Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Brisbane

  • book-learning

    book-learning

    I just feel so ruddy fortunate to have a decent academic education. It obliges me to be of service in the world, even as I benefit from the knowledge of people whose education differs from mine. I went off to Berlin for two years, leaving my old farm ute parked in the street. When I got back it was high summer in Queensland and we drove down to the local watering hole to cool our feet. On the way back down the main road my driver’s side mirror simply flew off, and smashed at the roadside, the solid steel stalk that upheld it having rusted through to nix. And then the gears started complaining. It took us several goes to get up a medium-gradient hill – we creaked up slowly until a handy side street appeared, backed into that to get another run-up and take another bite at it. Traffic accumulated at my tail like well-wishers to a visiting dignitary, only lack in all dignity and free from well-wishing. Finally I took the thing groaning and spluttering dust into a local mechanic, a Laotian named Vince who took one look at the aged machine and said, I can’t handle this one. We will need to call in Sid.

    Sid. What a guy. He is eighty, round and floury in his cement-dusted blue overalls, the fabric worn so thin it looks all snuggly and soft as down. He resembled in his courtesy that actor on Are You Being Served? who held his fingers to his lip when considering colour and girth – John Inman. He took my car to pieces very patiently and when, days later, they finally called me in he had assembled a teaching platform of worn-out sprockets and rusted-through parts in order to show me for sure and definite that (a) they weren’t cheating me and (b) I needed to change my ways. He left behind (without reluctance, I think) the fussy paint job his wife had set him out at Redland Bay and toiled all the way into the city by bus, an hour and a half’s early morning journey, so that he could take me on a long explanatory test drive and coach me – with a tact and delicacy I didn’t deserve – in the right way to care for my new shiny gearbox, the best way to use my foot on the clutch, basic things.

    Today I realised that arghkh, the rego runs out at the end of June. And that the end of June is on Monday. And it’s still registered in Victoria, meaning it will have to go over the pits and be checked out. I rang Vince. “Sure,” he said, sounding so beautifully unalarmed, the television sqwarking in the background. Last time I was in there he showed me the framed photograph of his father, who always told him he could have his own business. An hour later Sid rang me back. “We can do it, luv,” he told me, “but you might have to get in here pretty early. Vince is gunna ring his mate for you, that does the roadworthies.” He asked had we been enjoying the vehicle, had we been out of town, off the road. I asked had he finished his work in the kitchen. He told me what was on his mind: seven months ago he got $40,000 worth of hail damage to his motor home. “And the insurance people are kicking up a fuss.” I said, “They’re not bad, are they. Do anything not to pay out!” He said, “I had to get the ombudsman onto them. Now I’ve just gotta write them a letter, only I’m not much of a one for letter-writing, I’m just no good at English, I’m struggling with it a bit.”

    I said, Sid, would you like me to look it over for you? Because I am good at English, and letter-writing. Send it on to me if you like, I’d be happy to. His gratitude was so overpowering I felt shamed. I cannot understand engines, motors, mechanics. I look at those devices and my brain glazes over like a river in winter. I can feel the synapses cracking, it hurts, it makes me feel stupid inside. Sid parsed my rotten old engine like a chef diagnosing the herbs in a beautiful soup. But he’s no good at letters. And I rely on engines all day, in my computer, my car, on the bus, in the train. And he rides English as his only tongue, feeling no mastery of it and no ownership. How can we respect each others’ gifts better and expertise?

  • brisbanally retentive at last

    Brisbane. Took me ten years to settle here, having uprooted from sultry Jakarta and a school which had barely two students of each nation in one class. This was the first time we’d lived in the suburbs, since I was a tiny baby by the sea, a child learning to walk in the desert. I used to lie on my bed listening to lawn mowers almost frantic with the choking feeling that lives go nowhere and end in dust. Lawn clippings and agapanthus and dust. But then there was sultry West End, the village which now has devolved to a suburb at last. And then I moved away and now I am back. It has taken me months to move out of the suburbs and into a place of my own. And six months and tonight I feel the trickle of sweet familiarity at last, a trust in the landscape, a kind of security that releases a kind of intrigue it is hard to feel when you are always new, like how it’s hard to be deeply creative and free and wild with no safe home place and without a routine. I felt I belonged at last. God damn it, Brisbane.

  • superpow

    I think maybe my superpower is interfering in other people’s lives. I pick up their rubbish. I make faces to cheer up their miserable kids. Not only do I do it but I feel like it’s my perfect right, kazam, kerpow. We went out for dumplings. The table next door were depressing. He sat sprawled in his own homeroom slump, scrolling endlessly through the blackened thicket of his fascinating phone, actually holding the device up to his face while she ate stoically from a bowl of poached pork gyoza so that the back of the phone covered half his face, a carneval mask. The girl pulled out her wallet at the end of the evening. I said, Excuse me. Politely she leaned over. The boy was in earshot. I said, You’re really beautiful. And you seem interesting. Her eyes came to life. Thank you! she said, warmly. I said, I think you deserve a better relationship than one where the guy drizzles through his phone all night while you are out with him. And I wanted to tell you that. Ok, she said, um, fair enough. Thank you. We walked home slowly in the light dark rain and passed two signs that reminded us of underpants. One was an A-frame set out sturdily in front of a kebab house, and the other hung from the awning of an old shop now a restaurant. I said, pointing, does that photograph remind you of underpants? The photograph was of a segment of Grecian columns. Yes! he said. With the… and the way it sort of… Exactly, I said, lengthening my stride. Underpants.

  • The Rover

    Last night I saw an amazing film. It uses South Australia as a post-Collapse landscape, compellingly. The Rover. Apart from the number of actors being shot dead at point-blank range with no warning, I found it beautiful and strange. The credits rolled and I leaned forward eagerly, trying to see who had made all that intricate and baffling music. The guy in front had pulled out his phone and was already deeply immersed in his messages. That the world could collapse while you’re in the cinema, in the dark, unable to do a thing to prevent it or hinder it. That by staying on top of the endless loop of chatter and information masquerading as insight, you could prevent this. Well, I guess at least if you never really live, presumably you can never die.

  • ute tray of goodness

    In the back of my ute is so much soil and sundry scraps of leaves and dirt that I just found, in the seams of the rusted steel, a tiny plant growing. I plan to leave it and see what becomes of it. Maybe I can drag a fruiting tree behind me round the town. Put in a cane chair and folding picnic table. Add a coloured cloth & give readings. Uh huh.

  • this most severe moon & I

    A house nearby is small, wooden, and humble, a tiny workers’ cottage in the classic Queensland style. Only it’s been done up like an Ascot knot with a formal grey-and-dark-grey paint job, art-gallery landscaping (blades), and an unpleasant extension bigger and taller than the house that clamps onto its back side like some shuttered and illegal petrol station. It looks like a small, private jail for teenagers. It occurs to me that is perhaps what it is: the parents maybe have built this for their kids who were too big to leave sprawling round the living room and too small in the eyes of the world to take their chances under a beckoning dancing and quite shameless moon. As with beads, as with knucklebones, as with tealeaves: who can tell.

  • Jack the Hammer

    Fought the good fight, and won. The battle if not the war. We came home an hour ago to the sound of jackhammers ringing up and down our street. It was 10pm. I rang the police. They said, they can do nothing, I would have to ring the Council. So I got on my ugg boots and walked down to the guys who were carving up the roadside with their gigantic hammer-carrots.

    There were two of them, young and decent. Two older guys who work for a different company – the ones who take charge of blocking off the road – sort of shrugged when I spoke to them first, nothing we can do. I went and tapped Jack the Hammer on the shoulder. “Hi!” I said over his mate’s continued noise. “Do you realise this is a residential area? And it’s 10 o’clock at night?”

    He pulled his earplugs out to speak to me. After a while his mate stopped work and we all chatted. I said, when my brother was doing that work, he used to wake up with his hands locked in a gripping position. Yeah, he said, feelingly. I said, you know in some practices like yoga, they suggest you do the exercise that’s the opposite, so that you undo some of the damage. Like if you hunch over a desk all day, you can lie back over a ball, to stretch it out. You could maybe stretch your hands this way… He tried it. “So that you don’t feel like you’re 75 when you’re only 28,” he said.

    The other guy was calling his boss. He came back. “Boss says he’s sorry. It’s actually not in his control. You would have to ring the utilities company.” I said, “Can you please give me their number?” He wrote it down on a pink post-it note for me. He said, most probably it’s the local businesses who wanted the water to not be shut off while they’re trading. He said, You should have got a notice through the letterbox, a noise notice. He said, Usually we do this work during the day.

    I went back home and called the utilities number. The guy at the other end was unhelpful and bullshitty. His smooth corporate speak annoyed me. “Yes, there’s nothing I can do,” he said several times. He tried to tell me the guys on the road would have “just said whatever to get rid of you, not meaning to be rude.” He slid the responsibility smoothly equidistant from all parties like a bead floating on an abacus so there was no sum. I kept him on the line for quite a while before giving it up. Then I heard the truck pull up stakes and park outside our door.

    I told them what the call-in guy had said. “He said we should just wait til business hours and then report it.” “Hah! How does that help you?” Jack the Hammer rang his boss again, then his bigger boss. He came back to our door and stood shyly, courteously on the path, until I noticed him and came back out to ask what gave. He showed me on his iPad all the hydrants up and down the streets of Brisbane that need work done. I said, Is that all the places where you have the pleasure of jackhammering in future? He said, “He shouldn’t have said we would tell you anything and that we were just bullshitting you.” I said, “I know! I thought that was rude. He was just trying to avoid taking responsibility.” He rang his boss again. “Yeah we’re hammering in the middle of all these houses, mate. This needs to be done during the day.” He so impressed me. Courteous, friendly, warm, pragmatic, and with humour. Stood up to his boss and to his boss’s boss. No soft soap, just genuine humanness. I felt like offering them a cup of tea. My eyes felt like they were peeling. He said, “I’ve got my big boss to come out here… he’ll be about a half an hour.” I said, “Well, if he needs to talk to me, can you get him to come knock? I’m going to try and get half an hour’s sleep.” He said, kindly, “Would you prefer he rang your mobile number? That way he doesn’t have to disturb you and that.” I said, “Yeah, that’d… No, wait. I reckon it’ll be harder for him to tell me, to my face, that you’re about to start jackhammering at 2 o’clock in the morning.” “True,” he said. We shook hands with great affection. I told him, “You did a good thing. You’re very very decent and I appreciate it. Thank you.” He said, “Well, you need your sleep.” And then they went away.

  • the good ship junk

    At my last place I cut down one of those plastic “NO JUNK MAIL PLEASE, thank you!” stickers and clapped it on my letterbox so that it said: NO JUNK. This didn’t stop some people who felt that their pizza-shaped pizza menu, Thai takeaway special delivery offer or local dentist’s surgery was immune. So at the new place I kept the “you!” Now it says: You! NO JUNK. *dusts hands*

  • buy a smoke

    I went and sat in a church for an hour. Outside and around us the traffic and screaming world swirled. I sat limply, examining nothing, letting my gaze rest like butter on the high colour windows and glowing long pews. God was there for me, the god who is not grand but great and not distant, proclaimed by all the world’s most dangerous people and who doesn’t really exist, I think, but to whom I somehow cry out in moments of deep joy and crushing down grief. I gazed at the flowers, the candles, the keys of the lovely old organ. Afterwards trailing up the street with a frangipani tucked in my bag I smiled at two celebrating ladies, with their backs to a wall of constructing industry, all the ingredients of their afternoon laid out: smokes, supermarket catalogue, bottle of a possibly mixed fizzing drink. “You look beautiful!” said the younger one; I nearly fell over with surprise. I mean, I tripped. I went into the post office. “Has this got a battery?” she said. “It’ll go by road but not by air.” “Ok,” I said. I paid for the parcel. In the Chinese grocer’s I brushed my knuckles across all the fronds of the barrel of brush brooms to choose by the feel which I would carry home. Paid four dollars and balanced it across my arms like a bayonet. The Aboriginal man who spends his afternoon by a tree on the hillside said, How are you. His mate, a red-faced white man with a spreading lap, said, judgelessly, “Saw you eating something off them bushes there.” “Lillypilly,” I said, “you want one?” And uncurled my hand to show a pink-stained palm lumpy with fruits. The first man reached across himself for a pocket. “Buy a smoke off you,” he said. I said, as I always do, “I finally quit! Sorry ~” and spread my hands, because my first thought is not to make a smoker who’s not yet quit (every smoker) feel bad in their still smoking cave. Around us the afternoon was fresh and untamed. Up the hill little houses crept, clutching their gardens. The two old men had a bag of wine plump between them like a jellyfish beached and slowly dying in the sun. I went on up the hill and behind me another climber approached, this time a man in a suit, already reaching into his breast pocket as the old man sang out, “Hey, Michael!” “Heya, Marty.” “Buy a smoke off ya?”

  • light and shade

    light and shade

    Today was a sad and complicated day and I couldn’t get myself off the couch. Life seemed at once too little and too much and I lay coiled under a faded rug that I love, cat curled on top of me, reading one trashy novel after another. Just now with the afternoon sun streaming in I went out to admire the work my incorrigible companion has been making: he is determined to transform the weedy, shaded wasteland out back into a luscious lawn, “so,” he said, “in the summer you can lie down on the grass and read your book.” He went to the hardware store and bought boxes of light-and-shade lawn seed and some kind of strewable powdered fertiliser. He yanked out all the flowering weeds and raked up dried twigs thrown down from the large camphor laurel that spreads its branches over our tiny yard, into a furry, untidy pile in one corner. He made a proper compost pile. The old man who lives next door and spends his days sitting either end of a splendid gold-figured couch in a little garden shed with his best friend struggled over on his stick to see what went on. He is Italian and speaks so little English and in so husky and broken a tone it was almost impossible for us to understand each other. He said, “No rain.” The grass would not grow. “I know,” I said, rolling my eyes and pointing – “Optimist.” “No sun,” he said, indicating the tree with its complication of fine branches. “Yes,” I said. “Maybe we are lucky,” said the man scattering fertiliser. Our neighbour gazed across the yard. He pointed to the huge shaggy mango tree two doors down. “I plant that.” He was immaculately dressed, a feat which in an older person living alone fills my throat with painful tears. He told us his grandchildren used to play in this yard and that is why he’s put the plastic netting up, to protect the lady (Mrs Something, I couldn’t decipher her name) who sold this house to our landlord from having to rescue their balls all day long. He told me his wife died, five years ago, and when I said, “I’m so sorry,” his face was consumed with sadness fresh and undigested. Mrs Something has died too. Now he rents out the top floor of his house to the man who two days ago knocked on our door with five rooting sprigs of Roman basil tenderly wrapped in dampened “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” paper towel and then kept moist with a layer of cling wrap. He had attached with string a little label written in cursive, “Roman Basil. Very good for eating.” This tenant has filled the Italian man’s concreted yard with pots of herbs and vegetables and sometimes glances out his top window to wave to us on our shaded verandah. It’s a long time since I’ve had such wonderful neighbours. The Italian man rested on his stick, watching. He explained, or I think he did, that he is waiting for his sister who calls every morning from Venice. Talking about the death of his wife and the death of Mrs Something from this house he patted his chest with a knotted hand. “I too, soon.” “Me too,” I said, “eventually. Happen to us all.” “No,” he said, shaking his head, smiling: “92! 92!” It astonishes me how some people can be so self-centred and cruel and others light their eyes on the world like birds resting on a beautiful branch: the fire in their belly is a generous flame, lighting everything around it with compassion and love; were it not for those people I would not know how to make a home of this strange and wonderful, terrible world.