Visual Diary #28

Singing Sisters of the Outer Suburbs, a ghost sign, a grevillea and a very good read.

Dear reader,

I’m writing from the swingseat out the back looking at the trees all swaying and listening to the birds and it is very pleasant. The landlord is supposed to come over some time this weekend to get something from the shed, but while he’s here we hope he will fix the broken door and get the specs so he can replace the broken oven. We think it is unlikely that he will fix the broken tiles on the bathroom floor, or in fact tile over the sheetboard that encases the bath/shower. Yesterday I went to a native nursery that was having a sale and bought plants that may well grow too big for pots, but maybe by then we’ll have moved somewhere we can put down roots. I have been listening to the audiobook of “Where the Hearth is” by Kate Humble which is full of stories of home for humans and other-than-humans. I really like the way it’s structured with personal stories interspersed with stories of birds and badgers - it’s like sneaky science. The public holiday falls on my teaching day, so I’m getting stuck into writing, which is its own kind of labour, and I am thinking a lot about unpaid labour generally and wishing I could be like a cuckoo bird, rootless and cavalier. I hope wherever you are you are having a nice time.

Simmone

Here are this week’s pictures:

This is the Moir Sisters, late of Scotland, later of Mooroolbark - had a hit as teenagers with a song they wrote themselves, Good Morning How Are You. They have been in my mind, their story relating to my work-in-progress, which is set in those outer Eastern suburbs and considers searching for the numinous amid the mundane. I remember reading about the Moir Sisters in Julie Mac’s excellent Rage - a Sharpie’s Diary. For a while they had Sharpie-ish haircuts despite prim-but-of-the-time outfits. And okay they don’t look at all like my picture - they are far sweeter and more animated, and I don’t know why I gave them halos but I bet it can’t have been easy being girls in the 1970s Australian pop world. Lots of people tearing up in the comments section and saying things “Australia was a different place back then.” The video is a strange blend of the sisters and what seems to be an ad for jewellry of the seventies man or maybe a chemist?

Enjoy!

This is a ghost sign seen from outside Cheltenham station. My Dad had a bike shop when I was growing up (and a BMX team called ‘The Pegasus Crew’ of which I was a keen member). I was fast and dogged, my highest ranking was #3 in Victoria (and #12 in the country). I was always racing against the same girls, and there were some I just could not beat (Amanda, Nadine, I’m looking at you!) But there weren’t so many girls racing BMX then. We got called Powder Puffs, we understood this to be a little insulting, but it was 80s and we were kids so what could we do? Nights before meets I ate huge bowls of spaghetti for energy, and gobbled Glucodin tablets. On weekends Dad would load the van and drive us to unfamiliar outer suburbs to take the berms and whoop-de-dos. “Riders ready, pedals set”. I knew no tricks. My bike was a silver Super L.A with aluminium wheels and, for a time, a pink sheepskin seat-cover.

A grevillea from my garden.

This is a scene from Julianne Negri’s singular YA verse novel “The Belly of a Wolf” - launched this week at The Little Book Room, with music by Mia (Little Red Riding Hood and Please Please Please Let me Get What I Want, and an insightful conversation between Julianne and writer/editor Kate O’Donnell. The novel is about 15 y.o ‘Red’ dealing with feelings of guilt and despair in the aftermath of her best friend’s suicide. The book is powerful and alive, with a reverence for childhood imagination, and teenage friendship, collusion and myth-making. It’s set in an unnamed country town, in an unnamed time that feels timeless. Titles of the poems are named for songs - music, art and friendship become the magic objects to reckon with grief and source personal power. In this scene, Red is climbing to the top of the Devil’s Rock:

I have stepped through the veil to the parallel world
Not the me with you and now without
but to a world where you never were
in the first place
That's where I'm trying to go.

The natural world looms large - the Australian landscape being a place of solitude, interiority, transformation - like Indigo Perry’s memoir Darkfall, In the Belly of a Wolf has much to say about the girl’s experience in this colonised country - violence is never far away. Like Kate Bush sings, it gets dark, it gets lonely, but Negri’s care and craft, the language, imagery, the sense of the real makes it worth it - it never feels gratuitous or didactic. I find it interesting that this was published through one of the smaller presses (UWAP) - I hope it finds its way into many hands. My copy is already dogeared. I heartily recommend you buy it for a young person and/or yourself.

Some quotes:

Music girl says,
I know.
I used to see you together,
and think,
There they go,
like binary stars,
forming their own constellation

Everything is so small here
small town/small street/small houses/small minds
How did you dream so big
surrounded by so much small?

The ultimate gaslighting
is how teenagers
are given none of the tools
of adulthood
but expected to construct
a future