Category: Writing

Among the rocky crags

My mother and her sister and brothers had a tradition where every few years when they came together as grown ups, they sat in the same position they occupied as children for the family photo. A tradition that lasted several decades until the first one died.

Now there is only one left, nothing remains but the memories and the photographs.

This last weekend my family of siblings, not all, but seven of us came together for yet another reunion and this time in the Blue Mountains. It was a long way to travel for all of us scattered throughout Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT, but we made the trip to reconnect and I’m glad we did.

I find myself censoring here, fearful that any of my siblings might read about my thoughts and fearful they might disapprove given I am not a spokesperson for us as a group and yet something impels me to write about this time away under the bluest of skies in the brittle cold of those rocky crags.

Most of us grew up together though the oldest had left home by the time the youngest of us was still in primary school and then the youngest among us stayed home a number of years after we older ones had left.

She did not remember where I was in my last year living at home. I am not there in her memory. And it’s strange how hard it is for me to hold her in my memory given that last year when I lived at home and my sister, the one younger than me, had gone back to boarding school because she could not bear the thought of living at home and getting through her final school year while I was starting university and had no such option. Not that I’d have wanted to go back to boarding school.

I thought I knew the Blue Mountains well given I’ve stayed at Varuna, The Writers House, in Katoomba a number of times, but somehow I managed to get us down to the wrong entrance to the cable cars, which meant we needed to pay for tickets on arrival at the main building from where all the scenic tours begin.

To be in such amazing structures slipping down to the rainforest floor and dangling across the sky thousands of metres above the ground in a yellow cable car was exhilarating.

My sisters and I share the same concern over heights and found ourselves reminding one another to look forward, not down, as a way of protecting ourselves from the dreaded vertigo and jelly legs that come to me whenever I rise to any height above ceiling level.

We stood at Echo Point and asked a passing tourist to oblige us with a photo. He took pleasure in capturing this group of aging siblings against the back drop of The Three Sisters.

The tourist also took photos of our four sisters in front of that sisterly rock formation and we stood together arms linked.

My brothers present, three tall greying bearded men stood side by side when it came their turn to pose for the camera. The two on the ends crossed their arms while the one in the middle dropped his arms to his sides.

We sisters urged them to move in closer and to smile.

‘That’s as much intimacy you’ll get out of us,’ one of my brothers said, as if we had asked for too much.

1962

1972

2009

The boys in my family find displays of affection even harder to muster than the girls. And speaking as one of those girls, I recognise how hard it is to get close and yet when it came to say goodbye on the Sunday, and each one of us hugged the other in turn, and the boys shook hands, there was a sadness, albeit tinged with eagerness to get back to our other lives.

Margarine is made of tar

Last night my daughter listed the various quantities of sugar in different yoghurt products. She was making the point that although we might think our favourite yoghurt is good for us, it’s not. It’s riddled with sugar.

Over the years we’ve heard these things, the perils of sugar and of salt, of fat in butter, so we’re better off on margarine only to discover margarine is made of tar or some other bizarre non edible product, made edible by extraordinary feats of science.

When I was young we welcomed the arrival of margarine not for its low fat properties but because it was cheaper than butter.

When my adolescent sister and I wandered through the aisles of the IGA supermarket off the highway in Mentone we took delight in choosing the cheapest of everything.

No name brands had not yet arrived on the scene but there were alternatives to almost everything.

Alternatives to the expensive and wonderful double decker biscuits that came from the Arnott’s factories. Alternatives to smooth Cadbury’s chocolate. Alternatives to Macleans tooth paste. And though we took pleasure in choosing these brands I also felt a mark of poverty at the check out as the girl ran through our items. And I did not enjoy it.

Still it was the only way to guarantee there’d be enough money left over from the twenty or so dollars our mother gave us once each week for the weekly family shopping.

She had no time to shop herself. She worked every day at the old people’s home down the road and in those days supermarkets closed like other shops at 5.30 pm and only milk bars stayed open for limited times after hours.

And milk bars then, as they are today, were more expensive for all items other than milk.

My sister and I needed to have a few extra dollars left over from our twenty dollars to be able to add a block of cheap compound chocolate to our collection and then with our school bags overloaded with necessities, including Fairy brand margarine, we began the half hour trek home through the back streets of Cheltenham and shared out the entire block of chocolate.

By the time we reached home we were sick from our fill of it. No longer did I hanker for a pile of sandwiches to eat from my seat in front of the television as we watched Kimba the White Lion; whatever Disney cartoons might be showing in the afternoons or family sitcoms early evening, alongside the American cowboy shows of Daniel Boone or Robin Hood and his merry men from England.

On nights we did not shop, I ate three or four rounds of jam filled bread. And when dinnertime came round I was unwilling to eat whatever food my mother served up.

There were times when she tried to make out that the rabbit she had cooked in some sort of casserole was actually chicken. She never fooled me. Or that the potatoes she’d left boiling in the pan too long before the water dried up and the bottom of the pan and potatoes resting there were black; that these potatoes once drained and the black sections omitted when mashed together with margarine and milk were still not burned.

A taste I can still conjure up. The taste of charcoal, without its texture. Not one to cherish.

I preferred my rounds of sandwiches or chocolate blocks to the daily fare my mother cooked unwillingly at the stove every night of my childhood.

I do not blame her now, although then I resented these things.

Now I recognise what a tedious job it is to come up with something fresh and tasty every night, especially when you’re heart is not in the cooking. Especially when money is so tight you have no options in terms of nourishment.

My mother went for the salt, sugar and carbohydrate to keep us full, with a few vegetables, eggs and meat for good measure. She’d lived through a war and was not one bit squeamish about sugar or salt, once so had to come by, and necessary in almost everything she cooked to enhance the taste.