The usual New Year hiatus in blogging is over- back from Tasmania to find an embarrassment of Christmas riches from mama in Poland and a letter from the quarantine officers saying that her Polish sausage contravened regulations and has been captured at the border. Not so the 30 sheets of communion wafer, the body of Christ miraculously passing where the body of an unfortunate pig could not.

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.