Eureka!

This week I made it into the pages (well, the website) of Eureka Street, a life long ambition, hitherto unfulfilled.

It's the text of a talk I gave recently at the Australasian Religious Press Association annual conference. 

 Click here to read it

Sweet September

I can’t bear to let September go by without a visit to our little patch of paradise at Anglesea, because it’s freesia season. Here I am again, sitting on the verandah, revelling in the scents of spring. I wrote about this last in 2008, a piece called Sweet September, and it ended up as the very last piece in my second book. Here it is:

Sweet September

Sitting on the verandah of my family’s beach shack late September, white ti-tree petals waft like confetti. Footy’s over for the year, the spring racing carnival has just been launched, cricket has yet to start for the summer. In Melbourne, we measure the seasons by sport. 

Me, I stick with the ti-tree. I’d rather know the time of year by blooms and blossoms, the colours of the flowers and the scents they dispense so generously. 

Our beach shack sits on a chaotic acre and a half of bush. Wild old marvellous crazy gums wind and contort; their branches twisted in weird angles or lying horizontal, parallel to the ground. Come down here late July – officially mid winter – and the wattle is set to take off – all Aussie gold and green and the heavy sweet smell of cake.

By late August the wattle is past its best. Come September and the official start to spring, all that is left of our proud national symbol is moth-eaten balls of dirty yellow that come off on me every time I brush past, so that my little nephew bursts out laughing when I appear at the door and says, ‘why are you wearing wattle all over you?’

September is my favourite blossom time at the beach. Get out of the car after the drive down from the city and it hits you in a wave of sweetness: freesias. The bush block is carpeted with the things: pure white, creamy yellow and pale mauve. They are everywhere. When I go back to Melbourne I take bunches with me to fill our city home with the smell of the bush and the beach. When my sister leaves, she takes a bunch in a jar to leave on our mother’s grave.

Jonquils take me back to another bush-beach place where we lived when the kids were tiny. We’d drive out of the country town on a day off and go picnicking where there was an old stone church, still used on the odd occasion, and a crumbling tennis court to go with it – vines devouring its sagging fences and the roots of trees buckling its floor.

Early spring in this magic place was jonquil time – mini daffodils of bright yellow and white. We’d gather armfuls to take back home and look around and not notice the difference, so many were left.

But jasmine is pure Melbourne. September in Melbourne means jasmine – climbing all over suburban fences in undisciplined riot. First the tightly furled, deep burgundy of the unopened buds and then opening out to white and pink. And the scent! 

Every spring I pick jasmine to bring the scent into the house. But it resists me. Jasmine is only good in the wild, the urban wild of gardens and fences, pergolas and walls. When cut and put in a vase it flops around anyhow, looks odd, wilts in a day. 

But I need to smell it. First of all, it takes me back to exams. As long as I can remember, I had exams looming around the time that jasmine is flooding the city air with sweetness. Just when a young girl gets restless with thoughts of spring and warmth, new life and romance, she has to have her nose in her books.

Secondly, an infinitely sweeter and more poignant memory – of young love. Back then I lived in Toorak where my dad was minister at a church. I was never happy there. Coming from India and then a small weatherboard house on a tiny block the other side of town, the high walls and exclusive shops of Toorak make me miserable. 

When we moved there, I was 14 and seriously in love for the first time. I had lived a couple of miles from the object of my affections – to move to Toorak felt like the end of the world.

Still, love will find a way, even teenage love, especially teenage love, and he caught the tram over to see me every weekend. We would wander those empty Toorak streets, ostensibly walking the dog but really just desperate to be alone.

Or else sneak off without even the dog as chaperone. Walk until we found a friendly wall covered in abundant clouds of jasmine to hide behind in the unlikely event of anyone ever walking along that cul de sac. Press up against the white brick wall and against each other; kissing and barely coming up for air, drowning in innocence and desire and the scent of jasmine.

The jasmine is all but over in Melbourne now and with it the vividness of memories that can only be evoked by the sense of smell. That boyfriend, to whom I’ve been married for nearly three decades, sits beside me on the verandah at the beach, bald and much loved, reading the paper, his glasses on his nose, cup of tea steaming gently in his hand. And the sea breeze surrounds us with the perfume of freesias and wafts white petals of ti-tree confetti around our heads.

Leaving

Because I was born into a minister’s family and then I married one, moving has always been a way of life. Mum and Dad were missionaries for 20 years, so as a kid, we didn’t just move parishes or towns. We moved countries, continents; we moved hemispheres.

So I never expected to be part of one church community for almost two decades, but in fact, that is what has happened, and that 19 years and six months has just drawn to a close.

We moved to the congregation in West Brunswick when my husband was appointed as minister there, at the start of 1995. We were in our mid thirties and brought with us Guinness, our beloved bull terrier, and offspring aged eight, seven, four and one. We came from ten years in country Victoria and several of us, including me, weren’t particularly happy to be moving back to the big smoke. Mount Beauty and Portland had been great places to bring up kids.

The next few years were significant for all of us. For me, they included some major milestones: I suffered depression and worked through it, changed my name by deed poll to Boyd-Macrae, decided I wanted to write and set about learning to do so, and became more deeply committed to a life of contemplative prayer.

And of course the kids grew up – primary school, high school, jobs and uni. Friends and partners and parties and all the angst and exhaustion of the teenage years. Through those years, we were surrounded by our church community, who became a major part of the village that grew our kids into decent human beings, and I am forever grateful to them.

We babysat for each other, had coffee, ate together, and listened to each other through the intense ups and downs of those years including, for several core couples in that community, divorce.

I never thought I would have the privilege of seeing a generation of babies and toddlers and primary school kids grow up. When you live with a minister, you interact so intensely with people in times of death, conflict, breakdown, birth, but then you move on to somewhere else entirely and you may not hear of those people for years.

At Brunswick, not only have I seen a generation of kids grow into adults, I have also seen a generation of 18-year-olds who joined our church fresh from the country to go to uni, and who are now well into their thirties with careers, relationships and children of their own. They babysat our kids; now our kids babysit theirs. The cycle will be completed nicely when our older son and his partner are married at Brunswick Uniting next year.

Most of our closest friends are not part of the church, but the church community was the next circle that surrounded our family with loving support. We might not talk to people from church for a while, but if we needed them, they would be there for us, and we for them, day or night.

We’ve been there so long because when he stopped being minister at West Brunswick, Alistair proceeded to work in non-parish jobs for 13 years. We were lucky enough to buy a home in the area, and the kids and I stayed on at the church. When the worshipping community moved from West Brunswick to join up with Brunswick Uniting, we went too.

But now we’ve said goodbye to the place that has been our spiritual home, our faith community for so long. Al is starting at a parish in the CBD this weekend, and I will go with him, to be a part of this next adventure. It’s close enough for us to stay in our house and I can continue my job in the city. Compared to previous moves we’ve made, it’s pretty straightforward.

There’s also an element of relief in moving from a place where you have become very involved. Your name goes off all the rosters automatically, without having to think of an excuse and feeling guilty. Brunswick is such a bustling, busy church, always so much happening, new names to learn, people I really should talk to after church but didn’t have the energy. It was wonderful and also exhausting, and introverted me would regularly come for worship and then sneak out during the benediction so as to avoid having to make conversation with anybody except God. I avoided social functions and the annual church camp for years.

But how I loved those rich decades. I am so lucky, minister’s partner that I am, to have had so long in one good place. For my kids, most of whom don’t spend a lot of time in church anymore, it will always be their church home.

Now for the next chapter in our lives.

Top End - Predator

Soon as you say you’re going to Darwin, people start joking about crocodiles. Even the taxi driver who took us to Tullamarine told us to be careful and we chuckled. ‘Yeah, the paper there, the NT Times, they love a good croc story,’ said my husband.

It certainly feels a bit lawless up there, a bit Wild West to this soft, sheltered southern city dweller. Bicycle helmets are not compulsory. There’s a 130 k speed limit on the highways; until recently there was none at all. Most unnervingly for a mother who spent many years counting heads nervously around any body of water, no fences around the plethora of swimming pools in this hot place.

We had two nights at Mary River, about half way between Darwin and Kakadu. We checked in, we had a cup of tea, we had a snooze. As soon as the fierce afternoon heat began to wane, we headed off for the ‘River Walk’ – eight k’s of bush track winding along the banks of the Mary River, inland for a bit, back to the river and home to the campsite in a series of big loops. As usual, Al was jogging while I elected for a brisk walk.

It was lonely and wild. The most domesticated things I saw were Brahmin cattle, pale, shadowy, hump-backed shapes in the dusty bush. Tiny wallabies, not much bigger than a hare, delicate and nimble, stared at me and hopped away. For the first half of the walk, the Mary River flowed strong and brown and silent to my right. When there was a break in the scrubby bush I wandered over and peered down the steep bank cautiously.

When I got back to the campsite on the banks of the river an hour later, there was a cop car and an ambulance looking incongruous in the middle of folding chairs, tents and caravans. People in dark blue uniforms looked grave, knots of campers looked stunned, gazing at the river, then at the officials, then back at the river. A little way away from the others, a young man was crying, and a big, bearded bloke had his arm around him.

‘I’m back,’ I called to my husband as I let myself into our cabin. ‘And I think something bad has happened.’ I described the scene at the riverbank campsite to him. ‘Probably someone had a heart attack,’ he reassured, but then I remembered the reason for my extra unease. ‘There was no one on a stretcher,’ I said. ‘And there were press. There were cameramen.’

He was 26, the young man who was taken. It was a thirtieth birthday party with a bunch of friends by the river, and he and his mate decided to swim across. Half way back, the croc got him.

That night, at the ‘Wilderness Retreat’ where we were staying, there were a bunch of reporters as well as ambos and police. The next day the place was crawling with water police as they trawled the river for the body, which they found on Monday morning. The staff at the place were distressed and weary.

We’d booked a boat trip for Monday morning but decided to cancel. Not, as the young woman at the desk suggested, because ‘you don’t know what you might find out there,’ simply because it seemed somehow disrespectful to take a pleasure jaunt down that lethal stretch of water so soon after such a tragedy.

The papers described it as a ‘rogue’ crocodile. Cops and crocodile hunters shot three, to be sure they got their guy.

I cannot begin to understand what the family of the young man must be going through, not to mention the mate he was swimming with when he died. Maybe killing a few crocs gives the families of victims some kind of closure. But in a river known to be full of crocodiles, I can’t help wondering what good that will do. Or what sense it makes to describe the creature as a ‘rogue’. It didn’t leave its natural habitat and start ripping down tents to eat the campers inside. Despite the warnings plastered everywhere in Mary River and, indeed, all over the Northern Territory, these humans decided to do something really dumb. Even boringly sensible me did silly things, especially when I was young. But in this case, can we really blame the crocodile?

Between the 1940s and 1960s, crocodiles in the NT came close to extinction as they were hunted for skins and sport. They have been protected since the early 1970s, and their population has returned to a healthy level.

In the paper the next day was a local calling for a culling, a massacre of crocodiles, so that they would once again know ‘who ruled the planet’. I felt a deep sadness as I read this. Human beings, the ultimate predator, haven’t exactly done a great job of ruling the planet.

I was profoundly shaken by this senseless, tragic loss of life on my doorstep. Once again, I was reminded to respect the land – the bush, the sea, the rivers, to know my place in them.

Top End - Darwin

It’s like another planet up here, and a warm one. Not that the mercury’s so high– my benchmark based on Melbourne summers being so much hotter than it used to be – just sticky. I’m not normally a sweater, but here I’m aware of a film of perspiration coating me the minute I walk out the door and away from the air con.

Thursday afternoon I have a swim in the part of the harbour that’s walled off to keep out crocs and stinging jellyfish. It’s a five-minute walk from where we are staying, and there’s a glass lift that takes you down to beach level.

That night we go to famous Mindil Beach, mooching around the markets, eating souvlaki and drinking mango smoothies and watching a glorious clichéd big orange sun going down reflectingly over the sea. The locals are more impressed by a heavy black build up of rain clouds to the southwest. Later that evening, standing on the balcony of our flat we watched the rain pounding down, abrupt and violent and unseasonal.

Directions in Darwin are confusing. Here we are, at the very top of the country; we should be facing out to Papua New Guinea and East Timor. In fact, the peninsula that is Darwin is such a complicated shape that the big picture windows of the flat we are staying in face south. The morning after we watch the sun go down on Mindil Beach, I watch it coming up from our balcony.

Before that sun gets too high, I load up with water and head off for a couple of hours, walking to the end of Stokes Hill Wharf, back along the sea wall, through Bicentennial Park the length of the Esplanade and back through town, stopping a lot, and taking every side trip I can find.

The rampant vegetation, which I swear seems greener after the heavy rain the night before, cascades crazily down the steep slopes to the wild, mangrovey beaches below, and every time I see steps down these slopes, I follow them.

The first lot takes me to the Deckchair Cinema and a walk that celebrates the women of the Northern Territory with photos, mosaics and art works. The second takes me to the sandy part of Lameroo Beach – such a secret, lonely-feeling cove it’s hard to believe I am five minutes walk from the CBD. On my way back up to the park I meet a fisherman coming down; apart from him, there’s nobody and nothing except a sodden, washed up beach towel.

My third side trip is into Doctors Gully. It’s heavy with moisture there; thick vegetation growing down to a little creek and despite the concrete steps I am walking down, I imagine that I get a tiny feel of what this place must have felt like before my ancestors arrived. A group of Indigenous people are sitting on the walkway and we say hello and that’s the only human sound down in this dim, moist gully.

At the top it’s all contemporary western city and I walk ‘home’ along Smith St with its Mall which is just a mall in any generic western city, with its Cotton On and McDonalds and cafes promising perfect coffee.

What a strange place. It feels so foreign to me, I keep looking the wrong way when I cross the road, expecting the cars to drive on the right hand side.

It feels like Australia, it feels like Asia and there are more reminders in an hour than you’d get in a Melbourne month that there were First Australians here long before my forebears sailed in.

It’s industrial and functional with more and more harbour-facing apartment blocks going up, looking weirdly south across the sea, out to the tour boats and the fishing boats and the vast grey sinister bulk of an American Navy vessel laden with helicopters.

It’s historic, with reminders everywhere of the Bombing of Darwin and World War II tunnels and Cyclone Tracy, the old courthouse carefully reconstructed and the modern Parliament House, beautiful as clean white bone.

The Whitefellahs only arrived in 1869 and by 1872 they had already built a telegraph line connecting the top with the bottom of the country – travelling down from Darwin and up from Port Augusta in South Australia, more than 3000 kilometres. An underground cable connected all this to Indonesia – Australia’s first modern communications channel to the rest of the world, the forebear, I suppose, of the tiny mobile in my pocket.

That evening we do something as Darwin as having take away on Mindil Beach – a barbeque on the deck looking out over the harbour with a couple of quiet ales. Sure feels a long way from Melbourne.