The ferry
I’m on my way to the harbourside suburb of Balmain in Sydney’s inner-west to re-visit my childhood home. I loved growing up in Balmain but I have mixed emotions about returning after so long. A bit like the melancholy nostalgia you feel when looking at old photos. A sort of sentimental-pleasurable pain.
The mustiness of old emotions mixes with present-day retrospect bending space-time as old emotions clash with the context of current, daily life. It’s a rude awakening of dormant neural pathways belching up submerged memories. Suddenly I’m finding myself on a deep, untrodden path long since buried by the noise of the present-day overgrowth.
Going down this rabbit hole forces a spinning montage of seizure-like memories triggered by the external landscape. It’s the same sensation when you feel when you go through an old photo album, hear a sentimental song, smell the scent of the lip balm your first girlfriend used to wear, and of course… revisit an old place. A physical, geographical place where a lot of your life unfolded is perhaps the most powerful trigger of memory. This moment, sitting in the park next to my childhood home is one of those moments.
Suddenly, I connect the fact that the present moment is what was once a distant future. Growing up in Balmain as a child, the thought of me sitting here as a 36-year-old adult would have seemed so far away. Yet it is now… very real, very vivid and it arrived much sooner than I ever imagined.
For me, this landscape oozes childhood memories and seeps the essence of my childhood DNA, dispersed across street corners, parks, pubs and of course the old house itself.
This place is chaotically dense with stories that made up my childhood… all of which I won’t tell now… well, not all of them anyway.
Having travelled the world and moved more times than I can remember (literally), this place is the only long-term constant in my ever-shifting life of spinning landscapes and eras in perpetual flux. A place associated with more moments and memories than anywhere else in the universe.
I climb the hill to our old street, past ‘dead fish corner’ (named as such because we once found a giant dead fish there) and arrive at the back of the house. I’m shocked. It looks exactly the same, sitting awkwardly and bulky, its 60’s-style squareness is in opposition to the converging street corner it sits on. We did try and modernise it with renovations over the years but these changes seem awkwardly bolted on to the original Besser-block, a bit like a child might build a Lego house without much planning.
The only thing that’s different is the strange car in our driveway… An indiscreet concrete carport that housed our family car, provided a stage for emotional family farewells when interstate visiting relatives left, backing out of the driveway and off on long
The old concrete stairs that used to lead to a garden still there… The strange old storage shed still intact… A place where a girl once pushed me inside and tried to kiss me way before I was ready for any such events.
The lower deck seems untouched. It was once just ‘the deck’ (before we built an ‘upper deck’), a place to gather, stick Australian and Aboriginal flag poles deep into the soil of the plants lining the railing on ‘Australia Day’ and watch the tall ships sail across the harbour. A space for summer family BBQs on endless afternoons that stretched into the evenings, signalled by the arrival of an Easterly breeze from the ocean and the spinning and interweaving vortex of bats that would cross the sky at dusk, right on cue.
The steel poles and girders holding it up are still there… These are poles I’d slide down silently like a fireman sneaking out of my bedroom window. I was only caught in the act once… In my last fireman escape, I smugly slid down the pole only to realise that I ‘d forgot my ticket to a rave party I was (“not”) on my way to and had to sneak back in to get it. My grandfather opened my bedroom door and sprung me as I was mid-window-entry. When asked why I was climbing in my own window I answered that I didn’t want to wake anyone up. That didn’t fly given it was about 7pm and the question that followed “why didn’t you use the door?” Left me speechless.
Somehow I still made it to the party. Things were simpler back then… No smart (or dumb) phones, no internet (well, not really)… things were probably a bit easier to get away with during the 90’s. A decade of staccato synthesised emotional reverb over electronic beats, grunge bands dressed in flannel over ripped jeans and untied Dr Martin boots. Music delivered from bad compilation CDs, pumped through crude, easily-startled and skip-prone Discmans.
The 90’s was an era that seemed to all move too fast. I feel that I went from; seeing ‘Take That’ live, attending X-File conventions, queueing for tickets to see the Cranberries, hanging out at the ice rink and Pizza Hut birthday parties to all-night dance parties, underage park drinking, skipping school, kissing girls (not in sheds, but at least willingly) and New Years Eve parties that sometimes got out of control when the high school crowd descended on the lower balcony to watch the midnight fireworks.
All this seemed to happen overnight.
So, here I am… now sitting in the small triangle park always referred to as “the park next door” because, well, (spoiler alert), it’s next door. It was (and still is) a place for people to sit and take in the expansive views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and city skyline. A small piece of grass that (aside from our old balconies) also swells with crowds on New Year’s Eve to watch the world-famous Sydney fireworks.
I look out at the view and feel my pupils stretch and dilate trying to take it all in. The combination of the massive vista combined with memories forces my mind into running a time-lapse of how I’ve seen it shift over 30 years. The skyline has changed dramatically. Gone are the gaps of blue sky between tall buildings of a sporadic and emerging city. Now, futuristic, glass skyscrapers dominate the landscape at acute angles. Tall shafts of glass, mottled with yellow glowing lights push up from behind the peninsula headland.
Everything’s changed.
The old vacant land and demolition site where I built my treehouse and played illegally is now parklands, curated with delicate fences and manicured pathways as businessmen in suits shuffle up and down from the city ferry to their now ridiculously expensive inner-city terraces.
I sit down on the one wooden park bench. A bench I first sat on about 26 years ago. A bench where I’ve contemplated
I have a clear view
I pull out a bottle of red wine from a crinkled brown bag and crack open a packet of plastic cups. Cups I bought from the two-dollar-shop that now stands in a building that used to be a record store. A store I worked when I was 16. It smelt the same and the carpet’s the same from 20 years ago but the walls of CDs and VHS videos have been replaced by rows of cheap household items and well, picnic accessories (obviously).
I place a plastic cup on the bench and pour my wine. The light, cheap cup wobbles, perhaps too flimsy for my bold shiraz but I make it work. Being back in this landscape calls for a drink. A mild, hazy escapism and detachment from the vividness of this place seem appropriate. The inability to deal with the sharpness of reality was often a theme that caused problems in this house. A conflict between the abrasiveness of life and a lust for something more… happiness, fluidity, stability?… I’m not even sure but, a perceived divide between what was and what “should be” often clashed throughout the years.
I sit and sip and watch the silhouettes. They move into what used to be my great grandmother’s room. A room with a view over Sydney Harbour kept out by blue paisley curtains, drawn cautiously so the sun didn’t fade the furniture.
She’d lie there with Leonard Cohen playing from a small stereo beside her bed. His sultry, dulcet tones swirling through the stale air, blending with the smell of bitter crushed vitamins and fresh newspapers strewn across the foot of the bed. She’d unwrap valium from a crumpled tissue, placing it in her mouth allowing it to dissolve into a paste before washing it down with a swig of Chivas Regal whiskey kept hidden in dark mustiness under her bed.
I used to imagine that, in her mind, she’d go to a place in her youthful past where she travelled the world on cruise ships, shopping local Asian markets for antiques that ended up filling the house. Just lying and replaying memories of dinner at the captain’s table. An evening of swaying and rocking, of red wine, fine dresses, crisp uniforms and conversation. A time before she lay there alone…
I guess Cohen would take her away from that small brick room. She’d ascend his minor key melodies and drift to another place where she’d too, swim in old memories. I doubt whoever occupies that room now has such wisdom, life experience and stories to tell.
Growing up in Balmain, the pinnacle was always the new years eve parties. My teen parties on the lower balcony were famous and pretty epic.
The upper balcony was a different story. A (slightly) more civilised affair where the adults drank (legally) and danced to Neil Diamond and ‘Let’s do the Time Warp Again’ while us teens raged to house music on the lower balcony and friends vomited over the railing and into the sprawling ivy garden below.
Later in the night, the adults would gate-crash my teen party and try to embarrass me with their 70’s style dancing and, at the same time, we’d head to the upper balcony and scream out the lyrics to “Sweet Caroline” with the included “da,
I pour another shiraz into my plastic cup… a little more generous this pour. I glance up at the steel railing that frames the upper balcony and remember that my grandmother once ‘went off’ that balcony. Maybe it’s retrospect or even my coping mechanism of dealing with what happened that day but writing this now, I can only describe it as a comical suicide attempt. I’m aware of the oxymoronic nature of that description and I by no means look at self-harm or matters of the mind lightly.
But, it did happen… My Vodka-fuelled grandmother climbed the cool steel bannister with her feeble feet and launched herself over the edge. I say ‘launch’ yet it was more likely a tumble. Perhaps even a dramatic attempt not meant to be followed through yet, she tipped over the point of no return and went over. The park I sit in now is grass only and bare. Yet, there used to be sprawling, twisting lantana, scattered with ever-growing jasmine that crawled up the side of the house. This meant that, back then, ‘going off the balcony’ was probably only a two meter fall into a scramble of
Despite this, she fractured her pelvis and ended up in the hospital for months. The upper-balcony, like the house itself… and probably any childhood home, has mixed memories and emotions. Growing up in Balmain, like anything in life, was good and bad. Harsh realities we try to run from before realising we’re never running anywhere. It is what it is and our reaction to events is the only thing that we can control. It’s arrogant to think we can do much else.
So, now I sit here as the rain starts to fall, causing stalactite-like upward drips in my cheap red wine and I realise that growing up in Balmain or any place doesn’t define you. Experiences shape and influence you for sure but I feel as though I’ve moved on from this place. This landscape, memories and events that unfolded and manifested around the small triangle park were significant but, the present seems to clash with the mustiness of this emotionally dense place making it feel irrelevant to my life now.
I pack up my wine and head for the bus stop outside the pub that’s no longer a pub. Another landmark shifted in time and space and turned into a day spa of all things… Welcome to modern Balmain.
This bus carries me off the small peninsula, over the Anzac bridge and back into Sydney CBD.
I realise that our past is our past and reminiscing can be both positively nostalgic as well as a little dark at times. I’ll always have a special place in my soul for Balmain but only as an era that once existed and has since ended as we all shunt along the timeline of our lives. It’s not landscapes or physical places that create the episodes of our lives but the people and experiences no matter where we all end up.
We can escape in our memories, in the bottom of a cheap red or even physically but what really matters is what’s here and now… This very moment is all we ever have and all that will ever be.