Braidwood Dreaming - revisiting
Entry of Paula into Braidwood: Wallace Streetlooking South across Monkittee Creek
Recently I journeyed the 3 or 4 hours drive south of Sydney back to the small country town of Braidwood from which my mother's family comes and in which I spent every school holidays up until I was ten or twelve or so.
I went with Alex - mon amour, my sister and her eldest son. We drove down early Saturday morning and stayed overnight at a good, reasonably-priced local motel, "The Colonial", before returning to Sydney Sunday evening.
Braidwood is a heritage-listed town which is nestled in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales between Canberra and the coast. The railway never having come to town, and the developers kept baying dolefully in the distance, its 19th century rural character has largely been retained unspoiled. Braidwood and the surrounding district is redolent with history from the early colonial, goldrush and bushranging times. During the 1970's the town was saved from a late twentieth century demise by a measured and respectful influx of tea houses, antique shops and art galleries.
Busloads of tourists supplemented truckloads of sheep and cattle!
Artists and bohemians arrived; the famous poet Judith Wright took up residence.
Braidwood looms large in my childhood memories. I grew up in the bustling, grimy inner suburbs of Sydney in the 50's as part of a complicated extended family mix of Scandinavian darkness and Irish sentimentality; working class circumstances blended with an intellectual and literary bent. So Christmas holidays in the country amongst rosy-faced, pragmatic country cousins under wide blue skies pierced with the cries of magpies was an extraordinary paradigm shift for me. One that made a wide and lasting impression.
Over the intervening 30 years I have made an occasional and infrequent return visit but always as an awkward and alien passer through. Slipping, diffidently, in and out, invisible as a shadow on a dark night.
Now for the first time since transition I made the return to Braidwood - the present and the past - as me as me, as Paula.
Transsexualism pre-transition most often means one experiences the world in a disengaged, alienated, behind-a-glass-wall way. Post-transition, the resulting psychological and physical integration lends experiences an immediacy, a cogency, an authenticity that quietly but deeply amazes, pleases and reassures the heart; heals the spirit.
It was the first time, since the relative uncomprehending innocence and guilelessness of childhood, that I - me - had been back. This time I was really there. And that little lost child I had been was there with me, striding along beside me, her own long legs keeping pace with mine.
Monkittee Creek which flows along the northernlimits of the town at the back of my Nana's old
house in Solus St. The white shapes are geese.
That morning, as we hummed down the revamped, straightened-out, autobahn of the new Hume Highway towards the Southern Tablelands my mind drifted back to those foggy early morning long-hauls of years ago back in the fifties; our '48 Chevvy winding tortuously around the narrow gum-lined bends of the old road.
Now the little villages and towns are often bypassed by the new highway. There was something about motoring in the fifties that required frequent stops...to check the radiator or have a beer or do a wee behind a gum tree or perhaps it was something more arcane than that and now lost to the popular consciousness.
Now we just put the car into overdrive and keep going!
Arriving at Braidwood just before noon, we checked into the motel and then headed for a welcome caffeine fix at the Nambawan Coffeehaus (great coffee, to die for hot chocolate and amazing African wares for sale) and then, while I drove Alex around the back streets and showed him all the scenes from my childhood, my sister and nephew walked around town.
Later, we met up and drove up to the lookout on Mount Gillamatong, a high hill overlooking the town. Mount Gillamatong has an ancient, sacred feel to it. As a child I explored it's rocky, tree-covered slopes and dark, damp caves with my cousins during day-long escapades ("Famous Five on Gillamatong Mountain!"). It featured hauntingly, in a typical Australian, starkly beautiful way, in the film The Year my Voice Broke.
Alexx adopts a gentrified rural pose on Mount Gillamatong.
Paula revisits the scene of childhood ramblings.
From the foot of Mount Gillamatong one is treated to a sweeping view of the valley and the far blue hills and of Braidwood town, nestled like a storybook English village, with its church spires and sleepy tree-lined streets. The high, clear, cold air sings, soaring, the song of the Dreamtime - the land's dreaming and mine.
My nephew, Josh, is a keen movie buff and is studying film at TAFE so Braidwood was a rich mine of movie lore for him, several films having been made there over the years including Ned Kelly (1970 with Mick Jagger) and the afore-mentioned "The Year My Voice Broke" (1987 with Noah Taylor).
Later that evening, while Alex and Josh had a nap, my sister, Rowena and I went for a recce to find somewhere to have dinner. I just had to stop off at the bakery and buy a Braidwood Tin Loaf - the biggest high-domed loaf of delicious soft white country bread you'll ever find. When I was little we'd arrive at my Nana's to find the open fire burning in her big lining-boarded kitchen and fresh buttery tin loaf toast starting to pile up in the middle of the scrubbed deal table. I would have been content then, I think, to do nothing else with my life but to sit at that table eating that toast! One with vegemite, the next with peanut butter, the next just plain...then start all over again!
Historic Royal Mail Hotel caught
in an autumn evening's glow .
For dinner we settled on "Somewhere Special on Wallace". This absolutely great restaurant is situated in the old bakery and we sat out in the back room where the original ovens can still be seen. The fire was toasty, the food was delicious (I had Thai beef and Alex had spinach and fetta pie), the wine organic and the service very friendly. We all had a thoroughly good night. I recommend dining there if you're ever in Braidwood.
After a wintry night snuggled tightly up to Alex and with the electric blanket left on I rose early on Sunday and strode out into a clear crisp morning air and the warbling of magpies to crunch the gravel roadsides where I'd roamed as a child.
First stop was my Nana's old house at Solus Street just across the road (it was Poppa's house too but he seemed large and aloof and intimidating to me as a child - I think men often were in the fifties). Strange to think that it was now someone else's house! Then I was inside, snuggled up under the patchwork quilt or huddled in front of the open fire toasting toast on the toasting fork; now I could only look shyly from the footpath.
The house is basically the same on the outside but the wonderful world out the back of truck sheds and woodsheds and water tank cubby houses and jungles of overgrown fennel in which my cousins and I played endlessly were long gone. I could still smell it all though - in the deep recesses of my neurons - the woodchips in the tumbledown woodshed on a rainy day and the cold concrete floor of the austere outside bathroom and the soap and starch of the brick-copper laundry and the gunmetal of the shotguns in the office and the prickly bales of hay and the truck grease and hessian bags and diesel in the sheds and the road dust and the fennel. The fennel, pungent n' green n' yeller, taller by far than a tall child's tussled head!
My sister, Ro, outside Nana's old house in
Solus Street
I had the digital camera in my handbag and captured scenes: some from my childhood, some new. I was feeling excitement in my waters (as Kath of Kath & Kim fame would say). Somehow I was making a connection with the child I'd been; somehow, unexpectedly, something more than just a weekend visit to a country town was unfolding.
I'll talk more of that in a later blog.
Up to "The Pines" on Glenmore Road I strode, down to the old swimming hole on Monkittee Creek (pronounced "Munketty" according to Mum but I like to say "Mon Kitty"), past the old flour mills on Mackellar St (unchanged since I was little), up Ryrie street past the little council flat my Nana moved into in her last years, along Coronation Ave where my auntie and uncle lived and where I spent much of my time playing as part of a horde of cousins and neighbourhood kids. Then back into the main street and past the Royal Cafe made famous in "The Year My Voice Broke" and the pressed-tin-walled picture theatre where we used to queue up on Saturdays to see black and white cowboy and Indian matinees in the fifties.
Old Flour Mills on MacKellar Street. I remember playing on the crumbling
overgrown terrace out the front as a child. It seems just the same.
Finally past the old garage where I used to watch, amazed, as my very grown-up seeming country cousin (surely he was only ten or eleven years old?) used to help out serving petrol on Saturday afternoons. It's a Chinese restaurant now! Finally past the sculpture over the stile (yep! a real old English storybook-style stile) leading to Doctor Braidwood Wilson's grave up on a lonely hill beneath two trees. (he was the founder of Braidwood in the early nineteenth century).
Later that morning after a breakfast of tin loaf toast and motel coffee we visited the cemetery to say a prayer for Mum over the graves of her parents and sister. Just to break the illusion of being caught in a fifties time-warp I ended up being talked onto the location of my Auntie's grave by my Mum in Sydney giving me directions over my mobile phone! Afterwards we went to the Catholic Church, St Bede's, and took photos of the Bell Tower, which my father, an architect, designed in the sixties for the cathedral bell (which was originally an afterthought and too large for the church). I can still remember the little balsa wood architect's model with the silver Christmas tree bell he made sitting on our dining room table.
My sister and nephew under St Bede's bell
tower designed by our father in the sixties.
Our final stop before leaving town was at the Braidwood Museum which is housed in an 1840's era hotel. Fascinating place, rich with local history but, sadly, the museum shows the effects of underfunding and over-reliance on hard-working but under-resourced local volounteers.
Braidwood Museum: Alex outside the old colonial
slab lock-up from the village of Mongarlowe
We are a nation that prefers to pander to multi-national developers and foreign imperialists than to build and tend our own communities and cultures. Look it's not my fault they bull-dozed that historic site...I didn't know! I was watching Shrek 2 on my new Samsung DVD! Ah! Yes! Fiddling with the remote control while Rome burns!
Well, emerging back out into the twenty-first century, jostling for a cubicle in the public toilets with Korean tourists and four wheel drivers we packed up and headed out of town. Back down the King's Highway to Goulburn (where my paternal grandfather ran a Ladies Hairdressing salon in the twenties and where our Dad grew up) where we had a coffee and toasted cheese and tomato sammidge at the iconic Paragon Cafe before the long drive back home to the the big smoke.
Paula's first Braidwood visit was over but already her mind was turning over plans for a return visit. Mmm! A vision quest on the slopes of Gillamatong and along the reaches of Monkittee Creek!
Stay chooned!
Symbol-rich sculpture over the entrance-way to the trail to
Doctor Braidwood Wilson's grave against the stippled autumn sky.
Braidwood Tourist Information site including map:
http://www.braidwood-tourism.com.au/
Southern Tablelands Tourist Information site (Braidwood pages):
http://www.argylecounty.com.au/towns/braidwood.html
Australian Community History online (Braidwood pages):
http://peoplesvoice.gov.au/stories/nsw/braidwood/braidwood_c.htm
You can get a good-resolution image of Braidwood on Google Earth:
http://earth.google.com/
(try tilting the map and "driving" down the road to the nearby goldrush village of Araluen!)
Now the little villages and towns are often bypassed by the new highway. There was something about motoring in the fifties that required frequent stops...to check the radiator or have a beer or do a wee behind a gum tree or perhaps it was something more arcane than that and now lost to the popular consciousness.
Now we just put the car into overdrive and keep going!
Arriving at Braidwood just before noon, we checked into the motel and then headed for a welcome caffeine fix at the Nambawan Coffeehaus (great coffee, to die for hot chocolate and amazing African wares for sale) and then, while I drove Alex around the back streets and showed him all the scenes from my childhood, my sister and nephew walked around town.
Later, we met up and drove up to the lookout on Mount Gillamatong, a high hill overlooking the town. Mount Gillamatong has an ancient, sacred feel to it. As a child I explored it's rocky, tree-covered slopes and dark, damp caves with my cousins during day-long escapades ("Famous Five on Gillamatong Mountain!"). It featured hauntingly, in a typical Australian, starkly beautiful way, in the film The Year my Voice Broke.
Alexx adopts a gentrified rural pose on Mount Gillamatong.
Paula revisits the scene of childhood ramblings.
From the foot of Mount Gillamatong one is treated to a sweeping view of the valley and the far blue hills and of Braidwood town, nestled like a storybook English village, with its church spires and sleepy tree-lined streets. The high, clear, cold air sings, soaring, the song of the Dreamtime - the land's dreaming and mine.
My nephew, Josh, is a keen movie buff and is studying film at TAFE so Braidwood was a rich mine of movie lore for him, several films having been made there over the years including Ned Kelly (1970 with Mick Jagger) and the afore-mentioned "The Year My Voice Broke" (1987 with Noah Taylor).
Later that evening, while Alex and Josh had a nap, my sister, Rowena and I went for a recce to find somewhere to have dinner. I just had to stop off at the bakery and buy a Braidwood Tin Loaf - the biggest high-domed loaf of delicious soft white country bread you'll ever find. When I was little we'd arrive at my Nana's to find the open fire burning in her big lining-boarded kitchen and fresh buttery tin loaf toast starting to pile up in the middle of the scrubbed deal table. I would have been content then, I think, to do nothing else with my life but to sit at that table eating that toast! One with vegemite, the next with peanut butter, the next just plain...then start all over again!
Historic Royal Mail Hotel caughtin an autumn evening's glow .
For dinner we settled on "Somewhere Special on Wallace". This absolutely great restaurant is situated in the old bakery and we sat out in the back room where the original ovens can still be seen. The fire was toasty, the food was delicious (I had Thai beef and Alex had spinach and fetta pie), the wine organic and the service very friendly. We all had a thoroughly good night. I recommend dining there if you're ever in Braidwood.
After a wintry night snuggled tightly up to Alex and with the electric blanket left on I rose early on Sunday and strode out into a clear crisp morning air and the warbling of magpies to crunch the gravel roadsides where I'd roamed as a child.
First stop was my Nana's old house at Solus Street just across the road (it was Poppa's house too but he seemed large and aloof and intimidating to me as a child - I think men often were in the fifties). Strange to think that it was now someone else's house! Then I was inside, snuggled up under the patchwork quilt or huddled in front of the open fire toasting toast on the toasting fork; now I could only look shyly from the footpath.
The house is basically the same on the outside but the wonderful world out the back of truck sheds and woodsheds and water tank cubby houses and jungles of overgrown fennel in which my cousins and I played endlessly were long gone. I could still smell it all though - in the deep recesses of my neurons - the woodchips in the tumbledown woodshed on a rainy day and the cold concrete floor of the austere outside bathroom and the soap and starch of the brick-copper laundry and the gunmetal of the shotguns in the office and the prickly bales of hay and the truck grease and hessian bags and diesel in the sheds and the road dust and the fennel. The fennel, pungent n' green n' yeller, taller by far than a tall child's tussled head!
My sister, Ro, outside Nana's old house inSolus Street
I had the digital camera in my handbag and captured scenes: some from my childhood, some new. I was feeling excitement in my waters (as Kath of Kath & Kim fame would say). Somehow I was making a connection with the child I'd been; somehow, unexpectedly, something more than just a weekend visit to a country town was unfolding.
I'll talk more of that in a later blog.
Up to "The Pines" on Glenmore Road I strode, down to the old swimming hole on Monkittee Creek (pronounced "Munketty" according to Mum but I like to say "Mon Kitty"), past the old flour mills on Mackellar St (unchanged since I was little), up Ryrie street past the little council flat my Nana moved into in her last years, along Coronation Ave where my auntie and uncle lived and where I spent much of my time playing as part of a horde of cousins and neighbourhood kids. Then back into the main street and past the Royal Cafe made famous in "The Year My Voice Broke" and the pressed-tin-walled picture theatre where we used to queue up on Saturdays to see black and white cowboy and Indian matinees in the fifties.
Old Flour Mills on MacKellar Street. I remember playing on the crumblingovergrown terrace out the front as a child. It seems just the same.
Finally past the old garage where I used to watch, amazed, as my very grown-up seeming country cousin (surely he was only ten or eleven years old?) used to help out serving petrol on Saturday afternoons. It's a Chinese restaurant now! Finally past the sculpture over the stile (yep! a real old English storybook-style stile) leading to Doctor Braidwood Wilson's grave up on a lonely hill beneath two trees. (he was the founder of Braidwood in the early nineteenth century).
Later that morning after a breakfast of tin loaf toast and motel coffee we visited the cemetery to say a prayer for Mum over the graves of her parents and sister. Just to break the illusion of being caught in a fifties time-warp I ended up being talked onto the location of my Auntie's grave by my Mum in Sydney giving me directions over my mobile phone! Afterwards we went to the Catholic Church, St Bede's, and took photos of the Bell Tower, which my father, an architect, designed in the sixties for the cathedral bell (which was originally an afterthought and too large for the church). I can still remember the little balsa wood architect's model with the silver Christmas tree bell he made sitting on our dining room table.
My sister and nephew under St Bede's belltower designed by our father in the sixties.
Our final stop before leaving town was at the Braidwood Museum which is housed in an 1840's era hotel. Fascinating place, rich with local history but, sadly, the museum shows the effects of underfunding and over-reliance on hard-working but under-resourced local volounteers.
Braidwood Museum: Alex outside the old colonialslab lock-up from the village of Mongarlowe
We are a nation that prefers to pander to multi-national developers and foreign imperialists than to build and tend our own communities and cultures. Look it's not my fault they bull-dozed that historic site...I didn't know! I was watching Shrek 2 on my new Samsung DVD! Ah! Yes! Fiddling with the remote control while Rome burns!
Well, emerging back out into the twenty-first century, jostling for a cubicle in the public toilets with Korean tourists and four wheel drivers we packed up and headed out of town. Back down the King's Highway to Goulburn (where my paternal grandfather ran a Ladies Hairdressing salon in the twenties and where our Dad grew up) where we had a coffee and toasted cheese and tomato sammidge at the iconic Paragon Cafe before the long drive back home to the the big smoke.
Paula's first Braidwood visit was over but already her mind was turning over plans for a return visit. Mmm! A vision quest on the slopes of Gillamatong and along the reaches of Monkittee Creek!
Stay chooned!
Symbol-rich sculpture over the entrance-way to the trail toDoctor Braidwood Wilson's grave against the stippled autumn sky.
Braidwood Tourist Information site including map:
http://www.braidwood-tourism.com.au/
Southern Tablelands Tourist Information site (Braidwood pages):
http://www.argylecounty.com.au/towns/braidwood.html
Australian Community History online (Braidwood pages):
http://peoplesvoice.gov.au/stories/nsw/braidwood/braidwood_c.htm
You can get a good-resolution image of Braidwood on Google Earth:
http://earth.google.com/
(try tilting the map and "driving" down the road to the nearby goldrush village of Araluen!)
posted by Paula at
1:18 pm
1 Comments:
Cheers Paula!
Thanks for sharing a good deal of yourself & past here as you tripped back to Braidwood. The area certainly seems special - apart from holding a special, important & nostalgic place in your heart.
Thanks for the links and all the lovely images! It's always wonderful to see you & Alexx again - and now I have a face for Ro as well.
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