River Bend

I can’t help thinking that there is a rosella following me. Black and blue and red tail feathers poke over the guttering outside the window when I wake. I don’t see the whole bird, just the tail. Then later a noise on the other side of the picket fence makes me look up from the book and it’s there again, but hidden still, scrabbling around in the grass. I don’t see the whole bird, just stripes of blue and red.

There’s a wombat, too, massive and slow. His eye glints in the torch and twilight as we stumble down to turn off the pump. And kangaroos on the way back to Jinglemoney and then home. The sign on the gate next door says NO JINGLE.

A dark coloured wallaby by the road back to Sydney makes me slow a little, turns its head.

The landscape is shocking. Not dry like parched grass ready to burn, dry like the moon. It makes me think of this place as a planet. It’s windy and I think of news reports about other planets whose names I can never connect with their appropriate climates and distances from the sun. Hot winds howl across uninhabitable landscapes. Here there are paddocks so bare you could lie down in them without a single itch. There is barely any stock.

Earlier, frustrated, hot, sober and somewhere in Campbelltown I drove past a random breath test station again and again, gave up and found another which waved me in the first time. “How do I get back on the M5?” I pleaded.

But then finally there was Braidwood. Several men in kung fu outfits in the main street, and a crowd in the bakery on the way to the coast. Inside the butchery there is a boy with an emo haircut and one eyebrow shaved into stripes. He is serving sausages and mince.

At River Bend there’s a high deck and once the sun is deemed to have lost its sting we step off the deck into the dark water of the Shoalhaven River. The take off and approach have to be absolutely straight on lest we brush the reeds either side and in our minds dislodge dangers from their midst.

Across the river lives a blacksmith. He’s divorced from the woman who runs a café in town but we think he’s a good blacksmith because another blacksmith bought a property close by in order to look and learn. Chris says that the divorced blacksmith wears a kaftan but I think that sounds unlikely and I want to continue to imagine him in a navy singlet.

The next day we come some way to understanding why the blacksmith might be divorced when we see his wife in action at the café. Ray finds a sizable piece of plastic in his toasted sandwich, chews it for a while, but doesn’t seem to like it so takes the sandwich back to the kitchen to ask for his money back. It’s begrudgingly granted, but a little later it seems they might renege when they come to the table specially to explain that the plastic was the casing off the salami. Problem solved. No problem at all - except the great hunk of plastic in the sandwich.

At the very beginning of this story: I'm disappointed that I’m at the chemist buying sunscreen and Aerogard. It is Australia Day.

Last Night - Uncle Vanya

Noonie and I discover in the car on the way home that we both wanted Sonia to have stolen the morphine. We wanted her to kill herself or, better still, Helena. Now that would have been something.

It was almost worth it for the curtain call though. A line of eight people slightly more dour than a whole week in Budapest.

On the way home I give the homeless man a dollar but he doesn't even know. He's sitting cross-legged on the footpath outside the 7-11 and he's asleep. I buy a Cherry Ripe and a Fanta and blame Hickson Road Chinese.

There's a sleepy cockroach in my room and I kill it with one brown canvas and rope wedge and think of Pete the Bugsquasher.

My second clock-radio of the year has become a radio. I try to set the time by the display panels that are left but it's hard to tell whether the alarm is set for AM or PM. Noonie says the perfect house has an electronics vortex.

This Night

The elements encroach. In this order from furthest away I can see: sheet lightning; Balmain; the water of the harbour green today, black now; the apartments wharf; us with our rose and digital camera. He's an architect but he says he photographs experimental music festivals and lingerie models. It's raining softly when I walk to the car, the wood of the boardwalk baked in the day and now damp smells like so many verandahs. It's an opportunity for one of those fragrances: ink, freshlty cut grass, dirt, rain on a wooden verandah at the end of a hot day. Also, wet hot concrete. As a child I said concreek. Around the same time I think I was keeping my clothes in a wardrove. And I remember my wardrove. Matt blue and green stripes that came from almost but not quite mixing the paint.

In Newtown it's raining still but smoky too from the bushfire. Malcolm Turnbull is on the tele using his best Prue and Trude voice to tell us that the drought has come to the city.

Not how many, and in which pocket and in what sequence. Just why. Why sucking stones?

And imagine how annoying that whole sequence would be to read as prose.

Tennis as an extreme sport. What would Uncle David think? Success through sheer gangly force of will. And Marcos looking like a puppy.

Sick of Regina Spektor already, sick of her and her cheap, juicy fruit.

The things that someone didn't steal from my car:
- the pencil sharpener for my eye pencil
- parking security pass
- FM i-pod transmitter
- parking fines
- the book containing my creative writing exercises from 2002
- Bruce Springsteen's Devils and Dust

The ways in which Gen Y is sometimes adorable, interesting, cute and reverential
- leaving a thank you card and a joint in appreciation of time well spent on NYE

Tennis as an extreme sport. What would Uncle David think? Success through sheer gangly force of will. And Marcos looking like a puppy.

Sick of Regina Spektor already, sick of her and her cheap, juicy fruit.

The things that someone didn't steal from my car:
- the pencil sharpener for my eye pencil
- parking security pass
- FM i-pod transmitter
- parking fines
- the book containing my creative writing exercises from 2002
- Bruce Springsteen's Devils and Dust

The ways in which Gen Y is sometimes adorable, interesting, cute and reverential
- leaving a thank you card and a joint in appreciation of time well spent on NYE

The director stood in front of the open doorway. Sunlight bounced off metallic shutters and a very clean boat behind him. Shiny things. We couldn't see him, just an outline. I haven't read the play but I want to think that it was apt that the harsh light obscured him. Is it just a little about that moment when you come back inside, at the day's height, probably from mowing the lawn?

Had he moved faster he may have been a member of Boney M in one of those film clips where the light chases the silouhette, but he talked slowly in a kind of maniacally languid way about adjustment and entrapment and the dreamlife of suburbanites. When he turned to the set we could see the rat's tail in his profile. He kept remembering important things. Things that he needed to tell us so that the other things made sense. He said when they are inside they will be filmed, that we have a man playing a female character for a reason and that it was the summer of the bitch on heat. Then he went behind the screen to eat a lamington.

Now where was I the other day where there was a kangaroo?

Michael Winter is back and so I can begin again. It seems not a moment too soon before friends steal the anecdotes that are my life.

January, with enthusiasm for everything except work, when almost every night we see things that we might not have seen before. Can we believe that we might have lived without seeing them - or, alternatively, believe that we'd ever want to see them again? I'm talking about the Festival but it could almost as well apply to the supermarket.

He's rotund. That grey thin but lank hair that shows where the teeth of the comb have been, even at the end of the day. I see him talking to people that he doesn't know and I avoid the aisle in which it's happening. Then, when I'm ready to join the line, here's right there behind motioning me to step in. I'm eyes in front with enormous concentration until the toothless smile is somewhere near my ear and he's asking how my day was. Fine, thanks. I'm thinking: "please don't say anything mean to me." "And your Christmas?", he says. Yep. Fine too. He's laughing as he leans over a third time: "She was only the baker's daughter but she kneaded the dough". Next.

On the weekend I wanted the Telophaza dancers to wear their costumes to the party. They were bugs. Smiling bugs in a well-ordered palette. But then I learned that they were probably atoms and that made some kind of sense too. When I was growing up I used to think that in my adult house I'd have one of everything in every colour so that I could line them up and appreciate the similarities and differences. That was the Telophaza costumes.

LT says that the dancers had a body guard at the party because it's just all part of the Festival service. I think it's because they're Israeli, although I thought they were Russian (around - quite apt for dancers) until Noonie set me straight. Why is it that I do most of my research after I've seen the show? Only interested if I'm already interested.

It was too soon my curfew and I was shaking the stones out from between my toes and getting in a taxi.

At the tennis there's a red apple and a pear. Each of them have white shiny tights on their legs and a chaperone who holds their hand and guides them away from obstacles such as garbage bins and small children. I guess they can only see straight ahead, not down. The pear gets around this by squatting down to child height. But then he jumps up quickly and the children are uniformly petrified or delighted. I only see the kangaroo in the distance bouncing above the heads of the crowd.