darwin museum

the lesser labiaboxsaurus croc dines strictly on the ladies.

grace darling

the body knows

"some say the soul informs the body. but what if we were to imagine for a moment that the body informs the soul, helps it adapt to mundane life: parses, translates, gives the blank page, the ink and the pen with which the soul can write upon our lives?

"suppose the body is a god in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? then what?

"is it wise to spend a lifetime chastising this teacher who has so much to give and teach? do we wish to spend a lifetime allowing others to detract from our bodies, judge them, find them wanting? are we strong enough to refute the party line and listen deep, listen true to the body as a powerful and holy being?

"... in the wild psyche, body is understood as a being in its own right, one who loves us, depends on us, one to whom we are sometimes mother, and who sometimes is mother to us."


i started to tell mum about this passage in women who run with the wolves and she cut me off. oh, i never read that at the time. it seemed too fashionable. but if it's any good maybe i'll read it after you.

if i'd read this in 1992, it might have saved me a lot of fuss.

town bikes

tram stop

What i want ... more than anything ... is for you ... to fuck off.

ok fair enough, bleeding man lying on the footpath in the foetal position with your head rigid as though there's a pillow underneath. i did plough in thinking some dudes were kicking you round. they left, i tried to nudge you upright. white hair, torn forehead and knee.

those eyes, i know them. you were young and hot and funny or spiritual or something other magnetic. now a bit old and still drunk and watching to see what i'll do next. night.

also it's christmas and people are a bit nuts. yelling into phones while crossing the road. generally, with or without family, equally nuts.

i hope you get home. maybe prop yourself up against a wall.

town bikes

blue light limbo

i brush past her at the dessert table as she mentions the womyn's collective. must be one of R's friends from uni - post feral, shaved head. cute. trying to stay positive about this whole man-wife wedding caper.

later, in the line for limbo, she leans back to me. i can do this. i've been to enough blue light discos, yeah? she says. it hardly matters cos lolli will kick all our arses – i've seen her limbo under a coffee table before – but i like that she's taken her shoes off.

growing up lesbian in the goddamn suburbs. bummer, but she got there. here.

my spine hurts.

litchfield in the wet

Wangi Falls is really hammering over that rockface, the rockpool full to overflowing. there's a big sign, says WANGI CLOSED. shitballs, thwarted mission. but it's still an awesome sight. the creek is flooded and the salties have moved in.

we picnic on the grass in 90% humidity, smashing a couple of gluten-free wraps and promising to write to Freedom Foods to ask why they call them wraps if they won't. watch backpackers pile off a tourist truck after their guide. he's a tough nut who wants a durry and a chance with one of the European girls in short shorts, but they're all bothered by the heat, busy with their SLRs and water bladders.

we get going before the salties catch wind of toddler flesh. motivated also by the idea of a frosty fruit or calypo or even – if it's all they've got – a plain lemon icypole.

Monsoon cafe and caravan park (no cats)

Something calls from the tall trees, lush green itself maybe. on the verandah, a backpacker with his back to me, eating. he puts his elbow on the table and turns to study me. judges me to be of no interest. returns to his baked beans.

sliding door. i find the frosty fruits, try to pay the concierge, get ushered to another counter, next to the bain marie, in front of the door through to the deep fryers. everything festooned with christmas decorations.

"Have you come from Wangi?" asks the cashier, hot and German.

"Yep."

"Was it busy there?"

"Ah, it's closed, so ..."

"Ya, we know, but was it busy?"

"Kind of. There were a few of those ... tourist things ..." I say, trailing off, counting out coins.

"Cars?" he asks.

"Ah, yep." embarassed that Mr Dictionary has abandoned me again. "Ok, see ya."

"Ya."

We take the dirt road back to darwin past Berri Springs, 4WDing thru a rushing river listening to The Wiggles.

eldorado

my toenails are full of festival mud, my head holds the peace that comes from waking up in the bush and brushing my teeth while staring up at trees and sky. a weekend of finding my forest feet, floating down the river, heckling hippies from the chai tent.

i pull into the carpark to find a ute in my spot, but i can't find my post-it notes anywhere in the family wagon. probably best. i take a deep breath and summon an affirmation:

i'm not the crazy lady with many cats, bathing in a wheelbarrow out the back and striking young whippersnappers with her umbrella. not yet. i can handle this without infringing anyone's human rights. surely.

the ute has a mobile number on the back. i dial it, only a bit surly.

me: mr anglesea landscaping design co, i just got home from camping to find your ute in my spot etc.

father: oh that's my son. I'll call him now and get him out.

son: action. car moved.

being nice kinda helped. sometimes it's easier to go with the rapids instead of fighting the flow.

darebin council ute

la nina

this summer will be an advertisement for some kind of coffee liqueur. sultry women barely wearing their singlets, beads of sweat, the fondling of melting ice cubes. and then the warm rain. the laughing and the dancing.

his father's son

the four-year-old hammers a nail into a piece of wood. his grandfather comes over.

what are you doing, mate?

fucked things for fucked people, replies the four-year-old. keeps hammering.

after eltham

my leftovers

"The leftover sausages in the fridge are mine," she says out the driver's side window, and repeats herself as he comes around from behind the car. He nods, now hungry, and waits in his office-crushed suit for the traffic to pass.

She says it without malice, but studies him with narrowed eyes under that shiny black bob as he crosses the top end of Brunswick Street. Might as well add: "so keep your hands off, fat boy".

It's a Volvo he just got out of, with the numberplate WTF. She's off somewhere and he's going home to eat around the leftover sausages.

alexander technique

How your body holds itself is its own aching history.
- Andy Jackson, The Dead, in Going Down Swinging Issue 30.

plutonia on cromwell

i am nude and about to get dressed. she is dressed and about to be nude, but it's her strong voice i recognise first. it echoes round the change room and wrinkles the decades: she clarifies the steps for taking a japanese bath; calls to order the rattiest girls in her classroom (me among them); summons her kids and their friends (me included) to the backyard for tea.

i catch glimpses of her as i dress and dry my hair. she looks the same. my hair is long again as though the intervening years never happened – neither the dreads nor the shorn advertisement to lesbians. in the ladyhawke moment before she gets into the bath and i go upstairs, we hug and say hello. get told off for talking too loud. 

all the way through my massage i think about her son … how we ran riot in playgrounds at dusk. how cool i thought he was as Fagin in year eight. how he kept me sane in doncaster, knocked on my window til i answered. stood beside me when i most wanted to vanish. how we fell apart. about platonic male friends and how close I still hold them. how far away.

i come downstairs and there he is, waiting for his mum, sitting cross-legged with his own son (older now than when his father and i first met). i kneel awkwardly until his son offers me a headrest. i could do with a headrest - my head is too full of information and fuzzy from this cold - but I don’t know what to do with it. they both look beautiful and kind.

i take flight.

coming back from the island

figuring out old-new friendships over seven kinds of cheese, wine and seafood, sandstone and sea views.

we walk to pyramid rock, over pigface and fox bait. down the cliff to rock pools where we find lady-garden anemones and starfish mid-feast. dead baby seals on the rocks and gulls beak down in the sand. dad jokes wash up at high-tide alongside half a surfboard and a computer: somebody crashed surfing the internets. 

i haven't been a passenger since May. not in a driving way, at least. maybe on weekends away. 

driving home alone tonight, slightly wired by sleeping platonic, late lunch lasagne, RRR and iced tea, i come home you, tradie vehicle, in my spot. my voice cracking while i leave a message on the landline signwritten on your truck. hi mate. you've parked in my spot. stop it. it's fkn annoying.

old punk

On growing up in Canberra:

"Sure, I had some great experiences, but I'd trade them in for some good parenting and support any day."

world map tetris

the cartographer hears a confession over crepes: i make tetris games of world maps. brazil fits into africa, see. madagascar belongs with mozambique. papua tucks into the gulf, new zealand hugs the eastern seaboard.

so how do we fit together? what does that mean for us?

the cartographer mops up chocolate and strawberries and cream, and follows my eye to the map on the wall. "I know something of how that all works," he says, wistful, and disappears into his own world.

Polite cyclist

To that guy I see around over the years, mostly with your dark hair under a helmet, framing that square jaw and well-adjusted smile.

We cross paths on the bike highway and find ourselves in the queue together at the bottle shop while it pelts down outside, or on the back deck at a party. I am glad of your sensible conversation at two am. I passed you yesterday on the footpath on St Georges Road, and at CERES a while back I set eyes on your partner and the small children you summon in every conversation.

You seem like a kind man. But please don't brandish my name like a weapon, showing me how sharp your memory is. I like you. Put your memory away, or prompt mine. Talk about yourself in the third person or something.

Colosseum on Collins

"So he looked up and his nose was just ... gone," a businessman tells his Blackberry, his face a matrix of broken capillaries. "Blood spurting ten foot in the air. Blood just everywhere. Ah, it was terrible. The worst thing I've seen in sport for a long time. No nose. Just terrible."

He hangs up and disappears into Centre Way, a flash of navy pinstripes fighting to the front of the queue for his lunchtime baguette.

next time you get towed too

good old collingwood forever

crossing gertrude

She's got her hand on the horn behind me. She wants to turn left but i'm going straight, and there's a stream of traffic. she just has to wait.

I've pulled back my mitten top and formed a middle finger before i've even turned around. Just wait.

Hand still hard on the horn.

She looks like a Collingwood supporter. maybe i should put my middle finger down and concede defeat, but she's riding that horn and i'm more stubborn this morning than i've felt in a long time, and let's face it, i barrack for the pies too, at heart.

the passenger door opens. wow. they really are Collingwood supporters. missing tooth. sunken cheeks, dark eye sockets. tracksuit. i really shouldn't be fucking with them on the corner of the flats like this.

"I wouldn't fuck ya with my dog's dick, ya ugly cunt."

There's a break in the traffic, and i'm off.

epworth eastern

"Your hair looks good, Nance," says Nan, not quite sure. Nance's hair is cut short. a tube spools out from under her nightie, draining light-red liquid from her lung into a machine gurgling at her feet. She's lost so much weight she looks ten years old. like a tomboy.

"You think? Jim hates it. I went down the Mall before I came to hospital, and I said no more perms. i can't be bothered," says Nance. she's tugging at her admission bracelet. Jim shifts uncomfortably in his seat, hand on walking stick. He does hate it, you can tell, but finally Nance won't hear it. I wanna punch the air say yeah.

I can feel Nan, my mum's mum, getting self conscious, needing to justify a commitment to her own fragile inch-thick fro. my grandmothers have both gone to the hairdresser at the Mall in West Heide for half a century.

"I have to perm mine," says Nan finally. "I've got a big bald spot at the back." she giggles. shy. I've heard it before: it's one of those statements that lock the Arnold women into their routines. like when a waitress puts a big plate of food in front of my mum. i can't eat all that she always says, shifting her gaze from me to the waitress to the food like she's unsure who needs to hear it most.

it makes me eat all mine, and then some. just to test my genetics.

next time you get towed

do you mind if i park in your garage in
doncaster while you inconvenience me?

concrete blocks

sometimes after a downpour, it rains for hours inside the half-built Artist apartments.

there's a fancy new block of flats a bit further along, past the union club hotel. windows like lit fishbowls at night. a guy in one of the windows tonight: largely nude, from what i can see. holding a paint brush, staring at an easel with his head to one side. not hot, not not hot.

just a dude painting nude at 6.30pm on a cold friday night.

smelly shop

"Where's my poor woman," says the shopper, swinging around with a moisturiser in each hand, her eyes falling on a saleswoman up the back, misting organic hair sprays with another customer. The attendant at the counter shrugs and smiles softly, then goes back to wrapping a scented candle. "My poor woman, I abandoned her because I was undecided and now that I need her, she's abandoned me..." says the woman, her handbag sagging.

stripping in reverse

"It's the fixies people are stripping right now. No wonder - some of them are riding round on $1600 cranks. It takes about seven minutes to strip that."

"Hate fixies." [silent agreement]

"How long would it take to put gears on a fixie, if it's locked to a post?"

"We should do that."

saturday in the car park

saturday in the car park behind my block of flats. me and the camry come back from the market, string bag full of white fruit and veg, and stopped short of practicing parking by an interloping black commodore in my space.

the notes i write for windscreens are terser every weekend. at first, 'hi! i think you've parked in my spot! please call me when you go so i can move my car' has given way to: 'next time you get towed [gddm fkr].'

swearing like tourettes itself. where the fk am i going to park, fkn brunswick st etaggers gdm your brunching ... gated communities now i get it ... fk fk fk every fkn saturday a new fkn commodore. that type of thing.

i look up at the flats. a wall of windows catches the full winter sun. a girl on the first floor sits in the window, long brown hair gleaming toppling down. a bare leg drawn up. if she's painting her nails in the sun, i think, she's a gdm parody of herself. but she isn't. she's squeezing her ingrown hairs.

at least something is right with the world.

people having fun downstairs

or is it upstairs, i can't tell through the earplugs.

they fall over each other laughing as they come home, voices echoing up the crazy-paved stairwell - what i reckon, yeah i reckon ...

belting out the words to their favourite songs, one after the other until somehow sleep takes them. i can't remember the last time i did that.

train river, car river, river river

i nearly clip a pedestrian as i come out into Kerr Street tucking fingers into mitten-tops and thinking: did I take my asthma spray? Am I masking early-onset alzheimers if I find a trick to remind me of this twice a day?

Weaving around construction workers and a splattered takeaway coffee at the ICI roundabout, hard right onto napier past the soccer field in the shadow of the commission flats. The first stretch of green for the morning. Everything is singing after the rain.

Through the hospital sector, orderlies unloading cardboard boxes while the fitzroy gardens shine orderly on the right.

Leaving the injured behind. Overtaking the human racehorses training in full-body onesies at the G while baby grand pianos go out of tune in front windows, underneath chandeliers, behind hedges.

Up up on top of the train river, over the car river where once a fox followed me home in the dead of night. And then, the river river. A reporter with noosed scarf warms her hands while the camaraman sets up a shot of the city.

That’s definitely a peacock calling from the botanic gardens … scooby doo and his gang would be huddled on this hill in their mystery machine punching cones and summoning the guts to leap the fence if they could only find a goddamn park amid the champagne-coloured cars.

A wedge of fawkner park appears before the wedge heels, knee-high boots and soft ponytails of south yarra.

And then I’m at work. Flanked the whole time by green. Uphill to go home, but then it’s all downhill from there.

at tiamo, in our 30s

'are you seeing anyone at the moment?'

'yeah, my counsellor. she's awesome.'

'cool. i found a new naturopath in northcote, she's amazing.'

meals on wheels

sixty-nine years, we've been married. if he went, i'd be ok. i don't know what he'd do without me though. a couple of weeks ago i just thought ... i've cooked every single meal, every day, breakfast, lunch, dinner. for other people, for 69 years. well i'm sick of it. someone else can do it. meals on wheels or something.

beaming

magpie, i love your scrambled digital signal.

kelpie on kerr

i shook the snow dome but instead of glitter it was filled with rocks. in this new dome i'll keep an eye on the sparkly stuff and the nearby bluestones.

pocket money

in the morning fog on gertrude street, a 40-something tradie paces the footpath in his fluoros. he's on the phone, holding it hard against his head. all the muscles in his body are tense, his eyes red.

'You never gave me pocket money!' he says, sucking back tears like a five year old.

the way there

the way back

anzac day, high street

'what's this, a crime scene, is it?'

'yeah. i take photos of crime scenes with my mobile.'

joe's organics

new car. well not new, but from 1993 and not 1983. i drive it home from camberwell with both hands clamped on the wheel, thinking about geography, the cover note on my insurance and how bright lights are when you look into them.

stop off to get some organic bubbles and veggies for dinner. joe asks me if there is some reason to celebrate. ordinarily, there's no special reason for bubbles. but tonight ... maybe my grin betrays me. the same grin as with Nessie, and she ended up parched, smoking, towed and scrapped after three weeks and 400,000kms.

so joe says, 'i wish someone had told me this when i first started to drive. you must look in the distance as well as in front of you.' He repeats it over and over in different ways. 

i'm pawing the potatoes. thumbing the tomatoes. i repeat after him each time, the same way i nod when people give directions, hoping they'll stop talking soon so i can work it out myself. someone else taught me that. i pay. he donates a bunch of goddamn mouldy bananas that'll have to be baked before they liquify, and takes me out on the street. i have the box in arms, and he is pointing at the traffic lights about three blocks away. they're green. 

'you see?' he says, making a sweeping gesture that forces me to take in the entire horizon. victoria street northcote and everything above and beyond it. 'look at what's close, but also at what's far away.'

i go home, cook up the tomatoes, watch the last of madmen series three and fight with my girlfriend.

greek easter

made in reservoir

thornbury to croxton

an analogue TV falls face down in the cooch,

near a chair with the wicker kicked out of it

sick of each other, the watcher and the watched

futons and inner springs commingle in a stack

cottage cheese spills from a plastic milk bottle

saying come back to bed, we fixed you a warm drink

flirting on mitchell

An old man shuffles along the footpath, pressed beige pants hoisted high on his belly, tufts of chest hair peeping over a white singlet.

He's gently waving a giant net, like one for catching butterflies or something the BFG would find useful in the place where all dreams is beginning.

'Come on, come on,' he coos softly, just out of swishing distance. His half-hearted comb over swirls in the smoggy vapour. There are fires burning somewhere in the state.

A little bird, uneasy in the big wide Brunswick, permits the courtship.

seagull on wellington

carlton walking frame

sugar on wheels

I gave my last $20 to a taxi driver and asked him to take two-thirds of a lemon meringue pie to Hanover. it's too late and i'm too drunk to drive. Geo was going to haggle the driver down on price, but i met his eye and asked him to make sure it got there. people are hungry, you know. but maybe he is too.

it takes muscle, what with wrestling the ghosts of old meringue makers who peer into this 1850s Fitzroy kitchen. tut tutting as my cornflower glugs and then goes sloppy. Lemon too tart. Pastry stuck to the dish. And keep whipping that meringue chunder. more. that's not a peak ... they put all that sugar in it to give you the energy to keep going with the hand whipping.

hanover called. it got there.