Wye?

I've never been a fan of Christmas Day, growing up in our family wasn't 'very merry', and this year I had rashly tweeted on Christmas Eve, at 10.03 PM, 'joy to the world! ~~ it's almost over for another year.' I wasn't to know that in less than 24 hours everything would be turned on it's head, a bushfire would sweep through Wye River where I own a property.  I would spend a large part of Christmas Day with my partners family in Sydney glued to my iPhone and the Fire Ready app in particular.  if you haven't got the Fire Ready app on your phone, load it now.

It was in the afternoon that the warnings started, with a sickening post Christmas lunch lurch I read that it was too late to leave Wye and Separation Creek, a smaller hamlet just over the hill from Wye.  The iconic Great Ocean Road was the only road into and out of town and it was now closed. The fire would burn right down to the beach, leaping over large sections of the road. By 10.30 at night the ABC predicted that a total of 60 houses had been lost.

By Boxing Day that number had risen to 116, 98 in Wye River and 18 in Separation Creek, or Sep as the locals call it.  I would wait over 24 hours before hearing that my house had miraculously survived, while others on the same street, more exposed to the bush, had burnt.  Other home owners would wait longer to hear the fate of their homes.  Twitter hashtags #vicfires and #wyereiver both a blessing, the source of unofficial confirmation, and a cause of more stomach lurching: one tweet from a local, 'Riverside got hit hard'.

During the days after the fire I spent an obsessive amount of time on my phone.  While mobile technology has gifted us with applications that literally save lives, that same technology has hatched a fixation in times of crisis on a live stream of comment, photographs and videos, calling out for own raw contributions to the feed.  TV seems, and is, staged in comparison.  My neighbour posted a photo on Instagram of his house on Christmas Day with the fire clearly visible over the rooftop; someone took a photo from the inside of their car as they left Wye with the fire closing in on Separation Creek, a dog's face in the passenger seat oddly reassuring; and Mashable Australia helpfully compiled some of the Christmas Day social media activity on one page.

The most important, and the most astounding outcome of the Christmas Day fire was that no one lost their lives.  There was no better news than that.  The house I've owned for less than a year and the first house I've ever purchased, made it.  I have cherished memories of the times I've spent at Wye River: the view from my deck 2 weeks before the fire; our dog Nero passed out in the sun on that deck;  a family lunch the last time we were all together at Wye in October; a drawing of the 'Wye Beastie', a whimsical offering from a friend, now framed and hanging in the spare room.

A house is more than its contents, a house brims with memories, with the times we've spent in it with family and friends.  In the ten months I've owned that house I've shared it with loved ones and holiday renters I've never met.   The previous owner who owned the property for 19 years asked me to look after 'her'.  Her.  As a Buddhist I had to remind myself as this tragedy unfolded, that this was a perfect example of attachment playing out.  But there is little relief in acknowledging that in a time of crisis, or in its aftermath.  Our attachment to home, to place, runs deep and quick. 

NSW 2015

Katoomba 2780

New Year's Day, the Clarendon Hotel, Katoomba

the place hung over from last night’s Fire and Ice ball, the numbers at breakfast have swelled

newspapers parade New Year firework extravaganzas, positive messages and exhortations -

please let there be no more planes swallowed whole by the sea,

no more reporting of the frantic searches and family anguish,

set aside these grizzly details

as we pause over breakfast, and thoughtfully sip our teas.

we pack the car and leave, for coffee and gifts in Leura

Bundeena 2230

we drive through a national park with poodle, mother, and step-father back seat

the rent-a-bomb fearless on the hot sticky roads

to the beach which is crowded, 

I rush into the water and sink under, the sand suddenly gives way

washed up

plunge back

into the waves

Marrickville 2204

we pick up a bag of ice and return to Marrickville,

to drink on the balcony,

and watch 20,000 Days on Earth on the laptop -

Nick on memory - Nick on love

I can't remember anything at all, flame trees line the streets

we fall into bed, another sticky night's sleep

Sydney 2000

we brave the train and head into town to swim by the docks,

the pool is crowded, lap-swimmers, families and couples idling the day

beside us an aircraft carrier berthed, no sailors, the winches and cranes abandoned,

the harbour entrance just visible, day boats turn in to look, then head out again.

I swim lengths, the salt water stings,

we buy a salad roll and head up to the gallery on the hill,

to meet Nelia at 1.30, beautiful the way the sandstone carves,

the names etched along the facade, Michael Angelo, here?

Warhol offers no surprise, nor the Barbra Krueger,

a spinning siren sings out Brett Whitley in New York,

a collage, a dead bird, the scratched and lyrical words -

the world is brilliant, and painful,

it must be honoured, and anaesthetised

eventually we dawdle, home

Newtown 2042

meditation at 9, a simple breathing exercise for 1 hour,

afterwards we visit the bookstore,

then ice cold frappes: banana, berry and passion fruit,

it melts quickly as my hot hands wrap around the plastic cup

then into the blessed cool of the theatre,

darkness, early Victorian England, to see Mr Turner,

his trick with light, and his own spit -

the way the world looks when you are warm inside,

when we love without asking for anything back

Bronte 2024

is full of brash young things, women swimming in bras and undies,

sitting by the side of the road,

big boys in big cars.

Melinda malingers but I plunge in, free, as the ocean sweeps over, and into the pool

watching the waves, inhaling the mussels as they cling to the rocks,

the moon appears over Bronte, and Bondi beyond

the birds in the bay,

circle, soundless from here

Amanda Surrey, 2015

Gaiman and Bacon (Part 1)

Early last Friday morning I flew up to Sydney to attend a Neil Gaiman performance that evening at the City Recital Hall in Angel Place.  I had missed out on tickets in Melbourne and was determined to see the Sandman.  Neil was to read chapters from his new novel which he described as a 'short story that had got away' from him, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  Not only that, but groupies like myself, and I might add there is a sizeable army of us, would all receive an advance sample copy of the first three chapters from that novel.

I describe Neil Gaiman's evening as a performance, which for a writer is high praise in deed, not many have the eloquence, the stage presence (somehow he fills up a theatre, and its not just his clear well annunciated words delivered in a very particular English country accent) and the talent to take his audience, laughing and enthralled, all the way with him.  Neil traverses mediums with ease, his relationship with Amanda Palmer, his equally talented wife, has seduced the musical side of Neil the performer out on to stage.  A month ago at a New Years gig in New York Neil stepped out from the wings and joined Amanda front stage with her band accompanying him as he sang the theme tune to Gerry Anderson‘s Fireball XL5, something of a dare between the two.  On Friday night backed by the string quartet, FourPlay, Neil sang the same song with the pace and authority of a Brat Pack era crooner, albeit more shaggy in appearance.

Neil has been a 'friend' to me via the pages of his writing over many years.  I discovered him back in the late 1980's when I had the good fortune to access a collection of comic books by an astute collector.  The Sandman comic Neil authored served up story arcs of fantasy and horror, plundering but not butchering the classics of English literature and old ancient fables, weaving in and out of modern day via the imaginings of the Sandman and his band of brothers and sisters, most notably Death.  Death featured in her own 'mini series', a popular character, the traditional  bone and rattle skeleton of the Grimm Reaper usurped by an attractive young Goth, who gently, with compassion and kind words despatched the dying to the other side.  It was many years later and after the Sandman had published its last that I picked up American Gods, published in 2001, and sunk back into a world where old gods are dying in a new and disinterested world, in an America that had assigned them to the scrap heap, an America, without the gods and reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon's surreal nightmare.  Neil could write good novels, why that surprised me I don't know.

As an Englishman who now lives in America Neil's sense of place and what may be wrong with it is well honed and links in with a view that he is forming, or has formed of Australia.  Neil ended the evening with a poem he wrote two years ago to coincide with a performance Amanda Palmer was making at the Sydney Opera House on Australia Day.  Acknowledging the traditional owners and elders of the land, Neil began reading his poem with FourPlay winding out and curling their strings around him.  The poem begins, 'We killed them all, when we came here' and he spoke of a land where 'nightmares loped', and 'night falls down' to 'swallow up Australia Day'.  These few words lingered, and as Friday night would soon tick over into Saturday, Australia Day (26th January), we filed out of the Recital Hall, this poem from the Sandman ringing in our ears, a storyteller who understands the value and wisdom of the very old stories, and the horror we run from in the new.