1001 Nights Cast

At the end of a northern hemisphere summer, C’s piece in the newspaper reminded me of the south. Like C, I moved to Australia as a child. I was five, and went from England with my mother and her parents (my mother being divorced from my father): my grandfather had been offered a job as a consultant on a television series and my grandmother said she’d go, if my mother and I went too. The job was supposed to be for a year, but my grandfather never left, and unlike C, I didn’t leave until I was in my late twenties. So I spent many summers there, and remember a jumble of summer incidents. In my memory, at least, summer felt like freedom, even though I never quite felt like I belonged. Not quite feeling like you belong can feel free, too.

There was one suffocating summer in Melbourne, before we moved to Sydney. We lived in a low block of flats in St. Kilda. My friend F and I were so enervated by the heat, we would find whatever shady spot we could—I remember a concrete stairwell—and just sit there. I can’t imagine what we talked about. That summer, too, F’s father, who was a commercial fisherman, brought home a blue-ringed octopus in a bottle, to show us what we mustn’t touch.

In Sydney, we first lived in Cremorne. At Christmas, my mother and grandmother would slave in the hot kitchen to make an English Christmas dinner. It was years before we worked out we should take a picnic to the beach. My friend S and I would run around unsupervised in the reserve down by the harbour, spending time at the seawater swimming pool cut into the rocks, and clambering out to the lighthouse at the end of Cremorne Point. Once, aged about eight or nine, I lay in the sun for what seemed like hours, holding a net bag over the end of a drain in which I had spotted a blue-tongued lizard, until finally it ran out into the net and I captured it. It seemed quite large, and I was very pleased with myself. I think I kept it in a shoebox for a few days before letting it go. Sometimes my grandfather and I would sit on the edge of the ferry wharf and fish, with fishing line wound around corks. We never caught anything, but that wasn’t the point.

When my mother married the wicked stepfather, we moved to a flat a hundred yards from Balmoral Beach. S had moved there, too, or already lived there, and again it seems as though we were barely supervised. We would spend our time at the beach and in the park. Our particular adventure was the attempt to get all the way around ‘the island’—a rock formation you could actually walk to—by clambering over the rocks at the shoreline. By the end of one summer we had braved the waves that crashed against the rocks, and succeeded. Perhaps it was the same summer in which a shark managed to get itself caught inside the shark net. Sometimes we would ride our dragster bicycles up to Mosman Junction, and then come as fast as we could down Mandalong Road. I hardly wore shoes. My grandfather would ask my mother whether she was going to let me go out like that.

The wicked stepfather dragged my mother, sister and me to a house in Belrose, which was awful, and insisted that we spend every summer at his banana plantation near Coffs Harbour. There were advantages to this (one morning, early, my grandfather and I ventured into the nearby village of Sawtell, in search of warm bread from the back door of the bakery, and took a stroll on the beach, where we saw dolphins playing in the surf), but I didn’t really get on with the country kids, and of course I couldn’t see my own friends for months on end.

Summer returned, in a sense, when I went to university. My mother divorced the wicked stepfather, and for a while we lived in flats provided by friends: one in Potts Point, and a gorgeous one in Elizabeth Bay overlooking the marina in Rushcutters Bay (there were forty nine or fifty steps down to the flat, we never got it right, which was why the elderly couple who owned it had moved). I worked in a café through university, and summers were at once sun-drenched—the air scented with jasmine and buzzing with high-decibel cicadas—and nocturnal. We would leave work at three in the morning, go to Kings Cross for ‘breakfast’ at the Hungarian café, or to the railway workers café, or an early-opener pub, then sleep the morning away. Or else, when I wasn’t working, a group of friends would begin to form in the late afternoon: perhaps we’d end up dancing in a club in Darlinghurst, spilling out in the early morning, the air still warm but enough to cool the sweat on our skin (I remember that sensation as the counterpart to salt drying on one’s skin at the beach). If numbers were low enough to fit in the little Datsun I borrowed until my mother gave it to me, a little group would often end up at Nielsen Park in the middle of the night, where we always had to swim out, through the mild phosphorescence, as far as the shark net, where we would cling, half-scared, waving our arms through the sparkling water, till we gathered the determination to swim back in.