I stepped out of St James Station onto Elizabeth Street to face a police barricade blocking off the street from just beyond the station down as far as I could see east of the station. My first thought as I wandered across the street was that a Christmas parade was about to take place. So, along with a few others, I found my way to the edge of the pavement and glanced into the distance, wondering where all the action was. Less than 30 seconds later, bored with the absence of anything apparent on the empty street, I decided to get on with my Christmas shopping.

Pulling out the scribbled list of items that I intended looking for, I checked the time. It was 10.45am. This meant that I would have about four hours before I would need to make my way back to the airport to meet Steve’s flight. He had flown down to Melbourne early in the morning for a meeting with a client and, unusually, I had decided to accompany him the night before on the trip from Wollongong to Sydney, or more precisely to a hotel across the road from Sydney Domestic Airport. He was particularly tired because he had been working long hours on a number of large projects and I was worried about him driving to Sydney alone.

It was also extremely unusual for me to shop in Sydney as an intended, planned action. Shopping for anything other than food, tends to occur for me almost accidentally or at least incidentally, and Sydney has been the location of this activity perhaps three or maybe four times in the last 28 years that we have lived in Wollongong.

David Jones was the first shop that I visited. Within a few seconds of having made my way to the Clinique counter to purchase cosmetics for my youngest daughter Tessa, the sweet sales assistant, perhaps in her early sixties, and all bonhomie, reached for two jars of moisturising creams, and midway through a comment about the benefits of Youth Dew for a young complexion, dropped her voice to a barely audible level and asked me whether I knew about the ‘hostage situation’.
‘No’, I said in surprise.
‘A Muslim is holding a group of people hostage at the Lindt Café in Martin Place’, the word Muslim expressing a you-know-what-I-mean sense of terrorist.
‘Oh’, I replied with a mixture of shock and surprise, ‘that must be why the police are manning a barricade across Elizabeth Street’.
‘Yes’, she said, ‘you need to be careful. That’s a lovely pendent you are wearing.’
‘Yes’, I said, ‘it’s a gift from my choir friends in the ‘Gong’. And on our conversation went until she wished me merry Christmas, and having given me instructions for getting to the nearest Sussan shop, encouraged me to be careful. Why, I wondered for a fleeting moment, before remembering that there was a hostage situation just a couple of streets away.

A few minutes later I found my way to the Pitt Street mall, stopping for a few seconds to take a photo of an enormous Father Xmas display made out of Lego. The photo I thought would make a good conversation piece with my four grandchildren who would be spending a few days with us over Christmas. ‘Wow, Lulu that’s huge. Is it really all made out of Lego? I reckon I could do that if we had enough pieces’, were some of the comments I imagined them making when I showed them the photo. I walked around the Lego display to take in whatever else was happening.

To one side a strange agglomeration of dogs sitting in a cart was attracting a fair bit of attention. They were there to raise awareness and money for Assisting Wellbeing Ability Recovery Empowerment (AWARE) Dogs. A metre or so away from them on another corner of the giant Father Christmas was an old man playing a Christmas carol on a violin, his tune struggling to compete with the piped music – another vaguely familiar Christmas tune – that pervaded the air, and frustrated me because I could not locate where it was coming from.
Glancing to the right I realised with a touch of surprise that King Street was closed, and I noticed a number of police officers purposefully striding along and across Pitt Street. And, all the time, I could sense the growing unease among other shoppers: the comments about the hostages.
‘Have you heard any more news?’
‘No, nothing more; just that there are 40 hostages. One has been forced to hold up a flag with Arabic script on it; others are standing with their hands up against the front window of the café. Well, I think he’s from ISIS.’

My thoughts returned to Christmas shopping. I checked my watch: it was 12.30. Yes, there was enough time before Steve’s return to Sydney airport to pick up some books from Abbeys in York St. Books are a standard favourite Christmas – and birthday – present for him, and I wanted to also get a few for the grand kids. Half an hour later I emerged onto York St. The load of Christmas presents in my little backpack had now been made considerably heavier by a couple of novels, and a couple of non-fiction books for Steve and a pile of young readers’ books and colourfully illustrated story books for our grandchildren.

Then it suddenly dawned on me. What if the trains are cancelled? Shit, how would I get back to the airport? What if the roads are closed and I can’t get a taxi? Picking up my pace, I made my way to the Queen Victoria building, navigated a path through the crowds of people shopping, drinking coffee, and eating lunch and headed down the stairs to the Town Hall Station. Ok, which train will get me to the airport? Should I just jump on any train and get to Central or find out which one goes directly to the airport? Pulling my phone out of my shoulder bag, I quickly searched for the city timetable, completed the Plan Your Trip details, and with 2 minutes to spare, tapped on and walked as briskly as I could down the stairs to Platform 2, conscious all the time of avoiding a fall.

Stepping onto the train, it was surprisingly easy to find a seat. I gazed around only to be met by a silent sea of down-turned heads, most of them nonchalantly focused on mobile phone screens, some reading the newspaper, a few quietly dozing. Twenty-two minutes later I made my way up the escalator to the arrivals area at Sydney airport.

Just as I downed the last mouthful of a coffee, Steve appeared. ‘Have you seen the news?’ he asked.
‘Yes’, I nodded. ‘Isn’t it awful’ I added, not sure what else to say.
‘I’ve been worried about you. I am so glad to see you. Let’s go home.’

The signs in French seem to indicate two separate counters: one for Malagasy nationals and the second for others but they are both unstaffed. Instead a surly, aggressive moustachioed official shrieks across the space and, in response, a young woman carrying some sort of notebook, runs to one of the counters. By this time, however, we have followed other travellers arriving at Ivato International Airport, apparently in the know, by walking past these counters and joining a queue to purchase our visas.

Confusion reigns. I have no idea whether we have broken the rules because travellers behind us are being processed by the young immigration officer. To my left I can see two lines of people making their way towards the baggage carousels: those that seem to be locals and another set of people that have been processed by the young woman. To my right there is another queue of people that seem to be presenting themselves to another set of officials behind a counter labelled ‘police’. I suggest to Steve that this is where we should go but he is concerned that we should have joined the line on the left. Nevertheless, armed with our visas we join a crowd in front of us and to our right. ‘Stephen John’, confirms the round faced policeman to my husband, and ‘Louise Rosemary’ he says to me, and hands back our passports. I think we are in the country.

Following a hardwired travelling practice, we return our passports to their dedicated storage places in our backpacks but before we have had a chance to close the zips and replace the backpacks on our shoulders we are surrounded by three porters all agitating to retrieve our luggage from the carousel a few steps away.

Two of them carry the luggage a few metres to the customs section; a third keeps close, seemingly in the hope that he can still get a piece of the action. But they are all irritated when we do not pay them for their services. Unfortunately, we have had no chance to get any local currency and our Euros are in too large a denomination.

Waved through customs by an official clearly uninterested in the contents of our bags, we make our way into a cacophonous confusion of people. The scene is discombobulating with Asian and Indian faces placing us in South East Asia rather than Africa. Some are calling to arriving family or friends, others are holding signs for travellers that they have been contracted to pick up. To our right I briefly notice a lady holding a Spice Roads sign and then a little further on a man tells us that he is giving us a lift into Antananarivo – otherwise known as Tana, the capital city of Madagascar. Neither of these things gel with our understanding of arrangements for the cycling trip that we are here for, and Steve’s preoccupation is in finding somewhere to get some local money. So, we ignore the Spice Roads lady thinking that she must be waiting for somebody else, and dismiss the offer of a lift as a ruse. Once we have sorted our cash supply we find our way to a taxi, negotiate our fare and make our way to our accommodation in Tana.

The road is dusty and heavily pot holed. Lining each side, flimsy timber structures provide a bare minimum of shelter for simple counters on which are crammed a plethora of cheap, gaudy products, a few vegetables, animal carcasses, and precious little piles of charcoal. Long discarded plastic bags and a scruffy array of other rubbish add to the general grubbiness. The scene is teeming with pedestrians, cyclists, motor bike riders and car drivers that weave between each other in relative harmony, the faces readily revealing the country’s mix of Indo/Malay, African and Arabic history.

With one day in Tana we decide to visit the capital city’s famous old royal palace. Located high above the city, we travel to the site in a taxi. An ancient Citroën, perhaps a very early version of the Dianne, is our vehicle. The passenger seats are tattered, and the interior lining has long gone as has any suspension. So we each clutch the seats in front of us as the miniature vehicle noisily clunks its way up the hilly streets towards the palace. Within minutes of setting off, the driver pulls into a petrol station. Using the 5000 Ariary (about AUS $2.50) deposit that we paid him, he purchases just enough petrol to complete the trip. The palace ruins give witness to the time when Madagascar was ruled by kings and queens who tested the innocence of people accused of a crime by feeding them poison. According to our guide (who told us that each of the many guides that work at the site do so half a day a month), if they survived they were innocent. Christians were not treated with as much generosity. One of the queens, an animist that disapproved of them, had them thrown off a nearby cliff.

The next taxi that takes us back to our hotel is also one of the tiny pale yellow Citroens that make up the city’s taxi fleet. Its in much better condition than the previous one. It is lined and the seats are covered with a rug. And, although the car is roll-started without a key, it runs reasonably smoothly. However, before we can take off the driver begs us a few minutes to replace a flat tyre, and along the way also stops to pick up the fuel necessary to complete the trip.

But as we discover over the next couple of weeks, the taxi drivers are relatively well off. Ahead of five other African countries, Madagascar is the sixth poorest country in the world. Just over seventy per cent of Malagasy people live in poverty, and more than fifty per cent live in extreme poverty, a fact that is impossible to ignore in the streets of Tana.

Madagascar’s population is dominated by young people. Little kids dressed in rags play in the dirt and detritus that surround shabby little timber and corrugated iron houses and shops; young men and women mingle, lean and lounge. Some boys no older than nine or ten are perhaps luckier because they have work. They transport huge loads of charcoal, metal, timber or rice by pushing or pulling the long arms of medieval looking wooden carts that sit on tiny rubber wheels. Skinny, bare chested and typically barefooted, the immense struggle is writ large on their young faces, which stream with sweat.

We bought our tickets to an Eagles tribute dinner dance, the third retro event of this type that we have attended in the last year. Run by the City Beach Function Centre in Wollongong, we were invited to all of them by Lesley, one of the ladies in Out of the Blue Singers, the choir in which I sing. Along with about a dozen other members of the choir and their partners, we went to the first dinner dance to give it a go. It was a bit of a ‘why not ‘decision. The food was great, the wine free flowing and the music terrific to dance to. So, that was enough reason to go to the second, which featured a band that played sixties music. Again, it was heaps of fun.

Although much of my choir’s repertoire could be described as retro pop, I have an embarrassingly poor knowledge of pop music, and had barely heard of the Eagles let alone any of their songs. In fact, on the afternoon before the show, I did a bit of googling and came upon and listened to Hotel California. Immediately, I realised that I knew some of the tune and just one line of the song – Welcome to Hotel California. But in listening to the lyrics for the first time I was struck by the surreal and terrifying story that they tell – a man is seduced by ‘such a lovely place, such a lovely face’ but cannot escape from some brutal entrapping force that pervades the hotel in the desert:
‘Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
‘Relax’ said the night man,
‘We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!’

To be honest, we were uncertain about the merits of going to this third show. Steve was nursing an injured knee (running with one of daughters and our eldest grandson a few months before) and this was going to be a serious impediment to his enjoyment.

Neither of us is a confident dancer. My ability to move on the dance floor is about as good as my ability to master the choreography that occasionally accompanies our choral performances. However, I don’t really care, I just love letting my hair down and moving in any way the music suggests to me. And, in coming to these shows Steve’s strategy is to ply himself with enough alcohol to feel relaxed enough to just dance like a crazy. There are no half measures for him, so suggestions that he could take it easy in order to avoid further hurting his knee were met with near contempt.

Even if we sat out a few of the songs, when we did get up on the floor, we both did our thing, moving like idiots together, becoming 16 and 18 again and not caring that were really much older.
Probably because we sat out more than we had at the previous shows, I had the opportunity to take in more of what was happening around me. The crowd was dominated by people in their fifties and sixties. Many in fashionable finery, others in jeans, a few wearing those ‘comfort’ shoes that are designed for oldies. One tall bloke discarded his shoes and was just wearing his socks.
Groups of women were dancing, dancing, dancing in sheer delight as if there was no tomorrow. Arms swinging, bodies twisting and turning, legs stepping, kicking, feet tapping irresistibly in time with the music. The sheer freedom and exhilaration of it all. Sidestepping in chorus line unison or moving in and out of ever forming and reforming circles of friendship.

Then there were the couples. Many embraced, arm in arm, lost to the rest of the crowd. A few old guys with crook hips or knees and big bellies swaggered on to the floor, hips and knees rocking, feet barely shuffling but nevertheless transported by the music back to discos, pubs and Police Boys’ dances from 40 or 50 years ago. We were all teenagers feeling hip, groovy, hanging out with our lovers and friends. Strutting, cooing, cuddling, arms romantically clutched around each other’s necks, staring into each other’s eyes.

We are avid theatregoers, we love seeing films and going to concerts, but neither of us has much appetite for going to the ballet or watching contemporary dance. I don’t think we really get it as an art form. But probably for the first time in my life I realised how utterly enrapturing and magical dance can be as an expression of love and friendship. And by contrast with the seductive nightmarish qualities of the Hotel California, we could happily leave our sweet fantasy world when the music died.

Louise Meyrick

My brother-in-law Tony warned my husband that he might not want to visit the gents’ toilet. We were on a cycling trip in the UK and had just finished morning coffee at a lovely café overlooking the River Tone in a little town called Taunton. Ignoring his advice, Steve returned with a wry smile and agreed that the turd in the toilet was indeed very large. Much merriment was shared as we contemplated the difficult task that lay ahead for the café staff in attempting to clear the toilet of its hefty load. Would they need a knife or perhaps blast it with hot water to break it up?

Toileting in India was always a challenge in 1977, when Steve and I backpacked our way through south east and central Asia to Europe and the UK, but one experience stays with me more than any other. We travelled on an overnight bus from Bangalore to Goa. Early in the morning, a comfort stop dropped us in a small barren looking town called Hubli next to an open field at the far end of which was a toilet block. We descended from the bus, weary from the muscle-aching half sleep that comes with travelling at speed on pot-holed roads, and started to walk along a debri-laden path that ran alongside the field. As we did so, we were confronted by the image of a noisy, angry mob of men who chased and killed a mangy dog on the field. Gaunt and dishevelled, the men hit the dog repeatedly with heavy blocks of woods, the creature’s body bouncing up and down with each deadly strike. Perhaps the dog had done something to make them angry, but there was something about their vicious determination which made me wonder whether it might be their next meal.

With eyes turned away, and my heart still pacing from this shocking scene, I made my way to the women’s toilet block. One hand clutching toilet paper in my pocket, I tentatively stepped into the L shaped concrete building. A shaft of sunlight cutting across the entrance revealed sloppy piles of shit lying on almost all of the available floor space. My second hand went straight to my nose to offer some protection from the nauseating smell, and I tightened my toes in my shoes in an instinctive but futile attempt to protect my shoes from treading on the squishy brown mess.

By this time, we had been on the road for a couple of months and had become accustomed to the awful smells and sights on offer in public toilets. However, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw as I turned the corner into the main area of the toilet block.
Squatting on the footholds of each of the five door-less cubicles were old women. Each was gently swaying backwards and forwards, her bare feet gripping the porcelain beneath her, in order to keep her balance. Each was sound asleep. With grey hair pulled back in a neat bun, each was wearing a simple white and spotlessly clean cotton sari.

This was a perfectly awful personification of the utter hopelessness of poverty; it was also a picture of grace and beauty.

During this trip we discovered that toilets came in a number of forms in Afghanistan. Our entry into the country was via Peshawar, Pakistan from where we travelled to Kabul in an old truck that was laden with a miscellany of plastic and wooden wares that bulged over the sides of the vehicle and doubled its height. Although the distance along the Jalalabad Highway through the Khyber Pass is only 200 kilometres, the trip took about 8 hours. The terrain was rugged, the road narrow, steep and winding, and at times the driver needed to edge the truck through highway passages that threatened to disgorge its precariously packed load.

Our driver had offered us the lift ‘baksheesh’, and his generosity extended to also inviting us to have some of his hashish. While we didn’t share this part of the journey with him, we somehow managed to engage in congenial conversation for most of the way, using hand and facial gestures, about Afghanistan, his truck, the Khyber Pass, his wife and kids, our relationship, our travels, Australia.
Half way through the journey, we stopped to eat, and shared a steaming hot chicken stew and flat bread with him and an afghan policeman who was also passing through the area. The place was a lone mud brick structure, just big enough for the four of us to sit on the straw covered earthen floor. The meal was cooked by a local tribesman on a woodfire, and its aroma and taste were gently delicious and restorative. I was just recovering from a bout of Delhi belly and this was the first real meal that I had been able to eat in about a week. The conversation, challenged by our lack of a common language, was again halting but warm, the situation strangely free of any sense of menace that the policeman’s uniform and gun or the truck driver’s supply of hashish could have created.

Toilets were a rarity in this rugged, arid, mountainous terrain, and along the Jalalabad Highway there were few places behind which to easily hide. In addition, we did not see many other women travellers and there were certainly no women in this tiny outpost on the Khyber Pass. But on this day, there was a toilet. So, before having the meal, I made my way along a narrow rocky path to it. Located about 50 metres behind the café, the toilet was a rickety wooden box with a hole in the floor and two concrete footholds, just within reach of which was a tub of water. There was no door, and yet, as I squatted, I felt solitary, and strangely safe and private. All I could hear was the wind blowing furiously. All I could see was a wall of mountains.

Herat was a fascinating city and, while it was just as smelly, dirty and chaotic as Kabul, we found it more attractive. We walked along dusty, noisy streets and crowded alleyways, where most of the buildings were simple mud brick structures with cut outs in place of windows and doors. We made our way between colourfully decorated horse carts and clapped out old cars, a wheat grinder driven by a camel, and fly infested sheep and goat carcases hanging from hooks on the side of the road. Narrow alley ways revealed noisy, messy bazaars full of all sorts of household paraphernalia from gaudy plastic goods to wool blanket shawls and densely patterned rugs, exotically engraved brass ornaments and leather goods, including a sturdy rectangular leather bag that we bought for Steve.

The city also indulged our taste buds with the country’s own form of mouth wateringly delicious roti – long narrow lengths of flat bread baked by being slapped onto the wall of a mud brick oven. Ours was purchased fresh from the oven – so it was piping hot, and the baker placed a huge chunk of sweet fibrous halva on it. But the highlight of the city was the magnificent 800-year-old Friday Mosque, covered in intricate geometric patterned blue mosaic tiles.

Although our practice was to choose, not quite the cheapest, but the Lonely Planet Guide’s second cheapest recommendations, our options for accommodation were often fairly spartan. The bathroom, laundry and toilet ‘amenities’ at the hotel we stayed at in Herat consisted of one grey concrete floored room with water supplied to a long trough which sat along one of the walls. Turds, large, deep brown and firm lay in neat piles on the floor. I recall staring at them – there were so many they were impossible to ignore – and wondering whether their dark brown colour, solidity and sickly, pungent smell were a result of the high meat content of the Afghani diet. On the floor near the trough stood a few bright red long-spouted plastic pots from which water was poured in lieu of toilet paper and flowed onto the floor. No doubt, at some other time of the day somebody would have the job of washing the turds away to become part of the local sewerage system. But in the meantime, we found a safe foothold at the troughs to wash ourselves and our clothes.

More than 30 years later, Steve and I did a six-week trip to South America. By contrast with our year of backpacking, this was not a $20 per day adventure: it was our reward to ourselves after having sold our company. As well as spending ten days cruising around the Galapagos Islands, and exploring the wonders of Ecuador, and a little of Chile and Argentina, we joined a small group of other travellers to walk the Inca Trail, a four-day trek through steep, rugged terrain to Machu Pichu.

According to the strict government regulations a maximum of 500 people that can be on the Trail at any one time, and they must also be accompanied by government qualified and licenced guides. Ours was a highly competent and wonderfully supportive woman called Maria. As well as providing an ongoing commentary about the Incas and their travails at the hands of the invading Spanish, Maria also indulged my delight in the complex and changing landscape.

This was our first trip to South America and I knew next to nothing about any of the countries including Peru. So, while I was excited to discover the history and culture of the country, and enjoyed the novelty of seeing lamas nearby, including a huge one that prodded me in the back as I stood looking at an ancient Inca settlement, I was also gobsmacked by the natural beauty of the rainforests and the open rocky terrain through which we walked. And, an unexpected bonus was discovering that some of my favourite plants that grow in our garden at home are indigenous to Peru. I enjoyed the novelty of seeing fleshy-leaved begonias with delicate red, orange, pink or white flowers, and bright pink and purple edged flowers that protruded proud and strong from the centre of huge bromeliads, at each turn of the path.

Among the government regulations affecting the trek was one limiting camping to specified locations, all of which had toilets, or access to nearby villagers’ toilets. Most of these could be flushed; some just made use of a bucket of water located inside or just outside the cubicle. One of the peculiarities of the toilets was that soiled toilet paper was not dropped into the toilet bowl but was instead put into a bucket that sat next to the squatting footholds.

When we arrived at each of the three campsites in early evening, the toilets were relatively clean. However, a visit by torchlight in the middle of the night was more problematic. And, by the following morning when the serious task of shitting typically took place, the toilets were breathtakingly awful. Once the door was closed, and the benefit of sunlight lost, the challenge was to disrobe without letting your trouser legs touch the floor. Imprisoned in this tiny dark chamber, thankful for the protection provided by hiking boots, the senses were assaulted by a thick smelly stew of screwed up sheets of wet, soiled toilet paper as well as ruddy, used tampons and sanitary pads, all of which spilled over the bucket and onto the floor.

The fourth and final day of the trek began in the cold darkness at about 3.00am. This was to enable us to reach Machu Pichu in time to see the wondrous ruins emerge from the mist with the rising sun. Keen to avoid missing out on this experience, Steve and I secured a spot towards the front of the queue, which, within minutes, swelled to about 100 trekkers, all of us donned in familiar brands of warm clothing and hiking boots and carrying day packs, ready for the final stage of our pilgrimage.

Shivering with cold and nervous excitement, we eagerly waited for the signal to start walking, when I was suddenly gripped by stomach cramps. Reluctant to lose our place in the queue, I nevertheless realised that I just had to find a toilet as quickly as possible.

Even with the light cast by head torches, it was difficult to find any of the campsites carefully hidden from the trail. After about 200 metres, the twinkling of torchlights to my right revealed the first toilets. These were the men’s and would have been fine, but they were all occupied, as were the adjacent set that were for women. My stomach cramps threatening to explode, I was desperate to find a loo, when I suddenly saw a huddle of young women standing near a third block. They were American, I would say in their early to mid-twenties, and from their new colour coordinated trekking gear, and refined hairdos and makeup, almost certainly city girls – and probably university students.
‘Are any of these free?’, I anxiously asked. ‘Well, yes’, one of them said squeamishly, ‘but you can’t use them. They’re disgusting’. ‘Ok’, I said and raced past them into the nearest cubicle. It was awful. The floor was awash with putrid stinking shit mixed with soiled paper and urine. The toilet seat was a mess of muddy shoe marks. But with the finesse of a trapeze artist, I squatted over the bowl and gave my erupting intestines full flight.

In India, Afghanistan and Peru, shitting was – and probably still can be – difficult to deal with. Often, toilets are at least uncomfortable, and sometimes seriously challenge not just our senses but also our perceptions of hygiene and cleanliness. To a considerable degree, however, I have taken for granted that the ugly, smelly presence of human waste – along with dilapidated housing, dirty streets and disfigured bodies – is almost inevitable in an underdeveloped country.

To many travellers, San Francisco is an exotic place but perhaps not a place that one would expect to have to worry about public sanitation. However, an article in a recent edition of The Economist(1) provides a stark reminder of how powerful and yet fragile human waste management is as a measure of societal wellbeing, and more fundamentally, our understanding of the hallmarks of a civilised society.

Because of a complex array of market factors there is a shortage of housing, and in particular social housing, in the city. As a result, about 7500 people or nearly 1 % of the 871,000 that live in the US’s second most expensive city, are homeless. Last year, there were 16,022 complaints to the City and County of San Francisco about human waste on the streets. This represents a 2.5-fold increase in the number of complaints since 2011.

People are revolted by the presence of the stuff; some avoid sidewalks in fear of seeing it, smelling it or treading in it. To local residents and visitors alike – those that have places in which to live – it is an affront to their expectations of a civilised society. The homeless that defecate on the streets, probably wouldn’t disagree. However, they very likely also feel desperate, hopeless and abandoned by society.

(1) The Economist, June 2nd-8th 2018, page 30

I turn right off Springhill Road into Masters Road, when I notice a ute in front of me bearing a sticker. The only word that I can reliably make out is ‘Fat’ and I think that the next word is ‘chick’. Surely not, I think. Curious I think. Is the driver a fat chick? Does the driver have some form of fetish for a ‘fat chick?

The vehicle momentarily speeds away but then takes the Figtree exit that I am headed for. The vehicle slows down to meet the 50 kilometres per hour speed limit and to negotiate the exit onto the Avenue. I am now able to get a better view of the sticker. It seems to read ‘Fat chick make me sick’. I follow him along the Avenue and our cars stop for the red light in front of Figtree Grove – formerly Westfield. So, I have another opportunity to read the sticker.

My first reaction is one of disgust at the cruelty of the message. But this is also mixed with the thought that the sticker maker and sticker buyer are both a bit thick because the statement either contains a grammatical error or is a command. As it is written it is a command for a fat chick to make the owner sick. I surmise that this is a mistake and the intended meaning is that Fat chicks make the driver sick. Another set of traffic lights at the intersection of the Avenue and the Princes Highway avails me a chance not only to confirm the statement but to gain a glimpse of the driver and his passenger before they turn left and disappear. He’s probably in his twenties as is his pony tailed female friend.

Then my mind goes to a different place. Firstly, I wonder about the thought processes and actions that led him to get the sticker. Did he search for and then buy it online after seeing a young fat woman that he found ugly? I assume the term ‘chick’ refers to a young woman. Did he come across the sticker in a shop, and on a whim, decide to buy it because it reflected his attitude about young fat women.

A quick search online when I got home made me realise that I was on the wrong track entirely. There is a whole series of ‘fat chicks’ stickers which it is cool to place on a car bumper. Amazon sells them as does an Australian motor head’s website, Street FX Motorsport, where stickers bearing the message ‘no fat chicks – car will scrape’ are promoted as the perfect addition to your car or as a laugh for your mates.

Aghast at this new knowledge, I wondered how the females in his life reacted to his purchase. Did his mum, or his sister or his girlfriend question his motives in placing it on the back window of his ute. Who is he talking to? Does he want other drivers to honk their sympathy or agreement? What about his dad or his brothers or his grandad? What about the other people with whom he works. Does any of them think that there is something unkind and dehumanising about the sticker? I really hope so.

The directions on my information sheet told me to enter at the main entrance of the convent on St Heliers St and follow the signs to the Linen Room. As I made my way through the elegant grounds of the complex, past a café and other food outlets, contemporary art installations, and pop up markets, and then to my destination for the day, it dawned on me that I had a connection to the convent and its history. This was the ‘Linen Room’ of the old Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, a huge double room with gloriously high ceilings and ornately carved mahogany wood work.

In its heyday the Linen Room would have been a less joyous space serving a less genteel or romantic function. It was an industrial laundry – Victoria’s biggest – run by the Good Shepherd sisters, with the labour provided by its female inmates – juvenile delinquents placed there via court orders by the police, or young unwed pregnant women sent there by their parents in an attempt to avoid moral opprobrium.

The convent closed in 1972, and around that time, my Mum’s cousin Naomi lived there. A social worker by profession, Naomi was also a Good Shepherd sister. While she spent much of her working life in the order’s convent in Leederville Western Australia, she also spent some time at Abbotsford.

I seem to recall that this was also the location of a dramatic standoff staged by a number of young inmates who climbed onto the roof, either as a protest against their incarceration or just as an act of gleeful rebellion. I have vague memories of TV news footage of police cars and ambulances assembled in the grounds trying to encourage the young women back to safety. I was a young woman myself at the time and the incident reverberated not just because of Naomi’s association with the place. She had earlier given me the opportunity to spend a couple of days at the Leederville convent getting some insights into social work and what the Good Shepherd sisters did with young women. The two days were enough to put me off social work for life.

Just a few years ago I sought out Naomi’s assistance to provide me with some documented evidence of my maternal grandmother’s stay at the Leederville convent from 1931 to 1934. I know she stayed there because the state government child welfare records attest to this fact. My mum Pat and her brother Joey– aged 4 and 5 respectively – were made wards of the state in 1931 ‘under a Court Committal Warrant issued in Perth’ and placed in St Vincent’s Foundling Home for the next three years.

Immediately next door was the Good Shepherd Convent, where their mother Vera had been placed having suffered a nervous breakdown, which the child welfare records suggested had ‘affected her slightly mentally’. This was the great depression. My grandfather, destitute and ravaged by alcohol, had gone off rabbit shooting, a common way to scrape together a living.

Aside from their economic woes, in 1928 my grandmother had also suffered the loss of a third child called Joan – aged three and a half months, to ‘Marasmus Asthenia’ or malnutrition. They were living in Belka – not much more than a rail siding – in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. 

Sadly, search of the records at Leederville and at the head office in Abbotsford failed to find anything about my grandmother’s time under the Good Shepherd sisters’ care. My mum believes that Vera gave birth to a fourth child while staying in the convent. While there are no records of this, it is very likely that the child was informally adopted out, the shame carefully hidden by my grandmother’s better-off siblings and the Good shepherd sisters.

Today, I was one of about 150 people gathered at the convent to participate in a singing workshop with Clare Bowditch, a popular singer with a solid following in Melbourne.

Ranging in age from their late twenties through to their sixties (my age), most of the people were from Melbourne, and I suspect the more hip parts of the city. Attire was casual and dominated by colourful summery outfits that you would see in Brunswick St boutiques. A handful of men were among the crowd, mostly in their 40s or older.

He was sitting by himself near the wall, eyes down, nervously fiddling with his smart phone. Perhaps about 16 or 17, with warm brown skin and finely sculpted Asian features, he was a stand-out among the buzz of conversations that filled the room.

A lone visitor to Melbourne, I wondered whether I should say hello to this boy-man. As he lifted his head and looked out into the crowd I decided that I would approach him. Immediately, he stood, and his beautiful face lit up with a gorgeous smile. ‘I’m Zion’, he said, and without missing a beat we were talking.

As a guess, I thought perhaps he was Vietnamese. ‘No’, he said, ‘I’m a bit Chinese, a bit Indian and I’ve got some European somewhere’, as his voice trailed off.

He was just a few weeks into year 11 and vocal studies was one of his subjects. This was enough to establish a link because Dom, my eldest daughter had done exactly the same in her HSC just over 20 years earlier. Then our second point of contact was revealed when he told me that he was at Footscray City College. Dom’s first born, Joe had just started there and, as a fresh 7th grader, was still settling in. Zion offered to speak to the year 7 coordinator to look out for Joe. I was very touched by his readiness to do this.

Coming to the choral workshop, which was promoted as an opportunity for people who have had little or no singing experience to ‘have a go’, was a big deal for Zion. His Mum suggested that he do so as a way of gaining some performance experience. He told me that he was worried about how he will go with his music studies, nervous because, by contrast with others in his class, he had only just begun to learn singing. But, so far, his assessment marks had been about the same as theirs. He was reassured by this; proud of it. Being at the workshop was clearly an important part of his efforts to build his confidence.

Ok, I thought. I had better not outstay my welcome. So, I left my bag on top of a stack of plastic chairs that were clustered behind and next to where we had been standing and made my way to the Ladies’ toilet. When I returned a few minutes later, Clare had appeared, and people were picking up cushions or grabbing chairs and moving into the workshop space. I retrieved my bag and took a chair. As I did so, Zion followed me, positioning his chair next to mine at the back of the crowd.

As is usual in a choral setting, Clare took us through a series of warm up exercises that involved walking around the room, moving our bodies in silly ways and making silly noises. Zion was fine with that. Returning to the safety of our chairs, we nodded to each other and he added a smile of delight and relief.

Then Clare introduced our first song, the simple but powerful ‘Wade in the Water’. Zion’s voice was tentative, barely audible, taking a while to find the correct notes. As the morning progressed, however, I could hear him more clearly. The notes spot on, the timbre round and warm. The second song, Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’, was a little more complex. Clare introduced a couple of alternative harmonies. Most of the people stayed with the safety of the melody but Zion chose one of the harmonies, singing them confidently, beautifully. I gently touched him on the arm, smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

At lunch time we went our separate ways, so when we returned to the afternoon session of the workshop, I was a bit surprised that he again chose the safety of our spot at the back of the crowd.

The preparatory notes sent to us before the workshop included advice about bringing something special to wear at the performance for family and friends. In opening the afternoon session, Clare gave us a few tips about managing performance nerves and making the most of life. I found the life lessons a little tiresome, a bit too borrowed from the ‘wellness’ school. Then she reminded us about the dressing up advice for our performance later in the afternoon. ‘Have you got your suit?’, I jokingly asked Zion. I think I shouldn’t have said that. ‘No, I’ve got casual pants and a shirt’. ‘Great’, I said. We both chuckled but there was something in his tone which suggested that I may have momentarily shaken his confidence, and I instantly regretted it.

A third song – not my favourite – and then a fourth song were introduced: Crowded House’s ballad ‘Fall at Your Feet’. Clare suggested that we all move closer to the front. I dragged my chair a little way forward, not wanting to move too far from the comfort of my spot in the back corner. However, Zion left his chair, and made his way into the thick of the crowd and found a place on the floor among the cushion sitters. Yes, I thought, that’s a good thing.

At about 4.00 o clock, the workshop finished, and we were given half an hour to get a bit tizzed up and to rest before a final dress rehearsal and our performance.

My preparations took about 10 minutes at the most. So, I returned to the reception area where people were chatting, having a cuppa and one of the scrumptious treats on offer, or sorting out their outfits.

Then through the crowd I spotted Zion. He was sitting on the other side of the room in the same place he had been early in the morning. He now had another chair in front of him and on it was assembled a panoply of gorgeous cosmetics – foundation, blush, eye shadow, eye liner and mascara – which he was applying with great poise and grace. I glanced at him fleetingly, careful not to let him see me doing so but he was in a bubble of self-absorbed concentration, so I doubt he was aware of me, or anybody else in the room. Nor would it seem that they were looking at him either. Just before 5.00 o’clock, a middle-aged woman – perhaps gay – with two little children in tow made her way to Zion and embraced him, and I immediately wondered whether this was his mum and sister and brother.

Newly named Los Valientes – the brave ones – our 150-voice choir performed our four songs; we were loud, a bit rough on the edges but entertaining, and the audience, sitting on chairs or on the floor or hugging the walls just a few metres away, rewarded us with enthusiastic cheering and applause – the type that reflects unconditional love and support.

Afterwards I made my way back through the noisy exuberant crowd of singers and their fans gathered in the reception area. I found Zion with his family. He was triumphant – beaming – as he introduced me to his Mum who said that she was so proud of his performance that she had cried, and with that Zion and I hugged each other. I wished him good luck with his singing and with school and his career.

Just for a moment, all was right in the world. What a joyous experience.

I have never felt so elated; so excited, so satisfied with a travel experience. I am not quite sure why.
Certainly, one of the factors is our sense of pride in completing the mission that we set out to achieve. We actually did it. We rode from Wollongong to Melbourne, over a distance of 1295 kilometres, following a route that was more or less coastal but avoided all but 200 kilometres of the Princes Highway. We are not super athletes, just a couple of sixty somethings that have only recently discovered that we enjoy cycling, and that if you ride one day after the other, you can eventually ride quite a long way!
Arriving in Melbourne was quietly and smilingly surreal. I say ‘quietly’ and ‘smilingly’ because our entry to Melbourne CBD was via Gardiner’s Creek Trail and then the Yarra Trail, a beautiful tree lined path that meanders along one side and then the other of the Yarra River and didn’t really challenge our cycling skills but instead enabled us to move at a gentle pace. But this was really just the treble cleft where the melody and the rhythm needed to be subdued in order to enable us to maintain our cool, and to get to the finish line without a hiccup. In tension with this quiet control, the bass cleft was playing a more robust tune: shit, we are nearly there; we have really done it; we are in Melbourne.
Arrivals were a source of excitement and achievement on just about all of the 26 days of our journey. The mere fact of cycling into towns such as Ulladulla or Batemans Bay that we had previously travelled to by car was very satisfying. So were departures, especially in the first few days, when the further we travelled away from Wollongong the more we felt the growing sense of adventure and riskiness of unfamiliar surroundings.
But the trip was much more than a series of milestones, of kilometres clocked up, or of difficult ascents climbed. It was also a myriad of simple innovations such as the marvellous rest that can be had on a space blanket that occupies the area of a mobile phone but weighs far less, and yet unfolds to form a blanket big enough for both of us to lie on.
Travelling by bike – being on a bike – enabled us to become deeply immersed in our surroundings. As we pushed up hills at 5 kilometres per hour the senses slowed, taking in intricate details of tiny purple, pink, yellow or white wildflowers, or the gaudy red bulbous fruit on native palms. Smells were acutely experienced: the aromatic perfume of eucalyptus trees in the early morning sun; the sweet smell of freshly cut grass; the anticipatory smell of burning trees, the acrid smell of seaweed; the fetid, swollen hairless corpse of a wombat. Early morning cold stung the tip of the nose, hammered our fingers and sliced at our legs, especially in a rapid descent. The midday sun warmed and then scorched our faces, arms and legs, creating streams of sweat that trickled down our backs and dripped down our foreheads and into our eyes. Droplets of rain crowded my glasses until I was able to wipe each lens with my gloves.
Floral tributes to road accident victims generated a sense of intense fear forcing me to ride past as quickly but as carefully as my legs and arms and eyes and brain would allow. A desire to understand something about the life that had been lost on this bit of road would be pushed out of my consciousness in case the distraction would cause me to fall into the unknown trap that had killed the person whose memory was captured by the little cross and the dead bunch of flowers.
Throughout the nearly four weeks of cycling, the journey felt like a pilgrimage. Each day we were afforded the privilege of meeting people that simply wanted to talk with us or to help us. Perhaps it was the relative novelty – the oddity – of two not-so-young people travelling on bicycles and carrying their luggage in just two bright orange panniers that acted as a magnet. Free of the protective shell that a car offers most travellers, perhaps we were more accessible and more approachable. On the other hand, carrying so little with us, it was highly unlikely that we were going to hang around for very long. Quite clearly, we were on a journey; we were moving through. Whatever the truth of these speculations, we met far more people than we had ever met in any of our many travels over the previous 40 years. Some were attracted by our vulnerability, and very fortunately reached out to help when we really needed it.
The southern exit from Tathra involves a steep ascent that begins on a very tight bend in the road and continues for a couple of kilometres before flattening out a little. Having completed this tight pinch, my thigh muscles burning, we were about 10 kilometres out of town when I realised that I could no longer ignore the scraping sound that the bike was making every time I engaged the brakes. So, we stopped on the verge, offloaded the panniers and attempted to identify what was causing the noise. Our bike mechanic skills are less than rudimentary so it is not surprising that we could not work out what was wrong. Fortunately, and unusually, there was a bike shop in Tathra. Having rung to check that there was someone in the shop that would be there to help us, we decided to ride back.
We were just in the process of reassembling our gear when I noticed a lady glance at us as she drove past in a grey SUV. Then about 100 metres down the road she did a u turn and pulled up across the road from us.
‘Are you ok?’ she called.
With relief outstripping embarrassment, we accepted her offer to take me and my bike back into Tathra. There was just enough room to fit my bike in the back of her car, so Steve rode back. She was a local resident, a nurse that worked in a nearby hospital. We chatted about our trip and her work and agreed that Tathra is a lovely place.
‘Where will you sleep tonight if you have to stay in Tathra?’.
‘Oh, we’ll be ok, but let’s hope that we can get the bike fixed and reach our Merimbula destination’, I said, adding that we had accommodation booked there.
‘Well if things don’t work out as you hope, you are welcome to stay at my place.’
As it happened the problem with the bike was simple to fix and so we didn’t need to take up her kind offer but she wouldn’t leave until we had found this out from the bloke in the bike shop. And then, she left, and I realised that I didn’t know her name or how to contact her to properly thank her and to let her know that we made it to Merimbula safely that night.
We also had among the most profoundly moving conversations with people.
There was the cheery, chatty man in his late fifties who was working in a pub that we stayed at somewhere on the Gippsland coast. He had lived in the tiny town all his adult life and for most of that time had run the local real estate agency until his wife needed to have a series of life saving operations in Melbourne for a failing heart. He explained that the business was being neglected because of the time spent in Melbourne. To recover the cost of her health care he sold the business and took up a job on a gas pipeline construction project in central Australia.
Working on a fly in fly out basis, he did 12 hour shifts for 14 days in a row and then had seven days off. At least two of these off days were spent travelling to and from work in a finely calibrated commute involving bus, train and plane. He explained that if the 14-hour flight from Mt Isa via Brisbane was more than 15 minutes late arriving in Melbourne, he would miss his train and bus connections and have stay overnight in Melbourne. So, the rostered days on were preceded and proceeded by travelling days which lasted at least 20 hours, a schedule that he maintained for two years until their debts were cleared. This was a chapter in his life. His wife needed lifesaving medical treatment and, as a consequence, they needed a way of clearing their debts. There was no braggadocio, nor any resentment, just a set of assumptions about a commitment to love.
There are virtually no off-road cycling trails in NSW, so it was with great pleasure that we travelled on a number of unpaved rail trails through the Victorian part of the trip. The first of these took us from Orbost to the tiny settlement of Nowa Nowa, where we stayed for a couple of nights in a tiny cabin on the shore of Lake Tyers. A short walk across the road took us to the only place to eat, the Nowa Nowa Hotel Motel where we could expect to get a chicken ‘parma’ and chips or perhaps a steak and chips, the typical pub fare for most of the south-east coast.
We were just about to walk into the pub when we noticed two men on bicycles approaching us from the rail trail. Their bikes saddled with bulging panniers, this called for an exchange about travel experiences. ‘Hi, where have you ridden from today?’, I asked the younger of the two, a man perhaps in his early forties, longish brown hair, skinny and with a physique that suggested that this was not a familiar pastime. ‘We started in Orbost; left there this morning’, he responded. ‘I’m not a cyclist. I’m accompanying Casey’. In the background, I caught a glance of Casey talking with Steve. Perhaps in his early seventies, his old cycling shirt and nicks revealed legs that had mastered many a hill. The bike was newish looking – probably hired – but it became immediately obvious from the well-worn state of his clothing and panniers, and the makeshift array of other gear on his bike secured by old Occy straps that he was a seasoned two-wheeled traveller.
‘My wife died just a couple of weeks ago and Casey is her dad.’ Casey and his wife were Canadians living in Hong Kong where they had settled some thirty years earlier to establish a Christian bookshop. Shortly after arriving, they adopted Anne when she was a little girl.
‘They travelled to Australia to be with Anne in her last days. Anne’s mum has gone back to Hong Kong, but Casey had always wanted to take Anne on a cycling tour. So, this trip is in honour of her’.
‘Oh my god,’ I said, shocked by the story that slipped from his lips within minutes of us saying hello to each other.
‘Yes,’ he stoically continued. ‘We only met six months ago and fell in love almost immediately. I’m a graphic designer and she was studying fine arts at UWS. We met at uni. Then she was diagnosed with Leukaemia. We got married when she was in hospital. I can’t believe my luck. It took all these years to find somebody.’
‘That’s terrible. What will you do now?’
‘I’m taking a break from work. After this trip – we finish in Bairnsdale – I will go to Hong Kong with Casey and from there just wait and see what happens.’
The four of us ate dinner together at the pub, and as we were bringing back our drinks to the table I said, ‘I’m Louise by the way’. ‘I’m Quentin’, he smiled.
Our accommodation varied a great deal, ranging from simple motel rooms, a room in a pub, riverside and mountain cabins, an occasional apartment, and even a converted church. After a long day of riding just under a hundred kilometres from Morewell up across some particularly hilly (there really were only a handful of stretches that could be described as flat) and intensely beautiful dairy country, we arrived at a comfortable cottage sitting in a pretty garden behind an isolated residential home located on the outskirts of Koonwarra. Our hosts were a retired couple, probably in their early seventies: she formerly a music teacher and he a farmer. Because there was nowhere within easy walking distance to buy dinner or its makings, the landlady had kindly agreed to provide us with dinner for the first of the two nights we were staying there. The following day was a rest day so we would have plenty of time to take a leisurely ride into the village to pick up some food for the remaining meals. While Steve was out shopping, I returned the casserole dish to the landlady. Naturally, I made a point of complimenting her on the cosy comfort of the accommodation, and she told me with much pride that their guests include travellers from all over the world, including a famous European musician who had been on a concert tour in the region some months beforehand.
I congratulated her on their success. However, her response was not what I was expecting.
‘Actually, it’s just as well it’s working,’ she said, with a look of resignation. ‘We lost all of our life savings a few months ago’.
Responding to my expressions of sympathy and horror, she continued to share her story.
Her husband had invested all of their super funds with a financial planner and had lost the lot. They were not the only victims of the scam. It had happened to quite a few people in the area, and none of them was having any luck in getting any of the money back and not much luck in getting him prosecuted.
There was no malice or resentment towards the financial planner just sadness and a sense of powerlessness about their demise. But, there was something about her expression, which suggested that if her husband had been there in the room, she couldn’t have told me about the situation. His absence for a couple of hours enabled her to act on an impulse to share the burden of this terrible thing that had turned the cottage from an occasional hobby into a necessary source of income. ‘I am so sorry’, I lamely offered.
After about 15 kilometres of green rolling hills the ride from Koonwarra gave way to one of the easiest stretches of cycling through relatively flat, dry coastal plains, taking us back to the salty air of the coast at Inverloch. We arrived at this very pretty little town on the Gippsland coast, a few minutes before 9.00am. This was just in time to have to navigate a path through SUVs dropping kids off at school. Negotiating our way through the traffic, we were brought to a stop at a school crossing where a lollipop lady, a shock of bottle blonde hair and a huge smile, sang and danced the kids across the road, swinging the lollipop sign in time with her song and dance routine with the exuberance and finesse of a veteran calisthenics champion.
A second chance encounter that day was quieter but deeply moving. As we stood overlooking the sand flats outside Inverloch, an elderly man using a walking frame shuffled slowly past our vantage point. We started talking, and, with a heavy German accent, he described how he had observed the changes in the shape of the sand bar and the movement of the waters over the course of the year. His wonder and excitement at the power and mystery of these natural forces was obvious and infectious. As we got ready to leave, he said, pointing to the frame, ‘I use this. I have fused vertebrae in my lower back. But’ – he pointed to the track – ‘I have this. It is the best exercise. And it is free. And the air here is clear. It is the best medicine. And it is free’. And he smiled a beautiful smile.
Phillip Island was really our last destination before reaching the end of the journey in Melbourne. It was also one of just a few opportunities to catch up with friends. We stayed in Cowes, the most significant settlement on the island. It’s here that we spent a glorious evening at a great pizza place called the Fat Seagull reigniting our friendship with Ross and Barbara Fairhurst and the other members of the Vivace Singers, an a cappella group that had impressed the crowds with their glorious madrigals at a choral festival that I had run in Wollongong in late 2013. The food and wine were good. The company and conversation were vibrant, and the madrigals were magical.
Our plans for reaching Melbourne were to catch a ferry the next morning from Cowes to Stoney Point, and then a connecting train to Frankston, from where we would ride the final leg of our journey into Melbourne. But the weather gods played foul with this neat itinerary, and instead we sort refuge in a maxi taxi that took us and our bikes all of the 100 kilometres to Frankston.
This was the first time we had been in a motor vehicle in nearly four weeks. Outside, the rain pelted down, shrouding the scenery that passed by at what seemed to our cycling speed brains to be a phenomenal speed. Inside felt warm and safe. Fortunately, Tony, the taxi driver was chatty and pleasant, the sort of man that had probably done it tough but was grateful for his lot. He was a Collingwood fan and we follow the West Coast Eagles. With footy and parenthood in common, and his curiosity and our excitement about our cycling trip, conversation flowed easily. And then his phone rang. ‘Do you mind if I take this call? It’s my daughter and I don’t like not answering.’ ‘Of course’, we responded.
Within seconds the casual upbeat tone became tender, concerned, encouraging. His daughter, he shared with us, was one of two police officers that had been seriously burnt some 15 months earlier when a gas canister exploded at a flat in Melbourne that she and two other officers were visiting while on duty. She was doing it tough, not just physically but also mentally, and she needed to talk to her dad.
Then he told us about the do at his local pub that some friends had organised to raise some funds for his daughter’s rehabilitation. The evening included an auction of a Collingwood footy player’s guernsey, signed and framed. Tony put in a bid for the valuable icon, but others quickly outbid him until one bloke was triumphant, having paid an exorbitant amount for the privilege. Overwhelmed by the generosity of his friends and others that had dipped into their pockets, he told us that missing out on the guernsey was not a high price to pay. But as he was about to leave the pub, the bloke handed him the framed trophy. This is for you he said.
When we reached Frankston, he pulled in along the curb of a busy street in a standing only spot outside a series of tired grubby looking shops. The scene was one of crowded chaos and miserable poverty. Tony helped us remove the bikes and our gear onto the pavement. We probably should have said our goodbyes quickly so that we could give all our attention to assembling our bikes and loading our panniers. But, the moment was too important. We both threw our arms around him, thanked him for the lift and wished him and his daughter all the best.
August 2016

Singing is supposed to be good for you. Singing in a choir has the added benefit of providing social interaction among the singers. All of this sounds a bit clinical.
We had just performed in our last Sweet Adeline Convention. There was something rather poetic about the fact that it took place in our city, Wollongong. For me personally, it was doubly significant because the Wollongong Entertainment Centre was where I had first seen Out of the Blue Singers in 2003 and became instantly captivated by the chorus’s four-part a cappella performance of Simon and Garfunkel’s famous song, Sounds of Silence. It was the performance of this beautiful, hypnotic song that made me realise that I just had to become part of the choir. Being a ballad, the singers performed the song with intense emotional engagement but with very little physical movement. This was in contrast with what seemed to me to be curious choreographic movements that accompanied the performance of ‘up tunes’ by all of the choirs that graced the stage on that day.
However, Out of the Blue’s performance was so compelling that I momentarily ignored, and as it turns out, set aside for thirteen years, the weird idiosyncrasy colloquially called ‘choree’. I soon discovered this was but one of many anachronistic norms of women’s barbershop singing as advocated by Sweet Adelines International. Unlike some musical imports that change to suit and reflect local conditions, the performance practices that characterise women’s barbershop singing in Australia – and anywhere else in the world including Japan – are strictly upheld by the Sweet Adeline movement.
As a young child I was notoriously hopeless at picking up the words of songs or even committing to memory poems learnt at school. The exception I realise is the few prayers that I was required to learn by heart at the convent schools I attended in Perth. So, it is with a sense of amazement and deep satisfaction that I ponder the fact that I know many songs, and can hold my part in them in the choir: that I can contribute to the beautiful four-part harmonies that we sing.
Competition is the lifeblood of the Sweet Adelines, the centrepiece of the annual calendar for many member choruses (the term they use instead of ‘choir’), and a biannual requirement of maintaining membership.
Normally, each chorus must sing two songs: a ballad and an up tune, on which four judges from the US each allocate the chorus a score on four different criteria: music, sound, expression and showmanship. So, the judges award points not just for vocal quality and vowel accuracy (according to various American ears) but also for the way in which the chorus members make their way onto a stage, move into position and add choreography to the song. Of course, choice of costume and personal presentation of the singers are also important criteria. I recall one year our chorus losing points for the lack of uniformity of our eye make-up and the lack of ‘style’ of the hair do’s.
However, a few years ago, a new people’s choice category was introduced. As well as avoiding the burden of being subjected to a formal judgement and score, the new category’s focus on presenting a themed ‘show’ package (lasting no more than 10 minutes) appealed to our sense of creativity and play.
In what turned out to be our last performance in the national convention, we sang a set of three songs which were poignant, funny and joyfully rebellious. Replacing stories of unrequited or long-lost love somewhere in Mississippi or Carolina in the 1950’s, we were contemporary Australian women coming to terms with the realisation that we had lost our youthfulness and instead were at risk of becoming like our nagging, tired parents.
In place of the typical satin and sequins, we wore dreary brown aprons, and carried bright pink tea towels and fluffy dusters. Instead of the usual energetic stride and wide mouthed smiles that are expected of contestants, we dragged our way on to the stage, our hunched shoulders and sullen scowls conveying our weary acceptance of the abysmal lot that life had served up to us.
In yet to be revealed contrast with this suburban motif, one of our members, a sixty-year-old playing the role of Tinkerbell and wearing a lime green fairy dress and carrying a wand, skipped across the stage and into position on the risers. A second woman, also about sixty and dressed to look like an overgrown Pinocchio, wore a bright red tunic with yellow sleeves, black waist coat and a huge white collar from under which appeared a blue satin ribbon neck tie. This matched the ribbon that wrapped around her straw boater. Nodding at the audience with a silly gawky grin on her face, her entry was a perfectly clumsy caricature of the overgrown pointy nosed Disney character that she was portraying.
Their role in our daring little musical drama, part parody, part romance was to roughen the silken edges of the child-like dreams of these famous Disney characters with a touch of grown up reality.
The first word of our forlorn song was ‘help’, which we repeated over and over, beseeching the audience to save us from our demise.
But, by the end of the first song, we had ripped off our aprons in a bold rejection of the stereotypes that we had feared we were becoming to reveal gorgeous lolly pink and crimson costumes beneath. By contrast with the dreary reality of the first song, our second song, the well-known Disney theme, When You Wish Upon a Star, was the most romantic and lyrical of our set. It suggested that dreams come true when your wishes come from the heart. (When we first heard that the song was to become part of our repertoire, we shared childhood stories of having dinner in front of the TV while watching Disneyland on Sunday evenings.)
But of course, we also knew that Pinocchio doesn’t always tell the truth and that Tinkerbell’s promise that little girls will all blossom into beautiful happy ever after women was a mere fantasy. Nevertheless, in our third and final song we boldly dared to claim a new identity. Our bodies swaying and twisting in different discordant directions, the mantra was to ‘chillax’ and let yourself go, as we rejoiced in the newfound freedom of becoming whatever we wanted including crazy hipsters.
Only one other chorus performed in the people’s choice category. Being one of Australia’s largest and best choruses, they were taking a break from competing in Australia this year because their ambitions were focused on a much bigger target, the US convention that was to be held later in the year. Although the audience loudly cheered their support for us (mutual support of this kind is the norm at conventions), among the women that had been allocated the task of judging the two choruses, we were deemed to be the less popular chorus. Still to this day, we are very proud of our rebellious last hoorah to Sweet Adelines, and we laugh out loud when one or other of our lot claims that we were really cheated of that people’s choice award.
Normally, we take a break from rehearsals on the Wednesday following the convention and then celebrate our efforts and achievements with a party on the next Wednesday night.
Typically, a handful of partners, children or friends come along to the convention to give us support, to cheer us along, but the post-convention revelry is usually just for choir members. This year, an exception was made for one of our groupies, Pat’s daughter Jane who was visiting Wollongong from Melbourne.
About 18 months earlier, Jane and Pat’s son and grandson, Nick, then 17, had been seriously injured in a car accident. Every few weeks, Pat, retired and on a pension, would make the trip to Melbourne to see Nick, whose return to health continues to be painfully slow. On her return to rehearsals, we would ask how he was and offer sympathy and hugs. Every few months, Jane would post an update of Nick’s progress on Facebook and some of our members would respond with comments of support. Many also offered various forms of practical support.
Like many other women, Pat has been in the choir for many years. A former training manager for David Jones, she has a beautiful resonant bass voice – the lowest of the four parts that we sing, and is renowned for the smooth, seemingly effortless, physical warm-up routines that she frequently leads at the start of our weekly rehearsals. Indeed, she is one of our foundation members that date back to the choir’s establishment in 2002.
But that is all really immaterial. Friendships run deep among many members of the choir. More fundamentally, mutual respect and caring among all of our group are rock solid. Just as we rejoice in somebody’s good fortune, and celebrate birthdays, weddings and the arrival of new grandchildren, we are also there to offer support or to come together in grief, when the wheel of fortune is less kind.
When Pat mentioned that Jane was coming to Wollongong but was disappointed that she would miss out on seeing us at the convention, our directors not only decided to change the date of our party so that Jane could be there, but we performed our set for her, complete with our aprons and two-tone floral pink outfits.
The fare at our post-convention parties was, as usual, simple and make-do. Chicken, coleslaw and potato salad (picked up from the local Chicko’s takeaway outlet), soft drink and lots of wine were shared as various speeches gave due recognition to many in our ranks that had contributed in some way to our participation in the convention.
We thanked Vonny and Janette, our musical directors for their choice of such great songs and for their tireless commitment to guiding our performance over the previous five or so months. Lucy, Helen, Bronwyn and Rosemary, our four section leaders were also thanked for the many section practices that they had organised in their homes. Lesley and other women who had organised our costumes and this year’s very successful ‘harmony bazaar’, a pop-up market of more than 20 stalls selling clothing, jewellery and a miscellany of artwork and crafts at the convention, were also given a round of applause.
We exchanged stories about the comments that women from other choruses made about how much they enjoyed our very entertaining performance. We whooped with delight about the various reactions to the wonderfully bizarre installation that Rhonda and Di (sisters) had set up in a particularly busy corner of the main walkway of the convention centre. Capturing the beachy setting of our gorgeous city, the centrepiece of the installation was a bikini clad, red lipped blow-up doll that lay, drink in hand, on a banana bed surrounded by beach balls, brightly coloured towels and other gaudy looking beach apparel – including outsized bright yellow sunglasses. Not quite an up yours, the installation was nevertheless a quiet chuckle at the conservative female norms – the faux glamour – of the competition.
Jane took the floor and gave us an update on Nick’s rehabilitation. She thanked us for our interest and support, and we listened intently, witnessing with awe her down-to-earth courage, and drawing her into our circle of love. Then we sang a few of our favourite songs; chatted, laughed, ate and drank some more.
28 June 2017