Tag: Australia

Posted in Life

Total control

Posted on by Sharon

My youngest daughter rang last week with a confession.

‘Mum, I’m addicted to plastic.’

I knew how she felt. I’d been feeling somewhat the same.

I thought about this confession and my own (very similar) feelings and decided that I would reframe it with a more positive spin. I’m not known for putting a positive spin on anything, so bear with me as I struggle to articulate my reframing.

When Tim, my husband, was diagnosed with cancer in July last year, I took over kitchen duties. When we’d moved in, eight years before, we tended to dump things in cupboards and drawers, and over the intervening years we’d not done a great deal to move things around. It meant the cupboards that might more usefully be used for food and kitchen-related storage, instead stored boxes of CDs, VHS tapes, jigsaw puzzles, framed photos, x-rays, and the like.

I took over kitchen duties and thus kitchen organisation. It started my affair with plastic – specifically, Tupperware. One of my daughters-in-law had hosted an online Tupperware party some months before and I’d bought some modular mates to store basic baking needs (caster sugar, cocoa, icing sugar, brown sugar, etc). In my reorganisation I put them in the drawer where the saucepans used to be. My eldest daughter hosted an online Tupperware party some time later, and I bought bigger modular mates for plain and SR flour (regular and gluten free) and cleaned out the DVDs to create space for them. I got a buzz each time I opened the drawer or the cupboard and saw the containers so neatly labelled and organised.

More recently my eldest daughter decided to become an Independent Tupperware consultant and in the spirit of supporting her business, I quite quickly built up my collection of Tupperware. A few weeks ago, my youngest daughter took the same step. Two daughters, two businesses to support. The outcome is that not only are my kitchen cupboards beautifully organised, so too is my fridge and now my freezer.

The satisfaction this brings me could be put down to any number of things (shallowness, not enough else going on in my life) but my positive reframing led me to see it in a different light.

We are into the third year of a global pandemic. This has meant I’ve had limited opportunities to see my family – I haven’t been to Tasmania since January 2021, so it’s been over a year since I’ve seen four of my children and the vast majority of my grandchildren. I haven’t seen my other son, his wife and their children (who live in Qld) in 11 months. I saw them last when we were all able to visit my mother in southern NSW, and so that was the last time I saw Mum, my sister and my brother.

Tim was diagnosed with cancer in July last year. The day before he was to have surgery, we went into a ‘five-day’ lockdown that extended well beyond five days. It meant I wasn’t able to visit him for the whole time he was in hospital apart from a quick visit on day 10. He had a number of complications and so his stay in hospital (the first he’d ever had) went well beyond the 3-4 days we were expecting. Tim started a six-month course of chemo in August and again he had to go through that on his own as I wasn’t allowed to accompany him to any of his treatments.

Not long after Tim started chemo, I was officially informed that my position at the university was to be made redundant. My last day was November 19, 2021.

There’s a lot we have no control over:

  • COVID isn’t over (no matter how much everyone wants it to be)
  • Chemo affects a person’s body in often uncontrollable ways
  • Universities cut thousands of jobs (around 40,000 staff gone across the sector)

And then Russia invaded the Ukraine.

At roughly the same time, floods devastated northern NSW and SE Queensland.

And mosquitoes brought a form of encephalitis to piggeries in the border region of NSW-Victoria. Some people have now been infected and some of them have been hospitalised.

The other thing that’s been on my mind, in terms of ‘things I have no control over’ is turning 60. Today, as it happens. My sister, Debbie, told me on Saturday that 60 is the new 30 (twice), but that didn’t make me feel much better, I have to admit. It’s not that I’d prefer the alternative, it’s just that 60 sounds so old! I know, when I think about it, that it isn’t old – it just sounds it. Deb wrote about this in a recent blog post – and also added some great photos of us from over the years.

After talking to her over the weekend, and after a (very lovely) surprise virtual birthday party on Sunday night, I’m starting to feel better about it. Well, it’s not like I have any control over it. I’m 60 whether I like the idea of it or not.

While I have no control over wars, the pandemic, cancer diagnoses and treatments, being made redundant, or turning 60, I do have control over my kitchen.

I realised, in my reframing, that I’m not addicted to plastic; rather, I’m addicted to an organised kitchen. A little space over which I have control.

And, I have to admit, it feels good.

In Deb’s blog post, she included a clip of Missy Higgin’s singing Total Control (from her latest album). It took me back to the days of Countdown and so I dug out the The Motels’ version, from 1980.

What do you feel you have control over?

The Motels – Total Control
Posted in Family, Life, Photography

Diary of a distancer: Week 9

Posted on by Sharon

As I write, it’s May 9 2020. Many parts of the world are slowly emerging from restrictions due to the spread of coronavirus. Restrictions are beginning to ease in parts of Australia too.

Some people are concerned about this, others are cautiously optimistic that life will return to ‘normal’ soon, and others are pressuring governments to ease restrictions more quickly.

We might all ‘be in this together’ but we’re certainly not in the same boat. The same storm perhaps, but not the same boat. Everyone’s experience of lockdown/self-isolation – call it what you will – is different.

It’s alarming and distressing to read that instances of domestic violence have increased, as have calls to helplines such as LifeLine.

Through the week, I read a tragic story of a 12 year old boy in the US who hung himself in his wardrobe in mid-April. His father blames coronavirus. His view was that as his son wasn’t able to go to school or meet up with his friends, he had nowhere to put his energy (particularly his negative energy) and so took this very drastic step, perhaps, his father said, not fully realising the finality of his action.

There are other situations, just as tragic.

For some, then, this period is particularly difficult. They’re in the storm but in small boats, or boats with one oar, or boats that don’t have a lot of supplies. They’re tossed around by the waves and the wind and can find no safe anchor.

We can’t imagine that our own experience of this time is the same as others.

I’ll own that statement. I don’t imagine that my experience of this time is the same as others.

It’s why connections are so important to me. It’s important to me to stay connected – to others, to ideas, to creative pursuits, to routine, to family, to physical and mental health.

For some, unexpected connections have made this period of time less unsettling than it might otherwise have been.

ABC News Breakfast shared a story on their Facebook page of a man in Wagga, NSW who is drawing a crowd during his trombone practice. What a delight – a time for people to come together – to sit and listen, to tap their feet, to wander into the sunshine, to reminisce. Connecting the past with now, connecting memories to others, connecting sound and emotion.

There are examples of this sort of connection between people happening all around the world. If we can, we should seek them out as they can bring pockets of light into what otherwise might be a dark time.

I’ve also been struck by the connections some people are making as they seek to make some sense of this time. Poet Lorin Clarke writes from the perspective of dust motes as they watch humans spending more time at home. It’s clever, this way of seeing things from another perspective and making connections across people’s experiences. And then putting images and music and a very particular kind of voice to this, adds to that sense of connection across more than ideas – across aesthetics and art forms too.

And then there are those who can sum up experiences many of us will recognise, in seemingly simple ways. My friend Taimi, shared this on her Facebook page earlier and I laughed out loud (I won’t tell you which particular image made me laugh the most).

If our things could talk

Graphics like this can connect us to others – even unknown others – as they allow us to know we’re not the only ones putting the dishwasher on more often or rarely using the car.

We spent a few hours one night through the week listening to Wes Tank rapping Dr Seuss books over Dr Dre beats. Connections again – between words and sounds and beats and voice and cleverness and creativity and silliness and more. See if you can do it!

 

And then there’s connections to things I didn’t know I was missing. An email arrived just the other day, and I glanced through it disinterestedly until I saw the words ‘Slow TV’. My attention was immediately caught.

A car company filmed a driver driving through the NSW countryside for four hours. It almost made me cry!

There’s a world out there that I haven’t connected with for weeks … months. There are hills and trees and bumpy roads and grassy verges and sky … all that sky. There are horizons that go beyond the back fence, two metres from my back door. There are sheep and road signs and beautiful music to accompany me on this journey of what might be described as nothingness, but which I describe as bliss. Absolute bliss.

Connection to country. Who knew it was something I missed?

And, of course, as always, there’s connection to family. To Mum, and my sister Deb, and my daughters Rochelle (and on weekends her husband Michael) and Emma, and their kids, and Alison, and to my daughter-in-law Kaz (and even more grandkids), and my cousins Cassandra and Jenny (and often their kids), and sometimes to my nieces Sarah and Eliza and sometimes their kids too. We exercise together every day (those of us who can make it), then chat – or listen to all the kids saying hello to each other.

It’s a fabulous connection – four generations and multiple arms of family coming together as often as we can to keep physically and mentally healthy. As has been emphasised as we’ve exercised more and more, exercise is not about how you look, it’s about how you feel, and exercising with family feels good!

And on the back of that connection, we also connect creatively. We’ve completed our Images of Isolation project and are into our Images by the Dozen project. We’re all to take 12 images – representing the numbers 1 to 12 without actually having numbers as a feature of the image. It helps keep our brains busy, our eyes seeing differently and our connections strong.

These are just some of the connections I’ve made this week. What connections have you made? 

Posted in Family, Life

Blessed

Posted on by Sharon

We’re home now from two weeks of family, warmth, generosity, laughs, fun, connections, looking out for, talking, playing, keeping calm, being distracted, trying not to worry.

I feel blessed that we could spend a week in Tasmania and then a week in NSW/Queensland, popping home to Melbourne for a few hours in between to repack our bags, process some photos, and orient ourselves to the next phase of our adventure.

Our week in Tasmania was a week of blue sky, clean air, far horizons, wide open spaces and golden light at the end of each day.

Gold at the end of the day

It was Christmas Day on Boxing Day, giving and receiving, unwrapping and gratitude, watching out for leeches in the lawn, totem tennis and bocce with the littlies, small motorbikes for the bigger kids, and bigger bikes for the biggest ones. It was going to bed early, sleeping late, following the sun around Ben’s kitchen table in the mornings, and eating endless Christmas leftovers. 

It was babysitting so my eldest daughter and her husband could celebrate their wedding anniversary without children, babysitting so my eldest son and his partner had a chance to spend some time together cheering on the Perth Scorchers, taking two of my grandsons to visit my youngest daughter and her husband and seeing the various cousins playing happily together, spending time with my second son and his wife who are preparing to welcome my youngest grandson (their first child) into the world, and celebrating another grandson’s fifth birthday.

Playing happily

It was photos, candid and not so, silly and even more so, fingers behind heads, other fingers being held under control, waving and not waving, looking and not looking, jumping and running and in the frame and not in the frame. It was chaos and patience. It was herding cats. 

Me and eight of my grandchildren!

It was a trip from Melbourne to Devonport on the Spirit of Tasmania on Christmas Eve and an even calmer return trip on New Year’s Eve with Sakye, our eight year old granddaughter in tow.

We were blessed to take Sakye to Murwillumbah to spend some time with other family. This second week was staying a few days with my mother, and Sakye seeing photos of her great-great-great grandparents, and much younger versions of many of the now older generations. It was hot, sticky days and taking Sakye to the pool I’d swum in when I’d spent summer holidays in Murwillumbah. It was gliding and duck diving and trying our hardest to sit on the bottom and breathing out through our noses when we were under water and when we did handstands. It was lame attempts at diving and then better attempts. It was watching other kids and trying out what they did. It was being convinced by the idea of a milkshake that it was time to go to the Austral cafe where her great-grandfather used to head as a 13 year old when he’d been paid for his paper round and could finally afford a milkshake and thinking it weird that Granny (great-grandmother) was drinking a lime spider. 

It was walking past the house her great-great grandparents had lived in and me telling her stories of the holidays I’d spent there as a child and of Nan and Pop who were kind and gentle and good. It was going to Wet n Wild with her cousins Hunter and Lily, and learning that Sakye and Lily have similar spirits: they’re feisty and sassy and strong.

It was heading to Redcliffe to spend a few days in the house next to my brother’s and Sakye spending time with his grandchildren – eight year old Chaylarna and six year old Johnny, cousins once removed – swimming and scooting and playing at the park, lazing about in the hammock, playing endless games of ‘what am I?’ and Mario Kart. It was being reminded of summers 20 years ago when, for a number of years, my brother and I spent time at our parents’ place with my daughter/s and his children and how they’d clicked and now our grandchildren are doing the same and it’s fabulous. I call the new crop of eight year olds their mothers’ names and they give me a look and I am reminded that they’re not children but grandchildren.

It was spending another day with grandchildren Hunter and Lily and their parents, my youngest son and his wife, playing UNO and Sequence and Quarto and What am I? and Mario Kart and watching videos on YouTube while adults talked in quiet voices and serious faces and then playing at the park and telling lame jokes and laughing and not fighting, not even once, and being called your mother’s name and thinking your grandmother is losing her marbles and eating fish and chips and there being cousins and cousins-once-removed and it was like being surrounded by friends but them all being related.

It was all new and all interesting and connections to Sakye’s own environment had to be made: do they have chickens in Queensland Grandma? Do they have horses in Queensland? Why do you have to work out ‘our’ time and ‘their’ time? Why do I have to go back to bed when it’s light outside? (Because it’s 4:40 in the morning and that’s way too early to be getting up!)

And then with more days in the heat it was sleeping in and sweating and not complaining and swimming at the beach and scooting and the skate park and more lazing in the hammock.

And then it was a day at Australia Zoo where we saw and patted all kinds of animals: kangaroos and koalas and a snake we patted and others we saw: rhinoceros which isn’t a unicorn Grandma even though there’s a horn on its head, and giraffes, and lemurs and alligators and crocodiles and a jabiru and a stork called Strike that wouldn’t get out of the way when Murray the crocodile was on the prowl. And there was Bindi and Robert Irwin and a man in the screen in the Crocoseum called Steve and there was Crikey! and enthusiasm and energy and leaping out of boats and out of cars and excitement and passion. And we stayed till the zoo closed because there was so much to see and we didn’t sleep in the car on the way back because there was a lot to talk about and digest.

At the zoo

Over the two weeks it was all five of my children, most of my (many) grandchildren, and my mother, brother, niece, great-niece, great-nephew, an uncle and aunt, and a cousin, her husband and their two children. It was a lot of people – all of them related to me in some way or other.

And now we’re home and there are no children and no grandchildren and no mother and no brother. It’s quiet and in the quiet I feel how blessed I am to have had these two weeks of family and of not quiet.

And now we’re home it’s keeping busy and being scared and trying for distraction and not to think about it and not to worry. It’s quiet and Enya calming my mind and it’s strength and positivity and knowing it’s going to be okay.

Herding cats

Posted in Learning, Life

A hard reset

Posted on by Sharon

Tim messages me late on Thursday afternoon: We can get to Tassie for $750. Will I book it?

I thought for a nanosecond and despite not having been to Tasmania so far this year, and despite my usual ‘nothing will keep me away from Tasmania when I have a few days off’, this time something was different. I simply didn’t want to go.

Tassie is known and familiar and I wanted, desperately needed, intuitively knew I needed to be somewhere unknown and unfamiliar. And somewhere a long way away. As far as it was possible to go in the six days we had available to us. Somewhere we hadn’t been before. Somewhere where all the people were strangers and all the roads new.

I wanted to go to Broken Hill.

Tim turns to me late on Thursday night: So. What are we doing over Easter?

It’s 9pm. I mention Broken Hill for the first time. Tim doesn’t blink an eye. It’s no wonder I love this man!

By 11pm our trip is organised, accommodation booked, distances calculated.

By 9am we are on the road, bags packed, keep cups full of tea/coffee, water bottles full, lunches tucked into the cooler bag along with a rudimentary first aid kit, snacks, tea bags and a tea towel – just in case!

I drive out of Melbourne – our usual arrangement – and then over the next six days keep driving.

Photo by Tim Moss

Driving means I’m present, aware of ‘now’, focussing only on the road not on writing rubrics, determining how to publish the children’s stories I’ve written and had illustrated, responding to online discussion threads, reporting on how many law academics I’ve worked with, drafting journal articles and performance objectives, organising photo shoots, exercising, keeping up with social media …

… all left behind, all fading into the increasingly hazy distance as the road unwinds ahead of us. 

Importantly we have a bag of CDs, all compilations we put together for my radio shows over 10 years ago. It’s only on day 6 we have to replay a CD. We have music for every part of our journey, even if it means pressing pause on Damien Rice’s Eskimo until we’re out of Wentworth because it’s a song that deserves space and the open road.

I drive and am present, focussed on this moment, on seeing new landscapes, new combinations of colours, new horizons, new destinations.

I drive and keep my eyes looking forward, into the distance, into the immediate future. I shed the city like a skin by the second day and there’s only the road and the wide-open spaces to contain me. I can feel myself expanding under the warmth and width of the bluest of blue skies.

The ribbons of road shimmering into the distance are my favourite – endless horizons full of possibilities and discovery, full of newness and unfamiliarity. Roads without curves, one line on the map, taking us to the edge of the outback.

The road stretches out before us. The compass says west and then north and they’re the only directions I want to head.

Warmth, colour, distance, the unfamiliarity of the landscape … the only place I want to be.

Broken Hill sunset

Away … so far away … into the desert where the hills gently whisper, and where, right before sunset the silence is audible. The desert where the horizon sits in some distant space way, way over yonder and where time and space mean different things. The desert where my grief for Dad pales against the vastness of the landscape, and I can drop it here, knowing threads of it will return to the city with me but also knowing that it’s safe out here in the warmth and almost limitless space between the far horizons.

The dying ends of the day

It’s a hard reset on a hard start to the year – a chance to stay in the ‘now’, to not think beyond the next bend in an arrow-straight road, to simply be.

Away … so far away … and then home.

Re-evaluated.

Refreshed.

Reset.

 

 

A few days after we came home, we made a book about our journey and published it on Blurb. You can see a preview here if you’re interested. I wrote the blog post above for the book, which also features essays Tim wrote and a selection of our photos from the trip.

It was one of the most significant and important trips I’ve ever taken.

We made it!

Posted in Life

Just when I thought I could …

Posted on by Sharon

As communicated in my last post, I can now jump.

At least I could.

Here’s the lowdown …

My jumping days came to a crashing halt when I tore the medial meniscus in my left knee. I didn’t even know I had a medial meniscus (I also have a lateral one which I didn’t know about either), yet I’ve somehow managed to tear it, preventing me from jumping on the trampoline at Rochelle’s place on the weekend with 11 of my grandchildren!

It’s also preventing me from walking too far (more than 10m and I’m done), standing on it, bending it (putting shoes and socks on at the moment is a source of some discomfort (for ‘some’ read ‘lots’)), and jumping.

Not that I did a lot of jumping it has to be said, but I liked the fact that I could.

And now, for the next few weeks at least, I can’t.

Not being able to jump won’t change my life too much, but it’s one of those things we do that we quickly take for granted, and then when we can’t do it anymore, our lives are changed and somehow (strangely, in this case) diminished.

I felt the same way last week when a water pipe burst outside #12 and as a consequence we had no water. I had been to the gym and as a consequence was on the pong, so went to have a shower. When I turned the tap on however, nothing poured forth. I trundled off to work unwashed, and sat there, in my open plan office, convinced gentle wafts of eau de Sharon were circulating to all and sundry. I admit to leaving sheepishly, and somewhat early.

Meanwhile, a plumber had been to fix the water pipe. When I returned home from work, even more ready for a shower and a cuppa (not, I hasten to add at the same time), it seemed that not all was fixed. The water pipe was, and #12 was happy, but when I turned the tap all that came out was a trickle of muddy water/watery mud – it was hard to differentiate.

We quickly sought shelter, and a shower, elsewhere for the night.

But that incident caused me to reflect on the ways our lives can be diminished by a small change in something we generally take for granted – in this case, the ready supply of water. I turn the tap, and water comes out.

But for one day last week, it didn’t.

And my life was somewhat diminished.

Imagine the ways we could change people’s lives by giving them taps to turn on, and even more joyfully change them, by having clean water pour forth.

It’s worth a thought.

Posted in Nature, Photography

349

Posted on by Sharon

Tim and I love to go a-wandering, along a mountain track … and if we can’t find one of those, we drive west for miles until we stumble upon a forest.

Yesterday we stumbled upon sequoia redwoods near Beech Forest in the Otways.

Living in the city means that getting amongst the trees is particularly special – and what a special place this was!

Posted in Life, Melbourne

273

Posted on by Sharon

A trip to the Dandenong Ranges has become a regular part of our life here in Melbourne. When the city starts to feel like it’s closing in, we head for the hills. Literally. Being amongst the trees brings an immediate feeling of peace. One of the gardens we visit when we’re in the area is the Alfred Nicholas Gardens.

At the bottom of the garden (and the bottom of a hill) is a lake. On the lake is an island. Linking the island and the shore are a series of bridges. On this bridge is my husband Tim. In the distance is another man, a stranger, who told Tim as he walked past that he had good taste in shirts.

I thought the symmetry was pretty neat.

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