Reminiscence - the poultry

My mother went through a stage of poultry breeding while I was in high school. In addition to the chooks, which we kept for eggs and sentimental value, she bred runner ducks (because of a fondness for Leunig cartoons and the runner ducks which are scattered through them), and Chinese geese, an elegant breed with [...]

Reminiscence - the nudist commune

When I was in primary school, my brother and I occasionally went to visit friends of ours who lived in a nudist commune. When I related this recollection to my mother recently, she frowned, and said that it wasn’t a nudist commune, just a commune where a lot of people didn’t wear any clothes. This [...]

Cyclones

In the kitchen at work on Monday morning, I glanced over at the paper and noticed that the front page was plastered with a satellite image of a cyclone cloud swirl covering the northern part of the state, right where my parents both live. I dashed to the Bureau of Meteorology to look at [...]

Childhood toys

Tash:  I remember my baby doll.  I had a boy baby doll, for some reason, and all my friends had girls - they all made fun of me.
Me:  Did it have genitals?
Tash:  Um… no.
Me:  So how did you know it was a boy?
Tash:  Well, it was wearing blue!  And all the other baby dolls wore [...]

Floods

It was raining when the train pulled into the station tonight - a steady, constant shower of what I think of as flood rain. In Daintree, January is flood season, when monsoonal rains hover between the mountains and drench us, filling the rivers until they overflow. Further south, we don’t get the same rain patterns, [...]

Swimming

I’ve always been comfortable in the water. Actually, photos of me at seven still wearing arm floaties make me a liar, but as far back as I can remember, I’ve always found it easy to swim. I float easily, which makes swimming feel much more natural, I think. I once had a very vivid dream [...]

Blisters

I have a blister and a bruise on my thumb from bottling beer on the weekend. Could I be more of a weakling? My mother and I used to compare our hands - hers are brown, wiry, narrow, and strong, because she’s outdoors most of the day using them. Mine are pale and soft, with [...]