Cockatoo Island

I was photographing some bullshit stiletto race in the Quay which stank of money and corporate sponsorship, not to mention downright demeaning to women, so I made a gettaway via ferry which dropped by Cockatoo Island, a little re-discovered abandoned patch on the Parramatta River. They used to build big ships there back in the days of black and white. The baby had finally fallen asleep on my chest from the swell of the ferry casting him about, I took my chance, took my leave and pushed the stroller ashore. I need some yin to the yang of 245 women running in high heels.

I found myself sucked into a 200m long sandstone tunnel to get some shade. It was eerie, speakers played creepy music as you walked under the wooden pillars that supported the low roof of 'Dog Leg Tunnel', cause it had a big bend in the middle I guessed. Finally we popped out the end into that Spring sun that's taking some getting used to, and found myself wondering what to do next.

This was a Biennale of Sydney location showcasing artworks from around the globe, but the backdrop stole the show. It was like the abandoned mine in 'Thomas the Tank Engine'. It was the perfect place for Scooby Doo Mystery Mayhem, it reeked of an olde worlde forgotten time. Huge factory shells dripping with industrial leftovers. Mega machines lay dusty and rusty.

I'm always amazed by the big scale of men

and their ways, how they build things, shift enormous chunks of machinery around the globe, whether it be a ship or a bridge or a building, they seem unafraid of scale. Why, women get to give birth, that's pretty amazing too.

The more I walk around this decrepit island, the mood starts to infiltrate me, the privacy and dusty corners are filled with floating particles of light that dance and take me to a lost quiet. The stiletto race washes away and I'm thinking about form and light for a change, not celebrity and exclusives, nor cheesy Opera House backdrops and whether some girl is sexy enough to sell a shot.

Why do people do anything?

Why do I toil at all, when I anything I look back on that once gave me pride, I don't feel any connection to it like I do at the moment of execution of creation, it's the doing that counts, not the memory. I get riled looking at old family photos because they are essentially useless, they only stir up muddy emotions, blow a wistful air in my ear, brag of a time that has passed. Why do I even take photos at all?

Mmmmmm, I start to think, this would make a terrific location for a shoot.....shove a pretty woman in front of this stuff and print the cash. Then suddenly there are other photographers next to me, with more expensive large format cameras, like a reoccuring nightmare, they've even bought their cute girlfriend. I breath and force myself to focus on focal points.

And tonal ranges, shadows, blacks, colour temperatures.....

I see a sign that says 'no photography', oops. I presume they mean of the artworks, which I've neglected to actually notice most of, so I try a little harder. It makes me think about the artists, and their current mood, or maybe their mood next week when the Biennale is over and it's all just a dream. All this hard work, just a dream. I think, did he have fun making that sculpture of a crocodile out of what are they.... rooftop capsules????

Somebody made this, they took lots of time to specially write out all the different measurements, to file something that made something, that made something.....and so on it goes, like ants in the nest, we are but put on this earth to roll little balls of dirt about because that is what we do. The rain can wash it away at any time, but it's that drive to do that we follow till the heart stops.

Why does the light of an open doorway appeal to me, why is it my job to notice it? I start to think that I'm ready for my old career back, the last baby is a boy now, but this boy starts to stir in his stroller and upon wakening fully throws himself onto the concrete and wham, I'm back in the day job, fully. But whilst he dreamt that 45 minutes away, so did I. 

Don't Mess with the Don

I'm having 'blog wishes' come true. After my previous whinging about having no mobile phone I now possess a sexy white iphone with $500 per month credit...and after moaning about having no career, I did two freelance jobs this week. As it's never come up before I may as well mention I am what is formerly known as a paparazzi, but now that word is too loaded with lawsuits and manslaughter charges, I just prefer photographer.

Today it was actress Eva Mendes, a Cuban hottie who flew all the way around the world to squeeze her little brown self into my camera lens. I am a sucker for a pretty lady and a gift bag. After two kids and low income I now cram as many freebies in with my camera gear whereas in my previous life B.C. (before children) I must have had so much disposable income I just sneered at the promotional perfume or italian water being past around.

So I turn up early to get a good spot, and lo - there's one right in the middle waiting just for little old me! I am technically the shortest photographer in Sydney so I go well in the middle of a media scrum, it's great to double park behind me and shoot over my head, as long as you don't try and use me to balance on like a tripod, I won't accidently step on your foot.

So this bloke I've never seen (fair to say I've been on/off 5 years maternity leave mate) pipes up and says,

"that's Don's spot"

I'm like who-the-fuck-is-Don? "Well where's Don now?"

"He's gone out for a sec but when he comes back he's not going to be real happy"

I'm thinking who IS this Don that's got fatboy really scared.

I said "well he's not here now so it doesn't matter, he'll find another spot"

and fatboy is shaking his head at me like I've just sworn against the mafia. I know I've been a casual drop in since I left the scene to have babies, but this guy doesn't realise that time and space has only made me stronger, why all that time at home I have been wrestling for tiny increments of my own personal elbow room, Lord I finally got the cot out of the bedroom last week and have a child-free nighttime for the first time since the original conception.

"What are you, his bodyguard?" I said "Don knows the rules mate, yer leave a bag or something" I reminded him of statute 21 of celebrity photographer's code. "Possession is ninth-tenths of the law".

He hissed through his teeth like now I'm really gonna get it. "Don't blame me when he get's back and he wants his spot back"

"Don't worry I'll sort Don out" I said, thinking Don is nothing compared to a tantruming two year old.

"Oh there's Don over there" he says, relieved and his shoulders unscrunch.

"Oh what, Don's got two spots going?" I say and overlook fatboy to say hello my oldest colleague behind him - the only one with manners and kids.

I leave early because the fatboy on my right and the photographer on my left started the squeeze on me, but I already got the shot they missed, I decided to get home early and wire it out first. Now I'm sitting here smelling like a tart's armpit and wondering what else I can ask the blog fairy for......

Mummy, where is my career?

What do you tell yourself after you've pushed the boat of your career out and realised you forgot to tie a line? Turn and look at what is holding you to the shore? Turn your back on the sea and delude yourself "it's not so great, I've seen it before." At what stage do I just dive in fully dressed and start to swim like mad to get that little boat back or is it gone forever, nobody told me not to let go, to shelter it somewhere. Isn't that what you should tell your daughters before they have children, before they sink the little part of their heart that is so hard to resuscitate after letting it go? What have I done!

Pessimism is a last resort

Very busy dreams last night.  Melinda (she's a fitness instructor) is baking pies. I'm not allowed to touch them. Eunice is at Coles, she walks past me, I'm near a register waiting to be served. I must also find time to enter the Moran Art Prize. The dream shows me ten artworks so beautiful, a whole body of work - pointillist, silvery, esoteric - great stuff. Tiny windows of magic light flashed at me for a second. I suppose my imagination was exhibiting what I am capable of. I drink them down fast like shots.

I wake up to fart and think on this coldest morning of the year. 'Six degrees' reported from MSP who delivers the morning cup of 'hot, steaming Joe', which it is not by the time I pull-up on one elbow. My fingers peep out from under the doona, feeling bitten, looking for pen and paper. My arse does an excellent impression of a trombone. I consider risking frostbite up to the elbow to reach the coffee before it is beyond repair.

This was to be the weekend I meant to rent a six hundred dollar snow chalet overlooking Lake Eucumbeen. Poverty, once again, has forced me to live behind my hopes. Our next fabulous weekend planned in the country of my day-dreams is Dubbo Western Plains Zoo. I shall wake up in August and think 'I dreamt of lion's roaring last night - in Gladesville'. 

It hurts. I like to concentrate on pain in the morning. By afternoon I've worked my way up to mild discontent. If I plan an outing I can enjoy slight boredom. In the evenings I turn to drink. I've decided that making money might get me truly wondrous. That way I can use it to gawp at expensive magazines, spread my legs at top-class beauty salons and ideally visit African animal resorts and centrally-heated winter cabins. I would alleviate my ennui with trips to IKEA and post large packages of gifts to my nieces instead of the piddling efforts I'm currently guilty of.

For this week's menu, in order to buy myself a book or a bra, I'll plan meals that rely heavily on noodles and vegetables. That old temptation to toilet train Chuckles returns every time I enter isle three for nappies. By the time I pay for my trolleyload I'll experience the equivalent of a tiny thrill, smug in the knowledge I can feed the family for another week, or is it just seeing a three figure number on a cash register. In my Coles dream I spot Eunice shopping, I bet she never has to count carefully for groceries. In real life I did phone her for a loan so I could rent the snow chalet. She never acknowledged the request, she did however tell me of her own plans to take her children skiing. I pray to be a considerate friend, so blog bitching about them isn't very good as they are my only readers. Names have been changed.

There is a particular time of morning, when I am due to get up, the sun enters the window, piercing my dim, sleepy world. I am not a morning person because I wake up angry, covered in sleep-mud. Writing helps me beat off depressing, rabid-dog thoughts. I have to mentally kick the little fuckers off me. Sometimes that small, happy square of sunlight drifts over me and picks me up from under my armpits and props me up on the pillows and says 'here, drink this'.

The clouds mask the sun with a grey filter, everything is not so sunny, there is no pick me up. My pen is grumpy, the coffee has gone cold. But today I remember the science, that if I lay here as usual, I know that somewhere the sun is swimming in its blue sky as usual, just behind the clouds, right there where it always is, only obscured by a passing earth mood. It will come back. I cheer myself with thoughts like 'when I am dead I will get to sleep in a bit longer'. My Auntie Christine (pictured in the 60's) died in her mid-thirties of a brain tumour, cleaning the kitchen cupboards.

Space and Time

Lying under the flight-path, I like to listen to old, heavy planes rake across Sydney, this one at ten-thirty pm, half an hour before curfew. Some come later, in bad weather - you pity the pilot, egg him on to his landing strip via tantrummy clouds. The growl of engines taking their time across the sky, big and slow, travelling in an alternate universe it seems, time slowing down.  I think of them from my bed.  The old ones sound different, probably it's the props or the weight of them. Coming in from the desert or some map-dot of a place where things are run differently - places that don't have a curfew or runway lights. They must see Sydney from a hundred kilometres away, a huge hub of light, even at this late hour.  In that glow the Pope is here, somewhere, awake - are his rooms full of 'groupies', post-mass on this Sunday night?

Sydney mums sigh, everywhere, with both relief and sadness. School holidays finish soon, the last day of freedom tomorrow - we'll fork out some goodies for the last time and make sure the uniforms are clean, bananas & ham stockpiled for lunches. Baby siblings say goodbye once again to your playmates. Be ready to rise for the school bell everyone. The roads will clot once more with cars full of kids heading towards ABCs/123s.  Families return from all corners of Australia, from far-flung relatives, spare rooms, the snow or the farm, back home tonight by air or road. The rain falls for the first time this sunny, quiet week they were gone. We are always the ones to stay in town whilst others leave, left to enjoy the empty streets.

The sewage pipe is still broken, the real estate office is useless, all these holidays we've had our waste spilling onto the lower lawn and down into the earth-sponge and sadly, to the swamp I love.  Nobody cared, nobody came when we asked, all were off somewhere.

Me and my children, my husband occasionally wafting in from the world of men. What did we do apart from play imaginatively, roam in pyjamas, make snacks, watch DVD's and read laying in the sun, crawling all over each other?

I Love Books

I am supposed to be making a booklist for my pregnant Melbourne buddy, the only smart one from school (apart from moi, in our circle of jocks and social climbers anyway). I loathe going to Borders without knowing what to get, finding myself frazzled  by all the designer dust jackets and busting to go to the loo, it must be just the smell of books that makes me want to 'go'. At home we have Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories as a loo read. At age 18 a family friend put together a great list for me of 'must reads', they were all fantastic, none of which are included below.

On this list there might be one you like or have not read yet. After trolling our fiction section these fell on me. Must get shelves. Authors with an asterisk I've found good for more than one book:

'The Time Traveler's Wife'  - Audrey Niffenegger

'The Mists of Avalon' -  Marion Zimmer Bradley

'The Dice Man' - Luke Rhinehart

'Moon Palace' - Paul Auster *

'The Way I Found Her' - Rose Tremain *

'Lost in a Good Book' - Jasper Fforde

'The Clan of the Cave Bear'  - Jean M.Auel (series) * 

'Atomised' - Michel Houellebecq *

'Eucalyptus' - Murray Bail

'The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency' - Alexander McCall Smith *

'The Red Tent' - Anita Diamant

'Year of Wonders' - Geraldine Brooks

'Staring at the Sun' - Julian Barnes *

'The Restraint of Beasts' - Magnus Mills  *

'The Old Patagonian Express' - Paul Theroux * - non fiction but hilarious and also excellent fiction writing depending on where you start.

In bookstores I find myself wistfully looking at all the books I've already read, wishing I'd never read them yet, and wonder what the fuck I'm supposed to read now. Please return me a list of your favourites (doesn't have to be the definative list as mine isn't), but I've loved all these books.

Stop Scratching Skip

Oh god, 20 days since my last post. Am I suddenly unleashing the perfectionist who has been hiding somewhere? I've decided to spank her and send her back to her room. So please bear with me as I get over my blog hump and break through to the other side. I tend not to respond to compliments as well as criticism so now my mum has read my blogs and said they are lovely I'm basically cured of all attention seeking behaviour (for a while) and can just retire.

But alas, something burning at the back of my mind wants to be born, something called 'a family trip to the country', the remnants of which are still haunting me in unpacked bags strewn all over our bad carpet. My husband's incredibly reliable habit of finding a way to sabotage any attempt on my part to escape the shackles of domestic bliss worked again. I should have a sticker on my Kombi that says 'MY OTHER CAR IS A MERCEDES' (a shit one). That likes to run down its battery whilst the car doors are open to air out the mysterious source of mould.

'Lucky we have two cars darling' said I in a very good impersonation of someone with anger management classes under their belt. Perhaps all the self-help books are actually working. Or more likely I was so exhausted from packing I couldn't put up my fists. Not only was there too many things, I had also worn myself out getting the cat vaccinated and then shipped to Meadowmist boarding school for waaay bad ass cats.

VW to the rescue. South we were heading, overtaken by EVERYONE. Even really tiny little Jap Crap cars that were 20 years old. I'm starting to worry about the old girl and if she'll make it through rego. I finally won the battle of the Berry Donut Shack stopover cause I was driving. I can report they are very hot, sugary and nothing to blog about. 

I'm still scratching, you can't 

be too sure once you find one tick, there won't be more. Nurse Alison, my favourite removalist took to my neck with a pair of tweezers (that I packed) and deftly took out the the tiny bastard of page 55 on 'Family First Aid' (packed by me). The Paralysis (bush) Tick loves me. One year I had one on the labia majus and it wasn't till after a bottle of gin, a match, a wombat and some marital bonding that it was out of my life. Now on this dawn the 'weakness of the face and eyelids, then arms' alerted me to the fact that it wasn't just a hangover, certainly 'irritation at the site of the bite' (jugular) and 'breathing becomes difficult' (more of a panic reaction) - I thought it might be the mattress (holiday cabin quality), but the tingling fingers were an exciting addition to symptoms of the previous years, which I remembered well. I had a tick. I pulled out the secret weapon - homeopathic anti-insect-bite-potion.

Bream Beach is lovely. We are usually the only ones there, every winter solstice. The whales are passing on their way to Hervey Bay to birth. The sun sets early over St Georges Basin, we 

are on a small neck of land between there and Jervis Bay. The best part is we hire 6 cabins, all full of people who shall be called friends, old and young. Someone always swims, someone always sleeps, someone has firewood and nobody ever has an axe. The VW cosied up to a motorbike and the whole scene swum with kangeroo, kookaburra and possum. We burnt through 40 kgs of wood to get the fire just right for all the variety of meats. Nobody claimed the Portugese chicken which was cooked to perfection by the end of all 20 bottles of wine. It's always the Kiwis to bed last.