Day 19 - Red dust

Each day at work, my father was surrounded by people. So in the holidays, he just wanted to get away from people. And explore the Australian countryside.

While most of my classmates had seaside holidays, my family preferred to head for the desert for the holidays.

While we were at school on the last day of term, my mother busily packed everything we would need for two weeks away from civilisation: sleeping bags, tent, camping cooker, cooking utensils, lots of water, food supplies, cameras, torches and matches. Each of us kids packed our own small bag of clothes and a few toys, books and paints.

The next day, we would be on the road before sunrise. We headed out of Sydney and drove and drove and drove. Many of the roads and even highways were still unsealed then. Gravelly, dusty and pot-holed. If a car or truck came in the opposite direction, we would spend the next few minutes choking on red dust.

It would be close to sunset, after a full day of driving, that we would look for a suitable remote spot to make our camp. The holidays that were the most fun were the ones where we camped near a river. My mother and father worked quickly to get the tent pitched before sunset.

In our own world away from it all, we saw kangaroos, emus, goannas, snakes, galahs and also rabbits and foxes. Some days we went on long bushwalks; other days we stayed at the camp and relaxed by reading or painting. My brother and I scraped elaborate roads into the red dirt to play with our matchbox cars. We also built towns with houses out of sticks and leaves because the roads had to go somewhere. This game could consume days.

The nights were filled with strange bush sounds and all around it was incredibly black but up above there were just millions of stars. And always a shooting star.

Day 18 - Bandaid princess

So then my youngest sister was born.

Until she was about three, she had almost no hair at all but then when it did grow, it became a wild mop of curls.

When her curls grew, my baby sister became obsessed with her clothing. She usually had at least three complete changes of clothes during the day. I'm not sure why. When we came home from school, my mother would tell us how many times my sister had changed her outfit that day.

She was also obsessed with bandaids. She loved to plaster them all over herself and could very easily 'require' twenty in a day. The weekly shopping list had to include a sufficient supply of bandaids.

I'm not sure whether she outgrew the bandaid obsession, or whether the weekly shopping was just no longer able to accommodate it.

Day 17 - Going boating

After a few years of working hard, my parents were able to get a bank loan to buy our own home: a little cottage on the northern beaches.

Not only a house. They bought a boat too. It was a 12 foot tinnie with a 6 horsepower outboard motor. For the next few years, we spent most summer Sundays boating on Pittwater, exploring secluded little bays and having picnics on tiny little beaches that we had all to ourselves.

Once in a while, an irresistible urge to flirt with danger impelled my father to steer our tiny boat into the open sea. On one such adventure, the weather changed suddenly and the swell grew monstrous. I think my mother was terrified.

But she needn't have worried. A couple of dolphins suddenly appeared beside our boat, as if they knew that we were in danger and that none of us had life jackets. Gently they guided us back to calmer waters and we got home safely.

Day 16 - Modern things

Mrs Pearson was our landlady and I think she must have been nearly a hundred years old. She lived downstairs with her stout little dachshund who was the only dog I wasn't terrified of.

She liked modern things but really, it was a long time ago when they were modern.

Mrs Pearson fascinated me and even though I knew I wasn't supposed to disturb her, I loved to go down to visit her sometimes. She didn't actually mind being disturbed, and she would show me her treasures which were very colourful costume jewellery pieces that smelt strongly of stale perfume.

On a pedestal in the hallway, stood a black bakelite telephone with an old silver dial that still had letters as well as numbers on it. A few times, my parents asked if they could use it and Mrs Pearson said they could.

In the laundry out the back of the house, there was a washing copper with a gas boiler underneath to heat the water. Not quite a modern washing machine but I didn't mind because I loved the smell of the soapy boiling water and best of all, I loved it when my mother let me turn the handle to squeeze the clothes through the wringer.

Day off

Dear Readers, thank you for visiting my blog :-)

I am having a day off today, so I hope you come and visit again tomorrow. I'll have a new story and linoprint for you then.

x

Day 15 - Sad moon

One night I couldn't sleep so I got out of bed and went to the bathroom.

There was bright light streaming through the frosted glass of the bathroom window and it didn't seem to be from a street light. I wondered what it was, so I climbed onto the toilet seat and stood on my tippy toes to open the old window to investigate.

I pushed the window open and saw a beautiful big full moon. But the moon looked sad and I thought maybe the moon had a sad face because he knew I should be asleep in bed.

"Please don't be sad, moon. I'll go straight back to bed, I promise." And I did.

But the full moon still always looks sad.

Day 14 - The baby

Then my sister was born and she was a real Aussie. Now our family had a solid connection to this new country, because no matter where else we might go, my sister's place of birth would always be Australia.

She was just beginning to learn to talk when I started school. Each day when I got home, I proudly showed off the English I had learnt, although I often mixed up the two languages. I was working through my 'David, Sue and Wendy' book at school, and sometimes I cried because Wendy was such a difficult word that I thought I would never in my whole life learn to spell it.

But my baby sister was immersed in two languages from the start and she just absorbed them both with an impish smile.

Day 13 - Fish in the pan

Our next home was closer to the sea again. Although this neighbourhood lacked all the little 'continental' shops of the inner city, it more than made up for it with beaches and headlands and bushland. It was a lovely suburb for going for walks and we often went to the beach to make sand castles and to play in the waves.

I think we had very little money during that time, so sometimes when my father came home in the afternoon, he would go rock fishing for our dinner. All four of us went on these afternoon fishing excursions. While my father fished, my mother watched my brother and me as we played with toy boats in rock pools or climbed on rocks.

Some days my father caught a big fish, but mostly they were pretty small.

My parents didn't want relatives in the old country to know that things were a struggle for us. To reassure the relatives that life in Australia was simply perfect, my mother and father asked me for my dolls' cooking set. My father had caught three little fish that day. He and my mother artistically arranged one of the fish in the dolls' frying pan, with a few mini tomatoes alongside to give a sense of scale (they were supposed to look like big tomatoes).

When our relatives received the photo in the next letter, they marvelled that my dad caught fish that were too big to even fit in the frying pan!

Day 12 - The old quarry

Berlin and Melbourne are flat cities, but Sydney has lots of steep hills. Each day, my mother took my brother and me on a walk up and down the hilly narrow inner-city streets near our house.

We walked to the post office to buy aerogrammes and to post letters back to family and friends far away.

We walked to the little deli that sold 'continental' groceries which you couldn't buy in 'normal' grocery stores back then: things such as dark rye bread and olives and gherkins and liverwurst and cheeses that weren't cheddar.

We also often walked to the little park with the swing. The little park was at the high end of a street and it had a sort of rock cliff that dropped down to the streets below. I wonder if the area down there may have once been a quarry. My mother didn't like us going close to the edge, but I loved it because from there, the houses down below looked like they were a sort of toyland.

Once my brother rolled a big glass marble over the cliff edge. I hoped that it would bounce all the way down to the miniature-looking houses at the bottom, and knock them all down. But instead the marble just disappeared.

My brother was very sad that he had lost his precious marble. I was sad that I had missed out on seeing the demolition of toyland.