things I fail to save

I haven’t been able to write. I thought it was me and my mind and my migraines, but it turns out I might need new reading glasses.

Banal normality is what happens to us most of the time. I’m worried about tumours and hormone imbalance and what is missing is an appointment at the optometrist. I am plodding towards my destiny of old age, decrepitude and death in the usual manner. Nothing to read about. Cancel the blog post. Turns out I’m not the centre of all things after all, just a participant in that rough-smooth movement of creation through time.

Earlier, before I started writing again on here, I had attempted a few paragraphs describing my grandmother’s jewellery. My Aunty Beryl passed away a year ago, leaving some of the jewellery with my mother. Now it sits here on my desk, in my line of sight, goddammit, just sort of existing and daring me to open up display boxes and again attempt a written representation of Edwardian jeweller’s art. Or mid-century mass-produced bling that had sat so long on the top shelf of my grandparent’s lowboy before Aunty Beryl, in her mid-eighties, finally quit the house in a body bag.

I can’t think where else I can put the old lady’s jewellery, so it sits in my line of sight, a punishment for attempting a description in an unsaved file that my ever-loving husband, even he, described as ‘not your best work’.

Yes, it’s been a while since I have wanted to write, or had the clarity of mind to do so.

I have a friend. A visual artist. Over a lunch of sweetened kale leaves she says, “When you can’t produce art, it indicates that you are not in the best place yourself,” and I think about those hopeless little paragraphs that failed to save. That I failed to save. As if I knew. I can’t remember what I wrote.

It’s been a year since mum has come to live with us.
And writing the above line and I stop dead. I want to abandon my computer and this whole idea of writing an autoethnography.
Why the need to stop?
She guts me, even now.
She’s here.
A Barb we never knew,
But a Barb we all prefer.
Soft, pliable. Decent.
But she hollows me out.
Dreams and achievements on hold. Like I’ve seen and heard nothing. I have never lived my life. I just re-enter hers at the point she needs me and now I am again part of her story.

“She lives a really lovely life now,” I tell people, thinking of the daily outings, the social input. Clean, dry, warm. Sleeping, eating. All of these I attend to so she does not suffer the lack. But I feel split open and eviscerated, stretched like a canvas on a frame. In Chinese, the word for cross, the one Jesus is sacrificed on, is shi zi jia. A cross-shaped frame. We say cross, but we forget we speak of not just iconography but a wooden device to keep people pinned back and held up. Carpentry is involved. And a carpenter, stretched out on a frame in the shape of a cross.

She has been sitting on the lounge for two hours now, ever since the Anglicare worker brought her back from a failed trip to Norman Lindsay’s Gallery. They had got there and it was too dusty to leave the car. The bureau had been expecting 90kph winds, drought’s dusty sands lifted up from the inland and carried over the mountains to the city basin. And now, half way down the mountain it has met a small fire on Bell’s Line of Road, fanning it out of control and I am at home with mum, listening to the updates on local radio and praying for strength, wisdom and wiles for the Rural Fire Service.

For two hours she has been napping. Sitting upright, mouth gaping like Aunty Beryl the day dad found her dead on the couch in the Enfield house. But not dead is my mum, just exhausted from the last-minute change and, instead, a visit to the Museum of Fire in Penrith.

She wakens and I ask her if she wants cake. She says no and I wonder what that means, make a considered guess and cut some just for myself. Armenian Nutmeg cake from the Australian Women’s Weekly Sweet Old-fashioned Favourites cookbook. The cake is not good. Overcooked 5 minutes. My friend, my visual artist friend, suggests that our palates have changed since AWW Armenian nutmeg cake was invented and perhaps it seemed more of a gastronomic sensation in the seventies. I say next time I will use twice as much nutmeg and greek yoghurt instead of milk, but suspect going straight for a more recent Persian Love Cake recipe would be wiser.

One of the jewellery cases is melamine. A hinged, cream-coloured heart, embossed with a bow. It sits on three clawed feet. It is ornate and there is grubbiness in each crevice. Temporarily forgetting what is inside, I place my fingers on the early plastic container. I remember. Inside will be an ornate Edwardian gold ring. What is the stone? My mind says white opal. I open the box and the opal is much bigger than I remember. It is surrounded by little leaves worked in gold. The ring seems just as grubby as the box. I remember I had searched ‘Saunders Ltd’, the name embossed in gold on the satin lining, and discovered the jewellers is still in Sydney. I had been thinking of taking the whole thing in to the store to see what they would say. That’s what I had been thinking. Before I lost the paragraphs. I snap the melamine lid against the base and put the box back on the middle shelf in front of me. I push my reading glasses up on my nose, then drag them back down again when I discover I cannot see.

Waiting well

Today my mum was picked up by the Anglicare bus for a day at their neighbourhood centre for the first time ever. In the bus, she immediately brightened up and started chatting with the woman in the seat beside her. The centre runs a half-day of activities interspersed with morning tea and lunch. And as I waved goodbye to basically just the busdriver and ran into the house to collect my stuff and then back down to my car, and then as I found a rockstar car park and jauntily walked to the cafe, I thought “How great is this country – this sharing of resources?” I felt like thanking the whole community. Because even though mum isn’t sure about who owns this house and sometimes the execution of a half-twirl causes her to forget what she is doing, her life is a still series of lived moments in the company of people who are familiar. So thanks, everyone.

So I’ve had time and headspace to write. And today’s lunch has been cold meat straight from the package and a two-day-old buckwheat pancake with butter and jam – just like old times!

#instalunch

 

At the cafe, previous to starting this post and eating the above appalling lunch, I drink coffee and read the Sydney Morning Herald. Half way through my second flat white, I arrive at the letters page and read this missive from Brendan Jones in Annandale:

Electric cars’ dream drive

Alan Finkel dispelled many of the myths regarding electric cars but there’s one vital thing he omitted (“Step off the gas and turn on the lights: electric is the way”, February 10-11). Electric cars are so pleasant and beautiful to drive that once you’ve succumbed to their responsiveness, smoothness and simplicity, you’ll never want to drive a petrol car ever again.

Brendan Jones, Annandale

And I thought: How pleasant and beautiful are the words ‘pleasant and beautiful’. I’m overlooking the gendered phraseology of ‘responsiveness, smoothness and simplicity’, Brendan, because the truth is, I also long for a car that is obedient, beautiful and does not take much effort to live with; one that is powered by the same sun that has been causing even natives to die off around me this summer.

At church the other week we were reminded that one of our roles as saints is to ‘wait a little longer’. It’s unwise to distill an entire talk into a gory proof verse that probably shouldn’t be read out of context (and, even in context, is quite destabilizing), but here you go:

¹¹ Each of them was given a long white robe and they were told to rest for a little longer, until the full number was reached of both their fellow servants and their brothers who were going to be killed just as they had been.

Revelation chapter 6, verse 11

And the question posed that evening was: How do we rest/wait well?

I am in awe of the sun for its destructive power, and yet I want to see it tamed and harvested.  I want to see its withering power transformed into responsiveness, smoothness and simplicity. Can you blame me? I am the First Adam and the First Eve in an eon of relived denial. I was made for a garden and now I’ll never get back there, although the Good Book assures me that the city which awaits will be even better.

So our life as believers is to involve waiting well. And I am thinking that waiting well involves embracing, as much as we can, the good future of the world. There is a great deal of brokenness and heartache, which anyone alive can immediately confirm. But when I now read about South Australia maybe making electric vehicles in its old car factories, a little tear comes to my eye. Because I want the future to be good. As good as we can make it. I want us to wait well. I even bought a packet of those little metal straws with which to drink my iced latte, although I suspect a teaspoon and the lip of the glass would have sufficed. Also they taste a bit like a metal tube. Contact me for any product endorsements.

People sometimes ask our new four-adult family ‘Do you live with them or do they live with you?’ and we reply ‘We all live together’. The question makes me uncomfortable. Read one way, it implies power is contingent on property ownership. Read another way, power is presented as being inversely proportional to one’s need for care. In the city to come, we all live together. And this spiritual urbanisation is represented as an inevitability. Perhaps that is why Jesus suggests we reserve some real estate while we still can. This is Sydney, after all.

 

 

How I used therapeutic beading to overcome impostor syndrome for good.*

I don’t like to brag, but today while shopping in my mountain village, I had two people randomly compliment me on my earrings. I had only made them the day before.

I’m no stranger to beading my own earrings, but this is the first time I had tried such a complex pattern. My friend Toni is an art therapist and she uses her beads in her work. A few times she has invited me over to hers to make jewellery together. I love it!

Toni and I both worked on the same design, based on a pair Toni already owned. It took four solid hours.**

But being more adventurous than I, Toni sent her work through several morphologies. After creating the full pattern, she squeezed it all into the palm of her hand until it was a tangled mess and checked to see if it looked any more interesting in that condition. Then she pulled it all back into shape and repositioned it until it was sitting on two planes rather than one. Finally, she squashed it flat again, like the earrings in the photograph.

Toni’s experiments were bold and courageous and I was jealous of her disregard for consequences.

How I would like my research proposal to appear.

In the end, we both decided that our earrings would look better if we removed the bead we started with. If you look at the pic you can see that the earring has one focal point: the rectangular green bead. The bead I discarded was a darker green, egg-shaped thing and it would have sat just underneath the hook. But…two focal points was uncomfortable for the eye and disturbing to the mind. And there is more than enough to discomfort and disturb in this life already. The extra bead had to go.

 

The issue of the unwanted bead reminded me of my writing process. After I have written a piece, I often decide that the first sentence is unnecessary and delete it. Not out of any lack of respect for the sentence. In fact, I am grateful. The first sentence is the tap that I turn to get the story flowing, but only rarely does it remain part of the composition at the end of the day. Yet without it, the rest of the page would never have spurted (or dribbled) forth.

Which leads me to today’s personal issue: I am having trouble finishing my research proposal. All the elements are there, but I am struggling to make myself sound smart and focussed and…

I have flirted with various ways of of tricking myself into finishing. I could pretend that the research proposal belongs to somebody else and I have been paid to write it on their behalf. I could play-act that I am an experienced academic, certain of my positions and expected outcomes, clear on my procedure.

How my research proposal actually appears.

The first earrings I ever made were three little beads on a straight metal shaft twisted into a small circle at the end and attached to a hook. They weren’t much, but they were everything in my developing world of jewellery making. I had taken discrete elements and fashioned them into something enjoyable, beautiful, wearable. The same friend, Toni was beside me on that day, too, cheering me on and being impressed by my fledgling efforts.

 

If I were to sit down tomorrow and work on my next piece of jewellery, maybe it would be as complex as the piece above, but I hope it wouldn’t be as wobbly. Or maybe it would be even more complex and just as wobbly. I could practice the skills I already have, bedding down my technique, or I could challenge myself with something newer, crazier. I could do whatever I want. And I can accept the stage I am at. The newer, crazier, wobblier stage.

It occurs to me that every graduate research proposal is written about that which the student knows something but not everything and each proposal contains the seed and promise of something new. A kernel of hope.

My research proposal may be as freshly developed and wobbly as my new earrings. But it will contain all the colour, delight and promise of a deftly crafted work to come.

*#jokes

**Including gossip.

 

 

In Absentia

This coming week is Graduation Week for my Arts degree. I’m not going to the ceremony. Not out of any hard feelings, I’ve just decided to save up all those passage rites and go for The Biggie at the end of my Masters in Education.

I didn’t do a full Arts degree, but I did most of one. I made up the extra units from a Masters in Creative Writing from Macquarie University. As a result, my Bachelors degree felt a little piecemeal, like I was just getting the hang of it when it had to end. Sad, really.

At my first high school, a co-educational local number, we had one teacher who would dress in his academic gown at the end of the year assembly. Just one. A languages teacher. In year seven he was my teacher for French, German and Latin. Not much French or German. And really not much Latin, either. But I do remember learning to say I feel like a Tooheys or two:

In animae habaeo en Tooheys uel duo.

If I am remembering it incorrectly, perhaps the more serious Latin scholars among my readers can assist? And while you are at it, let me know how to say Beer O’clock in Latin. That would be really useful down at the Royal. Thanks.

I feel like a Tooheys or two was the jingle for a beer ad saturating the televisual airwaves of our 13-year-old lives.

I can remember our language teacher announcing to us that the beauty of this most modern of Latin phrases was that it scanned so well it could be sung to the music of the beer jingle. And so, after a few runs through to get the pronunciation correct, that’s what we did as a class. We sang:

In animae habeo, in animae habeo, in animae habeo en Tooheys uel duo. 

Try it yourself. I’ve chosen a 1980 cricketing version of the iconic beer ad, which comes from about the time I was in year 7. It’s all historically legit:

When I look at advertising like that I wonder how I survived the levels of masculinity portrayed in media at the time. There’s even a deliberate crotch shot, for those who don’t immediately get the point of what this beer/cricket combo is mostly about. Hint: it is not about the beer.

How outrageous to teach a bunch of adolescents a beer jingle. But…here’s the educational punchline…omg I remember it even now, 35 years on! That language teacher was an educational genius! He certainly knew how to use a repertoire of effective teaching strategies to implement well-designed teaching programs and lessons (thankyou, Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards, NSW).

Now that they have invented the internet, I can tell you beyond any shadow of a doubt that a quick, googly back-translation of the beery Latin phrase he taught is:

“Or two of them, that I have added to Toohey”

I’m pleased with that. It sounds like Yoda said it. Meaning-wise it is close enough, and really quite ancient language-sounding, at least to the likes of me, with my six lessons of local highschool Year 7 Latin.

And as I remember, this language teacher was the only one with enough chutzpah to turn up to our high school Speech Day in an academic gown avec its own furry stole, symbolising his success in, as I remember, several Masters programs. And when I think of my future Graduation Day, what I find myself focussing on is the question of regalia ownership. Will I rent the academic gown or will I buy? Will I buy and wear it at Speech Day, not because I have to, not from an untamed sense of ironic distance but out of deep respect and acknowledgment for the one who taught me my first Latin phrase?

By the way, I google-translated beer o’clock into Latin, and apparently it is nona Bersabee. 

I’ll make sure I use the phrase next week when I am down the local, celebrating my graduation in absentia. 

 

Now HECS census date has come and gone

That’s it now. HECS census date, March 31st, has come and gone. I am financially committed to the course units I am currently enrolled in. No turning back, no turning back without financial disincentives.

The first undergraduate study I did was in Nursing. In 1989. At the time, in other states of Australia nursing was still being taught in hospitals and it was deemed inequitable to be charging us for learning that others were being paid for. We New South Wales undergrad nurses were given a free ride as all around us physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists and ophthalmology students were filed into the beginnings of a beneficiary-pays system. I remember snickering behind their backs. In an empathetic, nursey kind of way.

For those outside Australia, HECS (the Higher Education Contribution Scheme) is a system of paying back some of the costs of your university degree through the tax system, once your income is high enough, i.e. once you are considered to be receiving a financial benefit from your studies. As it stands it is relatively fair, but change a few numbers and the system is primed and ready to disadvantage the poor, the sick, the disabled, the female. As you can imagine, it is the battleground of considerable political struggle, and you can probably already guess on which side of the line I stand. If not, let me remind you that I once wrote something for the Labor Herald.

In the early seventies, then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam shoved Australian society into a large mason jar, screwed on the lid and shook the contents. Really quite hard. The jar was opened and tipped and the contents spread along the kitchen bench of political reform. “Ta da!” said Gough, ending conscription and the death penalty and delivering everything from hospitals for Western Sydney to maternity leave for Commonwealth employees. One of the magnificent changes wrought was fee-free higher education. And the children of Australia’s less well-off were given access to a world of critical thinking and argument that has caused no end of irritation to the priviledged end of town ever since. Oh how I love my country. And Gough. (If you want to spend more time, and I’m sure you do, admiring Gough’s chutzpah you can read about his political legacy at Whitlam Institute, which is part of Western Sydney University.)

Oh how I love my country. And oh how I believe that higher education should remain within reach of people living with disadvantages, because there are more social gains to be made that only today’s batch of disadvantaged kids will be able to get educated on, fight for and win. You go, kiddos.

Maybe that is why I am retraining to be a secondary school teacher. At Western Sydney University. Where yesterday was HECS census day.

Any time before census day, you can withdraw from your unit without the cost being added to your ‘account’ with the tax department. (So that’s four weeks of free higher education for everyone, every six months! #jokes…Although…).

And that’s four weeks for you to make up your mind if you are in the right course, or have chosen units that fit with your needs. Four weeks where you can be ambivalent about your chosen career, or just those language classes you thought would be easy enough (guilty). Then, as sure as Christmas, census date arrives and you are forced to decide if you meant everything you mouthed on about during the last month or if those were just empty promises to yourself.

You have your will I/won’t I moment, and then as suddenly as it came, census date is gone and your life now has a predetermined nature to it that not even the memory of hazy summer holidays can dilute. And that’s why I’m here, right now, composing this blog post. Because nothing gives your hobbies an urgent quality like the pressure to do real, intellectual work.

 

 

 

accidental community

A couple of weeks ago I went down to the local pool to do a few laps. They were my first few laps since my belly was round with child. That child has become a certified adult. And I need to do laps again. Just like I prepared my body for childbirth and baby-rearing, I have come to an understanding with myself that I now need to prepare for the next 10 years of life. I want to move into that time with as robust health as is possible. No matter what our age, we all need to be preparing for the physical demands of our future lives. Enter a decade as healthy as we can, and we have a better chance of enjoying that decade in good health. So, laps.

I moved into my mountain village two years ago. I’d done a fair bit of house moving over the previous decade and all of it involved a process of settling in. There is a lot to learn about a new place. Public transport routes, sneaky back roads that only the locals know about, best cafe for a latte. Local information.

Depending on how far you have moved from your previous home, you may be grieving the loss of connections with your community. Perhaps you feel those connections were built up slowly, over the full period of time that you lived in your last place. Maybe you are dreading the idea of starting over, saying to yourself, “I was there six years and had all those friends and acquaintances. It will take another six years to gain back what I have lost in relationships.” I felt very similar. 

But come back with me to the pool.

At the swimming complex that day, I bump into an old friend who has accompanied her son to swim school. I finish my laps and she says, “You’ll have to come over for coffee sometime.”

There is a cafe poolside. “Let’s do it now.” I only have the change from the ten dollar note I used to enter the building. “You’ll have to lend me some money!”

We consolidate our loose change on the plastic tabletop, giggling as if we are back in Year Seven. Between us we scrape up $6.15. Not enough to cover ourdrinks. So it is back to being grown ups and she shouts me the flat white with her credit card. We sip coffee and talk while her son mucks around in the water with some of his friends. We share stories of our recent past and dreams about our future and it is so good and gloriously unplanned. It is accidental community.

But that friend is somebody who moved to this village years ago. I knew her before I got here. How do I get accidental community happening with people I don’t even know yet? Perhaps you have moved somewhere new, unpacked your boxes, filled the fridge and then finally had a chance to take a breath and consider the community living round about you. Perhaps you are asking:

“Here I am. I’m new here. How can I settle-in purposefully?”

We all know that children parallel play when they are young. They might be sitting just a metre from each other in the same room, but they choose to enjoy their own toys in their own space without collaborating with others. That is a function of their development. The temptation for adults in a new place is to do something similar. It is tempting to walk to the shops, eyes fixed on the ground, make an order at the cafe and then spend the rest of the time reading enthralling blog posts on community. Sometimes disconnection feels like the default method of moving through our world. That can be the right and healthy thing for us to do on some days when we need time out of the house but also Time Out from others. But other days are different, and we feel the longing for connection with our fellows. How can we move away from a disconnected interaction with our local environment and into a more present sense of community belonging?

After several significant life moves I have worked up a few tips:

Firstly, this settling-in time is probably not the best time to turn over a new leaf. Children regress when they are getting used to new environments and I don’t think adults are much different. Don’t lash out and join the gym if you were not a gym-goer in your previous life. You’ve got enough changes to cope with.

But take a bit of time to think through your current passions. What do you love to do? What do you spend time feeling passionate about? What floats your boat in terms of recreation or physical pursuits?

Find a local group that does those things and join it for a session or two. You know what the great thing is about joining a group? Other people are there because they like hanging out in groups, meeting new people and engaging in conversation. So more than likely, they will be happy to get to know you, a newcomer. And don’t despair if at first a group doesn’t seem right for you. When I first arrived I joined a writer’s group that met locally. They were a lovely bunch of people but the meeting time didn’t suit me so I didn’t carry on with it. There are all sorts of groups about: dancing, team sports, gymnastics, gardening and land care groups. Playgroups, preschool story-time at the library, groups that run soup kitchens, knitting groups, bridge clubs.

When I thought about what floated my boat I decided the answer was politics, religion and art. (You should have me over to dinner sometime. I am fascinating!)

I joined the local branch of my favourite political party, which meets once a month. “Oh yeah, I totally want to do that,” I hear you all say at once. I didn’t say it was compulsory! Yet if you are a politics tragic, joining a branch is where it is at. At the branch level in Australia you hear feedback from local councillors and news from state and federal representatives about issues that drive the party. And I enjoy being able to greet people near the election booths, handing out how-to-vote forms on election day. Voting is compulsory in Australia so the whole area comes out to cast their ballot. And what says ‘community’ more than Election Day? I may have lost a significant portion of my readership at this point.

Do you have spiritual inclinations? A lot of people do. Try out a few of the local places of worship. And, as I said above, don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work out on the first visit. When we were settling in, one of my friends said to me about churches, “If you want to find your Prince Charming you have to kiss a lot of frogs.” If it is like that for churches, I guess it is the same for other places of worship.

What is your hobby? I joined a local arts group that meets monthly to share written and visual artwork we are currently working on. I love it! I feel like I belong.

Get to know your local shopkeepers. Time for a song.

Not sure where the women were in that video, but alarmingly enough, kale makes an appearance. Do you know what this means? This means in the time between this song being recorded and today an entire female revolution occurred yet kale only became more popular. I think we all know which vegetable is going to survive the next global catastrophic event.

So as I was saying, get to know your shopkeepers, a lot of whom by this stage will be women. (Remarkable!) This suggestion extends to professional services. Find a local doctor, dentist, accountant and physiotherapist. For these are the people in your neighbourhood. Service providers are an easy target when settling in because they are the members of your community that can be found in predetermined places for long stretches of time. Also, they are pretty much paid to be nice to you. And there is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes people need a little encouragement. Maybe for you they need a lot of encouragement. Which brings me to my next point.

Be nice to people. Smile, take time to say “How are you?” back to the people serving you. Lift your head up and look other locals in the eye when you are walking down the street. If you vaguely recognise them, nod your head in greeting. Chances are they’ve seen you about too. If they respond with a smile, smile back, venture a “good morning”.

Greet people working in their gardens. Say hello to council workers and contractors on the street. When you walk into a shop, don’t miss the opportunity to scan around and see if there is somebody that you recognise. Smile at the parents of small children in prams. These are all people that you might meet again on another occasion in another context.

What about some other ideas?

Read the local paper, so you are keeping up with local news and events.

Attend local arts and music shows.

Attend your local farmer’s market. I only wrote that to sound pretentious. (But I still go every month.)

This morning, after a drop off at the car pool, I drove back up the hill to an early morning cafe and ordered a latte. On my way to the table a woman looked up from the book she was reading and smiled at me. I smiled back. Sometime later she leaned over and asked me about my smartwatch and was it any good for tracking exercise. Something she said in that short conversation clued me into the fact that she was a primary school teacher, and we had a good chat about teaching, she with her fifteen years of experience, me just starting out. After a while we left off talking and went back to our reading. When it was time for me to go I stood, told her it was nice to meet her and asked her name. She asked mine. We shook hands and spoke how we hoped to bump into each other again. We might never see each other again. But if we do, it will be a wonderful moment of accidental community.

It was my friend at the poolside that introduced to me the term ‘accidental community’. I am growing to appreciate both the term and the experience.

However you choose to move into your community, I hope that you embrace living locally well. And I trust that you soon come across the delight of accidental community.

 

10 gluten free foods to enjoy on Norfolk Island

I’ve been on a Pacific island for a month. Mostly eating. Well, eating right up until Christmas, suddenly realising that I had overdone it in the bodyweight department then layering in some light, irregular exercise over exactly the same amount of food consumption for the next two weeks.

I didn’t take many food photographs while I was there, being too busy hoovering up the contents of my plate, so this is going to be one of those food-porn free web pages that would probably make Melinda Tankard Reist (I love her!) proud.

Norfolk Island, situated about half way between Australia and New Zealand, turns out to be one of the gluten-free, organic, low-food-miles havens of the South Pacific. And it is overrun with both chefs and good, old-fashioned real-food cooks. (I had no idea!) So it’s important to eat as much gluten-free food as you can while you are there. There was something yummy to chose from wherever we went, but here’s a list of more or less ten gluten-free food items I ate on Norfolk Island:

1. Bananas. Celiac disease and bananas go back a long way. Before the medical profession knew so much about the disease, someone discovered that celiac kids began to thrive if they were taken off all other food and fed only bananas, so I hear. So if you are an older celiac you may prefer to avoid the nostalgia. But, bananas! Not grown for storage or transport, these bendy things taste just like banana candy/sweets/lollies! (It’s an upside-down, crazy old world.) On Sunday mornings go down to the markets near the post office and buy them off my friend Patricia who has a banana plantation on her family farm. But they are just as nice picked up from the service station, supermarket or laundromat. Also pawpaw. The island does not import fruit. It is a matter of eating what is in season, but over the year there is quite a variety.
2. 

   

   
3. Drive up to the north of the island (10 minutes. Try not to get too exhausted.) and visit Bedrock Cafe. Tables are stretched out along the deck with a beautiful view of the waves washing into the cliffs. Just the sound of the waves itself is soothing, but the view is worth a return visit. The menu at Bedrock is a list of home-made GF cakes and tarts followed by just as many home-made main courses. On one of our visits we arrived to find a new pot of beef and coconut stew simmering on the wood-fired stove. Our host scooped it out of the pot and served it in a bowl over a scoop of brown rice with a garnish of salad. Also from Bedrock, the lemon tart. Creamy and zingy in the filling, rough where it needs to be. Drizzled with cream. And chocolate beetroot cake. What is cake without vegetables? The beetroot is a thick-grated, sweet companion to the dark chocolate. Lovely and moist.

   

   view from your table at Bedrock

4. Down at the Rissole (RSL or Returned Services Club) they have gluten-free batter, so you can order battered fish and chips for dinner just like everyone else does every day. (They also offer grilled fish, but why?) The Rissole also offers battered pineapple rings dusted with cinnamon sugar and topped with ice-cream and a grilled pineapple ring for afters. I asked them if they could use the gluten-free batter on the pineapple rings, and yes, they could, and I did. But not on the same day. I do have some self respect.
5. Chilli prawns, made to the authentic Singaporean chilli crab recipe at Little Singapore, a cafe/restaurant run by some old hands in the Singaporean restaurant industry. At the same cafe, chef made us deep-fried sliced (longways) green bananas with ice-cream for dessert. They were crisp and hot and sweet and soft and cold all at once.
6. Melting moments the size of your palm (the palm of your hand, not the palm outside your resort-style accommodation). These are an old-style recipe of mostly butter and sugar that falls apart in your mouth. From The Golden Orb, set back from the island’s main street.
7. Chocolate macaroons. Not the smooth macaron you see about nowadays, but the rough, sticky, desiccated coconut and egg-white delights that remind me of mum’s cooking before she got that full-time job in the city. (I’m not complaining! The consequential frozen danish pastries were also welcomed by the whole family.) These are also from The Golden Orb. The GF bread at The Golden Orb is also worth consuming. I ordered a sandwich or two there but ended up peeling off the fillings and eating the bread separately. Their gluten free bread tastes like fluffy scones. Order a BLT and you can chow down on warm bread lightly soaked in bacon grease. Not so heart healthy, but you are on holidays and it won’t happen again, honest.
8. Corn fritters at The Olive off the main street. Served on a bed of delicate local salad veggies. I wish someone would make corn fritters for me every lunchtime. If you have any interest in doing this, apply in the comments section below.
9. We waited until almost the end of the month to visit Norfolk Blue, a restaurant set in the farmhouse of the island’s former dairy. We took a table on the verandah overlooking the garden. The service was formal and attentive and the slow roasted beef with vegetables was a roast at it’s best. This outing also afforded a drinking of red wine in the middle of the day which set me up nicely for a snooze over the road in the Hundred Acre wood. Take something to lie down on in the grass as you are lulled to sleep by a variety of birds living peacefully on the island.
10. Thai green fish curry made with Trumpeter fish caught that morning off the coast of the island, served on the deck of Castaway. They have a good bar that can serve you drinks as you enjoy dusk falling over a wee valley.
11. The Governor’s Lodge provided us with a Tahitian fish salad that I could eat every day. Raw fish is marinated in vinegar then mixed with some kind of coconut milk, and some kinda pink flower. Oh, I am such a food writer! The dish is sweet, cold and delicious. Tahitian fish salad is a cultural food for the islanders. Many trace their heritage back to the women kidnapped from Tahiti by the Bounty mutineers on their flight to Pitcairn Island.
12. I almost forgot the Bowlo (Lawn Bowls Club)! The chef there will make you normal bistro food but check down the menu and you can see he has slid in some gluten free cheffy food. My favourite was chicken stuffed with prunes and ricotta in a white wine sauce, served on a bed of vegetables.

 

Can’t get enough of tying Norfolk Island Pine needles in knots.

It was also great to see that the supermarket has a generous range of gluten-free dry groceries.

The other small thing I would mention is if you are particular about the silken texture of your lattes, order flat whites instead. Fresh milk is $8 a litre flown in weekly from New Zealand and I doubt anybody is going to put it in your latte. It’s UHT for the rest of us so order flat whites, eat another GF cake and consider it part of the joy of travelling.

All-in-all a very gluten-intolerant friendly island. So  all you need to do is fuel up and freely explore the incredible history of the place from the mutiny on the Bounty to British penal colony horrors to the wreck of the Sirius (flag ship of Australia’s First Fleet), finishing with a swim/snorkle. Well worth a week (or four) of your time.

British penal colony ruins, terrible but awesome stuff.

 

Have you been to Norfolk Island? Did I miss anything?

 

 

It might never happen

Tonight I was out with my mates at the local. The Royal is within walking distance. I’ve always thought of it as a pretty good pub, but it has recently become an amaaazing pub with the introduction of the new smoking laws. Previously, people were free to smoke on the balcony. But the new state provisions ban smoking in all commercial outdoor dining areas. This means that the balcony, which overlooks one of the local bush valleys I have written about previously, is now a safe haven for the weak-chested and short of breath. Yes, people of questionable lung function can now sit out in the fresh air, enjoy the tops of the trees, and slurp down a bottle or two of locally-made Bilpin or Hillbilly alcoholic apple cider. Slurpy slurp slurp. Except this evening. Because it was 40 something degrees celsius during the day and even sitting around quietly on that balcony drinking cold drinks poured into tumblers full of ice was going to force us to sweat. So we sat inside where the air was conditioned, the ice melted more slowly, there were lashings of bistro food available for hungry souls, and the band was just setting up for the night.

We had a good evening of cider, nosh and friendship until the musicians informed us in a loud, musical way that they could not get no satisfaction. We realised that there was probably not a lot more discussion to be had indoors in the yummy air-conditioning, and we had the choice of moving  out onto the balcony or meandering off on our separate ways. We wandered home.

Web spinning occurs every evening in our yard, and much of the time my husband and I walk through the silken traps either on the way home from a night out, or in the morning on the way out again.

And when we got back to our place it was dark and we walked through the yard from the side gate, past shrubs and trees and hedges to the main entrance. We walked through spiderwebs in the dark.

And we get into the hall, turn on the light, check ourselves and one another for spiders and tonight, for the first time ever, there actually is an eight-legged friend, measuring about four centimetres across, gripping onto my skirt, no doubt wondering a few things:

1. Who turned on the sun again?
2. Could this walking wall of humanity be the catch of my life? or
3. Would this be the right time to have a small, spidery panic about the situation I now find myself in?

As for me, I reminded myself, as one needs to in Australia, that the spiders whose webs you walk through in the dark are not the spiders that are capable of killing or maiming a human. (As it turns out, that is only mostly true as explained in this Australian Geographic article on the 10 most dangerous Australian spiders.) We flicked the little fella/lass onto the floor and out the front door.

And now I hear you asking, what is the significant, blog-worthy message of this anecdote?

Could it be: Walk through enough spiderwebs and you will eventually get a spider on you? Well yeah, maybe.

But it is more likely to be: I’ve spent my whole life worrying that walking through spiderwebs would end in a spider on my body. And yet it took over 40 years for what I had dreaded to eventually come to pass.

Maybe we all have a dark, cobwebby yard that needs to be crossed to get where we are going in life. How much energy do we put into thinking about the spiders we might come across when we could be focussing on the delight of our final destination? Sure, you might collect a spider along the way, but probably not. And I can’t guarantee that you won’t find yourself stopping momentarily to pick off some sticky lacings of web from your clothes once you reach home.

 

It’s raining in my mountain village

Today in my mountain village we are living in a cloud. Soft rain sprinkles those who venture outside until they look like they are covered in dew. Three hundred metres up from sea level, the main road is set along the ridge-line. The local shops perch along the spine of the village, each side of which drops down to rough bush, or, where humans find themselves lucky, residential land. Down behind my favourite coffee shop there is a bitumen road that leads to a bush track. It falls slowly through a fern-lined valley, then winds around the land’s lowest points past a stream, until it reaches a cliff face offering the choice of two equally uncomfortable steep sandstone climbs ending at some of the furthermost points of the village. And the entrance to this wonderland? Hiding down behind the shops! So whenever you are in town, the bush is there beckoning, ready to open herself to you in new and more pleasing ways. Ever willing to give up to you a new, quiet secret, or beat you into a panting, submissive sweat.

actually, I took this one

On a drier day, I took the half-day walk along the track with my friend Lyndal. Lyndal knows how to compose photographs, so whenever I saw something beautiful I would hand her my phone and say, “Here. Take a photo of this.” And she did. Lyndal has one of the most honest Christian minds in the business and we talked long and well. So, all in all, five hours well spent.

 

On Christian blogging, matted dogs and eating your own ear wax.

Spring has come to my part of the Southern Hemisphere and this morning I chose to sit out on the front deck for breakfast. Because this is Australia, the sun is already fierce fourteen days into Spring, even at 9am, and I had to put up the sun umbrella. I had to. It wasn’t at all about pretending to be some kind of fifties movie star lounging under a twenty-four spoke oriental-style sun canopy surrounded by my dogs, who are actually someone else’s dogs.

I have been dog-sitting while a friend has their side fence replaced. The furry friends have coats that are non-shedding, which means they are self-matting. And have I told you that I once trained to be a Registered Nurse so I have this thing about maintaining the cleanliness of any living creature in my jurisdiction? Your bodily hygiene is my bodily hygiene. Remember that, if you ever want to make any comment about personal boundaries to me. Conversely, if I want to get really stinky that is my own business. Try not to mention anything.

Anyways, these cute doggies came to me pre-washed and fluffy but with a couple of winter matts still in their fur and I felt the need to attend to them(see previous paragraph about personal issue).

When I lived in SouthEast Asia I had a white poodle called Mimi. She was an International Exchange Dog of sorts, since she had lived the majority of her life in a Thai-speaking household. After eventually finding herself in a somewhat dilapidated state, Mimi was rescued by a local dog rescue agency and then taken in by me. She adjusted breathtakingly well to my English speaking household for a year before being placed back into the care of a Thai family.

Mimi the International Exchange Dog was irregularly taken to the local Poodle Parlour for a shave and a hair cut. Once home from that journey, she would spend one evening recovering and be back out rolling around in the dust of the partially sealed access road first thing the next day.

Money well spent.

Mimi also liked combing over the rubbish dump next to the house, looking for deceased food sources. She was pleased to pick up any seed or burr available and store it on her person for unknown future uses. Mimi the International Exchange Vector. Suffice to say that fur tangles are familiar to me, and I love, no, long to snip them out. 

So after my friend’s dogs arrived,  it didn’t take me too many hours before I wanted to take the paper scissors to these short-stay companions. They loved it! (Or one of us did.) And this morning after breakfast, I cut out the last, most difficult matt. It had formed up under one the dog’s ears, and was tricky to get at and cut out safely. The dog was a brave soul. He had just experienced the first hot day of Spring and the matt was obviously bothering him and he wanted it out, but he could only cope with a couple of snips at a time before needing to walk off and take a breather. Then he would return and present his ear for further attention.

Once the matt was finally released, I presented it to him like a prize, thinking he would be as impressed as I was, even without the nursing training. He sniffed at it and shook his head. I put in down in the pile of offcuts and picked up my tea. He delicately leaned towards the pile, collected the earwax matt between his incisors, pulled it away from the rest of the pile, slurped it up and gobbled it down.

And as I sat there, rapidly cooling cup of tea in hand, watching a labradoodle chow down on its own hairy clump of earwax, I thought to myself:

A proper Christian blogger would be able to work this up into an analogy of the love of Christ.

Because I am a blogger, and I am a Christian. And I believe nobody in the history of the world shows nor has ever shown deeper respect for our freedom to make our own life choices than God, and I am not about to up the ante nor lower the bar on that one. Even. For. Ear. Wax.

As for what other life messages may be conveyed through the story of a labradoodle eating their own hairy ear canal residue, perhaps any answer is best left to the consumer.

Give thanks and eat.