Monday morning Maeve wore her extra-stompy shoes to music class, hoping for a couple of reprises of “Bear Goes over the Mountain”.

(The bear did not go over the mountain, we later heard, but a new song was learned. Maeve sang it to us later, as CC carried her up the slope, past the fine-flowered rose bush leaning seductively over the picket fence, to the bus stop on Rowntree Street. It went a little something like this: Naughty pussycat, / You are very fat. / You have butter on your whiskers, / Naughty pussycat. It is sung with prim accusation. If you are Maeve, you sing it while also wagging a condemnatory finger.)

While the kid and maybe eight or nine of her contemporaries wiggled and chorused their way through rhythm and rhyme in the Scout house, CC and I waited across the street, on the grass in Mort Bay Park, reading, writing. Just after eleven-thirty, we heard Maeve’s high-pitched, “Mummy, come and get me!” amid the other eager cries. Like so many squidgy-cheeked jailbirds clinging on to the aluminium rails of the Scout house balcony, the hullabaloo of three-year-olds jumped and squirmed and stuck their arms out towards freedom and sugary treats. It had not gone unnoticed that one mother had baked cupcakes with pink icing.



Adventures call on a sunny and cloudless day, to me and CC and the bundance kid shaking her moneymaker to the techno thumps blasting out of Jet Bar Café.

We meandered through the Botanical Gardens marvelling at the cactii collection and the ingenious, impossible webs of the trapeze-artist spiders. Above our heads, the bats swooped and called and settled battily upside-down on any available tree branch. Longtime residents of the city centre, these grey-headed flying foxes have fed on the sweet, sweet nectar of Sydney’s fruit trees and native eucalyptus flowers for a hundred and some years; inspired, we sat in the garden café for iced chocolates and lemonade ice creams on sticks. Just outside, fat pink blooms broke the leafy green surface of the lotus lily pond every here and there, and bright-eyed ducks paddled in the shade of the large, nodding leaves.

Later, the kid skipped and ran under the spreading branches of a fig tree as old as stones. She was a supergirl with flying powers, and with an invisible wand she turned us into supergirls as well. The sound effect of transformation, in the whizzbanger cartoon series that is her life, is: “Turn!” Similarly, when she is the boss lady of an imaginary cake shop, the sound effect for putting a pretend cake in a pretend box is: “In a box!” You will perhaps not be surprised to hear that the sound effect for closing said box before handing it over to a customer is: “Close!”



The sunny promenade along Farm Cove took us past the Opera House to Circular Quay, and to the 5:10 ferry pulling up at Wharf 5. Just across the harbour at Milsons Point, the wondrous, terrifying carnival mouth of Luna Park waited to welcome us in. In the late 1930s kids rode the Big Dipper and the Coney Island for ninepence a spin, and during the war servicemen sauntered down to the fairground on their time off. Half an hour to closing time on Monday, we mugged in front of the funny mirrors while the Tango Train ran backwards, and then the kid picked out a painted horse on the merry-go-round. The carousel carnie leaned against a pillar with spacey eyes, but our grins were wide for all to see.

We are having a lazy day today –

I know it seems like everyday’s a holiday in Stellouland, but you try carting a wriggly three-year-old around town all day, keeping curious little fingers out of your food and away from all manner of breaky things in the shops, you try entertaining a small and quick-moving creature who can’t stop nattering and asking questions, and then come and tell me about your holidays –

So you see.

We are having a lazy day today, keeping close to home with comics and fashion magazines while outside the crickets are keeping up a steady, hysteria-inducing chant into the hot, hot afternoon.

Our Saturday jaunt to Haberfield with Deborah yielded, among other things – among mini cannoli and veal ravioli and a rose ganache in white chocolate – a handsome lump of burrata, this yielding, cream-filled ball of mozzarella made fresh at the cheese factory. This was lunch this afternoon, sliced and plated with small, sweet tomatoes. We mopped up the peppered-and-salted olive oil with chorizo-and-red-pepper flatbread from the bakery up the street.

Oh, Haberfield: Two buses south and west of us, Haberfield is good for girls with a penchant for pleasure-seeking. In the deli-drogheria on Ramsay Street, Italian mammàs stipulated strict cuts of meats and cheeses, while on the corner, in Pasticceria Papa, the coffee cups clinked on their saucers and the shopgirls served up chocolate biscuits and ricotta cannoli and gelati in green and swirly pink. These are treats that feed a bout of girltalk. When Deborah gently chided her absent fiancé for leaving the toilet seat up, I said, “It could be worse – he could be a ladyman.” “A ladies’ man?” she said, laughing confusedly. “No, no,” I said, “a ladyman.” Saturday sweet-tooths swirled around us like aunties in a Toa Payoh hawker centre, but we’d found ourselves a table for four and we are ladies – even the kid, who was on the floor playing with her tractor by this time – who like a sit-down.

By ten Sunday morning the bus to Bondi was already packed. There were hats and ponytails, canvas totes and rattan baskets, shorts and thin cotton shirts. Bikini ties peeked out the collars of girls’ tops. We sat in the back row, me and CC and Maeve, like the bad girls on the schoolbus. The kid had been slip-slapped with sunscreen. I had on starlet sunglasses and dotty flip-flops. We had ice cream money in our pockets.



The approach to Bondi Beach on the 380 is steep, delicious downhill. First a glimpse of sea beyond the trees and low wall, then, after the curve in the road, the full, resplendent swathes of turquoise, teal and cobalt blue as the bus revs along Campbell Parade.

We started at the markets: here, the elastic-waisted rayon dresses, the made-in-China matryoshka dolls, the Muchacho T-shirts, the handmade soaps cut like blocks of butter, the mismatched mirrors made out of handsome, salvaged wood. The smell in the air was bacon on the grill; we followed the scent till I was holding a sausage roll in my hands.

A sausage roll in the hands can save you from many things, friends. Buying necklaces with cutesy laser-cut plastic pendants, for example, or handing over money for a fetching stripey dress whose above-knee hem, while fresh and frisky on the beach, while dazzling and devil-may-care in the sun and the sea breeze, would probably make me mince down London streets as I tugged ungraciously at the fabric and the seams of my self-awareness. I was out with Nora once, shopping, and I said, “Am I too old to wear a T-shirt that says ‘Drop Beats Not Bombs’?” “Yes,” she said, unhesitatingly, and I dare say I got a Look, too, for having even asked. I am not saying you are a sausage roll, Nora, but I am saying sometimes a sausage roll in the hands busies you before other distractions take hold.



Later, the cousins converged: Stephen and Suzanne, and Yen-Yen, and Sam – Ee-ee the chaperone among us all in her large straw hat – and the Exotic Dessert Platter from the fish-and-chip joint. Hello, pineapple fritters, and hell-o deep-fried Mars bar. I held out for a pistacho gelato, eaten in the shade, before we headed down to the beach, CC and me and Sam and the kid, to bury our feet in the soft sand, and to scream at the water teasing our feet.

This is how a Sunday afternoon passes by while the waves wash languidly onto the shore. Maeve chased her pretend pet crab. Stephen did cartwheels on the grass. The girls sauntered in maxidresses and minidresses, and surfer boys grinned in boardshorts and bare torsos.

So. This is life with a kid. In this life, I wake when she pads up the stairs at seven-thirty in the morning, and I can only be grateful it is not seven. (Some of us are very tired.) It is a funny life – and a sticky one, too, as plum juice runs down her arm. Tonight at dinner, we tried to make her eat one last bit of risotto, one last bite, just one last spoonful. “Eat some more, Pokes,” we said, CC and I did, cajoling, and she said, smiling widely before running off to balance on the top of the sofa: “Tough.”

This kid, in this life, whines and stamps and crosses her arms tightly in displeasure. She interrupts relentlessly. She wants me to be a cat, her sister, a baby, a rabbit, she wants me to order rubber sushi from her red-roofed playhouse, she wants to play dominoes – no, trains – no, doctor – no, painting, she wants to scale every height, to ride every bouncy animal in every park playground across town.

She is unturnoffable, this kid, this pixie with the bright eyes and the ready laugh. From a running start she torpedoes herself towards my legs; with arms wide open she launches herself into a huge smack of hug. She draws cats with a frenzy – pages of stripey cats, smiling cats, six-legged, fat-tailed cats. She pokes. With her index finger out straight, she pokes, decidedly and seriously. She likes glitter and lip gloss. “Look at my lips, Ee-ee,” she says, and then she cocks her head and puckers. She has a set of self-adhesive moustaches, one for each day of the week. Saturday is ‘The Grandpa’, a dapper curl of grey. She likes this one because it is fuzzy.

In the late afternoon, sometimes, we play pretend among the thick roots of the old trees at Elkington Park. Down Fitzroy and its sweet terraced houses, the park is lush and green with biblical leaves, and its cliffs lead down to the Parramatta River and its leaning sailboats, its sturdy ferries. There is a tree to climb, here, and space in which to run around in circles. There are swings to swing, higher with each push, till the ground disappears and our feet are framed by the sky.

“Ee-ee,” this kid says, “I like you,” and I say, “Pokey, my sweetheart, my sweetest of hearts, you are A plus.” She is generous with her kisses.

I’ll tell you, though. Nights, CC puts her to bed and then we stay up too late with date mamouls and rose pu-erh tea, or Turkish delight and a flowery jasmine. Two days a week we drop her off at playschool. These days are very nice days.



Last Thursday at the Bourke Street Bakery on Broadway, we had to tell no one to keep her hands out of her mouth. We didn’t tell a soul that chairs are for sitting on, not for jumping on and shaking one’s booty on. At no point did we have to lunge forwards to catch a cup slipping off the edge of the table, and at the end of it all, after the flat white, the hot chocolate, the rhubarb danish, after the jammy toast, no one whipped out a baby wipe to clean off the grubbiness and smears.



We walked up Bourke Street and down Crown, stopping only for pink and yellow biscuits and blue sandals and some very fine objects. The morning’s grey sky had turned into wild rain, and it wasn’t letting up. By the time we reached Danks Street and the wide, warehousey façade of Fratelli Fresh, we were an embattled troops, wet in the foot and empty in the stomach.

We ate slowly, savouringly, while the rain came down outside. There were berries and a wobbly buttermilk pudding. The macchiato was small and dark. We ate savouringly, slowly, while the rain came down and down and down, outside.

Tuesday we sailed the high seas again, hopping onto the ferry at Circular Quay right before it left. One of us had big sunglasses. One of us had a giant visor. One of us, the smallest one of us, had a banana.

Not twenty minutes east from the heart of the city, Watsons Bay, almost all the way to the very tip of the South Head peninsula, was a small curve of beach with a host of hopeful seagulls and a bustling fish-and-chip shop.



Hello, holidays! We have a bucket and a spade in the bag, and a big towel for the sand.

We tumbled about in the playground, on the turny things and the twisty things, and then on the climby things and the wobbly things, and then we ran through the park to the beach, to the water clear and sparkling like sapphire soda pop.



Here, we dipped our feet in the water noncommittedly; but it cooled our toes and our ankles, it lapped invitingly at our calves, and soon the hem of my skirt was wet. I bunched it half-heartedly around my knees but I knew the sun would take care of it.

We made one-bucket castles, on the beach, and we goaded the kid on toward the water. We looked out nervously for bits of broken glass, glinting green. We stalked the gulls, who edged away from us and bobbed on the little waves. We laughed, very loud, into the wide sky.



Of course there were fish and chips under a shady and welcoming tree, afterwards, and calamari and salads besides. We yelled at the seagulls and flung our arms out at them while they screeched and called in a ring around us. “No use waiting around, birds,” I said, “for there will be no chips left over.” But there were, in fact, chips left over, for we had an understanding with the gelato joint up the street – the best kind of understanding, really, tinged with the tang of a passionfruit sorbet.

We have been floating by on days floating by, like clouds on clouds against the brilliant blue, and with a tube of SPF 45 in the bag. We walk in shoes red and purple, we sit down for tea, we pick out truffles to make up a little sack. We have unlimited travel passes, and we want bang for our buck.



Last Monday we screamed and ran through the grass at Mort Bay and then took the ferry, green and gold, to the city. We sat out back with the sun on our heads. The wind was through my hair. “This is great,” I said, because it was, and at the Rocks we sat down to fizzy sodas and ham sandwiches.

I like buses and I like maps, so it all works out ’cause sometimes a girl’s got to get places.



Yesterday I hopped the 442 up George Street to an architectural walk in the city, you cannot say I am not clever and serious. Okay, well, actually it was because the promo literature said the walks are led by young architects. Everybody likes a young architect!

Oh, stop. I care DEEPLY about architecture. And if it just so happens that I now know architectural things because a bright-eyed curly-haired young architect told me them, ALL THE BETTER. For example: There is sandstone under much of New South Wales, sandstone that leaches rainwater and nutrients from the topsoil, so that local florae have to be hardy and cunning in order to survive. The plants emit poisons, then, that keep animals from eating them, and when the trees shed, come tree-shedding season, (I know it seems like this story is getting nowhere fast), (his eyes were very nice), (and he had small cloth-covered buttons on his shirt), when the trees shed, the leaves, INSTEAD OF DECOMPOSING ON THE GROUND, SIT ABOUT AND EMIT POISONS. West of Sydney, the Blue Mountains have been attracting squirrels and, I dunno, wombats, and nature lovers for years. That smoky mountainy blue, that mysterious enveloping blue, that, my friends, is THE BRILLIANT BLUE GLOW OF PLANT POISON IN THE AIR. And perhaps this does not seem architectural, except for the architect who told me it, but it is part of a whole story about a whole city, and every story has to start somewhere, and sandstone is just as good a place as any.

This afternoon the 378 took me to the fashions of Paddington and back. If you are just quick enough, you can see, from the bus, the questions along Oxford Street: Have you seen Francis? Have you seen Timothy? Have you seen love?

And if you are quite eagle-eyed, you can even see, from the bus, CC and the baby waiting outside the video store back in Balmain so we can go have a sunset gelato in the park.

Living on the water means that, nights, we can take walks on the quay while the stars hang low and bright over a city of twinkly lights. There is one star in particular, lower and brighter than the others, straight ahead, and at the tip of a pointing finger.

Living on the water means that, afternoons, we can stroll through the mishmash of Birchgrove waterfront architecture to the wharf, and take the ferry downtown. This afternoon, we picnicked with fish and chips on the lawn outside the MCA, while the gulls closed in on us. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I have no love for seagulls, these Dr. Evil birds with mean, beady eyes. I called “Kla!” at them while gesturing madly with a plastic fork, but they are hardened criminals, shrugging down low to swoop in and steal a potato scallop. CC says their brash nature is because they live on the open sea and have to deal with whales.

No Internet connection. I write a week’s worth of postcards.



Monday. The new house is on the quay. Stuff is still in boxes, but the sparkles on the Parramatta River come in through the windows, the white boats on the water bob in through the windows, and through the windows the sun fills the room.



Tuesday. I went out for the paper and I came back with forty-eight dollars’ worth of magazines. I hardly ever read Vogue, and I never read British Vogue, but I’m on holidays, so okay. There is a photo shoot in British Vogue to take your breath away. It is India, it is dusk, it is the hot sun, it is curving staircases and long dresses and colors like yearning, colors of the secret life in a girl’s secret heart.



Wednesday. There is a street named Darling, and we took it west to Rozelle, to The Barn, to great wood tables and mismatched chairs, to bacon sandwiches and bean soup, to fancy chocolate and honey yoghurt.

We were heading home and CC said, “If the baby falls asleep, we can go have iced coffees or something.” The baby lay down in her pram and co-operated, so then we went east on Darling, past the garden with the porcelain menagerie display; past the carpet of pink petals; past the lawn bowls and the old men with their bowling ball bags lined up by the fence; past the London Hotel and the two white pups on the wireworked terrace; down two hills, which meant later there would be up two hills; we went east straight toward the wharf, toward the Harbour Bridge curving beyond the orange trees.

At Thornton Park, the ferries came a-calling, Alexander and Scarborough and Charlotte, handsome in green and gold, and the baby smiled into the wind.



Thursday. I dream about ex-boyfriends and non-boyfriends, about walking down a path with lanterned lights, about Chinese students involved in an underground computer-smuggling outfit, about trying to find my way through a dank concrete building, about a bicycle ride in the dero-beauty of the Lower East Side. I wake up confused and tired, still.



Friday. The seagulls above Cockatoo Island circle like questions, like bits of white laundry on a spiral laundry line, like white confetti at a white wedding.

Once my friend Gab showed me a picture he took at a wedding. The image is black and white, and it is confetti all over, blurry and falling, and through the specks of celebration you see two grins, and a twinkle in the eye. And maybe I am remembering the photograph inaccurately, but certainly that is how it makes you feel.



Saturday. We turned right at the factory straight out of Chris Ware. There were smokestacks, even, but no smoke, because of Saturday.

Across the Anzac Bridge, the growers’ market in Pyrmont, the air smelling of hot coffees, of Saturday sausages and bacon on the grill. From white-topped stall to white-topped stall, there were samples of Christmas cake; of taro root; of pecorino; of salted butter yellow and thick and tasting of lamb.

When we left we had smoked trout in our canvas totes, and a fruit loaf fat with figs. A small container of fresh goat’s curd. A jar of raspberry jam, and strawberries smelling red, smelling sugar. We would have had a raisin snail and an apricot-almond tart, too, had we not eaten them, with hot coffees, on the lawn.

At home, I read in the Saturday sun while the water sparkled in the bay like Saturday.

Later, I was reading on the red sofa, and CC was reading on the carpet, and we are lucky to have each other. And she looked over at me and said, “Hello, sleepy.” “I’m not sleepy,” I said, and it is the last thing I remember, and then it was three hours later and I was stretching long and good and waking up, like Saturday.



Sunday. We danced to Otis Redding, me and the baby, and we danced to Django Reinhart. We danced to Bob Dylan, to his Queen of Spades, to her chambermaid. I sang her a song, a soft one, I rhymed “afternoon” with “bubbadoon,” she rolled over and she went to sleep. Me, I rolled upstairs to a slice of chocolate tart and a strong coffee in the sun. It was very warm on my neck. On page one-sixty-three I left a chocolate smudge and on page one-sixty-nine I cried.

When CC and Matthew got home from the largest IKEA in the southern hemisphere, CC made us French toasts. “That was tasty,” I said. “So it’s just bread and eggs?”

“And milk,” she said.

“Oh.”

“And cinnamon sugar.”

“Mm.”

“And fried in bacon grease.”

“Ahh.”

Wednesday. I sleep in cars. I was awake when we pulled out of Redfern, and the next thing I knew, I was waking with a crick in my neck as we barrelled down the Hume Highway heading south.

In Yass, we stopped for burgers “with the lot.” In Yass, “the lot” is bacon, a fried egg, lettuce, tomatoes, and beets. Summer never tasted so good.

We raced along, after, while flocks of sheep lay in the shade under the trees.

“I just want to stop the car, dash into the field, grab a lamb, and run, with it tucked under my arm,” I said.

“You’d be giggling so hard,” CC said.

And then I saw myself: doubled over in the field, a bemused lamb in the crook of my arm, my getaway foiled by mad giggling. The sight made me giggle, hee-hee-hee.



We pulled into Young, cherry capital of Australia, in the mid-afternoon. At the Cherry Blossom Motel, there was a cup of instant coffee and a chocolate biscuit while the wall-mounted television ran an ad for six CDs containing the greatest love songs of all time. We were very tempted to call now for this special offer.

Young at night is quiet. Slowing down and peering into Golden Crown restaurant, we turned the corner instead and headed for the Young Services Club. “Maybe there’ll be a roast dinner,” CC said, and there was. Next to the bar and the pokey machines, traditional Services Club–style, the chalkboard read “Roast Lamb.” The help-yourself vegetable selection included a deep bowl filled with round beets. “I want to tuck that bowl of beets under my arm and run,” I said.

“You’d have to decide which to carry first, the lamb or the beets,” CC said.



Thursday. We loaded up our baskets with pickles and jams at JD’s Jam Factory, then aimed for breakfast in the tea room. I tried to order mince on toast with cherry jam, but the waitress said it was no longer on the menu. I settled for sticky date pudding with cream, what better way than pure sugar to get going first thing in the morning.

At Chinaman’s Dam in the Chinese Tribute Gardens, the yellow birds and the pink birds talked to each other in the gum trees.

Back in the car and on the way to Tumut, I made up a song to sing the baby to sleep: You are the baby / and you have nice pants. / Those sure are nice pants, / for pants.

There was a picnic lunch under the shade of a willow by the Tumut River—hams, and tomatoes, and zucchini and cauliflower pickles, and sweet, deep red Rons cold from the Esky.

I threw my shoes on the grass and stepped on flat rocks in the river water, icy cold from the mountains. When I got out, my dark footprints on the hot granite-slab bench disappeared as soon as they were imprinted.



Past Talbingo and the inviting blue of the Blowering Reservoir, everything green and brown and light gold and open and flashing past beyond our windows up and AC on.

Along the Snowy Mountains Highway, an emu made her way through the high grass with a line of baby emus behind her, black and fluffy. Still no kangaroos.

We drove into The Rock in the late afternoon.

On John Street, Matthew reached under the first blue flowerpot for the key and we moved into Nan’s retirement cottage. Inside, old-people smell and old-people things: lace curtains, a rosary on the side table, a red candy dish filled half-way with Licorice Allsorts, a La-Z-Boy with knitted armrest covers, a teddy bear on the television set. The teddy bear still had its barcode tag attached to its ear.



At the ranch, dinner was like Christmas come again. And then we stepped outside to walk home, and, one foot out the door, we had to stop, because stepping outside into the darkness was like stepping into the sky, it was unspeakably amazing. Everywhere stars and stars and stars, and the Milky Way like magic spreading out from a wizard’s hand. We walked home with our faces turned upward.

Every day I am a little browner.



Friday. I woke to the smell of sausages in the pan.

After a massive fry-up breakfast at the faux bois laminate kitchen table, I was about to head out for a walk when I spotted the next-door neighbor granny coming up the path.

“Hello,” she said, “How’re you going?”

“Good,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m well,” she said, “And yourself?”

“Um.” I said.

I extricated myself with a smile, and headed down the street. On Nicholas, twelve silky black cows grazed in a field. I watched one of them while she watched me. She stuck her head under the wire fence and munched at the wild oats and purple Patterson’s Curse. It was late morning. The road disappeared into shimmering. I could feel the heat on my shoulders.

Matthew took us for a drive around The Rock after. Far off in the fields, young eucalyptus trees like little giant heads of broccoli evenly spaced. On Cullingullie Road, sheep and lambs hung out on the right while cows and calves in all shades of chocolate grazed on the left. Grand shiny silos glinted in the sun, waiting for the grain trucks.

There was time for ice creams before lunch.



At the ranch, we made chicken sandwiches with leftovers straight from the fridge.

The afternoon was the kind of hot where you break into a light sweat doing nothing. Family talk was a lullaby of a different family in a different accent. I went indoors for a sit-down in the air-conditioning, and woke up an hour later sprawled out on the sofa.



We sat under the gorgeous oak in the backyard while the sun set, slowly. We shooed flies left and right. Rob hung mosquito coils on the tree branches. The smoke curled upward in wisps. Someone turned on the string of colored bulbs, green, blue, yellow, red against a watercolor sky.

There was a kid with a serious face and a large bag of marbles. He climbed the oak, blond hair against the dark branches, grinning from the leaves.

There was a boy who made sushi and who rides his nan’s Gopher (“The whole town laughs at him but he doesn’t care,” Matthew said). This boy might move to Melbourne to become a chef.

There was a guy with twinkly eyes and meaty hands who took serious children seriously.

There was a woman in a purple caftan and big silver jewelry who rolled her own cigarettes and made gin and tonics for the ladies.

There was Nan, eighty-nine years old and wearing her good pants, who told of moving to The Rock in 1939, borrowing the hundred-dollar down payment on the house from the baker. She told about smoking two packs a day, about taking in boarders during wartime. She was wrinkles and bright eyes.

The air was the Best of Dusty Springfield, and meat on the grill.

“This is a great song,” I said, when “Little by Little” came on.

“That’s what you said about the song that just finished,” CC said.

“ ’Cause that was a great song, too,” I said.

“You’re in the right place,” Hughie said. “This is Dusty universe.”

Greg stepped out from the shed in an apron striped blue and white, and announced dinner served. New Year’s Eve tasted of three kinds of green salads. Three kinds of coleslaw. A tomato salad. Grilled eggplant. Sausages, lamb, chicken. Soft white bread. Rosé in a plastic goblet. Orange cordial.



Walking home in that singular sort of country quiet, the baby farted a comic fart into the last night of the year.

Home, I pulled a white plastic garden chair to the middle of the lawn to watch the stars. I tucked one leg under the other. I warmed my hands on a cup of coffee. The sky was wide, and low. The stars seemed suspended, like sparkles in an enormous bowl of champagne jelly. It seemed eminently possible we are all suspended, ourselves, from the sky by gossamer-thin threads. Barely noticeably, we bob.

There was a shooting star, and then another. A train honked in the night air, and then I heard it going by. I turned around to catch it racing through the trees, first the big headlight, then blackness and only the click-clack on the tracks, and then the smaller light on the caboose.



Saturday. The first day of the new year was quiet.

The baby asleep, CC and I sat in the kitchen over strong tea and cherries. Outside, the wind chimes tinkled listlessly in the thick air.

“I want a salad—” I said. (I’d had as much red meat in the last couple of days as I usually do in maybe three weeks.)

“With goat cheese?” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “But, just, a green salad. And then some pie.”

“A meat pie?”

“Fruit. With cream.”

“I want a meat pie,” she said. “Steak and mushroom, and chips and a salad.”

“Mmm.”

“And then a lemon meringue pie. And an egg cream.”

“Chocolate?” I said.

“What other flavor is there?”

We spat out cherry pits. Then:

“If only we had a bunch of DVDs and some banana splits.”

I wished we could taste our words. I settled for a slice of toast with apricot jam. Burying the butter knife into the jam jar, I lifted out fat pieces of sweet fruit.



When the sun began to abate, I took a walk along the train tracks. Bare legs through the scratchy weeds bring back me at seven years old, making a shortcut through the overgrown grass behind the Methodist Girls’ School in Mount Sophia. There were dogs—wild dogs?, I don’t remember; fear and memory confuse the details. I remember running, and I remember later showing my mother the scratches on my legs—thin, uneven scrapes lightly bleeding. It has always been blurry in my mind if the wounds came from thorns or dogs’ teeth.

By a wire fence, a cow black as night saw me approach, then turned and walked away. She kept her calf close to her side.

The wind in the eucalyptus sounded like rain while ants, big and quick and black like temper, ran about on the cracked earth.

Black-headed top-knot pigeons like Chinese courtesans perched on telephone lines.



Later, Matthew strapped on the baby in the Baby Bjorn and we all headed out again. When we hit the railroad tracks, CC started singing that Chordettes tune, “Lollipop,” and then acted out that bit from “Stand By Me” where the boys are walking on the tracks and the train’s coming. Like value for money, she did the train sound, too: “Pohhh!! Pohhhh!!!” Arms out to either side of me, I balanced on one of the rails.



At the showground-slash-golf-course, like great white hunters, like great white hunters in Campers and a Marc Jacobs tote and a summer dress from H&M Paris, we went looking for kangaroos in a Hayao Miyazaki forest.

Really, it was Matthew looking for kangaroos. CC and I followed behind him chatting and laughing while he kept turning around telling us to be quiet.

Then CC pointed to beyond the trees to the left, and said, “Well, I see a horse.”

We peered.

“Could be two kangaroos in a horse suit,” I said.

“Okay, we’ve seen ’em,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

The baby was asleep under a rainbow hat. We walked to the ranch while the galah birds with their bright pink undersides picked at grain on the side of the road.

We’re going on a drive, no return till Sunday, now there's a big drive. There might be a whole lotta country, a whole lotta cherries, and maybe even a drive through a donut drive-through, wahey!

In Marrickville: a slap-up lunch at a Vietnamese eatery, a bag of grapes, a red stripey dress flirting with the wind, and candy-colored sodas for all. I smell of the sun.

I like breakfasts in general, but breakfasts in Sydney are somethin special. Raspberry yoghurt, banana yoghurt, boysenberry yoghurt, blueberry yoghurt. We are not talking additives and flavorings, we are talking real, beauteous, smushy fruit bleeding into the creamy white. Holidays taste like full-cream dairy.

After the early morning rain, a sunny summer day means walks and treats. We packed up the baby and headed out. There was gelato in a cone while strolling under the green leaves of Bourke Street. The houses, higgledy-piggledy, sunned in the sun.

Christmas morning the smell of coffee crept upstairs and tapped me on the shoulder. The baby smiled, so I kissed her.

The day after Christmas was quiet and lazy, the comfortable hollow sound of roller blinds knocking against the windowframe in the breeze. Three naps later, I woke for snacks of buttery panettone and a pot of Stockholm Blend.

Later, Christmas leftovers at Matthew’s parents meant a happy reunion with everything tasty from the day before, plus a bonus pavlova—three tiers of meringue, thick, freshly whipped cream, and raspberries, and the whole sloppy regal gorgeous thing dripping top to bottom red and pink with rose syrup.

In the midafternoon, a darkening sky and thunder rumbling about in the clouds. An electric streak across the sky like the Eighties. From the doorway, the coolness and the smell of wet. The rain comes, shyly. After, raindrops hang from the laundry line.

Even after the sundae breakfast, even after the wondrousness of early morning ice cream and strawberries and a date biscuit crumbled up and chocolate shavings, it was a grey day for leaving. It rained on our heads, and there were no horses down the street where sometimes there are horses.

I am bone tired, people. This is a broken body. In the last two days there has been walking and walking and walking to take in all the city I can before I leave, and then clearing and packing and staying up too late and waking up too early. But it’s all part of the pre-trip prep insanity, because when your flight is, I dunno, twenty-something hours long, there is plenty of time to sleep during the journey.

It’s all packed—the Vegemite and the Tim Tams and the two tins of Tasmanian honey, the Bonds T-shirts and the Elle MacPherson underwear and the Veronika Maine dress. My god, that dress. I will wear that dress and I will blind you with my grace. It’s all packed, and tomorrow there will be a plane and I will be on it.

I woke up whining this morning about nothing and everything: “It’s not fair I don’t wanna go I hate it it’s not fair I just it’s not fair I don’t wanna” and then CC said, “Coffee? And walnut toast? With butter?” and then it was better.

Then it got even better because I got to log on to Gab’s radio show direct from Paris, and have Maud and Clem and Gab do mad shout-outs and song dedications across time and space. Incroyable. It was the kind of better where you hear Maud and the boys go “Astelllaaaa” just before the Beach Boys kick in with “Surfin’ USA,” and you are sitting there with a big grin and you forget that maybe just half an hour ago you were curled up in bed refusing to face the world.

The day was calling, so CC and I caught the bus to Circular Quay, where the ferry to Manly (“Seven miles from Sydney and a thousand miles from care”) was waiting for us. Across the Sydney Harbour there were fish and calamari rings and chips and a blue Slurpee for lunch at Manly Beach. There were also: a seagull missing a foot, a girl wearing a short denim skirt that said “Diva” across the ass, and a little old Indian couple enjoying ice creams on their promenade.

We walked to Shelly Beach, the Tasman Sea sparkling on our left. We sat on a bench dedicated to “Big John” and we talked and we laughed and we looked at the water. Sometimes you laugh a laugh, but sometimes you laugh so hard you laugh nothing. Matthew calls this “laughing so dogs can hear.” Sometimes, also, you laugh till you hurt so much you can’t laugh anymore, but then you are still laughing, and it still hurts. At this point you must stop doing whatever it is you are doing, because your knees won’t hold you up anymore, and if you are holding something in your hand, you’d better put it down quick. Sometimes you can’t even laugh, you can only snort, and sometimes when you throw your head back and snort that entire trajectory, you might almost fall over.

At Shelly Beach Park, we climbed on rocks and roots to the top of the lookout point, where the big blue was big and blue, and the clouds were like drawings of clouds, and there was a breeze, and there was quiet.

Later we walked along the Esplanade to Oceanworld, where we poked around the gift shop for fish-related gifts. Because we are big spenders, we left with one pencil with a plastic orange octopus curled around the eraser end.

Sometimes you know, you just know, that the ice cream in the display case is gonna be so good, so you order it up, a scoop of strawberry in a cone, please, and then you walk along the Woolloomooloo pier with it, and all is smiles and bliss.

Southward, past the airport and its planes overhead, past the deserted beach at Brighton-le-Sands, the blooms of the Illawarra flame trees sparks of red along the road, we drove under greying skies to Fitzroy Falls, where the rainforest valley stretched out below and in front of us all lush and green. In the park, the platypuses were asleep or hiding. (Fact: They are shy.) (Fact: Wombats poo square poos.) (Fact: The Morton National Park is full of facts.) Around us, invisible lyrebirds clicked like Japanese wood spirits.

When you go for a drive on a cool winter day, a good thing to do is to stop for a minted lamb burger with fruit chutney and a package of thick, hot chips, so that is what we did, while the bell birds sang in the trees.

On the way home, low and heavy with water, the clouds seemed to weigh down on my eyelids. I fell asleep to the raindrops on fogged-up windows and the rolling wheels. When I woke, home was just minutes away.

They call this winter, these funny Sydneysiders. Saturday afternoon my sister and I took a walk up Bourke, looking in on the French café on the corner with its baskets of croissants and its little lemon and chocolate tarts in the window, and passing by the Italian place with their menu of homemade pastas satisfyingly scrawled on the chalkboard up front, and breezing past Café Zoe, where just days before we’d had a taste sensation breakfast of ricotta pancakes and sweet berries, and an asparagus-lemon-parmesan omelette, and thick slices of salty, meaty bacon—

Wait. Tangent. The asparagus story is, once Jeff had me over to dinner, and he’d cooked a cheddar-and-tomato pie and a lemon cake, and he’d gotten both recipes from Real Simple magazine, and when I marveled at how tasty everything was, he said: “Thanks, it was real simple.” No, but the asparagus story is, besides the cheddar-and-tomato pie and the lemon cake, he’d also steamed some asparagus for vegetable purposes, and I said, “Oh, but I love asparagus,” and finished the sentence in my head, because the sentence finishes with “and also I love how it makes your pee smell,” and I thought maybe that is the sort of end of sentence one keeps in one’s head when one is in company other than, for example, one’s sister. But then Jeff said, “Me too, and I love how it makes your pee smell.” So of course I said, “Me too,” and he said, “It’s like, it smells like a healthy thing happened in your body,” and I said, “Yes, that is true,” because it was, because that is exactly what it smells like.

But that is a different meal and a different day. Saturday afternoon, in this so-called winter, under clear blue skies and smiling sun warm on my arms and my neck, my sister and I walked up Bourke, tasty treats all along the way, and scoffed at all of them, because we had our eye on the prize, where the prize was fish and chips at Bondi Beach.

(We eventually cracked, but it was the tiniest of cracks, because when we passed the Greek pastry shop, we had to go in, and then it was only for one jam-sandwich biscuit for her, and one coconut macaroon for me, and my coconut macaroon, half-dipped in chocolate, was only the tiniest of sixty-seven-cent, mouth-sized treats.)

On Oxford, we missed the bus, then waited for the next one, then rode to Bondi, the spirit of the Beach Boys growing stronger the closer we got to the coast. Then, truly, at Bondi, there was fish to be had, and chips, and potato cakes, all of it fried up on order, then doused in vinegar and rained on with salt, then wrapped up in large sheets of paper held closed with a rubberband crisply snapped. The fat white package was warm with promises.



We sat in the shade and watched the sea in Bondi Bay and wolfed. The seagulls collected and stood in front of us, facing away but watching us the whole time out of the corners of their beady little eyes. Where kookaburras are lovely and furry and squat, and sing while perched on a power line, seagulls look mean, like they would club you in a dark alley if they thought you had a cold, greasy chip hidden in your pocket.

While we ate:

1. A surfer watched the surf, his board under his arm.
2. A man adjusted his Speedo in the carpark. It was the kind of small where he was trying to make it cover his bum.
3. A girl with pants rolled up and stripey socks walked down to the sand.
4. A black dog came racing, from some distance and with some speed, to a passing mutt, to sniff its bottom.
5. Little kids chased littler seagulls, runningrunningrunning.

When we could eat no more, CC caused a feeding frenzy hurling the leftover chips to the gulls. She was possessed, her eyes wide, her throwing arm unstoppable. I kneeled on the bench in front of her to take an action shot with my camera and she flung a chip over my head. The gulls shrieked behind me. Later, after she’d calmed down, she said: “I was drunk with power.”

We walked south along the coast to Tamarama Beach. Sometimes we sang “Best of My Love.” Sometimes we sang “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody.” Sometimes we sang “Tom, Dick or Harry.” We didn’t know all the words, so sometimes there was humming, and sometimes the lyrics were “something-something-something.” Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we didn’t say anything. Sometimes we laughed. Mostly we laughed. Sometimes we laughed so hard we had to hold on to a railing. When there was no railing, sometimes we might lean against a rock.

A red boat bobbed on the water. Surfers in their black wetsuits bobbed on the water. The horizon was the horizon. The sun was setting.

Walking further south, we reached Bronte Beach. I took off my shoes to walk on the soft sand. We taunted the waves, and I let the cool water wash up on my feet. I stepped on smooth, mossy stone in a clear rock pool. The moon was a smile in the pale blue.

At the bus stop, the wrong bus was idling. The driver said the right bus home wouldn’t be long. And then, it wasn’t.

In the rainy chill on Castlereagh Street, I boarded the 303 bus headed for Sans Souci.

We drove west, past the furniture superstores and the car dealerships, past Parramatta and Katoomba and Leura, to where there were mountains and sky and big space all around, the land dotted with horses and cows and lovely sheep. Bathurst, gorgeous with its old mining-town buildings. Orange, where there was a chicken kebab with tabouleh and sweet chilli sauce for lunch. Mount Canobolas, rain and snow and hail all at once, and black tree silhouettes blurry through the air white with mist. Sofala, all its houses little and wooden, some leaning, one with a sheep keeping guard on the porch. Just past sunset we checked into Room 19 at the Mudgee Motor Inn. Outside our window, a brown horse munched at a grassy dinner.



Sunday morning brought the sun, and a cinnamon doughnut covered with pink icing and sprinkles. We drove through the vineyards, rows and rows of bare, gnarled branches, and the local radio deejay played “Venus.” At the Windamere Dam, a hot tandoori lamb pie and a raspberry cream tart. At the Jenolan Caves, gum trees with stripped bark and the Blue Lake of turquoise sparkle mystery blue.

On the way home, dude in a neighbor car picked his nose through darkened windows not dark enough, then saw me see him.