eglantine's cake:

First Day, New School

2012-02-03T13:07:00.002+11:00

1. Una, Grade One
You are stalky arms and legs
And a stiff green dress.
You are a backpack
And a broad rimmed hat.
You are eyes peering out
From under the rim.
You are a cubby hole
With your name on it.
You are your lunchbox.
You are the new girl on the mat
Sitting closest to the teacher.

I am goodbye.

2. Fred, Grade Three
You bounce
on the balls
of your feet.

Your worried smile
shows a gap.

You ask me not
to kiss you goodbye.

But your hand gives
the secret signal:
two quick pulses.
A single heartbeat

to tell me you love me
that right now
you need to be loved.

3.
Two girls vanish into a world
made for them. I swim
through a sea of parents,
strangers,
into the quiet of the deserted playground
looking for my husband's face.

Circus Girl

2012-02-02T21:38:00.003+11:00

Yesterday Martin went back to work and I didn't write a poem. I took the girls shopping for school shoes and to have their haircut. The girl waved her scissors somewhere near Frederique's head and charged me $22. She was, admittedly, an excellent comber though. Fred almost cried because the only Mary Janes in her size had a buckle. The shoe shop girl was brisk, firm, and on my side, unlike the hairdresser. In the end Fred opted for clompy shoes with velcro fastenings. Una tried on every pair in her size, walked around very thoughtfully in each and settled on very fancy brown t-bars. I gave them all the moneys and then I went home.

At home I lost the baby twice. In fairness to myself, once before we went out, and once after - and by then I was a whole new person. The first time the front door (with a dicky latch) had swung open and he had quietly taken himself up to visit the chickens. Fred, Una and I ran madly around the house inside and outside. My heart pounded. I was so relieved when he showed up. They were a long two minutes. The second time, Fred found him almost straight away. He'd climbed up the steep ladder and got himself on the trampoline. For a baby who's not really walking yet (15 steps is his record to date), he sure can move. We are all on high alert. Also yesterday Avery, who is a veritable strap houdini, fell out of the high chair onto his head. It wasn't a great parenting day. Today he did this boneless thing in the supermarket and managed to stand up in the pram totally self-liberated, despite a firm five point harness. I remember there was a girl who went to my high school who was a skilled contortionist. She would perform sometimes at school concerts. It was sort of like that.

Where is she now, that contortionist girl? What bleak-hearted circus did she join? I can't remember her name, but I can clearly visualise the bendiness of her body, and the sharp angular face. Angela? Andrea? If we ever speak of her again, let's call her circus girl.

Every day of January, this is the sort of thinking that went on in my head just before I wrote a poem. I miss it.

It's the last day of everything

2012-01-31T16:18:00.001+11:00

It’s the last day of everything
Summer has crept out the back door
Words taste salty on my tongue

The baby has woken a song
His hands found the words hiding
in their shape like a diamond

In the sky light is fleeting shadows pass
Laundry flaps on the line the end
Of the world and nothing is dry

Now I think about it nothing
Ever dried not completely you
Can’t enter the sleeve for dampness

The time for drying is done
In this peeling wooden house at
The fierce edge of disappointment

Things that will not end well include
The unrisen cake the fridge left open
This mineral poem

Words taste salty on my tongue
It’s the last day of everything
I don’t know what memory is for

the silk of sisters

2012-01-30T21:14:00.000+11:00

everything fragile
and the mirror is the world
this is the fairytale
I never told you
and it is coming true
the pride, the fall
the sideways sweep
see how it frames you?
your eyes haunt your face

Dromana Poems

2012-01-29T19:24:00.002+11:00

Rickets Point Arthur Streeton, 1890

DAY
1.
sea gull
gullup
brackwater

glooming algae

storm carry
spillaway

2.
seasky
flatlines

3.
shimmer light
heat glaze
long shallow deep

ironstitched
ghost ship
making waves

4.
look what
wash up
sea

two daughter
one son

one man
far out

NIGHT
1.
sun set pastiche
80s retro

2.
late night
babywalking

one house
up lit
late night
big shed
kid red
icypole

3.
young man
out with friends
no ID

4.
foreshore fireworks
city sky falling

5.
us out
afterdark
streets store
tomorrow’s heat

---
We had a night in Dromana at my sister-in-law's husband's family's holiday house. The painting above is actually Beaumaris, not Dromana, but looking out at the hazy heat this morning, Streeton's paintings were in my head.

The BFFs hit their late 30s

2012-01-28T09:57:00.003+11:00

For Z
She lives on the island
of our shared childhood
Something is making her sad
She's been brained
By the gods of trouble

An ocean is not impossible
We could go for gold
In the telephone olympics

If days were dealt
Like hands of cards
I used to get
A royal flush of her

Now she draws
A two of kids (and me a three)
There's hearts and spades
(labour, love)
Not many diamonds between us

And now she's clubbed
Oh gods of chemical sadness
Watch out
My voice is in her head too

Rhubarb

2012-01-27T21:24:00.006+11:00

for Kelly Gardiner
1.
A clutch of rhubarb, pale green, rose blush.
Heirloom: divided from her uncle’s crown
And dispersed among the family, now grown
In this garden plot, so green and lush.
The bush, the river. Summer’s fertile hush.
We drank coffee, talked of writing, and now
She cuts me several stalks to carry down
To where the car is parked. There is no rush.

The vegetable bouquet fills my front seat.
I take it home and cook it, soft and sweet,
In the cast iron pot that was my mum’s.
Perhaps the bub will have this as a treat
Or it could be a foil to fatty meat
Look how dark and deep the colour runs.

The evening holds the heat, I sweat and stir,
And think of the mild morning spent with her.

2.
So, in the fourteenth century the seeds
Were worth far more than opium, it’s said,
Indeed a potent drug from what I’ve read
It cured fevers, plagues and serviced other needs.
In the early eighteen hundreds close to Leeds
An apothecary finally got ahead
By learning how to grow it in a shed
Now rhubarb grows as easily as weeds.

They used as you’d expect good horse manure
“Night soil” was also merde du jour.
Let’s move on! And turn to other art
Now sugar was more readily procured
A recipe from sources quite obscure
Says cook it as one would a gooseberry tart.

In my dad’s wartime town a household tried
To stew, like chard, the leaves. They sadly died.

Let them come: an Aussie "bush" ballad for Australia Day

2012-01-26T19:01:00.005+11:00

Inspired by Firstdog

There's a small wooden boat that is barely afloat
On an ocean of sorrow and dreams.
While Australians vote, the PM clears her throat
And hope comes apart at the seams.

They will never arrive, neither dead nor alive,
If our politics bring them undone.
Let their dreaming survive, let their drowned one's revive,
Let them come, oh let them all come!

The borders aren't there, it's just water and air,
And land, water, air should be free.
There's plenty to share in this place "rich and rare",
And after all, we all came here by sea.

So let that boat reach us, let us learn what they'll teach us,
Let them come, oh please let them come.
And when they beseech us, let's not give them speeches,
Let us take them, let's take every one.

Yes we'll pack up the lies, let ourselves recognise
Our own selves in the depths of their faces.
In welcoming skies let a blue flag arise:
Shelter here, in our wide open spaces.

Synopsis

2012-01-25T22:22:00.001+11:00

It’s a city, it’s an island, this girl is looking for her cat.
She’s also being haunted, I should probably mention that.
A girl she knew in high school, but didn’t know that well
It’s all a kind of metaphor for some kinda sorta hell
I think she’s got a boyfriend, in fact they share a flat.
But mostly what she’s doing is she’s looking for her cat.

A poem by Una

2012-01-25T08:51:00.002+11:00

On Your Own
A girl plays softly on the piano
Nobody’s around
And everybody’s out of harm
The light shines on to the painting
As you look at it and stare
The painting makes you feel calm
The sunlight shines in the painting
You can almost see it move
As you look at her
She’s concentrating
She doesn’t know she’s being painted
She plays as the birds fly around

the long-dead artist's widow

2012-01-24T21:35:00.006+11:00

For Daphne
We’re here to take the children that your husband made of light,
Every brave and dancing dazzle a strike against the dark.
Here – a boy emerges from the shadows in the park,
And here a girl leans over, in lemon sun, to write.

These children have been pressed together, hidden out of sight,
We weigh them up and balance them, beauty strange and stark,
Every brave and dancing dazzle a strike against the dark,
We’re here to take the children that your husband made of light.

We’ll hang them in the lounge room, or the hallway where it’s bright,
They’ll live in our whole vision, every glimmer, every spark.
We’ll visit with our infant son your place of mud and bark
We’ll tap on glass, and peer inside: you’re sturdy, but you’re slight.
We’re here to take the children that your husband made of light.

---
Today Martin and I did a wonderful and strangely poignant thing, we went to visit his Great Aunt whose husband was a wonderful artist in the post-war years and came home with six paintings and two sketches after sorting through, oh, hundreds with all the sketches. It was amazing looking through the work, selecting which ones we wanted to keep - a once in a lifetime opportunity. I love that they are all of children of varying ages (the one in "lemon light" is a very young grown up), and they all suggest inner-reflection, a depth of experience that the artist respectfully observes from a distance, without intrusion. She lives in a mudbrick house in Wandin that her husband and his brother (also a painter) built soon after WW2. A magical place. It is some many years since David died, and Daphne recently decided she would rather give the paintings to family who know and care about the subjects in the painting (mostly their five children) than try and sell them.

We enter the green forests where treeferns

2012-01-23T20:56:00.005+11:00

We enter the green forests where treeferns unfurl secret desire – long of tongue. Lichen scales a Mountain Ash like second skin.
Valleys plunge and mountains swell.
Cicadas scream: warn us that we will be lost.
We are lost, we are travelling into the past, a little faster than walking pace.
We are looking for ourselves waving at crossroads. We lean out, we wave, we are looking.
There’s someone at a back fence, their garden grows towards us, three grown ladies: a triptych of daughter, mother, grandmother.
They solemnly wave. Is that us, I wonder, waving frantically, is that us? Which one am I?
I am still waving, though the train’s long gone. I go inside with my mother, with my daughter and pour each of us a cup of amber tea, leaves drift below the surface.
The forest is still growing. I can hear it from my kitchen. The whispering of stringybark, the throaty husk of fernsong. I have forgotten to tell you about the birds.

Villanelle for an outer suburb

2012-01-22T20:43:00.001+11:00

From outside there drifts the sound of hens,
The tv in the lounge room murmurs on,
And at the edge of things the light descends.

The next-door neighbours entertain their friends
In the late gold of January sun,
From outside there drifts the sound of hens.

And further down the street what’s broken mends
(a cup, an egg, a life, stuff come unspun)
And at the edge of things the light descends.

Across the road a marriage slowly ends,
At number twenty-four the worst is done,
From outside there drifts the sound of hens.

The road, you’ll see it narrows as it bends.
This is where the Wilsons lost a son.
And at the edge of things the light descends.

The shadow of each object looms, extends
The TV murmurs on and on and on
From outside there drifts the sound of hens
And at the edge of things the light descends.

First Steps at Heide

2012-01-21T21:50:00.003+11:00

Sunlight, grass, flowers; the world expands.
Stout with purpose he stands
Wobbles, steadies. Then without dramatic
Flair he takes a step. Two, three, four,

Observed not by me (I faced the other way).
He soon repeats the stunt, hands
Grasp air. These legs will bear him
all his life (god willing), through every door

Into the world of men, places
I will never follow [public toilets, his mates’ dark houses, his lovers’ houses of light, the apartment he rents for a month in France, the road flecked with butterflies that he drives down too fast on balmy nights, his honeymoon suite]
Anyway, it is done. Four erratic steps.
Unseen by me, but history made this note.

magnify

2012-01-20T19:50:00.007+11:00

on closer inspection
I discover
an insect wing
stuck to your cheek
and I see you
for what you are

a surface
in this house of surfaces

the insect wing
is also a surface
translucent
webbed with dark veins
a mosaic
of tiny flecked surfaces

I pluck it from you
let it flutter

the floor
the final surface
which supports
everything

swimming lesson reprise: a sonnet

2012-01-19T22:18:00.002+11:00

glitter
dim
swim
shatter
flutter
limb
skim
better

shoulder
breath
reach her
hold her
death
teach her

swimming lesson

2012-01-18T21:09:00.001+11:00

that man
is teaching
my daughter
how to breathe

one two
three

scattering light,
her arms
seem too thin
to matter, but
she’s progressing

he scoops her body
suddenly sideways
against his large body
touches his cheek
to her cheek

I catch my breath
the surface of the pool
dazzles
chlorine smells
like slow time
amniotic

Lullaby for sad girls

2012-01-17T21:17:00.002+11:00

Press your head and listen to the deeps
The burrowing of Beetle as it creeps
Deep inside the tunnel where it sleeps.
Lay your head down on the pillow dear.

Light has gone and everything is drear
Listen with the pressing of an ear
Something down there sings so soft and clear
Sorry for this child as she weeps.

It’s night time darling, everybody sleeps,
In the morning, I will still be here.

Dave

2012-01-16T19:56:00.006+11:00

His working life began with cleaning bricks
He'd lift them one by one and scrape them down
With mostly migrants, old Italians, Greeks,
Their forearms as thick as Christmas hams.

At lunch: spaghetti poured out from a thermos,
The talk, not rough or kind, of adult men,
The feel of brick dust scouring epidermis,
The unrelenting ache of labouring.

He spreads his teacher's hands as he tells this,
Hands for music, hands that help him speak.
Embarrassed, laughs, "I didn't last a week."
His head goes back, I watch him reminisce.

It's that old tale of boys becoming men;
Quite simply put, it didn't happen then.

The Park

2012-01-15T21:21:00.001+11:00

I had a daughter once, a pretty thing, I took her to the park.
She built a wild, living house at the base of some trees
and became an angry thing, and refused to leave.

I still drive past that old park sometimes, hoping to catch a glimpse.
Everything’s fallen into disrepair.
The slides enter the deep earth, the swings have swung off their chains.

All the ladders go nowhere.

Toby

2012-01-14T22:01:00.002+11:00

That dog never gave us anything but despair
He snarled and bit. Every time the screen door opened,
He bolted. Once he got run over, and worse survived.
Something had gone wrong in the making of him, mum said.

Though frightened of gleaming tooth, I loved him.
He was a terrier, brown and silky with long blonde hairs
He could fit on a lap, he worshipped my mother,
He knew the words walk and cat. Shook hands.

Most of the time he was okay, as long as you kept
The door tight shut, and didn’t let him go a visitor.
He was unpredictable. I’ve loved men like him since,
Lying in front of the gas heater with one eye open.

They sent him to live on a farm. I can picture him, bolting
Across paddocks, no law, nothing, would catch him
Skimming the fences, taking off into the sky.
He could run that dog, though he never gave us anything but despair.

More Month of Poetry

2012-01-14T21:46:00.004+11:00

The official blog, created and co-ordinated by Kat Apel can be found here. You have to have a password to read the daily poetry, but there's other stuff to look at there.

Anna Ryan Punch, an accomplished poet and fantastic being, is recording her poems at her blog: four hundred years ago, a baby went to sleep.

Amra Pajalic, a really interesting YA author and all round supergal, is recording hers at her blog

Camer0n is recording his at his blog: not unimportant. I particularly enjoyed his How to roast a chicken in a Sestina:
Enlist a poet to extol the extinguished life of your noble chicken.
Remember how it knew how to chicken and none of your guests know how.
Serve its memory best on the day with gravy and steaming hot.

I have decided that Sestinas are a kind of fabulous delirium. You have to be potty to keep repeating yourself like that.

Cuspid

2012-01-13T15:11:00.003+11:00

Swollen tissue, bulging gum.
Sleepless you arch against
this old enemy, pain,
angry at the savage saw

as what lies hidden rises.
Child, this thing will come
and change you, sharpen you.
In time there will be more

through shining pulp, one by one,
then each lost, and grown again.
It is eternal, a gleaming truth
hidden in the puzzle of the jaw.

This is what the medicine is for
so drink it, the sleeping hours wane.

Dollhouse

2012-01-12T21:00:00.001+11:00

A house that folds itself inside a house
A house within (and so within within)
The longing of the object for itself

Word Made Flesh

2012-01-11T21:44:00.003+11:00

The kiss that passes from your mouth to mine is a word
First learned. Such strange tenderness, in the full
Rose of your blushing mouth. This is a love song, though you
Are not my first. But I have known you since you were complicated:
All shadows and bones made of light, I have seen your sisters
Tug you into the world by the length of your limbs.

I am here you signal with your semaphore limbs
On daily waking, every morning a new bewildering word
Wielded in the drama of laundry and breakfast and sisters
You look out the window at landscapes stretched under a full
And golden sun, a dangerous kisser (it’s complicated),
Renewed everyday from the same ancient light source: you

Who are the centre of everything understands this, you
Who wears yourself out like clockwork, your mechanical limbs
Chugging along the floor towards anything complicated
So you might understand it with your fingers, speak its word
Fathom it with your emerging cerebrum to the full
In the same way you long to comprehend the intricate sisters.

For example you know that like your own hands, sisters
Come in twos, rolling around on the floor, they are like you
But so long, so complete in their power, so risen, so full.
They weave and dance they plait their limbs,
They speak with tangled tongues, and each comes with a word
That is the shape of their faces, their complicated

Selves which began in the shadow- and light-world and complicated
My body, split me into shards of matter, into sisters
And now brother of the tender kiss. You are the word
I couldn’t think of before I went to sleep, I couldn’t think of you
Until I felt the press of your burning skull and your limbs
Aslither from the tightness of me, an emptying of what was full.

I will never be that vessel again, I will never be so full,
I will never be so starving and cram packed, so complicated.
You are the last of them to arrive, the last package of limbs
The last precious gift of skull. No more brothers, no more sisters
For something was born that early afternoon, what was born was you,
What was born was the last, the final word.

I gathered you into my limbs and looked at your face full.
It took one word to make you complicated,
To give you to us and your sisters; I carved flesh to name you.

----
I was awed by Anna Ryan Punch's Sestina when she wrote it ages ago and reminded of it today when I saw her and Kat Apel, organised of Month of Poetry, chatting about it on Twitter, so I decided to give this puzzle like form a go. It took me a while to get my head around it, but I found writing it oddly hypnotic.

Display Home

2012-01-10T21:47:00.002+11:00

This house is not to scale. The Sinatra has a powder room,

while the Columba has a water closet, he says, as if it means something.

I laugh. I am wearing my boots and a two hundred dollar dress

because we are pretending to be grown ups, but grown ups don’t laugh

and my handbag cost fifty cents and we don’t want a room

for our play-station. The man looks at us as if we come from

very far away, though it’s only twenty-five minutes up the road

and we do that every time we need to buy milk and bread and shoeshine.

Size is everything and the rule is you have to have three types of cladding.

Before we went in, we felt we were doing something dirty

like going to Club X, or contemplating swinging, or mixing our rubbish

with our recycling. At home our chickens have been cooped up

and one of them is getting pecked by the others, we call them the bitches.

We’ve built a new separate coop for Rosie who gets pecked and we made it

out of a wooden box and a stained glass window and she stays in there

all the time. She might die still, but at least she’ll spend her last days

in peace. I think about Rosie and the chickens and wonder what would happen

to them if we lived here. What would happen to us all? The backyard

is a sliver of green, with plants that were frightened into existence.

They manufacture the air you breathe because there’s not enough here

to sustain us, but that’s an extra, it will cost you.

Some nights

2012-01-09T22:03:00.001+11:00

Some nights fall:
The chickens are fed,
The kids are in bed,
The dishes are done,
But the words don’t come.
Nothing at all.
The shadowy hall
The clock on the wall.
Nights fall. And some
Are like this one
The words don’t come.

Kinglake Sonnet

2012-01-08T22:11:00.002+11:00

In the fire scarred, mist softened hills we stop
for hot milk and meat pies, shelter from rain.
A man considers the rolls that remain,
reflective bands on the sleeves of his top.
His uniform draws the attention
of my two girls. “Fireman? Police?” they ask.
“Paramedic,” I say, as he walks past.
The girls regard him with apprehension.

He cradles a large sized bottle of coke.
“Somebody crashed in the rain,” says Fred.
Una says, “Somebody’s dying, or dead.”
But girls, he’s mostly a normal bloke
getting lunch and a drink like us, just the same,
and the rain is the rain. Just the rain. Just the rain.

Breastfeeding

2012-01-07T21:55:00.002+11:00

You wake crying

in the early afternoon,

In a sunlit room

I lie down to feed you.

Your eyes gaze into mine,

Light enters and exits you,

And we are twice joined.

Wimmera by Sidney Nolan

2012-01-06T20:58:00.003+11:00

I said to my love who is living
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian tree
Ern Malley

a figure
the lost dark
reels from the open country
of himself

I was in Dimboola once
the landscape was not gone
though you took it with you
pressed between the pages of a book

the artist eliminates all traces
of looking
takes only himself
and not the frightened dust

At One

2012-01-05T22:25:00.001+11:00

Hello? You okay?
You gone go inna car?
You gone go?
You okay?
yuh/yuh/yuh/
More? G'day. Hi. Yay.
Hey. Heeey.
Mumma. Dadda.
You okay? Okay?
Gone go?
Bye bye boowa.

Dreaming Sisters

2012-01-04T21:49:00.003+11:00

each night
they sisters lie
side by side
on narrow beds

squabble fret
squirm protest
finally one
then the other
submits

two girls
breathing out
ink black clouds
pin-prick stars

private constellations

they wake at light
relieved
and irritated
to see each other
again

The manifestation of unnamed longing

2012-01-03T21:14:00.002+11:00

Baby in the high chair

More? More? More?

We give him more

It ends up on the floor.

41ºC

2012-01-02T21:21:00.007+11:00

As if he can’t believe the heat either

a crow, glossy as an oil slick

staggers under the supermarket awning

with his beak hanging open.

I shop for things we might require:

Arnotts Assorted Creams, 40 fish fingers,

5 litres of milk, yoghurt by the bucket.

In the carpark my husband runs the air-conditioning

the baby lolls sideways in his seat

and the girls play animal vegetable or mineral.

Una is a letterbox

Fred is a potato cake

Una is a pancake in the shape of a dead guy.

At the cash register I run back for dishwashing liquid.

A woman says sternly into the telephone

hooked up to the loudspeaker:

there is a Nissan Patrol with a dog inside

and no windows open if you are in the store

please attend to your animal.

I walk out into the sweltering carpark of the late afternoon.

This human world is melting into the hills.

We drive into the glare.

I join the game. They ask me: Are you an animal?

No. Are you a vegetable? Yes.

What sort of vegetable? they shriek

Mum? What sort of a vegetable are you?

Una asks are you crumby?

Laughing I look back at their laughing faces.

We drive past cows in their fields.

I am an apple pie.

The long day grows hotter.

Something is terribly wrong.

The Two Brothers

2012-01-01T16:32:00.004+11:00

such wounded funny men such boys

such self-effacing broadfaced fathers

of dark-eyed sons such husbands such friends

with hands that dote that circled their aunts

that brush past at the sink with incidental touch

that hold each other aloft such men

such wounded funny Catholic boys

such tea-drinking on and off the wagon men

such country boys such eager grazers

of the night sky with one collective eye

such moon walkers hand talkers heart warmers

such tall talers such dream sailors

such brothers such boys such men

---

Month of poetry is on again and I am participating. I treasure the poems I wrote last year, capturing daily life with a six to ten week old baby as well as the older girls. The above was inspired by our company for New Year's Eve. We spend a lovely night in a rambling house in Drysdale in the company of very dear friends and some of their extended family. These brothers are two of five boys, and two of the genuinely kindest and most interesting people I have ever met - I am fascinated by their whole family. The kids had a ball, romping around in the gardens in a massive tribe with two dogs, even Avery had the company of four other babies. It was a wonderful night and a magical start to the New Year. The men got the big telescope out and we all lined up to look at the craters on the yellow edge of the moon and dream ourselves up into the timeless sky.

Reading Recap

2011-12-30T09:25:00.004+11:00

So I've actually kept a record of my reading this year thanks to Goodreads. It's the first time I've kept any sort of reading journal, though I have long envied the friends I have who have always done this. I should get Fred and Una onto it.

At the beginning of the year I blithely signed up for a reading challenge at Goodreads - 100 books in a year. I assumed I'd easily read that. But in August I realised there was no way I was going to make it. Rather than write the challenge off, I amended it to 50. So far I've read 48. I am almost finished two books (The Man in the Wooden Hat on audio and Amy Bloom's astonishing short story collection Where the God of Love Hangs Out) so can comfortably say I will achieve this.

Of those 50 books, some are audio, some I read on the Kindle and some I consumed the old fashion way. Some are novels I read aloud to the kids. Anyway, here's a best of:

Best Kindle

The Summer Without Men was the first book I read on the Kindle and it cemented my love for it. I think the Kindle is especially well suited to novellas. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a short memoir of illness, in which a bedridden woman becomes absorbed in recording the life of a wild snail who shares her sick room. Another short novel, The Golden Day, is Ursula Dubosarsky's latest, a very absorbing fiction which transcends traditional audience (which means it has been published as YA), an urban Sydney Picnic at Hanging Rock, well matched with The Secret River which I listened to later in the year. I also loved the chilling We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a Penguin modern classic by an author I hadn't heard of before, Shirley Jackson. Castle is one of those books that pre-empts modern YA. Her short story collection The Lottery is also on the Kindle and I've been dipping in and out of it all year.

Speaking of short fiction, I've been reading quite a lot this year as that's what I've been writing. Also on the Kindle I loved Making Babies by Anne Enright, short memoirs about parenthood. I love her as a writer and feel totally bonded to her as a parent. Also after reading a recommendation by Louise Swinn I read Karen Hitchcock's collection Little White Slips. Hitchcock is a doctor and according to the interwebs a triathlete. She writes beautifully and seeringly about people touching on many of the same subjects I am drawn to as a writer, so it was fascinating to read fiction by someone who was "same same but different" (ahem, I am not a triathlete. Have I ever mentioned that? I am not a doctor either.)

Best Audible

Audiobooks are situated somewhere between reading and having a long gossipy conversation with your best friend. Below in my "best of" is actually all the audiobooks I've listened to this year. I attempted others but am more likely to abandon books when listening than reading.

Abide With Me Sprawling, compassionate, heartbreaking.

The Help I've blogged about this before

Old Filth My afterlife consists of a giant library of books about everyone I ever met. Many of my family would be in books by Jane Gardam. Actually my dad knew her as a boy.

The Secret River Bill Wallis narrated Old Filth, so I came across this when searching the audible website by narrator. It was a book I'd always meant to read (having loved Lilian's Story). So it was a done deal. I struggled through the first part set in England which is impeccably researched but burdened with so much detail I couldn't make a picture in my head. But from the moment Wallis spoke the words Part Two I was hooked. Listening is relentless and unforgiving, and there were some difficult scenes I would have skimmed if I'd been reading.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Amazing layered non-fiction book that includes as part of its project a deep and intriguing reflection on the act of writing about people's lives.

The Marriage Plot This is a wonderfully put together book, very much driven by character. I found the material very identifiable, though I am probably 10 years younger than the characters. But it was a world and a collection of experiences I recognised. I had a few issues by the end of the novel particularly regarding Eugenides treatment of his main female protagonist, but it was a fun and absorbing listen and I felt invested in all the characters.

The Man in the Wooden Hat is a gift of a book, a sequel to Old Filth that dwells with his wife Betty.

Best Read-alouds

Superfudge and the Lotta books made the whole family laugh out loud. Martin would finish the dishes and sit in the lounge to listen. I love these books, structured around incident and encounter. A friend described the genre as "the family down the street" and I think it might be one of my favourites, especially for very young children.

The Hundred Dresses is a book that's been recommended on here a few times by American readers and when I came across it last year just before Christmas I decided to buy it for Una who had recently enjoyed The Worst Witch. She struggled to identify with The Hundred Dresses but Fred listened fascinated. And then they both incorporated the book into their imaginative play.

For Una's birthday, I decided to go back to the picture book, but still wanted an extended and engaging reading experience. I came across Millie Starts School at the wonderful Eltham Bookshop and knew this would appeal. It is a picture book in four chapters and conjures up the school experience beautifully. Jane Godwin is brilliant at capturing contemporary Australian childhood and those sorts of experiences to which we can all relate.

Cicada Summer This was almost a bit beyond Fred but she loved the idea of the timeslip, and because she knows Kate well, and has played often with Kate's oldest daughter Alice (who bears a lot of similarities to Anna in Cicada Summer), the book resonated for her, so next we tried

Charlotte Sometimes which was definitely more challenging and actually is structurally very odd. Fred adored it though and we will look out Penelope Farmer's other books about the Summers girls.

Best of the Rest

Gilgamesh I read this after the Meanjin Tournament of Books. It's a strange book, often book people talk about being "in safe hands", feeling the author knows where she is taking the reader. I never felt safe with Gilgamesh and I doubted the author's ability to satisfactorily end the book right up till the last paragraph, but by sleight of hand she did it. That feeling of not being safe actually makes the book an oddly tense read, not entirely comfortable, but I was completely entranced. This is more like a spell than a novel.

The Shattering is great YA. As is This is Shyness. These both might fit into the "supernatural romance" category that most YA seems to be tipping towards these days but both are SO MUCH MORE.

After listening to Abide With Me I read Strout's other two books Olive Kitteridge and Amy and Isabelle. I love the way she writes, the richness of characters interior lives and their interconnectedness, the sprawl of detail and the small town as stage for human drama. These are books you can read page by page, sometimes I would devour a 100 pages in a sitting, then it might take me a week to read ten more. She builds her stories sentence by sentence, each one is its own artwork.

Kinglake-350 is a retelling and examination of the 2009 bushfires but also a study of the Australian male. It got a little *too* blokey for me by the end, but I fully acknowledge that this is a book written to also appeal to people who don't regularly read. And it is extremely compulsive, and more than a little unsettling (as it should be).

In the last months of my pregnancy last year I read the Little Women books so sometime after Avery was born I picked up March. I was disappointed, the connection to Alcott's world to me is the most problematic element of March. But I was inspired to read Year of Wonders and I loved it. I even loved the epilogue that dismayed so many others.

The first book I read this year was The Children by Charlotte Wood, the sequel (or companion or whatever) Animal People came out this year and it's high on my to read list. Charlotte is active on Twitter which is to say she and I spend more time than we should talking about our respective dinners on the computer.

Out of the 50 books I read this year, 13 were by Australian women (well, strictly speaking Karen Healey is a New Zealander but she was living here when she wrote it) plus there were 2 anthologies in which Australian women are well represented. Only 4 books of the total fifty were by men (2 Australian). There is an Australian Women Writer's Reading Challenge for 2012. Considering my "to read" pile currently includes Sophie Cunningham's Melbourne (I'm about a third of the way in and relishing it), Gillian Mears The Foal's Bread, Grenville's Sarah Thornhill, Wood's Animal People and Maureen McCarthy's Careful What You Wish For and my most anticipated books for next year include the conclusion to Michelle Cooper's compelling trilogy The FitzOsborne's at War (rock on April - also the month the new Anne Tyler is being released), the next Shyness novel, Margo Lanagan's Sea Hearts and Maureen McCarthy's newie inspired by her family connection to the Abbotsford convent I am almost there. But looking over the year's books I am beginning to think I might benefit from a few more Y chromosomes in my reading pile.

Changing Places

2011-12-14T09:53:00.006+11:00

Our oldest daughter started school at The Local three years ago. It was a small school when we chose it. We shopped around because that’s what parents seem to these days, looking at three schools in the area. We were impressed by the big school 10 minutes drive away, charmed by the little (but not as little as The Local) school adjacent to Fred's kinder about 8 minutes drive away with its mix of new and old buildings. Both these schools are serviced by a bus that passes on the main road, five minutes walk from our house. But Fred loved The Local the best, and I favoured the idea of a local school, one we could walk to. When we chose it we thought there were about 85 kids, by the time Fred started there were 65.

Her class size, a combined prep/1/2, was fairly normal, about 25 kids total, with two teachers in the expansive double unit. It seemed in many ways an ideal set up. The extremely experienced prep teacher was kind and gentle. I have never in three years heard her raise her voice. The other teacher in the room was also experienced, but with a different style. They seemed to complement each other.

By the time Fred was in grade two, the numbers of the whole school had dropped dramatically to 37. Her grade of ten was down to eight. My other daughter, Una, started the school as one of only two preps, for the second year in a row. The art teacher had left, as had several other staff members. The school was down to three permanent teachers (all very senior), and there was no longer two teachers in Fred's classroom - it was her third year in a row with the same teacher.

The Local School offers many opportunities to students, inter-school sport where everyone gets a turn from grade 3 to 6 (sometimes combining with other smaller schools to make a team), a lovely music program, PE, and a larger than usual number of whole school excursions and incursions. There are discos and bush dances and this year the parents participated in a progressive dinner party. The whole school is performing The Wizard of Oz tomorrow night. The kids care for a small but productive vegetable garden. The students host assembly each week. The OSHC program is staffed by a dynamic and creative young woman.

In the winter terms the kids have Cubbyland: using found objects they make little houses in a gully of trees. They form tribes and beg, borrow and steal supplies (one year a talented boy sang for sticks). The cubbies are dismantled every Friday, new tribes form on Monday. The politics of Cubbyland are intricate and impossible for an outsider to really fathom, especially a grown up. The self governing works pretty well. It's kind of like Lord of the Flies, but, as the Principal once said to me, 'without the Piggy killing.'

We’ve had problems at the school, some of them resolved easily, even elegantly, and some not to our satisfaction. I am sure this is true of every parent at every school, but it can be hard not to take it personally in a school of 37 kids. Still, mostly our kids' experiences at The Local have been great. Fred particularly is devoted to the school.

I have to admit, it’s been a little demoralising to be part of a school that feels like it’s dying, that doesn’t have the support of the local community – so many parents travel out of the area for school. It’s a vicious cycle. The smaller the school gets, the less people are inclined to choose it for their own children. 'Our school is not very popular,' Una said to me out of the blue in the car a few weeks ago as we drove up the hill out of Warrandyte where - a long time ago, a whole year - she'd gone to creche. 'No,' I admitted. 'It's not very popular.' She sighed. 'I'd like to go to a popular school.' Una and I have had a conversation along these lines every few weeks since before she even started at The Local. In fact over three years ago, when I was looking at schools for Fred Una came with me. She walked out of the Big School and said, 'This is my school.'

When Avery was born last year a friend commented (on this blog I think) 'You’ll populate that tiny school yet.' Unfortunately she was wrong. In the last two weeks we have made the decision to move our children to the Big School ten minutes away.

So we are saying goodbye to our tiny school and it's a sad goodbye. I love the school. I love the staff: I respect them as educators; I like them as people. I feel invested in the other children and the idea that I won’t be there in 2015 to see Fred’s class graduate is a sad thought. Although I know my children are ready for the challenges of the big school, for a busy and vibrant program, and for a larger circle of friends, I do feel that I am taking something precious away from them as well.

Mostly though I am mourning for myself. I love the walk to school in the mornings. I like feeling a part of the place, the relationship I have with the teachers, the easy, casual vibe with the other parents. I’ll miss arriving early to pick up the kids and wandering the corridor with Avery. I’ll miss the relaxed school uniform, that I can send them in streetwear if we're behind in our laundry. I'll miss the way I can hold the whole school in my head, I'll miss knowing who they play with. I'll miss miniature army, and the way all the older kids are ascribed family titles "mother", "uncle", "aunt".

We told them on Saturday, after their Friday night school disco. We decided to tell them separately, so we took them out "Christmas shopping". I took Una. I pulled over by the side of the road, opposite the Big School. I told her to climb over into the front seat, I had something to tell her. She looked at me very seriously. I explained she was going to change schools, that she was going to go to a more popular school. Her face lit up, her eyes shone. Everything pleased her - the Italian and violin lessons

Martin told Fred. I couldn't, I was worried that if she cried I would cry, and it would send the wrong message. I've been crying a lot about it. For the week after we signed the forms and before we told them I'd been sick with anxiety over it. Every time Fred hugged me or just simply looked happy and at peace I felt like a traitor. And as I thought would happen Fred burst into tears. But almost immediately she was okay. She knew she would miss her school and her friends. Yet the idea of a big bustling population of kids was undeniably exciting, and her outlook now is positive.

The teachers who haven't taught Fred yet are sad to see her go, they've both been looking forward to having her in their classes. 'I just hope,' says the 5/6 teacher, 'that conventional school doesn't take away her spark.' What I don't say, but have discovered, is that there is more pressure to conform at a small school, perhaps not from the institution but certainly from the other kids. I think socially at least Fred will be able to be more herself. To some extent she'll be able to create the community she wants to be a part of, instead of being forced to fit in with the 5 other girls in her class, or risk being an outsider.

So far the other parents have been disappointed but understanding. The sick feeling is slowly subsiding. As my friend Jelly said, coming and going is part of school life, even (perhaps especially) at our small school.

Yesterday the girls did a practice at the Big School. We got there during the lunch hour and the girls went off to explore the playground. I tried to keep both of them in my sights, worried that they wouldn’t know what to do when the bell rang, and got a little panicked as Una chased a boy she knew from Kinder in one direction and Fred wandered off with two preps interrogating her in another direction.

Instead of a bell they played music to signal the return to classes. I found Una staring at three rubbish bins, oblivious to the sudden tide of kids heading back to the school buildings.

'There’s music coming out of that bin,' she told me.

I delivered Una to her teacher, a warm woman who lives out our way and used to be the library teacher – so I think we will like each other. She was expecting Una and greeted her by name. One of Fred’s prep groupies from the playground was in Una’s class and volunteered to take care of her.

I took Fred round to her room a small, slightly pokey portable - so different from the expanse of space at the Local. The kids were lined up outside and Fred recognised a girl from kinder who lives near us, who we see regularly at the library bus. Her new teacher is tall and smily and used to captain the Australian volleyball team. Apparently he asked the class if anyone knew what an acrostic is and Fred-the-poet stuck up her hand and explained it to the class. Her acrostic was:

Funny

Reading

Eating

Doesn’t like eggs.

I love that she chose Funny and Reading to describe herself.

As I write this I hear the Local School bell, signalling recess. I love that sound, it makes me think of my children, I can picture them dropping their pencils, running outside to play.

I know they’re going to be fine. I just hope I can say the same about me.

The quiet of this blog

2011-12-07T21:23:00.003+11:00

I feel I should write something.

Something about my days, how one falls into to another. How they seem to flick past, like cards expertly dealt in a game of chance. How each day travels with its own startling velocity, and I am a passenger of time, being travelled. How I don't mind it, the brisk pace, the whirlwind, the clear breathless days.

Time is a contradiction. Its relativity is relative: an eccentric uncle, a distant grandmother, the child of your cousin, strange intimacy, the intimacy of strangers.

I go to parties and it's nice to see people but I feel like I am pretending to be someone else. I feel like I'm pretending to be myself. I talk, I laugh, I drive home so tired that inky shadows begin to take shape at the corner of my vision and I have to pull over and rest my eyes.

I count up the words I've written this year, the stories I've completed, and I realise I've actually been quite productive, all things considered, though I feel like I haven't been working at all.

I think in novels but I don't write them. I dream in stories. But I'm not writing. Inside I blog, I journal, I diarise. I write nothing down.

It's left me, the compulsion. I am adrift from words. When I try to force them out, they sit on the page and go nowhere. Sentences clatter. There's no music.

So I read instead. I wait. I try not to panic. I'm not writing right now. I'm not righting write now. The days go on, the hours slip by with ease, and I'm comforted by that, because if the hours were eternal, I'd be lonely inside them without the words.

Halloween, it's unAustrayan

2011-11-06T08:50:00.002+11:00

And yet...

In St Andrews, as in many suburbs and towns all over Australia, kids go trick or treating on Halloween. My kids went last year as part of a group, up the main street with a couple of plucky parents. They asked to go again this year, this time just with me. I angsted about it. It's not part of our cultural tradition and it felt wrong to let my girls go round knocking on doors caging lollies off the neighbours (though I know that wasn't the main appeal - they just wanted to dress up and parade around the area). I said yes with all sorts of caveats, with a plan that I would email our immediate surrounding neighbours to forewarn them or that I would send the kids out with treats to deliver rather than simply to receive.

The reason I said yes (apart from the fact that an expectation had been created from last year and also because from the year we moved in) was because I more than understood that desire to go knocking on people's doors. My childhood bestie Zoe and I as kids would take any excuse to go rapping on people's doors. We had gone Christmas caroling one year for instance, another thing that is not really a tradition in Australia. And I like the idea of the kids being out and about. They have a good relationship with all the immediate neighbours, so the idea of extending this to the wider area is appealing.

Apparently in other Australian suburbs there are letter box drops and sticker systems to alert people that you're okay with them knocking on your door. But we don't have letter boxes in St Andrews (you have to go to the General Store to get your mail). And there was no point putting signs up at the Store since it wouldn't apply to most of the area - it's such a far flung suburb. And for the same reason we couldn't just include families from the school, as we have only 20 families and they live many kilometers apart.

Anyway in the end the same mum from last year rang and said she was happy to take the girls again and so, loving a cop out, that's what we did, drove the girls down to their place (opposite the school) and left them with that brave mum and a small gang of zombies and witches. They made it as far as our place and back again. I drove down to pick them up, but I was too early, they were still walking along the main road. So I ducked into the access road where they couldn't see me and watched them walk along, carrying their bags of spoils. Una lagged a little behind, tiring perhaps. She stopped to look at something on the road. Fred broke away from the group and tugged Una along. They caught up. There was something deeply satisfying about secretly watching them out in the world.

There were other gangs of kids out too, four of five small clutches, all dressed up. I drove up to the house where Fred and Una were headed. There were still a few houses for them to try so I waited with some of the mums out the front. One was spectacularly dressed up herself. We admired her soft brown curly wig. She said 'It even looks good without make up.' The girls came running back, wired on sugar, thrusting their stuffed, disintegrating paper bags into my hands. They had cups of jelly with them that someone had made, with lolly snakes crawling out. So. Much. Sugar. And just before dinner too.

Anyway, in the end I had totally changed my mind about the tradition. Instead of bothering the neighbours, I realised the girls were bringing joy to people who didn't get to see kids all that often, either because theirs had grown or they didn't have any. People had dressed up, had bowls of lollies, were waiting for people to come and knock on their door and would have been disappointed if no one had come knocking. I remembered from the year we went caroling (1986), one woman who was so overcome with joy and nostalgia and homesickness for England that she thrust a five dollar note into our hands despite our repeated protestations that we didn't want money.

Watching kids milling around, most unaccompanied by adults, reminded me of my own childhood, growing up in a bushy suburb. We door knocked for all sorts of reasons - sponsorship for walkathons and readathons, our Christmas caroling adventure, offering to do odd jobs, looking for my dog who ran away on a regular basis and a menagerie of imaginary pets and even just mooching house to house looking for someone to 'come out and play'. In a world where this doesn't happen anymore, partly because of a societal fear of some shadowy stranger who wants to do unnameable things to our children, there is a particular pleasure in seeing them dress up as the things that scare them and march up to a door to ask in a clear singsong voice "trick or treat?"

Though Una as a mouse didn't engender much fear. 'NO ONE was afraid of me,' she said at the end of it all, mystified, because isn't everyone afraid of mice?

a game in a game

2011-10-23T16:30:00.000+11:00

The girls are playing. Una is a dog. She has bunches in her hair for ears, and a scarf stuffed into the back of her tights. Fred wants to join the game. She gets the stethoscope from the dress ups. She's the vet.

But Fred the vet is bossy and interventionist, and it was Una's game. Una comes to us. "I don't want Fred to be the vet, I just want her to be normal." By normal she means she wants Fred to be a dog too. 'I'll play my own game,' Fred says. Una wants Fred to play, she just doesn't want Fred to be a vet. This is an ongoing daily drama. Fred running from every disagreement with a quick and cutting 'I'm not playing!' and Una's copious tears. Martin starts to intervene. That way madness lies. He gives up. Fred goes down to the bedroom and comes back with an armful of stuffed toys which she dumps on the ground.

'I know!' Una offers. 'Fred could be a dog playing a game that she's the doctor. It could be a game in a game.'

Her words give me a shiver. A game within a game. A story within a story. A girl within a girl. Are metatexts are as primal as stories themselves - peeling back layers and layers of reality and illusion? Or is this trickery learned? Putting one Russian doll inside another, another doll already concealed inside the first.

10 Quick Questions*

2011-10-19T09:34:00.004+11:00

What was your earliest inspiration to write?

I was born with an ear for stories. Composing (music, songs, poetry, plays) seemed a natural thing to do, rearranging found objects into new structures.

Who is your favourite book character (any book) and why?

I’m going to be cheeky here and pick one of my own – I don’t think you ever really love a book character as much as one you have created. At the moment it’s Clara from Only Ever Always. She is brave and stern and fierce, but so vulnerable and has an enormous capacity for love. Her very existence is a philosophical conundrum, and I like that in a girl.

What is the best feedback a reader has ever given you?

Before my first novel Undine was published, Random House sent the manuscript out to teen readers for feedback. One girl answered the form questions in a positive but fairly perfunctory manner, but then added a note at the end saying she couldn’t put into words how the book had made her feel and how it was unlike anything she’d ever read. Her speechlessness was very touching.

What was your favourite picture book as a child?

John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat. I find it impossible to put into words how that book makes me feel, and I suspect it's more in the pictures than the words. So I'll tell you about another book, an odd little number called The Little Slipper Man. It’s a German picture book, quite nihilistic, about a miniature invisible man who no one can see. One day he steals a pair of psychedelic slippers (his little stalk legs slipping around inside each one) and runs down the street and feels very special and important until he realises everyone is looking at the slippers and not him. So he goes back into the meadow, disappears into the long grass and continues his insignificant, inconsequential existence. Not sure, now I have recounted the tale, why it appealed so much. I must try and track it down.

What are you reading right now?
Reading has been a challenge this year. I've wanted desperately to do it, but I am short on space. Avery sleeps in our room during the day and we only have one living area so in winter when the girls are home I have nowhere to go. Still, I am managing to find some reading spaces. This year I've been reading books concurrently, frustrated by how long it takes me to get through a book. I always have one or two collections of short stories on the go because I am enjoying them so much and sometimes I can even manage a whole one in a sitting before the baby cries or the television fires up or a child wants a snack.

I am reading quite diversely in terms of genre, though looking through this list I see that nearly everything is Australian, except for The Lottery. I had a deep craving about a month ago for Australian writing, which is what led me to seek out Patrick White. I am hooked, and plan to read another after this one. The only other I've read was The Vivisector in my early twenties. I am keen for recommendations.

Novel: Patrick White The Aunt's Story
Non-fiction: Melbourne by Sophie Cunningham and Kinglake 350 by Adrian Hyland
YA: Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith
Audiobook: The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Short Stories: Little White Slips by Karen Hitchcock and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

If you could set a story in any time or place, where would it be?

44 rue des Écoles, on 25 February 1980.

If there is one book you wish you’d written, what is it?

The Gruffalo. I greatly admire those effortless rhymes. How gloriously smug Julia Donaldson must feel, and so she should.

If you could sit next to any historical figure on a plane, who would it be and why?

An ordinary person with a tale to tell from any period in history (which is why I like Malouf’s Ransom so much).

If you could give one sentence of writing advice what would it be?

Interrogate reality.

Which literary quote best defines you?

“There is an extraordinary charm in other people’s domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else’s garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens.”
C.S. Lewis, Time and Tide, 16 June 1945

*Originally answered for the Ballarat Writers and Illustrators Festival, though I've updated my reading list.

Walnut and nutmeg cake

2011-10-18T10:38:00.003+11:00

The recipe for this cake has a curious method, where you rub the butter into the flour, spice and sugar and then pat half of this flour mix into the cake tin. You then mix the rest with the wet ingredients and chopped walnuts to make the rest of the cake. It means you end up with what is almost a pastry base, very thin, which gives the cake an excellent textural dimension: a crunchy, bitey, buttery, sugary bottom. The rest of the cake is soft and fluffy, a little caramelly from the brown sugar, balanced by the earthiness of the walnuts. The original recipe called for pecans but I had walnuts and I suspect this was an improvement - pecans would be sweeter but they're a little prissier, don't you think? We had this cake for morning tea and it was lovely as it was: unadorned, washed down with tea or coffee. But if you wanted to serve this for dessert (and I really think you could), then I think a thick sweetened yoghurt would be a perfect accompaniment. If you really wanted to go the whole hog and ice it, then a cream cheese or sour cream frosting (like you'd use on a carrot cake) would be the best match. The recipe suggested dusting with icing sugar. The cake is VERY nutmeggy. (I grated my own. First time. I liked it.) Una loved it, Fred not so much.

I did my "rubbing in" in the food processor so it ended up quite fine and I thought it was way too dry to stick together, but once baked the base was perfectly firm and solid, I suspect I could have done a lap of the house with it in my hands and it would have held together. I guess some of the moisture from the rest of the cake mix seeps in.

Ingredients

2 cups (250g/8oz) SR flour

2 tsp ground nutmeg

125g (4oz) butter

1.5 cups (345g/11oz) brown sugar

.5 tsp bicarb

1 cup (250ml/8 fl oz) milk

1 egg

.75 cup (90g/3oz) chopped walnuts (pecans, almonds...I don't see why you couldn't use any nut)

1/ Preheat oven to 180ºc (350ºF/Gas 4). Grease and line a 20m springform tin. Sift SR flour and nutmeg int a bowl (I never sift) and add the chopped butter and brown sugar. Using your finger tips, rub the butter into flour mixture until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. (I did this in food processor).

2/ Place half this flour mix into the cake tin and press it down until base of tin is evenly covered. Press it down smoothly (using back of spoon or hands).

3/ Combine egg, bicarb, milk, nuts and add to the remaining flour mix. Stir till mixture is just smooth (except it won't be smooth because you have chunks of nuts in there, stupid recipe)

4/Pour this walnut mixture over the crumb base of the prepared tin and smooth surface with spatula. Back 35-40 minutes or until skewer comes out clean. (In my whizzbang fan forced oven I needed the full 40.) Set cake aside for at least 10 minutes before transferring to wire rack to cook.

Recipe from Family Circle Quick Mix Cakes circa 1996

Lines written to amuse Una on holidays

2011-10-12T13:11:00.003+11:00

Under a figtree,

never seen by waking eyes,

a fairy girl creeps.

Petunias and daisies grow wild in her

eyes, she is

all flowers and cobwebs.

Remember her name? It’s on your

lips, like a half kiss.

You are 10 months and 10 days old

2011-09-25T14:59:00.004+10:00

A month ago you would get yourself up on all fours, rock back and forth and then collapse onto your tummy with your arms and legs elevated, balancing on your torso, as if you were trying to fly or swim, kicking your legs behind you. Though I also wondered if that was your impersonation of walking, from a horizontal perspective. A few weeks ago you began the labourious art of synchronising your arms and legs, and a sort of plodding on all fours began. Now you are an expert, speeding around the loungeroom. With crawling came the ability to sit yourself up on your own and it is surprising how much more human this makes you. In the last few days you have learnt to pull yourself up onto your feet at the couch, but once up your locked knees are stuck, and you can't sit yourself down again.

When you crawl sometimes you stop and press your ear against the floor, listening.

In the last few days you have sprouted your first tooth.

Your language is all music: repetition and intonation and emphasis. 'Na na na na na?' you ask me, with rising intonation. You punctuate our conversations with "yeah" or "oh?" The only word, used regularly and in context, is 'boowa' for a breastfeed. But there is also a recognisable greeting: 'Aiii!' or 'Ai Deh'.

You feed yourself, and eat all sorts of things - avocado, tuna sandwiches, pasta.

You are fascinated by your hands, more so than any of the other babies we have known. Sometimes you carry on whole conversations with gestures. You have three different waves.

You have discovered your pointing finger. You like to touch things - prod prod. You like to touch your pointing finger to my pointing finger. 'ET phone home?' I ask you.

You smile and smile. You are happy to be carried around by your sisters, held under the arms and hauled about the house or the park or the garden. Your brown eyes crinkle with amusement.

Watching your eyes turn from blue to brown has been a fascinating display of colour. For some time your eyes were both blue and brown, an impossible colour, but after many months they darkened to a convincing brown. Your brown eyes are a connection that only we share - mother, son.

You sleep pretty well during the day, except when you don't. You wake often at night. I don't mind. I look to the girls and know somewhere along the line they learned as you will learn. When you wake around midnight, I bring you into bed with me.

You are the child you will become but you are still a little unfamiliar. I wake in the night with you beside me. It dawns on me in the timelessness of dark night - slowly, then with a jolt of memory - that the baby beside me is a boy baby. A moment later I remember: it's you.

Why don't grown ups cry?

2011-09-18T20:13:00.004+10:00

Recently you said to me "Why don't grown ups cry? Why don't you ever cry?"

Amazed, I said "I cry! You've seen me cry."

You said, "Have I?" And again, incredulous, "Have I?"

I have sat down on the floor beside you and sobbed, from tiredness or grief or anger or hunger or because my blood burned with sugar. I have cried from hopelessness, because I am terrible at motherhood, because loving you hurts. Because I used to be one thing, and then when you were born there was a tearing, a splitting, like antarctica calving an iceberg, you split from the continent and I lost a part of myself and I must bear that loss over and over. You have borne witness to two pregnancies, and overfilled I leaked tears. You have seen me cry in public, in cities all over the world, in Paris by the Seine, in London as we crossed the street, in Helsinki, in Hong Kong. I have cried because you have used up all my oxygen with your hunger and your need and your love. I have cried because you would not sleep, would not eat, would not leave, would not stay. I have cried reading you sad stories and watching movies with you on my lap. From love and from pride, from exhaustion of feelings, I have cried.

It is a strange trick of your memory that you have forgotten all this. For the first time I wonder if you have repressed these memories, if you have actively chosen to forget. Or perhaps the mind cannot hold what it cannot process, the impossibility of a mother who melts like snow. Perhaps this is why grown ups don't cry.

We taught her to email and our profit on't...

2011-09-15T19:37:00.001+10:00

Verse Novel in Miniature*

2011-09-11T16:28:00.004+10:00

Walking in Clifton Hill

River dank,

Blossoms sweet with promises

I meet...myself

My young self walks past

Meets my eyes and looks away

She does not know me.

I have become

In these familiar streets

A stranger to myself

Though there's things to do,

This day I tread in her steps,

Watch her daily life

She visits the shops

Buys bread and cheese

Takes an hour

To choose a video

And then goes home

Through yellow light

Three cats drape themselves

In the garden, at the door,

Their eyes blink open.

My husband to be

Young like the child of my husband

On the front porch lights up

They smoke cigarettes

And weave dreams from smoke and air

In the park across the road

I am in darkness

The park around me

Grows greener, richer, deeper

Until I am all but lost

to myself.

She looks out at the dark.

____________

*This semester I am teaching a Young Adult fiction group as part of the creative encounters subject at Melbourne Uni. Last week we did a class on verse novels. We talked about voice in YA fiction and how the verse novel as a genre foregrounds voice.

'I sing the song of myself,' wrote Walt Whitman.

I think this is why the verse novel has been so readily adapted for the YA market. We experimented with the form through writing exercises (or provocations as one student called them) and because I was encouraging the students to be very honest and personal (the verse novel strips back descriptive writing and tends to convey in a simple pared back way raw emotional experience), I participated. I set them the task of writing a verse novel in haiku. As you can see I have departed from rigid syllable structures in terms of haiku. I haven't really edited what I wrote in class, so this is, indeed, very raw.

LAUNCH REDUX - in conversation

2011-09-02T10:02:00.003+10:00

So the lovely people at Eltham library along with the divine Eltham Bookshop have arranged a local launch for me.

I have invited Karen Andrews (aka @miscmum) along and we will have a conversation about the book. I asked Karen to help me with this one because our first "in the flesh" meeting (well we were fully clothed) was at Eltham library. She recognised me from here, Eglantine's Cake, and introduced herself.

Only Ever Always is a book for readers, thinkers, philosophers and explorers of the human heart - of all ages - and I know Karen is a thinker. I know the conversation will prove to be fascinating - I am looking forward to Karen holding up a microscope to the novel. Please come along.

"With parallel stories, worlds and characters, this is not a novel for a casual reader—it requires close attention, not just from the intellect, but from the heart. It's a book where not having all the answers is the most satisfying and in fact only conclusion—because life isn't always neat and tidy, and open endings suggest adventure and the great wonder of uncertainty—for the brave. If that sounds like a book for you— as it is a book for me—then I whole-heartedly commend Only Ever Always to you. "

Misrule

"...the toughness is part of the charm, as Russon explores complicated literary illusions and offers up a very different form of storytelling. ‘Only Ever Always’ will be a rewarding read for the intrepid young bibliophile who dares to try – but it’s also a novel to captivate and challenge older readers, as I found."

ALPHA reader

"Do we have another self somewhere, a self that leads a different life but is somehow connected in dreams and at the periphery of our daily lives? ...It's a clever open-ended plot device that leaves room for the reader's own interpretation... Russon's background as a poet shines through in her lyrical prose and eye for detail. Parts of the novel are told in second person which draws the reader in as an intimate participant in the story. An interesting, thought-provoking novel."

Michelle Harmer The Age

Odd Numbers

2011-08-29T08:43:00.004+10:00

A kilometre away, I hear the bell ring for recess, or snack-snack as the girls call it (to differentiate it from fruit-snack).

Who did you play with today? Martin asked Una a few weeks ago. She said No one. He asked Fred the same question. She replied: Bedda.

Last week the teacher rang me to tell me that Una's pants were loose in the waist and Una was worried they might fall down. I walked down with Avery in the pram and new pants. I happened to arrive at recess. A group of four or five girls, grades 2 and 3, ran around the school building arm in arm, conspiring about something.

Una! One of them calls and sets off running back in the direction they'd come from. I follow her. I find Fred and Una together, drawing with chalk on the pavement. The girl who had set off to find Una kneels down and joins in the drawing. Una wants to draw so I wait with Avery, hanging back a little.

At the periphery skulks Emily (not her real name). I gather that Emily has done something to Fred and Fred is upset. The group of girls I'd encountered before are looking for Emily and they find her. What's wrong Em-ma-lee? Emily runs off, shouting: Just leave me alone. It is not exactly bullying, but there is an undercurrent. We only want to help, say the group of girls. I feel awkward and out of place, not sure where to position myself in this political landscape - a mother in the playground doesn't belong. Luckily the bell goes and they are back under their teacher's jurisdiction. The kids crowd outside the classroom all trying to get a wave out of Avery. Look at this little guy, says one of the boys to his friend. He's awesome. Avery who is so talented at waving he often does it with both hands at the same time, stays absolutely still, staring with wonder and awe at all these faces, which though a small class (13 children including my girls), must seem a tidal wave of children to him.

I take Una inside to the toilets to put on her new pants. Her old pants are a little baggy but fine. That's funny, she says. Before they were falling down. Anyway, I promise her we will throw away the old pants, which are old - they were a hand me down from one of the grade two girls. As I help her dress, Una tells me that Emily threw away some kind of flower arrangement that Fred had been working on for days. She just picked it up like this Una demonstrates and scattered it over the basketball courts and Fred cried and I looked after her. I am glad. I am sad. Fred cried about it again on Friday night, feeling left out, that the kids are all pairing up, there's an odd number of kids in her class. But the up side of this is that Fred and Una are playing together at school, sticking up for each other, also enjoying each other more at home. I point this out to Fred and she agrees. But she longs for a best friend.

Last week on the walk to school, Una ran ahead so she could cross on her own with the crossing guard. Fred and I dawdled. I reminded Fred of all the friends she has that don't go to her school. Fred said sadly that she thought we should move to the city, closer to our other friends, tugging a sensitive nerve in my own heart. But on another day she looked around at the trees, the sunshine, the dazzling sky and said: I am lucky to live here.

LAUNCHED

2011-08-16T08:06:00.003+10:00

So on Sunday Only Ever Always was launched into the world with the help of Kate Constable and my lovely girl Fred. Karen from Miscmum put a video of mine and Fred's bit on youtube (apparently it cuts out midthanks, so if you don't see yourself getting bethanked, you can be assured that YOU did, of course YOU did, YOU were integral to the whole business.) Readings were wonderful hosts. Every time I turned around I saw another lovely face of someone I really like, friends, families, writers, readers. It was a WHOLE ROOM full of people I really liked. So worth doing, for that reason alone. I haven't had a wedding (or an engagement party or a kitchen tea whatever that is) and having Christmas birthdays, Martin and I don't throw many parties. So it was actually really nice and a little unusual, just to see all these people gathered, a crowd made up of likeminded friendly book people, all their for me. *SOB*. And many people who didn't come sent lovely thoughts and messages of support, so all in all I felt...liked. It's a nice feeling.

So, in case you missed it or want to relive the good times:

Kate blogged the launch here

Megs blogged it here

You can read the anatomy of Only Ever Always at Simmone's blog (what a lovely project, how fascinating to till the foundations of people's imaginations)

Misrule reviewed it here

Alphareader reviewed it here

And you can buy it here or here or at your local independent bookseller in Australia and NZ.

And here's the video:

Easy Cupcakes

2011-08-13T14:30:00.006+10:00

This is a recipe I found on the Taste forum, lost and then bashed a whole lot of combinations into google to find it again, so I am recording the recipe here for future procrastibaking. It's an odd method, but there is something oddly satisfying about it and the cakes looked lovely (they did shrink a little but I forgave them). I made them for my mother-in-law's birthday, along with the mini flourless chocolate cupcakes also on the plate. I decorated the white cupcakes with a marshmallow dipped in white chocolate and then hundreds and thousands and stuck to the cake with more white chocolate melted with a touch of cream, which is also what I drizzled on the flourless cupcakes. They were so cute and I wish I'd got a close up but I only took the quick snap above. (I felt like a bit of a dill standing in my sister-in-law's kitchen photographing the food.) I did the marshmallow thing because I wasn't sure if my mother-in-law (who has to avoid fat for health reasons) would eat a cupcake but I knew she wouldn't resist a marshmallow.

SCOUT'S* CUPCAKES
2 eggs
Cream
vanilla essence
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 cup SR flour

Into a 1 cup metric measuring cup break your eggs and fill to the top with thickened cream.
Beat 1 minute.
Add a splash of vanilla essence and the caster sugar.
Beat 3 minutes. It will go lovely and thick.**
Sift the flour in and fold into mixture.
Spoon into 12 patty pans (about half full). Bake in moderate oven until light golden and cakes spring back when lightly touched in the centre (I think this took 12 minutes in my fanforced oven).

*Scout is the user name of the person who first posted these cupcakes. They seem to be somewhat legendary on the Taste forum.

**I actually timed this and realised I was quite bored of beating after one minute and thought it MUST have been AT LEAST THREE MINUTES OR OMIGOD FOREVER, so it was good to user the timer.

Tomorrow it will be August

2011-07-31T19:27:00.003+10:00

And a new month brings a new book. Come out and see me.
And if you can't come, you could buy a book, stand for about 30 minutes, eat a biscuit, smile and nod to someone standing next to you (real or imagined, kudos if you manage to get someone to do it with you), applaud politely, mingle and pretend you are there.
I will blog a little more about the book in the days to come.

This

2011-07-30T10:35:00.001+10:00

The Ship Song Project - Sydney Opera House reinterprets Nick Cave's iconic song. Performed by Neil Finn, Kev Carmody and The Australian Ballet, Sarah Blasko, John Bell, Angus and Julia Stone, Paul Kelly and Bangarra Dance Theatre, Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Opera Australia, Martha Wainwright, Katie Noonan and The Sydney Symphony, The Temper Trap, Daniel Johns and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Directed by Paul Goldman.
Arranged by Elliott Wheeler.
Photography by Prudence Upton.

Conversations after dark

2011-07-24T19:50:00.004+10:00

Una: Those lights were very bright in my eyes.
Martin: They were bright. I flashed my lights at him to tell him his lights were too bright.
Una: (thoughtful pause.) He or she.
Martin: Yes.
Una: Why do you always say he when you're talking about someone you don't know?
Martin: Do I?
Una: Yes, when you mean she or he, you always say he. Why do you do that?
Martin: Social conditioning.
Una: I know why Daddy always says he. Because he likes boys the best.

...
Una: I am going to close my eyes and dream about Raphael. I am going to dream he gives me the true love kiss and then we will dance the tango.

Things we talk about before school

2011-07-20T07:27:00.005+10:00

I get up. Fred and Una are sitting on the couch side by side. Fred is holding a giant rubber spider up to her face.
Fred: I'm hiding.
Una: From you.
Fred: Well not from you. From a person called You.

***
After watching Justin Bieber (Una is an out and proud Belieber and I suspect Fred is a closet one) on the Tubes I said, "Do you want to see someone I used to love when I was a teenager?"
They were both extremely keen on the idea. So I searched for the film clip of Never Tear Us Apart, my favourite INXS song. My goodness, what a festival of eighties New-Romantic glam-pop gender-bending aesthetic that is, I had to keep pointing out which one was Michael Hutchence and which the random wafting girl. And of course the whole thing is filmed in Prague. Of course it is. Wikipedia describes the song as "a sensuous ballad, layered with synthesizers and containing dramatic pauses before the instrumental breaks. Kirk Pengilly lends a cathartic saxophone solo near the end." You gotta love a cathartic saxophone solo. You just don't get that anymore. Music today. Etcetera. Everytime Frederique sings "I'm wearing all my favourite brands brands brands" a little part of me dies inside.
As I watch the clip I think how young Michael Hutchence looks, how soft in his jawline, how clean and safe.
"Did you really like him?" Una asks.
"Yes," I say.
"Really?"
"I like him," Frederique reassures me.
"Do you know the really sad thing?" I say. "He died."
"Was he old?"
"Not very old. About my age I think."
"How did he die?"
"Well, he was all alone in a hotel room. No one's really sure if it was an accident or if he did it on purpose."
"Maybe he was murdered," Fred suggests.
"Mm," I make a non-committal noise.
"Maybe," says Una with relish, "it's one of the world's last mysteries."
"Like Tutenkahmen,' says Fred.
"Yeah," says Una. "No one knows how he died."
But later Una comes up to me and says "I think he must have done it on purpose. If he was all alone in the hotel."

Earth Music

2011-07-13T20:14:00.001+10:00

Outside the morning is progressing. The sun creeps across your bed. Your parents mutter on the other side of the closed door.
‘I’m going to wake her,’ Dad says.
Not yet. You squeeze your eyes shut. It’s too soon.
‘No,’ Mum urges. ‘Let her sleep.’
Climbing the stairs are the steady, dogged tones of an arpeggio. There is no magic in the relentless rise and fall of these broken chords. This is earth music, hard music, the most grounded music there is. It marches into your dreaming, and though you try to hold onto the dream, you can’t.
You are awake.

From Only Ever Always, in bookshops August 2011

Conversations

2011-07-11T10:05:00.005+10:00

With Martin

Kettle: boils.

Martin: from kitchen where he is scavenging bread. Were you making me a cup of tea?

Penni: Yes, I was! Do you want to finish the job?

Martin: Most of the work is yet to be done.

Penni: I boiled the kettle. I had the vision.

Martin: You're a big picture person. Big picture.

With Una

'I don't like him,' Una says (about her friend's mother's boyfriend). 'He looks weird.'

'Have you met him?' I ask.

'I've only seen a photo of him. B showed me a photo on her mum's phone.'

I have a premonition. I ask casually, 'Was he wearing a hat?'

'No,' Una says. She thinks about this for a moment and goes on, her voice clear as a bell, 'But I haven't seen a picture of him with clothes on. He was naked.'

'Oh.' The atmosphere thickens, well for me it does. Una seems oblivious. 'Was he going swimming?' I ask.

She shakes her head no.

'Was he about to get in the bath?'

Una puts a biscuit in her mouth and nods. All wide eyed innocence.

Eight Months

2011-07-09T20:06:00.003+10:00

8 months, give or take a week.

He can wave. Maybe. He flails convincingly.

He eats nearly everything we offer him, though he is not fond of avocado or plain yoghurt.

He stores toast in the roof of his mouth which I find at the next breastfeed.

He has this funny panty noise he makes, and we make it back and he smiles and makes it again. It may sound like hyperventilating but to us it is the beginnings of a conversation.

He says "ahdare". Sometimes we take it to mean "oh, there." Sometimes it might mean Daddy. Sometimes we say it means "thank you." Sometimes it seems to mean "look, my dummy, would you like it? Actually I might keep it." Really I think it means "ahdare".

Sometimes he sleeps beautifully during the day. Sometimes he sleeps like crap. He has never slept for more than four hours at night (I am coping fine though). Lately in the evening, when we're watching tv, he will wake in the cot and cry. I lift him up or Martin does and carry him up to the lounge, where I will feed him or rock him back to sleep, and hold him in my arms. The weight of a sleeping baby is a particular pleasure, watching dreams ripple over his features is a private and intimate and fleeting joy.

School Holidays

2011-07-08T09:27:00.005+10:00

Martin is being very busy and important writing a book.
So the rest of us went to the zoo. It was free for kids. It would have been a reasonably inexpensive day out if I hadn't got a parking ticket. Turns out you have to pay to park at the zoo. I am sure I would have noticed that if I hadn't been busy wrangling three children on my own. OH WELL.
Snake charmer (I freaked Freddy out by telling her the snake was trying to hypnotise her. She never wants to go in the reptile house again. Which is a shame because it is my favourite part of the zoo. Also it was warm.)
The butterfly house was also warm. This butterfly hung out with us for ages, allowing itself to be passed between the girls, then to another boy, then back to Fred again. Finally it flapped slowly away. It was either new (drying its wings) or very old.
The bears I love the bears the best.

Just to prove he was also there, this is Avery in the butterfly house. He liked looking at the butterflies, but his two favourite things at the zoo were the people and the fat greasy pigeons at the caf where we sat and ate our sandwiches and peanut butter and white chocolate blondies (another holiday activity).

Yesterday we went to buy new boots but the shoe shop lady poked the toes of Fred's beloved old boots and declared them fine till the end of winter. Fred was extremely pleased and we saved, ooh, about the cost of a parking ticket. We wandered through the dark dim shopping centre to the scrapbooking shop to buy some paper for making with. They were doing classes and on a high from not spending money on boots I booked the girls into an afternoon class.

Oh the cute.

I also bought Fred a dress at the winter sale in the kids clothing store. She picked one out herself and I told her to try it on. She wandered into the change room, giving me strict instructions to wait outside. A minute later she came out, still wearing her own clothes, carrying the dress still on the hanger.

"Do I take off all my clothes and put this on?" she whispered. Yeah, we mostly get hand-me-downs.

Kill. Your. Darlings.

2011-07-07T10:10:00.004+10:00

I have a story Trick of the Light in July's Kill Your Darlings. Apparently they spelt my name wrong, but I have forgiven them because I am a magnanimous mammal.

Doesn't Kill Your Darlings look evil when you put fullstops in it? It's actually writerly advice from Faulkener - it basically means delete all extraneous writing (which is usually those frilly self indulgent bits, in my case it's nearly always in the form of a prologue or extended character thinkery).

Flowering

2011-07-01T13:33:00.004+10:00

The Hardenbergia violaca
is awake.
It clambers the fence
and waves purple flowers.
Happy wanderer!

The dusky green haze of
wattle trees
on the high side of the house
is suddenly shocked with gold.

The sun looks down
on the early jonquils,
surprised to meet itself
in my winter garden.

Faultlines

2011-06-29T07:43:00.010+10:00

A few weeks ago Fred and Una and I got separated on the way to school. At the corner of our street and the street that takes us down to the main road Fred ran ahead. It is not uncommon for Fred to run ahead and walk by herself and in fact last year she chose to walk to school alone a few times a week rather than drive Una to kinder, with never an incident. So at the corner I called out "We're going to go the back way" and Una and I set off on the hilly scenic walk, down the dirt road, under gum trees where parrots flit from tree to tree and occasionally you come across a quietly grazing kangaroo. It doesn't take much longer than the main road walk but for some reason Fred doesn't like to do it. Fred wasn't *that* far ahead and I assumed she had heard me, but I also assumed even if she hadn't she would keep running all the way to school and beat us there, as she often does.
Anyway, Una and I wended our way to the crossing.
"No Freddy today?" the guard asked us.
"But she's already crossed hasn't she?"
The crossing guard frowned, trying to remember. "I don't think so." But she wasn't sure, though there's probably only half a dozen or so families who regularly walk to school (there's only about 30 familes at the school, and many of them are too far away from 'town' to walk). Anyway, Una and I crossed over and looked around the playground. No sign of Fred. I wanted to leave Una with the pram so I could run back and look for her, but Una, also worried, wanted to come too. I was making a plan (leaving Avery and Una with Jools in the office) when Fred came hurtling into the school yard, tears streaming down her face, followed by one of the other Grade Two mums.
She was crying and shaking, still frightened, in shock I think. Seeing me safe and well, with Una and Avery, also made her a little angry I think. I took them into the classroom and then Fred and I went to the staffroom where I held her while she calmed down. It took her a long time to stop shaking.
"I called out," I told her. "Didn't you hear me?"
It turns out Fred hadn't heard me. She had run ahead to talk to Jake the dog. When I didn't follow she got increasingly worried. She walked back up the road, realised I'd "disappeared" and began howling.
"What did you think had happened to me?" I asked later, guilty, exasperated.
She couldn't tell me.
Anyway until Saturday I thought that the next thing that had happened was the other mum had picked her up, driven back to our place to see if we'd gone home for something and then taken Fred to school. But on Saturday night we had a progressive dinner in the area, moving from house to house to eat the various courses. It's not something I've ever done before, but Martin used to do it as a kid. It was a great night, a fundraiser for the school, and the cooking was exceptional - a few foodies among us I think (highlight was the slow roasted tomato tart with pistachio crust). It was an utterly charming occasion, like everything out this way, a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. Anyway, during the soup course (one long table in the big kids wing at the school) I was sitting opposite Jake's owner and she told me of her encounter with Fred.
"Jake was barking this really weird bark," she said. "I knew something was wrong. It was very strange."

She came outside and found poor howling Fred.
"My mum's disappeared," Fred told her. Fred has dramatic tendencies and has a flair for following things beyond their logical conclusion. "She was right behind me and now she's gone."
This was when the grade two mum saw them talking and stopped to pick Fred up.
I apologised to Fred a few times that morning before I left her (I stayed in class for an hour to do some reading activities with the prep/one/twos) and again when I picked her up.
"Don't worry about it Mum," Fred said, but she looked hollow and haunted every time I brought it up.
We've been playing scrabble together on the iPhone and her iPod Touch.Okay, so it's not like in my childhood where a game of scrabble was a companionable hour or so with my Nanna, but I really enjoy playing with her. One of the best aspects is the chat feature. It's like a meta-narrative:

"Mum, I don't want to talk about it." That took the wind out of me. I wanted to talk to her. I like to think I am a persuasive talker, and I wanted to convince her of my version: she was never really in danger for a start. It was a misunderstanding.
"Are you angry with me?" I asked her that evening.
"A little bit," she admitted. Then, not looking at me. "I don't want to talk about it."
We've mentioned it since then, in passing mostly. This morning I told her what Jake's owner said about his unusual bark, she liked the idea that Jake had helped her.
You know it's not a big drama. If it's the worst thing that happens to Fred this year then she's a pretty lucky girl. And look at what a great community we have, how quickly she was cared for by other mums, and by the neighbour's dog.
It's funny these hairline cracks. So faint they hardly show. But it's a faultline (a fault line) between mother and daughter. It's part of the continental shift, the stretch and pull and collision and rupturing of our two selves. How can such a thing like maternal separation not leave scars? It's almost like this had to happen. Oh not exactly this, not necessarily this sequence of events. But somehow: the acting out of the conflict within, the dramatisation of the internal drama of the self in which the archetypes, mother and child, each play out their role, like puppets on a string. She had to know that one day she could turn around and I will be gone.

Little Mouse

2011-06-27T13:47:00.002+10:00

"Don't look in my school bag," Una told me as we left Guides on a cold dark Wednesday evening. "I have a surprise for you."

I did not look in her bag.

When we got home I took Avery (who had fallen asleep in the car) to the bedroom and tried to resettle him. Una went straight to her bag. But it was Martin, not forewarned in the least, who intercepted "the surprise". I entered the lounge to find Una howling and Martin interrogating her. In his hand: a dead mouse, wrapped in a tissue.

*Surprise!*

Una and her partner in crime, the grade one girl (singular, Una is the prep girl singular so they were destined to be friends) found a dead mouse at school. It was under the water fountain on the concrete. So cold. Poor little mouse.

We have had something of a mouse plague this year, all the rain I suppose. Our own house has been Visited by them - squeak squeak scratch scratch - and one was kind enough to die in my ugg boot, which puts the ugh in ugg boot I can tell you. I will not tell you the story of how I discovered this mouse because I haven't recovered from the trauma yet. I will say there was a pop, a smell and a strange sensation between my toes, but, unfortunately, not all at once. There now. My trauma is your trauma.

Anyway, Una's mouse was at school, and Una and Isabel wanted to have a little funeral for it. Erica, their teacher, put the kibosh on this plan for all the usual reasons adults think children shouldn't play with dead mice. Unbeknownst to Erica a tissue was procured, the mouse was stealthily wrapped and hidden away in Una's bag. This much we determined, because as soon as Una realised she was in trouble, she began to fabricate - insisting, for example, that her teacher had suggested she bring it home. (She rapidly reversed this story when Martin bluffed that he was going to call Erica.)

Oh, I understand the fascination and in writing this down we seem to me to be cruel parents. In early autumn that other star of children's stories the butterfly proliferated in our area (funny how one doesn't say "a plague of butterflies"). Una found a dead one at school, a perfect specimen, and brought it home to show me. We put it in the magnified bug catcher and studied it closely, marvelling at the scales on its wings, the hairs of its body, the inquisitive proboscis. This mouse was as perfectly interesting to Una as the butterfly had been, and perhaps if it hadn't been a Guide night, if we'd had a bit more patience or energy, if it hadn't been dinner time and we hadn't all been hungry and cold we might have slowed this down a little, taken the time to talk through it, paid the mouse some respects. As it was Una clung howling onto Martin as he gave the mouse a quick burial without ceremony. It was, after all, almost seven o'clock and we hadn't yet eaten dinner.

"Everyone says you get sick from touching mice," Una wailed at me as I took her on my knee and tried to comfort her, attempting to explain the difference between mice and butterflies. "But I'm not sick and it isn't true." Una, a gifted and easy liar herself, is terribly self-righteous in the face of other lies - whether they are her friend's whoppers (Miss Grade One Singular is adorably prolific in the tall tales department herself), a grown up's kindly intended white lies or even generalisations or exaggerations, though Una is fond of a little hyperbole herself.

It was a moment where adult and child's worlds were impossibly divergent. We simply could not capture the child like wonder at the intimate smallness of the mouse corpse, its static dollhouse perfection in death. She could not comprehend our disgust, our loathing.

Still I am touched by their collusion. There was something so tender about that white tissue. Lies are revealing, sometimes they are truer than bare facts. Behind every one is the truth of Una's self, the clarity of her spirit, revealed in her wide blue eyes. And I am touched by her guileless act, the gift of the mouse (like a cat), and by her utter disbelieving dismay when this gift was so rudely rejected. I am reminded at how when you are a child you live in a parallel world and it can be hard to slip between real and imaginary, it is so utterly painful to have this space intruded upon by the giants of this world: us. No wonder her heart went out to a mouse, so small in the face of death.

Choices we choose that choose us

2011-06-21T10:50:00.003+10:00

It can hard not to feel faintly (or overtly) accused when people you respect and admire make different choices from the choices you've made. Or the choices that made you: the choices that erupted from nowhere - the volcanic variety - and shaped you.

I feel there was never a time I chose to have children, for there was never a time I seriously considered not having children. I felt the flow of my life as inevitable as a tide, towards the period in my life where babies would come. Lucky me that these babies did come one, two and three, with no real problems along the way. We tried for number three for a while between Una and Avery and I began to think there might be something wrong. Certainly it would appear as I neared 35 my fertility was not quite so whack as it had been the month we conceived Una practically by sharing the same apple. In fact the month we did finally conceive Avery we had just about given up on the idea. Still, when it did happen the months of it not happening were instantly forgotten really, because - fatalistic as I am - when we had a third baby, we were always going to have a third baby.

Yesterday I read two things about babies and choices. One was this article by Clem Bastow. She writes about her own lack of maternal desire and her perceptions of what society expects of her. At 29 she is feeling societal pressure from various quarters (family, friends, media) to reproduce. Some of this pressure, it seems to me, is also coming from within as her close friends start having babies she is obviously feeling a need to qualify and articulate her own position.

The other thing I read was this post by my sister. She had a baby very prematurely two years ago due to pre-eclampsia, a condition that threatens the life of both mother and child. Kylie had had a long journey towards motherhood. She collected baby clothes as a young woman, but by the time she was thirty was quite convinced children weren't for her. She met and married Corey and still believed that she would have trouble conceiving. This was not the case and Joseph was conceived easily enough, though clearly the pregnancy was fraught. Kylie has been advised by doctors that any subsequent pregnancies would be considered high risk for both her and the baby. In the post I've linked to Kylie has made a list of reasons not to have another child. These include the health factors that are the biggest consideration, but also other more general concerns. There would be many people who have had fairly straightforward first children who would relate to at least two or three points on Kylie's list, and lots of people consciously choose to stop at one. Kylie told me all the time we were growing up she wished she were an only child, now her son will probably be one. I think the saddest thing for Kylie is that, because of her health complications, she will never know what she would have really chosen. Maybe if her first pregnancy had been a dream she might have stopped there anyway, for the other reasons on her list.

The choice not to have children is not actually an event but a continuum, a decision that for various reasons Clem Bastow will revisit many times over the next ten to fifteen years, something Clem acknowledges. Kylie will revisit it too, grimly, because some choices we don't get to make.

I wanted to say something here, about choices. About the many women I know who have chosen not to have children, and those of us who have chosen it. I wanted to say that choices pretend to be bipolar, especially in mainstream media, but they are actually nuanced, complex and as individualistic as the individuals who struggle with them. Clem snarks that motherhood is not "the pinnacle of existence" that *insert they here* make it out to be. I quite agree and I am not sure who, apart from lady's magazines and nappy ads, is peddling this crap. Motherhood is nuanced too. My children are people that I share my life and my home and my stories with. I have shaped my life around them for now, because they are vulnerable to the weather and hunger and bodies of water and wild animals and need a place where they are protected and can grow and be provided for. My body and my lover's body made them and they brought enough love with them to keep them alive (through our parental fascination), and then more love grew. We have made a life for ourselves, hewn it out of raw materias, carved it from the landscape. There are rich rewards for this kind of life, and there are penalties too, and you show me the kind of life where that isn't true.

There's a quote about parenthood that I often think of. It's from the movie Lost in Translation. This is a movie about self and identity, a movie about personal journeys. And amidst it all springs this moment, spoken by Bill Murray's character about his kids: "The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born. Your life, as you know it, is gone. Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk... and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life."

Parenthood is something other than the pinnacle of existence. But this is because existence is a continuum too. There's no pointy end. Motherhood doesn't have to negate ambition, creativity, professional success, sexual desire or individualism(as Clem Bastow comes dangerously close to implying). But neither does the desire to be childless negate a sense of family, community, love or selflessness and I support both Clem Bastow's choice and her need to write about it.

Anyway, I wanted to say something about choices. Something sad, because Clem Bastow still feels this needs saying in 2011 when we have a childless female Prime Minister. Something terribly sad because my sister doesn't get to make the choice she wanted to make. Something slightly guilty because I could make that choice. And something defensive and apologetic because I have children and I openly love my kids and celebrate that love and that's one of those social pressures right there that people like Clem Bastow feel they have to kick against - and probably kick harder than they really mean. And I wanted to say something happy because my babies came to me, and though I couldn't have made an informed choice about motherhood before I had babies (how could I have known what it would be like?), I choose this life. I choose these kids. I choose this me – because of and despite everything.

As I finished writing this Una said, engrossed in a game on my iphone, "Mum? Do you like kids or smelly animals better?"
I said, "Kids."
Una didn't look up. "I would have said smelly animals."

Ashcloud

2011-06-19T11:30:00.002+10:00

My mother who recently finished her treatment for breast cancer slipped on a rock at a beach while bushwalking and broke her ankle. She was in hospital for a month and during that time I flew home to Tasmania twice with Avery. While I was in Tasmania an ash cloud breathed from the depths of a Chilean mountain drifted into the atmosphere and Qantas and Jetstar stopped running flights to the mainland. For a day or so I was stranded (not sure how long my exile would last), and I was reminded of how islanded Tasmania is. When the apocalypse comes I suspect Tasmanians will be safe from everything but their own isolation, and perhaps each other...

ººº
It is a strange sensation, like time has slowed down and I am adrift from my normal life. It is not unpleasant, a little like being haunted by the landscape of my past, by my own past self - though Avery, a constant companion, is a talisman of my adult life. Looking down on me the whole time is the mountain of my childhood and adolescence, a thing of sun and shadow, of cloud and stone, a creature of contrasts. That mountain, there in the sky, all the time...benevolent? Distant? Yes always distant, though close too, intimately so. A living landscape, once a shallow sea, but then rock piled on rock, rock surged up and made something solid. Though, from the distance, blue and hazy, its solidness is disputable. It could be an apparition. Indeed some days it is not there at all, entirely wrapped in clouds, a ghost mountain, a palpable absence. It is as if one day the clouds might lift and reveal...nothing.

While I am in Tasmania, Una drops my favourite bowl, one my aunt bought me for my twenty-first, in the last days that I lived in Tasmania. ( It was a deep purple, one of the mountain's many colours.) It shatters in a million pieces. Una is bereft, she cries so much, Martin says, that she is white and shaking, he thinks she might be afraid of my reaction so he forewarns me. When I talk to her the next day I console her. She admonishes me for not being more upset, she wants me to be angry, to rail, to grieve. I do grieve. But the bowl is far away in a life I am temporarily severed from and I can hardly believe in its existence or the loss of it.

I spend the days with my ageing father, running back and forth from the hospital, or driving their car to Medicare and the supermarket running errands. A woman from the low vision unit come to see Dad who is slowly going blind. She shows him various magnifying glasses, looks at the light he uses. She talks about bringing him a bookrest, like a music stand. It sounds awkward. Dad has read three books a week for years. I say "isn't there any way he can sit on the couch and read?" She gives him a lecture. She implies he can no longer read like that not just because he is losing his sight but because he is old and lacks the capacity for concentration. I am more offended than he is. Watching him hunched over his newspaper in the mornings with his giant magnifying glass fills me with a bitter blend of emotion, I grieve for him and what he has lost, but I am proud of him too, for persevering. Not once does he say "why me?"

For that matter neither does my mother, who is impatient with hospital life but nervous too of what it will mean to come home. She has a trial visit and it doesn't go as well as she hopes. She can't hop over the awkward front steps, which are at a right angle from each other, and has to enter on her bottom, then get herself up from the floor. The occupational therapist, not Mum's usual one, is doubtful about mum coming home on schedule. The shower is a problem. As there is a question mark over me going home due to the ash cloud, there is a question mark over mum going home. In the end she too is delayed only by a couple of days but they are long days. She is moved from her room with a sensational view of the mountain's changing dayscape to a room that overlooks drab hospital buildings. She is upstairs from the Gibson ward, where she received her chemotherapy, and treatment for the early dangerous complication. Now we all know the hospital's switchboard number by heart.

I pop in on Zoe, my oldest BFF. We eat lunch together, and then sit on the couches to breastfeed our babies, which is a long way from pounding through a chemical night at Earthcore, or playing that we are wild creatures who feed on school children in her domed house on Mt Nelson when we were nine years old. I remember how, a year or two after we moved to Melbourne Zoe took the white pages and drew a line around the cover image of the Melbourne city skyline - it was the same shape as our mountain.

At the airport I am interviewed about the ashcloud, asked my story, with Avery peering out from the sling and that night my dad rings me to tell me I made the six o'clock news. I don't have the presence of mind, as the camera records, to say the ash cloud is the manifestation of my own ambivalence about arriving, departing, about living far from what will always be, in some primal sense, home (I wonder if they would have aired this).

As I fly into Melbourne just after midday from over Port Phillip Bay, looking down on the city from an angle I haven't seen before, the northern sky is eerily orange on the horizon, like a premature sunset, like a bushfire sky, like the residue of either natural or human violence. Was this the last of the cloud of ash that had bound me to the earth, the cloud that had travelled all the way from the other side of the world, such a long way from home?

Moss Garden

2011-06-03T13:45:00.011+10:00

I love tiny worlds. I have never quite stopped believing in fairies. Actually I believe in everything - Santa, God, Buddha, fairies, monsters under the bed. To me, everything is true and nothing is real (not even you), and that is why I deal in stories.

Anyway, tiny worlds, I loves em. Who doesn't? We got this idea from an Usborne "make and do" book we bought Una for Christmas. It was easy, fun, instantly gratifying using things we had accessible. The project also has remained interesting, watching the moss establish itself and grow. We started the ones below in summer. The top one is Fred's made in an old cake tin. Fred looked for flat stones to make a fairy path. She was also quite particular about only using one type of moss. When it was first done because it was summer and quite dry, it looked a bit patchworky, but all the moss has thickened up and become quite lush.

This one is Una's:

For hers we used a terracotta pot. Because of the better drainage hers doesn't stay quite so damp (Fred's has drowned a few times but always survives), and it took longer to get lush. In Una's there's an old ceramic tile, stones, a glass pebble and a little cherub, all things we had around the house. So now, without further ado, here is a quicky tutorial. It is a bit cheeky calling it a tutorial when it is very straightforward but it makes me feel important.

Excuse me owl, can I borrow your home? I have an excellent temporary dwelling for you. Think of it as a little holiday in the south of Spain. What do you mean you can't dance like that? Just lift your arms...oh yeah. Sorry. You're a Greek owl.

You will need:

a container (cut off milk carton, empty cake tin, pot plant holder, butter container, tea cup, anything you like really.)

A teaspoon

Dirt

Moss (any sort of moss will do)

You will also need any pebbles, toys, buttons, tiles, stones, bits of random crap you choose to decorate your moss garden with - please refer to above picture of random crap.

Using your spoon as a spade (not your Nana's best silver probs), fill your container with dirt. Can be crap dirt pebbly dirt, doesn't need to be potting mix or anything. Scrape some moss up with your spoon. Gently press it in. Because my container is small and the moss is so green and PHAT, mine looks quite neat and tidy, but it doesn't matter if yours doesn't, as the moss takes hold it will fill out over the days and weeks. This is part of the fun of it. In the pictures above, Fred laid her stones out first and then planted the moss around them, Una pressed hers into the moss afterwards. Because mine is a hillock for a wol, I am not decorating it.

By the way, should they catch you at it, your chooks may look at you like this. What you doin' crazy human?

But your owl will be most pleased.

Winter thoughts

2011-06-02T11:37:00.003+10:00

Morning
Kind sun enters house
I spread it on toast. Sated,
I wash the windows.

Afternoon
the grass gasps
to meet the sun
orange billboard
this hill is for sale

Evening
Dusk, Eltham, the smell
of patchouli and woodsmoke
is fifty years old.

Why I Write

2011-05-29T19:02:00.002+10:00

As part of National Young Writers' Month 2011, I answer a couple of questions here about why I write and what inspires me. Funnily enough when I was talking I felt like a babbling fool but watching the video I actually sound a bit like I know what I'm talking about. Bwahahaha.

Anyhoo, National Young Writers' Month is an excellent idea. Instead of focussing on competition or product, it's all about process. Sort of like Nanowrimo or Blomomofo (or whatever it's called - the blogging every day for a month thingy) but writers set personal goals for what they want to achieve, with the opportunity to join what I'm sure will be a very warm and supportive online community. Learn more about it here.

I really love Express Media because a lot of interesting people are involved with it (including many of my ex-students - bright and shining stars that they are), and they provide real support and genuine opportunities for young writers. But mostly I love them because the lighting in that video is SUPER flattering and it makes me look ten years younger. Hurrah Express Media!

In honour of National Young Writer's Month I am going to set myself a modest goal of writing three short stories in June. I'll let you know how I go.

Timeline: Coming of Age

2011-05-17T14:06:00.003+10:00

1990 - I am 15. Jim Henson and Roald Dahl die (oh gods of my childhood) and the first Macdonald's opens in Tasmania (I am vegetarian). I watch Pink Floyd's The Wall concert live on television commemorating the fall of the Berlin wall. The Cold War is almost over, but the Gulf wars are just beginning.
1991 - Stores stop stocking vinyl records, though many households (like my own) do not yet own a CD player. This is the height of the cassingle era. The crackling sound as a vinyl record begins to play becomes a sound of my childhood and I learn the particular skill of knowing exactly how long to rewind a casette for to relisten to a favourite song.
1992 - Unbeknownst to me on the other side of the world, the first SMS message is sent by Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, wishing him a Merry Christmas. It will be ten years before phones are small enough and cheap enough to be interesting to young people, and eighteen years before I will buy one for myself.
1994 - A second commercial television station begins broadcasting in Tasmania, which brings total number of stations airing in Hobart to four. Around the same time they stop "closing" the stations at midnight with a religious "thought for the day" and the national anthem.
1995 - In Hobart all day Saturday trading is introduced. I am pleased about this, being at this stage of my life pathologically incapable of getting out of bed before midday. (Now I think it would be quite nice if all the major stores closed at 12 on a Saturday and remained closed till Monday morning.) My boyfriend of the time helps me sign up for my first email address.
1996 - This is the year I move to Melbourne. The use of the word Internet enters common usage. Bob Brown is elected as the first Green, and first openly gay, Senator. The following year the state laws in Tasmania that discriminate against homosexuals will be lifted. This is also the year Martin Bryant killed 35 people in what had been a pleasantly boring tourist destination of my childhood and altered the landscape forever.

I have been thinking about this lately. To me it felt like the world came of age when I came of age. Lost its innocence alongside me. The explosion of capitalism, the proliferation of the mass media, the commodification of childhood, the emergence of the Internet, the changing political landscape and the mainstreaming of environmental issues. I was not longer the protected child, and the world was no longer designed to protect and shelter me - this was all too clearly brought home by the horrific murders in Port Arthur (I can't bring myself to use the inflammatory and sensationalist word "massacre"). Oh course in 2001, around the time Martin and I were talking about getting married overseas, the second airplane crashed into the twin towers as we watched on live tv, and the world really did seem to sever in two - Before and After. But it wasn't all bad. Generations of discrimination ended, and continue to end. Vinyl made a comeback. The Internet and the telecommunication revolution lives up to its promise to connect us, to bring the world closer together, to give people a voice in countries where they have been previously voiceless, to offer a model of true democracy.

And surely every generation must feel this way as they reach adulthood - that they have the seen the world grow up. My father was a young man at the end of the second world war, a returned sailor, heady and powerful with relief to be alive. My mother came of age in the 60s in country Tasmania, and though she tells me it was a lot more conservative than in other parts of the world, she came of age in a world where she could have increasing control over her own body and choices - she wrote her Masters thesis (after I was born) on the confluence of women's employment and access to contraception (though she had been basically forced to quit work herself by sexist maternity leave policies in the Tasmanian education system in the 70s).

The world grows up again and again - perhaps it grows older and wearier and more cyncial, or perhaps it is always being unshucked, and what's underneath is always new and raw and vulnerable. My children are innocent in the face of it (yes, despite ongoing wars, and earthquakes, fires and floods, and Tony Abbott, and the rise and rise of commercialisation) and at the moment the world reflects their innocence back to them.

Who knows what will happen when my children come of age. What beast will emerge from the outgrown skin? What will the cracked mirror show? The best and the worst, I suppose, of humanity.

Happy Anniversary Martin

2011-05-17T09:51:00.004+10:00

We have been married for nine years and together for thirteen. We have three children - I still feel shocked writing that. We have lived in seven houses (one of them twice, several years apart). He has done a four year degree and changed careers midstream - it was a huge gamble that has paid off in more ways than we could have imagined. I have written books, done a Masters, started this blog, gained and lost 15kg.

An anniversary is a measure. Measures of time - how many people have we made? What have we done? How far have we come? Far enough, for sure, but always in intricate movements, like a dance, round the hall, back in each other's arms before nightfall.

We're not rich. We don't have a new couch or a house with spare rooms. But we have enough. We have the right amount.

At the end of the day, we're happy. What more could we ask?

Found objects

2011-04-16T13:08:00.001+10:00

Una: The government writes all the songs. The government wrote the songs when he was a kid.

Fred: Mum, I think you're the most normal thing in my crazy mixed up world.

Talking Books

2011-04-04T16:25:00.003+10:00

Last year Audible contacted me through my Twitter account and said "hey, thanks for following us, you're special, we're special, have a free audiobook" only not quite like that, I'm paraphrasing. So I signed up, chose my free audiobook (Revolutionary Road) and then didn't quit my membership so they kept giving me credits but started charging me, which I really hate, but by then they had me hooked and that right there is a cautionary tale in which I am a sucker, but also, a happy one. I know, I'm also confused. If you don't want to sign up for a monthly credit, but you are interested in listening to audiobooks, find out what your local library has to offer - I can download Bolinda audiobooks straight from the website of our regional library. Martin and I take it in turns to spend the audible credits, but we source audiobooks from other places too.

I was commuting into Melbourne Uni (either in the car or drive and train) when I got my first book, and so I mostly listened while I traveled. I was completely drawn into Revolutionary Road, gutted by the ending, and totally addicted to the narrator's voice. That's what it's like when you get a good narrator, an addiction, and you make any opportunity to feed that addiction.

I thought perhaps when I lost the commute I might lose the audiobooks, but then I got diagnosed with gestational diabetes. The stories I listened to roaming the hills in spring twilights were from the collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke: English fairy and folktales set in very dark, English woods, but in my imagination, in the gloaming hills of my bushland, with the distant razor toothed fire burnt hills, and the moon rising from them.

And I still listen, when I'm walking, in bed at night, when I'm cooking, during night feeds or when I'm just hanging out in the house with Avery. Avery finds them soothing too. Together we've listened to Margaret Atwood's Dancing Girls (which I bought for $4.95 as part of an audible special, which they seem to run once or twice a year), Elizabeth Strout's mesmerising Abide With Me and The Help by Kathryn Stockett. The Help was sensational, the narration so perfect and compelling that I can't imagine reading the book. It seems to me that to read it would be to miss out on some of the depth, the nuance, the pure pleasure of the writing - the cadence of the words, the Southern voices, the deep characterisation that flows from the mellifluous voices. Cannot. Recommend. Highly. Enough. If audible are still offering a free credit to new listeners then I really recommend The Help as a gateway drug. 18 hours and 6 minutes of pure pleasure.

Sometimes I listen for an hour, sometimes for five minutes. Sometimes I dip in and out, sometimes I make opportunities to listen. It is a different pleasure from reading, yet it has revitalised my reading - after reading Abide With Me I went back to Olive Kitteridge also by Elizabeth Strout which I'd put down a few stories in and raced through the rest.

Each time an audiobook finishes I feel bereft. I grieve the loss of those particular voices in my head. It's been two or three days since I finished The Help and I am not quite ready to commit to the next one. I felt the same way after Abide With Me. It has to sink in - it's really over. After Revolutionary Road I honestly felt I might not ever be able to listen to anything again. I was shocked, appalled, gutted.

But of course, tentatively at first, I always begin again: words fall through me and I live again.

Strangely, Undine, Breathe and Drift are all on audio too. However, I have never listened to them. I am almost ready to. I flicked through Breathe last night and so much of it I've forgotten, those words I agonised over, wrote and rewrote, now adrift from me.

I Scream

2011-04-01T19:44:00.003+11:00

I won an ice cream maker. It's fancy. A while ago I came to the food pornographer's blog via flickr (but I can't remember what I was looking for) and stayed a while, reading this gorgeous post about her family Chinese New Year celebration and desperately wishing she would adopt me. Anyway, she had a competition for an ice-cream maker supplied by Kitchenware direct, and I entered and I won! Me! And it was very exciting, because I don't often win things.

Although I said the first ice cream I would make would be an indulgent vanilla one made with eggs from our chookies to serve alongside the blackberries that grow wild in our garden, by the time the ice cream maker arrived (surprisingly prompt) and we'd finished the crappy ice cream we already owned, the blackberries were few and far between. After I announced my win on Twitter my friend Ess-jay linked to a stash of ice cream recipes she'd bookmarked on Delicious. The one that caught my eye was David Lebovitz's Brown Bread Ice Cream. The stars aligned, the ingredients were all to be had and lo, my first batch of ice cream was born, still using (of course) eggs from the chookies. (Speaking of the chooks, Fred has recently learned how to hypnotise them. It is a sight to behold.)

The best thing about this ice cream without a doubt is the crispy bits of bread. I thought they would go soggy after a day or two in the freezer but they have retained their biscuity crunch. The worst thing was not being allowed to sit in the pantry and eat all the sugary cinnamony buttery bread crumbs with a spoon. I used a whole grain bread from our local bakery. It's a lovely dense dark bread. I used light cream cheese and low fat milk (because that's what we had) and the ice cream doesn't seem to be compromised at all. I used low GI raw sugar with crumbs and, as David suggested, a mix of soft brown sugar and caster sugar for the ice cream. I had a moment watching the thin custard sloshing around where I thought "there is no way this is going to come together and be ice cream" but it did of course. The ice cream maker was great to use, it feels very sturdy with one big button and no fiddly bits.

I am still on my low GI diet, and have trained myself to eat ice cream out of a tiny bowl, one intended for dipping sauce. I get about two desert spoons worth of ice cream in it and I have to say, it's enough. Ice cream is an acceptable food in the low GI universe as long as it's not too sweet and not too fatty, the ice cream maker is great because I can control the amount of sugar I put in. We have three soft skinny bananas that are destined for great things this weekend. I am excited about more experiments, I have a lot of cooking mojo at the moment, but am sometimes disheartened by the fact that I can't eat too many sweets.. I see a lot of icy treats on our immediate horizon. Thank you TFP!

Hey you. Yes, you.

2011-03-30T16:46:00.001+11:00

Sh! Come over here.

You have to wait till August to read it, but meanwhile have a look a the new cover.

Isn't it shiny pretty new?

Time Travel

2011-03-23T08:26:00.003+11:00

Fred and Una are playing a time travel game (the travel mechanism is a perpetual calendar), that is causing a fascinating argument about whether or not the time traveler would remember the person in the past, or if the other person in the past would remember the time traveler when they encountered each other. The game and the argument touches on which one is the constant - the traveler, or the timeline.

Meanwhile, what they should really be doing is getting ready for school or they will be LATE.

The rigid, patriarchal time of the school day/the mythical, cyclical time in the realm of the mother. Less and less I find myself wanting to insist on the first, instead I want to draw the two girls back into the second. Una wants to live here with me, but Fred is already lost to the world. "We're late!" she says wherever we go, even if we are early or on time. Her father's daughter. Sigh.

Room For One More

2011-03-18T22:11:00.000+11:00

Reading and Motherhood

2011-03-16T09:22:00.005+11:00

I used to only ever read one book at a time. I would burn through it, usually in one or two sittings. I spent whole days reading, and well into the night. I read in public, on trains, in parks, in cafes, in (der) libraries and bookshops. I read in bed. I read on the couch. I read at the kitchen table and on sunny days in winter I'd read outside. I'd lie on the floor and read. I read demanding books - literature, poetry, short stories, non-fiction – challenged myself with my reading, chose books based on authors, cover designs, book reviews in the newspaper and friends' recommendations. I also read absolute crap, my favourite crap genre being the eighties style YA series romances like Sweet Dreams and Sweet Valley High. When I was pregnant with Fred, Martin and I took turns reading J.M.Barrie's poetically spooky Peter Pan aloud to our foetus friend as she swam around (and frankly she came out poetically spooky. Whoops.)

Motherhood changed me as a reader. I know this doesn't happen to everyone but I also know from talking to other women my experience is not unique.

After Fred was born I still read, but whole days would go by when the only thing I read was the same clutch of picture books over and over again and whatever people were saying on the Internet. I read for work. I read Harry Potter and other children's and YA novels, often rereading rather than starting something new. I read baby books and recipe books and a gorgeous memoir/biography called Madeleine's World (in which a father chronicles the first three years of his daughters life) about ten times. I read newspapers and book catalogues. But I avoided adult fiction, too intimidated to begin reading something that required my full intellectual engagement. I would often take novels out of the library and return them unread. I would acquire novels I knew I wanted to read and then save them up for some future me who would have time to read like the old days. Time I used to spend reading I'd fritter away on the Internet. I used to blame the Internet. I used to worry that I was lazy, or that I was secretly a bit stupid. But looking back I realised it was a) a kind of mourning and b) I simply no longer knew how to read. I didn't know how to put a book down and not come back to it for days - so often if I started a book I'd end up abandoning it a few chapters in because in the old days if I didn't get past the first 100 pages it usually meant despite my best efforts I simply wasn't going to engage with the book. I didn't know how to get by on a page or two before bed, where sleep would overwhelm me. I'd never been so tired, or so busy in my life. Fred was also opposed to me reading, she'd take books out of my hands and close them. (Now she says, "Do you know why I love you Mummy? Because you like reading as much as I do.")

Basically I had to learn to read all over again. I had to come up with new reading strategies.

Now I usually have more than one book on the go at a time. I dot them around the house so that if I find a moment, I can pick one up and start reading immediately rather than go looking for a book and realise the moment has passed. I read regular books, ebooks (on my new Kindle - I tried reading on my iPhone but found it frustrating)) and listen to audiobooks. I am active on Goodreads, seeking out recommendations (particularly through the busy audiobook group) and keeping a record of what I read (though I have to admit I am chary of user reviews). Sometimes all I manage is two pages at bedtime before I pass out, and that's okay. I listened to audiobooks when I was commuting, now I listen when I'm walking, cooking, in bed (great for night feeding and Avery seems to find the voices relaxing) or sometimes just sitting around the house doing nothing.

At the moment I am reading: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, Siri Hustevt's Summer Without Men which I bought for the Kindle five minutes after I read a tweet from Anna Ryan Punch suggesting I might like it, and listening to The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which is an absorbing story and also beautifully read - I can see why so many Goodreads peeps recommended it. I am dipping in and out of The Makings of a Sonnet, a book I have had my eye on for a couple of years and which I picked up on super special at Readings (note Readings RRP of $49 - it was $60 in Borders. No wonder they're going to the dawgs). I also have - oh joys! - Mary Ann in Autumn waiting for my attentions.

Anyway, over the next week or two I am going to expand on this post. I thought I'd do one about Audible and one about the Kindle. I am interested in the fact that while the Internet has proved a definite distraction from reading (though of course all one does on the Internet is read!), it has also given me new ways to read, and reignited my passion for literature.

Edinburgh Gardens

2011-03-15T08:29:00.000+11:00

Happy Birthday Eglantine

2011-03-10T07:34:00.004+11:00

I have been blogging for five years.
When I started, Fred was not quite three and Una was a babe in arms. We were undecided on a third baby.
I coudn't drive.
I had published two books and was writing Drift. Martin had recently quit his job and begun a Bachelor of Education.
We were living in a rental house in Emmaline St, Northcote after a brief failed foray into home ownership (wrong house, wrong suburb, wrong time). The Northcote house was both lovely and ugly, with pink walls and a wall of mirrors in the bedroom, and in the lounge room, walls painted with a streaky sponge effect the colour of nicotene stains. It had a fantastic grape vine covered outdoor area and for six months of the year, we kept our dining table outside. We ate sardines wrapped in grape leaves cooked on the barbecue that was hooked up to mains gas. There was an odd windowed bit in the lounge room that stuck out from the rest of the house where we set up our couches facing each other and it was a bit like being in the carriage of an old fashioned train. We had a dishwasher. Good times.

Since I've started this blog, I've written seven more novels. I've started and finished a Masters. Martin completed a degree and has commenced a new career. First Fred and then Una started school. My father-in-law and my half-sister passed away. My half-brother divorced and remarried. My sister married. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. A niece and two nephews have been born, one so early it seemed impossible that he would thrive and yet thrive he has. As an added bonus my best friend from childhood also met a man and had a baby, extending the intimate circle of people I love by two (then they went away to Tasmania to live - boo). We bought a house that also constituted a lifestyle change. We've been to Palm Cove twice. I've been to New Zealand and with Fred: Paris, Helsinki, England and Hong Kong. I've learned to drive (last week I removed my P-plates). I've had a son. A black man became president of the United States, we voted John Howard out. Five years after I started this blog, Australia has a female Prime Minister.

If five years ago I had made a plan, it may well have looked something like: have third baby, get Masters, write more books, travel overseas, buy a house in the country.

Cancer and bushfires and grief wouldn't have been on the list. I would not have predicted a black President, a female Prime Minister.

Keeping up this blog would have been. I haven't always been the most regular blogger. I have never monetised the blog, partly because there is no such word as monetise, or there shouldn't be. I haven't leveraged it as a marketing tool or any of those clever things other people do. But it has always been my quiet corner of the Internet to record the domesticities of my life and to make stories out of the ordinary things that happen to me. It is a valuable keepsake, a map of my children's lives and the closest thing to a photo album I have.

You have come here and shared the journey with me, the unbearable sorrows, the conversations, the joy of daily life, and sometimes the tedium.

Thank you for reading.

Here's to another five years. Who knows what they might bring.

Bread

2011-03-05T12:14:00.004+11:00

I've been inspired to make my own bread using a no-knead method where you make a massive batch of dough and bake bread as you need it. Recipe and instructions here. The resulting bread is delicious and full flavoured with a good solid crust (crunchy and chewy) and soft white slightly sour interior. It really is easy, as long as you have room in the fridge. (I've just been using my biggest mixing bowl with plastic wrap over the top).

The girls made their own rolls for lunch today, stretching their piece of dough into a ball. Fred was disappointed that it was all over so quickly.
I actually used the dough to make a lentil roll like Kirsty described in the comments of a recent post, basically rolling/stretching/squashing out a loaf's worth of dough into a flat squarish shape (it was very rough, with thin holey bits and fat bits) and then spread a lentil mix leftover from making potato crusted lentil hotpot the other night and sprinkling with cheese before rolling it like the very ugly country cousin of a swiss roll. I didn't take a picture - it oozed and dripped lentils and cheese, but it had its own peculiar aesthetic charm. The kids devoured it. Fred had seconds after dessert.
We've been making our bread with organic white flour, and while that's the preference for Fred, Una and Martin, it's not great for me, as I am trying to stick to my low GI diet. I might have to experiment with some grains.

Romertopf Lasagne

2011-03-05T11:03:00.004+11:00

A few years ago Mum gave me her Romertopf (and the very 70s cookbook that went with it). It's so brown. I cooked a chicken in it I think, and then it gathered dust in the cupboard for a while. Anyway, I unearthed it last week after finding this recipe for a lasagne cooked in the Romertopf. You put all the ingredients in uncooked (the white sauce is the same one I always use, a mix of ricotta and an egg which I believe Mum got from a National Microwave cookbook), whack it in the oven. The only slightly complicated step is that, as always with the Romertopf, you have to soak it in cold water for fifteen minutes first, but it doesn't fit in our sink! I did it in the laundry trough, but tge plug didn't quit fit, and the water drained away...not sure how fast, but it must have soaked sufficiently because it all worked out okay.The lasagne was lovely, the girls especially loved it. Because I didn't brown the mince first, the texture was very soft. There was possibly a bit too much cheese (I can't believe I am saying that), next time I'll use a lot less mozzerella. There were lots of leftovers, which means this recipe will be a keeper - I am aware that in the blink of a wink we will have a fifth person eating family meals. The recipe uses fresh lasagne sheets and I prefer dry (more convenient and economical), but I guess you may have to start with a somewhat wetter sauce to use dry pasta.

I am inspired to try some more recipes in it. Perhaps bake a loaf of bread, or make a pudding, or a very autumnal casserole.

Oh! Week

2011-02-22T10:26:00.005+11:00

If you are a university person, you may well be in the thick of O week, or hovering around the edges of it. (O stands for Orientation and not Orsm! Free Beer!)

I attended six universities and all in all scored: one degree, one husband, one diploma, and a Masters (roughly in that order). I had a dual enrolment at Flinders Uni and Adelaide Uni doing english and classics. I dropped out just before the end of first semester because I had to break up with Adelaide, we were no good for each other. 'It's not me,' I told Adelaide. 'It's you.' But perhaps it was a little bit me. Then I went back to Tassie and did my first year there. During that year I fell in love, had my heart broken and surfed a wave of departure and ended up in Melbourne. Melbourne and I fell in love and stayed in love. I married Melbourne. I finished my BA at Monash, did the Diploma in prof writing and editing at RMIT (okay, technically Tafe not uni, and also where I met my other lifelong partner, Martin) and then, some years and children later, I did a Masters at Melbourne Uni.

In all that time, I don't recall ever "doing" O Week. I do remember walking past stalls as I nutted out paperwork and recognition of prior learning and the like, which generally involves sprinting from one end of the campus and back again while admin stands in the tallest buildings tracking your progress and laughing and rubbing their hands together and occasionally rewarding you with crumbs of cheese or electrocuting you. But no signing up to clubs or drinking out of barrels or other such mysterious O week shenanigans.

However once, at Monash, I did go to a wine and cheese in the archaeology department the week before classes began (so perhaps this counts as mysterious shenanigans). I made myself go because Adelaide and I had so disappointed each other, and I was determined not to rely solely on the 4 friends that I had moved to Melbourne with. I would win friends. I would influence people. I would be stunning social success.

I gave myself a pep talk on the train consisting of something along the lines of: it is your mission and duty to talk to people, no one will be rude, people are never really rude, people are nice, you are nice, you and people could be friends. So at the wine and cheese I took a breath, turned to the girl sitting next to me and she was totally totally rude. Sneer. One word answers. Shrinking away from me. (On reflection, this may have been a cultural misunderstanding. I have observed many female young adults from the eastern suburbs of Melbourne wear a permanent sneer, without actually being sneery).

I cracked up. I actually laughed because she was so rude. There was me, on my own at the wine and cheese. Having travelled to be there on a train and a bus and actually realising how ridiculously far away Monash is from the known universe. Having assured myself that no one could possibly be rude. I didn't just laugh. I got the giggles and had to beat a hasty retreat.

Still in the first week of uni a different girl recognised me on the train (oh look it's the strange laughing creature) and Sam and I were to become friends. Good friends. She slipped away at the end of uni, as happens, sadly. In fact I'm no longer in touch with anyone I went to Monash with. Not because I didn't go to O week, but because things happened that were sadder than Adelaide, and in the aftermath of this, I lost my way to be with these people and we all drifted apart. A post for another day, maybe.

I will tell you something about uni life though, some sage advice if that's you out there in the thick of O week. I have never looked back on my uni years and thought, I wish I'd slept more, or drunk more beer. But I do sometimes think 'I wish I'd gone to more lectures.'

And go on, sign up for something. You know you want to.

Sunday

2011-02-20T15:52:00.005+11:00

It's been a cleaning and a cup of tea drinking Sunday, a baby kicking on the loungeroom floor Sunday, a kids playing next door Sunday, a mop and milk buying Sunday. It's been a Sunday for grumping, and a Sunday for thinking about ordering bulbs, a Sunday for mooching between putting away laundry and sorting through the dress ups because I have finished my latest audio book and, like a jilted lover, I am not ready to start anything serious.

And so it's been a Sunday for baking.

Boston bun were a regular feature of my childhood weekends. In those olden days, shops closed on Saturdays at midday and weren't open again until Monday morning. The supermarket shop was done on Thursday or Friday nights (I also have resonant memories of late night shopping at Myer or Fitzgeralds or Venture in the city to buy perhaps wool for a jumper Mum was knitting, or a needed item of clothing - new tights, when I was older perhaps a dress for the school social). Saturday mornings were usually for the Hungarian delicatesses where we got cold meat and my sister fed her mania for double-salted liquorice. Perhaps we got bread there too, though my strongest bakery memories was a bakery in Sandy Bay Rd that had a door where you had to press a button to slide it open, very tricky for little fingers. Chances were that, along with crusty white sesame seed salami from the Hungarian deli in Magnet Court and crusty white rolls from the bakery on Sandy Bay Rd, Mum and Dad might pick up a Boston Bun. I remember discovering as a teenager that the key ingredient of a Boston Bun was potato, and I have a feeling this is not the first time I've attempted to make my own, though I can't remember any results of the first time.

We had some potatoes left over from our organic box of fruit and veg that we have delivered every Monday, and I thought this would be a fun way to use them up. I cooked and mashed three medium to large potatoes and that made about 2 cups of mash. This Boston Bun was a little doughier than the ones I occasionally buy these days from a commercial bakery, but much more satisfying. I didn't have allspice and missed it, also I only used big fat raisins, but sultanas would have been nicer, and some lemon zest perhaps. I put hardly any sugar in (a quarter of a cup of low GI raw sugar) because I still have diabetes paranoia, and I thought it was sweet enough, but less cakey. I added coconut to the icing mix in equal measures, rather than sprinkling it on top.

I'll make this again I think, if the girls enjoy it in their lunchboxes. It would be interesting, though not in the least authentic, to try it with sweet potato and I am definitely putting allspice on the shopping list this week.

Sorry the photo is so dark but it's that sort of a Sunday too

Baked Mince Roll

2011-02-15T18:20:00.006+11:00

After my mother's comment on the post about meatballs, I had to google baked mince rolls. Now of course everyone wanted to give me sausage roll recipes. I also found this:

Baked Mince Roll
This is quite a dainty dish which can be made out of the scraps of cold beef, ham or tongue. Pass the meat through a grinding machine, add bread crumbs, season with parsley, pepper and salt and work in a beaten egg. Make a nice short crust, roll it out, place the meat upon it, and fold the pastry over so as to make a neat roll. Bake 1-2 hour and serve with thick brown sauce. Mrs. William Morton.

SO dainty.

And a bread thing by Nigella, in which a sort of foccaccia dough is rolled up with a savoury mince filling. Which looks sort of tasty but if I am going to have some white floury concoction with my savoury mince then my nostalgic childhood longing demands it be Yorkshire pud.

Anyway I rather suspect Mum meant something more along the lines of this, in which mince is bulked up with breadcrumbs and bound with an egg, then rolled up like a swiss roll with a filling (though I can't imagine there would have been any pine nuts or grilled peeled capsicum in a 1950s Tasmanian version. I wonder if Mum remembers the recipe, and if she will include it in the comments?

Happy Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T10:27:00.000+11:00

Bread and jam and spaghetti and meatballs

2011-02-13T19:27:00.003+11:00

We've been reading Bread and Jam for Frances. Frances decides she only like bread and jam and surprisingly her parents comply with her fussiness, providing only bread and jam for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Pretty soon Frances knows just how a jam jar feels (full of jam) and bursts into tears at the thought of one more meal of bread and jam (What I am/is tired of jam, she sings) and opts instead to eat spaghetti and meatballs.

Both my girls go through fussy phases and Una is in full throes of conservatism about food. The other day they had jam and bread for breakfast AND jam sandwiches for lunch, so after a few jokes about Frances I thought Una might be open to trying spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.

This was not a dish I ever had growing up, or not that I recall. We always had a good old Spag Bog. I believe the only other way we ate pasta was macaroni cheese, or buttered fat noodles alongside a piece of veal, or the old kid's standby, with butter and cheese (actually I probably had that when Mum and Dad cooked pasta to have with a casserole, I was something of a Frances myself).

The meatballs I made were delicious, and I thought I'd jot down the recipe before I forget. There are any number of recipes for meatballs on the internet, but hey. Here's one more.

Meatballs
Three slices of white sourdough bread (it was a commercial one as the girls have decided they only like spongy white bread, so again, very soft and I included some crust. However I would consider replace bread with wheat germ for a coarser meatball)
Milk
500g ish of beef mince (I used organic and it was very soft)
2 anchovies
About a Tablespoon of Dijon mustard
An egg
Oregano
Rosemary and sage
Just after school I made the meatballs. I tore the bread up and sprinkled milk over it. Then using my hands mixed in the mince and egg (nothing like squishing yolk through your fingers). Oregano and pepper went in next, then I picked some rosemary in my garden (finally flourishing after two years of being a twiglet) and sage, diced the herbs with the anchovies and added the dijon and mixed it all in. Rolled up small balls which I baked for about twenty minutes on 180 degrees. I then set them aside. There was a slight taste of anchovy at this stage and I was a little concerned but it wasn't an issue by the time it was done; neither girl noticed it at any rate and I do think the anchovies were the secret ingredient. You could make up to this point and freeze, next time I might make a double batch.

Closer to dinner time, I arranged the meatballs in my Le Creuset (my mum gave me hers years ago and I LOVE it), poured a good quality bottled pasta sauce over the meatballs (yeah yeah, could totally make your own ye who are more holy than me), thinned it with a little water and put it on a low heat on the stovetop, covered, to cook while the water boiled. We had it with a high fibre (low GI) spaghetti and some steamed but still crunchy green beans and carrots and grated parmesan cheese.

We had enough left over meatballs (even after Martin went back for seconds) for Martin, Fred and I to have toasted meatball sandwiches the next day. Una couldn't quite come at that, but she did love them the first time round.

You could totally "hide" more veggies in this if you are That Parent. The girls actually eat heaps of raw veg in their lunchboxes and after school and if nothing else will scoff salad at dinner, so it's never been an issue for us. I am not a fan of concealing veggies because I think then they don't actually learn good habits or get to appreciate the tastes, colours and textures of a wide variety of vegetables. Plus it's not the way I like to eat. Still if you were looking to hide your veg, I suggest beefing up the pasta sauce with some pureed carrot and/or pumpkin, soft grilled peeled capsicum or grated zucchini rather than mucking with the texture of the meatballs.

Work

2011-02-10T10:22:00.002+11:00

This is the year Only Ever Always will FINALLY come out. I looked back through my blog and from what I can work out, I started writing it in September 2007 (I workshopped the first chapter as part of my Masters in early October), and it's publication date is August 2011. That makes four years. It is a book conjured from a constant series of transformation, and is radically changed in terms of theme and story from the first version though the central character remains the same and it has always had the same voice. I am expecting the copyedit in the next week. As the publication date draws closer watch out for some excerpts here on the blog. I don't mind saying that I am really happy with this novel.I have even composed a piece of music for it. The magical object in the book is a music box (actually two: the thing itself and the shadow of the thing). I am not sure what to do with the music however! I suppose a book trailer might be in order.

As for what I'm working on now:

I successfully applied for a Vic Arts grant last year, so for the first half of this year I will be writing short stories, which will hopefully elegantly link up to become a novel as one character - a four year old girl - will have a narrative arc, her character developing through the other characters' eyes. Yeah, well. It all sounds great in the application. I went over my application and thought, 'I would like to read that series of linked short stories slash novel.'

Instead I have to write it. Boo.

Still I am glad to have the space and time to develop a feel for short fiction. I have been reading and listening to short stories (remind me to blog about my Audible account sometime), and it's like a waltz, once you get the rhythm, it's not as hard as you'd think.

Steamed Eggplant Salad

2011-02-06T16:03:00.003+11:00

This is my new favourite way to cook an eggplant.

1 large eggplant (or a few of those slender Japanese ones but we don't get them out here)
Sesame oil
Soy
Mirrin or a good sweetish vinegar (white or red balsamic, red wine) or lemon juice
Basil, coriander, flat leafed parsley or mint (I've used all of these with success)
Spring onions
A few tablespoons of sesame seeds

Steam the eggplant - cut in slices and put them in a single layer in a steamer for a couple of minutes (we don't own a steamer big enough so I put them in a single layer in my metal colander which I sit in our largest saucepan). I don't bother salting. It will be soft, soggy and a bit fally aparty when done.
Chop the slices into chunks when cool enough to do so.
While still hot, toss eggplant with sesame oil (you don't need heaps), soy sauce and vinegar or lemon juice to taste. Don't overdo the vinegar.
Toast sesame seeds dry in a nonstick frypan.
Scatter seeds, sliced spring onions and herbs and toss through the salad. Serve warm or cold.

Martin and I have this as part of a bento style meal on a night when the girls might eat a snackplate type meal (say: fishfingers, crudites, bread and butter). I might stirfry some bokchoy (which I would also toss with soy and sesame seeds - hey, I loves them). For protein we might have some tempeh cooked in honey and soy, or a boiled egg or even say a single pork schnitzel sliced thinly and divided between the two of us. Something we always have with it are buckwheat noodles in a broth. We use a spiral instant buckwheat ramen packet that comes with a broth mix. It's delicious and makes plenty for two.

And first day of school

2011-02-04T11:38:00.000+11:00

Last day of the holidays

2011-02-03T21:21:00.000+11:00

Month of Poetry: The End

2011-02-01T12:17:00.005+11:00

In a blog post last July I said I wished I had more time to think in poems.

Well, the month of poetry is over, and I wrote 13 poems, which is 12 more than last year. I had various interruptions, sleeplessness, heat, family outings and a 2 week holiday in the middle (as well as the silencing sadness of the Queensland floods) but I achieved what I wanted from the project which was more blog posts and just "thinking in poems". I have read more poetry, bought more poetry and thought about poetry a lot this last month so all in all I would call it a great success, especially since the poems document a time in my life that is so very fleeting. I am hoping to keep it up this year with the slightly more manageable task of a poem a week.

For the record, this one's my favourite.

laundry

2011-01-30T09:24:00.002+11:00

The laundry needs doing
by which I mean
there’s washing
and hanging
and clothes to come in
so instead of doing it
I google laundry

discovering
my favourite semiotician
Roalnd Barthes
was hit by a laundry van
and a month later
‘succumbed to his injuries’
and died.

I’m thinking
of doing a PhD about it.

The Endsister

2011-01-27T20:04:00.005+11:00

Una says into the room:
I know what an endsister is
And nobody hears her but me.
It’s a kind of a ghost

My children are ghosts.
Visitations.

Later
She says it again
Pressing more insistently
Against the air.

Frederique
Who is seven
And has only recently uncovered
All the secrets of the known universe,
Corrects her

It's an ancestor.
It’s like
Your grandmother’s grandmother.

Una’s disappointment and mine
Make the same pale figure.

She shimmers once,
More real than your grandmother's grandmother,
Before she disappears.

The Secret Life of Frederique

2011-01-18T21:29:00.004+11:00

I can never write
The whole story
You have learned
To keep parts of yourself hidden

But it's why I write
And write
And write
My undaunted curiosity
Your mysterious darkness

The Contradiction of Dog

2011-01-15T20:28:00.001+11:00

Bemused optimism
Cultivated foolishness
Dismayed eagerness

Sad wagger

Relaxing

2011-01-15T15:18:00.001+11:00

Walking with Una

2011-01-13T22:32:00.003+11:00

And suddenly you are tired
We walk towards home

The constant fall
Of rain
Makes you whimper

Fear has no shape
It is only bloated
With appetite

You hold my hand and cheer up.
You tell me that if I died
You would die.

Agnostic*

2011-01-11T22:10:00.004+11:00

I pray

I just don't mind
if no one
is listening

---
*Thinking of Queensland and the terror and chaos and loss and sadness in the face of it all, as the rain here falls, gentle and persistent, a reminder and a lament.

Housesitting

2011-01-10T22:48:00.001+11:00

Rain
Walking
Dog

In a single storey
Beachside burb

Unfamiliar streets
But I know this life

Old homes and new
Rose gardens
Roast dinners
A hostel for tired men
A skinhead who doesn’t meet my eye
A slow moving ambulance

End of the street
The sun sets
A veil of rain
An aching sky

You like

2011-01-09T17:03:00.004+11:00

Showers baths
Weather
The tumble of sisters
The sound of passing planes
My hair, which is a miracle to you

Your voice,
Which you found
Singing in your throat