Recent Reading

Rosamunde Pilcher - Collection Volume 1 (Another View-The Day of the Storm-Sleeping Tiger)

Alexander McCall Smith - The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency

Ruth Rendell - Adam and Eve and Pinch Me

Robert Goddard - Hand in Glove

Pema Chodron - When Things Fall Apart

Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

In the palm of the Goddess

Last week I flew down to Melbourne for a business trip.

I always pray when the plane takes off and lands.

I'd been reading while the plane taxied out onto the tarmac. As it gathered speed, noisily, shudderingly, hurtling down the runway I looked up from book and stopped. Suddenly the realisation came to me, unbidden and surprising, that all things were part of oneness, in time and in space. The grime-streaked rivets on the wing below me and the grass over on the edge of the runway. The grass roots, even then pushing down into the soil, greedily, lustily as they always had. The air rushing by the fuselage over the wings' curves lifting us up, throwing us up, high into the high sky.

Forever, for all time, everything that has ever been and ever will be is this one, single oneness.

How I had often asked Goddess to hold me in the palm of Her hand and now I understood that I had always been there and always would...along with the rivets and the grass and my pain. For I understood, too, that there was no escape, that oneness was abraxas, the Oneness of Good and Evil. How could God do this to us? Because He, She was the God/dess of goodandevil, godandevil.

Once, long ago when I was a hippie nomad immersed in the spiritual striving of '70's I would have felt gratified, gifted, saved, self-satisfied to have had such thoughts. But now I understood that they conferred no benefit, no credentials but were true and precious nonetheless. I remembered Pema Chodron's "The Wisdom of No Escape".

My almost constant and crippling fear and anxiety, my low self-esteem, my suicidal ideation, my depression sat in and around me, part of the web of the whorls in the palm of the hand of the Goddess...along with my sense of self and self-possession and the skin into which I so surely and truly fitted and lived. The breathing in, the breathing out, ebbing and flowing, birthing and dying.

The plane levelled out. I settled back into my seat, returned to Robert Goddard and the Spanish Civil War.

Breathed out calmly between fears.

Melbourne

Last week I made a quick two-day business trip to Ballarat and Melbourne.

I had to "ride-on" with consultants in some of our sales and support centres, looking for opportunities to improve our operations.

I love the people in our company. They always impress me with their dedication and expertise. They always gladden me with their warmth and friendship.

And I love Melbourne!

Not sure why. I'm a Sydney girl and isn't one city just the same as another?

I don't think so. There's something about Melbourne that excites me.

I only had the one very cold night to myself in between a freezing, wet trip out to the regional gold rush city of Ballarat one day and a busy day at work in Melbourne the next before flying home to Sydney.

My colleagues planned an early night eating in but after checking into my hotel, the Grand Mercure,I set out at around 8pm along Swanston and up Bourke looking for somewhere cheap but not too greasy and not too Subway or KFC to eat. One of the things that amazes me is the way the streets of Melbourne are always thronged by young people hanging around at night - even on cold nights; talking, laughing, eating. The streets are somehow welcoming with so many eating places open and the trams dinging and squealing along. In Sydney everyone seems to scurry along at night, trying to get somewhere else.

A little uncertainly, I settled on a pasta and pizza joint on the corner of Bourke and Russell. It looked a little dodgey but I was pleasantly surprised with my delicious small vegetarian pizza and a most passable and welcome glass of house chardonnay.

I sat in front of the open door, not minding the cold, by this time excited by Melbourne's magic; taking it all in. I resolved, despite the late hour, to be daring and indulge my fascination with tramways.

Dressed definitely for fashion rather than warmth, I made my way back down to the tram stop and caught the Number 96 to St Kilda Beach. Very fitting I thought as that was about the closest I could come to replicating the now long gone experience of catching a tram to Coogee.

I couldn't really see a lot out the window as it was very dark especially after we left the CBD. We travelled by street alignments and reserved track (that's tram talk!) until we eventually got to the faded charms of St Kilda Road It was 9pm when the tram trundled to the end of the line in Acland Street. I hesitated about getting out into the cold and dark but decided I wasn't going to come this far for nothing.

There wasn't a lot open and I really didn't feel like going into the couple of bars that were open so I went to a coffee shop that looked like a French nightclub from a 1960's movie - all red walls and fringed lampshades. Damn it! where were my stillettos and bouffant hairdo?

Coffee warmed me up enough to do a quick, nervous Acland Street trawl. Even though most shops were closed I got an idea of the charms of the place - enticingly funky shoe shops and the famous Acland Street cake shops, their shelves groaning under slabs of baked cheesecake and other delights!

The return tram left me stranded in the dark outer regions near the Exhibition Centre along with a couple of passengers cradling Jim Beam in paper bags and leering lasciviously. Two girls who'd also been on the tram were striding away ahead purposely so I tailed after them. They headed along the river bank past the Casino so I did too. I love the Southbank - even on a cold night. They used to have wonderful big columns that surged out huge columns of gas-fueled blue flame. I crossed over the old railway bridge at Flinders Street Station and before long was back in a warm hotel room.

It was quite a walk though and, of course, I'd done it in heels. Sore feet!

Nice hot shower, Kit Kat, a few pages of Robert Goddard and then snuggle down to bed...warm...but alone!

Missing my Alex but then it was only one night.

Next morning I found I'd checked out with still an hour before my colleagues would arrive to take me out to our work site. So, still fired up about Melbourne, I set out briskly, sore feet not withstanding, for my favourite brekky spot - Degraves Street - a couple of block away.

Degraves street is one of Melbourne's wonderful laneways. A narrow dark umbrellaed passageway lined with hole in the wall coffee shops - some so small there isn't any room to sit down inside - that turns into an arcade of magickal shops filled with glitzy jewelley and shoes and bags.

I made for one I knew - Degraves Espresso - and squeezed into a rickety curve-backed chair at the front window where I could drink a great flat white and watch elegantly dressed Melbournites in wonderful shoes scuttle past. Degraves Espresso, like the other coffee shops in the laneway, is delighfully bohemian and seedy. Coffee's great, ambience transporting!

Ah! Melbourne! City of cities! Urbane urban, Glittery glass and steel towers shouldering Victorian wedding cake piles of goldrush grandeur. The polished and the seedy. Cosmopolitan sci-fi landscape of computer driven bells and street sculptures.

Guess I'm a city gal! And maybe in a former life...who knows?

Melbourne Trams

St Kilda


Degraves Street

Discovering Norman Lindsay

Yesterday, the first real balmy-warm day of spring, Alex and I gunned the little vee-dub up the M4 to Glenbrook in the Lower Blue Mountains.

My fifties-inspired, tunic-top, full-skirted dress and long sleeved blouse were ready to pick up from the dressmaker's, Julie Hoffman of "Thredz" (blog to follow soon!).

The dress is gorgeous, I am transformed into something half-way between Katherine Hepburn and Our Miss Brooks (so I dream on!). Well, at any rate, I am different! But you knew that already, hey?

Alex and I have been following my dressmaker visits with lunch at various local cafes in Glenbrook Village but yesterday, after sitting and talking and snacking in the car I suggested we do something different - pay a quick, flying visit (the day was getting on and Alex was tired from a recent chest infection) to the Norman Lindsay gallery at Faulconbridge.

Norman Lindsay is one of my favourite Australian artists, characters and rebels. He shocked a stultifyingly, wowserish Australian society in the 20's and 30's with his unashamedly pagan and erotic images of naked women cavorting in all manner of most-unwowserish poses and situations! He is, of course, also famous for his well-known children's classic, "The Magic Pudding", about a cranky and never-ending boiled pudding called Albert. His artistic energy was extraordinarily prolific and wide-ranging; he seems like some kind of bohemian renaissance man.

And I'm learning to be fascinated by Rose Lindsay, his wife, model and business manager - an also most extraordinary character - strong and talented in her own right, said to embody Norman Lindsay's concept of the "feminine dominant"! Ah! Girls, are we thinking we might resonate with that?

I'm rather fond of the Australian film "Sirens", starring Sam Neil, Hugh Grant and with Elle MacPherson, Kate Fischer and Portia De Rossi as a buxom trio of models. Filmed at the Lindsay home in Faulconbridge and at Sofala and redolent with symbolic and evocative imagery, the movie is a charming and arty comedy of how a stiff, repressed Anglican minister and his wife are transformed by contact with the unconventional, the pagan and the sensual of the Lindsay household against the backdrop of the the magic of the Australian bush.

Now Alex was unfamiliar with Norman Lindsay and I was keen to introduce him to the magic.

So we tootled further up the highway and, turning off at Faulconbridge, we knew we were getting close when we started to pass streets named after characters from the Magic Pudding. We arrived rather late in the day - around 330pm. The gallery is the original Lindsay home, studio and garden which have been renovated by the National Trust. As well as the wonderful house itself there are numerous paintings, etchings, sculptures, books and ship models (I told you the guy was wide-ranging!). The studio has been preserved to look as if the artist had only just stepped out! Throughout the garden one comes, unexpectedly, upon amazing statues and sculptures.

We only had about 40 minutes to look at things because the gallery closes at 4pm but they allowed us in free of charge. Alex was quite tired by this time but he saw enough to be hooked! He sat down in one of the rooms while I scouted around; then I took him on a brief tour of what I thought would be the highlights. In the "Oil Room" his eyes widened with amazement when he saw the incredibly forthright and exultantly erotic oil paintings paying homage (I think) to female sexuality and strength. He was also very impressed by the huge, intricately-crafted sailing ship models Norman Lindsay used to make to relax!

It was a good return visit for me too because they have done some further renovations since I was there 7 or 8 years ago (god! time flies!). They have restored the capacious tiled kitchen with its Aga stove and old artifacts at the back of the house and opened up the covered walkway to it which gives a view onto courtyards. I had a good chat with one of the ladies in the shop and - of course - bought several cards and postcards. We didn't have time to explore the garden as time ran out and there was a wedding being held in the part closest to us (yes! I'm thinking, thinking!)

When we returned to the car we noticed the wattle trees were in flower, setting its blaze of yellow against the spring-deepened green of the gums.

We drove home happy and already planning our next - but this time much longer - visit to the magic that is Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum!

Nestled in that greater and older magic that is Sydney's Blue Mountains!

Some interesting Links:

Norman Lindsay Gallery
(contains images of artwork as well as views of house and garden)


The Magic Pudding
(the children's classic)

Sirens
(the movie)
Amazon.com entry plus reviews
Reelviews review
SMH:An alternate view of the movie by one who was there

Glenbrook
(the village)

Thredz
(the dressmaker)

Salt-licks for cats

I went to a Catholic boarding school for all but the last year of high-school - as a day pupil (thank god! They had to eat vegetables and custard!).

The school was situated in what was then a semi-rural area and had its own farm. The farm was run by religious brothers who wore khaki overalls and battered slouch hats and drove an old dusty green Land Rover. It was very strange to see them on the rare occasion that they donned their religious habits.

Because I had to wait almost an hour after school before the infrequent bus home arrived I often used to spend the time hanging around the farm. It was very interesting for a kid who grew up in the inner city. Huge-seeming, clattery-hooved cows got milked in sheds (and delightfully let gush forth torrents of green cow shit that splattered gloriously on the concrete!) and squealing orange and black-spotted baby pigs in pens got doled out cabbage slops from kero tins and lengths of wood got sawn creamy smooth and straight in the old leather-belt driven saw as the evening sun slanted through the open windows high up in the corrugated iron mill.

One of the things I saw during those fascinating evenings was cows greedily licking "salt-licks" - blocks of frosty white fortified salt laid out in the lush green grass of the paddocks.

The other night, when I was aroused from ponderings over a report for work to find Chicory had discovered my half-eaten ginger nut biscuit (you know the ones that will break all but the strongest teeth!), I recalled those "salt-licks".

She slobbered round and round the ginger nut trying to crack it with her sharp but perilously needle-thin teeth (No! No! Pussy! You mustn't!) but fortunately gave up and resorted instead to giving it a good salivery licking.

The little cow!