Naomi Bulger: messages in bottles

Despite sharing this need to take little breaks from blogging, I am still guest posting my weekly antipodean dispatches over on English Muse.

This week, I'm thinking about The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, and how places, as well as people, can grow up and change, with or without us:

"Surry Hills is one of those places that has faced a fundamental shift in personality, more than once. A hundred years ago, it was the most dangerous part of Sydney, full of razor gangs and brothels and sly-grog joints. In Ruth Park’s famous novel The Harp in the South, she conjured up the Surry Hills of the 1940s, then a slum, and the downtrodden yet vibrant families that populated its old streets."

I also found some lovely and sometimes poignant photographs of Sydney life in the 1930s and 40s from the NSW Library archives (like this one, of a Salvation Army service in Surry Hills).

The post is here if you'd like to take a look. I welcome your comments!

Exploring Nicholson Village while it is still cold, holding hands and holding coffee, squinting into the parallel sun. Toy stores with hand-made and hand-painted wooden bicycles, puzzles, little upholstered toddler armchairs made by an old man in his shed on the coast. A bookstore just for children: pop-up books, cut-out books, glorious collections of classics.

Then it is our dear friends from Sydney, Aaron and Jutta, well-met in Carlton Gardens. To me, "You're so big it's hard to hug you now!" And to Mr B, "You look positively svelte by comparison." The instant chatter of good friends with months of sharing to pack into mere hours. Aaron and I lag behind. I am footsore with pregnancy, and he limps after having just finished the Oxfam Trailwalk at 6am. I am astounded he is upright.

Outside the the historic Carlton Exhibition buildings, the lineup for the Taco Truck snakes around corners, but we head straight inside to browse the Finders Keepers markets and marvel in all the crafty talent. We buy some hand-painted gift-cards, a three-tiered cake-stand made from old records, and little grey winter pantaloons for the baby, spotted in ladybird red.

Back into the sunshine, which is high and hot and glorious now despite the calendar insisting it is mid autumn, we enter the happy, eclectic bustle of Brunswick Street. Italian paperies, an old-fashioned puppet workshop, vintage clothing, milliners, outlets for emerging artists, and pubs, cafes and restaurants that spill out into the sun-drenched street.

We take the back streets to Min Lokal for a late lunch of grilled haloumi on radish and chat potatoes, Moroccan spiced baked beans with labna and dukkah, and crispy pork-belly over caramelised apple salad.

Then we hug and kiss again. "I can hardly reach you," they insist as I awkwardly try to bend forward, past my own belly and into their arms. We part ways but I am not as sad as usual because I will see them again next week when I head up to Sydney for a brief visit of my own. Mr B and I walk hand in hand back up Brunswick Street, looking in all the shop windows. A drunk man sitting on a park bench enjoying a brown-bottle beverage from a time-honoured paper bag yells at me: "You're pregnant!" then dissolves into gales of laughter.

Home as the sun begins to set, it surprises me how early it sleeps these days. Mr B heads into the bedroom for a little rest and the dog follows, eager steal a nap on the bed since I always tell him no. I rest my aching feet on the couch and read a couple more chapters of The Harp in the South before starting on the roast butternut squash soup that will be our dinner.

How was your Saturday?

All photos are from Finders Keepers today. I must remember to take my camera out more often, but I was too busy having a good time.

_Do you ever get that prickly feeling, when walking through the old parts of your town, that time is not linear? That it somehow overlaps?

As I took my dog Oliver for a walk on the weekend, I had in my head an Australian novel The Getting of Wisdom*, which was written a little over a century ago and set in East Melbourne, through which I happened to be walking that morning.

Looking around, I realised I was seeing many of the same buildings, tramlines and gardens that first caught the eye of the book’s scrappy 12-year-old heroine, Laura Tweedle Rambotham, when she arrived in Melbourne from her ‘up country’ home to attend a prestigious ladies’ college*.

_Here I tied Oliver to the same cast-iron lamp-post that Laura (or at least the book’s author) would have passed. There, the same historic Exhibition Buildings, set amid beautiful gardens. Overhead, a century-old criss-cross of tram-wires, decorating old colonial buildings and terrace houses like spiders’ webs over paintings.

Laura’s world and my world have combined, despite the passing of 100 years. And yet in my world, rising up and around and permeating Laura’s world, stand monuments that would be unrecognisable and unfathomable to her: skyscrapers, cars, new trams on much-used lines, and modern buildings interspersed amid the old.

_This is what I mean by time overlapping. I do not believe the present or future ever really replace the past. Instead, they are simply another layer on the old. Time is a collage.

And I thought to myself: if you look closely enough at the geographical contours of my city, at the odd and ancient tree that has survived, even at the cultural traits that we carry as a people; you’ll find that in this world sit also the worlds of not just centuries but millennia of Australians who lived here before me, going back more than 40,000 years.

It was quite the philosophical walk with the dog.

_*The Getting of Wisdom was written by Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, under the pseudonym Henry Handel Richardson. It is the story of a square peg of a teenaged girl trying desperately to fit into a round hole, with often funny and sometimes heartbreaking results.

*The fictitious Laura attended the factual and still prestigious Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Melbourne, which opened in 1858. Sadly, the original school building (see above) did not survive the years.

The historical photograph of the Presbyterian Ladies College was taken in 1905 and is classified for copyright under public domain.

Have you ever met your hero? The closest I ever came was sipping a Bloody Mary in Bar Hemingway at The Ritz, Paris, thinking, "Ernest Hemingway probably sat right here. He looked out of that window onto that almost-unchanged view." 

If only time could have compressed, turned back in on itself, or simply rolled backward Midnight in Paris-style, I would have been sharing the same space, breathing the same air, as my greatest literary hero. What would I have said to him? What would he have said to me? Anything at all? Would it have been a glorious moment to treasure forever, or a bitter disappointment? 

On Friday I was privileged to be part of DPCON12, a massive blogger conference in Melbourne hosted by Digital Parents. But the program wasn't the least bit limited to parents: we covered topics from using blogs for social good (particularly by partnering with not-for-profit organisations) to the process of going from blog to book (with folks on the panel who had done just that), and workshops on how to use your blog to generate other paid writing work.

For me, this conference was also an amazing opportunity to meet new bloggers and, through them, to hear new voices. I haven't been part of the Digital Parents community, so it was all very new to me: they are a cohesive, self-supporting unit bonded through familiar experiences (and regular reading), with their own language and subtle morays and behavioural expectations. 

It could have been intimidating and by the eve of the conference, I confess I was feeling the fear. However, the reality was that I was warmly accepted into this world, and my relatively different life experiences and blogging style did not stop this lovely group from making me feel part of their family.

What really got me thinking was when a certain speaker would be called to the stage, or a certain blogger would stand up to ask a question, and the room would erupt with screams and cheers and applause. 

Not having been part of this community, I rarely knew the one speaker or blogger from another. But almost everyone else seemed to, this close-knit family. And I realised that, for many people at this conference, they were meeting their heroes. Bloggers they had admired and sometimes even interacted with online were here in the flesh (or "IRL," an acronym that I learned stood for "in real life," but you probably knew that already).

And I thought, what if some of the big bloggers I'd known and admired in the past year had stood up there? People whose words I'd read and lives I'd watched through Internet windows, hearts that had opened to me, the anonymous stranger: how would I have felt if they then materialised, "IRL," as part of a panel? What if they had been there to chat with me later over cake and tea? I'm pretty sure I'd have been cheering like the room was on Friday, for people I didn't know. After all, it'd be a little bit like meeting my own heroes. 

I guess that's the crossover that blogging, blogger conferences and meet-ups offer: we are no longer just reading words, as we would in a book. On a blog, we are reading words, glimpsing lives, being invited into hearts... yet all the while we remain strangers. But a blogging conference - something entirely new to me until Friday - means stepping over what remains of the "stranger" boundary and into "friend" or, in some cases, "family." It's pretty special.

The Lee Street fete was on today, the annual fete of the Carlton North Primary School. Affectionately known as the "foodies' fete" because so many of the restaurant owners around town run stalls on the day, it is such a sweet day out for the local community.

_Top Aussie chef George Calombaris (of Masterchef fame) made a popular guest appearance to judge the kids' cupcake making competition. The children were incredibly excited (and their cupcakes looked very impressive).

George picked out the top 10 cupcakes to taste, before announcing the winners. When the event was over, I laughed to see several of the kids whose cupcakes weren't tasted sneak back up on stage to retrieve and eat their efforts. In this competition, everyone was a winner!

Mr B and I split our time according to our interests. I revisited the book hall three times (thousands of second-hand books AND new books at half price), while Mr B was in country fair heaven, entering spin-a-wheel competitions, book raffles, lucky lolly-jar dips and silent auctions.

We bought a sweet little yellow cardigan with a matching hat for Baby B, knitted by one of the grandmothers at the school. But baby had to try it on first, which was apparently a rather entertaining process.

We took our burgers (Mr B), vegetarian dumplings (me), home-made lemonade with fresh mint and our lemon cupcakes to the front of the stage to watch the talent quest. The kids were absolutely adorable.

The whole day was like a walk through nostalgia-land, triggering memories for both of us of our own school days. The excitement of being at school on a non-school day. The joy in the children's faces as they raced each other, pieces of fairy-floss sticking to passers-by, en route to the giant slide.

And we indulged in a little game of "imagine when." Like, "Imagine when our baby is at this school. What stall will we run?" And, "Imagine when our baby is four, racing ahead of us to the fete knowing that next year, this will be 'big school'."

How was your weekend? Will you join me here next year?