Memoir

Every time I walked through that gate, I’d marvel at the pawpaws, bead trees, palms, bromeliads, and magnolias that surrounded me, noting the difference in heat from the street to the carport.

It was set high in the northern coastal suburbs of Perth. The neighbourhood, Hillarys, had been a suburb for less than twenty years; before that, I don’t know.

My apartment is part of a council housing estate, which means it’s one in a honeycomb of 260 versions of itself.

I’ve returned this year, like I do every Christmas, to my parents’ home on a busy street in Lenah Valley, Tasmania.

You’re on the decking of our Christmas Hills house, the Yarra Valley stretching out like patchwork between your knees.

There is nothing uniquely ‘Canberra’ about our apartment. It is a generic yellow block, built in the ’90s, with a manicured yard and a body corporate that sends us letters we never read.

If northern NSW has ever had a ‘type’ of house, it’s a fibro two-storey with seams on the outside and a massive backyard, built high to avoid the floods.

While the city flooded, one of the timber stilts holding up my mother’s house uprooted.

All the cat-rearing guides warn against relocating a feline.

Part Four: the Holey Trinity of Relieving, Reinforcing and Restarting.

I am standing in the middle of a vast rural expanse in Oświęcim, Poland. I’d travelled by way of a rickety cab from Katowice, where I was staying. You may know Oświęcim as Auschwitz.

Part Three: Companions

Part Two: the Kids Aren’t Alright.

Reviews of life and stuff.

Part One: Triangles.

It’s a peculiar thing to know exactly where you are all the time, but not to know if you like or dislike it.

It’s five minutes past our scheduled interview time and there’s no sign of her.

I wish I could say that I fell in love with Julian Barnes because of the immaculate quality of his writing, but instead my reasons are shamefully superficial.

My brother got his head glued back together when I was nine.

Back in Manchester, the Americans are swapping stories about their trips and sorting through souvenirs.

Did you know you can buy a kitten off the Internet for $25?

Four years ago, I set out on a pilgrimage in search of Jane Austen.

I’ve always imagined my voice to be rich like oak or Bill Gates.

Although my days as a student are over and I no longer study menus with the same eye for ‘great value’ (or rather, ‘the least for the most’) I still love eating cheap.

There’s a rite of passage every Brisbane resident experiences and comes to cherish: storm season.

At the beginning of May my brother called me at work to ask if I’d been entering children’s competitions under false names.

For a while I was completely hooked on the Real Housewives of Melbourne.

My family and I moved to London when I was ten. We spent one day and one night in Singapore on the way.

Important hints and tips on how to be an adult.

This winter will be my fourth in Melbourne. When I first arrived, I didn’t know winter very well, beyond my experience of westerly winds, bright skies, and duffle coats in Toowoomba as a kid.

Two weeks seems like not enough time to really miss someone, but really I missed you from the second your mouth left mine.

When I was seven I was very shy. In report cards there were always comments like, ‘Michael is a bright boy, but he really needs to speak up more in class.

Last year two things happened that changed life quite a bit.

I find a Japanese toy from the 70’s when I am digging under my dad’s house. Just three parts of a robot bird. It is called a Micronaught.

Retire, after spending the day at Soveriegn Hill’s historic Goldrush Town, to your hotel for dinner.

One of the first things I made was a skirt from my bedroom curtains.

When I was young I liked performing on stage. While now I shy away from it at any cost, then I liked it a lot.

Children are pretty dumb and lame, because they can’t even drive cars and are freakishly short.

My mother and father furnished their Queensland home with remarkable thrift.

In 1989, 1990 and 1991 I wrote three poems titled ‘Love is like a Ferris wheel’ in my poetry diaries.

My parents love to travel. Even now, they’re somewhere in the Gulf of Carpenteria, swiping flies and uploading photos of their campsite.

I’ve got this list. Unlike most lists, it wasn’t conceived to restore daily order to my life.  This list is part of a far greater exercise in futility: the quest to arrive at a personality.

A few months back, on a day where I was at my most doubtful, my most fearful and claustrophobic, an airmail envelope arrived.

I have a lazy eye. Normally, when I tell people this, they stare intently at my face. Waiting for it, I guess.

Without a shadow of a doubt, my favourite thing to do during my post-toddler/pre-teen years was to create mini fortresses out of large cardboard boxes.

Once, I saw a segment on A Current Affair that chastised a middle-aged woman for wearing mini skirts.

My father is shorter than I am, about 5’10”, and muscled the same way I imagine an old sailor to be muscled.

Like literally everything else in your life, base your initial understanding of sex on FRIENDS.

My footy year wrapped up watching the grand final on a small pub screen in Julatten, a one-street town northwest of Cairns.

First of all, before anything, make sure to grow up not fully understanding the value of hard work.

Came runner-up in the Nudgee Junior College poetry competition in year seven.

I was raised by women or spent a lot of time with women in my family. I never knew my grandfather, only my grandmother without him.

My younger brother and I spent a long time living together in a house without parents, maybe almost a decade. Maybe this was too long for us to do this.

My father had studied photography and thought he’d be a photographer, but then that hadn’t exactly panned out.

My father had studied photography and thought he’d be a photographer, but then that hadn’t exactly panned out.

My boss’s dandruff looks exactly like white quinoa flakes. When I am cleaning the shop in the evenings, I think about vacuuming his scalp.

Three days ago I finished signing up to OkCupid. I’ve had it with Plenty of Fish. I concede that my friend was right when she said that POF is full of ‘psychopaths and punctuation abuse’.

Before starting, cultivate your infatuation with this woman over at least six months, or longer.

It seems that online dating is not for the faint-hearted. A friend of mine described it nicely as an ‘ever-escalating game of chicken’.

I am reviewing and deleting my 15 or so matches when I spot a familiar face in a profile picture. His screen name contains the letters FNQ.

It’s 9 o’clock on Friday night and we’ve found ourselves outside Club Minx on Elizabeth Street.

Invest in an array of cookbooks. Include books for vegans and books about low-sugar foods. Share salad recipes via email with friends.

Six weeks after coming home from India.

On Nguyen Duy Hieu, the road that runs right up the middle of Hoi An, there’s a tailor shop called Sun.

I can’t really remember when I first wrote a poem that I consciously called a poem, but when I was about three and four I used to make these little books. 

Mum points to the large cardboard box in the corner of the living room. Bulging with papers, folders and ring-binder plastic-sleeves, all of it yellowing and musty.

I remember asking one of my cousins to help me write a poem when I was about 7.

My mother packs for trips six weeks in advance.

Senjuuin is a Buddhist temple on top of a mountain between Nara and Osaka in the southern part of Honshu, Japan.

On my first day of school Mum walked me across the grass playground to the pale yellow weatherboard Queenslander sitting on the edge of the teacher’s gravel driveway.

I bought a suit last week. The suit is burgundy, slim-fit, and its kind was worn by my celebrity crush on the red carpet, once.

I’ve been having thoughts about moving out, lately.

The night before I was due to submit this piece, the guy that I have been dating told me he couldn’t see me anymore.

One Saturday afternoon Nanna was sifting through the cupboard, and came across that set of pictures. They were in a box of stuff from a McDade family reunion Pa had gone to years ago.

It occurred to me recently that I have had eight employers in the last financial year.

My uncle pulls the writhing silver fish up from the water and drops it in the bottom of the boat.

My little brother doesn’t like to put his head under the water. My cousins are trying to teach him to duck when the waves grow too tall.

If you decide to be a writer, you are going to want to tell people.

As a writer, you have to accept that most things you write will make you cringe like hell about a year down the track.

A writer has to write. Every now and then you are going to have to pull yourself together, draw on all of your shitty experiences and horrible trains of thought, and then you will have to write words and fit them together and call it a story.

I am somewhat familiar with culinary experimentation. After my parents divorced my siblings and I began to stay with Dad on the weekends.

Writers are a breed apart. We are fuelled on troubles and fun is our Kryptonite.

Nanna stands at the laminate bench and cracks an egg into a pyrex bowl full of mince. She removes her rings, and sinks her fingers into the cold meat.

There are definitely moments from my school days I could happily forget: woodwork, piss splash, Mr Kollar, the walkathon, the certificate I received on assembly for ‘letting my poetic juices flow’.

Game day. A slow start to the morning but with definite purpose in mind. Mum and I would go to Windy Hill, and Robin and Dad to Footscray.

I sometimes wonder who got the better deal, my brother or sister or me.

There are always signs that you have come. The middle knuckle of my left hand and the skin behind my right knee inexplicably flare up with dermatitis.

Growing up in a household of six children with all of us crammed together, my sister playing Alanis Morissette down in the garage, my younger brother sleeping in the walk-in wardrobe, my older brother eating food from the plate in front of me, I’ve grown up with a very relaxed understanding of personal boundaries.

When I was fifteen I went to Germany on a school trip for a month with two of my best friends Ellen and Kate, and ten other students.

I was born on the second of January. The significance of this day for my brothers, and possibly for my father as well, is that Michael Schumacher was born the day after.

On the southern bank of the Clarence, corner of Through and Skinner Streets in Grafton, is Walkers Marina Hotel. The pub looks proudly over the big wide river and out to Susan Island.

In high school, I was super horny. I had lots of friends who were girls, but no girlfriends.

I moved to Brisbane on my mother’s 47th Birthday. I gave her a small, newspaper-wrapped parcel after we unpacked the car. She took off the paper and started to cry.

Everyone knows great writers are great substance abusers. Drugs and alcohol go hand in hand with writing like cheese goes with tomato sauce on your lazy mother’s packed lunch sandwiches.

I grew up in Mackay, a town where sugar cane ran rampant across hillsides. Brisbane meant waking at 4am, leaving the dogs behind and driving to a servo where I would invariably eat hot chips.

That first summer we lived with two photography students in a rickety old Queenslander in the hills of Auchenflower and there was a hills-hoist in the sloping back yard and spiders big as paper plates hanging in curtains from the pistachio tree at the bottom of the hill.

We came down the range in a white Commodore. Mum and Dad in the front, and Tom and me in the back eating salad sandwiches with beetroot-stained white bread.

When I moved to Brisbane my Nonna pushed a fifty dollar note into my palm and grabbed my face with both her hands.