What I Overdid on my Holidays

I have a habit of getting sick on holidays.  On our Lindeman Island honeymoon, I had sunstroke and heat rash. On holiday with a friend at Lake Cathie I had an allergic reaction to sun block that brought me out in hives. I have had food poisoning in Katoomba, Adelaide, Cessnock and Southend on Sea. I have broken my ankle in two places: Sydenham & Millthorpe. Admittedly the Sydenham ‘trip’ wasn’t a holiday, I was on my way to work, but falling over in Millthorpe was a decisive break in our Orange winter break!

Recently a planned Sydney visit was presaged with foreboding when I developed a nasty cold and needed Sudafed and nasal spray to get through the car journey and that evening’s performance of Candide at the Opera House. However, judiciously balancing activity and rest over the following days got me fit as a flea* for dinner with friends and An Evening with Jimmy Webb by week’s end. My smugness was to be challenged though – imminently…

 

The ABC reported on Sydney's heat and humidity on 15 March

According to an ABC news report, Saturday 15 March was the hottest autumn day Sydney had experienced for 149 years. Temperatures nudged 40 degrees and humidity was over 70%. Sydney’s mugginess was one reason for our decision to leave that city. Early in the day, I was coping well through brunch, a bit of telly and an afternoon nap. When I headed to town I noticed that the air conditioning on the train to Kings Cross was struggling a little, but waiting for my friend, Ian, by the Victoria Street station exit I felt a pleasant breeze while enjoying the passing parade of tourists and denizens.  

The calm before the sweat tsunami

Ian arrived dapper in pressed jeans and a T-shirt and joggers, both of luminous white. I teased him about his immaculate appearance and he admired my colourful jungle print dress. Our dinner/theatre booking at The Old Fitzroy was over an hour away so we had ample time to amble through Potts Point to Woolloomooloo. Both assuming we knew where we were headed, we went north down Victoria Street toward Garden Island Dockyard and turned left/west into Cowper Bay Wharf Roadway and ferocious sun.  We turned off briefly into Brougham Street mistaking a backpacker hostel for The Old Fitzroy but did a U-turn. Ian is ex-navy so I appealed to his supposed navigation skills only to be told he had left his sextant back in his apartment. I consulted my phone but the combination of the map’s scale, the ever reorienting little blue arrow and conflicting verbal directions sent us crisscrossing through Woolloomooloo. Soon my steamed up glasses and sweat filled eyes prevented me from seeing the screen clearly anyway. Ian’s glasses were back at the apartment with his sextant. Tourists from Byron Bay, New Zealand and Ireland we asked were as clueless as us and with better reason. 

At the corner of Bourke and Dowling Streets we intimated that we were well wide of our destination. By this time I was a sodden wreck and had rung the pub and left voicemails twice hoping to get directions. Cathedral Street was a denominator common to the phone app and to Ian’s recollections but we couldn’t agree whether to turn right or left at the corner of Forbes. Luckily a kindly local convinced us to go right and lo, the sign for The Old Fitzroy came into view. Appropriately enough, that signage contains the phrase ‘This must be the place’. We were 5 minutes early for our dinner booking having traversed Woolloomooloo for approximately 45 minutes. Two flights of stairs took us to the restaurant cooled only by ceiling fans. I asked where the loos were so that I could ‘repair’ my hair and visage and the charming maitre’d pointed back down those two flights of stairs. One jug of iced water, 2 glasses of Sauvignon Blanc a piece and some ill-advised pate and gnocchi later, it was time to see Iphigenia in Splott in the basement theatre. Back down the stairs we hurried and, as the last to enter, found the only remaining seats, on a narrow bench at the very top of the steeply raked rows.  

The Old Fitzroy pub, theatre and restaurant in Woolloomooloo (Google for directions)

The brick walls of the small theatre are uneven and painted a dull black. The air conditioning seemed to be the evaporative sort with humidity poorly managed. The atmosphere was claustrophobic. Meg Clarke, in skanky active wear, used the four intersecting grey rectangles that comprised the set dynamically to deliver her monologue. We were introduced to her character who is a tear away young Welsh woman in an unsatisfying relationship with a thick bloke who fails to pick up his dog’s droppings in the street.  Her main recreation is getting blotto in Splott and one night, fulfilling this mission, she meets a soldier, an amputee, with whom she begins a passionate affair. That’s about as far as I got…

I wonder how it turns out...

I felt waves of cold sweat wash over my brow and I flopped forward in three distinct micro second movements coming to rest on the shoulder of the audience member in front of me. The next I knew I was lying on the bench seat unable to right myself and semi delirious. A disembodied woman introduced herself as a doctor. She took my pulse, described my colour, clamminess and respiration to others and at one point stroked my cheek reassuringly. I heard someone say ‘call an ambulance’ and report back that there would be a two hour wait. The anonymous doctor took matters into her own hands and spoke to the ambulance dispatch people. In ten minutes paramedics were on the scene.

The Old Fitzroy is somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty years old. It is amongst the most intact pubs of its era still operating and perhaps the only one to have maintained its performance space for decades. Before Iphigenia in Splott it staged a smorgasbord of praised productions including plays by Harold Pinter and Lillian Hellman and solo shows by Paul Capsis and iOTA. Given its age the fact that it is not an accessible building is unsurprising. This presented special challenges for the ambos. The gurney made it through the doors and a special folding carry chair got about half way up the incline. Somehow my support squad, which included Ian, the doctor, the man whose shoulder I had come to rest on (I think), and the paramedics eventually got me vertical, down a couple of stairs and into the seat and from there onto the stretcher/gurney. All the while the kind ambulance officer talked me through what was happening  as they got me settled in the ambulance and applied monitors for my heart rate, took my temperature and pulse and measured my  blood pressure which was a disturbing 80/30. She gave me a tubular vomit bag to clutch but fortunately, while I felt woozy, I didn’t need to use it. Ian stayed beside me on the trip to St Vincent’s and tolerated the hospital environment until 11pm despite its less than happy associations for him.  I was a little uninhibited in my conversation apparently as twice he responded to my statements with ‘TMI’. I do remember warning him not to steal my frock when they made me divest myself of it for a hospital gown. Its riot of candy colours would have shown off his complexion to excellent effect. 

St Vincent’s staff were amazing in their thoroughness and good humour and the care they took of me.  I had two more ECGs, blood and urine tests (I hadn’t peed from 3 pm to 11.20 pm which supported a dehydration diagnosis), three lots of fluid and oxygen because my level was initially 87. When I explained that there was no one with a car to come and collect me they moved me to a quieter area of the Emergency Unit where I managed to get some reasonable sleep amidst the symphony of machines that go ping, PA announcements and patient call buzzers. While Sydney sweltered through that uncharacteristically sultry autumn night I was cool enough in my cubicle to need two blankets.  In the morning I was given a breakfast of juice, cereal and yoghurt and provided with four soft towels to have a shower. By the time I was discharged and caught a taxi back to where I was staying my electrolytes and spirits were high. I scored a taxi driver whose daughter coincidentally works in Pathology at St Vincent’s and who knew about the history of the Grand Pacific Blue Room currently being refurbished as the Olympia Boutique Hotel on the corner of Oxford and Streets. That was of course right up my alley! And I made my 3.30 pm flight home with ease.

St Vincent's brekkie pack

Everyone has been commiserating with me about this incident but I think I had a very easy time of it and am full of appreciation and gratitude for everyone who intervened especially lovely solicitous Ian who kept me light hearted throughout. I am sorry I interrupted the play and the enjoyment of the other audience members. When Lucy Clements, Artistic Director of New Ghosts Theatre Company emailed me the following day to enquire how I was going, I apologised for my show stopping performance and she was kind enough to reply:

please don’t think twice about the show stop – the plot points you missed in the play were all about how wonderful healthcare staff are, but how hard it is for them to work with such large funding cuts – so the events that unfolded in reality (being told the ambulance would take 2 hours to attend to you!!) were much more dramatic, poignant and impactful to us than the play ever could be.

What a trouper! I will certainly visit the Old Fitz again but will be avoiding Sydney humidity. As for my and Ian’s inability to make the walk from Kings Cross Station to the pub in the nine minutes Google maps now tells me is standard, let not our excitement in meeting up after almost a decade ever again eclipse the need for sensibly checking our route in advance, or at least let’s not leave the sextant at his place again!

*why are fleas particularly ‘fit’? I suppose they must do their squats to be able to jump like that.

Just another week in arts paradise

The Wagga Wagga Art Gallery is currently hosting four exhibitions. I have seen three of them: Fantastic Forms – celebrating the drawings & ceramics of Merric Boyd, Nuanced: 75 years of the Wagga Wagga Art Society, and Mei Zhao: Remapping Erased Landscapes which explores the history of early Chinese migration in the Riverina region.  There is also Lisa Sammut: Radial Sign – three dimensional works which I have yet to see, and an additional two exhibitions at the National Glass Gallery. To say the gallery is showcasing contrasting bodies of work is an understatement.

His naïf coloured pencil drawings of landscape and farm animals were rescued by son Arthur from Merric Boyd’s spiral bound sketch books and framed. Their usual home is Bundanon the property the Boyd family bequeathed to the nation. I was particularly taken by the Munch-like swirls of some tree studies and by various chubby bucolic creatures. They and some forty of his miniature pearlescent glazed ceramic figures comprise a travelling exhibition that is beginning its national tour in Wagga Wagga. These, though less blatantly hedonistic, reminded me of John Perceval’s delinquent angels which I had the joy of encountering back about a dozen careers ago when I was at Craft Australia.

Where Mrs Milk Babies Play, Merric Boyd, 1949 (source: https://www.shoalhaven.com)

Having previously blogged about the vanished Chinese settlement in north Wagga, I was excited to meet Mei Zhao and to view her work. The exhibition, the culmination of two years of field trips throughout the Riverina, is on show in the self-contained Margaret Carnegie gallery space. Mei Zhao’s mixed media canvases evoke the lost market gardens and other remnants of 19th and early 20th century Chinese presence in the region.  Its centerpiece is the vibrant Wish You Luck GongXiFaCai Joss House installation conjuring the textures, structures and artefacts of joss houses once situated in Wagga Wagga, Narrandera, Adelong and Tumut.

Mei Zhao's Wish You Luck GongXiFaCai Joss House installation (my photo) 

Nuanced: 75 years of the Wagga Wagga Art Society, is a different kettle of fish altogether. The society, founded in 1949 by local art lovers, has operated continuously as a space for practice, education and exhibition for local artists. I discovered via a Trove search that in 1954 the society made a donation of £50 toward founding a permanent home for the Wagga Wagga Gallery by holding raffle (see clipping). Some other tidbits I found about the society’s history will keep for another post. While this show celebrates a 75 year anniversary, it is not a retrospective, all works are by current members. There is a wide diversity from Marion Adinsall’s meticulous botanical watercolours to Karen Walsh’s clever mixed media A Place of Many to Cheryl Wheeler's curiously named almost opaque Coming With Clouds – a religious theme one supposes.

The Wagga Art Society was instrumental in fundraising to establish a permanent home for the regional art gallery, clipping from The Daily Advertiser,17 July 1954 (source: Trove, National Library of Australia database)

Visual art has not been my only cultural exposure in the past week; I have also been to a reading by Blue Mountains poet Hugh Crago and a production by of our local amateur theatre group. First to Hugh. His poems are conversational, accessible, peppered with allusions that I ‘got’, wistful, occasionally melancholy and also sometimes very funny. I bought his 118 page collection Wind Age, Wolf Age and am enjoying it.

Hugh Crago's poetry collection (my photo)

Now and Then is a play by US playwright Sean Grennan that was staged by the School of Arts Theatre Company (SOACT) every Sunday throughout February. I have seen and reviewed a number of SOACT productions and must admit my first exposure to the company, Air Swimming back in 2014, mere weeks after my arrival in Wagga, set the bar very high. Subsequent experiences have not always matched that, however, Neighbourhood Watch and now Now and Then have done so. No point in promoting this production specifically as the season has just finished, but a shout out to SOACT for a witty enjoyable choice of play , to the talented cast: Blayke Thomas, Olivia Jones, Fi Ziff and Lucas Forbes and to director Craig Dixon.

We are very lucky here in Wagga to have this calibre of cultural activities on offer. I’ll have cinema, more exhibitions and an upcoming concert to blog about soon and I have a few poem ideas percolating too. Then there’s the Art Society's portrait prize controversy to research and write about! 

Death Café

On 31 January I woke up to the news that Marianne Faithfull had died. I already had Death Café in my diary for later that morning. Mementos mori were proliferating. My own ever present obsession with ‘dead uns’ (that is how my spouse refers to my genealogy research), the inevitable result of ageing i.e. more people you know die, and then the welter of celebrity deaths reported in the news in recent months. We’ve lost Maggie Smith, David Lynch and Shelley Duvall and now Marianne.   There is definitely a spike in road deaths and drownings over the summer holidays. Then the toll of warfare and climate related disaster just grows…

Death is more certain than taxes, eh, Donald?

When it is coming for us is unpredictable although the online mortality calculator Death Clock says I will die at age 73 years, 9 months and 25 days.  Better get a wriggle on with travel plans and memoir writing.  While I am skeptical about the accuracy of this prediction, the message is carpe deim and get my affairs in order…

That is also the message of Death Café, the two hour get together held this week at the Wagga Wagga Library.

Poster advertising the  Death Cafe event

When I saw it advertised, averse as I am to euphemism, I did wonder if it wasn’t a bit of a blunt way to market an end of life planning event. I realise now that the phrase ‘death camp’ may also have been echoing somewhere in the back of my mind. But the phrases on the poster: ‘no agenda’ and ‘discuss things that are on your mind about death and dying’ appealed. I have been procrastinating about finalising my will and power of attorney for too long. Going to this workshop might galvanize me into action.

Numbers weren’t huge. At first I mistook the journo and photographer from The Daily Advertiser for participants. Logic dictated otherwise. They were both in their 30s and male, whereas the bona fide attendees were all women and, with the exception of a social worker and a palliative care worker, in our 60s and 70s.

Jocelyn Mason who convened the café is cheerful, down to earth and perfectly equipped to run such an event having worked in the funeral industry for over 25 years and witnessed a wealth of death and dispatch related issues. She got us to introduce ourselves and say what we were hoping to get out of the two hours. One woman is currently nursing a dying husband and needed practical advice and reassurance. Some of us wanted to check we were doing the right thing re. our wills and to ask about funeral arrangements. There are four funeral directors in Wagga Wagga, it costs $6.5 K to get a burial plot, eco burials are available here. Nearly everyone had a poignant or frustrating experience associated with the loss of a loved one to relate. Dying intestate or with a will that challenges interpretation or implementation were common difficulties relatives had to face.

One person epitomized cognitive dissonance as no matter how strongly or frequently the facts around dying intestate, leaving one’s body to science or qualifying for a pauper’s burial were explained she was adamant in voicing her belief that all three were straightforward available options.

Jocelyn Mason, Jan Pittard and Vicki Bowles immediately after the workshop (source The Daily Advertsiser newspaper)

Most of us though left the café with greater clarity around preparing for the inevitable. One of Jocelyn’s wise tips was to consolidate all information about insurance, superannuation, online passwords, arrangements for pets etc. in a single document that is readily accessible to your executor and family members. She offered a template for preparing this. A similar, related document that contains your funerary wishes such as music and reading choices and any anecdotes you would like shared  is helpful guidance for  relatives and may ensure an uncringeworthy commemoration.

Jocelyn plans to offer further death cafes in the coming months in Wagga Wagga. They are happening elsewhere across the country too. Death can be a subject avoided by many with women more likely to be proactive in planning. I would encourage participation whether it seems immediately relevant to you or not. There is nothing negative about being informed and if death is a great leveler, death talk is a great source of affinity.

 

Parlez vous Francais a la Wagga Wagga?

It was not long after we settled in Wagga Wagga, the town so good they named it twice though only ever utter half its name, that we became aware of the distinctly continental flavour of many of its small businesses. Indeed Wagga boasts an entire Parisian ‘arrondissement’ in the northernmost part of town, known logically enough as ‘the Paris end’! The location of Wagga’s former Chinatown and of its only Spanish Mission style commercial building, the upper reaches of Fitzmaurice Street, show unmistakable evidence of  l’influence Francaise. Many ‘boutique’ shops are located there: Knights delicatessen with its terrine and camembert, the Circa 1929 day spa, a chandelier hanging in its foyer, as well as the café with the oh so French name, Uneke!

The Uneke Lounge has a totally unique spelling (source: TripAdvisor)

The street was named in 1849 by Colonial Surveyor-General, Sir Thomas Mitchell after one of his fellow-officers in the 95th Regiment of Foot (Pied), John Fitzmaurice. Despite sounding Scottish, Fitzmaurice had served in the Pyrenees, Nivelle and Toulouse, so his French credentials are impeccable. Mitchell was merely exercising a subtlety that has informed the naming of Wagga enterprises since his time, not all of them confined to the city’s Paris end.

For my first couple of years here I got my hair done at Salon Christé in the chic South City retail complex. It is located cheek by jowl with that phenomenal European marketing success, Aldi and has le magasin du articles des rejets and viandes de qualité du South City as companion businesses! The local business directory did let Francophiles down though by listing it as Salon Christ, probably a sop to Wagga’s huge devout Christian population.

It's official - Wagga is the 'Bible Belt' of New South Wales

A favourite haunt in our early days was Café Niché in Coleman Street (now sadly re-named The Brew). There was clearly a two for one special on acute accents when they arranged their signage. They served such authentic French delicacies as coffee with milk (cafe au lait) and ham and cheese toasties (Croque Monsieur) and had a chien-friendly jardin out the back.

Operating for several years in Baylis Street was Cache a cafeteria-style eatery that also contained meeting and conference facilities and accommodation on the first floor. One sad jour a combination of Wagga summer heat and the operation of a clothes drier caused un feu to break out in the premises and it was closed for some time. Attempts to re-invent the business as a chocolatier /patisserie were in exactly the right esprit but had short lived success. While the patriot in me applauds their use of Florence Broadhurst wallpaper perhaps Isadore Leroy designs would have been safer. But as this business, in contrast to Café Niché, completely omitted the acute accent on their name, their attention to detail was always clearly lacking.

Blogger's daughter nonchalantly poses avec beret in front of the Artisan Baker

Truly attaining Parisian standards is the Artisan Baker in Morgan Street which makes wonderful tartes, croissants and pain. Its slogan ‘So French, So Fresh’ is reassuring as is the inclusion of the mots ‘boulangerie’ and 'patisserie' on its window and website. While I applaud such discretion following as it does the lead of Sir Thomas Mitchell, would it not be in the business's interest to re-brand as Boulangerié, Patisserié et Café Formidablé de Wollundré?

STOP PRESS: Wagga also has a French Choir, a branch of L'Academie Francaise and an annual French film festival. Now if we just had a French restaurant...