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 of 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 before taking a trip. Travelling to England and France in the 1980s I had a ring binder folder full of destinations and 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 convenience 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

Traces of Wagga's Chinese Past

I recently came across an item on Trove from the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser of 26 June 1954 promoting the opening of the Grand Garage in Fitzmaurice Street.  It was headlined: Old Chinese Joss House is Now an Ultra-Modern Garage and Showroom.  The slick art deco styled facility included petrol bowsers, car display space, a mechanics workshop, a fully equipped kitchen, men’s and women’s showers, a writing room and even a ball room! Long before motorway service centres offered similar comforts, the Grand Garage was designed as a place for road weary visitors to Wagga to refresh, get their car serviced and maybe consider upgrading to one of the flash modern vehicles on sale. The article described the Garage as occupying the site of ‘a Joss house and temple where hundreds of Chinese once met to enjoy opium dreams’. On the same page there appeared an item claiming that ‘Chinese drawings and motives (sic) are still faintly visible’ on the walls of a structure being used as a storeroom at the premises.

Daily Advertiser clipping of 26 June 1954 (source: Trove)

My interest was piqued because I recognised the profile of the building and a Google search revealed that it still stands at 175 Fitzmaurice Street now operating as the Paul Seaman Swift Service Centre. It is something of a rarity in Wagga for a building constructed in 1954 to survive substantially unaltered for 70 years!  I had heard that this part of Fitzmaurice Street was Wagga’s Chinatown but assumed no vestiges remained. I was now on a quest hoping to be proved wrong.  My first move was to post on the Facebook Lost Wagga page to see if anyone knew anything about the ex-storage shed with the Chinese drawings on the wall. No-one did but another post showing the Grand Garage inundated in the 1950 flood elicited photographs and comments from Paul Seaman the current proprietor. I also embarked on my own research…

The Grand Garage as it looks in 2024 as the Paul Seaman Swift Service Centre (source: Google)

I found another clipping from the Daily Advertiser dated 26 September 1939 headed ‘Chinese Joss House – Old Wagga Building Being Demolished’.  A complex of buildings ranging in age from 50 to 100 years was to face the wrecker’s ball: the Joss House, a masonic hall known as the Chinese Free Mission Hall and a consecrated Christian church.  No specific reason is given in the article for the demolition but the paper quoted local man Wong (Charlie) Hing as saying that the once ‘elaborately outfitted’ church had not been in use for six years. It was implied that the other buildings had been abandoned for longer.  This was quite significant infrastructure and if the Daily Advertiser was right and ‘hundreds’ of Chinese had once congregated there, when did the location cease to be a cultural hub? For one poor soul, Ah Get, aged 66, blind with long hair and beard and dressed in rags, the Joss House had remained home. He was discovered by workers during the demolition process (The Age 29 September 1939). His fate after that is not recorded.

 

The service station before redevelopment pictured during regular flooding. The signage and structures suggest the site's Chinese heritage but I have not been able to establish their authenticity (source: Lost Wagga Facebook page).

The Daily Advertiser’s hyperbole notwithstanding, it is unlikely that the Chinese population encamped on Fitzmaurice Street ever numbered in the hundreds except perhaps when swelled by seasonal labourers. In 1883 it was recorded as 223. That figure is drawn from a report furnished by the  Sub-Inspector of NSW Police, Martin Brennan and prominent Sydney business man and philanthropist Quong Tart who were tasked with conducting an enquiry into ‘disturbances’ in the Chinese camps of the Riverina district.

Chinese people first came to Australia in 1828 when colonial administrators thought their migration could help solve a labour shortage.  Land and resource scarcity in China encouraged over three thousand Chinese workers to come to Australia as indentured labourers between 1847 and 1853. The mid-century gold-rush saw Chinese migration increase further and by 1861 there were 13,000 Chinese living in NSW.  When diggings were exhausted or they experienced discrimination that prevented them from continuing to mine many remained to work as labourers, ring barkers, sap cutters and fencers or to establish successful market gardens. There were several Chinese encampments across the Riverina, the largest one at Narrandera, the second largest at Wagga and others at various locations including Adelong, Gundagai and Tumut. In Wagga the Chinese erected basic shanties as tenants on flood prone, poorly draining land owned by white landlords on the banks of the Murrumbidgee in North Wagga and at the northern end of Fitzmaurice Street. In Wagga the areas they rented were mostly owned by Susannah Brown a shrewd property investor who also held shares in the Wagga Wagga Bridge Company.

Map showing historic location of the Chinese precinct on either side of Fitzmaurice Street (Source: Alex Dalgleish, report to Wagga Wagga City Council 1999)

In their review, Brennan and Tart looked at demographics, occupations, quality of dwellings, sanitation, gambling, prostitution, interracial marriage, access to education and prevalence of opium use. The report was published in full in the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser of 8 January 1884. It makes for fascinating reading. While acknowledging the squalid conditions in the camps and the prevalence of opium smoking and gambling, it makes a sincere attempt to examine the causes and contributory factors of crime and unruliness.  Blame is in part attributed to property neglect by landlords and to visiting ‘shearers, shepherds, and disreputable characters’ looking for sex and sly grog. The report points out that opium use gained a foothold in Chinese society having been actively fostered by the East India Company in the 18th and 19th centuries against the wishes of the government to fund the tea trade.

The report characterises the Chinese as ’the most industrious race in the world’ lauding their contribution to vegetable cultivation on the region and listing other occupations as shop assistant,  labourer and lottery house proprietor. There were small numbers of women, almost exclusively European, residing in the camps, some of whom were deemed ‘respectable’ and married to Chinese and others who worked as prostitutes.  The report explodes the ‘white slaver‘ myth stating that almost all the women engaging in sex work were European, hailed from Melbourne,  had an established history in  the profession and expressed a preference for the courtesy and acceptance they found in the environment of the Chinese camps.

Given the stories of racism on the goldfields, the riots at Lambing Flat in 1861 and the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act (White Australia policy) of 1901, it was surprising to learn that inter-cultural relations in Wagga Wagga were mostly harmonious. Tensions did of course arise but for the most part they were far less intense than in urban settings. As Brennan pointed out, some were directly attributable to ambiguities and loopholes in the law as to whether the games of my pow ghong, fan tan and pak ah pu (known collectively as ‘the Chinese lottery’) were in themselves illegal  or whether it was the placing of hefty bets that was the problem. Likewise,  regulations requiring that opium was supplied solely by registered chemists completely failed to cover the sales and use of opium amongst people in the Chinese camps who were vulnerable to prosecution and fines.

Inevitably as the Chinese population of the Riverina dispersed across the district and the wider state, the camps declined.  Some returned to China, intermarried, converted to Christianity, diversified their business interests and prospered, and some anglicized their names. It became increasingly common for Chinese-run general stores to operate alongside pubs and residential cottages in Fitzmaurice Street. With the advent of the automobile, successful Junee business man Tommy Ah Wah opened a service station on the site of the former enclave adjacent to the one remaining building, described as a ‘temple,  and apparently not demolished in 1939. It was this business and site that he later sold to Alf Ludwig and which was transformed into the Grand Garage.

Tracking the Dragon Dr Barry McGowan's highly informative book, published in conjunction with a Museum of the Riverina exhbition of the same name in 2012

According to Dr Barry McGowan's excellent publication Tracking the Dragon,  the temple was ‘beautifully constructed from rich Oregon timbers’ .  Ludwig offered to dismantle it and re-erect it elsewhere as a commemoration of the Chinese who had lived and worked in Wagga but the Council declined his offer. Tracking the Dragon also attributes to Alf Ludwig the story that networks of subterranean tunnels connecting various buildings used to escape police raids existed on the site.

Chinese gaming tokens unearthed in Fitzmaurice Street in 2006 now in the collection of the Museum of the Riverina (Source: Tracking the Dragon)

In 2006 Chinese coins/gambling tokens were discovered in the same area of Fitzmaurice Street. I am still on my quest to find out if there is any other evidence of Wagga’s Chinatown extant.  Next port of call is Seaman’s Swift Service Centre as Paul has shared a drawing of the site that claims Chinese graves were discovered there during levee construction in 1957!

Sources:

https://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/hong-kong-and-the-opium-wars/

https://issuu.com/riversidewaggawagga/docs/mor_waggaessay_lr_web

https://storyplace.org.au/story/once-out-of-view/

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/145648701?searchTerm=joss%20Wagga

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/101928639?searchTerm=Chinese#

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/145648707?searchTerm=Grand%20Garage

Morris, Sherry, Wagga Wagga – A History, 1999, Council of the City of Wagga Wagga

Christmas Passed

2023 ended with our least harmonious family Christmas ever. We were all tired and irritable. Conflict erupted repeatedly then finally at a level that so shook the dynamic that the rest of the celebrations were aborted. Christmas 2023, in all likelihood, marks the end of my attempts to curate a Kodak Christmas experience. I’m sixty seven, my husband is seventy two, and we have two adult children and no grandkids…  There is something a little forced about painstakingly decorating a tree (actually a conifer branch from the garden), preparing a perfectly stuffed and roasted turkey and recreating our mother’s ‘traditional’ ice cream Marsala cheesecake each December.

It is well known that the pressure to create an atmosphere of ‘comfort and joy’ for the festive season is at odds with how many people are actually feeling. There is also the tension between those who want to ‘put the Christ back in Christmas’ and atheists like us who cite Yule or, more appropriately for the Southern Hemisphere, the solstice, as the ‘reason for the season’. I went through a phase of eschewing all ceremony and ritual… that is the reason I didn’t go to my first uni graduation and delayed marriage for so long. I do now see, and have for a long time seen, value in coming together to celebrate, but maybe the cause has to be more personally relevant than the mixture of commercialism and sentiment that marks Christmas.

Until we lost my mother-in-law, and my husband’s family dispersed, our Christmas Day was always marked by trying to please both our families. To do this we would have lunch with my husband’s and dinner with mine and end up exhausted.  Once, before the kids were born, we tried asking both lots of relatives to our place for lunch with catering assistance from a friend who was a chef. He did a glazed ham and a pastry cornucopia with hors d'oeuvres spilling from it presented on an upturned mirror. It was more like a hotel function (the context for his training) than a family Christmas and the two groups didn’t mix readily either. I was so fretful that I got more exhausted than our usual shuttle Christmas had left me.

The Christmas dilemma took on new proportions in 1999 when my mother, declining with terminal cancer, was set to come out of hospital to spend the holiday with the family. Instead we got a call in the early hours of Christmas Eve to say she had died. The kids were little so we went – numbly - through the Christmas Day motions. It felt as if we were all treading water until the funeral could be arranged. Some kind friends invited us to spend New Year’s Eve with them in Newcastle, a welcome escape from the rawness and publicness of processing Mum’s death. My husband took the kids down to see the fireworks heralding the new millennium.  I retreated to bed.

The first Christmas after Mum died none of us could face organising a get together. We accepted an invitation from the same chef friend who’d helped us with that attempt at combining families. Needless to say, his catering was stylish but the whole affair felt hollow, adult-centric and overly steeped in alcohol. I missed my sisters and the children were bored and missed their cousins. After that the younger of my two sisters and her newish husband graciously took on the role of hosting for a few years. We became semi successful in balancing our sadness at the anniversary of Mum’s death with enjoying one another’s company and providing fun for the children.  Then that sister moved away for work eventually settling in Tasmania and generally spent Christmas with friends.

It was around then that we started hosting regularly. We always had a real tree whose decorations included remnants of my  mother-in-law’s collection dating back to the 1960s and our own accumulation of many years featuring felt kangaroos and koalas with little bells, a painted toilet roll and tissue ‘candle’ our daughter made at kindergarten, glass baubles, little wooden figurines and various arty trinkets we’d collected over the years. Some of this collection has succumbed to natural attrition but more recently it has been depleted by successive puppies. My other sister, her husband and kids and my grown up niece and her boyfriend usually joined us. When that sister and her husband separated, her two boys went to live with him and his new partner leaving my sister as a full-time single parent and carer for a daughter with severe disabilities. The first Christmas after their split, either through misunderstanding or bloody mindedness, her ex didn’t deliver the boys to our family gathering. A series of increasingly angry and desperate phone exchanges took place, then, furious and distraught, she took her daughter and went home.

We have tried a few times to dispense with all the Christmas palaver. In 2012 we booked a holiday at a farm stay place in Bemboka on the state’s south coast. Our eldest elected not to come so that cast a bit of a pall from the start. We did however have the company of our beloved family dog, whose cautious encounter with a billy goat provided one of the trip’s high points. Others were catching up with old friends in Tanja and visiting Potoroo Palace, a native animal reserve later threatened by and temporarily evacuated during the south coast bushfires. Christmas lunch was to be at a seafood restaurant in Merimbula a short drive from our accommodation. Despite confirming our reservation twice in the preceding months, we arrived to find the place closed. With the local club booked out, we ended up eating at a Malaysian restaurant, one of the few businesses open. The proprietors created a festive mood by draping a potted Dracaena with tinsel and impaling our desserts with little Aussie flags.  Afterwards we walked under sullen skies around the lake along a path of terracotta pavers many incised with decorative designs, some commemorating local identities and businesses. Merimbula followers (if I have any), who is Bernie ‘Poostain’?  His name is forever etched in my memory.

For our next attempt the following year we chose an Italian restaurant in Lugarno that did honour its Christmas lunch reservations. My sister and her daughter joined us and things were a little hairy on our arrival when my niece let out a series of excited shrieks. However, the family-oriented Italian restaurateurs were good natured and reassuring and she soon settled down.  I remember it being a reasonably successful if not overtly festive occasion. That may have been wishful thinking on my part as my sister has since told me she remained tense throughout and I see, looking at photos from the day, that our son was face down on the table at one point, not from inebriation but to avoid his father’s camera.

The first Christmas after our tree change to Wagga Wagga, when to my delight both my sisters came, sans spouse and offspring but with dogs, to our new home, should have gone swimmingly. In fact the swimming pool was a godsend both as respite from the heat and because it proved a useful way to wear out the largest dog. However the mix of four dogs and three cats, most of which were not used to sharing their domiciles, caused chaos. We had to erect a kiddy gate to stop the biggest dog stealing from the kitchen and dining table and all the visiting dogs chased our cats. It was an ambitious experiment that worked best only when we decamped to the Botanical Gardens to give the mutts some exercise and the cats a break. Everyone’s mental health was challenged and the visit was cut short, albeit not as acrimoniously as happened this Christmas just passed.

It is tempting to think we were just all emotionally wrung out. During 2023 my best friend died, my husband’s middle brother died, followed just 5 months later by his wife, our artist friend of over 50 years died, and our 12 month old kelpie pup was fatally hit by a car.  Our first Christmas both as retirees, the time pressure imposed on us to prepare and host was lessened. However our kids were under their own strains, one arrived from Sydney fighting off a virus and spent a lot of time sleeping and the other was preoccupied with work and rental issues. One of my sisters now lives locally but only had two hours between work shifts to spend with us on Christmas Day. This constellation of factors perhaps didn’t provide the best backdrop for tree decorating, turkey preparation and commemorative cheesecake production or for civilized human interaction, but it would be disingenuous to tell myself we hadn’t been here before.

Time to change course.

My first attempt at a sonnet...

 

Aquatic Aerobics Alphabet

 

Murrumbidgee Living

 

We hardly glimpsed

the Murrumbidgee

that winter weekend  

we first checked out the town

the pub bistro and Botanic Gardens donkeys

got our attention

and despite its location

the Tourist Information Centre

didn’t advertise the river’s existence

the only waters we tested

were chlorinated

contained by tiles

 

The promise of a life

where nature and art would combine

brought us here

we were warned of floods

but reassured

by sturdy levees

and would not see

the river swell

‘til two years in

when the full bellied Murrumbidgee

drowned its plastic buoys

roiled around trees

submerged shores

and swallowed picnic shelters

 

When the river receded

debris and dragged tree limbs 

caked in mud

made for an apocalyptic

khaki landscape

and sodden ground

sucked at our feet

 

Now we have seen the Murrumbidgee

in flood and depleted

have fallen under the spell

of its flow

and towering gums

sublime in health

or ashen silhouette

we’ve walked the Wiradjuri track

from Flowerdale to Oura

by remnants of the Hampden Bridge

and relics of the old pumping station

traced the intersecting lagoons

and watched Wollundry turtles

raise their leathery necks and snouted faces

above the water’s surface

glimpsed darting kingfishers

iridescent blue

against light stippled leaves and water

seen inky cormorants

perched on fallen tree limbs

wings outstretched to catch the breeze

watched neat native wood ducks

and their shiny mallard cousins

forage on the river banks

seen the contentious French geese

cross The Esplanade in procession

and always, always

under skies alive

with squadrons of cockatoos

wheeling and calling

 

We have heard

Gobbagombulin's and Pomilgalarna’s story

read Mary Gilmour on the

stinking swan hoppers

coated in evidence of slaughter

seen the Gumi races revived

and Wollundry all lit up

for a local mini Vivid

and know the fate the river’s deep

can bring to those unfamiliar

 

We respect  the Murrumbidgee

 the Murrumbidjeri

our adopted waterway

artery of Wiradjuri country

and draw energy and solace

from our existence

on its banks