Spooky, Mulder

Visiting The Rocks in Sydney last month I chose Café Danieli in Harrington Street for brunch based on online reviews like ‘high quality food and friendly service’ and ‘inexpensive in comparison to places located in the main street’. Described as being in the ‘Clock Tower Centre’, I imagined the café had a heritage location. In fact it is in a 1989 office/retail complex with no particular architectural merit. In 2023 Singapore-based developer Far East Orchard proposed demolishing it to for a hotel but it has survived so far. The café has outdoor seating but the main part is in an arcade. When I arrived at the counter the proprietor was talking to a young couple about landlines and black and white television.  From their incredulous reaction, he could have been discussing dinosaurs and hot air ballooning. He appealed to me to verify that these things had in fact existed in living memory. Possibly still unconvinced they left soon afterwards. Coincidence rather than causation I think. I took a seat at the one of the outdoor tables and soon a couple nearer my and the proprietor’s age arrived with their wheelie suitcases. We exchanged pleasantries, then, a few moments into the conversation, the man asked me how things were in Wagga Wagga. Knowing I’d been quite chatty I asked him if I’d mentioned that was here I lived. He said ‘no, I saw you at the Civic Centre a couple of years ago when we were visiting’. There was no time to establish the context as the couple took an inside table and our conversation ended. I wish I’d enquired further. What the occasion was. What his connection with Wagga was. Doing so seemed obsessive and a bit of an intrusion and as my friend had arrived by then my focus changed. Our meals were nice – the online reviews I read were correct.

The Clocktower Centre, Harrington Street, The Rocks, Sydney, New South Wales. Cafe Danieli is on the ground floor, seating visible (Source: The Daily Telegraph).

The phenomenon of coincidences and unexpected connections has been playing on my mind. Many years ago a friend lent me Colin Wilson’s The Outsider; all I remember of it is his remarks on coincidence. He saw no hidden significance in them but found following their trail rewarding. I suppose it’s the same impulse that sends us down ‘rabbit holes’ online. It has been my habit to pursue coincidence, to make links, to uncover stories (the research strand) or to crafting connections (the creative strand). Three examples that relate to connections with Wagga:

No. 1 – I met a woman in Sydney with the same first name as me who was born in Wagga Wagga but moved away in her teens. In one of the jobs I held after moving here in was located in Harvey House, the same building her mother had lived in as a nurse in the 1940s!

No. 2 – researching my husband’s family I discovered that his great great grandfather who emigrated from England to Australia in 1849 and  lived in Melbourne with his wife and had 6 children,  after his timber importation business went bankrupt in 1859, came to Wagga. He worked as a gang leader for a team of timber cutters for the telegraph line. He had a horrible accident in Tarcutta on or around November 23, 1860 when a tree fell unexpectedly and crushed his spine.  He was taken by cart to the Hope Inn (now the Hotel Riverina) in Fitzmaurice Street where he languished for ten days before dying ad becoming the a very early Anglican burial in the local monumental cemetery. When in 2017 we had our reconnoiter visit to Wagga to decide whether we wanted to move here,  we had dinner at the Hotel Riverina, in the dining area in the older portion of the building where John Semple stayed/died.

The Bridge Hotel formerly Thomas Turvey's Hope Inn now the Hotel Riverina,
Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga Wagga

No. 3 Researching my first cousin twice removed Armandine Garnay I found out that she and her husband and daughter moved from Rockdale to Wagga Wagga in 1924. Her husband Laurie was head accountant at the Union Bank here. She was Treasurer of the Shakespeare Club, the oldest continually operating Shakespeare club in the world. They moved to nearby Henty in 1927.  I have toured the Union Bank building, one of Wagga’s most elegant structures, visited their Henty residence and am now a member of the Shakespeare Club. If that wasn’t all enough coincidence, our son lived in the same Rockdale street as Armie and her family for a brief period.

Perhaps the six degrees of separation thing means that these are not so extraordinary. However there is a sort of spooky thrill you get when they occur. Related, or perhaps obverse, are the unexplained and weird things you see. I am sure I have experienced multiple instances but just now all I can recount is the time the train I was travelling in stopped and I saw a young couple exercising a kitten on an untended garden bed on Sydenham railway station platform. I mentioned it to a friend who dubbed it a ‘raelian moment’ but I just googled ‘raelian’ and it relates to encounters that suggest contact with an extra-terrestrial highly feminized race called the Elohim. Unless Bohemian inner westies and the Elohim are interchangeable that seems unlikely.

Three sharp looking Elvis impersonators ready to board the Blue Suede Express to Parkes, New South Wales (Photo: Belinda Pittard)

The most recent coincidences I had planned to pursue relate to a writing workshop I missed at the weekend where the exercise was to describe the qualities one would seek in a lion tamer and an Elvis impersonator. My sister was related by marriage to a Czech Elvis impersonator (not that surprising given their proliferation) and I thought I wrote a poem about a lion tamer in 2025 but it turns out it was about  a performing bear attacking its keeper, or maybe an Elohim circus act. 

Anyway, by way of non sequitir, here it is:

Poem after Andrew Sibley’s Stage Fright (1984) 

The book you bought me to cut up for my art

falls open at the page with the ‘dancing’ bears

muzzled and tethered

held upright by two staff-wielding

Turkish street entertainers

abducted as cubs

they were taught to ‘dance’ on hot metal or coals while music played

learning to associate music with pain,

lifting their paws in rhythm

as their keepers drummed and piped

 

In China, Myanmar and Korea

they still cage bears and drain their bile for specious medicine

Ursodeoxycholic acid has some anti-inflammatory qualities

says Wikipedia

How did anyone discover that?

 

In Andrew Sibley’s circus ring

the bear act departs from form

Clara, in her shiny emerald leotard proffers a single rose

red as her lipsticked mouth to Bruin

He rests his paw upon her hand as if to accept the token

but then rejects this human courtship

and casually sinks two razor rows of teeth

into Clara’s face

dislodging an eyeball

her peers will

doubtless rush in

shots will pierce Bruin’s shaggy hide

his gore will pool with hers on drenched sawdust

but he has made his point

it is over between them!

Andrew Sibley's Stage Fright, 1984, oil & enamel on linen