pungency of the sea, or the hot buzzing aroma of the coastal scrub on a summer afternoon, or even the smoky threat of a bushfire. It's the smell of something stodgy and unimaginative, and fearful, and irremediably colonial. I hadn't thought I felt like this about Australia, about Australians, but when I pull up 'cultural cringe Australians' on Google I find about 38000 responses so I am apparently not alone.

This is what Arthur Phillips said on coining the term in 1950:

'We cannot shelter from invidious comparisons behind the barrier of a separate language; we have no long-established or interestingly different cultural tradition to give security and distinction to its interpreters; and the centrifugal pull of the great cultural metropolises works against us. Above our writers -- and other artists--looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon achievement. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe. . .'.

Yet there they are, Kate Grenville, Peter Goldsworthy, Thea Astley, Delia Falconer Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all: proof of our literary abilities at least, that we are something worth writing about, worth thinking about. Will continue to think about this myself-

September 1

Bronwyn Oliver used to make sculptures, mostly out of wire- fragile, light-webbed things like tumbleweeds or leaf-skeletons, built with slow, compulsive care. These painstaking accumulations of copper wire wrap around themselves and spiral out towards the air with anxious certainty- they enclose space without strangling it, giving it a place to breathe within the fragile metallic confines of her work. She has spent hours, days, years producing things that can be crushed in an instant- in the contrary way of the world, they aren't. They are displayed in a gallery, lit to perfection and festooned with signs imploring visitors not to touch- they are too respectful to do so. They amble through, stubbornly alive, trying to sniff out suicide in the convolutions of her art.

Now that she has gone and done it, of course, you can see it's there- the agony that has gone into her work, the obsessiveness, the attempt to render the world comprehensible. There is talk that she had just ended a twenty year relationship with the wine writer Huon Hooke- he himself is stubbornly silent on the matter. This is what he had to say in the month following her death:

2004 Kingston Estate Merlot, South Australia, A$13/NZ$15.95The Riverland-based Kingston is looking further afield for grapes, with the result that this is a Langhorne Creek/Clare/Riverland blend. An odd mixture, it smells of raspberry and green mint to gooseberry on one hand, and dark berries and oak vanillin on the other. It certainly delivers on the palate, which is big and brawny for a merlot, with flesh, weight and tannins galore. It's chewy in texture and has guts. Elegance is not a word that springs to mind, but it sure packs some flavour and grip. An excellent barbecue wine.

25 august 2006

Even though literature is lying around everywhere, the appropriation of it is not as easy as it should be. Sloth and self doubt are to thank for the long silence – I am having the usual difficulties submitting my internal monologue (which has not been silent) to techniques of active expression, despite an ongoing interest in the sweat and greasepaint and boredom and delusions that constitute the world. The details of my life have altered again, with a change in backdrop: we now live in Alexandria in two- bathroomed bliss. Our flat is on the top floor of one of the blocks that has cropped up in the no- mans- land between Erskineville village with its overpriced fruits and trendy cafes, and the industrial hinterland that surrounds the airport. It’s a situation which takes some getting used to- space, privacy, release from the accumulated old couches and abandoned heaters and multiple toasted sandwich makers of 44 Chelmsford St. Contrary to expectations, the whole business of living somewhere beautiful has provoked a good two weeks of anxiety in me which is only just starting to subside.

On the weekend we moved into our new middle class life, two of Marcin’s friends arrived from Poland after an epic overland trip through Mongolia, Nepal, south east Asia and northern Australia. Lukasz had left his wife to run off to foreign lands with Justina, one of his school students: they inserted themselves neatly into the breach between slum and penthouse like a pair of tawny envoys from another world. From the first glance it was obvious that they had been having adventures- the suntans, the weariness, the intimate memory of the prices they had paid for everything from rooms to plane tickets, from Warsaw to Lhasa and from Kathmandu to Bangkok. Pangs of envy (it’s not a life I want to give up) and pangs of conscience ( becoming a bourgeois pig) ensued. Despite being dirty, poor and chronically underfed, I do love the simplicity of travelling, the immediacy of your concerns. There is a framework for the day, a soothing routine of arranging meager possessions and taking care of bodily functions, within which anything can happen. Packing, eating, shitting, staring, poking, photographing, unpacking, sleeping. Who would have thought it could be so absorbing, only because performed against a backdrop of swarthy strangers and unfamiliar landscapes? Of course there can be disruptions to this exciting round of events- mostly as a consequence of disruptions to aforementioned bodily functions, and in particular shitting out of sequence. I want to travel again and need to make a definitive decision on when and where.

July 24

I dreamt I was in a bark canoe on a brown river lined with spindly reeds, moving downstream at a great speed. Suddenly I hit an obstacle and fell into the water, and realised- from the shouts of my canoe-mates- that the river was in fact a stream of raw sewage. I climbed back into the canoe and removed my sewage soaked clothes, and suddenly there on the skyline was the city, a bright cluster of lights on the horizon. ThenI found myself naked and outraged , demanding that I be hosed down- Marcin was standing beside me with his arm around my shoulder, a gesture which ressembled (as in life) a headlock more than an act of tenderness, due to the fact that I am almost exactly his height.

July18

Marcin's brother Kuba inhabits a Sydney entirely different to the middle class commuter world the rest of us know. Riding the bus from Dee Why into the city at 5 am on his way to the Homebush factory where he will work a twelve to fifteen hour day, he falls asleep. He wakes with a hand in his groin, opens his eyes to find that a seventy year old woman beside him is the culprit. She begins to talk- where is he from ? Poland. Can she please move her hand? How interesting, she herself is of Russian parentage. Fascinating- can she please move her hand? Obligingly she moves her hand a few degrees and lets it come to rest on his upper thigh. Who supports him? she wants to know.

It's not an isolated incident and he sees her in action again the next week, hunting the dawn buses for well endowed bums (or migrants) who need someone to take care of them.

June 5

In early 2004, in the Ethiopian hill town of Lalibela, we met a small boy called Yayo. Yayo was our unofficial guide and gatekeeper for 5 days and would sit on small stool in the corner of our room at night until he fell asleep and had to be sent home. He accompanied us down into the valley on a futile chat-chase, defending us to the best of his nine-year- old ability against the horde of other (slightly bigger) small boys that we acquired as we went, bony calculating children wearing frayed shorts and flattened sandals, carrying sticks and leaping from rock to rock, chanting and prodding and never taking their eyes from us. He accompanied us to the tej bet and sat unobtrusively in the corner with a coke while we watched the masinko players and iskista dancers, ducking outside occasionally to bring us back fried fuul. He accompanied us to the stone churches, and waited patiently at the gate when he wasn't allowed inside. He accompanied us to the cafe for our morning macchiato and disappeared politely at dinnertime in order not to put us in the position of having to feed him. When we left we bought him a pair of shoes from the market, brand new Dunlop sneakers slightly too big (he would grow into them).
Later, the other small boys of the town came enmasse to our door, demanding we buy them shoes too- none of them needed shoes any less than Yayo, and some probably needed them more. We bought them for him because we knew him, because we liked him, and most of all because he didn't expect them. Moral of the story? Make it up yourself- I belive in reader responsibility.

May 26

Last night Australia played Greece at the MCG in a preliminary World Cup 'friendly' (most of the time the teams were eyeing each other like baleful chimpanzees, ). Almost 100000 people in the stadium: it was like theatre on a great green stage, and I started to realise why there's such a fuss when goals are revoked or a foul is allowed. It offends people's sense of history: impossible to try and disallow something that has already happened, and in particular on the basis that it's unfair. Started to think shapeless thoughts which I can't quite express about sport as a metaphor for history, sport as a parallel of history, sport as a second chance at history. Seen from this perspective, my incoherent theory might explain why football matters so much and why a Togolese priest has seen fit to make a trip to Brazil to seek mastery over the fate of Togolese football through acquiring the superior magical knowledge of Brazilian voodoo. (spawning a discussion on an African talkback program on Sydney radio entitled 'does voodoo work?')

May 25

Woke up minutes before the alarm from a dream of writing- I was on the edge of a dark, damp forest which somebody wanted for a setting in a play or a film, and it was my job to describe it. A clogged creek flowed thickly through the leaf litter and beside the mass of darker trees, standing slightly apart, there was a willow with its paler fronds trailing on the ground. This was the site of some event which was to take place in the play/ movie - somthing horrible, it go9es without saying, but I wasn't especially concerned about that. Under the willow tree and mostly hidden by its hanging curtain of vegetation, was a small concrete foundation like a site for a caravan ina campground. This was the stage for the Event. I sat down on the soggy ground and started to write.

This was followed by a more archetypal dream of the walking-down-the-street-with-your-pants-off variety. Marcin is having a birthday party- I am not invited. I poke out my tongue and say' I'm busy anyway,' and then spend the rest of the dream moping around waiting to be found and appeased. Not very exciting but these are the sort of adventures I have these days- they all take place in the overheated hours between 10pm and 6am in the ever-changing landscape of the marital bed.

May 23

Winter is here, a leaden sky lying over the world like a dead weight, a heavy, inert cold that reminds me of Europe in November. It's depressing and I'm finding it difficult to move my seasonally affected arse beyond the confines of the marital Ikea quilt: shades, once again, of Polish winter. I remember arriving in Warsaw at the end of January last year and Marcin meeting me at the airport- the first thing he did was reach out, finger my coat and say, "Roza, it's not warm enough." I felt my self respect take a jolt- what could I, a frivolous puff of hot air drifting up from the thirty fifth latitude (south), possibly know about the deadly serious business of keeping myself warm? This morning I contemplated my clothes rack in the annual Mauy reckoning and realised I still have nothing remotely suitable for warding off this sort of grey seeping chill.

So those of us with attractive and appropriate winter wardrobes may find comfort in finally having an opportunity to parade in their knee length boots and tweed: as for me, I am seeking solace in soup and sleep. (also alliterative sentences by the looks of things). Off to complete my reading of the weekend paper which I have been too sluggish to manage until now.

May 18

My mother, at 62, has retired, and has started to write some undefined hybrid of family history, world history and fiction constructed over and around letters found in an old suitcase in her garage - from her great great uncle in the trenches, from his sisters and family to him at the front. She has taken to telling me (quoting Manning Clark) that anyone who wants to know the meaning of humility should try sitting down and confronting a blank page. This is how I feel this morning in front of my blog, though I am wondering if it counts as a blank page with the free holiday (call within sixty seconds to win) flashing up in the left hand corner and the tempting offer of an enlarged cock inching its way (no pun intended) across the screen. The whole interface* is crawling with imperatives, urging us to want things- money, clothes, hot chicks, large cocks - in an escalation of desire that never ends. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my topic for today.

Last month I want with Marcin and Kuba to see an exhibition at the Maritime Museum about WWII in Australia, about the bombing of Darwin and the Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour. Part of the display consisted of Women's Weekly magazines from the forties, all urging frugality and recycling. They were full of clever instructions on how to turn an old suit into a housefrock and a pair of decrepit pantaloons into an evening gown, lists of the benefits of saving your string and stockpiling old newspapers. Frugality (along with sock knitting and market gardening) were seen as service to your country- bizarre to compare the Women's Weeklys of today, with their exhortations to buy buy buy , to these quaint old dinosaurs with their tinted pictures and recipes for making a jam pudding out of a pile of sawdust and two plums.

So this week we have two social markers of the last hundred years in Australia- the graph of the female suicide rate ( I can't get over the beauty of it, the elegant geometry that leaps and sinks and refuses to explain itself, the temperature chart of a century) and Women's Weekly magazine. Time to ablute and abort Mission Blog.


*what a nice word.
in·ter·face ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ntr-fs)n.
A surface forming a common boundary between adjacent regions, bodies, substances, or phases.
A point at which independent systems or diverse groups interact: “the interface between crime and politics where much of our reality is to be found” (Jack Kroll).
Computer Science.
The point of interaction or communication between a computer and any other entity, such as a printer or human operator.
The layout of an application's graphic or textual controls in conjunction with the way the application responds to user activity: an interface whose icons were hard to remember.

May 17

PS Happy birthday to my blog which is one year old today.

May 17

Back to a.m. blogging interspersed with searches on Vanuatu and forays into The Complete Book of Sexual Love, which we found in the rubbish that people had put out for council cleanup in Dee Why (along with Where do I come from and The Hunt for the Red October). Somebody has taken their perusal seriously and underlined relevant sections in green highlighter.
eg:
'Orgasm in males is of course essential to procreation, as climax brings about the release of sperm. In women this is not so.'
and
'It is said that many married men who also use prostitutes do so because of frustrated 'fellation libido'..............Provided that the man is scrupulously clean and has washed his penis thoroughly, the practice is in no way unhygienic.'

Being a high quality book which doesn't stint on colour photographs, there can be found within its pages a catalogue of codpieces and cartoons, erect satyrs and women in garters, pictures of Leda succumbing to the swan and statues of Priapus, and a discussion of the medical problems of Akhenaten, king of Egypt from 1379 to 1362 BC, who 'suffered from an endocrine deficiency. His statues show a very unmanly body with heavy hips, breasts and a pronounced stoop. Surprisingly, he was not infertile and fathered six daughters.' Venus of Willendorf, faceless and fertile, rubs up against purse-lipped 1920s pinups rendered breathless by whalebone and photographs of medieval chastity belts. It's far more comprehensive than the other sex manual we found with it, which was more clearly a product of its times (the seventies) and featured misty shots of hairy sepia couples in the throes of coitus and looked like The Joy of Sex without the rose-coloured tinting.

May 16

Despite my best intentions, two blogless weeks, which have been spent undergoing and organising certain rites of passage. Graduating, arranging a wedding, buying tickets for a honeymoon to Vanuatu. I don't quite believe that I'm doing any of this and a small independent voice in the back of my mind is chanting a litany of the joys of spinsterhood and commanding me to do a Google search on codependency. The part of me that faces the world has begun to discuss the possibility of buying a flat in Warsaw. Probably the majority of my panic is caused by the fact that it really does look as if it's going to go on for a long time, which requires a renegotiation of everything - no use waiting for the divorce to free up my time.

In the middle of all this Peter Carey's wife has made the front page of the Herald 'striking back' at a smear campaign against her based on an ugly divorce, claiming that she slaved away over his manuscripts for years and this is the thanks she gets. The headline runs Peter Carey's ex speaks out- I can't even remember what her real name is. Is it a reason not to get married? In my opinion it's a reason to be wary. Along with the spike in female suicides that shows up on suicide graphs for the twentieth century in the late forties as all the maimed and twitching diggers came home and started asking for their jobs back. Overall, male suicides were still higher, though women made more attempts. We are either more ineffectual or more equivocal, or maybe it's a matter the available means? Sticking our heads into unreliable ovens or overdosing on not-quite- toxic enough tranquillisers while our male counterparts went and shot themselves competently in the head. Time for work in the blazing autumn suburbs: this wave of arboreal red might be the most excitement Ryde sees this year. Over and out.

2 May

The current plagues of 44 Chelmsford St include: cockroaches, fungal growths, dust mites and alley cats. There have also been several sightings of rats which I would rather not discuss. Maybe it will prepare me for the houses of my mad people, who are starting at last to move out of the hospital- heady and nerve-racking times.

April 29

A suburban Saturday morning blog from 44 Chelmsford Street, where the air is full of enthusiastic hammer blows and the more refined whining of a drill or circular saw from numbers 36-42. A cluster of terraces with their corrugated roofs and working-class ghosts are being demolished to make way for nice white town houses with 3 bedrooms and four bathrooms (so hard to keep clean in these dirty times.) I had planned to go for a run with my friend the corporate lawyer but twisted my ankle chasing the neighborhood alley cats out of the back yard and had to cancel. My Prospective Spouse is snoring in bed after his hard week at the office and I'm inclined to wonder what's become of us and if we will suffocate in this cosy domestic corner we have painted ourselves into.

On Thursday we went to see a film at the German film festival about a compulsive rapist and a woman who falls in love with him, with my old schoolfriend Annabell and her philosopher boyfriend Daniel. Miraculously the philosopher didn't develop the headache which generally comes on when it's time to meet with us and so the movie was followed by a midnight stroll down Oxford Street, pass the drag queens and the Thursday clubbers, discussing love and morality, love and rationality, morality and aesthetics (all with reference to compulsive rapists and the women who love them.) Daniel (philosophically qualified to lead such discussions) constructed a disquisition on the topic which proceeded in the seamless style of a public speech or an essay while Annabell tugged his sleeve and looked furtively about for a taxi.

April 23

Home sick from work on Friday- having a bath and waiting for Marcin to come home reminded me of winter trips to Poland. The division of the day into segments of time to kill, the early anticipation of his return, waiting for life to begin. Dragging myself eventually from a warm nest of blankets long after he had left, a desultory cruise of the internet which never gave quite as much satisfaction as it promised. Writing for an hour or so in a sort of desperation, thinking that it was the only thing that could justify my housewifely presence there.

Eventually I would be driven out by cabin fever or the presence of housemates in the middle of the afternoon to walk along the river: by this time the pale sluggish sun which had heaved itself onto the horizon for a few hours would be almost ready to sink exhausted into long dusk. The river was a sort of consolation prize, a vein of wildness colonising the heart of the city, thick with plates of ice with raised rims of ice shavings caused by the rubbing as they jostled and eddied against each other in the current. It is a monochrome world completely exotic to me, a world assimilated through early absorption of European fairy tales of wolves and cold forests, but never seen. A world in suspended animation where motionless fishermen crouch on stools above their ice holes in frozen backwaters, a black and white world of soot and snow. Easy to imagine how it could produce a sort of harshness of character, a dogmatism, an overwhelming moral certainty in its inhabitants (more difficult to accomodate the virulently fertile summers with this theory.)

Home late afternoon, shopping bags in hand. The fat gatekeepers ignore me, having worked out that I don't speak any human language. As the season progresses they don't even bother to leave their heated office. On the wall behind the intercom there is a postcard that Marcin sent them from Africa. I eat something, drink a can of beer. I get into the bath and marinate until my body is pliable with heat and dress myself with the care of a kept woman . Then I arrange myself on the couch to wait for the sound of the intercom buzzing ( I am in possession of the only keys) and the footsteps of my love on the stairs, the aura of cold emanating from his skin, the kiss in the doorway. I have buried another brief, barren day.

April 21

My love and I are sampling the degrees of physical misery available on today's market, he with a broken collarbone and I with a mucus-laden chest. On Monday at an unspecified point somewhere on the Ingar fire trail we had our first encounter with downhill drama when Marcin hit a rock at the speed of 50 km/hr and flew through the air with the greatest of ease while several shocked spectators looked on. Rounding the corner a minute of two later at my pensioner's pace, I registered several standing bodies and one crumpled heap and went into an entirely self-interested process of elimination to ascertain whether he was amongst the standing or the fallen. And there he was, glaze-eyed and grunting and clutching at his arm in the gutter beside the track- luckily the bystanders were both less shocked and more competent than me, having no vested interests at stake, and took command and called an ambulance, rigged a sling out of a spare tube and made sure he was warm. And so to hospital- x-rays, stitches, painkillers, lights in the eyes and large scale disinfection- it was such a long process that I recovered from my shock and started to regret the sheer inconvenience of it all. As for the doctors and nurses and emergency staff: what sort of people live a life constructed out of glimpses of other people's life-changing moments, and make death and injury their daily bread? They are soldiers of sorts, living in an atmosphere of extremity and trying somehow to accept it as normality .

April 13

Yesterday, struggling with the looming apparition of my own ordinariness, I recounted the Seduction of Abebe Birera to my workmates- an English slapper, a misogynist Irishman, a wide-eyed dancer from the western suburbs and a depressed homosexual of indeterminate years. This is a story in which an Australian woman in her late twenties deflowers a tennage Ethiopian virgin in the hill town of Gondar, assisted by a litre of honey wine and a low grade episode of mania, for no other reason than that she feels like it (he doesn't object either.) The Ethiopian virgin is also of undisclosed age but dances like a young Michael Jackson and produces charming grammatical aberrances like 'shoeses' and 'stuffs' which is enough to override the horrible possibility that he may not be eighteen- as he claims - but something rather closer to sixteen. He is five foot tall (the pervert cougar is about six), and the romances blossoms in the Gondar cinema where the prospective lovers court over a bunch of chat, five cigarettes and an action movie starring an Aryan hero and a man- eating monster. The usher tells Abebe sternly that his mother will be informed.

For the next ten days this romance proceeds in fits and starts, with Sean Paul singing about sexy ladies all over town in the background and the first tiff occurring within days over the presence of an extremely drunk junvenile, asleep with his shoes on in the disgruntled sex tourist's bed. Disgruntled sex tourist takes the cue of the cinema usher and threatens to send drunk juvenile home to mother should this ever occur again. Luckily for all the affair is too brief for this to become a real issue and within a week the sex tourist is on her way out of town in a rattling bus that will- before the trip is over- see the birth of one long-lasting romance between the sex tourist and a Polish architect and the death of one donkey.

April 8

It's autumn at last and in earnest and the city is regaining some of its innocence and enthusiasm after the lethargy of the summer. The dockyards in Balmain, which have been sulking in the heat, are starting to bustle again and the markets at seven in the morning are an indication that the cynicism and obsession with appearances has momentarily abated. Mothers in tracksuits briefly share the world of homebound clubbers at the market cafe- this is bleary-eyed Sydney with her makeup off, lighting her first cigarette, forgetting to pretend for a few minutes. At this time of year I always have a renewal of love for the place and remember that I'm a daughter of the city, and this year it's particularly strong because I've taken up the most quintessential Sydney habit- commuting.

There are millions on the streets but it's not a revolution. It's a perfect metaphor for individualistic society- together but alone, everyone isolated in his private cocoon and not thinking beyond establishing and maintaining his place in the metallic serpent that stretches, gleaming in the sun and shot through with flashes of irritation, from the city across the Anzac Bridge, the Iron Cove Bridge, the Gladesville Bridge and into the hinterland of the western suburbs. Millions of people oscillating uselessly between work and home, picking their noses at the traffic lights and dreaming of what they will consume with the money they've sold their lives for. I can tell you all this with authority because now I'm one of them.

April 6

Nothing like a day spent in the company of the twitchy, the paranoid, the phobic, the delusional and the just plain poor to make you count your blessings. And to make sure I understood just how well off I really am I read the diagnostic manual for panic disorders and sexual dysfunction and took a long hard look at a picture of a cirrhotic liver. It's not only the starving children of Africa who make you realise how lucky you are to be born a sane middle class white honkey in a first world country.

April 5

A weekend in the mountains feeling manic with joy- the weather has turned to autumn and it was possible to ride all day in the coolness with the air so clear that Sydney was visible from the escarpment, clustered on the horizon like a dream city gone smoky grey with distance. The riding was a fantastic mixture of corrugated firetrail and boulder strewn single track and as I rode down to Bedford Creek, deafened by the sound of trembling and distressed metal, I had a flashback to my childhood and my days as Rattletrap Rosie. This name was given to me by Simeon McGovern, the Christadelphian boy down the road , and now I think of it he was named quite aptly as well since he used to ride hunched over his handlebars like a chimpanzee winning the Tour de France. I developed a crush on him as I did (in my rural pragmatism) on every boy in a ten kilometer radius and now that I try to quantify that I realise there were only three of them - Simeon, Ben DeVries and Hrothgar Brennan. Ben DeVries was the most enduring of these passions, and gave early indications of what would be an abiding interest in short brown men. He was lefthanded and mysterious and it ended in tears before it had begun when I asked my younger brother to request his hand on my behalf and he refused.

March 24

Daylight saving has been extended in order to accomodate the Commonwealth Games so I now wake up in the dark to head off to my daily rounds of the mad people, where I am developing my feminist principles and my concept of social justice and trying not to purse my lips too much at frequent infringements of same. I am seeing the dark underbelly of Australian society which nice middle class girls like me don't usually infiltrate: the inside of psychiatric wards, the Housing Commission dumps with squatters living on the balcony, the supermarkets on pension day. I still have the energy to cope with this and to believe that things can be changed albeit in a random and very incremental way, but I can imagine that this optimism wouldn't last long if I had to live in the circumstances that a lot of the clients live in. ('Patient' is out, as a designation. 'Consumer' and 'client' are the tags of the day. ) . At the moment, despite being chronically underpaid, I am getting an education I wouldn't be without and regretting the loss of my student life less as time passes. And now off to a picnic in the rain with Julie.

March 14

Vision of the day : a roomful of schizophrenics and other damaged souls shaking maracas and singing 'Volare oh oh oh oh' at the top of their lungs in top-volume tuneless karaoke style. As we howled away like we were testifyin' to the good lord I felt my cynicism about these sorts of activities take a mortal blow : it really seems to work, and to give people an unselfconscious pleasure that they might not get in any other way. It almost created enough warm fuzziness to dispel lingering remnants of Wolf Creek which are lurking at the dark edge of my psyche. On the Gladesville bridge this morning on my way to work I theorised that inability to watch sadistic psychopaths taunting their victims on screen is actually an indication of a highly developed empathetic faculty but on the other hand maybe I'm just a sissy.

March 13

On one of my rare forays into the alcoholic land these days I ran into Marcelle and Brendan's friend Damien and his girlfriend in the Town Hall. Damien is fresh back from Guatemala and south America, with a moustache to prove it, and I stayed until two in the morning trying to inhale some odor of foreign parts. Unfortunately I drank so much and was so consumed by misery and regret the following day that all that remains is a vague impression of the physical similarity of Damien and Anna, who exhibit the same uncanny convergence of behaviour and features as the bandy-legged man who walks his bulldog in Camperdown Park.

In other news I've completed my first full week of work in about five years and although it's engaging I'm suffering from the constriction of social life that inevitably follows. I feel as though I have no time. I leave home just after sunrise and come home late in the afternoon : the year is growing old, the light is shrinking and fading, and I'm feeling coming-of-age pangs. I've got a live-in lover, a full-time job, and the tendency to feel a periodic stab of loss when I think of my spinster student life.

March 6

A weekend of staring into space and gossiping with Katherine- the Prospective Divorcee, the still-unemployed Pole and the try-hard social worker bonding in the bush. I got drunk for the first time in three months and started ranting about my father, but otherwise the expedition was a great success. Today the try-hard social worker started work, an exhausting day which began with an idealistic edge and is ending in a dream of the dole queue- do I really want to work? Have I made the right choice re: Appen? I have made a decision to leave Marcin to his own devices and to consciously attempt not to worry about his fagging and financial state, but it's useless. I am going to watch Capote thank you and goodnight.

March 1

My favourite piece of news for the year is the one about the suicidal Frenchwoman who had half her face eaten by her dog while unconscious after an overdose of sleeping pills and subsequently became the first person in the world to have a face transplant. It has everything you could want in fact or fiction, from desperation to bestial behaviour and the redemption of modern medicine, and provides a conversation starter from an endless number of standpoints including:

1) what an amazing operation
2)what a fucked up woman
3)what a naughty dog

If anyone would like to pursue any of these lines of discussion, you known where to find me.

February 23

Suffering a small scale human tragedy of the decision making variety- I went for a job interview at Appen where the mistress ( an obnoxious specimen by the name of Julie Vonwiller- I wonder if this will appear when she googles herself) showed me all her teeth at regular intervals for an hour and said that she was almost sure they could use me. It seems that the issue is that I am in fact too employable. She is such an abrasive character that I tell myself I will only accept the job if she offers me a million bucks but of course in reality I'm interested. The thing that really horrifies me is the idea of calling someone up and telling them that I've had a better offer but probably it will provide some long- needed training in assertiveness. Interesting isn't it that I like to imagine myself as a powerful and independent woman but then crumble into a small heap at the thought of saying no to anyone.

Occupying myself more than I probably should with the proceeding disintegration of Katherine- and -Tawfiq: the plot is now so thick that Hollywood would reject it on credibility grounds, and I have spent hours straining my mind trying to work out what's really going on. I am inevitably coming down on Katherine's side ( the sisterhood isn't dead after all ) but having a few regrets as I had Tawfiq earmarked as a nice friend for Marcin to guide him through the pitfalls of migrant life. To be continued.

February 20

Contemplating womanhood recently - a difficult subject which is, believe it or not, further complicated by the fact that I am one ( a woman I mean). The subject gives me a sort of vertigo, as if I am inside a building trying to picture how it looks from the outside. How to distinguish the characteristics of my natural self from those attributable to my second X chromosome ? I am thinking of these peculiarly feminine sorts of behaviours and desires such as the urge to tell people to take a warm jumper with them when they go to the movies and a more generalised sense of responsibility for things which I can't control (the happiness of my prospective spouse, the imaginary feelings of my prospective employers should I decline their kind offers ). I fight with the niggling worry that my conception of liberation, and in particular the idea of sexual freedom, is just another nasty joke by the patriarchy - an insidious fashion which isn't really freedom at all but a twisted expression of all the old urges and a novel way of exploiting women by convincing them that they are doing exactly what they want. What can you do when the woman in a burqa (or the woman sucking a stranger's cock in a nightclub dunny) says, this empowers me, I'm acting on my own will, this is what I choose ? Having been so thoroughly molded by the external pressures of socialisation and ideas about gender, an attempt to get an outside perspective feels like an extreme effort akin to a mental space program that catapults me away from the gravitational pull of The World as We Know It. Think of the hazards and casualties of this sort of program- how many dead simian astronauts, how much galactic politicking, how many shat-in space suits, all for the sake of seeing a few square kilometres of dead rock and the vision of the little blue marble called Earth which suddenly looks like a perfectly good place to be after all.

February 14

Anarchy is in the air - it's a time of divorces and flux, and it's reflected in the demolition process going on at the university where they are knocking down the building beside the library. Behind a high wire fence they are slowly reducing it to a pile of rubble and it's a peculiarly satisfying sight: the smashed windows, the twisted wire supports protruding from the concrete, the sudden visibility of previously hidden rooms as they are torn in half and reveal that inside, there is nothing interesting at all. The same impulse that leads me to secretly hope to see a terrible car accident is the impulse that makes watching this destruction such a pleasure: it demonstrates what everybody knows, that nothing is stable, that everything will fall apart when the right amount of pressure is applied in the right place.

These maudlin thoughts provoked partly by Katherine and Tawfik's separation, which is unfolding as we speak in surreal technicolour. He went to Egypt to photograph an archaeological dig, fell in love with a sexy young headbanger and came back listening to Iron Maiden and requesting a separation. My powers of imagination are so exercised by this unlikely scenario that I am even dreaming about it and trying to make sense of it in my sleep. My first thought is that he has gone completely mad but Katherine tells me that 'that's what she thought at first, but that's what people always tell themselves when they're being dumped.' She is vocal and articulate about the process- the pity succeeded by rage with a constant drumming of pain in the background. Destruction is not only a source of secret fascination, it' s also unbelievably easy: it's possible to ruin something that's been years in the making in a matter of minutes.How depressing it is and how paranoid it can make one.

On another, not entirely unrelated topic , yesterday I made my first ever visit to a psychiatrist. I had to meet my mad phone-friend's doctor before meeting her, so at 12:30 I rolled sweatily up to the door of a discreet house in Paddington which had the blinds drawn and only a tiny Please Enter sign to indicate that it was anything other than an ordinary residence in a fashionable part of town. Inside the decor was relentlessly beige, the trashy magazines (Vogue and Cosmopolitan, not New Weekly- there is both money and taste here) lined up with military precision on a spotless glass tabletop, the light moderated by pale, neutral blinds, soothing music and a smiling, unintimidating receptionist hunkered down behind a high desk. Obviously the designers didn't realise that a lack of any discord is just as likely to cause an outbreak of madness as a hot pink couch and a Black Sabbath soundtrack.

Dr. Both himself was smooth and pleasant in the same uncompromising way - polished shoes, a balding head shaved to minimise the obviousness of his hair loss, neat ironed trousers. He sat in one wide beige chair and crossed his legs in an accomodating (as opposed to defensive) manner : I sat in another one opposite him and mirrored his pose. An easy conversation followed with exactly the right amount of eye contact, guided precisely by the doctor who gave me (in an unemotional but caring fashion) a rundown of Julie's illness. Diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia 20 years ago, she has never worked due to her condition and currently lives at home with her parents as she has for most of her life. She struggles with finding ways to occupy her time and has only recently ( within the last couple of years) found a medication which controls her symptoms (voices). She has made a couple of unsuccessful suicide attempts and frequently suffers from anxiety in new situations.

This, then, constituted the only discordancy: this recount of what has basically been an unhappy life circumscribed by recurrent madness, uttered in this reasonable tone by a pleasant- faced young man in his beige office.

February 9

Last week I went for my first job interview in a mad people's service provider in Ryde. I had forgotten how heavy the silence is in the suburbs- the only commercial sign of life was a bakery selling yellow bread hard up against a decrepit pet shop with empty fishtanks in the windows, the occasional bus rumbling by and stopping to drop off a pensioner in front of a shuttered house.It was forty degrees and I was dressed in my best brown polyester and sweating like a pig- being my father's daughter I arrived 2 hours early and since there are no public amenities in the suburbs I was forced to leap the fence (risking destruction of aforementioned best brown polyester) to piss in the Field of Mars Nature Reserve. Luckily Mad People Central was airconditioned to arctic temperatures so when I finally got inside my synthetic cocoon stood me in good stead.

The panel consisted of a gone-to-seed Morticia Adams, a smurf, an earnest young blonde and a shadowy HR representative called Nhu Nguyen. They gave me a list of questions before going in and the interview consisted of me reeling off my prepared answers while they looked at their notepads on the other side of an enormous round table and scribbled. The only hitch came partway through when the smurf started to cough his lungs up over to the north west- I was too deep in my incantation of Disability Service Standard 2 (Decision Making and Choice) to notice until Morticia stopped me to enquire ostentatiously after his health. The smurf (who liked me) hushed her irritably and my earnest recitation continued unbroken for the next half hour.

Apparently this lecture suited everbody as they offered me the job. Now I'm in a quandary- since, apparently, I am capable of getting a job, maybe I should keep trying and look for something better ? I want to keep studying as well. Will I get to be a famous linguist if I spend my energies reminding mad people to pay their rent and clean under the sink? I am already planning how to combine these two diverse interests.

January 21

Today Marcin went for a job interview as a draftsman in Arncliffe, where he was harangued for an hour by a steel trader with a bar masquerading as a desk. According to this man, Marcinski's qualifications entitle him to work in an office in North Sydney with men in black suits and a secretary with a double D cup, and not in the industrial zone near the airport with a swampy view of the Cooks River. Result? No job but license to dream of a beautiful future full of secretarial knockers and the pleasure of telling people I am an architect (a pleasure which I get to share by the way when I make my vicarious bid for importance- My Prospective Spouse is an architect.) As for me I find myself erring in the direction of caring for the mad and infirm when it comes to employment, and wondering what my chances are of improving conditions for anyone.

Well, my mother called today to discuss her burial and will with me so I'm off to negotiate my inheritance. Over and out.

January 14

Yesterday I tried to blog at the Marrickville library and a warning came up on the screen : You Have Tried To Access a Site Which May Contain Dangerous or Damaging Material. Maybe the blocking software has understood the perversion of people who hang around in dark gardens etc?

We went to the museum in the Hyde Park barracks yesterday, as an expression of new found interest in my convict heritage. Shoes half eaten by rats preserved behind glass under low lights to prevent their further decay, a row of hygienic and lice-deprived hammocks swaying gently in a sanitary breeze. Little plaques and locked display boxes everywhere- as usual the tourist rendering of the Olden Days is so far removed from the reality that the effort of imagination required to feel any empathy is exhausting. In Tuol Sleng, the prison and extermination centre in Phnomh Penh, they had gone to the other extreme and left everything exactly as it had been at the departure of the Khmer Rouge- bare iron bedsteads strewn with pieces of rotting rope and rusting boxes for administering electric shocks – and the only thing under glass was the photographs of the doomed, staring into the camera with the whites of their eyes showing like a herd of panicked horses. The moral of the story? There’s more than one way to skin a cat (arrange a museum).

Will close with selected highlights of the alphabetical listing of things you could be transported for.

illegal pledging
illegal selling
incest
insubordination
insurrection
intoxication
killing
larceny
machine breaking
maiming
manslaughter
miscellaneous

January 12

Back in blogland find myself having the same old ethical dilemmas- do I have to keep a paper diary as well where I tell thetruththewholetruthandnothingbuthtetruthsohelpmegod? This would make the online version so wholesome as to be unreadable and so isn’t feasible. My solution: tell a maximum of two people about existence of blog and then poach their readership who do not know me. They are reading this because they are the type (types? ) of person (people?) who hang around in other people’s gardens on dark nights peering through the window and waiting to see what happens next, not because they are a) interested in me or b) interested in finding some mention of their good selves and willing to plough through swathes of cyberjunk to get it.

Back in Sydney doing home renovations like a good pair of young marrieds- we cleaned the storage space above the stairs to make some room for the shoes and camping goods which had been breeding quietly under the bed. The accumulated refuse of a junkie, a weightlifter, a Goth with a mucus problem, an aspiring actress and a homosexual biochemist yielded the following bounty:

5 (five) expired cockroaches (proving that they would not in fact survive a nuclear holocaust)
1 motorcycle jacket
8 moldering cushions acquired from hard rubbish with the intention ( unfulfilled) of creating opium den ambience in lounge room
3 kettles
1 beached television set
1 faux fur muff

In fact on the home front the optimism factor is fairly high considering that we are two unemployed people sharing a room in a slum where one has to walk half a kilometre to piss in the middle of the night- I am deeply in love which is a relief since a refund is out of the question on faulty mail-order sex toys.

Today we spent our first day apart in 6 weeks and I went to meet my English student in Burwood. She’s small and brown and pregnant and always meets me barefoot at the door and offers me a drink when I’m about to leave- they live in a one bedroom flat in a backstreet off The Boulevarde with a maroon patent leather lounge suite and an Amway manifesto hanging on the wall.

I AM EXCITED ABOUT MY LIFE AND ABOUT AMWAY

I WILL SUCCEED BECAUSE MY TEAM IS THE MOST LOYAL AND DIVERSIFIED

I AM POWERFUL AND POSITIVE

I AM A CAM

I AM A CAM

I AM A CAM

I WILL DO IT

THAT’S ALL

PERIOD

There’s more but I can’t remember - I had to improvise to get that far. I wonder what a cam is?