Are those our gigabytes flying with the clouds?

The late afternoon gusts herd the humidity off to the North East. Corrugated iron and powerlines clack and hum: castanet and aeolian harp underscoring an adagio for the receding sun.

Armadas of billowing clouds stream by; foc’sles firmly focused on a North East passage.

We place so much faith in the things we create, while all the while living with an  abject fascination for the fickleness of nature.

I wonder if the wind will drop at dusk?

Late afternoon and a broom rests in the foreground at the end of Wasp War II

For the second time in a week, there were wasps; clustered under the verandah table and conspiring to build a nest. Maybe they should not be disturbed?  They are, after all, simply doing what they do, being a part of the world of natural cycles which surround us.  The problem is, of course, that in the process of them doing their thing, it makes the table unusable as ‘their thing’ may indeed involve biting the big warmth exuding thing which sits, forebodingly near to watch the street and puzzle over his crossword, cryptic, and critically intent on making some meaning out of all of this.

Wasp War I was fought and won with the broom.  Minor later skirmishes used folded newspaper, but it was the gentle push of the broom’s hairy head which hastened the wasp retreat. They flew retaliatory missions: beaming in on the warm heat exuding face which peered into the gloom to see their chagrin rushing forward in the beat of their wings.

All was quiet for days and then: they’re back, and so is the broom.

Victory again.  Once more we manage to impose ourselves, just as our whole streetscape sits atop land of the Worimi and Awabakal. High ground, gazing out across the mudflats and mangroves to the thundering seas and trapped wallaby dreaming buried inside Nobbys: lopped off to lessen luffing.

There is so much changed here.  Clanking in the night, we scoop up the black coal that streams forth from the bowels of the trains that batter and shove to drop their load before bucketing back up the line to Ulan, or Gunnedah or Warkworth or Wherever to refill from the growing holes.

Just down there was the Ferndale colliery, and across there, the soot of the cinder, and coke and blast furnace. A dormitory to sustain the mill, to feed the furnaces and supply the metal to back a nation, and an army. This was a suburb bred of heavy industry and mining.

Around the streets, there is the tell-tale flapping of flags on ute aerials, numbers on trucks and evidence of trades reliant on the mines and the loader.

And, living alongside, green leaning later arrivals: happy with their choice. We struggle often with the clash which occurs between possibilities.  As I sit in my chair I justify my victory over the wasps.  The brooms leans.

A day later, the street steams as if to say: “That wasn’t enough!”

The sun breaks through the clouds and the summer storm squalls off huffishly.

A random tweet from a Newcastle tweep, six minutes ago:

‘That’s some storm!’

We rushed to the BOM – the radar loop live on the net

And yes, there!

fingers pointing toward blobs of yellow blue and red, pushing in from the North West.

We moved our chairs on the verandah:

settled in to watch the lightning show

and listen for the following of the rain on roofs rolled nearby:

at Lysaghts.

These houses, once a dormitory for the steelworks: the coke-ovens and hearths at the blast furnace

Sit angular and uncompromising against the sky,

By no means ill mannered enough to challenge the heavenly doings

But smugly rejoicing in their ability to ignore it

From the point of view of dour reality as opposed to

Fanciful nonsense.

It falls,

soft, then harder and hard. A steady drum on an earth; and electric white-blue rents the sky.

We wonder at the stories that every culture has told its children in answer to the question:

why?

Looking Westward to where the twists and turns of overhead wires and the ribbons of steel conspire with the sunlight as our tram glides toward the stop.

On the last day, of the first decade, of the new millennium.

On special days like this, we don’t have to look far to see that generations past have pondered the balance between what has been, and what can be: maybe as a means of explaining what is; or as a reminder of the keen edge of the present.

Janus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Roman mythology, Janus (or Ianus) was the god of gates, doors, doorways, beginnings and endings. His most prominent remnant in modern culture is his namesake, the month of January, which begins the new year. He is most often depicted as having two faces or heads, facing in opposite directions.

Corellas, signalling nightfall and a full moon above the Murray gives way to a dawn chorus and a morning, stretching, ready: on the last day of the decade.  River redgum ride on dusty banks; bikes silent as the river rolls on downstream.  Early morning joggers and walkers, and houseboats backed into the bank, littered with the drinks and detritus of a long night.

There is such history here along the river.  To think of the miles just traversed at 100 km per hour in air conditioned car, and imagine the difference from poking along behind a few thousand sheep, working the long paddock: mutton for the miners, or, against the flow, and upward reach to the heartland of the big sheep spreads.

In Ballarat tonight, bushfire smoke borne on the wings of a saving rain underscores the rapidity of the cycle of possibility.  What began as a ball of black smoke, sinister in the South, ends with the gathering storm, and the drenching rain.

We are, at every point in time, poised precariously between our past; and our future.

It is the last day of the first decade of the new millennium: a long way from the Y2K virus and the spectre of tumbling aeroplanes and crashed systems.

The Bendigo Art Gallery was showing, amongst other things, McCubbin on loan.  The Pioneers. The delight of the triptych, captured, yet again, this theme of passage.  There are the beginnings, the  doubt and questions, followed by the building of home and family and the movement onward to a point where all of this is memory against a backdrop of change and development.

Bendigo: Formerly Sandhurst: pictures of past, with recognisable features of the present.

This first decade of the new millennium has been a decade of accommodations and adjustments: sometimes grudgingly acknowledging special needs and a universality of need for equity.  This has been a great outcome.

We need now, to move beyond this and to really challenge our dominant paradigms. We need , in education, to now look at the accommodations and adjustments needed to meet the needs of a broader spectrum of learners at this point in time. We need to move seriously from ‘school planning’ to ‘planning school.’

And yet, in an aside, it is possible to find a challenge in a simple cafe experience in Daylesford.

Musing on a young woman with dog: sitting outside the cafe. (New Year’s Eve, 2009)

Daylesford Dachsund snapping at flies

and

a chic tattoo

thumbing its nose at the inevitability of time.

Now, like the grapevines above: young and ready to burst forward with lush fruit but,

in time, will too

wither.

There are challenges and rewards looming in the new year.  We have hit double figures: and what a growing up it’s been.

Where were you ten years ago at the turn of the millennium?  And what has happened in between?

Let’s make the next ten a decade of commitment to the big questions:

‘what do we all need to agree upon as human beings to sustain ourselves?’

Have a great new year!

The views and angles from the end of the breakwater are amazing.  Straight across, to the wrecks encased within the breakwall on the Stockton side of the channel, and on to the pines standing tall on the way to Fern Bay.

Kooragang works reminds us of smokestacks past, while the prehensile limbs of loaders pump the black coal into the ready holds of red and black colliers.  They sit lower and lower in the water until they are hustled, prodded and pushed: then steaming outward away from the tugs’ insistent coddling.

Grain elevators dwarf juice containers. Bullock Island: a destination for farmers frustrated by rail strikes, trucking their own wheat to the dockside.

Beyond Muloobinba, the floating dock, the harbour becomes a mix of fishing fleet and pleasure marina: overshadowed by the opulence of fast ocean ketch, ‘Squall’ high on the slips.

We pause in our bike ride, looking back across the remains of Nobbys, trying to imagine what it looked like before they lopped the top off.  The dunes have shifted, and there are old trail tracks exposed in the sand.  All around are both memories and fresh hope.

The wind will be at our backs as we ride up Throsby Creek. Just as well, as it’s already very warm.

Bright red sunset burning beyond the distant hills points the way; way out there, across hills and rich plains of Gamilaroi land. This is also the land of my father and his father, and the great grandfather killed during harvest. To think that a heavily packed four bushel bag of wheat: the object of the exercise of growing the stuff , could actually kill you.  Across that small range, in line with Somerton Gap, is the place of my youth. There are many memories here. I am back in the city of my birth tonight.

Grandchildren paddling out beyond the break and daughters gambolling like seals in the shore breaks: Pop takes his last swim out there where the bottom drops off the bar.

We’d gathered to honour a wish, with no script, and no sense of what is actually meant to happen. There was a sense, though, that these were the memories for so many: the Mollymook days  – when the need to knock off on time to ‘meet someone at the club,’ or the lessons in dealing with the beach were passed on to generations. The Mollymook days – where family had come to share the beach and the sense of holiday fun; and where they all had uploaded a gallery of shared and personal memories which deserved a reprise.

The threads of this tapestry are so interwoven and rich that, for those unable to be there, their thread was still there as part of the picture that had been, and is, being woven.

Beach cricket; shouts of encouragement and fun. Family and friends on the sand. Then, as though at a common thought, we moved to watch as they swam beyond the break, and then we stood, watching, the sound of the waves and the sense that this was just as it should be.

There will be footage on Facebook and talk and memories: more Mollymook stories to add to the collection.

In the background, the boat finals begin. Crews jump at the sound of the  gun: bare buttocks sliding easily on wet seats as thighs drive backward and oars claw at the water, butting out through the break to turn and seek the providence of a rising and falling swell.

There’s a timelessness about these beach rituals for most of us.  Sometimes we catch the wave and sometimes it washes over us.

I reckon he would have thought it was ‘real good.’

Nightfall, and the bats are on the move.  They fly, beating wings against the greying sky, airborne mammals, shrugging upside down through the day and battering out through the sky in defiance of all probability.

In the distance, squeezed in the frame between roofs, the wind turbine swings lazily, yet, insistently: challenging any latter day Quixotes who would want to sally forth on whatever Rocinante takes their fancy.

Ahead of me the TV aerials thrust skyward: reminders of a time spent wanting Sydney – but only grudgingly.  The audio landscape blurs away with the hum of the coal loader, as we rip out the insides of the valley and pump them into the open squawking magpie chick mouths of an energy hungry world.

The wind turbine speeds up, energetically.

Why couldn’t we rehabilitate open cut mines as solar farms?  The infrastructure is close by to connect to grids, and the earthworks are required anyway.

The sky darkens more, and the occasional bat flies a reverse course: returning, almost sheepishly: to their inverted shrug.

The distant susurration of a rain squall crescendoes across tin roofs and glides across the street. Falling sheets are enough to excite the motion sensor and the light comes on.

Tighes Hill; Saturday night.

Soft mauve late October splashes of jacaranda punctuate my view east to where the Sydney Football Stadium squats: a half deflated tire, tired; between seasons: sighing for the heydays.

Look northeast to where the mid week sailors heel into the breeze out around the Sow and Pigs, far beyond the lurking menacing shapes of the battle grey ships: nuzzling against the shore which still beats a grateful heart to Jack Munday for the salvation of at least some of its charm.

The giant Coke sign at the top of the Cross will illuminate later; a beacon to the William St traffic which dodges its own intentions and musing: through the tunnel and home, or sneaking left to a guilty pleasure.

Wedged between me and Bondi Junction sit the solemn walls of the wards of St Vincents, standing in counterpoint to the old buildings of Darlinghurst Gaol.  As I look northward again over Woolloomooloo I reflect on the old population of Irish immigrants, watched over by the eye of the church, from St Mary’s cathedral to the West and the looming walls of Darlinghurst Gaol, and British authority to the East.

I remember the feeling, as a fifteen year old, walking up Oxford St from Central to East Sydney tech, in the old gaol.  The sense of wonder at a ten day poetry summer school: with people who swore publicly and spoke of opiates and ideas. Staying at Grandma’s house at Miranda, and sharing Miranda’s wonder in finding such wonderful things in such a brave new world. Sitting in the floor in the foyer, before a matinee production of Hair: a long way from Wongo Creek

It’s nice to be back in the city: there’s a palpable energy here.

The tower at the Paddo town hall begins to glow as the last rays of the sun catch the clock and the spire, flag proudly shouting at the end of the day: streaming boldly in the approaching southerly.

In the distance I can see the tower at Waverly directing our gaze down past the college and on along the Frenchman’s Road to the Prince at Randwick, where we can pause and see where it points to Coogee and memories of my early career.

I swing around and look to see the tower in Sir John Young Crescent where we ‘re-orientated’ from secondary to primary.  The block thrusts skyward, alone near the Eastern Distributor, giving the finger to the nearby terraces and warehouses: an ode to the Seventies and why my generation exists as such a paradox.

We still have time: let’s make a difference.