Brunswick Heads

I am living in town.  After many years of being in the country, it is good to have people around me again.  Cars driving past, children in the street, people living their lives, behind the lighted windows of their homes.  

Tonight, as I sat on my front veranda, I could see a woman walking to and fro in her apartment across the road.  She seemed to be floating backwards and forwards across her room.  Perhaps she was dancing or listening to music.  I liked knowing that she was there.  Like me, inhabiting her own space, doing her thing, imagining her own stories and dreams.  Perhaps one day I will meet her as she puts out her garbage and I will say hello.  A brief greeting will perhaps connect us for a moment in time.

An American man knocked on my door this evening to tell me that my car lights were on.

The other day my children came home from a birthday party.  They were given these beautiful bubble wands as parting gifts.  We wandered around town together and they were continually creating these streams of beautiful rainbow coloured bubbles. They glided down the streets, into cafes and across the paths of pedestrians.  Everyone that saw these  temporal rainbow spheres smiled and commented. I overheard a man we passed talking on his mobile phone telling someone that:

 “ There are these kids blowing bubbles.  They are filling the whole street.”

 It was a beautiful thing.  Just for a moment, my children brought a little magic into the hearts of strangers.

For now, I don’t need Sydney, New York or Roma.  Brunswick Heads is just right.

God I love My Studio

God I love my brushes. 
My old oily buckets that drip with congealed linseed.  My drop sheets, my drips, my paint encrusted carpet and all the dust.  My cut out bits of cardboard, my strips of painted masking tape, my hand prints everywhere.  My bottles and jars, my photos, my worn bits of graphite and blunt pencils.  My moldy tea cups, my empty beer bottles, my grotty sink, my spray cans.  My scattered clothing, my apron that stands up, my finger printed cd player.  My chopped up old books, the scattered quotes on the wall, my well thumbed books of Neruda and Borgess.  My unwashed dishes and all the years of music that follow me everywhere.  My silver lined ceiling, my old timber plan drawers and the go away/come here paintings that I make on the walls.


God I love my studio.

Something I remember # 3

I have only one retrievable memory of being a baby.  I was sitting on the floor in the kitchen at Colebrook. My vantage point was shin height.  The legs of the table and chairs were the jungle through which I would crawl.  The old patterned linoleum stretched out before me with its intersecting yellowed lines of red and green.*  For years this floor functioned as a giant grid of roads, highways and overpasses on which my sister and I would drive matchbox cars and build Lego houses.
On the other side of the room, was an object that captured my interest.  I do not recall what this object was but I was intent on getting my hands on it.
 I had only recently learned how to walk and I remember asking my one year old self, if I should walk or crawl across the room to get to this object. I decided to crawl. I knew that I would get there quicker in this way, without the interruption of losing my balance and falling over.
What interests me about this memory is that though I may have had a few words in my vocabulary  at this time, I would have been largely pre-verbal.  I would not have been able to vocalise this brief internal dialogue. But I was able to think about it and make a decision based on a knowledge of my own strengths and weaknesses in the area of perambulation.

* Years later my sister and I had both, at different times, visited the house and almost wept when we discovered that the lino had been replaced with a bland timber veneer and the door jamb where our heights had been measured, had been repainted.
And now, as I scroll through hundreds of google images of 1950’s linoleum, I find my heart beating a little faster at the prospect of perhaps finding that familiar pattern (no luck).