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-