Being Woman Becoming Woman

Deux vieux paysans de Provence

2008-12-06T22:52:00.002+11:00

Greek interlopers in little Macedonia

2008-11-09T11:59:00.004+11:00

Yesterday we had breakfast in Macedonia!

Well,we had breakfast in King Street Place which is a section of King Street, Rockdale which has recently been made into an attractive, popular little mall by our council and into a little piece of the Balkans by the local Macedonian population.

It has a very European feel with old men clustering on benches and in cafes to (as my dad used to say) 'chew the fat'. Presumably, politics, national, international and familial, their latest gripes and grumbles and their latest get rich quick scheme. The old women cluster on other benches - after they've shopped at the green grocers and delis. Freshly scrubbed fathers and sons in shorts and scuffs breakfast together over Borek and strong coffee and families with "four wheel drive" prams and beautifully dressed children tumble over each other like multi-generational litters of puppies.

When I first came to work for Telstra I was a rookie field technician very out of her depth. I was put under the wing of a crew of pit and pipe workers who'd come out to Oz in the sixties from Greece, Macedonia and Serbia. I was adopted as an honorary 'wog' and was privileged to enjoy the high point of each morning which was a sumptuous morning tea of fresh Macedonian bread sliced lengthways and crammed with cold meats and home grown tomatoes and cucumbers all eaten off the back tray of the compressor truck by the side of the road. It all struck a very earthy, ethnic proletarian note in an otherwise twee Anglo-Celtic Balmain (mind you I do love Balmain passionately!)

There was a, mostly but not always, harmless rivalry between the Greek and Macedonians in those days which I believed had historic and traditional roots. So it was both gratifying to revisit the culture yesterday and enjoy its difference and its familiarity but also amusing to think I had joined the other side in marrying Alexx, a Greek-Australian.

We had Borek, which is a light flaky pastry "pie" filled, in our case, with spinach and cheese. Not as substantial as Greek spanakoppita but very delicious and a great accompaniment to good coffee. Under our cafe umbrella I let it wash all over me while outside rain washed the morning and the mall fresh and clean. Our cafe was called the "Balkan Oven". It came to me then that my dad, who was a great lover of both European culture and "chewing the fat' would have really enjoyed all this. Alas, my dad and me seemed to have always been a couple of laps apart in life and never quite managed to be in the same place at the same time.

Here is my very own European man at the Balkan cafe:

Developers deal Art Deco decline for dollars?

2008-10-12T12:40:00.002+11:00

Yesterday, Alexx and I went to the inner city Sydney suburb of Dulwich Hill to see an exhibition by a photographer friend of ours. Neither of us had ever really stopped off in Dulwich Hill before.

At one point I went for a walk through the streets and laneways which I find is always a good way to get the feel for the essential nature of a place.

In a back street I found this small run-down block of Art Deco flats. The frontage was quite interesting and very art deco I thought. Ironically, the name Silverdale conjures up ideas of beauty and riches perhaps which is at odds with the down at heel back streets of Dulwich Hills.

As I stood and relished the Art Deco style I imagined I could smell the developers gathering like vultures, scenting a killing, building their mansions, always somewhere else, on the bones of local texture and the past's riches. I didn't really know but, given past performance, seemingly relentless, it seemed highly possible.

People, I think, can be divided into those who value what is and has been and wish to fit themselves into and around it, recycling and transforming but retaining connections and continuities and those who see themselves and their concerns as the immutable point of it all and seek to sweep everything away for illusory gain.

Oh! I know nothing is black and white and I do see the value in the new and know that the way of the world is change but a natural environment changes over time, incorporating the past into the present into the future, doesn't it? What happens to a tree when it becomes rootless?

Ironically, as we clear fell forests of Federation and Californian bungalows we hold a much touted Art Deco exhibition in Melbourne.

Of course, we not only lose Art Deco style but also somewhere where someone with less that a combined income of $200, 000 can live. And we lose the rough and ready but fertile environments where upcoming artists and writers and thinkers and changers and savers can grow - like our friend and his friends.

Beware council makeover plans that do not include waste land and the unrenovated, the unimproved and the underutilised!

Oh! I have become a lover of faded, drab walls and weedy lots along rusty rail lines and the old shopfront no one has ever done anything with!

Mmm! Maybe I'm wrong about Silverdale? Maybe this old girl has years left in her yet?

Earth, sea, wind and sky!

2008-09-13T13:51:00.000+10:00

Wind surfers on Botany Bay. Of a Sunday evening we often drive up to Nick's Greek cake shop at Brighton-le-sands and get some great coffees and spanakopita and then park bayside at Monterey.

We often see wind surfers, their kites like great birds ducking and weaving while they skim across the water. How do they do it? It's a major achievement for me to just not trip over my own feet!

Can this be minutes from the heart of Sydney?

2008-07-05T13:46:00.000+10:00

Winter evening - looking north along the pale sands of Lady Robinson beach at Monterey across Botany Bay to the Sydney skyline.

How did we come to be blessed with this? Talk about landing on your feet.

During our honeymoon we talked about the feasibility of moving to the north coast. Hey! We just brought the north coast to us!

Last day in the old home

2008-05-30T13:33:00.002+10:00

Alexx had come to find it almost impossible to negotiate the steep stairs to the old Coogee family home where he had lived for 61 years (barring his months in Nimbin and Japan). So while I rushed around making last minute preparation for the removalist, he went "next door" to the main part of the house and spent what would surely now be his last hours in the old house, sitting in the sunny little kitchen talking with his brother George.

Originally, the kitchen of the main house was the sun veranda. When Alexx's dad died in the fifties, his mum had the house split to take in boarders. the real kitchen became the kitchen of the "flat" and so a little kitchenette was made out of the sun veranda for what remained of the main house. Although narrow, it enjoyed the veranda's north facing position and was a delightfully sunny place to have brekky on a Sunday morning.

Not long after, while our furniture was moved out to the waiting truck, Alexx made the difficult struggle down the stairs for the last time. A sad end but a joyful beginning.

Ours!

2008-05-11T13:30:00.000+10:00

Well ours...and the credit union's! Who would have thought. We're home - at last! Our very "own" patch of mother earth (well stata title anyway!) to push down roots!

Our prospective home

2008-04-13T13:24:00.000+10:00

The street side frontage of our new soon-to-be home. "Richelieu" - cardinal red brick, the French connection of La Perouse, literally "place of riches". All true. A month of agonising applications for loans and organising the move were to follow!

The day we found our home

2008-04-12T13:16:00.000+10:00

On Saturday 12th April 2008, at an inconvenient time for bizzy, dizzy me, Alex insisted we look at a new property in Ramsgate Beach. It fitted the bill in most respects and was very promising. Afterwards we had lunch at a local bayside Greek restaurant with brother George where I snapped this pic of Alexx . We weren't quite sure at the time but we had just found our new home!

Autumn Harvest

2008-03-08T10:05:00.004+11:00

A gift of macadamias from our tree

Haiku

2008-03-08T09:52:00.001+11:00

After the night's torrential rain,
Three bras hung on the line,
Caught fishes.

The boy who came out of the sun

2008-01-12T11:28:00.000+11:00

My husband, Alexx, as a young man of 18 or 20 in the mid-60's posing on the roof of the family Zephyr by the side of the road on the way south to Canberra.

His friend had taken the photo looking into the early morning sun, surrounding Alexx's head in a suffused golden glow which made me think of him as a magickal boy who flew out of the sun to travel down all of our years to my heart and my soul.

Over the recent Christmas break we had dragged out dusty shoe boxes of old black and white family photos from the '40's and slides or transparencies from the '60's. If you know me you know I love history, family history and the notion of time-travel. Oh! god! how I wish I could time travel!

Sitting out in the garden on a summer evening peering down into the slide viewer, the extraordinary clarity and luminous colour of the slide format transported me, drawing me deep down into the past.

I emerged from the activity quite shaken and unsettled, like earth fresh harrowed. In those images I could almost reach out and touch Alexx when he was a fresh-faced, bright-eyed boy with the whole world before him, and his choices unmade and their consequences unfelt. It made me reflect on our lives, on life; the process of living; of the green, smooth sappy sapling growing and twisting, bending and scarring and bleeding into the old gnarled tree. The old gnarled trees that we are fast becoming.

I was back there with him, on that bright cool fresh morning, feeling the warmth of a still kind sun, feeling the soft smooth sap of a world not yet grown hard.

I wept then. Wept for that innocent boy, thinking the world was his and nothing not possible, trapped now, forever, a numinous memory in luminous colour on a thin speck of film in a tiny plastic box. I wept for the sweet, sweet, strongfrail man he'd become, by my side, in my bed, in my arms, I in his. I wept for he and I both, arm in arm, picking our way down from the heights of promise, bearing our treasure of what was done, what was undone, irrevocable; of our exquisite joy and our exquisite sorrow.

Oh! Time travel! Where we touch, for a brief, moment all those fascinating things: growling, grimy, green and cream double-decker buses, coral pink lipstick and white alice bands, shiny black winkle-picker shoes and racy Zephyr cars.

But we touch too, like ice, like fire, the heart and the wound of this, our tiny, fleeting instant in the sun.

Corner Cat

2007-12-23T08:18:00.000+11:00

Corner Cat
Facing the sharp edge
Back to the wall
Looking this way
AND that
Seeing it all
Body in the shade
Tail in the sun
Ready to run.

Oh! Sweet Lord Ganesha!

2007-12-15T23:07:00.000+11:00

Statue of Lord Ganesha at Crystal Castle, Mullumbimby, northern NSW.

Oh! Dearest sweet, sweet Lord Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, Bringer of Good Fortune!

How, now so long ago it seems but only a few short years ago, I knelt down, alone, oh so alone, before the weight of black night and uncertain destiny; beneath the dripping disc of the Moon, wreathed by incense, lit by flickering candles red and white. And I prayed.

Lord Ganesha, consort of Goddess, if it be thy will, let this woman in me blossom, be released, that I may live as her, live her all of my days, for better and for worse. And, this more, my Lord, teach me to love and to be loved.

And so it was; and so it is!

And I am Paula and now I am married to my true love, Alexx.

Blessed be.

May the Long Time Sun Shine...

2007-12-15T22:27:00.000+11:00

May the long time
Sun shine upon you
All love surround you
And the pure light within you
Guide your way home!

(Incredible String Band)

Bright and fair fly the flags
Of the Aquarius hill tribes
Of the Rainbow Region.

Peace and rainbow flags flutter over the monthly market at the village of The Channon near Lismore in the Rainbow Region of northern NSW.

For our honeymoon Alexx and I chose a road trip in our new vee-dub diesel Polo to this lush, sub-tropical, fabled seat of the '60's and '70's hippie era and the Aquarian Revolution. We both had attachments to this area from that time and this was a way of revisiting our pasts and honouring the source of much of our mutual life ethos - a hope for the future, a dedication to peace, a love of diversity and a reverence for the Earth.

This was the journey we should have made all those years ago but we had another journey to make - the journey of our lives - before that was possible.

Our little car below the ancient sacred majesty of the Nimbin Rocks outside Nimbin Village, northern NSW

Me Mate!

2007-12-15T22:14:00.001+11:00

Mate: friend, companion, buddy, partner, join, conjoin, match

The Blessings of Water and the Spirit of the West

2007-10-21T20:23:00.000+10:00

Proceed to the West where the priestess holds up the symbol of Water - the chalice...

"Spirit of the West whose element is Water,
Give Your blessings to Paula and Alexx
Who are about to be married
(Sprinkle with sacred water)
And grant to their union
Intuition, compassion and inspiration!"

Wedding Vows

2007-09-27T22:12:00.001+10:00

Alexx

Paula, I give you my love and my life,
My dark times and bright,
To be for you, all of my days
Your friend and your lover,
Your soulmate and husband.

Paula

Alexx, I give you my love and my life,
My dark times and bright,
To be for you, all of my days
Your friend and your lover,
Your soulmate and wife.

Today will I marry my friend...

2007-09-23T22:04:00.000+10:00

Yesterday, the 22nd September, on the cusp of the Spring Equinox, Alexx and I wed on a wild and windy and cold spring day amongst the Spirits of Air, Fire, Water and Earth in a now sacred grove of melaleuca on the banks of the Lily Pond close to the spring which is its source in beautiful Centennial Park, Sydney.

Our dearest friends gathered around us as Marybeth, our priestess, performed the hallowed Pagan rites of hand fasting, sharing of cake and mead and exchange of rings and vows.

The readings - by friends - were Kalidasa, Gibran and the Apache Wedding Prayer and Jaqi sang a haunting song in her beautiful ethereal voice. Belinda took many beautiful photos (see above).

Afterwards we had a simple, close friendly gathering at our place to share a buffet lunch (of course there was souvlakia and spanikoppita!) and drinks.

Doesn't my man look handsome?

As we turned within the sacred circle - marked out by olive sprays from our tree and flowers from our guests - to receive the blessings of the Sprits of the Four Directions and the Centre, the Elements rose up around us in windiness and rippling of water and tree roots underfoot and sun breaking through.

As we stood hand in hand, hand-fasted in red and white ribbons, and spoke our vows and exchanged our rings I felt fall away the last diaphanous veil between Alexx and I so that we stood as one.

And as I stood within the Circle facing all who had journeyed with me; given me so generously their love and support, beside the man who has loved me so unconditionally, in my beautiful silk dress, the last diaphanous veil between me and womanhood also fell away; there beneath the wide, wind-swept sky and under and within the awesome love of Goddess and her consort sweet Lord Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles and Bringer of Good Fortune.

Thanks be, Blessed be!

Here is the Order of Ceremony:

The Wedding of Paula and Alexx

Order of Ceremony

Entry of Bridal Party
Tibetan Bells
Create Sacred Circle and Welcome to Country
Welcome and Introduction
Remembering those absent
Legal Reminder
Moon, Sun and Spring Equinox
First Reading – Kalidasa by David
Meaning of Ceremony
Presentation of couple
Blessings of the Spirits:
- East, North, West, South, Centre -
Cake & Mead
Second Reading – Gibran by Matthew
Hand Fasting – Lovers’ Knot
Exchange of Vows
Exchange of Rings
Third Reading – Apache Prayer by Annie
Pronouncement of Marriage
Kiss
Closing of Sacred Circle
Jaqi’s Song to Paula and Alexx
Signing of Certificates

Here are the Wedding Guest Responses:

Presentation of Couple

Marybeth:
“Who brings this man to stand beside this woman?”

Men guests:
“We, the community of men, bring this man to stand beside this woman.”

Marybeth:
“Who brings this woman to stand beside this man?"

Women guests:
“We, the community of women, bring this woman to stand beside this man.”

Marybeth:
“Are Paula and Alexx’s community of men and women willing now and always to strengthen this union by upholding both Paula and Alexx with their support?”

All guests:
“We are”

Under the Moon I lay with you

2007-09-15T20:39:00.000+10:00

Bleached bone disc
Of the moon sits
Still, frozen
In a frost sharp sky
High,
Aloof, distanced
Drawing down
My tides
To their destiny.

Through threadbare lace
Her light is a shroud
On all that has been
Done,
Not done
Never can be undone
Dead-set irrevocable
And…yet, also
A christening gown
Of antique hope
For our tomorrow’s
Birthing,
Blessing,
Wedding
Of our ways.

She pours a thin,
Thin stream of molten
Silv’ring,
Tracing
The bone sharp edge
In our bed
Of your upturned face.
My incredible shrinking man,
Growing bigger by the day
Immense,
Loving, longing,
Lashing my heart
To your mast
Head.

Like an arc
Of the serpent’s back
I flash back
To the past
When, on one night
- only one night –
Long ago
You lay– then too – in my bed
But propped above me
On your then strong arms
Your then wild full mane
Of Grecian hair
Spread
Like a raven canopy
Above my head
Beneath the shadowed canopy
- Indian-patterned - –
Above my bed.

Then too
A moon
- Maybe -
(I remember it that way)
Burning with this,
This
Unsuspecting destiny
Through a weather-worn window
Bare to a ruthless sky
Pouring relentless
Into a lonely garret,
Perched lonely
On a Darlinghurst hill.

I remember your even
Then thin nut-brown frame
Lithe like a guru
And your startling smell
- Smell of a man -
Strong, pungent, aromatic,
Greek.

Why did I not let you
Into me then?
Because you were you?
Or because I wasn’t me?
Or because I was?
A hollow man,
Crying out
To be hollowed out.
As unformed then
As my unformed vagina.

But now,
Now
In the proffered
Bowl of my being
I open my wound
Like a womb
To receive
- not so much rapturous
As reverential –
Your love,
Force,
Fading,
Blessing.
An ordained sacrament
Of tomorrow
Now,
Now,
Now and
Now;
Tonight
And every night
Entwined and
Intertwined
Around and beside
Close-woven warm
In this bed
And cold close
- forever –
In the next.

Now Voyager

2007-09-09T21:58:00.000+10:00

Alexx and I at Sans Souci on the shores of Botany Bay. The crescent in the sky is a wind surfer's kite. Note the ethereal city scape of Sydney in the background haze.

No Sister

2007-08-25T14:08:00.000+10:00

Dear Sister,

Did I perform badly
Just now
In a tragic
Comedy of errors,
Staged,
White-faced
And skirted by convention;
Forgetting my lines
In an allotted script,
My sister, your no sister?

I was exposed,
Caught in the open
Harsh glare
Of final commitment
Like a rabbit on the road
When I spotted you,
Fleetingly, in the wings,
Engaged elsewhere;
Not here;
Not anywhere near,
My sister, your no sister.

Why do I hear
The hollow echo
Of your laughter,
Haunting, taunting,
In the back room,
Turning sour in my ear;
Morose, non-committal
(We'll see, maybe)
When you answer the phone
My sister, your no sister?

Look!
Even when
I was playing your brother
(you said we were sisters)
Was I ever
Anything else
More or less
Than a frame on the mantel;
An element,
Untouchable,
Irreducible
In your personal myth;
A mover of furniture,
Two disembodied arms,
Empty and broken,
Under a bowed-down back,
My sister, your no sister?

You know,
Don't you that
At our age
You were never
Going to get
A sister by other means
Who bled with your own blood
And wept the tears
Of your kindred spirits keening,
My sister, your no sister?

Bowed,
Bowed down,
I see between my legs
The blood of my own birth
And your betrayal.
In the barren passageway
Between here and then
I find my gift to you
Untouched, unopened.
And is that his picture
Still gathering sacred dust
My sister, your no sister?

Well, no matter,
Tomorrow breaks anew
And then will I wed,
Becoming another man's wife.
But until
And beyond,
I understand
I remain, forever,
My sister, your no sister.

Our New Car

2007-08-19T12:24:00.001+10:00

Our new VW Polo TDI Diesel Hatchback on its first Sunday outing - to Double Bay.

Sleeping between two lovers

2007-08-19T12:19:00.000+10:00

Crawlspace

2007-08-19T11:59:00.000+10:00

In the still dim folds of morning
Round the pale laced shroud-square
Of the window

- While you two
Are sleeping,
Snoring and purring
Softly, softly
And almost in unison
On either side of the still-warm
Crumpled crawlspace
In which, between your backs’ press
Each night I try
To extinguish hell –

I ready myself for battle
Girding lean loins in
Full briefs and false bravado
Stuffing my bra and hoping
I don’t lose it
All.

Already the voices
Crowd and clamour,
Negative, positive,
Arcing their opposites
Across the bell jar
Of the brain,
Battering, jitterbugging
In a constant current,
Tangled up, wired up
On the wire.

In the gathering light
I will assemble
An array of earrings
And incantations,
Prayers, plays,
Ploys, pretences,
Strategies, ruses,
Runes, routines,
High heels,
Desperate deals.

Until I’m
Brushed and blushed,
And dressed for the kill.
Then I’ll move up to the line,
Pausing by your bedside briefly
Trying to fix the moment,
Your knowing eyes,
Your gentle smile,
Drinking deep
A stirrup cup
Of your quiet hope and longings,
Sweet, sweet kisses, blessings.
Stuffing them, hopeless,
In my heart and handbag;
Adding to my armaments.

Leaving,
Lurching
Launching
Clicking and clattering,
Into the labyrinth

Trailing a thin, thin thread.

A story part 4 - Calling up the past

2007-06-11T19:44:00.000+10:00

"Garbutt n' Turnbull, Ruth speaking."

"Mum, it's me."

"Oh! Yes, what is it?"

"Sorry, mum, what's the problem?"

"Oh, nothing, Fleur. I'm just so busy. I've got this terrible estate. Mr Garbutt's going to court tomorrow and I'm not even half way through. What is it?"

Oh, nothing, mum, sorry!"

"No come on! Look I've just made a cup of tea, tell me while I drink it."

"Mum, it's nothing, it's just something strange. It might be nothing. I wanted to tell you. Hey, I was looking through the births, deaths and marriages. You know it's Hayley's funeral next Wednesday? Well, it's just that I saw this death notice for Daniel Lyon."

"For who?"

"Mum, you know, remember that guy you told us about? He tried to fly and fell out of a tree and broke his arm. The hippy guy, when you were in Nimbin? I remembered the name, 'Daniel in the Lyon's den'? Gotta be the same guy, don't you think?"

"Oh! Umm! Could be. I dunno. Anyway, it was Mullumbimby."

"Oh! OK! Well I knew it was somewhere up there. Mum, he was fifty. That's about right, isn't it? Wasn't he younger than you?"

"Well, yes, Look I don't know, It could be. It's strange."

"I just thought you'd want to know. I mean, if it was him. He always seemed to mean something to you. I mean the stories you told us."

"He was just someone I knew. It was a long time ago."

"Well, anyway, the funeral's this Friday, at Riverstone, St Alban's, two-thirty. If you're interested."

"What about Hayley's funeral?"

"Mum, I don't want to think about it. Not till Wednesday. It's just going to be tragic I know."

"Alright, well ring me. Look I've got to get this thing finished. Thanks for ringing."

"OK, mum, sorry. Seeya."

A story part 3 - "Let the Sunshine Inn"

2007-06-11T19:41:00.000+10:00

At the corner, I hesitated.

By the time I'd got to Mullum, I was stripped raw; wary, jittery, looking over my shoulder, paranoid.

I felt done, shown up.

I kept expecting to see Ruth and Rush, together, laughing.

The nearside of the street was still in shadow. A couple of housewives in tangerine shifts over slacks and curlers in scarves were maggin' outside the Four Square supermarket. A couple of blokes in blunnies and greasy slouch hats were hangin' over a tailgate outside Rasmussen's garage.

Opposite me, Let The Sunshine Inn was doin' just that. It's open frontage caught the morning sun perfectly. The locals had already started to gather, heads down over vegie burgers and muesli, like crows on a wire fence; picking over their roadkill. A week ago I'd have strode straight over, hungry for the warmth of belonging, like hot tea in cold hands. Now I faltered. What if they know? Shame flared and subsided.

The guys from the co-op were out the front, clove rollies hanging from their mouths like white, smouldering grubs. Only the fat guy looked up; acknowledging me, just, with a barely perceptible nod. Inside, the clash of plates and the clatter of the coffee grinder rose above the hum of voices. The smell of frying and coffee mingled with the cloves wafting in from out front. A baby squealed.

A couple of people looked up, and then dropped their eyes. Trish n' Dave were in front of me. I greeted them in a weak, quavering voice that belonged to someone else,

"Hi! Dave, Hi! Trish!"

Trish said nothing, just kept breastfeeding and didn't look up. Maybe she was embarrassed. Yeah! Right! Dave just mumbled into his beard and avoided my eyes. A week ago they'd have been all smiles.

Sarah eyed me blankly, "Soykoff?"

"Umm, no." said the weak, quavering voice, "Is that Dandelion Coffee? Is that new? Could I have that, and raisin toast?"

Did I close my eyes? I saw Ruth, troubled,

You know, you really should just be yourself. Be straight out about things. No one kmows what you're thinking. Honestly, you look shifty. They don't how to take you. They think your'e up to no good.

"Two dollars seventy!"

"What? Oh, sorry!"

I sat down and took out a book, keeping my eyes down. It was crowded this morning.

Then I heard him. Fuck! Not today!

My eyes flickered around the room. Mine was the only table with an empty seat. I groaned inwardly.

"Hey! Birdman! How they hangin'? No one sittin' here? Good, I didn't think so!"

Doug's battered, red-nosed face, leered, sneering over a grubby purple tie-dyed t-shirt, stretched tight over a beer gut.

"Umm, hi! Doug!"

"Mmm! What's that?"

"Umm, Dandelion coffee, it's new."

"Any good?"

"Umm, yeah, I think so."

"Hey, Sal! I made up me mind: Dandelion Coffee. Birdman reckons it's a good brew. Yeah, you too, luv!"

"So whatcha readin', Birdman?"

"Umm, the Bhagavad Ghita."

"No shit! heavy stuff, man. Too much like the Bible, for me. You read, 'Zen n' the art of Motorbike Maintenance'?"

"Umm, no, not yet. but I want to."

"Forget it. Starts off good then it goes to shit. Don't waste ya time. Hey, you still campin' out in that blackfella's humpy out on the back road?"

He went quiet. After a moment I dared to glance up from my toast. Doug was sitting opposite me with something like a smirk on his face. He looked me straight in the eyes.

"Hey, Birdman, they're takin' on pickers at Maloney's, and Patels."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah! I reckon it'd be a good move."

"What?"

"You packin' up and gettin' on at Maloney's. Mick Maloney's a mate of mine. He'll take you on. 'Bout time you found a job. Put hair on yer chest."

I left the last piece of toast, hurriedly gathered up my things, face burning, legs like jelly; stumbled past him.

"Umm, yeah, OK! I'll think about it."

"You do that Birdman. Don't take too long about it. Never know when you'll get a chance like this again."

Outside there was a dirty white panel van pulled up opposite. A hard brown face ringed by a full black beard leaned out. "Daniel." I looked up. It was the guy from the leather shop. I didn't know his name. But he knew mine.

"I'm goin' to Maloney's. I'll give you a lift. Yer can get yer things"

"Umm, thanks. It's alright, I've gotta few things to do. I'll hitch. I'm still thinking about it."

"Get in."

I got in.

His hands were large, with blunt fingers, stained black with Ravens oil.

Through the dusty windscreen, as he pointed the bonnet out towards the back road, I saw Rush's ute. Ruth was in the front. Sitting close.

I swivelled round but already they were gone; hidden by the Last Bend into Town. Even the town was hidden, beyond the trees along the North Arm.

The feudal hierachy of the new age had closed ranks around Ruth and Rush; the shakuhachi players and the wholemeal bakers, the hand-spinners and the sandal makers, the dope growers and the bush mechanics. Sealed them off, protective, like a wound; against infection, against me.

Already, I could hear the Voices.

Daniel! Birdman! He was some weird dude! I mean, there's weird and there's too fuckin' weird!

I know, I know, luv. But it's for the best. Look, Ruth, you are one Beautiful Lady! And guys like that, they drag yer down, hold yer back. Yer better off. I tell ya, you and Rush are just such a Beautiful Couple. Yer like the Sun and Moon, the Sun and Moon.

Meant To Be.

A story part 2 - Road to Nowhere

2007-06-11T10:28:00.000+10:00

I was rooted.

Feet frozen to the spot; numbed with cold, and reality. Blackness spreading across the day. Heart a stone, like ice. Hurt screaming soundless, somewhere inside; engulfed.

Swallowed up.

The long-feared-come-true-at-last.

At my feet, a jagged chunk of quartz shone starkly, seamed with fool's gold. Nearby, a discarded bottle top, blue...

Let's not pick it up. Let's leave it as a gift to the Queen of The Magpies.

...mocked. The faint outline of a sandal in the dust, dug deeper where it had changed direction.

After an eternity, I turned; slowly, weighted down with leaden loss and dread.

Ruth was a long way up the long climb to the cross-roads, becoming smaller and smaller with each step, determined-seeming, thrusting forward.

At the top of the ridge the day was bright and clear, like steel; she stopped, a tiny figure like a rose-pink doll, the wind picking up and tossing her raven black hair wildly. I willed her to turn. Sending my thoughts like broken birds.

Please turn, please, please....

And she was gone.

I began to walk slowly, each step an effort of struggle hard against the dead weight of despair. The sharp gravel bit through my thin soles. I grasped the hurt.

At the top, exposed, the wind was fierce, cutting through threadbare cheesecloth, whipping tangled hair across my face. Ruth was nowhere in sight. Down in the empty hollow the white signpost on the Twenty Mile was stark; like a gibbet.

I sat for a long, long time, letting the wind hurt; the pain gave form to whatever was left of me; edged a black hole that went down forever. The wind shushed through the dry pale paper grass; saying nothing of any sense. High up in the empty sky a crow cried, solitary, mournful. A long way off a dog barked then stopped abruptly.

The world had emptied out; of anything of sense, of anything of substance, of anything that I would want.

A faint far off sound of gravel crushing grew louder. An old faded Commer ute trailing dust: Old Fred, Goin' up the Top Forty. He stared blankly through the wound-down window as he passed, saying nothing, never acknowledging my presence. Once he would have waved, gruffly. But that was then, when I was with Ruth. Now, already, I was with no one, was no one. Rexie barked wildly from the back, scrabbling to stay upright on the shifting bales of hay.

The silence returned; and the sighing of the wind. It was too cold now up there, even for despair.

I began the long, dragging haul back down the way I'd come. Off the ridge, it was deathly still and silent; was a different world; all the magic drained out, like water down a plughole, dried up, left a corpse, withered, dull, flat.

I saw the Winding Forest Road for what it was: an empty, desolate, back road to nowhere. The bush silent and dry, straggling along a deserted strip of rutted dust and rusted fence wire.

I stood at the entrance to the camp on the edge of the trees. Once, months ago, it had been a Ranger's Lookout; I'd sweated its dream into being on a bright morning to the ring of an axe and the warbling of magpies.

Now it was tawdry, grubby, pathetic. A rumpled, greasy sleeping bag; sagging pine boughs yellowing. The campfire cold and unraked. On a bush rock, the pale blue star flowers Ruth had arranged in an old ink bottle, eons ago, were wilted, withered.

I felt sickened, ashamed, stupid.

Suddenly I grabbed my shoulder bag and ran. Ran hard, heart-bursting, throat-burning hard, down to the road and halfway up to the ridge until I could run no further.

Sobbing, I stumbled on. Pushing hard till it hurt, running whenever I could, tears streaming down an unwashed face, stiff with dust. Down past the Twenty Mile turn off, down away from an empty valley, down away from an empty life.

A Chorus of Currawongs

2007-06-09T21:18:00.001+10:00

Reading Jane Fonda

2007-06-09T21:03:00.000+10:00

Recent reading includes Jane Fonda's wonderfully candid, fascinating and eminently readable autobiography, "My Life So Far". I do recommend this book to anyone and especially to women. Although the circumstances of our lives are poles apart, I could so relate to so many aspects of Jane's long difficult journey to self. She so often expressed my own inner quandaries, struggles and workings through.

Of course, her story of her childhood growing up in the shadow of her father, Henry Fonda; the suicide of her mother; her life in films and activism and the many remarkable people she has known and worked with; the Vietnam War years and her marriages to Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden and Ted Turner make fascinating reading. She, herself, is of course a remarkable, talented and committed person.

My sister lent me this book which is autographed by Jane herself. My sister and mum went to see her during her recent tour of Australia. I so wish that I had gone to see and hear her too.

"My Life So Far" Jane Fonda Ebury Press (Random House)

Autumn Reflections

2007-06-09T21:02:00.001+10:00

Comfort!

2007-06-09T18:10:00.000+10:00

A story part 1 - New Morning

2007-06-09T17:33:00.000+10:00

I remember now.

The morning, hard and bright, with strong yearning, new venture, resolve; guilt. The bird song was almost deafening coming through the New Forest. Magpies winging through the trees, darting, flashing, white and black; their melodious warbling cries like silver bells.

There was heady freshness to the day, full-scented with spring, sap rising. In The Gully, the Tea Tree river rushed and hurried, shooshing over smooth green riverstones, tinkling among treeroots.

My sandals slapped loud on the cool hard dust of the back road. The man ferns and black boys of The Gully, dew green and black, primeval, dwarfing, spears raised, fell away and the slope of the ridge opened up to a sparse standing of slim gum maidens, their smooth green-grey trunks straight up near the ground amongst the wire grass, twisting into writhing limbs high up beneath their red-tinged canopies arching across my head.

Nearing the crest, the sky broke through, brilliant and wide, a deep mid-blue, shocked with piled mountains of bright, white cloud.

My heart was in my throat, singing; a rushing filling my body, like a stream in flood. I felt washed and new, alive, beautiful; bad. If I closed my eyes I could still see Rush, his tousled hair gilded by the flickering embers of the fire, raked over. Smell his body, sandalwood, my head buried in the firm warm hollow of the base of his neck.

I opened my eyes. Warning. A huge crow stood still in the middle of the sandy road. Black, glistening, like a hole in the fabric of the day. His round white eye watched me. He stood his ground, a sentinel before destiny. I came on.

Goddess, be with me.

I breasted the rise; into the day’s wide arms; and you were there. Halted at the edge of the road. Pale, like a ghost in grubby once were white cheescloth. You said nothing but I watched your eyes, those doleful cow eyes, flicker over the rose-pink dress, ironed-fresh and never before worn.

No I love it, but I’d never buy it. It’d be too self-indulgent. I have the Coming Spring to wear.

Flicker down to the pearl pink polish on my toes.

Yes, it’s nice but I don’t really need that do I?

I faltered in my stride. In that frozen moment, the crow called. Was it thrice? Or was that my guilty imagining?

I stood as if naked before you; my ambition and desire brash and strident. My arms bore fresh-picked snowdrops and betrayal.

Fuck you! Did I say that? Or did you just hear my thoughts? Like you always did? You never said a word. It didn’t need words. It was all said, there in the hard bright morning, on the back road into Mullum, just up from Josie’s.

Two spirits, kindred to the core; two blackbirds, sharing broken wings, winging it to the beat of a different drum. Sitting out the long hours of the night; marking the heartbeats of our separate pains to the sound of the same waves, flashing phosphorescent along the dark rimmed edge of Brunswick beach.

Ethereal, pure; or wannabe pure. Beyond samsara and commitment. Unbodied, unblemished; or so we hoped. Never touching but being touched. A platonic passion. Bloodless wraiths frolicking in muslin shrouds.

Fuck you! I feel like a nun! I want him, I want me. I want me back. I want something, not this. Yes, this but not just this. My cunt aches. Does that shock you? I said it. So I said it. So what?

What we had was a dream. Pretending to be magpies, pretending to dwell in Middle Earth. Everything starting with capital letters; Moreton bay figs being Mallorn trees; leaden loaves being Lembas. I want to be real; get real. I’m thirty-two. I’m running out of time.

You said nothing, just stared, with those wide-open doe eyes. Deep brown, sad eyes welling up with bottomless sorrow and hurt.

For a moment we stood together, face almost to face. Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands. You’re like a fuckin’ sad eyed Lady of the Lowlands and you’re the guy! Supposedly. Fuck you! Daniel! I’m a woman, I want a man.

He said nothing. I said nothing. I stepped slightly to the side and swept on, the new rose-pink dress swirling after me like a last word, my freshly washed feet raising cold clouds of dust from the hard road. Long after I started the climb up to the crossroads I could feel Daniel far behind me. Not letting go, not ever letting go.

I stood on the ridge at the crossroads. A cool early morning early spring wind whipped up and flung my hair around. I stood still for a moment, feeling the goose bumps breaking out along my arms and the chill in my feet, the chill in my heart. Then a cloud passed and the sun streamed down. Like a Sign! Down on the flat, the white signpost pointing up the Twenty Mile Road to Rush’s cabin was lit up, brilliant. Meant to be!

Joni sang, “I’m a radio” but I felt like a battery. I could feel the charge arcing and pulsing between the electrodes, Rush’s and mine. I’d broken free from moorings and my sails were out. I could feel the hard, strong tug of the winds of change lifting me up.

I stepped off, and down. Down to where the sign pointed brightly to the way ahead. Down away from your sad brown eyes, and dreams of flying and a Magic Land with capital letters.

I walked into the sun and my pearl pink polish shone and the scent of my own Patchouli wafted up, heady.

And you were gone.

Olive Harvesting

2007-06-09T17:10:00.000+10:00

On a sunny mid-Autumn afternoon Alexx and I ventured into the backyard to do a little olive harvesting from our tall thirty year old tree. Alexx hasn't done any harvesting for quite some time due to his disability but we had a plan. I helped him up the slope to where there was a low hanging branch full of olives. He sat on his tall stool and picked the lower ones while I grazed the higher ones. Alexx powered through the harvest and when he'd stripped the lower branches bare I bent over the higher ones and held them down while he culled them.

The olives are rather small but are the most beautiful mix of colours, many grading down from green through rosy-pink to purple to black. We picked them into a colander.

It was so lovely to be out in our garden working together under Mother Olive. Alexx had a great time and spent the next days soaking and bottling the harvest in brine. Alexx bottles them up in old Ocean Spray Cranberry juice bottles whose narrowish necks are great for holding an olive oil seal.

My new Flickr photos

2007-04-06T15:37:00.000+10:00

I have added a new set of Flickr photos called "Around Coogee" - just some interesting sights or should that be sites(?) I've seen in my travels around Coogee and the surrounding area.

I've also added three new photos to my "Our House" set.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/transitingvenus

Tiger! Tiger!

2007-04-06T10:43:00.000+10:00

Tiger! Tiger!
Burning Bright!
In your jar of Vegemite!
I better keep the lid on tight!
Just in case you want a bite!

In the Lift

2007-04-06T09:54:00.000+10:00

In the lift, the other day,
A lovely woman, soft and gentle,
And with whom I share a love
Of romantic art and craft,
Said to me
She always drinks two beers;
Every night without fail.
I never would have thought it!

In the lift, the other day,
A very nice woman
I work with;
Always dresses smart,
We talk about arts and crafts,
Told me she was transsexual!
What do you know?
You never can tell!

The other day, in the lift,
Two old bags from work
Were going on.
(You'd think butter wouldn't melt
In their mouths to look at 'em)
Turns out
One's an alchy an'
The other's a bloke!
Fucken weird shit, eh?

Safe Harbour

2007-04-06T09:43:00.000+10:00

outside,
a sea-storm dashing,
rain gusts against
the window glass;
gutter gushing;
mossy path,
a river rushing
leaf-litter log jams
swirling downstairs.

inside,
still and snug
in safe harbour,
our bed is our boat,
cat coiled like a rope
in the prow of the doona;
her heavy warmth
moored to my leg.

alongside,
stretched out,
the reassuring bulkwark
of my husband,
rimming the edge
with safety.

buoyant
with warmth and complacency,
we skim the surface;

beneath us
the dark deep depths
of destiny and death.

What a doll!

2007-03-25T12:39:00.000+10:00

Queen Chicory on her throne

The Flying Boat Factor

2007-03-25T10:17:00.000+10:00

You be the judge...

My last post concerned a wonderful night Alex and I spent recently at a friend's wedding reception at Catalina, a waterside restaurant in Rose Bay, a Sydney Harbour-side suburb.

I mentioned that Rose Bay was originally home to the Qantas Flying Boat base which operated domestic and international flights with Empire and Catalina flying boats for many years. Sadly, these giant, lumbering waterborne birds with their distinctive throaty call, are now extinct in these parts although a smaller related species, the two-floated minor seaplane has taken up residence (see the pickie of Alex in my previous blog - there's a couple perching on the waterfront in the background).

Interestingly, both Alexx and I have connections of a not dissimilar kind with Rose Bay. I'm calling it the "Flying Boat Factor"

Alexx's mum and dad arrived in Australia from Greece via Cairo as emigrants on an Empire flying boat in 1946. Alexx had, in fact, already been conceived and arrived in the plane as well - albeit as a secret stowaway in his mum's belly!

Just a few short years later, in 1950, my mum and dad flew out of Rose Bay on their honeymoon to Yamba, on the north coast, in a Catalina flying boat. I had wondered if, perhaps, I was a secret passenger on that plane, even if only as a twinkle in my father's eye! Alas! A check on my sources (mum) assures me that was definitely (mum's tone was most emphatic!) not the case as I was not born until 1952! Gee! Mum! Not even a twinkle? Sheesh!

Oh! Well, I always have been slow at coming round to things - even it would seem - to being twinkles in father's eyes! But, hey! it might have taken a while but that flying boat trip musta started sumpink 'cause here I am!

Oh! Dear! I feel my memories congealing into a grandmother's now seemingly ancient and now barely comprehensible stories of "the old days" in the withered belly of my mind. "Wotsa flyingboat, nan?"!

Club Marine feature on The Golden Age of Flying Boats at Rose Bay

Some interesting by-notes on this excellent article:

1) The little girl in the cabin photo, looking like Shirley temple, is not me!

2) In the aerial photo of the Rose Bay base, down in the Catalina section of the article, the large square structure on the water's edge is just to the right of the present location of the Catalina restaurant we went to. Catalina restaurant was originally built in 1957 during the last years of flying boat operations.

3) The article mentions the famous Australian aviator, Captain PG Taylor. The pilot of mum and dad's Catalina was none other than the famous "PG"!

4) Pehaps mum and dad were the origin of that old joke about pyjamas being in case there's a fire on your honeymoon 'cause that's exactly what happened to them! The Ritz hotel in Yamba actually burned down one night while they were sleeping and they had to escape only in their nightwear! The reason they were staying in the Ritz was that the main hotel where they had intended to stay had recently been destroyed by floods (mmm! Yamba was a hazardous honeymoon destination in the '50's!). In true Aussie style though, one part of the main hotel survived the flood - the bar! Mum and dad and the other honeymooners used to traipse up the cliff each night to drink in what was left of the hotel bar! Onya aussies!

Cinderella @ Catalina

2007-03-19T20:22:00.000+11:00

Last Sunday Alexx and I attended a wonderful wedding party (no! not our own! not yet!).

A friend from women's spirituality workshops had just married in a private ceremony and was holding a reception for her friends and family in Sydney.

When I think back though to the events and the emotions of the night I want to say:

"On a beautifully languorous Sunday evening in autumn, Cinderella and her handsome prince were driven in a pumpkin vee-dub to a magickal ball by the sea. Dressed in a beautiful gown and shoes, awash in glittering lights and friendship, her head went spinning and her heart brimmed full. Then at the stroke of midnight...."

Well, you know the rest! The next morning the corporate world awaited her as did her twin carry bags of dread and failure, propped by the kitchen door, next to her twig broom and laptop; just where she'd left them.

Anyway, here are a couple of pickies from the night which was held at the Catalina restaurant in the posh, leafy harbour-side suburb of Rose Bay, former site of the Qantas flying boat base.

Dress was cocktail and Alexx, the frog-prince, had completely transformed himself into a Daddy Cool Blues Brother with a completely new wardrobe care of a $500 award I'd won at work for teamwork and leadership.

I wore my fifties-inspired, full-skirted, mid-blue broderie anglaise dress teamed with faux pearls and a cream lace shawl from Barcelona with matching Spanish sling-backed heels.

Alexx looked soooo good; I felt soooo good!

The bride was beautiful and she and her new hubby looked very happy and contented. The food and drink brought round by a never ending succession of smiling waiters was excellent. And the views of the bay and the city skyline as the sun went down and the lights came on was utterly enchanting.

My Granddaughters

2007-02-24T22:54:00.000+11:00

Nikoya - "the absolute seriousness of being fourteen"

Tegan - "look at me"

North Head

2007-02-24T22:31:00.000+11:00

Alexx does his Ray Charles Down Under impression during our visit to the rugged beauty and sweeping views of North Head.

Alexx took this snap of me doing my Sound of Music impression against the breathtaking backdrop of Sydney Harbour.

Birthday Blouse

2007-02-24T22:25:00.000+11:00

Alexx surprised me with this beautiful Vietnamese pure silk blouse bought with his very last pension cheque!

Recent Reading November-December-January

2007-02-01T22:16:00.000+11:00

The Kalahari Typing School for Men - Alexander McCall Smith

- more absolutely enchanting magic from Private Ladies Detective Precious Ramotswe and the land of Botswana

Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer (the double life of Herbert Dyce Murphy) - Heather Rossiter

- extraordinary early-twentieth century Australian eccentric whose exploits included being a British lady spy (!) and an Antarctic explorer with Mawson

Silver Wedding - Maeve Binchy

- Maeve Binchy - what can I say! Journey to Ireland and the human heart through her books!

The Glass Lake - Maeve Binchy

- a solitary woman drowns in a lake - or does she?

Tara Road - Maeve Binchy

- another epic tale of families and friends in Ireland - now a film

The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd

- one of the best books I've ever read! Powerful woman/human/spirit stuff! Thanks Pat!

The Earth Path (Grounding your spirit in the Rhythms of Nature) - Starhawk

- melding the pagan spirit with a hands-on caring for the earth

Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald

- four sisters grow up in early twentieth-century Nova Scotia amongst pain and secrets - a powerful story that rushes on getting darker and more powerful as it goes! I love Canadian writing!

Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone - JK Rowling

- finally! Love it! I would love to be Hermione but alas I think I'm Dobby!

The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff - Margaret Forster

- great tale of the scottish mother/mother-in-law from hell and how she changes!

Leadlight

2006-11-05T22:00:00.000+11:00

Morning sun-cave

2006-10-03T20:48:00.000+10:00

A morning sun-cave,
Warming, bright on a
Face turned
Unashamedly idolatrous
To the east north east.

Olive branch
Overboughing
As a mother's arm;
No harm

Befalling me
In the moving moment
Between the irrevocable
And the inescapable.

Olive blossom dropping
In deep drifts yellowing
Amongst rampant green
And falling fruit.

My life, too,
An unkempt garden...
Ruined, teeming, fetid, moist.
On my fingers I smell sex.
Yours or mine?

We wind
Our fragile coils
In self-indulging coupling;
Repeating our mistakes,
Breeding No Escape.

Olive blossom dropping
In deep drifts yellowing
Amongst rampant green
And falling fruit.

Recent Reading

2006-09-20T22:20:00.000+10:00

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

2006-09-09T21:21:00.000+10:00

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

2006-09-09T21:02:00.000+10:00

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

2006-09-03T13:49:00.000+10:00

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

2006-09-03T13:10:00.000+10:00

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!

Rainy Day Women Dreaming

2006-08-05T23:09:00.000+10:00

Outside, the rain-washed day dulls to evening's end. The traffic crowds, arguing, in the damp, dim street.

Inside, I muse over journal, mull over coffee...sink into reverie.

Looking out...or is it in...I keep seeing the ghosts of a past almost but not quite before my time, rattling by; haunting, beckoning.

I see the ghosts of toast rack trams, faded cream and green with rust brown roofs, rattling over rails up Broadway. Women bustling by in opaque plastic raincoats and pink umbrellas; men in dripping hats and damp-shouldered sports coats.

Time...time to go...I launch out, into that wet, dark evening of dreams. In button-up raincovers my shoes glow against the black pavement, tap-tapping to the tram. I see my hand, starkly white, grasping the rail, cold and wet; the concertina doors stiff and awkward. Inside, pale, damp faces stare up like ghosts from pleated plastic rain bonnets. They shuffle up unwillingly, too wet, too miserable; shrinking inside to find some inner place of dry.

Outside the rattling, rain-streaked glass, dark terraces and tenements wind by, bleak and barren-faced. From under balconies, their narrow windows stare like sunken eyes, still dark and for the most part empty, but some faintly lit with a dull, yellow light from behind cheap curtains.

Inside, I know, there will be pink and green tea cosies waiting forlorn on laminex tables, china ornaments will glow dimly on sideboards over empty grates. Headlights will drag shadows at odd angles over cold, damp walls.

One of those dark, lonely terraces, I know, will be mine.

My key slides into the lock; the door opens... onto the narrow, cold hallway I knew would be there.

I peel off wet things like a wet skin, leaving pools of water on the lino.

In the kitchen I flour and crumb the cutlets before making tea. The kettle sings mournfully in the gloom. I stay in the dark; safe by evening's last light through an uncurtained window and the blue flame of the gas stove. Muffled sounds from the street steal through the half-open fanlight; the shushing of tyres; the tapping of heels.

I huddle before the kero heater, breathing in its pungent fumes; muse over diary, mull over tea...sink into reverie.

Looking out...or is it in...I keep seeing her, that other woman, far off in a far world that might have been but wasn't...or was it?

Dreams or memories?

The bend in the road

2006-07-02T17:14:00.000+10:00

"...but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. The joys of sincere work and and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright.... And there was always the bend in the road!"

- The wisdom of Anne Shirley in L.M. Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables"

Meeting trouble halfway

2006-07-02T16:48:00.000+10:00

"But I don't see the use of meeting trouble halfway, do you, Marilla? I think it would be better just to enjoy Mr Allan while we have him."

-Anne Shirley, on the prospect of losing a good minister, in L.M. Montgomery's children's classic "Anne of Green Gables"

Recipe for Winter Breakfast

2006-06-25T13:39:00.000+10:00

Ingredients:

A sunny winter's morning;
A garden seat and table...
...under an olive tree;
A deep green bowl of...
...banana, orange, strawberry,
sunflower kernels, currants, fig,
granola and country-style yoghurt;
a fork (don't you eat muesli with a fork?);
Anne of Green Gables;
The company of a cat.

Flights of Fancy and Recollection

2006-06-19T13:59:00.000+10:00

Just finished "Bluebirds" by Margeret Mayhew. Great book about the British Women's Auxiliary Airforce during World War 2. Couldn't put it down!

I picked it up by chance (?) from a discount table at the local newsagents.

It tells the story of an odd assortment of women of different ages and personalities from all walks and stations of life thrown together in the dark days of the Battle of Britain. Looked down upon by a misogynistic, male-dominated military, given scant equipment and poor conditions and pay and relegated to the most menial tasks, they nevertheless rose to the challenge and proved themselves a vital and indispensible part of the British war effort.

The book is a very readable and enjoyable weaving together of personal drama, romance, action and historical detail. I loved it!

The book had a special appeal for me. Quite apart from the fact that I also have done some military service and could personally relate to a number of aspects of military life related in the book, my maternal grandmother served in the Volounteer Observer Air Corps, a part-time civilian auxilliary force assigned to support the air defence of Australia. Many members of this force "manned" observation posts around the country to report on friendly and enemy air movements and their information was fed into the various air commands coordinating the defence. Others, however, served in the Fighter Sector Headquarters themslves, alongside regular RAAF and WAAAF personnel.

Grandma was one of these and worked as a plotter in Number 1 FSHQ at Bankstown. This was set up initially in a cinema but then moved to an underground bunker (see below). Grandma's job was to plot the positions of aircraft on a large plotting table in response to commands from the controllers who were receiving information from observers and radar stations.

My grandmother would get up early in the morning to see her two sons off to school and my grandfather off to De Havillands Aircraft factory (also at Bankstown) where he was engaged in making the Mosquito fighter bomber, which amazingly was built largely of plywood. Then she would go off to the bunker. That night she would be home cooking and serving dinner. Yep! Our fighting women, as always, served on two fronts!

I can still remember sitting with her at her sunny kitchen bench having a cup of tea and her showing me her service brooch (nope! no uniforms for these heroines! just an insignia to pin to her jacket), her certificate of service and her khaki log book in which she proudly showed where she'd plotted the arrival of The Duke of Gloucester and Bob Hope! She pointed out the various aircraft types, Kittyhawks and Mitchells, and could still recite the Radio alphabet albeit the old World War 2 version: "Able, Baker, Charlie..."

Three high points for her were the night she had to come home and sit down to tea with her family and not say a word about the shelling of Sydney by a Japanese submarine because she and the other staff had been sworn to secrecy; the visit of the Duke of Gloucester to her bunker where he shook her hand and spoke with her briefly and the time when one of the fighter pilots lifted her up to sit in the cockpit of his Spitfire.

Sadly, I did not write all this down at the time and do not have her service memorabilia. I do hope that they are not lost and are safely in the keeping of my uncle or one of my cousins. I now have only these few scraps of memories.

By a coincidence, although my mother dearly wished to serve in the Navy during World War 2 (but succumbed to her father's strong opposition) she also served briefly as a volounteer air spotter, searching the skies for Japanese aircraft over Braidwood (!) from the Church of England tower. Today one is tempted to snort, "As if...!" but in those dark, desperate days it must have seemed very real.

Although I served in the army as a male; women's military service always held a special, if secret, significance for me. I can still vividly remember, as a child, listening avidly to my mother's and grandmother's stories.

I had the priviledge of serving in a unit which had a relatively high proportion of female soldiers. For all that I threw my heart and soul into my own duties I would often look wistfully at them, squadron clerking, radio-operating, truck driving, acting as enemy patrols and think, "There but for the unfortunate grace of God go I".

But one soldiers on, doesn't one? And...often, by that very same grace of God, wins through!

My own military service gave me the strength and sense of self to undertake, finally, the difficult path to transition.

How hard it is to tell life's crosses from life's gifts? Each seems to have the extraordinary tendency to become the other.

As the Buddhists say, "The three poisons become the three seeds of virtue."!

I found this extraordinarily comprehensive website about Australia during World War 2 including information about and pictures of 1 FSHQ's bunker:
Peter Dunn's Australia@war (home page)

Australia@war - RAAF (1 FSHQ & the bunker)

I also found this account by a woman who served in the WAAAF in Fighter command HQ:
Australians at War

Hormones and Milestones

2006-06-15T22:03:00.000+10:00

Went to see my endocrinologist, the "Prof", this morning. I've been going about every six months lately. The "Prof" is a remarkable man, well beyond retirement age but soldiering on. A real old-fashioned doctor, supplementing all the usual gamut of tests with his own rigorous observations and measurements; taking meticulous notes; a thorough gentleman. I believe he could be quite daunting if you weren't being honest...with him or with yourself; or if you weren't being sensible. But if you are those things, he's wonderfully professional, caring and supportive.

He - along with the others in my health care "team" - has saved my life.

Before my surgery he had me on weekly Primogyn depot injections supplemented by Depot Provera progestogen and Androcur anti-androgen. Since my surgery he's put me on twice weekly Menorest patches. We started out with the strongest dose, 100mcg then I tried 50mcg.

I didn't feel right on either - on the stronger I found myself overly emotionally labile and prone to bouts of woolly-headedness and fatigue; on the lower dose I felt irritable and cranky and felt "hard" and "dry" and somehow subtly less feminine. Each time I see him, the "Prof" carries out extensive blood tests; he was concerned that on 50mcg my blood levels of estrogen were too low and carried too greater a risk of both osteoporosis and also a noticeable loss of femininity in my features. As a compromise, we tried the 75mcg patches.

On those I felt well in myself; even-keeled yet "feminine". Don't ask me how, okay - it's sort of a feeling of being soft and round rather than like being a sharp dry stick! And yes I know this long streak of dishwater doesn't LOOK round - I said "FEEL", right?

Well this morning, the "Prof" went over my results. I have estrogen levels equivalent to the high end of normal in post menopausal women not on HRT which is what we were aiming for - not abnormally high but neither too low. PSA levels, which give an indication of the risk of prostate cancer - yep! I've still got one of those! - were extremely negligible. That's the protective quality of estrogen there! However that very same level of estrogen exposes me to the same risk of breast cancer as any other woman of my age. Menorest has the advantage of not being being processed through the liver which makes it safer for a woman of my age. That's good because, having neither ovaries or testes I rely on hormone replacement therapy both for feminisation and lowering the risk of osteoporosis. These little patches and I are in for the long haul.

I am aware that, being a 54 year old baby boomer, I'm part of that pioneering first wave of transsexual people entering middle and old age in significant numbers. We're an unknown quantity when it comes to all the medical, legal, social and political considerations of aging, retirement, superannuation, inheritance and dying.

Transsexualism is not something you take off, or grow out of or give up, it's you; a birth-mark going all way down to your core; the blood flowing in your veins; your being; your growing and your growing old; your living and your dying; your forever and always.

The "Prof" closed his file. "Well, Paula, I think you're doing very well. I don't need to see you again, unless you feel you need to. So we'll leave it at that, 'appointment on request'". I thanked him and walked out into the bright cold sunshine of an early winter morning.

I stood waiting for the lights to change, just as I'd stood there four and half years ago after my first visit to him. Clutching, my heart pounding, my first script for oestradiol. I'd gone into the first chemist I'd seen; got "on the train"; never looked back.

Now I was walking out after my last visit. Somehow, that was it, a milestone had been passed. There's still things I need to do; but I do them as the woman I am, living MY life, its highs and lows, its excitement and humdrum; its bright promise, its dark depths...an ordinary life at last.

Viewing Maningrida

2006-06-13T13:27:00.000+10:00

Last Wednesday night I attended the opening of "Maningrida", a photo exhibition by my dear friend and internationally-acclaimed photographer, Belinda Mason-Lovering.

"Maningrida" is named for the aboriginal community by that name in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. It tells the story in wonderful colour images of Charlie Djordila, the man, his family and his land. Charlie, a traditional Burarra man divides his time between his homelands, the township of Maningrida and the wider world of Australia. Charlie is senior lecturer at Maningrida Jobs, Employment & Training Centre.

Outside it was a wet, cold Sydney winter night. My mary janes were sodden and my feet blocks of ice. Inside the Chrissie Cotter gallery in inner-city Camperdown it was all light and colour. Belinda was there with her boys and so were some friends and others I knew. I'd not been there long before the opening was launched by Lester, a local elder of the Sydney Cadigal people and Sam Byrne, the mayor of Marrickville. Lester, an urban man introduced Charlie, a traditional man.

Armed with a glass of red to smooth the rough edges left after a long day's work I explored Belinda's images most of which I had never seen before. They were wonderful. The images she took of me in "Becoming Woman" were in black and white but these were in vivid colour. They had to be...the wide, deep, red earth, the high, wide, blue sky, the long, white sands of the coast, the deep, dark, blacks and browns of the people, the glistening silver of moonfish and the bright prints and patterns of clothing.

I was entranced. How I wanted to be spirited high up into that high bright country, wider than the world, as clear as clear air, hearing the endless crash of the sea on the long shore and the cry of birds; feel the red earth and the white sand under my feet...far from the clatter and clutter of my corporate city strife...I mean life.

Oh! I loved all the images! I can never go to one of Belinda's, exhibitions without being changed, challenged, unsettled, moved, transported, stretched.

Now which did I love the most? Oh! It had to be the one of Charlie's daughter holding up two little silver moonfish like brooches. But I also loved the one of Charlie and his little son (see my photo of the invite above), the one of Charlie sitting down in the middle of the bush with his laptop and his little naked, wide-eyed son beside him, the one of the smoke of the bush fire on the horizon piling high up into the sky and joining with huge banks of cloud to form a high pillar in the sky; and the one of Charlie's wife cooking great-looking dampers over an open fire. Mmm! I loved them all!

I felt an urge to do the groupie thing and talk to Charlie. He was in great demand so I hung on the rim of the acolytes. Eventually he noticed me and we spoke briefly. He explained each image and who was in it and its personal significance to him. We were both subjects...and friends of Belinda.

I had never spoken with a traditional aboriginal man before and, tho' I'm not sure about this, I think perhaps he had never spoken with a transsexual woman before. A first for both of us, maybe...I dunno.

It wasn't long before he was whisked away though and after talking to some friends I bundled myself up underbrolly and sloshed down Parramatta road to catch a bus home.

That night, lying, warm and snuggly in my princess bed, listening to the rain on the roof, I savoured the richness of friendship and meeting that has, so quite surprisingly, been bestowed upon me in these, my middle years, my second chance at life.

And...I dreamed of Maningrida!

Marrickville Council press release about exhibition

Maningrida Council website

Maningrida Art & Culture website

Barani - an aboriginal history of Sydney

Intimate Encounters - Belinda's website

Blessings from Birds

2006-06-09T20:38:00.000+10:00

This morning we were roused from our routines by a raucous chorus high up in the gum trees at the back of the yard.

Oh! blessings from birds!

We had been visited by a flock of white-tailed black cockatoos.

Our tree-groved back yard on its sandy hill overlooking Coogee beach is home to kookaburras, magpies, currawongs, crows and the sweetest little green parrots (I won't mention those nazi messerschmidts of the Australian backyard - Indian Mynahs) but this is the first time that I have seen black cockatoos.

A magickal visitation!

I took some photos and found a great web-link here.

Braidwood Dreaming - revisiting

2006-06-04T13:18:00.000+10:00

Entry of Paula into Braidwood: Wallace Street
looking 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 northern
limits 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.

Autumn afternoon view of Braidwood and surrounding
countryside from Mount Gillamatong Lookout

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!)

Wot's in a name?

2006-05-22T21:56:00.000+10:00

When I was little my mum always had lots of funny names for things. I guess I like to continue the tradition. Here's my list of names for my - furry - darling:

Chicory
Pussma
Pusska
Pusso
Miss Puss
Missy Moo
Hungry Hippo
Living Teddy
Bear Baby
Baby Bear
Little Horse
Fur Belly
Fur Bear
Purr Bear

She calls me mum (altho' the way she says it it sounds like meow!)

She has lots of words - like her hungry hippo howlings at dinner time and her little middle of the night dark time chirrupings.

How blessed are we!

The Progress of Queen Chicory

2006-05-22T21:10:00.000+10:00

Do you remember me blogging about being a cat lady without a cat? La femme sans chat. Well guess wot? We've got one! A cat that is...or has she got us?

A friend was going away on a cruise and asked us to mind her cat. I was as usual miss scaredy cat myself and had all sorts of fears and trepidations. But on the due day Miss Puss arrived - in her box - to the accompaniment of loud protestations! After some ginger-footed explorations she settled right down on the couch and that was it - she took up royal residence!
Her name is Chicory and she is a five year old tortoise-shell.

Altho' her first night was a little disturbed and spent in roaming and chirruping, over the next two weeks she settled right in to become our pampered lap cat. We fell deeply in love with her. She was so affectionate and funny! She would hop up on the pea-green boat of our bed and walk all over us - in more ways than one! When we wheeled out the column heater with the arrival of cool weather her days - or rather nights were made.

Mind you I did have to mount a couple of rescue operations...from tall fence posts and trees usually after a bailing up by badder and meaner neighbourhood cats.
Her own household included a number of children and relatives who were allergic to cats..and I am told, especially to Chicory. So she had spent much of her life consigned to outdoors or permitted relatively brief, chaperoned visits to the land of "inside". I can only imagine what was going through pusso's furry little head at finding herself given free range to bed, lounge, heater and laps!

But wait there's more!

On her last day I answered the phonecall that I thought would herald her return home only to hear my girlfriend asking me if we would like to keep her.
We did and we have!

And we do keep her...in the manner to which she is now accustomed!

Sometimes I suspect my girlfriend of having planned the whole thing but then I look into Her Highness' inscrutable jade green eyes as she lies stretched out on the rug in front of the heater and I think I know who the master mind was!

One of the things I did when pusso came was to do some research on the web. Now here's a fascinating article about tortoiseshells and XXY's and chimeras and gee there's some unusual hybrids out there walking the streets!!!

Mosaicism, tortie tomcats and genetically impossible kittens

My Birthday Boy

2006-05-22T20:46:00.000+10:00

On Easter Sunday just past my dear man finally got his long longed-for wish and hosted a birthday party for his friends. He's wanted to do it for as long as we've known each other (this time!) and I should have made it happen earlier.

Oh! There were difficulties until we got the self-contained flat finished (it's a little capsule of Pattie Munster inside the tumble-down Herman and Lily of the house proper). From that perspective we could have held the party last year but I had a "annus horribilis" last year and was mired in the throes of some serious panic attacks.

This year tho' the sun of sanity has started to shine on my inner world and by keeping it simple we put together a wonderful little party for about a dozen guests. It's success could be read in the glow in Alexx's face and the sparkling in his eyes as he was surrounded by friends!

Nearly all the food got eaten (good sign!) and Alex's brother, George, helped guests harvest their own olives from our tree. Alexx's pet idea was to have a group blog. You can read what the guests had to say on Alexx's blog "we lost but we're not down"

You'll see lots of the photos we took that day there too.

I so love my man, he's so special!

Surfacing 2

2006-05-15T21:03:00.000+10:00

It's only a couple of months since I devoured Margaret Atwood's Surfacing - one of her thin books! Already I want to plunge into its murky, haunting, fascinating depths again!

Accompanied by a problematical lover and a couple of friends a woman journeys back to her childhood home in the Quebec wilderness looking for her father who has disappeared under puzzling circumstances.

The journey takes on an inner dimension as lost elements of her life also begin to surface. Diving into the dark, entangled waters of northern lakes she encounters more than she bargained for.

Denouement - which I like to translate as unravelling - is perhaps an apt word for the outcome - in more ways than one! Be warned, though, a neat ending is not on offer here!

Love "Surfacing", love its dark, rich, organic and disturbing texture. But, hey, that's me!

Surfacing 1

2006-05-15T20:29:00.000+10:00

There's a pussy in my window,
There's a magpie at my door,
There's a kookaburra calling,
So who could ask for more?

Louise - a story

2006-03-05T14:50:00.000+11:00

I remember that summer.

The last summer I spent with Louise.

The days, hot and fierce, reeling, like a slap in the face; gasping, like the wind knocked out of you. Hot as corrugated iron; dry as drought. The long twilights, lingering and langorous, cooled by the soft sea breezes from over Coogee beach.

The last summer I spent with Louise.

The last summer she wasn't Louise.

The last summer she wasn't a woman.

Almost...almost wasn't....

She dressed then exclusively, exquisitely, in soft sarongs, in lilacs and blues, the clour of sky, the colour of serenity. Her floaty, filmy Indian shirts and blouses brilliant white against her honey brown skin.

I remember her hair, brown and long; a river of dreams flowing lusciously down the hollow of her back. Soft and straight, in shades of auburn and amber with flashes of copper. Dark drifts drawing me in to their warm fragrant secrets; highlights bleached light and golden by the sun. I see her now, silhouetted by the moon, silvered, charmed, on all fours over me, a she-wolf, swaying and brushing that long soft feather light hair across my bare chest.

Oh! Louise! Where have you gone? Where have I gone?

I remember her body, tall, slender, slinking, sensuous; sliding with an easy grace through my heavy hearted days. Her skin a golden honey brown, warmed by the sun, fragrant with patchouli and Jasmine, Spritual Sky.

The moon rides high over Coogee bay, a bright white belly moon, swollen with promise. Louise is a sliver of silver drawn along my bed. My hand, nut brown against her honey, slides over her arm and onto her soft, smooth stomach, slightly rounded already. Is she too swollen with promise...then...now?

She whimpers and stirs, stretching her long limbs under the moon. I slide my hand down, onto her penis. She is the shape of heaven, the size of paradise. I have never spoken of my love, my fingertips speak my truth. She moans, she turns, hunching into a foetus child in my arms.

She has reached the outer limit, the knife edge. Tasting honey, she draws away from me, before the sweet turns bitter.

But I am bitter. Bitter as gall with the sharp, hot fire of desire coursing my veins like acid. Distressed and with no repose.

I rise and pace the cool, smooth tiles of the veranda.

Through my window, Louise melts into the moon, her tide ebbing.

Headlights search the stucco, feeling like blind men around a difficult corner. Gone, they leave the street silent, bathed only in moonlight. I watch the chrome and duco reflect the moon reflect the sun long gone.

The night air is cool, soothing like a mother's cool touch on a child's hot fever. My fever subsides. Louise is draped across my bed, draped across my life, like a shawl, decorative, insubstantial, impractical.

I grip the cool iron of the railing and for an instant, almost not there, my hand delays its release. Then I come free.

Returning to my bed I watch the slow rise and fall of her breasts, already swelling, moonlight catching on pale hairs.

Nuzzling the fragrant warmth of her hair I bury my head and my troubles. Stirring but not waking she spoons into my stomach, her bottom already soft and substantial.

Taking comfort in something older, deeper than desire I surrender to the night.

Let go

Let loose...lose...Louise.

Spring into Summer

2005-11-10T21:21:00.000+11:00

mulberry ripening

bush lemon blossom

olive bud n' flower

Spring's come and almost past
...so fast!
and summer's gath'ring
fat fruits,
warm winds,
bright buds n' berries

...and us.

We'll be flowers, won't we?
and wear light lemon cardies draped
over short sleeved shoulders.
Leave off our stockings
so soft summer skirts
swish n' brush
bare legs
smooth-shaven.
We'll wear white sandals n' sunnies
and consider hats.

Float free n' easy-feeling
under summer breezes.

Remembering Bali

2005-10-05T17:32:00.000+10:00

Today I wandered down to a favourite place of mine - North Coogee headland, now named Dolphin point after the local footy team which was all but wiped out in the 2002 Bali terrorist bombings.

It's a spiritual place, I feel. The headland juts out into the sea; at its foot a jagged heap of huge fallen sandstone rocks, once the forefront of the cliff face. Testament to how even the mighty will be eventually fallen; by the ebbs and flows of the inexorable tides of life and death.

The salt sea winds tug at my hair, clearing my head; blowing away my fears and worries, carrying them off on the cries of gulls, soothing them in the relentless sushushing of the waves.

Below me, a reconstructed entrance way commemorates the old sea baths that once stood on this headland and now houses a plaque to the fallen at Bali. The archway and the paths remind me of an ancient seaside temple. A little to the side is the (locally) famous fencepost shrine to Our Lady, no longer thronged by black clad Italian matriarchs but well-tended, nonetheless, and replete with statues and candles.

I close my eyes, letting the waves lull me in their timeless liturgy. A Filipino woman asks me if I'm praying. Yes, I answer. But it's not to Our Lady. I've come down here after a health scare to talk a while with that presence I feel so personally, especially here, and which I call "Goddess". Perhaps it's all the same tho'. I'm eclectic and ecumenical or is that easy-going? To me there always seems a hard=edged, bitter and mean-spirited iron in the soul of evangelicals and fundamentalists. I can't see a place for that in the great swirl of livinganddying in which we swim and swarm, each one of us a precious glint in the eye of Being.

A line comes to me, "I am an irridescent scintillation in the undulation of ouroboros"

I watch the waves rise and fall, rolling in towards the beach. A brief froth and foaming then sliding back into the swell and tow. I feel like a brief, oh! so brief frothing of wave, evanescent, transient. A wave for just an instant but the sea forever; water before, during, after. The dewdrop falls into the shining sea. The rainbow serpent eats her tail.

All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, said Mother Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century mystic.

I've often come down to this spot. During some of my darkest of dark days in the bottomless pit of despair I've sat on this headland letting the sea winds scourge me; soothe me of shame and hopeless despair; smoothe away the deep gougings of pain. And yet, leave them there, somehow, strengthening my joy with a rod of melancholy and humility.

Goddess whispers words of winds and waves, and I am winds and waves whispering her name as I come and go. And all manner of things shall be well.

I turn back. The Bali monument stands before me. I so love this sculpture. Stylistic yet organic, stark yet feminine. Pagan yet universal; speaking, surely to all. It's called "Reclaiming Spirit" and is by Sasha Reid. Three bowed figures interlocked in shared grief and shared support.

Underneath its overarching forms a jar of blossoms left in remembrance has fallen; as others have now, yet again, fallen in senseless terror.

Australia is littered, tragically, with monuments to the fallen of senseless wars. But these were no soldiers, just ordinary, everyday people, unarmed, unknowing, going about ordinary lives as best they could.

I pause and reflect tho' that this has always been so - the senseless slaughter of soldiers is remembered but the senseless slaughter of civilians has never been recorded - until, sadly, so sadly, now.

And I reflect that terror has always had two faces, the ruthlessly fanatical individual with his backpack of explosive and cellphone detonator...and the equally ruthless state and its leaders and generals, raining down cruise missiles and smart bombs.

I wander back through the school holiday throngs, frollicking, carefree. Everyone I see, all of us, it seems, have innocence in our eyes...and blood on our hands.

The Joy of Aprons!

2005-09-25T13:08:00.000+10:00

The inimitable nutcrunch has expressed uncomprehending disbelief at my wearing an apron to do the housework (see previous blog).

Lest the tolerance-challenged of this world (read bigots and fundamentalists) take this as proof that I am indeed a weirdo and do indeed warrant burning at the stake (don't laugh, an evangelical party worker actually recommended this procedure for lesbians - aka witches, at our last elections) I fear I must set the record straight (no pun intended).

Hey! And I'm not a lesbian either...not that there's anything wrong with that...some of my best friends - and heroines - are or were. Anyway lesbians don't wear aprons do they? Do they? Oh! It's all so confusing! If only people would wear little stars sewn on their clothes so we knew who were the good guys.

I'm not a witch either, tho' I am a pagan. I'm not sure if I'm just too lazy, disorganised and neurotic to be a witch or if I'm just too dreamy, eclectic and amorphous. Is there a difference? I suspect that witches, being practical magick, earthy, cooking pot-type people may just very well wear aprons - at least some of the time.

Mmm! Now I'm starting to feel a bit less confused. OK! So now I know that anyone wearing an apron is definitely not a lesbian but might be a witch...or a christian fundamentalist trying to occupy woman's rightful place in the kitchen. Oh! Oh! How will I tell? What if we burnt the wrong person at the stake? Would it matter?

Anyway I digress. I'm not sure why I wear an apron when I do the housework. Who cares? It probably does have something to do with a) growing up in the fifties b) being a naturally "feminine" person - whatever the hell that is and c) being a transsexual woman and so tending towards things which enhance her sense of "the feminine" (I challenge you to define that too!) in the face of others' bemused skepticism or outright hostility.

I told you I was no saint (well not until hair shirts come in pastels with a nipped in waist)!

Ennnywaaaay! here are what I think some good reasons why one might choose to wear an apron around the house (yep! believe it or not, unlike the life-long condition of transsexualism, wearing an apron is actually a "lifestyle choice" and I could, if I so chose, give "it" up!):

1) The pockets are great for carrying pegs or cordless phones when you're up at the clothesline.

2) The pockets are great for carrying the car keys when you've got both hands full carrying stuff up to the house or assisting someone with a disability downstairs.

3) In general, aprons are a good way of bolting on removable pockets when you habitually wear things like skirts, dresses or pants that don't have pockets.

4) Aprons protect the clumsy (yep! that's me!) from all manner of wetnesses inundating their persons - bleach water when cleaning the toilet, greasy washing up water, pots of soup and splashes of worcestershire sauce - to name just a few.

5) Aprons protect against the "poltergeist phenomenon". You know when you have a tendency to pick up a jar of pasta sauce only to watch it sail, unbidden, out of your presumably perfectly capable hand, land on the dresser, smash your favorite cup and saucer and then spurt broken glass and tomato back all over the good pants you just had drycleaned. Don't believe it? Come round to my place sometime...but wear an apron!

6) An apron allows one to do little spurts of housework before work or going out while wearing "good clothes" (you won't catch this little duck wearing "tracky dacks"* to the supermarket!)

7) Throwing on an apron when you get home late from work allows you to help your partner finish off getting dinner then sit down on the lounge and eat it in front of your favorite TV show (up till it just finished recently that was "Silent Witness" with the wonderful Amanda Burton - still looking for a replacement) without worrying about spilling chilli and olive oil on your good skirt.

8) Aprons are a great way to wipe your hands in an emergency.

9) Aprons are a handy way of wiping away your tears when collapsed on the floor during hormonal surges,

10) Buying an apron is a great way to help support those worthy charities that set up street stalls "manned" by remarkable old ladies with incedible sewing skills.

11) Aprons are a way of expressing one's individuality in an increasingly bland and politically correct world.

WARNING! Aprons are absolutely of no use in the management of small children whose ability to direct a semi-digested stream of bright orange baby food onto unprotected areas of clothing is developed to a high level of competency in utero (I'd go for the "tracky dacks" here!).

You think I'm the only person who hasn't forgotten about the joys and practicalities of aprons? try this quick Google image search!

Now whilst performing this search I came across this doozy! The sanitary apron!

While we're on the subject of aprons, christian fundamentalists and burnings at the stake might I thoroughly recommend the chilling novel, "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood (this book was written in 1986 would you believe!)

Amazon.com listing

Margaret Atwood website

Handmaid's Tale study guide

*"tracky dacks" is an Australian colloqualism for "tracksuit pants" which I believe Americans might call "sweatpants". Australians consider it perfectly acceptable to wear "daggy old tracky dacks" just about anywhere they think they can get away with it. In contrast, I have heard that, at least until recently, English women dressed up in high heels and make-up to do their regular housework. I try to steer a middle course in life!

Silencing Dissent...the user pays way!

2005-09-18T17:52:00.000+10:00

Dangerous days ahead. Hey! What am I saying - they're already here!

Scott Parkin, American peace activist and promoter of non-violent protest is surrounded and hustled from a Melbourne sidewalk by 4 ASIO secret agents and 2 officers of Australia's most beloved and compassionate government department, DIMIA - department of Immigration & Multicultural & Indigenous Affairs. You know the guys that run the razor wire detention camps in the desert and wrongfully deport our own Australian citizens.

You can read some more transcripts on Alex's blog

or here at Margo Kingston's Webdiary

or here at the ABC

Oh! How a right wing government hell-bent on ramming home its ideologically-driven agenda loves a war - even one it helped start. Yep! 'cause then whenever anyone anywhere says anything against them, why surely that's a threat to national security! And then we have to lock them up - or deport them.

And we don't even have to explain why we did it - 'cause that would be jeopardising national security too - oh! how convenient.

What's even better, such a government gets to bill the victim! Yep, Scott now owes the Australian government $11, 000 for expenses incurred in muzzling dissent and degrading our integrity.

You know the only thing is...ummm! Scott Parkin was alledged to be a threat to national security for coaching some activists in non-violent methods of protest but what about our own Prime Minister, the dearly beloved John (I love you George W) Howard. He jumps on the bandwagon to help invade Iraq to support his mate Bush and thereby inflames international tensions.

Now I definitely call that a threat to national security!

Laundry Tip

2005-09-18T16:31:00.000+10:00

I have a little Samsung 4.5 kg washing machine. I love her!

When my marriage broke up and I was eking out a living in a spartan little flat and ploughing all my money into doctor's bills and an intensive electrolysis program I used to do all my washing by hand in a bucket in the shower recess!

Such is the "lifestyle choice" we transsexual people make...so whimsically and so perversely!

So you can understand how my wash days are now a joy - just like in those bright sparkling 1950's ads! (I do wear an apron but not a horizontally striped day-dress altho' I do keep checking out my local vintage clothing shop!). I have a girlfriend who used to be convinced that my brain had become addled by watching too many episodes of "Leave it to Beaver". "Doctor, I feel like I'm Mrs Cleaver trapped in a man's body!". The aprons, I suppose ,were derived from an earlier, insidious exposure to Alice in "The Honeymooners"!

Nah! Mrs Cleaver I ain't! Something seems to happen even to the most compulsive-obsessive, anal-retentive of us all when we hit 50 something. Yes, the ominous slide into that saddest of indictments of modern society...no, not permissive sex or gay rights, I'm talking about lowered standards of house-keeping!

Anyway, all that was just a long-winded and self indulgent lead-up to my Laundry Tip of the Day. "Ladies... and gentleman, yes I think we do have a gentleman in the audience, have you ever suffered from a clogged up fabric conditioner dispenser (collective groans emanate from amongst the throng of aprons and day dresses)?"

Well, try this: pour a jug of boiling water slowly through the dispenser. It seems to dissolve the conditioner residue and allows you to continue to enjoy warm, soft, fluffy towels. Mmmm!

Yes, I do worry about the environment! I compromise between pristine rivers and soft towels by only using half the daily recommended dosage. Hey! I'm no saint either! (Have you ever tried drying yourself on a saint's towel? Who needs a hair shirt?)

Bread!

2005-09-18T16:24:00.000+10:00

The Way of Bread - musings and recollections

2005-09-10T16:06:00.000+10:00

It's an early Spring morning, still cool, but with the promise of a balmy warmth later on. I have bread baking, a mongrel loaf of whatever's left: organic unbleached flour, oatbran and polenta with a skerrick of Indian besan flour and a pinch of sea salt thrown in. It'll be heavy but I'm hoping, golden and nutty and, toasted, an excellent accompaniment to spring vegie soup.

I've recently been dipping into the online writings of an Oregon woman, Risa Bear. She's articulate and prolific and, like me, 50 something and living with transexualism. I particularly find myself drawn to a series of her essays entitled "Viewing Jasper Mountain".

She writes about living in view of a fir-covered ridge or bluff and recounts the various aspects of landscape, external and internal, that she encounters and experiences. Her words picked me, middle-aged, corporate, urban woman, up and transported me back thirty years. Back to a mythical-seeming time when first I launched the little boat of my life, hippie-clad and romance-dreaming, out into the turbulent waters of the early seventies and my misspent youth.

Memories flooded in...of unleavened bread and brown rice; roach clips and magic mushrooms; of Judy Collins and Creedence Clearwater; of Sand County Almanac and the Last Whole Earth Catalog; of sleeping out under shooting stars on a north Queensland hillside; of long, gear-crashing semi rides along the Hume highway, nodding asleep to Johnny Cash.

Mmm! I hear the breadmaker start its clunky kneading cycle and I think back to other bread-making days...

Early spring days just like this, 1974, Tasmania. Slipping out of an opshop 40's salmon swamee nightdress and donning either king gee's and jumper or circle skirt and peasant blouse, depending on the temperature and what I had planned for the day and whether or not the compost needed turning.

Those days I ground my own wheat, purchased by the sack with a friend going halves. My friend was a big Birmingham lad who built himself, single-handedly, a log cabin on the hills overlooking the Huon. Well, I do remember helping him adze some logs but mostly I'd sit, wan and delicate, while he carved out his dream. While I feel a swooning affinity with the earth and sky, strong, capable earth-mother I ain't!

But yes, I did grind my own wheat, using one of those metal, meat-grinder style thingos that were so common back then. I had it clamped to the back steps of the converted stable-cum artist's den in which I lived. I must have made a sight - long Indian squaw plaits swinging wildly as I swung the handle round; our two chooks watching intently from the sidelines, swooping in, whenever they could, to snavel a grain or two.

Grew my own yeast, too. A tangy, bubbling gloop fermenting away on the sideboard. And added other goodies to my loaves - buckwheat and millet, barley and oats. I'd do a marathon bake-in every Saturday - to last me the week and to take to friends. The currency of the hippie! Home-baked bread and apple-crumbles! With the bread in the oven I'd start on home-made bourghul and apple-pies! Hey! Who says I was a bulimic, food-obsessed, macrobiotic hermit?

These days I do it differently! Breville electric breadmaker (just like my washing machine - chuck in the load and choose the cycle) and supermarket (albeit wholegrain) breadmixes. Still like my Tree of Life Indian skirts...but alas! no chooks! And no plaits - I seem to have lost the touch for those (right one of the middle one; left one over the middle one). Tanks Gott! you say!

I was always a bit of a psuedo-hippie; a psuedo bohemian - as Penny Arcade calls it - always making sure my little safety line was attached. To what? Not sure...destiny probably!

How else could I have gotten here?

Wisteria in the Springtime

2005-09-10T15:55:00.000+10:00

White Wisteria, redolent with a heady perfume, blossoms over our side entranceway, heralding Springtime.

Muffins!

2005-09-07T22:28:00.000+10:00

Banana & Fig Muffins

2005-09-07T22:27:00.000+10:00

The muffin you can eat for breakfast!

And it's guilt-free!

Unless you're a food-fundamentalist in which case watch out for my raw, unleavened, fat-free, unsweetened, wheatless muffin recipe!

INGREDIENTS

2 cups wholemeal SR flour
1 dessertspoon mixed spice
1/2 cup raw, brown or demerara sugar

1/2 cup chopped turkish dried figs

1 free range egg
1/2 cup plain yoghurt
2 sml-med ripe mashed bananas
1/2 cup virgin olive oil

METHOD

Mix dry ingredients
Mix in figs
Separately beat together wet ingredients
Mix all together
Grease a 12 hole muffin tin
Bake at about 200F for 20-25 mins

NOTE: May increase sugar to 3/4 cup for a sweeter muffin

Nasturtiums

2005-09-04T11:41:00.000+10:00

The sandy, tussocky rise that is our wild, unkempt, hippie backyard is a riot of nasturtiums - in all shades or reds, oranges and yellows; like a Van Gogh painting!

On a warm if windy, second-last day of winter I accepted the gift of their beauty and picked some to grace our dining room table.

Oh! blessed be are we!

Howard's design for Democracy without Debate

2005-08-27T13:10:00.000+10:00

Here are the supporting comments I attached to a GetUp.org email directed to members of the government regarding the proposed introduction of legislation to prevent University administrations from charging a fee to finance Student Unions, on campus organisations that provide a wide range of support, sporting, cultural, social and student-political activities.

In classic Orwellian doublespeak, this legislation is known as "Voluntary Student Unionism". ie it will be MANDATORY that the paying of student union fees be VOLUNTARY.

(A bit like Howard's "Unfair Dismissal" legislation which is actually legislation to allow unfair dismissal!)

Why, you ask, is a right-wing Federal Government (Howard's NOT-liberal government) descending from its lofty God-given heights to meddle in the day-to day running of university administrations and thereby jeopardising the provision of valuable character and health building activities and support services?

Why when surely there are vastly more important things to be tackled - like global terrorism, the war in Iraq, nuclear proliferation, world trade globalisation, poverty, racism, indigenous alienation and marginalisation, drug-trafficking, human rights abuse and global warming?

Is he banking on Australian "I'm alright, Jack" laxities to lead to lower levels of funding being available for student political clubs irrespective of the collateral damage to other organisations and services such as those devoted to support, sporting and cultural.

You wouldn't be that machiavellian, would you Johnny? I mean not as machiavellian as you were with "children overboard" and "weapons of mass destruction"?

Is this another rung in Howard's grand design to build democracy without debate, democracy without dissent here in OZ? You know, the democracy without an independant senate, without an independant judiciary and without an independant media.

Wouldn't it be nice if Australian university students would just be good little girls and boys and concentrate on their studies and pay for their own childcare and their own cricket. We don't want our students getting waylaid by long-haired radicals.

Hey, wait a minute...what was our treasurer Peter Costello (and the Clintons) doing in the seventies? Surely, he (they) weren't student activists!

"Dear Representatives of the people,

The VSU bill is being touted as a step towards the "voluntary" and the "democratic" but its promotors have also made reference to student activism.

I cannot, after the last ten years' bruising to my trust and hope, help but think that a desire to stifle one more source of dissent is not ultimately behind this legisation.

It is not only the collateral damage to vital support and social activities that are being placed at threat here but also the very important role that university debate and dissent - of all political persuasions - plays in the building of personal and national values.

It is in that environment - of university-fostered ideas, action and community - that so many of our current leaders - of all political hues - found their inspiration.

If we're serious about true democracy - as well as building well-rounded individuals and a strong nation - isn't it vital, for the sake of the people and the nation you represent that you seriously question and oppose this legislation and its underlying motivations and negative consequences - for all Australians.

Thankyou, Paula Kaye."

The Immortal words of Pastor Martin Niemoeller

2005-08-10T16:31:00.000+10:00

"In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Pastor Martin Niemoeller
Columbia Theological ,Georgia 1959

You know, Australians, maybe we aren't a refugee or a unionist or a muslim or gay, but don't you think it's time we spoke up...while we still can?

Have you read George Orwell's famous classic "1984"; are you familiar with the word "doublespeak"?

What is the meaning of the word "democracy" when it is used by a government that has taken overt, documented steps to erode state rights, the efficacy of the unions, the independance of the media, the independance of the judiciary, the right of churches to speak out about matters of social justice, the rights of workers to basic entitlements, the hopes of refugees and the ability of the people to be heard and taken notice of?

What is the meaning of the words "family values" when used by ultra right wing political and christian bodies to divide the nation, consign ordinary, decent, law-abiding people to second class citizenship, malign all who would speak out for tolerance and diversity, turn back the clock on women's, workers and GLBT rights and promote insidious misogyny, homophobia and transphobia?

Democracy, like life itself, is big, messy, untidy, diverse, inefficient, contentious and often uncomfortable. But from that very diversity, messiness and contention springs change, growth, endeavour, hope and life itself.

Values are things like: love, caring, trust, courage, honesty and integrity. Are they not? Values are about "how" I am not "what" I am. What does the word "values" have to do with my genetically determined condition or the circumstances of my life. What does the word "values" have to do with being a two-parent family or a single-parent family, with being a two-sex family or a same-sex family? If love, caring, trust, courage, honesty and integrity are present in each?

Let's speak out...now...and let's speak out honestly!

Have your say:
Go to GetUp.org!
Go to MoveOn.org!
Blog now! Go to Blogger!

GetUp! and have a go Australians!

2005-08-09T22:00:00.000+10:00

Today, the Australian parliament resumed with the Howard not-liberal government having control of the senate. With an ominous start to events the government changed the rules, once again, without consultation, to limit the number of questions that can be put and seeking to limit the Senate estimates process. Government ministers were typically dismissive of Opposition protests as they are of any protest, criticism, opposition or popular expression.

This is a very dangerous time for Australia. A dangerous man driven by dangerous and malign personal ambitions and (not so hidden now) agendas is at the helm, not just of a conservative government but of a government that has actively courted ultra-conservative, ultra-right wing and Christian fundamentalist forces within Australian politics and society.

A government that has sought to callously take advantage of world tragedy to further its own ideology.

To date the Howard government, in open disregard of widespread popular and political protest has:
*deliberately deceived the Australian people over refugees and the Iraq war,
*changed Australian boundaries to suit its appalling immigration policies,
*wrongfully detained and deported Australian citizens,
*unlike all other nations, ignored the fate of Australian citizens detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in contravention to any form of international law or humanitarian principles,
*run its own malign detention system for refugees in the absence of any compassion or accountability which has seen hundreds of desperate children, women and men locked up behind razor wire in detention camps in the desert.
*arrogantly and deceitfully taken this country, despite widespread popular protest and in the absence of any international mandate or valid reason, into a war that has not only been disastrous for the Iraqi people and led to the deaths of very large numbers of Iraqi civilians and also many Coalition personnel but which has created huge tensions across the globe and inflamed international terrorism,
*imposed Federal control over state jurisdictions like the control of ports and uranium mining,
*committed Australia to the ongoing presence of US troops being based on Australian soil in so-called "joint" facilities,
*actively sought to degrade the independance of the judiciary and the media, stacking the former with its appointees and concentrating the latter in the hands of sympathetic moguls,
*promoting hate and divisions within the community with its prejudicial and discriminatory policies against gay and lesbian people,
*eroding our economic and cultural sovereignty and well-being by submitting us to a so-called "free" trade agreement with the US and, it hopes, China
*openly and embarassingly displaying a fawning and dangerous admiration for and support of the Bush administration,
*and finally introducing sweeping changes to Australia's successful Industrial Relations laws that would erode workers' rights and hobble independant arbitration.

Lacking an effective opposition and facing the bleak prospect of an increasingly restrictive, proscriptive, divided, subservient, homophobic and xenophobic regime, protest is becoming popular and non-traditional. Increasingly, protest is crossing party, religious and socio-demograhic lines.

One striking example of this is the great initiative of Jeremy Heimans and David Madden who have brought the great techniques of MoveOn.org in the US to Australia. Jeremy and David participated in the 2004 campaign against the Bush menace and have now introduced Australians to the power of internet lobbying. Already Coalition senators have been subjected to thousands of emails protesting the state of the nation and warning them that the people will hold them to account. This is people power 2005 style. Add this to the mass protests of the Union movement, the speaking out of Church and community leaders and the opposition within the government's own ranks and we see a glimmer of hope.

Howard, you dismissed us as "the mob". You reckoned you didn't have to listen to us. I reckon you don't have much of a say in that anymore.

Howard, IT'S TIME...again!

If you're Australian, check out GetUp.org, join up and have your say! Make a difference...while you still can.

If you're not Australian, check it out anyway; hear an alternative to the lies of Bush, Blair and Howard.

Oh! And while you're at it, check out MoveOn.org!

And if you're a blogger, keep on blogging...'cause we sure don't look like having any other form of independant media left to us, if this goes on much longer!

I blog, therefore I am...free!

Sunday Lesson

2005-08-07T21:07:00.000+10:00

Last Friday my surgeon, Dr Haertsch, performed a minor adjustment we'd discussed after my sex reassignment surgery a little over a year ago. The skin over my mons pubis area had not joined together as well as it should and it had remained a little tender. Also I felt that my labiae majora were a bit more widely separated than I would have liked. My surgeon wanted to wait the 12 months before he did any adjustments. I was a bit too stressed out when the time to attend to it came round but last Friday we finally did it...under local anaesthetic.

The procedure went well and I am very pleased with the result - prrrr! nice pusso! However, once the local wore off I was a sore and sorry girl. Shades of my previous experience after the operation itself - shuffling carefully, oh! so carefully around the flat like an old neanderthal woman; only too painfully aware how many things in my little world needed bending down to get them!

Alex was wonderful - he drove me there and back and attended to me with great tenderness. But thank god(dess), too, for electric blankets and Mersyndol! Oh! And the Romans! Where would we be without the Romans...and plumbing (read long, hot showers)?

Anyway, I took it fairly easy this weekend, altho' I did get Alex to drive me out to the Feminist Bookshop in Lilyfield yesterday to pick up a copy I'd ordered of Sandra Haldeman Martz' "I am Becoming The Woman I've Wanted" (No! it's not about being transsexual woman per se, tho' the sentiments are very apt and the stories, photos and poems extraordinarily touching and inspiring - it's about the journey, our various journeys, of being and becoming woman).

Big mistake, Paula! I felt every tiny bump in the road thru' our 40 year-old vee-dub's non-suspension. Ouch! Ouch!

This morning, feeling better but still a bit fragile, I sat in the sun under the mandarin tree by the old laundry wall and dipped into Sarah Ban Breathnach's "Simple Abundance: a daybook of Comfort and Joy". Her inspirational thoughts for early August were right on the mark for me.

You see, I have just managed to secure a new appointment at work as an "Operations Specialist", reporting to the business unit manager and supporting her in matters of problem and risk analysis, process and workplace training. That's right up my alley being, in effect, a formal recognition of the work I've done for the last few years. However, I'd be lying if I didn't admit to the little voices of self-criticism and doubt clamouring to pull me down. I sort of feel like now I'm in the spotlight and will be found out as the fraud I am and fail...embarrasingly.

Yeah! I know! We all feel like that!

Anyway, "Simple Abundance" addressed exactly those issues...that's synchronicity for you! I particularly liked two of the chapter headings: "Honouring Our Gifts" and "Calling Forth Our Gifts" as I do know that I have a gift for communication, articulation and teaching...as much as some horrible little person inside me keeps screeching, "yer no good, yer no bloody good, everybody hates you, nobody loves you"! The other thing I really liked was a sentence in the chapter, "Second Thoughts":

"Actually, feeling inadequate to the task we're asked to do seems to be a spiritual prerequisite."

After a while, soaking up late winter's sun I became drowsy. I was roused by a big currawong* shaking the bush lemon tree. She made me see the abundance of fruit which had gone unnoticed even tho' it was right in front of me. "Black bird singin' in a lemon tree". I looked all around me at the glorious mess of our neglected garden...a perfect ruin. It was perfect, all of it. Fallen fruit and rampant creeper, cracked concrete and...and me, broken old me. I had one of those moments - haiku moments - when I knew that I was held in the palm of Goddess, in the matrix 0f Gaia and that everything was as it should be.

Gardens...and currawongs..are great teachers!

Click here to hear a currawong calling. Link to bird sounds on Australian National Botanic Gardens site kindly provided by the lovely Ravensong
Thanks Marit!

Paula's Berry Nice Muffins

2005-08-07T20:54:00.000+10:00

INGREDIENTS

2 cups wholemeal SR flour
1 dessertspoon mixed spice
1/2 cup raw, brown or demerara sugar

300g frozen black-, blue- or raspberries

1 free range egg
3/4 cup plain yoghurt
1/2 cup virgin olive oil

METHOD

Mix dry ingredients
Mix in fruit
Separately beat together wet ingredients
Mix all together
Grease a 12 hole muffin tin
Bake at about 200F for about 20-25mins

NOTE: May increase sugar to 3/4 cup for a sweeter muffin

The above recipe evolved from one in the excellent Australian Women's Weekly cookbook series ("Muffins, Scones & Breads").

Summer's quickening; Spirit's rising

2005-07-31T11:43:00.000+10:00

The sharp hard ridge of winter's passed.
The king has died his little death
And Queen Mab's belly's rising,
Pregnant with the coming spring.

No longer hurried by Antarctic winds,
I tarry over laundry,
Watching baby skinks a-scurrying
Round the dangerous sanctuary of shoes.

Don't worry babies, I'll take care!
Warm sun soaking my back,
I hang out panties and spensers
Like fresh, clean, white shoots.

Above me in the long wands
Of the coral trees,
Green parrots tussle red petals,
Squeaking and squawking.

Dark spirits rising;
Light at last!

Poppies and Lavender

2005-07-31T11:38:00.000+10:00

Our Anniversary

2005-07-15T21:13:00.000+10:00

Well, today is our third anniversary - by my reckoning. It was on this day eggzackly three years ago that I came out to see Alex after a 22 year absence. I'll post a more in-depth blog about that day soon but I want to mark today by touching on that day and on what knowing Alex has meant to me.

Why do I date our anniversary from that meeting? Because, after the initial and disturbing shock of seeing what myotonic muscular dystrophy had done to Alex physically over the preceeding years, I began to fall in love with him, on that first meeting. Sitting in the kitchen, sharing tea, I fell in love with his beautiful brown eyes like deep soulful pools of awareness and feeling and acceptance. I fell in love with his profile, dignified and earnest, haloed by the afternoon sun filtering like old gold dust through his bedroom window as he bent at his computer.

From those moments our journey of growing friendship and love and mutual support began. Our love has opened up like a flower, blossomed from that day.

It isn't easy finding someone to love you, someone to love, when you have a disability.

It isn't easy finding someone to love you, someone to love, when you have transsexualism.

Somehow, we found each other. Magic, maybe; we met 22 years ago when we thought we were the beautiful people. We weren't but I suppose there was also nothing to make us shy away as one may shy away from someone with transsexualism or a disability. I mean you don't have a problem with that but...you wouldn't want a relationship with them.

We weren't ready then but some seed was planted to lay dormant, waiting.

When we came together again it burst into life...by synchronicity, by serendipity, by luck, by destiny.

Somehow, by extraordinary means we were proffered the gift of finding one's mate, one's soul-mate.

Mates, like the he-wolf and the she-wolf are mates...for life, under the bright moon of irrevocable destiny, howling on the sharp ridge of consequence, nurturing the pups of their dreams.

Mates, like Aussie mates...sticking by each other through the tough times, the droughts of the soul; seeing each other through the barren desert of despair.

The greatest compliment a man can give a woman in this country: "...she's me mate!"

That's us. We've gone way past his condition and mine to be just ourselves. Alex worried that if we got too close he'd lose a precious friend and instead I'd become a dutiful but resentful "carer". I worried that he wouldn't be able to treat me as a woman, especially before the operation; that I'd be redefined somehow beyond my control, to somewhere, someone I didn't want to be. Neither of those happened. We have just melded into a harmony but somehow retained our individual selves. I am the empty space shaping the inner curve of his bowl. He is the whisper of my leaves in a summer's breeze.

We give each other challenge, richness, hope, comfort, new perspectives. He is my rock; I am his sweetheart.

So what did we do for our anniversary - on this dark, damp, cold winter's night? We said, "Hey! It's our anniversary, we can do what we like!" So we did and we snuggled up in front of the column heater and tucked into comfort food - vegie soup for him; grilled cheese and tomato on toast for me. The electric blanket is on and tomorrow is a Saturday sleep-in.

Home is where the heart is and my heart is here with my head snuggled into Alex's Greek fisherman's jumper; safe, warm, loved; in love.

And tomorrow is the first day of the next three years!

"war is not the answer"

2005-07-10T11:31:00.000+10:00

"Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today - Yah

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today...."

Marvin Gaye 1971

reflections of my father

2005-07-03T22:49:00.000+10:00

Reading List 2005

2005-06-30T22:59:00.000+10:00

Simple Abundance: A daybook of comfort & joy - Sarah Ban Breathnach

Lighthousekeeping - Jeanette Winterson

Hidden Agendas - John Pilger

Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Cats Eye - Margaret Atwood

The Way the Crow Flies - Ann-Marie Macdonald

The God of Small Things - Arandhati Roy

I am becoming the woman I've wanted - Sandra Haldeman Martz (ed)

Away - Jane Urquhart

Loved them all - breathtaking reading!

And what am I reading now?

Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

Stay chooned for my book reviews!

Alex in the 70's

2005-06-19T14:40:00.000+10:00

Alex 70s
Originally uploaded by paulakaye.

This is how I remember Alex when I knew him in the late 70's. Quiet, dark, gentle, doe-eyed, wild-maned, slow and quiet talking, committed to his ideals: alternative living, natural foods, peace, reverencing earth and body.

When Paula met Alex - a love story

2005-06-13T00:39:00.000+10:00

PART 1 - The phone call

I guess it was about three years ago, now...

A mid-winter's day...midday.

A pale winter's sun suffused the long narrow sun veranda-long-turned-kitchen of the old house on the hill.

Alex sat propped in his high stool, savouring a long midday breakfast and the warmth from the open stove.

Suddenly, startlingly, uncharacteristically, the phone rang.

Roused, he lifted up the handset to his ear, a voice of indeterminate age and gender on the other end...

"Oh! Hi! Is that Alex?"

Hesitant, "Ye-es."

"Hi! Alex, my name's Paula and I think I used to be your friend."

Hesitant, doubtful, "I don't know anyone called Paula."

Continuing, undeterred, "Did you used to have a business called 'Alexx Slow Foods' and bake bread and own a cafe?"

Puzzled, still cautious, "Ye-es, but I still don't know anyone called Paula."

"Well...(pause)...there's a bit of a story to that! I changed my name...and my sex! I used to be called...and I knew you about twenty years ago."

"Ummm! I'm not sure...."

"I was very tall and had really long hair and I used to come to your place and I helped you bake bread and in the cafe and we went to the "Down To Earth" festival in Bredbo in '79."

Remembering, suddenly, now animated, "Oh! I remember you!"

Over the next two hours the pair rambled on, him in the wintry well of light of the small kitchen, warmed by the oven left open, she hunched guiltily over her work phone in the back of the office, only a couple of days away from full-time transition to womanhood.

She told him, surprisingly at first but then it made sense, of her long concealed transsexualism (concealed from him, too, tho' he remembered now that she always wore a woman's watch. Funny that, he remembered that watch, more clearly than any other detail). She told him of her marriage and her step-grandchildren and her years of army reserve service and her work in Telstra, first as a telecommunications technician then as a trainer.

She asked him if he was married (probly is by now - with kids). He told her, "No.", but went on to talk about his work as an activist with a queer disability group. Queer? Disability? He didn't really talk about queer, that came later when she found out that he'd been gay and she didn't know - just like he didn't know about her lifetime identification with the feminine and about always wanting to be and feeling like a girl. Secrets and lies! Secrets and lies!

He told her tho' about the onset of his myotonic muscular dystrophy, something she was only vaguely aware existed. She asked him how it affected him but didn't really understand...not then. That came later.

He told her about the loss of his business and his World Bike Ride for Nuclear Disarmament, cycling all the way from Canberra to Darwin and then by boat up to Japan and his travels around Honshu and Hokkaido. About his mature-age university degree and his increasing disability.

But they didn't really spend much time on recounting historical chronology or the present day. For those two hours they delved back into all that they could remember of their time together, of all that had been significant but unsaid, unspoken, unnamed; twenty-two years ago. Now they spoke of the feelings and thoughts they'd had but never spoken of. Named that which had never been named. Shared that which had never been shared.

She remembered the one time she'd gone to bed with him. She didn't go to bed with men. She saw herself as heterosexual (oh! it's very hard to find the right words when you straddle two genders), only had girl-friends and kept her transsexual thoughts and feelings largely to herself (but periodically flew her little flags - like ladies' watches and long hair and peasant blouses). She used to listen, yearningly, to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Our House": "with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard, now everything is easy 'cause of you....". She would meet the perfect woman and her troubling "impure" (the hippie dream is a "pure" dream - the alternative fundamentalism) transsexualism would melt away and all would be sweet beauty and light, yeah! down to the end of her days! She dreamed incongruously of both meeting and being that perfect, shining, hippie earth mother. Indian dresses and strappy kung fu shoes and shawls and patchouli.

Then, the woman in her had cleaved, naturally, ingenuously, unremarkedly, almost subliminally, to this quiet, gentle, beautiful man who was both like her and not like her. But the man shape she inhabitated, found it problematical. Being with a man while she lived (half-lived) as a man would make her a gay man in the eyes of the world and she wasn't that. Whatever she was, she wasn't that.

She remembered his nut-brown hands and his doe-eyed face, framed with a riot of wild frizzy hair hung over hers, close, reaching, searching. She remembered his smell, an unfamiliar, unsettling man smell, redolent of his Greekness. She withdrew from his advances, left him puzzled, confused.

All this came flooding back and was somehow, now, part of the present. She had, in the dark lonely well of transition simply hoped to find another friendly face, another person who would accept and not condemn. Now somethng else, unexpected, unbidden, destined, was stirring in her, dizzying, tremulous.

In the office, the other women began to return from lunch.

"Well, I s'pose I'd better be going", she said, reluctant.

"I've really liked talking with you", he said, "I'd like to see you."

"Well, this is my last week at work before I go on a month's leave. When I come back, I'll be Paula, at work too - for always, forever. Why don't we meet this Monday. I can come over."

And she did come over and they did meet, again, after twenty-two years.

But that's another chapter; the beginning of another story.

(...stay tuned...)

Frangipani

2005-06-13T00:34:00.000+10:00

Frangipani! Frangipani!
Gentle, shady tree,

Drop me down some of your stars
And I'll pretend they're dreams.

End of Day

2005-06-13T00:24:00.000+10:00

Winter's dead end of day,
Damp-distressed,
Let's fall
A pall,
Ash-grey,
A-cross my tattered dreams.

Raining its sorrows,
Drumming its dread
Notes on, on
The corrugations of my brain.

A faint, cruel dirge drones
Mocking the false
Oracle of faded hopes;
Wide-eyed fear
Of night's omen-ous coming
Hard on the nailed cross
Of forsaken day.

Cracks craze
The bone-cap
Of the skull
Stretched taut
Over the scream.

Shattered, shivered,
One draws
The close of things
Over hunched, sharp shoulders
Like a threadbare
Cloak of blame.

2005-04-30T19:06:00.000+10:00

Alex - my little Aussie digger, my little Aussie battler; my rock, my love, my all.

Stepping out into a hail of bullets

2005-04-30T18:26:00.000+10:00

Sometimes, it seems like my life is like stepping out into a hail of bullets.

During the invasion of Iraq, I remember seeing an image on television which has remained with me, as some kind of metaphor.

A metaphor for my life.

I saw a British soldier crouched behind a pillar, somewhere in Basra, sheltering from fierce incoming fire. I knew that at some point he would have to come out from behind the safety of the pillar, out into that maelstrom of lead and death, face up to his fate whatever that might be.

I thought of the second before he moves…and the second after. The last second of safety, of the continuance of what went before; the next second, the next fateful, heart-thumping, brain-numbing, cold-fear-running second when what cannot be faced is faced, when what comes next…comes next.

The second before…and the second after.

I have been a reluctant and unwilling soldier in this life, cowering behind a succession of crumbling pillars, not-living in the eternal second before…. Before decision, before action, before consequence, before result, before what comes next.

Nine years ago I came to an acknowledgement: that my life was not my life, that my death would not be my death. That I would lie on my deathbed with the thing undone, with my life unlived, dying someone else’s death after a lifetime of not-living someone else’s half-life.

I acknowledged my transsexualism; I acknowledged that I was somehow, someway, some incontestable, unavoidable, ultimately inescapable, refusing-to-go-away way, female. In the core of my being, in the depth of my soul, in the very fibres of my heart and mind…and brain.

It took another six years to get me out from the hiding place that is no hiding place, kicking and screaming. Mother, if it be thy will, let this cup passeth from my lips.

It wasn’t. It didn't.

Three years ago, finally, I stepped out into the maelstrom of reality and consequence. I transitioned. This is your joy…you enjoy it; this is your pain…you suffer it. This is yours…all yours…only yours.

At first, there is only the enormity of what you have done. The adrenalin, the fear, the exhilaration, the release of action, the imagined release of imagined freedom.

Then the bullets start hitting. The realisations, the realities, the consequences. And all my pouches and packs are empty. All my resources were dreamed, all my preparations were made in fantasy…for a fantasy world.

My real hands are thin…and old...and empty.

I used to have a deluded sense of invulnerability, of immortality. I was the reigning queen of distraction, Miss Ostrich 1952-2001.

I was eternally nine.

Now I am middle-aged and my pillars are crumbling, crumbling, fast, oh! so fast.

Once upon a time there was a would-be-if-she-could-be hippie chick who KNEW if she ate enough brown rice she'd live forever...and nothing would ever go wrong.

Once upon a time the future was so big I couldn't see it. Funny how the future shrinks, the gossamer becomes gritty.

Once upon a time I drifted in dreamy currents. Now I strain at the oars, navigating mid-life, tiny safe harbour by tiny safe harbour, dark jagged reef by dark jagged reef.

Then, I tripped flippantly along the cliff-top of my life; the eternal delusionist, pulling eternally painless rabbits out of an eternally blameless hat. The eternal Aussie, “She’ll be right, mate. No wurries! No fuckin’ wurries!”

Now I’m worried.

A light has gone out; the only light I knew how to keep aglow. The light of enforced, obligatory ignorance, of assumed innocence; the light of illusion and delusion. In the dark, damp womb behind my closed eyelids, I lit an imaginary match to light an imaginary path to nowhere.

Now the weight of night, long night, is palpable, pressing hard on the thin, dim end of day. The future is what happens to other people until one day, shockingly and unthinkably, impenetrably and irrevocably, it becomes your own.

Oh! Don't get me wrong! There is joy and wonderment aplenty! Bright precious stones found in the bottom of pinafore pockets. But now you run your fingers over the rough-burred surfaces of both sides of life. Feel them for your own. Gritty, real.

When I smile at you I wear melancholy as a brooch.

How loud is that clock ticking, woman, how loud is that?

Not as loud as the silence that follows.

It's little things. Like sore, old neglected paper-thin feet, like a mouth half-full of neglected decay.

It's big things. Like glaucoma, like blindness waiting in the wings to sing your swan-song. Like the slow, persistent creep of muscular dystrophy, laying claim to the love of your life.

It's irrevocable. Like the criminal record of a lifetime of betrayals, deceits. Stamped, recorded. On your deathbed, or mine, you will remember what I did to you. And so will I.

It's intrinsic, endemic. Like the fear that's knotted tight and hard into the structure of your being. For always, for ever...you.

How could this life happen to that young girl, I might have been, in the Annie Oakley hat with the fake plaits, sweating in the damp summer swamp of her cowboy tent?

How could this life happen to that girl that I never was, who was never a girl but woke up one day in middle age, whose might-have-been menarche went unrealised and unbled until it withered into a quasi-menopause, barren and dry? Like discarded driftwood. Unblossomed and unborn. For ever more.

When I was young, I could run, god! I could run! Could outrun my crimes; and my sins. Greased like a hillbilly hog, I slipped the net of consequence and accountability; pulled off stunt after stunt.

Yeah, I was the stuntwoman - nothing was real. Now someone has stolen away my hidden mattress; now falling is hard, REAL hard.

When I was young sometimes I attended AA. I wasn’t alcoholic – that was someone else. I was the helpless, hopeless one, instead. No that’s not true, they were helpless and hopeless, those men and women who got up and faced us, faced themselves and did the first step. I never did the first step, took the first step.

There’s no hope until there’s no hope.

They gave me a gift, though: “One day at a time, sweet Jesus”. Sometimes I have my own version: “One second at a time, sweet Jesus”.

Life is what you live, clinging to the edge.

Thank god for Alex!

2005-04-30T18:24:00.000+10:00

Web Weaver

Your window of opportunity

2005-04-25T11:10:00.000+10:00

Hey!
Grab hold of this -
Your tiny, brief
Window of opportunity.

Plant out the moist dark earth
Of its window-box
- heritage green -
In sweet, dappled apple-mint
And pretty heartsease -
Sunny yellow
And velvet purple.

Polish round squeak, squeaky clean
Its thin, wavy window panes;
Reflecting in dark liquid
Pools of glass
An indigo blue sky and silver'd clouds.

Drape it within in snowy white
Curtains of lacy net
Embroidered with fairies.

Wash out your hair in
Chamomile and nettles,
Hang it loose, fly it free;
Henna and auburn,
Like a dark river of secrets
Stained tea-tree and golden;
Eddying, murmuring.

Hum haunting snatches
Of Patsy Cline
To bemused passers-by.

Let lazy summer evening breezes
Softly tink tinkle
Cut-glass crystal wind chimes.

Fling out the warm, sweet, spicey
Smell of ginger muffins,
Fresh-baked and steaming
Under a red check table-cloth,
Enticing lovers loitering in laneways
With dreams of domesticity and bliss.

Do all of this!
Now!
Please!

For fleeting is the moment,
Like a pale moth against dark night;
Flittering, fragile;
Tiny, temporary;
Dancing lightly, forever out of reach
And gone tomorrow.

Winter morning's brief patch of sun

2005-04-23T21:45:00.000+10:00

We squatted down
Side by side
You n’ me
Soft n’ young
Hard n’ old
Tiny n’ big.

In winter morning’s
Brief patch of sun.

We cracked open oranges
N’ giggled.
You shaking your plaits,
Me shaking mine.
We drank their liquid flesh;
Their blood spilt,
Gold’n on our hands,
Sticky n’ good
Amid heartsease n’ boronia.

In winter morning’s
Brief patch of sun.

2005-04-23T21:42:00.000+10:00

My darling Pussma with her four babies.

River Cat

2005-04-23T21:29:00.000+10:00

I’ll call you River Cat!
Your fur a river of dark dappled with light.
Scintillating sunlight, molten, golden,
Glistening, gliding,
Sliding into shifting shadows
Of tea-tree, umber and amber.

I’ll call you Audrey Hepburn Cat!
Your slinking, sinuous, sensuous limbs
Gloved in black velvet.
Where is your Cartier bracelet?
Where is your diamond tiara?

I’ll call you Furr Bear and Purr Bear!
And bury my troubled head
In your warm belly fur.

I’ll call you Womb Cat!
And you’ll enfold me
In your primal mothering.
One paw over me,
Protecting.
Fur belly rising,
Fur belly falling.

I’ll call you Dream Cat!!
And you’ll draw me deep
Into your eyes.
Eyes of inscrutable clarity
Eyes of glass, eyes of jade.
Golden and green,
Unfathomable, beckoning;
Entrancing, enslaving.
Those eyes where there is
No thinking, no feeling.
Only being.

And I’ll call you Gone Cat!
And you’ll be gone
And I’ll be gone
And we’ll be as
Faint wind whispering in fur
Faint wind rippling on water
Fading, then forgotten.