Finest 500 Writing Prize

The Finest 500 is an annual competition for Geelong Writers’ members. This year, writers were invited to submit prose or poetry to 500 words in response to the theme: A Place I Know. Dr Jennifer Hurley judged the shortlist. You can read her notes here. Finest 500 judge’s notes. Read all eleven shortlisted entries below.

FIRST PLACE: ‘Living at the edge of the world’, by Catherine Bell 

Dad bangs his fists down hard. Plates and glasses clatter and bounce across the kitchen table.

Bloody Ripper. Throwing a cigarette out the truck window in the middle of summer.

Ripper is our neighbour. When his battered Chev truck rumbles up our driveway, I don’t get too close. He’s different. He’s from the Back Blocks, the land to the west of our farm.

I wonder if everyone from the Back Blocks has large, baby-pink ears like Ripper’s. They glow on a sunny morning like the ears of a weird and thrilling creature. And his roll-your-owns dangle from his bottom lip, bobbing up and down as the ash grows longer, and longer. I wait for it to fall. My mother says I mustn’t stare.

The Back Blocks. I don’t know that country. That country doesn’t know me.

It’s all thistles, piles of rocks and scraggly sugar gum plantations. Rain spears sideways there during the winter months and in summer, the grass is as brittle and desiccated as a twig.

And when my father drives towards the west, I sit in the back with arms held tightly by my sides. If we go far enough, I know we’ll fall into a dark, bottomless pit.

This is where I live. At the edge of the known world. Where the west meets the east.

It feels different going east. This is my country. I ride my bike along the narrow gravel road passing farm after farm towards Morningside. Big blue sky overhead, corrugations and dust below.

I know this country. This country knows me.

Every bend of the five-mile road is familiar. I know where cars bounce through potholes in the gravel, where long puddles pool over winter, where snakes hide in fallen logs, where mushrooms sprout in the long, damp grass and where tadpoles turn into frogs. I know where plovers and magpies swoop in Spring, and where the swallows nest.

I can smell the sweetness of clover paddocks, spy drifts of golden-yellow everlasting daisies and moss-coated rocks strewn by the side of the road. I hear the shrill calls of the birds: straw-necked ibis, kookaburras, cockatoos, and mountain ducks.

This country’s trees, creeks, lakes, and even the names on farm gates, are a part of me. This is my land; this is my sky.

I freewheel, flying downhill into Morningside. Cheeks burning in the wind. Happy heart singing.

There’s not much to see in Morningside. One long street. No-one walks along it. Everyone goes by car. A few rundown houses and shops. A mile of flat-topped, spreading cypresses lining the road. It’s quiet and easy to hear the wind in the trees, crickets in the grass, the pitter-patter of rain in Morningside.

It’s the locals who make my town. They wave and call out my name. They know I’m Marie’s daughter.

Morningside is my country. This is where I belong.

I know everyone. Everyone knows me.

 

SECOND PLACE: ‘Grand Final Day’, by Judy Rankin

I stand outside the back door. In my hands, the essentials for the task ahead; trowel, rake and transistor radio. I look around the garden bathed in mottled sunlight. A light breeze carries stunning purple flowers across the sparse yard from the twenty-foot Jacaranda tree. One look at the magnificent blooms still clinging to the branches above tells me it’s futile to rack up the fallen. Instead, I place the small transistor radio—happy banter coming from it—on the ground as I kneel by a neglected garden bed.

It would seem a picture-perfect day.

From the house, I hear the squeals of my children playing with their father. As the radio begins to sing, I feel wistfulness overtake me.

I’m high on the hill, looking over the bridge to the MCG…

I hum along with Peter Kelly, unable to sing for the lump developing in my throat. This is always the day I miss Melbourne the most.

Melbourne: the enigma that I call my hometown. It has always puzzled me why I think of it as home. I’d lived all over Australia, yet, when asked, I zealously claim I come from Melbourne. Why? Because it is the place of my birth? Because it is where I’ve marginally spent more time than anywhere else? I don’t know. But on Grand Final Day, I am a Melbournian through and through!

As I sit attempting to clear the intruders from the sandy patch I like to call the vegie garden, I barely see the interlopers. Instead, I see the clock on the silos telling me it is eleven degrees.

I remember, I remember.

Here I sit, over 3,000 kilometres away, yet transported. Flinders Street Station clocks, the river that runs upside down, Young & Jackson’s famous Chloe’s room – before the renovation. How many games of pool had we played in that room before stumbling around to hail a taxi home?

The warming sun begins to sting the back of my neck. No longer pulling weeds so much as staring at the ground, I can imagine the excitement filling the streets. Everyone proudly wearing their team colours. Watching highlights of the footy season. My team isn’t playing today, but that doesn’t matter. It is the day when the banter flows, rivalry at the fore and all a bit of fun. It is the day Melbourne feels the most united in its division between the two best teams of the year.

“Oi!”

My husband calls as the back door bursts open and four excited children bound out and pull me away from the cool streets of Melbourne to our sunny backyard in Perth.

“How are you going?” he asks.

“I go in leaps and bounds,” I reply.

He looks quizzical for just a moment. Then jolts, supposedly in dance, and begins to sing.

I remember.

I can’t help but smile as we lose ourselves in imaginings of a place we know and love.

I remember everything.

 

THIRD PLACE: ‘Weightless, Yet Stronger’, by Jo Curtain

Early May, on a Sunday, is not so bright anymore. Winter is almost here. I follow the path down the stairs and early morning walkers in hoodies. The beach break is dotted with surfers in black wetsuits. I enter the old concrete dressing sheds and strip off into my sensible black bathers, appreciating the privacy.

There is only one other swimming in the Austinmer ocean pool, an old man with bright yellow goggles and a red cap. I watch as he does a steady slow breaststroke up and down the pool—the colour of dark turquoise. Crabs huddle in cracks, some green, some almost black and hints of seaweed swirl. I descend, wading inch by inch into the waist-deep water. Ducking under, I kick off from the rough edge, emerge and like a flat seal, I flip skimming the surface. My skin’s reaction to the cold water, the rise and fall of the waves lapping over the pool’s edge to open water is exhilarating, yet safe. I feel protected in Austinmer pool.

I glide through the water to reach the back wall, turning to face the imposing escarpment. Forever present. Once, I feared cold water. The rush of my breath galloping away. Mum says mountain living has toughened me up. But I think it is a symptom of endurance to retain some vestige of life before middle age and mediocrity is forced upon me.

But more than that. This is a special place. The escarpment guides the stretch of golden sand and rock pools straddling craggy sandstone cliffs—swerving and curling their way to Wollongong. When my dad died, I applied for his birth certificate and discovered he was born in Austinmer. Now, I visit once a week to swim and connect. Although a fine line, it is a tangible link with a familial place.

I decide to join the old man, slowing my pace to his; we do an easy clockwise crawl. It feels comforting. It feels satisfying. We channel bumpy flesh and clicking joints— an unselfconscious celebration. I learn the practice of patience as I recuperate from a dislocated shoulder, familiarising myself with water again—articulating the abstract state of swimming. Ten laps later, I am back floating, watching the changing morning light and colours.

A younger woman strips down to her bathers on the concrete edge. I catch her eye—

‘Going in’

‘Yes, just for a moment.’

Our conversation bubbles away. She walks to the end of the pool, pauses and dives in swimming but a lap. She is out in less than half a minute, drying off and walking away from the pool.

And then it is just the old man and me again.

Underwater, our bodies are amplified. I am free from the usual constraints. There is a delicious peacefulness in making the most of a single breath of air.

This is my place. I glide. I wade. I submerge. Weightless, yet stronger.

 

HIGHLY COMMENDED: ‘The Amethyst Room, by Kym Tyzack

The thud wakes me. ‘Great Britain’ has fallen from my grasp. I bend to retrieve it. The room spins as I right myself. I sip some water and wait for the walls to steady. For the white of the mantle and skirting to sharpen again. On the website, I wasn’t sure about the purple walls but sitting here, enveloped by them, I’m soothed. I decide they’re amethyst. An old colour. Like the claret walls in the dining room and buttercup in the kitchen. Don’t think about the white bathroom. Bile. Shit. The night before last.

Nothing is required of me but rest. I’m free to read. To think. To stare. People will say – Such a shame. Two whole days of your stay in London. Wasted. But there’s no waste. I’m content. Sunlight warms me through the open window. There are birds in the Chinese elm, just out of my reach. When I crane my neck, I see the long sweep of the Georgian terrace opposite. Its speckled bricks, white sills and architraves. Black spiky railings. There’s a sapphire sky. Traffic hums but it’s elsewhere. The neighbourhood waits.

‘The day came slow.’ Is that Dickinson? I don’t know her well but I get a sense that she wrote her compressed poems in a quiet room, by a window. My mind wanders from her to fictional women. I see the swooners and the ones recuperating (or not) from fever or melancholia. They all join me as I lift my face to the sun. Relishing being alone. Left to our own devices. No expectations of us. For us.

Unlike these women my agonies only lasted twelve hours. Two days ago. I’ll be up and about in no time. But today, in my high-ceilinged room, on the second floor of a terrace house in Islington, built in a time when people of means convalesced, I am Heidi’s friend, Clara, in her comfortable chair by the window. I am Austen’s Louisa Musgrove recovered enough to sit up but still weak. I am a languid Marianne Dashwood holding a book she is unable to read. I am Alcott’s Beth, her room full of everything she loves. Her father’s books, her mother’s chair. Jo’s desk and Amy’s sketches.

Sorry, it must be my spaced-out brain. My wobbly body. The sunshine. Ye olde world prints. The gold-framed desilvering mirror. Precisely placed, carefully curated curios. Patina. The faint scent of tobacco and vanilla – beeswax? Longing. For simple stuff. For languorous days. I want to hold onto it all. How do you remember sensations? I reach for my phone. No, not on Instagram. Too tired to write, I save them to my hippocampus.

The sun is lower. Paul is due back from The British Museum. He’ll bring electrolytes with stories of missed buses, packed trains, strange people, bad coffee. Of getting lost. Of seeing wonders. There’ll be brochures and postcards.

The last of the sun fills the amethyst room with a moment of gold. Then it’s gone.

 

HIGHLY COMMENDED: ‘Belonging, yet only a witness’, by Julie Rysdale

The keening gulls low over the Transporter Bridge echoed the voices of their ancestors, their sense of belonging clear and determined.

However, for me, a sense of unease, a sense of changed familiarity. A place familiar, yet foreign. The streets were cloaked in a sepia haze as I walked with the shadows of bygone days. A touch. Shoulders brushed with the past, as I returned to my birthplace after more than 50 years absence. A home I had left as a young child. Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales.

Here, walking beside me, before me and swirling behind, was a time before I was born. Another life that I knew through photos and discussion, cleverly fabricated memories. And a coloured imagination, always an imagination.

And here, the narrow terrace house where my father was born, not far from the Transporter Bridge and the docks where he played as a child. And where he later pilfered coal to fend off winter and The Depression. The shabby house now an attempt at gentrification. Fragile and false. Linked only with the past, I resented the new, flimsy apartments which hid my memories and imagination, my lost doll, my farewell so long ago as a young child. My tears beneath their rickety future.

Look there, now. Was that my mother just ahead pushing a baby’s pram up Chepstow Hill? Bowed against the incline, worn shoes wearing down the pavement, smooth and trodden. Bowed under a burden, the daily worries of making ends meet. Can I walk on those slabs and feel her presence, shall I reach down and touch her footsteps? There! Did she turn towards the cemetery, the pram’s frame catching the light? I should be quick to follow her. Can I make things easier for her? My life a series of colour and light, clear and neon against the greyed tones of her life. Can I ease the troubles of her day?

Corporation Road. Still drab and melancholy, still struggling with work and family troubles and gossip. I was told my grandmother had lived at 149 Corporation Road. My grandmother. She had walked this road. I felt anxiously drawn to her home. I drifted along the grey pavement, hearing the hushed whispers of another time. Did I catch sight through the light-slivers in time to my ancestors’ daily lives unfolding? Could I reach out and touch the astrakhan couch, the brocade curtains, the angst and arguments, the talk? Could I smell the cabbage and bubble and squeak? Why was she not waiting and waving? Why was the gate closed fast and the curtains drawn?

Was I wandering through a place, a time and space lost to the present? A misty curtain wafting in the breeze of time, teasing and unsettling with the glimmer and glimpses of another life. The layers tricking and taunting me.

I was searching for the rhythm of the beat of the times long past.

Belonging, yet exiled. Always to be the time traveller lost in the ether of memories.

 

HIGHLY COMMENDED: ‘Burntwood’, by Adrian Brookes

‘My, she’s having a good go at him.’

Barry had taken Sophie, his companion of these last few weeks, to a popular riverbank picnic spot. Amongst several other groups with their rugs and baskets sat the conflicted young couple Sophie had pointed out. The angry woman’s target was staring dismally towards the town clock across the river as though wanting time to swallow him. From a stroller next to them came the cry and kick of an infant.

Barry sighed. Sophie clearly found the couple’s discomfiture amusing. Her life had been very different from his, free of the conflicts he’d endured, and the contrast had begun to grate on both of them.

‘Say something wrong, did I?’

Barry cleared his throat. ‘It’s just sad.’

‘They’ll get over it.’

‘They won’t.’

‘How d’you know? They’re young. They’ve got a baby. It can’t be easy for them, but people learn.’

Barry could have gone along with her, but this time he stopped himself, allowing her only a wry smile.

‘Well then, perhaps you could go over and give them the benefit of your wisdom.’

‘It wouldn’t do them any good.’

‘I’m amazed you can say that. So negative. Why are you like this?’

‘Because I recognise exactly where they are. I’ve been there.’

‘Where’s there?’

‘Burntwood, I call it. Where I once ended up with… someone. If you have the misfortune to get stuck there, it’s a place you get to know all-too intimately, with its tensions and taboos, its rocks and hard places, its every cutting word and prickly silence. It consumes you, leaves you charred, dried out, brittle and too ready to burn again. The more you struggle, the tighter its grip. Finally it hit me: you can try what you like, but it’s the end of the road. There’s no way back and no way through. And that’s where they are.’

With a jolt he was back there too, on the kitchen-sink battleground in the glare of the someone whose name still choked him. On the scullery wall above them hung their broken clock, its accusing fingers pointing immovably.

‘There must have been a way out, otherwise you’d still be there.’

‘Huh?’ He shook away the image.

‘And you’re not.’

‘Except that over time there’s a transference. You know—you can take the person out of the place… But the place invades you, possesses you. You realise you weren’t just passing through it after all. It doesn’t matter by then, because everywhere you go you take the place with you. It warps everything you do.’

The young woman was flouncing off with the stroller, leaving her partner scrambling to gather up their things. Sophie watched her go and drew a sharp breath. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I can handle this.’

Once more Barry felt caught in the irresolvable tug-of-war between relief and despair. Burntwood had spoken, and he watched its words arc through the broken clock and plummet into the abyss of futility.

 

SHORTLISTED: ‘Across the Bay’, by Jenny Macaulay

I feel the surge of power as the captain opens the throttle, or whatever they do on ferries, as we pull out of Portarlington’s calm harbour. The rolling motion across Port Phillip Bay is pleasantly comforting in the warm cabin.  When the engines slow near the entrance to the Yarra, or Birrarung, rays of morning sun bounce brightly from a rusty red tanker moored off Williamstown. The hulls of white yachts gleam against a grey horizon where magnificent two-storey dwellings begin to emerge from the backdrop of a foreboding sky. Above, large patches of blue are speckled with swerving gulls enjoying the winter sun.

We glide under the Westgate Bridge and between tankers and wharves piled high with multi-coloured containers, a tall brick chimney, a row of ugly electrical towers and a cormorant drying its wings on top of a marine marker. We pass huge petroleum tanks and cranes resembling a family of mighty brontosauruses ready to begin their daily graze.

Long corrugated iron sheds stretch behind privately owned cruisers worth more than it would cost to house a city’s homeless. The ‘Melbourne Star’ adds a soft curve to a skyline of rectangles that reach for the sky as we pass under the cantilevered Bolte Bridge and approach the CBD. The steam tug, ‘Wattle’, nestles near the ‘Alma Dopel’ which still remains under canvas concealing its ongoing restoration. A huge bright octopus embraces one end of a massive maritime shed.

My observations are interrupted by the loud-speaker encouraging us to remain seated until we berth. This is completely ignored and the thirty or so passengers on the top deck immediately make their way to the stairs. We follow and join a similar number from the lower deck in a queue to disembark.

We catch a tram to the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets, cross the Princes Bridge and notice a large number of people on the footpath near the art centre. It is NAIDOC Week. There are stalls selling Aboriginal jewellery, paintings and clothing and we browse before entering the State Theatre to see ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, a story I had loved in my teens and enjoy today as one of the best stage performances I have seen.

We have a wine at Federation Square then make our way back to the ferry terminal where the ‘Firelight Festival’ is gearing up for its third night of activities. Over-weight security personnel in yellow-green vests wander around eating from greasy paper bags. Flames in fire drums try to warm the rapidly cooling air and children in gloves and beanies prance around under the black and white cubic cow that lies upside down in the bare branches of a sculptural tree connecting both Australian floods and Dobell’s art, according to the sculptor, John Kelly.

Our ferry is late.

 

SHORTLISTED: ‘Chez Moi’, by Geoffrey Gaskill

I have lived a privileged existence, never wanting for much and, until recent years, never having to think about those big life-questions starting with why? or what? I have travelled enough to know there will never be enough time to see or experience all the things a restless soul might want to experience.

But here’s the paradox. After a lifetime of avoiding something I didn’t even know was there, I now exist in two worlds. The first I have known all my life. The other I have not.

I’ve come to call this place Chez Moi. One day it appeared to me fully formed and unwanted. Such a destination was never on my to-do list of places to go. It wasn’t that it was easily accessible. To get there I had to go a little mad with grief.

Now, here in the twilight of my life, I’ve visited Chez Moi more times than I want to remember. For all that, it still as elusive as my computer screen is not.

It’s about now I can hear the reader groan about yet one more old man rabbiting on about life lessons. I harumph. Believe it or not, such didacticism belongs to another country, another time. It was after I went mad and, gathering as much self-loathing and self-pity as I could carry, I was forced to acknowledge that Chez Moi was accessible only over the corpses of lost friendships.

I’m not proud to say that I became an angry old man. ‘Why,’ I cried in my dark immodesty, ‘would they abandon me at my most vulnerable?’ I didn’t try to see things through their eyes until, illuminated in the smouldering embers of sanity, I could just make out the whiny, self-indulgent little twat I’d become.

I hated going there even as I couldn’t stay away. Each time I returned from it, there was no-one to acknowledge or welcome my homecoming.

The cliché about the therapeutic value of time is true. A word, a melody, a scent or any of a dozen triggers would set me off so often down that road I’ve become desensitised. They may be less frequent, but I haven’t eliminated them. Growing older has just inured me to the bloodless mediocrity of the place.

Now and then, in flights of whimsy, I liken myself to a latter-day Ishmael. When, ‘I find myself growing grim about the mouth,’ I take the Chez Moi road. It is pointless to resist.

I know sometime in the not-too-distant future, I will set out on my final journey. That day will, like Ismael’s, be a ‘damp, drizzly November in my soul,’ and no matter how much I may want to return, I won’t. On that day, alone in Chez Moi, the big questions may, at last, get an answer.

 

SHORTLISTED: ‘Context’, by Helen Booth

Even now, when I think of him, I catch my breath. His long fingers wandering up and down the neck of the bass guitar, green eyes locked on mine as I sway, and the soft cotton of my dress brushing against my bare thighs. It must have been his smile … straight white teeth, boyish dimples peeking through dark stubble.

His bedroom was a hothouse jungle. Close. Sweaty. A haze of tendrils shooting from all directions to caress and entwine me and lift me from a tangle of darkness into a canopy of light. Oh. My. God.

It wasn’t till the second day I noticed the hard bristle of stained carpet against my feet, the pile of empty pizza boxes, half-drunk cups of congealed coffee adorning the bookcase, chest of drawers, TV and coffee table. Inside the fridge there was nothing but the remains of a slab of corona and a carton of milk way past its use-by date.

Sometimes context is everything.

He lay on the sofa, naked in the afternoon light, smoking a joint and channel surfing between the tennis and the cricket … oblivious to the soft click of the door as I left.

Imagine being cooped up there during lockdown? … Hmmm. Might not be so bad, if I could block out those musty smells of dust, stale pizza, dope and cigarettes … There might be benefits … the sight of his long naked body stretched across the matted maroon of sofa.

No! I laugh out loud at the thought. A laugh. With myself. Alone in my apartment during lockdown. No… I could creep across town to the bay in the dead of night. Beyond the five-kilometre limit. Tyres rolling over wet bitumen towards the empty funfair chained and grinning in darkness. No. Remember the mess of greying sheets on his bed? And those mushrooms of mould growing in the corners of his shower recess. The roughness of his too-many-times-washed towel against my body, my face a stranger peering back through a mirror of steam.

I’ll take my little apartment any day: breakfast on the balcony in the winter sun, scrolling through the news, listening to trams roll up and down St Georges Road as dark clouds race across the city sky … From the rooftops to the glinting beads of dew on the red petals and furry leaves of my potted geraniums, this is where I’d rather be.

My floors and surfaces are spotless, my fridge and cupboards full of food, my towels soft and wafting a gentle fragrance of cleanliness.

I’ve got Netflicks, Instagram, Twitter, and a stack of books. I’ve got playlists and friends a mere touch of the keyboard away. I can have them with me, plugged into my ears for hours.

Imagine him here, stretched out naked on my sofa among my coordinated cushions and throws, smoking a joint and watching the footy or some grizzly, blood-curdling movie.

Imagine us tangled in my clean sheets.

 

SHORTLISTED: ‘Special Days’, by Kerstin Lindros

I know this little town, where we used to play in the forest by the train tracks every holiday, cupping hands over ears when the steam train passed with its whooshing rhythm and piercing whistle. We came home dog-tired after roaming for hours and feeding ourselves with the fruit from roadside trees. We had secret hiding spots. Played marbles. Spent loads of time at the pool, rollicking in the scents of summer.

And I know a house that was full of treasures, fun and warmth. Always.

Excited, I park the car. The network of roads feels familiar, giving the illusion that nothing has changed. But as I walk into our street, the houses—repaired, refashioned and painted in subtle hues—don’t seem to belong. How can something refined and beautiful feel so alien and cold on a sunny day in spring?

Grandma and I used to know the neighbours who chatted with us from their front gardens or waved out of windows. Where are the people? Anyone? Where is the fragrance? The thriving gardens bursting with lilac and peony this time of year?

Cracked earth and pebbles, the signs now evident wherever I turn, signal drought and change. My grandmother’s house has become a boxy fortress with yard and garden behind a high solid metal fence. Shiny perfection. Sophisticated. Unsettling.

Staring at the cold wall, now from the back lane, I reminisce about following the rustling sound to see the hedgehog emerge from its winter bed, performing plays in the summery garden, picking pears and bottling fruit for winter. Celebrating New Year’s Eve with neighbours—the festive aroma of the bubbly the adults drank here … the voices, music, laughter … the green-stemmed high liqueur glasses with a taste of Advocaat for us kids …

As the images and sounds fade, I lament the loss of yesterday’s simplicity, then ponder my expectations. My surprise? Naïve. The touch of disappointment? Ridiculous.

Enough. The streets are still empty and I head back to the car. I don my jacket in the cool breeze that’s stirring around the church, and now I see the A-frame: Open Day. Old Mr K invites me in at closing time. I hesitate.

‘I’m in no hurry,’ he says.

So I tell him about Aunt Margot, about when I was five and she played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor for us on this organ, and how I held my breath and I saw the goosebumps on Dad’s arm and he saw mine and smiled at me warmly …

‘Miss Margot?’ He takes me upstairs and unlocks the organ. ‘Please sit. Take your time.’

I touch the aged timber. Inhale the scent of old furniture and dusty books. And I’m reminded that memories and fragments of the past live on, waiting to be found and matched.

Earlier, this was a place I no longer knew. Now I can’t stop smiling as the church steeple shrinks to a dot in my rear view mirror.

 

SHORTLISTED: ‘St Helens Beach’, by Colleen McGrath

It’s no longer how I remember it.

The new development with its multi-storey apartments, prestigious allotments; now a blot on the landscape.

It was here, I once played, embracing the freedom of summer. Memories preserved, gently tucked away in a place undiluted – unspoilt by time.

Summer days – parading along the promenade, in our new Christmas bathers. The rickety enclosure; planks missing, rusty nails protruding, awaiting a victim.

Hives nurtured at the adjoining convent, bees gathering, in search of nectar.

My mothers’ voice planted* in my subconscious; ‘be careful and don’t annoy the bees;’ to no avail! With the help of friends, two shoulders to lean on, I hop the distance home. A ‘blue bag’, and my mother not saying, ‘I told you so’, takes the sting out of the bite.

The nuns, strolling across the grassy slopes whilst keeping watch over the cliff face; making sure our makeshift ‘toboggans and repurposed cardboard boxes, are sturdy enough, to survive the steep ride; bruises and scrapes, when our bravado was greater than our navigational skills.

Catching glimpses of the younger, more venturesome nuns, in their ‘neck to knees,’ much to our amusement.

Treasure hunts with Mrs Rickuss, our next-door neighbour…. taking her lead, sifting through the debris, washed in during low tides; eager to find a few pennies, or colourful and stylish shells, or even the occasional find, of a piece of stylish jewellery.

*The pride I felt on School Sports Day when ‘my beach,’ was the chosen venue. How I enjoyed sharing my knowledge; of the various seaweed clusters, sand banks and stony areas, to be avoided.

‘My Tree’ at the top of the beach lawn, a stunted conifer, which oddly, grew outwards, rather than upwards. It’s unusual growth, creating a branched hollow, allowing our ‘club of three’ to hide away, whilst enjoying our private tea parties. We thought ourselves so sophisticated.

The cheerful groundskeeper who kept the ‘larrikins,’ away from our tree.

The countless times my elder brother and sister were sent to bring me home, for lunch or tea.

The sadness I felt years later, when crowds arrived in droves and the beach, no longer mine. Favoured spots now sought out by beachgoers determined to ‘reserve’ a spot, with tents erected and often left vacant, until early evening.

Surrounding areas changing.

Modest homes sold, another storey added; each competing with the other, as multi-stories become the norm.

St Johns church, overshadowed by development, it’s’ charm lost.

I mourn the loss of simplicity; there is a shift, towards ‘bigger and better,’ – without a thought to history, aesthetics, nor neighbourhood.

I grieve for my paradise – lost.

All things in life, wax, and wane – like memories, but the place I know lingers still …

 

ABOUT THE JUDGE

Jennifer Hurley (PhD) lives on unceded Wadawurrung land in Victoria. After a long career working in universities, she is now writing fiction that explores everyday life as it intersects with broader social issues and historical contexts.