Memory

The road from the east coast of Tasmania to the central north where I live winds past Piccininny Point, skirts Irishtown and Germantown, goes straight through St Mary's and on past Cornwall. At one point, lying alongside it, is a crooked graveyard attached to a solid Anglican church. Lucy, my parents and I stopped here on our way back from our holiday before Christmas, and spent some family time wandering amongst the dead.





This is perhaps not the most obviously family friendly fun but we love these places. They are quiet and beautiful and each piece of stone holds a story. They never end well but then none of our lives are attached to a happily ever after. Some though, are a little harder to read than others. This one made my heart stop and then start again a little more slowly than it had before.



Lu asked me about it when I was taking photos and I told her what it said, without thinking. I told her the little baby was sleeping under the ground, cosy with his dead friends. Then she asked if he was fixed with bandaids and cream (ointment). I said no, that he would always be under the ground. Then she asked if he was fixed with bandaids and cream (ointment). And I said 'yes' because she wanted it to be true and so did I. I am a mother and I want to think that no-one ever has to face this horror, this one of a thousand worst things, things that cannot be named, things we fear when we think of our children and wonder at our fragile luck in having them still.

It's a month and a half since we walked in the graveyard but I think about that memorial every day. No lily following the curve of the headstone, no 'sadly missed', no 'dearly loved'. But those words don't change what happened or what was felt. Everyday I think about that memorial and I remember that I am blessed.



And I would like to acknowledge those mothers who have faced the worst things.

The shock of the new

There are changes afoot in my neighbourhood, which have brought my concerns about lost gardens and space to the fore. When we first moved to to our area, it was touted in the real estate literature as "bohemian south" (bohemian = run down rental properties), now it is "on the fringes of the city" or "a short walk to the Paris end of Charles St" (Paris end of Charles St = two cafes and a bakery, with seating outside, how European!). One by one the houses along the streets leading to ours are getting paint jobs and the ubiquitous new french doors + back deck combo. The overlooked spaces are disappearing under big houses with teeny tiny yards, and generally, there's a lot of people drawing down their housing equity to tart things up a little. It is not an over-statement to say I hate it.

I do admit this response is partly because I am curmudgeonly and suspicious of change. Also, I'm frugal and am not comfortable with people drawing down equity, which isn't real money - just possible profit - to transform their perfectly functional houses into boring sameness, pushing up my interest rates in the process. In part, I like my space, any old space, but especially that which holds mystery and delight within it, and find I this is fast disappearing.



In part, my concern is aesthetic - I like the humble, the tumbledown, the rough around the edges (Lu said to me yesterday, sounding concerned, "I don't want to move in to a dump, Mummy", which isn't as crazy as it sounds - each dump for me holds great possibility; Lu on the other hand, likes impersonal motels and stainless steel - these kids, always rebelling).



But there are other more symbolic and less personal issues informing my grumbling about the McMansions across the way.

Richard Sennett - a deeply under-rated sociologist, but aren't we all? - talks about the city as a place for encouraging tolerance. As we move through the space, confronted in a real way by difference, we learn to live with and indeed look for diversity in our lives. In a time of great social change, with ongoing debates about who 'we' let in, and what 'they' should believe, every day in cities we come across the Other, the stranger, and on the street they become people, transformed from the bogeymen on our imaginations and political rhetoric.

But others have pointed to the rise in gated communities, high front fences and underground carparks, drive throughs, the reliance on cars, and even ipods as indicators of our growing reluctance to face difference in our communities. We barricade ourselves from threat, discomfort, distaste, and in so doing we add to, rather than protect, ourselves from the fragmentation of our social worlds. If we unplugged our ipods and took a bus, the world would seem a lot less scary place.

I'm thinking the same things about how we treat our surrounds. I don't like the big houses with their high fences and paved or pebbled yards because they refuse to acknowledge any world but the one they have created in their boundaries. Things are hard edged, clear cut, with no blurring between inside and out, then and now, wild and tame.


For me, they are the architectural equivalent of the bubble world that hides us from social interaction; the bricks and mortar protects the inhabitants from acknowledging we share our space with others: present others, past others, and others who are not people at all.

Where I live, when flash new houses are built, a piece of the past is erased. The footprint of an old house is destroyed by the earth movers, the previous gardens trampled, and the needs of current creatures - the birds and bugs and furry things - are utterly denied.

It smacks of a disdain for the history of the place, and a discomfort with the messiness of our environment. Little Jenny Wren mentioned in my last post an old rose that has been destroyed as new flats go up - is it hard-heartedness or a lack of imagination that allows people to deny that which has gone before? We all want to make our lots our own - a woman's home is her castle after all, and her garden her realm - but there's a decided lack of co-operation in how we go about this.

I know in our busy, busy lives there's not much time for gardening, but why does this translate into no interest in our space and those who share it? And the time argument's a bit of a furphy anyway. As I walked by a new lot of lego houses, scowling and muttering, I saw the shell of an in-ground pool awaiting installation. I've had the misfortune of house sitting places with pools, and the skimming, chemical-ing and creepy-crawling take up far more time than my garden does, and for no great return. I also raised my eyebrow at the idea of an in-ground pool in a town where swimming is only very for the strong (or well-insulated) and in a state in drought. The rest of the yard covers its shame in pebbles and paving - all of which will require a lot of up-keep and weed-killer to keep the green bits at bay -


- and there's no inch given for the birds and the bees. But somehow, it's just fine to install one of the most unnecessary and environmentally useless domestic features currently available to home owners. It's enough to drive a scruffy, organic suburban householder to tears.

Protecting the environment, one forgotten scrap at a time

I am always struck, when reading any social history of fruit and veggies, by the decline of biodiversity in our food world. All those thousands of apple varieties, culled to a few dozen, the tomatoes lost to history, the potatoes never to be dug and eaten with butter and chives again. Where do they go? I understand the structures that lead to their loss: the corporatisation of the production and selling of food, transportation, subsidies and governance, and our expectation that food bills should be as small as possible, regardless of the larger costs. But where do the plants go when they're not wanted anymore?

I guess the orchards are bulldozed and the old backyard gardens paved over. But surely some hardy specimens remain in the cracks in the fence or down the back paddock, left to endure by chance or laziness or a lack of money to sub-divide. It's the dream of every gardener, isn't it, to stumble across a lost variety, just as those who love art hopes to find an old John Glover shoved in behind the beer fridge in a tumble down garage, and those who thrift believe one day they will discover a Clarice Clift teapot going for $2 at the Salvos down the road. Once plant hunters traveled the globe for the new, now we peer over back fences in search of the old.

Or at least, I do. There're things in my neighbourhood I don't see elsewhere, the remnants of gardens destroyed. Apple trees are dotted about the place and on the verges freesias and sparaxis grow in great drifts.


Many grow at the bottom of slopes, I suspect pushed down from the higher places by the landslips and deluges that wiped out the houses to which they once belonged. Some of these freesias I've not seen in the catalogues. They're not the sweet scented albas, and bear no resemblance to the large and bold varieties offered at 40 cents a bulb. Some have particularly caught my attention: mauve and gold, brushed in sepia tones, they are the flowers of a grandmother's wedding bouquet. Hardy and humble and not at all common (in all meanings of the word).

These plants bear a strange relationship to their environment: they're introduced and now naturalised; they're a product of suburbanization and now in threat from it as the council seeks ways to stablise the land for new sub-divisions, and 'cleans out' the growth in the name of neatness and hygiene. So I've started to collect some bulbs, scrambling down the slopes with Jasper the dog following enthusiastically (there could be a ball down there!).



I'm planting them in the garden as a token of things past, as an acknowledgment of what my environment contains within it now, and as protection against the loss of diversity and difference that will no doubt follow in the future.

I don't think this is helping the Amazonian rainforests or the loss of Australia's river systems. I'm not stopping a pulp mill (but then no one else is either). It's just a few flowers next to the road and in the traces of backyards. I doubt they're a lost flower, even though I can't place them, but even the commonplace becomes rare, as our agricultural past reminds us. Maybe one of my scraps will become The Flower That Saved Our World. Or maybe they'll stand as a reminder to the few who remember that there was a time when there was space for surprise and overgrowth and delight.



There are, of course, other very good reasons for keeping things just the way they are. You don't get this in 'townhouse alternative' living:

There's no place like home

We're back in Brisbane, fulfilling commitments. Our baby Nell is getting baptised, we're rushing about to family lunches, dinners and bits in between. The trip is a series of obligations, some welcome and some not. As nice as it is to see people, it's not my idea of a holiday: there's no big pool with a bar in the middle of it, and no snorkling. (This holiday fantasy has emerged since we entered parenthood. Before this, I aspired to culture and nature and mild adventure but truth be told, that now all sounds like a big effort.). Nor is this a home coming; Al and I sit here and dream of home.

For a long time Brisbane was home for both Al and me. Until the big move down south, Al had never lived elsewhere, and I'd spent my teens and most of my twenties here. We've both had some very fine times and some that were less than stellar. Things were pretty grim when I left four and a bit years ago: dumped, no house, no income and temperatures that never dropped below 30 for weeks on end. I was staying in a friend's house, trying to finish my PhD before taking up a job in a town where I knew no one. That final summer was spent desperately tapping away at the lap top on a verandah, drinking copious amounts of water to avoid dehydration, and then getting up every twenty minutes or so to pee. Despite going out with a fizzle, I've often dreamed about coming back here, coming home.

But I'm a stranger in a strange land. Brisbane is really big and really hot and really, really dry. Many people seem to be taking the BrisVegas label a little too seriously (irony, people, irony!). So many of this town's features - cocktails, glam restaurants, late nights and infinite consumption opportunities - are not relevant to my life. The suburbs in which I once lived are almost unrecognisable, bastions of high density living and and Tuscanana architecture. My old rental houses are either gone or schmicked up. There's a lot of concrete and a lot of dust. As an outsider, I see little love for gardens. The water restrictions are cruel, yes, but in some places, the land is divided and divided so that a backyard is an oddity and a front yard is a bit of paving and a sail for the household cars. The plants are the same in every yard, and the houses themselves fit a template. The ramshackle, the quirky, the odd are being torn down or tarted up. There are a few small pieces of my different life - Nono's kebab shop, Northy Street City Farm, The Gun Shop and Mondo Organics - but the pockets of interesting possibilities are shrinking fast.

Until this trip, I saw myself as exiled from my home, tied to Tasmania due to work commitments and the financial inplications of a mainland move. But the exile is as much temporal as it is physical: the Brisbane of my heart exists five years ago. The exile is emotional: my town exists in my love for people who have long since moved on, from the town and sometimes my life. Indeed, it's not a state of exile. I could go back if I wanted to but really, I don't. Brisbane looms large in my past but it's not where I belong. In my personal dictionary, "home" is a haven, a place of safety, a source of succour, the core of identity and the hearth of my family. And it's not here. I'm a small town girl now.