A long plastic fringe as a flyscreen in front of a milk bar. Endless afternoons at the swimming pool. Christmas cake with marzipan and icing. A bruise-coloured cloud cracked by a bolt of lightning. Covert glasses of Baileys in our hotel room.

It is the Australia I remember from my childhood.

—–

With its art deco style and urbane hosts, the Playhouse Hotel is the ideal venue for a Roaring Twenties sex farce. Next time we should bring all our crushes, and no children.

—–

The memorial site for the Myall Creek Massacre is very moving.

“This is your inheritance,” I said to Jules as we piggybacked on ahead, moving quickly so the bullants wouldn’t bite my sandalled feet. “I’m sorry it doesn’t have more honour.”

“What is honour?” she asked, and I was enlightened.

Claire said: “I am against the white people, even though I am white.”

I said: “But some of the white people behaved very well. William Hobbs reported the murders, and Governor Gibbs prosecuted them.”

“It’s complicated,” said Jeremy.

—–

On the way home we rescued a snakeneck turtle from the middle of the highway.

If you go to flummery.org and scroll down to Handlebars, which is right now the second on the list, you’ll see the awesome inspiration for yesterday’s gloom. It’s a portrait of the Tenth Doctor as the lonely trickster God, getting increasingly out of control. It got me thinking about how the Doctor is in some ways the personification of Britain, or even of the Anglosphere: brilliant, in love with humanity, in love with cleverness, lacking a sense of proportion, ruthless, Death, destroyer of worlds.

It’s a remarkably prescient piece of work, foreshadowing not only the 2009 story arc of Doctor Who itself but also that of the Obama administration. But as the first-hand accounts start trickling out of the smoking embers of Copenhagen, it’s clear that the days of the Anglophone trickster are over. It was China, India, Brazil, South Africa and the USA that sat down in the decisive meeting, and it was China that prevailed. It’s the Monkey King’s century now. It’s his planet to destroy.

In some ways it’s more painful to live under the Obama administration than under Bush. You seriously never thought you’d hear me say that, did you? It’s impossible, however, to avoid the conclusion, if you sit down and look at this botch of a health care bill – women and children thrown under the bus again – and the near-total-disaster of Copenhagen – saved only by the man himself arriving in his Tardis at the last possible moment and salvaging something, anything from the wreckage.

I had hoped for so much more. I don’t know what. Comprehensive, single-payer health insurance and a binding treaty on climate change, for a start. I know Obama is at heart a moderate, a reformer, one who believes in institutions and working through them. I don’t know whether I am that moderate any more. I held on through the tumultuous summer and fall but when he committed tens of thousands more troops to the war in Afghanistan – I almost wrote fresh troops but they won’t be fresh, they’ll be the same tiny minority of working-class people on their sixth or seventh tour – the president broke my heart.

I am not saying I have better options. I guess that’s my point. I let myself dream of better days, and now those days are here and they involve a difficult and disappointing set of compromises with the real world and its constraints, and I no longer even have the fire of my outrage to keep me warm. Paul Krugman, who is rather like Jeremy in his infuriating habit of being right about everything all the time, tells me to suck it up. “If you’ve fallen out of love with a politician, well, so what? You should just keep working for the things you believe in.”

No one is coming to the rescue. Time to grow up.

I finally made it over to the new Blue Bottle Coffee location near work, for yogurt parfait and New Orleans iced coffee. It’s a stunning place, all blond wood and huge windows, just like my idealized typical Sydney cafe. Idealized Sydney is awesome; the food is incredible and there are no cockroaches and everyone is going to live forever. I am about to head back to Australia and tear myself apart all over again, the neurotic expatriate’s annual orgy of second-guessing and self-doubt. Whee. I didn’t love my country until I left it and now I long for it with an intense and hopeless passion. I also greatly fear having to move back. Don’t you wish you were me? To paraphrase Garfield, until you actually go and live there again, Sydney makes a very serviceable paradise.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with the notion of sanctuary: a farm in a green valley fortified by impassable mountains (it was somewhere near Lithgow, or maybe Braidwood), a nine-hundred-year-old college quadrangle, a city on a hill. After ten years of war and bloodshed and political heartbreak, and after having my babies in an empire that seems to have gone mad with its own power, my longing for safety is more intense than ever. And at 38 I am finally smart enough to have figured out that nowhere is safe. Bushfires threaten my parents’ little country town; California’s bankruptcy is the water eroding the foundations of UC Berkeley; San Francisco trembles astride the San Andreas fault.

James Ellroy says “Closure is bullshit,” and he is right. Sanctuary’s bullshit too, and so are happy endings, and so is vindication. The grave’s a fine and private place; other places are busy and beset with interruptions and altogether not so fine. I blame time. It’s time that slams asteroids into your Chicxulubs and shoots your last breeding female in the eastern migratory Whooping Crane population. Of course it’s also time that puts a brand new baby Claire in your arms in the dark of a Christmas morning; that wakes you up at dawn to look into the wide blue eyes of a brand new baby Julia. I would not, in fact, have wanted to miss those moments.

Sanctuary is bullshit. Imaginary Sydney is imaginary and so is imaginary San Francisco, and this sensation of treading water, of struggling to finish a to-do list that gets longer the more items you cross off, this is, in fact, the experience of life itself. You wake up and hug your brilliant, stubborn children, you go to work and listen to peoples’ stories and try to figure out what it is they are asking for and which wishes of theirs you can grant, you listen to music and you mourn your beloved dead. And if you’re lucky you get a few minutes a day, three strides of Bella in a collected canter, one really good cup of coffee, kissing Jeremy on his throat and feeling his heartbeat quicken. The memory of the candlelit table on Sunday night, and everyone laughing.

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.

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.

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.)

You walk out of the airport terminal and into the fragrant miasma of perfectly reasonable expectations you had of yourself, that you never lived up to. The climate of Australia is determined by all the things you said and did that you can never live down, even if no one else remembers or cares. The continental land mass is made up of the smugness of expatriatism which is a very thin layer of topsoil over exile. The bottom line about this harsh, gorgeous environment is that if you hadn’t been such a gigantic asshole, you could have stayed.

I dreamed I had him back. He was strong and young and happy, his coat shining orange, his mane long and tangled, his expression intelligent and wry. I can still feel the hot sun on his neck, and smell his unforgettable scent, mixed with the eucalyptus flowers.

This time I had enough money, and he wasn’t going to die of cancer, and everything was going to be okay.

Ike is the size of Texas. It is the Earth’s great white spot.

Sunshine, high clouds, another gorgeous lazy day in Bernal. I was strolling back from Charlie’s Cafe to Precita Playground with a couple of cafe lattes when I realized it was *Claire* making all that noise. Liz popped up in my field of view to remind me that scalp wounds bleed like crazy, but I was already accelerating toward my screaming kid. Jeremy lifted the blood-stained paper napkin off her head. I took one look at the gaping wound and said “Hospital.”

I lifted her as if she weighed nothing and swept her to the car, Jeremy and Julia scrambling in my wake, saying our hasty goodbyes to Liz, Danny and Ada. We drove the five blocks to St Lukes with Claire howling and my hands white-knuckled on the wheel.

If you have to go to an ER south of Market you should go to St Luke’s; we waited five minutes for the nurse, who rushed us in to see a doctor. I suppose it helps if your five year old girl is awash in her own blood. The doctor was fantastic, very patient with Claire, explaining things to her so she would understand them. He checked her thoroughly for concussion – “Touch your nose. No, not with my hand, with *your* hand!” – and put local anaesthetic on the cut.

Jeremy took Julia home for her nap while Claire and I waited for the anaesthetic to work. We did addition and subtraction and ventured into negative numbers. I told her the story of when I broke my ankle. We played Rock Paper Scissors for a while, then when we got bored added new game options: Dynamite, Cannon, Meteor, Nova, Supernova. What beats Supernova?

Doctor Bell came back and put three neat staples in Claire’s scalp. I looked into her eyes as he was doing it. She was so scared and she had to go through it alone, even if I was there holding her hands. And she faced it, and came through.

“I know what beats supernovas,” I said. “You do.”

And then we went to the library.

The excellent Spanish class that Claire and Julia attend has its own DVDs and CDs of original music; one of the tracks we all like is about opposites, and ends “Triste, feliz; triste, feliz.” Sad, happy, sad, happy. I’ve taken to singing this to Jeremy when I’m feeling particularly mood-swingy.

And it’s been that kind of a week. I cried with happiness over two newly-announced pregnancies, both hard-won and full of hope. And I cried with the other thing over having to buy flowers for two funerals, one long-expected but still wrenching, the other out of the blue and incomprehensible.

And life just keeps tumbling on. I cook dinner and order school uniforms for Claire and the uniforms arrive and she puts them on and is transformed into a schoolgirl! My baby! Not possible. She has a wobbly tooth!

I am very keen to see Up the Yangtze, the documentary of the last cruise up the Three Gorges before they were dammed. I think a lot about the villagers whose homes were drowned.

Time is a river.

Happy birthday Salome. Wendy, I still miss you. Wish you’d got to grow up and have adventures and babies too.

We went out onto Coe Fen, which is quite the loveliest part of Cambridge we’ve found so far, all birdsong and head-high wildflowers and fragrance. I ambled on as Claire and Julia, exploring in the verge, found a roly-poly, what I’d call a slater. Wikipedia calls it a woodlouse. Jeremy loaded it onto a piece of grass to bring it with us. The girls ran ahead, as its heralds.

When they caught up with me, the roly-poly was gone.

Claire collapsed with grief. She could not contain her sobbing. Julia stood stony-faced and sorrowful nearby; she could not be comforted. Jeremy was mostly amused but I remember what it was like to be that little and lose something you care about. I sat on the fen with Claire and told her about Sugar, my dog. I recited Sugar’s elegy and improvised one for the roly-poly:

We had a roly-poly,
he was on a piece of grass.
When we turned to look
he was gone, alas!
Roly-poly how we miss you.
When we see you next, we’ll kiss you.
Roly-poly we love you.
We would not make you into stew.

Claire’s weeping abated a little. I said: “There’s a cafe at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Shall we go and have hot chocolate? I think it’s what roly-poly would have wanted.” Jeremy snorted and I kicked him.