The Fall

Fifteen minutes earlier we’d been admiring the heritage streetscapes of Millthorpe and enjoying coffee and cake in a trendy café.

Sporting my new Middlemost coat and oblivious to what lies ahead in Millthorpe

Then, just one step. One misstep. That’s all it took! Does it happen in slow mo? It definitely absorbs your attention. Descending and landing. HARD. On the floor for far longer than you’re airborne. Then leg buckled under heavy body. Gyrating like a semi turned turtle. Gasping in pain. Lots of hands and lower limbs come into view as people crouch down offering aid. The shop proprietor has to go next door to get a cup of water. Water is a panacea. I gulp down my arthritis meds and take deep breaths between sips. There are ‘Mind the Step’ signs pinned up and fluoro tape edging on the floor apparently; I saw neither. I was chatting to my husband and the owner about a scarf we were buying. I reached out to touch some garments on a stand and fell in a split second. 

The fateful scene (well just adjacent to the fateful scene)

Adrenaline lets me exchange pleasantries with the people who gather around me and I somehow manage to sit upright on the rogue step. A woman says ‘it is dangerous, it isn’t obvious’ and her husband says ‘there’s signs and tape that’s what you’re supposed to do’. The shop owner laments the uneven floors of old buildings. ‘You do need to do something’ says the first woman. An Irish guy wearing a tweed sports jacket with toning scarf asks if there’s anything he can do to help. There isn’t. Then he compliments my husband who is now swathed in the new scarf, on being ‘nattily’ dressed. The proprietor takes my name and phone number. I don’t think to get anyone’s.

Somehow I stumble without yelping audibly to the wooden bench outside the shop and wait while my husband goes to get the car. He’s been assured it is okay to double park. The streets are hardly busy. He returns and I hobble into the passenger seat. My leg and ankle feel like something is ripped. I ring our lunch hosts and leave a pitiful message about having fallen and needing to get to Emergency. 

Triage, Orange Hospital

We drive the 15 minutes to Orange hospital. The staff bring me a wheelchair and fast track me to triage where the kindly nurse with a spectacular inked moth at her throat asks me if I’d heard a ’crack’. I say I didn’t but the impact was undeniable. I hand over my Medicare card. For some reason the medical practice I have been attending for 10 years doesn’t present itself on the hospital’s system three hundred kilometres from home. I give them the number from my phone contacts. They let me keep the wheelchair and bring me an ice pack for my now elephantine ankle. 

Three quick X-rays and the wait begins. Jury finalisation for Trump’s trial is on the small TV screen suspended from the ceiling. The reporter says it has been hard to find anyone without strong preconceived views. I exchange superficial remarks with a thin woman cradling her wrist. ‘I fell off my bike yesterday evening’ she says. ‘I slept with my wrist like this’ she gestures holding it gently to her chest. It is mid-morning and the waiting room is almost empty. That changes over the next three hours as more injured and unwell trickle in. 

Self explanatory

A woman whose name is almost a homophone of mine gets called and I optimistically ask to be wheeled up. Our lunch host returns my call. ‘We’ve just eaten the lasagne and the apple crumble and feel guilty’ he says and wishes me a speedy recovery.

In the consult room the lanky red headed registrar asks me to recount what happened. I do, concluding on the note that I hope it is just a sprain. ’It is broken’ he counters and shows me the image of my fibula with its clean horizontal fracture. He tells us where there is a coffee cart for my husband to get us drinks while we wait for an orthopaedic surgeon to give a ruling. They’re operating so it will be a while. I get chatting to the thin cyclist with what does turn out to be a broken wrist who is waiting to get it set. She is depressed about her general health and talks fatalistically about the future. She doesn’t have a phone so we send her boyfriend a text giving him an update on her progress. The lanky registrar returns and catches my husband trying to look at my x-rays on the laptop and chides him. ‘It’s a breach’ he says as he might see other patients’ records. I apologise and he is cordial. We develop a rapport as I tell him we’re in town to see a show that evening and comment on his striking colouring. He says he’s used to it, that strangers would come up to him and ruffle his hair when he was a kid. 

There’s another hiatus. A nurse checks my blood pressure (still a little elevated) and temperature (normal) again and I drink my take away tea. I brave the unisex accessible toilet relying on my husband to direct the wheelchair to both the loo and the hand basin. That occupies a good ten minutes. Eventually the Registrar comes back and says he’s shown my x-rays to one of the orthopaedic team now. They’ve given the go ahead for me to be fitted with a cam boot and crutches and to be discharged. I learn that he originally trained as a physiotherapist but found the work dull. I remark that he must certainly now get variety in ER. He enjoys it he says. He chooses a medium cam boot and adjusts the crutches to my height then drills me on how to walk with them. I am allowed to place some weight on the foot. ‘Bad foot, crutches, good foot, bad foot, crutches, good foot’ I repeat the mantra out loud and he watches me take a turn about the corridor.

It’s a Saturday and no-one at the hospital back home can take a referral so I need a hard copy discharge letter and treatment plan. While we’re waiting for them the bike rider and I introduce one another properly and chat a bit more agreeing it has been nice to keep company on and off for four hours. I ask my husband to take our photo which we send to her boyfriend and post on Facebook dubbing ourselves ‘The Fracture Sisters’. 

The Fracture Sisters

We leave with the paperwork and a prescription for some strong pain killers which we get filled en route to the guest house. The adrenaline carries me through enough to joke with our hosts who are most solicitous bringing me a footstool and another ice pack. They recount their own experiences with fractures on holidays – a smashed sacrum from falling off a trail bike and a shattered wrist sustained while tugging at potential firewood. My story – tripped while shopping – feels distinctly bourgeois in comparison. 

Although I have missed two thirds of historic Millthorpe and lunch with our friends I have been treated royally by hospital staff and our hosts and had a few laughs with the other ER patients. I will rest now and be able to go to the theatre this evening.

Serendipity Tribute

Introduction

Having just broken my ankle I was unable to attend our Word Play writing session in person this week. Facilitator, Claire Baker kindly sent me the Haibun* exercise they did for me to complete at home.

Write a haibun recording a recently experienced scene, or special moment, use a highly descriptive and objective manner. It may be factual, wholly fictional or dream-like in tone

Then write an accompanying haiku that has either a direct or subtle relationship with the prose and encompasses or hints at the gist of what is recorded in the prose section.

* A Haibun is a prosimetric literary form originating in Japan, combining prose and haiku. 

Prose

Like many people I often research what there is to see at my destination before taking a trip. Travelling to England and France in the 1980s I had a ring binder folder full of sights I planned to see. Among them were pre-Raphaelite murals in Oxford and a Lewis Carroll memorial stained glass window in Daresbury neither of which we could find. Often though, just happening upon somewhere, unplanned, can be incredibly rewarding. Like being in Windsor when Frogmore Gardens was open to the public and seeing Victoria and Albert’s lavish mausoleum.  Or visiting Versailles on the only day of the year the fountains were ‘playing’ (it drains the town’s water supply to have them on too often) their grandeur eclipsing the actual palace for me. Or, on a more modest scale,  arriving  at the little 15thC  church in my childhood village, at dusk  expecting to see it in ruin,  but instead a kindly onsite caretaker unlocking  the building and letting me look at the restored building as the sun set - an unanticipated and moving experience.

I recently discovered (see previous blog post) a local automotive business, the Swift Service Centre on Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga Wagga, which opened to much fanfare in 1954 as the Grand Garage, the epitome of (late) art deco modern conveniences for travellers. It boasted fluorescent lighting, pastel décor, showers, a kitchenette and even a ball room. While interesting in its own right to a local history and architecture nut like me, I was more fascinated to discover that the building stands on the site of an 1860s Chinese settlement/camp that had included substantial buildings progressively demolished between the 1930s and 50s, one of which contained original art work still visible when the Grand Garage started operating.

An illustration from a Sydney Mail article of 10 July 1935 recounting the Lambing Flat riots  

Researching the Chinese presence in the Riverina and reading about the 1861 racist riots at Lambing Flat where white miners ran their Chinese counterparts off the gold fields, physically attacking and humiliating them, meant that when we drove through Young (as Lambing Flat is now known) recently my attention was particularly alerted to a sign post in the town pointing to ‘Chinese Tribute Garden’. We took the road four kilometres out of the town centre to investigate…

What an oasis of beauty we found. The gardens, constructed in 1992, incorporate the historic Chinaman’s Dam site and an additionally created artificial ‘placid lake’ supporting a wealth of diverse plant life and water fowl. An elegant gently curved bridge spans the lake leading to a pagoda-style green and red triple gateway guarded by a pair of handsome carved marble lions with cascading manes and eerily finger-like digits, one impassive and one with suitably bared fangs.

 
The marble lions and ex-Taronga Zoo gateways (photo Bob Erwin)

Beyond that is a further gateway, a circular opening in a sinuous cream symmetrical curved wall with matching discs featuring painted Chinese dancers flanking the opening on both sides. Reading the signage on arrival I discovered that these structures were part of the temporary panda exhibit at Taronga Zoo in Sydney in 1998. While they may have looked twee there, afforded sufficient curtilage (great word that another architecture buff introduced me to) and surrounded by sufficient plantings in the tribute gardens I think they work. But I love follies, gazebos and rotundas having grown up in the English park tradition.

Plantings include maples, yuccas, conifers and camellias and many other species I didn’t identify interspersed with stone quarried from nearby Boorowa. The paths and gardens hug the sides of a ‘Pool of Tranquility’ populated by water lilies and three sculptures of disparate style: a cairn-style structure of four piled boulders, a rustic waterwheel and a replica of a 1,600 year old Chinese bronze ‘Matafeiyan’ depicting a horse gliding on the back of a swallow and probably the park’s most authentic evocation of Chinese culture. The dimensions of this sculpture,  at 34 .5 cm x 45 cm it is quite small, means it is in danger of being overshadowed by its companion pieces but its wonderful verdigris and dynamic form draw the eye.

On one edge of the pond is a stone and red lacquered wood pavilion providing a vantage point for contemplating the water. There is also a stone mounted brass plaque under a ‘Peace and Prosperity Tree’ planted in 1997 to commemorate Young’s sister city relationship with Lanzhou. The path circles back to the dual gateways affording multiple glimpses of red and green foliage and plump ebony moorhens that seem to thrive in the gardens.

The 'Pool of Tranquility' (my photo)

It was a sunny autumn weekday when we visited and there were few other walkers. One young woman I passed several times seemed to be walking around the park for exercise carrying a take away coffee. A mother and three children sat in one of the picnic shelters adjacent to the carpark. The eldest boy, about six, ran after a bread bag that had blown from their table, retrieved and binned it. I praised him. Less laudable was the action of three flannelette-clad young men carrying fishing gear who emptied their unused bread and sausages onto the grass in front of a group of ducks. Admittedly there were no signs discouraging the practice and based on their builds and swagger I elected not to challenge them. Probably wise as when we stopped briefly to check the sat nav on the road out they hooted impatiently at us from their metallic blue Holden. So not a thoroughly Zen experience...

What remains with me though is that in roughly 140 years Lambing Flat has gone from assaulting and reviling Chinese miners to celebrating ‘the contribution of the Chinese community to the settlement of Young… and the ongoing contributions of the Chinese people to Australia as a nation’ and the means of acknowledging that has provided a calming and aesthetic experience for anyone who visits the gardens. 

 

The Matafeiyan - flying horse balanced on a swallow (source: https://www.goldtrails.com.au/article/youngs-chinese-heritage/)

Haikus

1.

eighteen sixty one

assault and persecution

today some recompense

 

2.

elevated tail

head and three hooves held high

speed on sleek bronze horse

 

3.

feeding sausages

to undiscerning waterfowl

is never okay

NOTE: This short video gives a good summary of the clash at Lambing Flat