Jules: “The world is beautiful!
The sky is so pretty
and the trees are sweet
like my mom!

“Mama do you like my song?”

Me: “I think it’s the best song I ever heard.”

*

Fall! And the hills are green and the leaves have turned and the air is clear and cold and the sunlight pours out of the sky. Since we started going back to Australia for Christmas again this has become my favourite time of year; pie and butternut squash soup and the chill in the air all carrying the promise of summer.

*

The new swim school is insanely great. Claire can now jump in from the edge and swim loops around her instructor. Julia and Milo can each swim a couple of feet unaided.

It’s like watching them learn to fly.

*

My favourite moment of Julia’s ridiculously awesome fourth birthday party was watching Jamey, Liz and Shannon’s niece Shelby compare their spongiform tonsils.

*

Best little mare Bella is for sale. CHRISTMAS HINT, PEEPS. I’ll be sad to see her go but if ever a little copperbright horse deserved to be some lucky girl’s own beloved pony, it is Bella.

*

Reviews to come of Aaron’s residency in the Headlands, Colin’s exhibition of photos of the Berlin Wall coming down, Jennifer’s trio playing at Socha and McKenze and Hallie’s recital at Noe Valley Ministry. We live in such a fantastic neighbourhood and have such incredible friends.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

To whom it may concern,

As a graduate of Sydney University, I am appalled, but not surprised, to read that a group of past and present students, including many from St Pauls College, created a pro-rape, anti-consent Facebook group.

It’s no secret that the colleges have long fostered an environment of privilege where binge drinking and violence against women can flourish out of control.

What’s horrifying is that in the second decade of the 21st century, the university still apparently lacks the institutional leadership and political courage to address this toxic culture.

I call on the colleges and the university to expel the students involved.

Failure to take strong disciplinary actions against students who advocate for rape sends a clear signal to women that the university does not consider them fully human.

Rachel Chalmers
BA Hons and University Medal, 1992

ETA:

Tracey Fredson
Personal Assistant to the Master
Accommodation and Function Manager
Wesley College

Hard though this may be to believe, I sometimes underestimate the sheer well-bred-ness of the horses I grew up around. We all knew Ralvon Ilk was royalty, and Wellworth Morning Star and Finewood Lefire, but at the time I failed to appreciate that my own Arab horse Alfie’s milk-white half-nephew Tristram Apparition was Australian champion Arabian stallion in 1984.

Alfie’s family is still in the ribbons. His jet-black great grand-nephew, River Oak Tabu, was three times reserve champion on the East Coast.

Here’s Bellboy’s father Aethon looking exactly like our pony.

Poldark is by the same sire. (You only call them half-siblings if they are out of the same mare.) Poldark famously won a supreme championship in open company, and his son Zakah Zahara is a world champion endurance horse.

So, you know, it was nice.

Events have conspired to endow hyper-topicality upon Light Industrial, my scandalous kiss-and-tell expose of the two weeks I spent working in Australian television in 1993.

This is nice and all, but on the whole I would prefer for Australian television to stop being so hideously embarrassing…

A lovely warm lazy quiet summer evening. I want Christmas cake, and the sound of cicadas.

Ursula Le Guin says: Offer your experience as your wisdom.

This is my country. This is where I am from:

I was born twenty miles from where this photograph was taken. I swam and fished in that water throughout my childhood. I rode my horse across those hills. I love this place beyond the telling of it. Today I am sitting in my office in San Francisco and missing my country right down to my bones.

Everything you see is stolen.

On this day 221 years ago, George Johnston stepped out of a boat and onto the sand of Sydney Cove. “Johnston received extensive land grants in areas of modern Petersham, Bankstown and Cabramatta… Johnston’s other grants included land which is now the suburb of Annandale, named for his property that was in turn named after the place of his birth. He and Ester Abrahams farmed and lived on this land with their children until the 1870s when it was sold and sub-divided for residential development.”

George’s daughter Blanche had a daughter she called Isabella, whose daughter also called Isabella had a daughter Brenda whose son Robin is my father. My family prospered and I was given an inheritance and an excellent university education. The people from whom the land was stolen have not prospered.

“Over the period 2002-2006, Indigenous Australians died from diabetes at nine times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians and from kidney diseases at four times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians.”

“Over the period 2002-2006, Indigenous Australians died from hypertensive disease at four times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians died from rheumatic heart disease (which predominantly affects children) at 9 times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians.”

“Indigenous males and females died from avoidable causes at around 4 to 4.5 times the rate of non-Indigenous males and females.”

Nor have we finished stealing.

When we went to see Ric the day before we left, he was completely alert and present as he had not been on other visits. As soon as he saw me he wanted to talk about how much he was enjoying his book, and once we’d got him installed on the verandah with a cup of tea and some gingerbread men the girls had made for him, he turned out to be willing to answer questions he’d never wanted to answer before.

His mother’s name was Mildred Lyons. Richard’s grandfather Grantley Hyde Fitzhardinge was a NSW judge and himself the grandson of an earl, so there appears to have been some question about whether Mildred was Good Enough for the judge’s son, Ric’s father. The marriage went ahead, perhaps in the face of the judge’s disapproval, and turned out to be fairly unhappy. Mildred languished in Girilambone.

It’s remote today and must have been incredibly isolated then, although Ric points out with some pride that they did have a quite magnificent car. This was driven by everyone, over unsealed roads and recklessly, until its steering wheel came apart in Ric’s hands and it was abandoned to rust near the railway station. He liked the car. He did not, however, like horses or cattle or dogs, preferring books. He was not at all a country boy.

(On another memorable visit this trip, Lulworth had arranged a petting zoo. We found Ric in the garden gazing with considerable distaste at a calf, some goats and a poddy lamb. I dandled a sweet rabbit on my lap, and asked him: “Vermin?” “Oh yes,” he said, in his courtly way.)

Richard said Mildred was a wonderful mother, musical and artistic, and that she encouraged him in his interests and fully supported his desire to flee Girilambone. He went to school and university in Sydney and was halfway through an architecture degree when he had a great falling-out with his professor. This was in the late forties, after the war, and he managed to get a berth on a ship to London at two weeks’ notice. His family rallied round in and a terrific scramble supplied steam-trunks and a passport. His mother was still alive when he returned to Australia years later, but she died before Ric met Jan.

In this one conversation Ric spoke more about his childhood than in the rest of the thirteen years I’ve known him. Once he’d taken his degree in London he went on to have a lovely and interesting and productive life all over the world. Looking back on this life seems to afford him great pleasure, which is lucky, because old age and infirmity really have nothing else to recommend them that I can see.

The hardest thing to accept about Ric’s predicament is that this is about as good as it gets.

My dear old friend Garfield is back in Sydney after a decade in Russia working for Bloomberg. I asked him what it’s like to be in Australia again. “The trickiest part,” he said shrewdly, “is that Australia’s not the paradise we could imagine it was, before we came back.” Obama is saying more or less the same thing. I am still struggling with it. This is the happy ending? This is it? I made a life for myself in California, but Australia still tugs at my heart? I still need to clean out the cat tray? Ric doesn’t get any younger? We don’t get him back the way he was?

I watched as Barnaby and Jeremy helped him back into his walking frame, their hands so tender on his thin back. Ric raised good sons. He made meaning in his life.

It’s not enough. But I think it’s all we get.

These days when I get noticeably emo around the blickets, even Julia blinks at me with her lemur eyes and says “Do youse miss yours mom?” I say that I do, because missing my mother is as good a synechdoche for what I do feel as anything else.

Ever since my very happy week in Barraba, my pointed longing for Mum and Sarah and Kelly has taken the form of mah jong mania, since that’s all we did over the break: eat my Dad’s Christmas cake and play and play and play. Jeremy had to pry me away from the tiles to go to the airport.

As part of my efforts to fall in love with San Francisco again – efforts in which San Francisco and the Bad Cat are colluding, the city by turning on the fragrant lemon-yellow angled winter sunlight I can never resist, the Bad Cat by sitting on me and purring loudly – I wandered up Grant Street to buy myself a mah jong set. I knew exactly what I wanted: brocade, trays, finely carved tiles, a good lurid bird for One Bamboo. My Dad’s set, in short.

It quickly became clear that mah jong has fallen out of fashion in the new China. There were lots and lots of blobby ugly plastic tiles in plastic boxes. There were a few more interesting bone tiles in boxes apparently lined with old Chinese newspapers. There were no sets I wanted.

I walked halfway to North Beach and found an antique store, transparently covering some kind of money laundering operation. The very helpful Russian gentleman who ran it dug up an original 1950s E S Lowe Bakelite set, complete with the marbled plastic benches. It was marked for sale at $8,100 but he offered me a deal: “You pay cash? Visa? $1500?” I told him I would have to go away and think about it. “How about $500?” Ordinarily I would be very pleased with a $7,600 markdown, but it’s selling for $26 right now on eBay, so…

My set was in the last store I looked in, almost back at the office, long after I had given up hope. It’s not perfect and I devoutly hope the sweet Chinese woman was incorrect when she told me the tiles are ivory and bamboo – it’s almost certainly bone. The case is shabby and sun-faded and frayed, but hey, so am I. Who wants to play?

We had the annual Three Rachel Dinner this evening, and the restaurant was sweltering. I sat next to Rach H, who is pretty and delicate and who has little blue birds to help her get dressed in the morning, and I felt like a sweaty elephant. Still, the food was good – roasted figs and goat cheese, kingfish with potatoes fried in duck fat – and the company was even better.

Jan looked after the little kids. They all baked together, and when Jeremy and I got home the children were sprawled asleep and Jan was a little floury and frazzled, but happy. We sat in the playroom with the door open to the terrace. When the weather changed at midnight, a great cool mouthful of blue-green air stroked my back like a friend’s loving hand.

On our way back from collecting Jeremy in Tamworth, we passed a huge sand monitor on the southbound lane of State Highway 95, also known as Fossickers Way. I thought it was alive; Dad and Jeremy said it was dead. Dad turned around to look. I was all “Be careful!” but my big atheisticky skeptical papa said “He’s my totem animal,” so that was the end of that.

The goanna was dead of course – half his poor head was gone – and he stank to high heaven, but he was so beautiful, his patterned skin almost unmarked, the green double-chins still iridescent in the sun. Dad got a little shovel out of the back of the Terios and put him over on the side of the road, so that the carrion-eaters who fed on his carcass wouldn’t also be hit by cars.

Dad says they are called racehorse monitors because they can run so fast, and that he once knew a pet one called Phar Lap.

I am going to make some New Year’s Resolutions, any day now.

Ickle wickle twin-prop plane to Tamworth, the girls striding out resolutely across the tarmac, bless. Major turbulence over a glorious view of the harbour, filling me with terror lest I plummet back to French’s Forest in flames. Bumpy landing at tiny Tamworth. I got the sleepy girls dolled up in their sunglasses and hats, and there was my Daddy in the terminal. Hugs, bags and carseats into the little Terios, and the girls slept peacefully as we drove the hour and a half north to Barraba, Dad and I plotting to save the world.

Barraba is far more beautiful than I imagined. A little basin in wooded hills with a river running through it. Big big sky! Last night’s sunset was all gold and apricot and pink nimbus and cirrus against a glowing indigo. I have seen fantail doves and galahs and cockatoos and rosellas and lorikeets. And there were two lovely green frogs outside my sister’s house last night. My sister’s children Kelly and Ross are fabulous, and the four kids all piled on top of each other squealing with joy to be together.

Seems Lulworth House was also Patrick White’s childhood home. When Jeremy and I went on our honeymoon to the Blue Mountains, we ended up quite by accident in the cottage at Withycombe – Patrick White’s other childhood home.

Gough Whitlam is in the same place Ric is in, and Neville Wran was seen in the elevator the other day, so for a seventies-and-eighties ALP nerd like me it is sort of like visiting Valhalla. It’s a nice place, Lulworth House, a repurposed 19thC mansion – Patrick White’s boyfriend Manoly spent his last years there, and so did Kelso’s mum Pat. But the weird thing is that it’s right in King’s Cross, like two blocks from Big’s and Jeremy’s and my Surrey Street Aerospace and three blocks from my ex-boyfriend Phil’s apartment in the Statler.

I can’t really explain this geography in San Francisco terms, but the Cross is the red light district, all heroin and fab little street cafes and brothels and nightclubs, and Elizabeth Bay, which shoves up against it, is old old old money, where everyone’s Little Aunts used to live (squattocracy brats like our parents all had Little Aunts, left over from the Great War culling a generation of marriageable men.) So it totally makes sense to have this lovely Establishment nursing facility in Elizabeth Bay, except for the cognitive dissonance it creates in a girl who lived in Darlinghurst and Potts Point throughout her Australian would-be hipster years.

On the bright side, knowing this area like I know the inside of my own (equally shabby and incongruous) head meant that when Ric pointed to a review of a book that interested him, I knew exactly which too-cool-for-school bookshop around the corner was likely to have four copies: Ariel, and sure enough. I gave him Travelling Heroes today and we pored over the photos and read chunks to each other; he pointed out that all the Homeric heroes were very young, life spans being what they were then, and we agreed that this was a good explanation for how callow for example Achilles sometimes seems. It’s a great read and I’m going to grab a copy for myself.

Ric grew up in Girilambone, a place so small and faraway it makes my parents’ tiny Barraba seem bustling and urbane. He got himself to Sydney and trained as an architect and spent his life flitting around the world: London, Berkeley, den Haag, Easter Island. So many of my most intractable bugs – isolation, provincialism, cultural cringe, exile – he just seems to have sidestepped or routed around or floated above: a clever and accomplished man, a loyal and witty friend, a good father. Achilles without ever having been callow. I am very glad to know him.

As this year winds to its ignominious conclusion, I am defiantly focused on the things in my life that I am happy about. These include but are not limited to Claire, growing like a weed, gap-toothed, volatile, brilliant and charming; Julia, rose-lipped, wide-eyed, white-haired and implacable. Jeremy, muscular from wushu and still as funny and even-tempered as ever, continues to put up with me despite my cranky shenanigans. Australia is beautiful, my favourite beach golden and opal, the air full of sunshine and birdsong. Mangoes here smell like childhood and hope.

We still have all four of the childrens’ grandparents, and fine grandparents they are too. All siblings are likewise present and accounted for, and most are happily pair-bonded to boot. My niece and nephew Kelly and Ross are delightful and intelligent and obviously closely related to my own daughters. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a bit wet, but he’s no John Howard, and for this we are all extremely grateful. Similarly Obama, while under more pressure than any one man should have to bear, has shown an enviable track record of steely nerves, and his cabinet appointments are thoughtful and encouraging.

The world is full of books to read and films to watch, meals to make and eat, music to hear and play, science museums to explore, valleys and forests and mountains and beaches to hike and camp at and loll upon. I’m glad there is a Kiva.org and a Human Rights Watch and a Medicins Sans Frontieres, a St Luke’s Hospital and a Monroe Elementary School. The same Pacific washes Sydney and San Francisco. The same tide that washes my past away carries me forward into my childrens’ future.

We, and by we I mean Generation X, are really going to have to rethink this whole getting old thing. Retirement homes need (for example) decent coffee and non-institutional food. And for that matter, we need little cabals around to prevent the entire burden of an aging relative from falling on a single spouse. It’s the flipside of the suburban nuclear family problem. Mothers need other mothers around, if only to complain to about our delightful, uniformly above-average children.

Cicadas singing. Last night we had a tremendous thunderstorm, the cold front rolling over Bondi Junction like a rogue wave in the sky, complete with pink lightning. This morning Jeremy and I snuck out for breakfast at Bronte Beach. The Pacific Ocean was so clear and bright it looked like lime jelly (that’s lime jello, for the USonians.)