For years our family kept photographs, school reports and other ephemera in old suitcases and hat boxes.
These items, fragranced with cedar balls to ward off moths were a rainy day treat when I was growing up. Along with the button tin, with its precious jewel-like treasures, all of these wonders are now from a by-gone era.
Here is a selection of stories and essays written over the past few years.
HANNAH IRVINE’S DELICIOUS SECRET
There’ll be hell to pay if I’ve lost it.
I know my sisters will have plenty to say; none of them thought the family heirloom should have been entrusted to me.
Margot will say I did it on purpose to rile her over our argument last week. If truth be told our tiff was only the latest in a lifetime’s worth of petty rivalries that started the day she was born not quite two years after me. For heaven’s sake that was almost fifty years ago, you’d think two adult women could put aside all that immature jealousy and competition, but that’s Margot for you. Each month since the divorce her fuse has become progressively shorter. When her husband of 18 years left her you could see the bitterness etched in her face from a hundred paces … read more
BOOK CROSSING
He’d never seen anything like it.
Marco opened the abandoned book and fanned the pages. It was full of writing, handwritten notes crammed wherever they would fit on the pages of the paperback novel. In each twist and turn of the story someone had poured out their heart onto the margins, over the chapter ends, spilling pain into all the white spaces in a stream of consciousness and liberation. He turned the book this way and that, onto its side to make out words and sentences, some added later in bubbles or marked with asterisks or numbers as must be important … read more
THE FARRIER’S WIFE
I don’t know when I started to hate her, it just crept up on me until one day it was there, full blown and ready to eat my heart out. It was the poem that did it, hidden in that damn book he’d stashed in the shed. Fading ink on paper, strong downstrokes talking of love, desire, passion. I wish I’d never found it.
That first summer we spent golden Sunday afternoons under a ghost gum down by the creek. I’d wait; a quiver of excitement would catch my breath at the sight of his ute billowing yellow dust behind it. Closer. Closer. His hair was burnished by the sun, his arms rippled from hard work, his eyes blue, I swear the bluest blue I’ve ever seen, even bluer than the fairy wren that sings outside my window.
It was so easy to fall in love with him … read more
RACING SOUTH
She’d dump him for sure.
Danny always said he was a fool but that was more to do with his choice of footie teams and pizza, older brothers are like that he’d figured, taking every opportunity to tease, call him a pest. But this time Danny was right.
Turning the globe upside down, Josh’s finger traced the meridian to 90⁰S, a line worn thin by years of longing for that magical place of his boyhood dreams. Since schooldays, tales of Shackelton and Mawson had lit his world with daring, courage and adventure. Now, with the reality so close, he hesitated. It wasn’t for any lack of guts, he reasoned, he’d planned his life with his dream in mind. No, this was a different fear, one that had been gnawing at him on and off since the envelope arrived … read more
REMNANTS OF ABUNDANCE
Summer. A season of long, hot days. Late afternoon black and green thunderstorms. Perfect weather to watch vines and tendrils weave their magic through the garden and over the shed, and the tiny green hoppers flitting through the herbs delighted at the bounty that lay before them. And never-ending, sleep-eluding nights suffocated by dampness on the leaves. And the humidity. The crackle of lightning in the midnight sky. Rain drops on the tin roof, one, and another, heavier and heavier. Water gushing down the drainpipe to its own singsong beat. The green frog calling for a mate. A roll of thunder. The endless drone of mosquitos.
Simple fragments of memory. Of other summers, happier times. I’d missed all the magic while regimented by locks and clocks and bells and a time for every action in ordered days of penance; all my hours rolled into one. Bound by ties of remorse I yearned for days and nights of simple freedom … read more
F-red to the rescue
This story is for those people, especially children, who delight in the sight of the Chesterfield tractors lined up on the grass fronting the M1 at Loganholme on the way to the Gold Coast. I’m sure I’ve seen them chatting to each other!
Every morning the manager would start all the tractors and one by one drive them onto the grass verge overlooking the highway. He knew that all the farmers driving by would be able to see his tractors for sale.
The tractors like this arrangement too … read more
ESSAY: Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Lucky us living in Queensland! If we were living in temperate latitudes, autumn would mean it was the time to start making sure our chimneys were swept, that we were laying up large cords of chopped wood, and that our roofs were in sound condition for the coming winter snows.
So what is all this ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’? If you remember your high school poetry you’ll recognise it as by John Keats. Critics and scholars have praised the poem enthusiastically, declaring “To Autumn” one of the most perfect poems in the English language.
Of course it refers to the northern hemisphere autumn, and the approaching winter, a time of hardship. Having to cope with floods and cyclones during summer in SE Queensland it’s just as well we’re spared the harsh winters — that would be just too much to handle. And besides, that’s why everyone from down south wants to holiday here … read more
ESSAY: THE OCEAN
Often when I was very young and could swim a little my father took me to the beach nearby at Surfer’s Paradise. One day we took my best friend Venetia who could not swim at all so we frolicked around in the shallows and made dribbly sand castles on the beach. It was fun but as usual I was desperate for my father to take me out beyond the line of breakers, way over my head. He would hold me in his strong arms and we’d flutter around in the deep water and watch the waves from behind crash onto the beach.
I felt so safe and yet daring at the same time … read more
ESSAY: Random acts of kindness
Everyone wins when we pay it forward!
Ever since the incredibly sad movie Pay it Forward was released in 2000, the simple concept of doing a good turn for someone who cannot do it for themselves has come into our collective consciousness.
Many cultures and traditions consider that the virtue of helping others is the cornerstone of their beliefs and should drive behaviour. But is such kindness as simple as it sounds? What benefits do we get from our altruism? Should kindness be its own reward? And is true selflessness even possible if we consider the buzz we might get in return for our thoughtfulness?
Some have suggested that there is a vital difference between pay it forward and random acts of kindness … read more
