Uninvited Guests

There’s a knock on your front door. You open it. There’s a stranger there, pleasant enough, say’s he’s looking around the neighbourhood for somewhere to live. You invite him in, give him a cup of tea. He goes on his way.

Some time later, he appears at the door again. This time with several friends, some of whom you really don’t like the  look of. Somewhat reticently, you invite them in. Gradually,  they begin to take over your house. Where you thought they only wanted to look around, it becomes obvious they’re not going away.

They bring in their own food, spread themselves around all the rooms, trash your furniture, clog up your plumbing and generally wreck your house while hardly taking notice of you.

Eventually you find yourself sleeping in the backyard.  They’ve taken over completely.

This is, more or less, what happened in what we now call Australia when the first Europeans arrived, although as an allegory, it doesn’t begin to describe the impact and the devastation that European invasion visited on the original Australians and the land that they had turned, over millennia, into what historian Bill Gammage has called, in his book of that name,  ‘the biggest estate on earth.’

It was on the 12^th of November 1777 that the ships which would become known as The First Fleet weighed anchor in the Cape of Good Hope and set sail for the country that they would eventually name Australia.

The 962 people on board the eleven ships were to begin a colony in a land that had not been properly explored beforehand – Cook and his crew had merely made landfall on the east coast, stopped at  Botany Bay for a few days and sailed up the coast. No subsequent voyages were sent to reconnoitre. They had come half way around the world to an unknown land, officially to establish a colony. But that was not the real reason for the journey. As Robert Hughes wrote in The Fatal Shore, ‘In their most sanguine moments, the authorities hoped that  it (the voyage and subsequent ones) would swallow a whole class – the “criminal class”’ which they could then forget about.

But there was another agenda, as expressed by Lieutenant Watkin Tench in his first book A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. As Tench saw it, upon leaving the Cape,

they ‘soon left far behind every scene of civilisation and humanised manners to explore a remote and barbarous land and plant in it those happy arts which alone constitute the pre-eminence and dignity of other countries’

A good start what? No pre-judging there. One could understand ‘remote’ but ‘barbarous’? How did they know that? The only reports they would have had from Cook and Banks’ visit eighteen years before  did not indicate barbarity, rather temerity. The first indigenous Australians they saw threw rocks, or threw spears (darts Cook called them) or ran away.  The first Europeans they saw fired guns.

On May 4^th 1770, Banks wrote in his journal ‘One of our midshipmen stragling by himself a long way from any one else met by accident with a very old man and woman and some children: they were setting under a tree and neither party saw the other till they were close together. They shewd signs of fear but did not attempt to run away.’

This fear of the newcomer – as it turned out quite justified – didn’t change. Recalling the effect meeting explorers had on the locals much later, Henry Reynolds wrote in The Other Side of the Frontier ‘Meetings with Europeans were often terrifying experiences even when violence was absent. Screaming, perspiring, shaking, involuntary urination and defecation – all the normal human reactions to extreme fear were reported at one time or another by white observers’

He tells of explorer Edward Eyre coming upon a camp at night  and provoking ‘ a wild exclamation of dismay’ followed by a ‘look of indescribable horror and affright.’

As we have subsequently learnt, the original Australians had extraordinary methods of communication and doubtless stories like Philip’s capture and chaining of Arabanoo which, although the man came to no harm, would have been alarming. This was not how guests behaved to their hosts.

The first Europeans didn’t arrive empty-handed. Along with ‘trinkets for the natives’ they bought a considerable amount of food and livestock.

From England they had brought carrots, potatoes, lettuce, asparagus, onions, broccoli, beans, peas, watercress, wheat, barley, rye and oats. Also apples, pears, plums, cherries and a selection of citrus including navels, Seville oranges and Tahitian limes.

And in Rio de Janeiro they picked up tamarind, prickly pear plants complete with – and specifically for – the cochineal grubs – the first but not the last botanical blunder, the pear later ran rife and became an environmental problem – coffee, cotton, lemon, orange and guava. In Capetown, they added rice, maize (then known as Indian corn), apples, bamboo (the second mistake), pears, strawberries, quinces, apples, an assortment of trees and five hundred head of assorted livestock which included a bull, a bull calf, and seven cows – one of the cows died at sea.

So the uninvited guests arrived with their own food and their own methods of agriculture from the other side of the planet – methods that would prove disastrous. But first, they had to steal the land.

 

THEN WE TOOK THEIR LAND

On the Treaty Republic website, Professor Stuart Banner wrote: ‘The British treated Australia as terra nullius—as un-owned land. Under British colonial law, Aboriginal Australians had no property rights in the land, and colonization accordingly vested ownership of the entire continent in the British government. The doctrine of terra nullius remained the law in Australia throughout the colonial period, and indeed right up to 1992.’

By proclaiming the land empty, in the eyes of the law –

and by extension, the eyes of the European populace – Aboriginal Australians did not really exist. How did this illogical and immoral doctrine come about in the first place? Nowhere else in the world, neither in New Zealand nor North America, had the British propounded or adopted such a policy. The reasons for the adoption of terra nullius are complex, and tied, in a great part, to agriculture: that is,

its invisibility to the colonisers.

Those who arrived in Australia in the late eighteenth century believed that a society without agriculture was a society without property rights in land.

Because the local peoples were assumed to have no agriculture, and therefore no farms, no fences, no stock, no gardens, they had no property rights. This was not a new way of looking at society, at property.  European thinkers like Adam Smith posited that all societies passed through four stages: hunting, pasturage, farming and commerce. Each of these stages corresponded to a set of political and economic institutions, one of which was property. Hunter-gatherers, as the indigenous Australians were thought to be, owned no property, did not know the meaning of property and, therefore, had no property rights. As we have begun to discover, although these stages of society were essentially correct for the much of the world, Australia, before 1788, was the exception. But there was more to the application of terra nullius than the perceived lack of agriculture.

The first settlers damned the locals as dirty, indigent, lazy and not quite human. On returning to England, William Dampier reported  ‘The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the World…. setting aside their Human(e) Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.’ As for their diet, he wrote ‘There is neither herb, root, pulse, nor any sort of grain for them to eat that we saw; nor any sort of bird or beast that they can catch, having no instruments wherewithal to do so.’

In 1809, the naturalist George Caley who had been sent by Banks to gather botanical specimens told Banks that ‘The absence of agriculture implied the absence of any property rights the British were bound to respect and more broadly reinforced the prevailing belief in the Aborigines’ backwardness. No farms, no houses, no clothes—could a people be any more savage?’ Worse, according to missionary William Pascoe Cook in 1803 they ‘seemed to be amazing stupid.’

In short, as The Southern Australian saw the matter in 1839 ‘We found the country in the state in which ages before the black people had found it—its resources undeveloped, unappropriated!’ The answer was at hand. ‘Britons “cannot but feel ourselves delighted at the sight of smiling harvests taking place of naked wastes,” applauded one far-off observer, “since man’s business, as an inhabitant of this world, is to improve and cultivate the face of the earth.”’

Can the settlers be blamed for their disdain of the original Australians ? Can we judge them by the standards of today? A difficult but perhaps not a relevant question. By any standards they treated the people they found here as little better than animals and ignored their human rights.

Not all agreed.

In 1802 the French explorer Nicholas Baudin was in New South Wales, and he took the opportunity to give Governor Philip Gidley King a piece of his mind about terra nullius. “To my way of thinking,” Baudin declared, “I have never been able to conceive that there was justice and equity on the part of Europeans in seizing, in the name of the Governments, a land seen for the first time, when it is inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages or cannibals which has been given them, whilst they were but the children of nature and just as little civilised as are actually your Scotch Highlanders or our peasants in Brittany….’ Baudin reproached King for “seizing the soil which they own and which has given them birth.”

The naturalist and zoologist François Auguste Péron, travelling with Baudin, obviously an enthusiast for the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, had an entirely different view of the locals, writing that ‘With inexpressible delight I had come to realize in them those brilliant descriptions of of happiness and simplicity of the state of nature of which I had savoured the seducing charm many times in my reading.’ We all bring our own baggage…

On a more down to earth note ‘It may be doubted,’ a correspondent to the Sydney Herald asserted in 1835, “that a people can be justified in forcibly possessing themselves of the territories of another people, who until then were its inoffensive, its undoubted, and ancient possessors.”

But the prevailing viewpoint is expressed in this editorial from  the Sydney Herald in 1838:

‘This vast land was to them (Aborigines) a common – they bestowed no labour upon the land, their right, was nothing  more than that of the emu or the kangaroo…..The British people…took possession…, and they had a perfect right to do so, under the Divine authority, by  which man is commanded to go forth and people, and till the land.”

And verily they did.

THEN WE TRASHED THEIR FOOD.

In his book Tukka,  Australian native food chef and restaurateur Jean Paul Bruneteau wrote ‘The total disregard of a civilisation’s cultural basis was evident from the theft and fencing of land within traditional cultivation areas. Unless a food could be cultivated, it was considered to be of no real value.’

Yes, we occasionally ate native produce and game. Tench believed that a drink made from native sarsaparilla (Smilax glyciphilla) saved many from scurvy. And he wrote ‘A few wild fruits are sometimes procured, among which is the small purple apple mentioned by Cook, and a fruit which has the appearance of a grape, though in taste more like a green gooseberry, being excessively sour.’ (The editor of the Tench book,  Tim Flannery identifies the former fruit as ‘probably a lilly pilly Syzygium’ and the latter ‘possibly a geebung Persoonia).  Tench then went on to make the percipient observation that ‘Probably were it meliorated by cultivation, it would become more palatable.’

But we never really took to the native foods, treating them, as best, as substitutions for ‘the real thing.’ In Santich’s paper on early colonial experimentation with native produce, it is this idea of substitution which puts native produce in its place. In writing of her use of murnong, food historian and academic Barbara Santich quotes settler Katherine Kirkland remarking ‘ I have put it in soup for want of better vegetables before we had a garden.’

Colin Bannerman elaborates on this theme. ‘Thus from the earliest days of white occupation, Australian native food resources were exploited on every plane of feeding — survival, nurture and feasting. Their appearance was often tinged with adventure: exploring, pioneering or hunting. However, bush foods also represented failure: the depletion of stores, extreme poverty… or separation from the society of ‘home.’

But how did we steal their food if we didn’t eat it? By trampling all over it with an imported and, as we are now discovering,  totally unsuitable method of agriculture. Just one example.

The tubers of the Murnong plant (Microseris scapigera), or yam daisy, were an important food source. They were abundant and easily collected and one of the staple foods of Victorian Aborigines. G.A. Robinson, in north-central Victoria in 1840 saw ‘women spread over the plain as far as I could see them….I examined their bags and baskets on their return and each had a  load (of murnong tubers) as much as she could carry.’ But murnong grew in the rich soil of that country and favoured for grazing livestock. By 1831, 700,000 sheep were grazing across Victoria, eating the leaves and digging up the tubers of the murnong. In 1839, a Goulburn Aborigine Moonin-Moonin pointed out that ‘plenty eat it murnong, all gone murnong.’

The transformation of the land to grow more European food would lead to degradation. The activity that Grace Karskens notes in her book The  Colony in 1804 in the Castle Hill area, where ‘six hundred convicts were continually employed in felling trees to open roads through the forest…’ would be repeated across the entire country for at least the next 150 years.  Curiously, the clear-felling of the trees was not in and of itself necessarily a bad thing, but it was evidence of the ways in which these first settlers arrived on a continent which already had a complex land management plan in place, and trampled over it with their heavy boots. Clearfelling facilitated the overstocking of their imported animals, compacting the soil and encouraging run-off rather than allowing the rain to soak into the soil. But the cattle and sheep and imported agricultural methods did more than ruin the land: they broke a profound spiritual connection with it which enabled Aboriginal Australians to care for the entire continent – and to ensure an abundant food supply.

AND THEN WE TOOK THEIR CULTURE: AND THEIR HEALTH

Gammage writes ‘Aboriginal landscape awareness is rightly seen as drenched in religious sensibility, but equally the Dreaming is saturated with environmental consciousness. Theology and ecology are fused.’

You’ve probably heard of totems. Each individual in pre-1788 society had a totem. This totem carried  a multitude of responsibilities, primeary amongst them to ensure the survival of that totem. Gammage writes of one man he met whose totem was the maggot, a most important link in the chain of creation.

The longest war any people fought against the settlers was on the Hawkesbury. In 1788, the Dharug people received Governor Phillip hospitably when he surveyed the river. Then, in the 1790s, he instructed farms to be built there.  Dharug means yam, and the yam was a major totem. The Europeans who stole the land where the Dharug used to farm and cultivate yams – for the original Australians did farm and cultivate  – took land, yam, totem and trade. The traded their yams with adjoining groups. ‘The clans fought back for 22 years, until all were dead or in hiding.’ Europeans did not understand this. The yams were more than food, they were ‘totem allies  needing help.

Gammage’s book painstakingly gathers and lays out the evidence  that ‘collectively (the original Australians) managed an Australian estate they thought of as single and universal…’ And that means from Cape York to Bruny Island. Some Europeans did get this. Gammage quotes pioneer squatter Edward Curr who wrote, in 1883 ‘It may perhaps be doubted whether any section of the human race has ever exercised a greater influence on the physical condition of any large portion of the globe than the wandering savages of Australia.’ Curr knew that what he said and the language that he used – ‘wandering savages’ and ‘greater influence’  would challenge the prevailing wisdom of the day.

What exactly did we take from them? According to  native Australian food merchant and nutrition scientist Vic Cherikoff,  ‘The average Australian (today) would be eating 70 to 80 different foods a year – in the cities. The gourmand who’d be eating white asparagus when it came into season, all the mushrooms, Asian vegetables, herbs and spices – you’d be touching 100 ingredients a year. Move away from the city they’ll eat 40, sometimes less. I’ve been out on stations where they’re surviving on sheep, mutton, beef, occasionally yabbies, local river fish – kangaroo they feed to the dogs they wouldn’t consider eating it – and a handful of vegetables. The Aboriginal people in traditional times, in the western desert, 150 different foods in a year. Move up into the tropical north, 750 different foods.’ And, according to Cherikoff, the nutritional density of these foods far surpassed our cultivated foods today.

And what happened to the diet of the original Australians when they were removed from their land, when they could no longer hunt or dig for murnong? Symons writes that they ‘drifted into  the mining settlements, stations and coastal towns’ and ‘became tragically dependent’, their diet came to ‘consist of white flour for damper, white sugar for tea, camp pie, salt and beer.’ Considerably less than  150 different foods. The result? Diabetes, third world mortality rates, and other problems only too well-known, many of which are specifically linked to poor nutrition.

WAS THAT ANY WAY FOR GUESTS TO BEHAVE?

So we came and stole their land, their culture and cut off their food supply. To add insult to considerable injury, we refused, for over 200 years, to  eat the food that grew here. This began early – and in many ways, still goes on

The annals and journals of those who explored the Australian outback make compelling reading for their encounters with native foods. They often ran out of the supplies they took with them, and had to make decisions about ‘going native’, often with disastrous results.

One of the best know of these stories is that of Burke and Wills, documented by Sarah Murgatroyd in The dig tree: the story of Burke and Wills. In August of 1860, Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills set  off with eighteen companions and camels to cross the country from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. They carried eight tonnes of food for a journey planned to last between eighteen months and two years.  After travelling through the desert, they reached Cooper’s Creek  which was, during a rare period of higher than average rainfall, ‘crowded, noisy and brimming with life.’

This rain had produced a feast for the local Yandruwandha people – and other groups invited in to share the bounty – along the creek.  And after millennia living near the Cooper, they knew how to eat well, even in times of drought. But at this time of  abundance, they chose  from among the thirteen fish, yabbies and fresh water mussels and  ate marsupials, lizards and snakes, all of which would have been herded by fire to facilitate their capture. From the land they took mulga apples, native figs coolibah seeds and, importantly, a small aquatic fern known as nardoo. As Murgatroyd writes ‘harvesting the local bush tucker demanded knowledge, skill and patience’ but Burke, the expedition leader, possessed none of these qualities, and had  ‘no interest in the intricacies and possibilities of his new environment. He had come to conquer, not to learn’

The end of the expedition – which failed within twenty kilometres of their goal, the northern coast in the Gulf of Carpentaria – is tragic. They returned to their Coopers Creek  camp only to find that it had been abandoned that same day.

Having previously rejected the locals, Wills now realised that ‘the men and women he had despised for their “primitive appearance” were now his only chance of survival.’ and became interested in nardoo, but at first had no idea where it grew. He and Burke began trying to live off the land but realised it was not as easy as they had thought, and ‘without the proper tools and traditional knowledge,

the three explorers prepared their nardoo incorrectly’

Eventually, after futile attempts to find help and quarrels with the Yandruwandha people, they died in agony. To die either of ignorance or malnutrition in a land with abundant supplies  of food, and inhabited by ‘a tall athletic people’ is difficult to comprehend.

In a similar vein, Anne Gollan writes in The Tradition of Australian Cooking of the death of a man called Brooks at the Carlo Border Netting Camp near Mulligan River who insisted on eating only his European food. ‘It is strange and sad to think of him dying so bravely, in his lonely grave, when all around him were wild yams, anyeroo nuts, growing prolifically in the sand hills, and the various wild bananas and nuts of the region’

Have we changed?  I recently interviewed Raymond and Jennice Kersh, two  contemporary pioneers of Australian native cuisine in their three consecutive restaurants called Edna’s Table, the last of which closed in 2005.

At their first location in Kent Street, chef Raymond Kersh used native ingredients, but he told me ‘you couldn’t put it on the menu what you were using because nobody knew what they were anyway – we were just using them to create flavours…’

When they moved to their next restaurant, in the MLC Centre, they began to name the ingredients on the menu, and, as Raymond said ‘… that scared the living daylight out of the customers.’

Raymond went on to recount a story from that time. ‘We had a customer who was a real regular. He was a fantastic customer when we were at Kent Street. He came to the MLC and ate the same food and read on the menu  what he’d been eating all along and he turned around and said to me “what are you using this Aboriginal shit for?” That was the late 1990s, and that was, the Kersh told me, a common reaction.

So, finally, we stole their land, their culture, their spirituality, and their food. Which we not only refused to eat, but thought of as ‘shit.’

Have we been good guests?

Who’s sitting on table 41?

 

Did you ever see the episode of Heat in The Kitchen when critic Matthew Evans and his dining companion walk into Aria on a night when chef Matt Moran isn’t there? You might remember the premise was that Evans had taken away Aria’s third hat, and the restaurant was doing everything to get it back.

It was scary. The entire kitchen went into panic mode. What to do? What to serve him? What if we fuck up? I’d hate to have been a paying customer that night. There were only two people in the room. And neither of them would have been me.

What did the sous chef do wrong? What do restaurants do wrong when critics walk in the door?

They forgot their raison d’etre – feeding people – and thought only of the award, the elusive third hat.

The main problem:  awards have become a goal, and not a reward.

I’d like to take you through the restaurant experience from the critic’s point of view.

I began using restaurants  as a boy in short trousers, when I was taken by my mother as her ‘companion’ when she reviewed restaurants for Sydney’s Daily Mirror newspaper, a profession (restaurant reviewing) which, following in her footsteps, I have practiced  at various times in various parts of the world.

I’ve reviewed restaurants for Gourmet Traveller when it was Australian Gourmet and Australian Gourmet Traveller. I’ve reviewed for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Good Food Guide, the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday and the Saturday Financial Review and  was for many years a reviewer for and co-editor of Sydney Eats, which was Cheap Eats and which was – sadly, it is no more, due to incompetence and misunderstanding ­–

the oldest restaurant guide in Sydney. And when I was living in Spain, I reviewed for an English language newspaper under the pseudonym S Panza.

 

All of which I tell you so that you know I do have a bit of experience in the business of summing up a restaurant. What qualifications do I have? About as many of most of our top chefs. Neil Perry started as a hairdresser; Tetsuya Wakuda  studied business at a university in Tokyo; Christine Manfield was an art teacher. Like them, I learnt on the job.

My qualifications are that I love food, I love to eat and I have made it my business to learn as much about it as  I can. And I’ve cooked a few times professionally – nothing serious  – but I’ve felt the heat in the kitchen.

But before we even look at restaurants, let’s look at the one question any critic of anything – restaurants, films, plays, operas, novels  – asks when evaluating whatever it is they’re criticising?

 What are they trying to do – and how well have they succeeded?

This question is key to the business of the critic. So if I walk into a hamburger joint in Glebe, I’m not going to judge it against Rockpool. As a matter of fact, I may score the hamburger joint in Glebe (my favourite The Spot) higher than Rockpool – because they’ve achieved what they’ve set out to do – and Rockpool hasn’t.

Of course you have to weight that – it’s harder to be Rockpool than The Spot. But it’s the right place to start.

 

How does a reviewer look at a restaurant? Leigh Prentice, architect and restaurant designer (Sydney’s Bennelong, Catalina) told me how he approaches a restaurant design.

He looks at the room, the chair, and the food, in that order – I realised that is exactly the way a critic should enter and begin to examine a restaurant.

So let’s look at it that way.

 

The room:

Just walking into a restaurant I can learn so much. But first, I have to get rid of me. You know because you see people walking in. How do I look? Am  I cool enough? Will they see through me. Nah. Get rid of it. Feel the room

 

Firstly, is it full? Nothing worse than walking into an empty room.  The restaurant manager’s nightmare. What does the critic do? Well, depends on the critic, the deadline and how the place feels. You can walk out, go somewhere else – or give it a go.

 Second – how does it look? Does it  look like a well oiled machine or maybe I can see empty boxes in the corner, holes in the carpet. I’m more interested in a place  looking well run that the coolest décor. In fact, I have to actually make myself notice the décor – but that’s me.

Are the other customers looking happy?

Relaxed? Do they look fidgety, agitated? If so, blame the waiters. Beppi Polese, a classically trained waiter who has trained more waiters than anybody in Sydney told me the secret: “When I walk through a restaurant, I look at every table as I go. If I see a customer moving, I stop and ask if there’s anything they want.”

When a customer has to wave and swivel constantly looking for service, when the waiters walk through the room looking at the ceiling – this is not good.  I can tell a  lot from  standing at the door for 5 minutes.

Actually maybe 5 minutes is too long. How I get to my chair is critical. It’s my first contact with the people in the restaurant (besides the booking, but that’s another story).

 

Who takes me? Has the booking been observed? From now on, I’m observing the rhythm of the restaurant.

 The chair

The late Anders Ousback pointed out to me that there are 20 minute chairs, 60 minute chairs and two hour chairs. If I’m sitting down to eat a leisurely meal and I’m shown to a 20 minute chair, I’m not going to relax. Even before I’ve eaten a mouthful, I’m on edge.

Now I’m seated I can check out the table setting, the crockery, the cutlery. Is it of a standard to match the restaurant? Is it – very important – clean?

How long does it take me to get a card? Am I offered a drink?

Do  I feel  comforted, looked after, relaxed ?

Do the waiters know what they’re serving?

What does the service feel like? Let me explain.

I was chatting to a friend once  -  a successful restaurateur and chef - about my disappointment after eating at a very good restaurant – I said I felt the service was way too mechanical. He said:

“There are two ways you can be treated in a restaurant: processed or nurtured.”

If on my first visit to a restaurant, the service sucks, chances are, I won’t come back.  If I’m looked after, given an enjoyable experience and the food isn’t the world’s best – I probably will come back.

I don’t need any new best friends – and that goes for waiters. Let me quote Beppi Polese once again:

“A waiter must be fast, gentle, patient and above all attentive…..people don’t like to be disturbed…..And remember, they don’t come here to talk to the waiter – if they do want to talk, they must take the first step.”

Finally:

The best food in the world,

 delivered badly by a surly waiter,

in an inhospitable room,

will not taste good,

 and will not induce a customer to return

 

 The food

 

First, the menu. The modern Spanish chef  Ferran Adria  (El Bulli) said, in an interview “A menu is  like a film – it’s made from different shots that have to be spliced together in the best way possible to create a story.”

Now, it’s your job to tell the story, and my job to interpret the story.

Does your menu tell a story? Or is it just a list of dishes? Do the dishes themselves make sense?

If your chefs are inventing dishes – do they know what they’re doing? Or are they just bunging ingredients together?. Check out these actual menu items from a restaurant in The Rocks not so long ago:

Risotto of Japanese Scallops and fresh herbs with a green coconut curry sauce

 

Breast of Chicken filled with a Smoked Salmon and Shallot Mousse, accompanied by lemon peppered potatoes, green beans with a light dill cream sauce.

 

Our own sun-dried tomato Fettuccine, Fetta, Olives and Asian Vegetables in a roma tomato sauce

 

 

What am I looking for?

1. Authenticity.

If you’re serving a coq au vin – is it really a coq au vin or is it just chicken stew? As a critic, I know the difference. And if it’s the chef’s interpretation – coq of our chef – make sure the menu tells me that.  A long gone restaurant in Bondi. I ordered a Greek salad. It arrived with hard little white cubes of stuff tasting of – nothing. What is this? I asked politely. Oh,  said the waiter, it’s tofu – we ran out of feta. Chef thought no one would notice.

If you’ve got tarte tatin on the menu, is it tarte tatin or, as I have been served twice, stewed apples on soggy cake? In both instances, the words ‘caramelised apples’ were on the menu. Again, know what you’re serving.

2. Simplicity.

Less is definitely more. Every ingredient has to have a reason to be there. Every garnish should be edible.

3. Flavour.

Flavour. Flavour. Flavour.

In Japanese cooking there is a principle known as mochi agi o akasu. It means that everything on the plate is there to support or to amplify the flavour of the main ingredient on the plate. This is something that all chefs could well take notice of. It is about both simplicity – and flavour.

4. Balance.

The Thais have a word for it. Rot Chart. Even though a dish may have 20 ingredients, they have to be in balance. Balance is second only to flavour

5. Attention to detail.

Peter Evans told me that when he served breakfast at Hugo’s in Bondi he would personally make sure that every piece of toast was buttered to the edge. A true horror story. I was reviewing a long gone restaurant in Newtown. Every dish that came out smelt of rancid anchovies. We sent every dish back. Finally, when the waiter came with the bill, I asked “didn’t you wonder why we sent everything back?” The waiter replied “I just thought you weren’t hungry.”

6. Provenance

 The founder of the Slow Food movement, Carlo Petrini said “an environmentalist who isn’t a gastronome is sad. A gastronome who isn’t an environmentalist is stupid.” The more we learn about the environment the more we learn how important it is for us to know where our food came from, and how it was farmed or caught. At Sydney Eats, that became one of the things we looked at in assessing restaurants for prizes. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones.

7. Skill

Not show offy foamy things with prosciutto dust all over them, but  evidence that someone – or better still many – in the kitchen who know what they are doing, and do it well.

Believe me, I know how hard it is to do properly. Every meal in a restaurant is a live performance. Each table is a separate audience. There are no rehearsals, no out-of-town tryouts, no script writer, no special effects. Just a waiter and perhaps a floor manager (maitre’d) between the chef, the brigade and the customer.

Whereas a theatre audience may include people who have never before seen a live performance, everybody in a restaurant can eat, and has eaten before their visit to that restaurant. Many can also cook. So the restaurant audience, unlike that for a play, could conceivably consist mainly of people with similar technical abilities to the technicians in the kitchen.

And they’re all experts.

Especially the pesky critic. And don’t forget, every critic has his or her own likes and dislikes and you can’t please ‘em all. Just do what you do do, well.

Finally, remember this.

What do you do when a critic comes into your restaurant?

Exactly the same as you do when anybody comes in.

Your very best.

The Brunswick Scronger

 I. I first saw the man who lived on the edge of the garbage early one morning on the way to the beach. I was staying on a friend’s farm in the hills behind Mullumbimby. Each morning I’d wake with the sun, wake my friend’s son and we’d drive down to Brunswick Heads for a run and a swim. The peak of Chincogan would often be covered with mist  and cloud that rainy month.

The night before, Neil had asked if I wouldn’t mind taking the garbage down to the dump on the way to the beach. “Chris knows where the dump is” he told me.

That morning we’d decided to drive along the Saddle Road to the highway instead of turning off at Uncle Tom’s corner. The low sun cut through the cloud and mist and shot beams of dusty light onto the melaleuca stands and through the dark mass of the giant fig trees. It was like that Elioth Gruner painting where the slanted early morning light shines through the farmer’s ears as he comes in with the milk.

“Turn right at the bowling club” Chris said. The green was empty of bobbing  bowlers in white straw hats. The crazy paved slate front wall seemed especially ugly in the misty morning light. The Brunswick tip is past the bowling club, down towards a mangrove swamp. You turn a hairpin left onto a dirt road, and drive back up towards the highway about 500 metres. That’s when we saw him. A tall bloke in blue coveralls buttoned to the throat and wrists, dusty gum boots, a brown bush hat shoved down to his ears, bushy greying sideburns curling round a thin plaited leather chin strap.

He glanced towards us as we drove towards the tip. I nodded gidday as Chris took the black garbage bags from the boot and heaved them onto the mountain of rubbish. He nodded at us and then his eyes slid back towards the tip. I wondered who he was, and what he was doing there plodding through the pile of garbage so early in the day. There were a couple of signs painted roughly on little rectangles of corrugated iron nailed to poles and stuck in the dirt on the side of the road. One read NO STEELING BOTTLES, the other NO SCRONGING. Some pedant had painted a small U on top of the O. I liked the new word. I wondered if the tall  bloke had painted the signs, and whether he was some kind of garbage warden. We left him still scanning the dump, arms behind his back, slightly stooped, lifting his feet high as he walked, the way you do in loose gum boots.

We ran along the soft sand at high tide, twenty minutes up, twenty minutes back, murder on the calves. I wished  I was fit enough to run all the way to Cape Byron, a bit over 12 kilometres south. We ran towards the lighthouse just visible through the mist, along the swelling sand hills that hid the low banksia clumps and mangrove swamps. Here and there a purple patch of pigface lay  on the yellow sand. Chris is fourteen and physically perfect. I watch his spare, lithe body running ahead of me and I feel old and sagging and short of wind. He humours me by running alongside for a while, then gets bored and sprints ahead at twice my speed, turns, runs around me, and tears off up the beach again. The little bastard.

The surf had been chopped right out by a vicious rip sweeping the beach from the north. A cyclone was hurling itself against the coast up around Maroochydore and the ocean down here was reeling from the backlash. Young Chris was disappointed, he was learning to body surf and wanted the good clean waves we’d had the past week or so. We splashed around and caught a few dumpers by the shore. There was nothing like the feeling of diving into the foaming ocean covered in sweat from a run. Your body felt like a hot frypan plunged under the cold tap, it sizzled with relief.

II. After breakfast I went down to the Snake Shed to work. It was named in memory of a family of carpet snakes that had lived there when Neil moved onto the farm, draping themselves round the hardwood beams, curling up in the warmth of the piles of rusting corrugated iron that lay on its concrete floor. There’d been a lot of rats in the house then, and the snakes lived off the rats. It was made of slabs of northern hardwood with an iron roof, no windows, but a big hardwood door that swung open on the farmhouse end. It was overgrown with lantana and blackberry and full of rubbish and spiders and white ants. When I came up to stay and said I’d like to write in the shed, Neil and Laura and Chris and I had spent three days cleaning it out and fixing it up. We chucked out the pile of rusting corrugated iron sheets, old aluminium picnic tables with missing legs, folding chairs with rotting cushions, and the scrag ends of rolls of fencing wire and broken tools.

Spiders the size of your fist scuffled round the underside of the roof, black and white ants by the millions swarmed in the cracks and knotholes behind beams and in the rotting planks, and one big old lizard scuffled across the floor and disappeared  into the lantana. But we didn’t find one snake, not even a discarded skin. The snakes had gone with the rats.

We carved three wonky but useful windows through the walls to let the light and breeze in and opened up a view right down Whipbird Valley, across Wilson’s Creek, all the way to Coorabell Ridge. Later, I’d sit and look out across the open paddocks and eucalypt stands and the patches of rainforest that clumped along the edge of Wilson’s Creek and listen  to the whipbirds cracking in the hot damp still of the afternoon, and try to count the shades of green in the valley.

I swept and scrubbed the concrete floor. Bought an old post art deco table in a second hand store in Mullum for twelve dollars. For an extra two dollars the bloke from the shop took it up the hill and helped me install it in the shed. I moved in my books, paper and typewriter,  and the Snake Shed was a writing shed.

I’d go down there after breakfast with a big mug of coffee, feed a sheet of paper into the typer, push  it aside, and begin writing long hand in a ruled pad.  It wasn’t coming easily. I was supposed to be re-writing a story I’d had rejected by a men’s magazine. One of those magazines that spreads glossy nudes across its pages like thick yellow butter. The stories that held them apart had the gritty quality of wholegrain bread. I wasn’t sure I could write like that.

The publishers were toying with the idea of interlarding the acres of unctuous flesh with a little earnest social comment. They wanted a couple of stories in each issue that showed real men had emotions as well as erections. This was probably true. It’s just they probably didn’t want to be reminded of the fact while they were perving on Jeldi Chenille’s tits. We hadn’t actually figured that out at the time, so I’d submitted a list of story lines to the magazine. They’d chosen the most difficult one to do first. Tentatively titled ‘How to make love stay.’ Here’s a quote from the wrap up I gave them. ‘Anyone can  screw around. But to keep one woman happy takes a special kind of man. With more and more women taking to heart Cher Bono’s oft quoted maxim that ‘men aren’t necessities, they’re luxuries’ how does a man keep the relationship going or the marriage intact if that’s what he wants and she doesn’t? What can he do to put the whole thing back on a solid footing?’

I rang one commentator on sexual politics, told her what I was doing and asked her for some quotes. She rang off saying “Good luck – better you than me.”  Writing of love, respect and tenderness to such men is no pushover.

The editor took me to lunch the day he rejected the piece, a little Italian place around the corner from the magazine offices. We talked about the story, love, and living with women. I told him how I’d pitched the story, to the readers he himself had described as greasers. He told me he didn’t think it was intelligent enough, that I should have been speaking to the ten percent with measurable IQ’s. I told him they aren’t the people who need the information. We talked about how hard it was being male today. I sat there thinking about the nature of love, aware that I was talking to a man who edited a magazine for men to masturbate by. He paid the bill.

So now I sat shirtless in the Snake Shed in the middle of summer and sweated and wiped my brow with a towel and stared down the Brunswick Valley or into the sky or at the spiders and skinks scurrying across the hardwood beams or at my humid navel and sometimes, very occasionally, I wrote something down.

What I was doing was rummaging around inside my head for a clue, some gem buried beneath a ton of gleaned scraps, a tiny sliver of hope to hold out to some poor schmuck waking alone for the first time in twenty years, his violent or indifferent behaviour having driven out his exhausted or terrified woman. He has no idea what to do or say or how to behave to get her back. He doesn’t even know what it is that he’s done wrong. He’s confused and terrified and lonely. Men find it too hard to cope, to face up. They dive straight into bottle, work or fantasy at the first glimpse of despair. The city parks are full of mostly male derelicts. What could I say to this poor bastard anyway? How could I find the right answers? I was going through the same agony.

III. I was waiting for her to come up to the farm for a month. We’d been living together almost two years, I’d moved in one Valentine’s Day. The last three months had felt as comfortable as a broken fingernail being dragged across a nylon stocking. Our connection was so taut and fragile, I’d felt that any moment it would snap, twist back and one of us would be thrown over. I knew which one it would be. I still loved her. More than I had ever loved. I had handed her everything for safekeeping: my heart, my future, my hopes. In the beginning, it had been a mutual exchange. And then, almost imperceptibly, she had begun to fade away, until one day, I looked up, and she was hardly there. I waited patiently, thinking that love would bring her back. Now I know I waited too patiently, too passively. Sometimes you have to fight back. I never did. I bent over backwards – not a position of strength.

So what did I know about making love stay?  Me with one failed marriage and a relationship breaking up around me like an icecap in summer?  Use your pain, they say. Not me, not in the middle of it, surrounded and engulfed by it. I’m not cool enough for that. I’m impressed by that quality of cool. I remember a friend telling me about breaking up with his girlfriend. The last big fight, while she was yelling abuse at him, he was scribbling down her words to use later in a story. My feelings get in the way. Towards the end, I couldn’t even talk to her without tears streaming down my face. I hated them. I wanted to put my case to her, to explain the love I felt for her, but they’d just well up out of nowhere. This holiday was supposed to be the beginning of our new life together. At least she’d agreed to try that. Away from her kids. Just the two of us. She wasn’t there yet. I lay alone in my single bed and watched the swelling moon through the flyscreen. She would come. Wouldn’t she?

IV. Late one afternoon Neil and I hitched the trailer to the car, put on boots and heavy working gloves, filled the trailer with the rubbish we’d cleared out from the Snake Shed, and clattered down the mountain to the tip. He was standing there in the falling light, gazing out across that stretch of coastal garbage. We pulled up some distance from him, and started to hurl our trailer load onto the pile. At my feet was a large painting of a clown, lying there smiling sadly among the rusting cans and broken furniture, smeared with dirt, the frame smashed.

A sad end, even for bad art. I pointed it out to Neil. He guffawed with laughter.

“Perfect” he said “the fool on the hill.”

”Pity it’s so knocked about” said a flat nasal voice from behind us. We turned and he was standing there, stooped, holding his arms behind his back, scrutinising the painting like a valuer from Sothebys.

“You must get an awful lot of valuable stuff tossed out there” I indicated the tip, taking a punt he was a professional scrounger, maybe even the official Brunswick Scronger. He shook his head slowly from side to side,  a bemused look on his leathery face.

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they chuck out.” As he spoke, his eyes meandered over the dump, picking through it.

“Jest a couple of weeks ago, this feller and his wife come down. Lost a two thousand dollar opal ring they tell me. She’d tossed it out, by mistake like. Engagement ring she told me. She useta keep it in an old tissue box. Now, coupla weeks before, I remember pickin’ up an old tissue box, shakin’ it. It rattled, but I said to meself, nah, it’s jest an old bottle top. I heaved it back in there. Somewhere.” His chin jutted out towards the pile. We groaned in sympathy. “Me own fault, me own fault. Always have a squiz I’ve always said to meself.” He shook his head ruefully, allowed his eyes to slip to the ground  at his feet for a few moments. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they chuck out.”

“You here this late every day?”

“O bloody oath. Yer gotta get here at sparrow fart, leave with the light. My word. Take yesty morning. Got here at six. Ten past, bloke from the phone company drives up. Dumps a pile of copper tubing. Tells me they told him  to take it to Bangalow Depot. He couldn’t be stuffed. Worth a good fifty dollars that tubing. Now, supposin’  I wasn’t here, some other bugger’d get it, sure as hens lay little eggs. Soon as they see me truck’s not here, they’re down like a shot.” His chin pointed out a dun coloured dust covered pantechnicon. It looked like it was bulging at the seams. It’d be as jampacked with geegaws and wigwams for goose’s bridles as the window of George Warnecke’s old junkshop in Paddington used to be. “They come down nights with torches too, the buggers.” He shook his head reflectively, bent down gingerly, like a man with back problems, picked up a sliver of barbed wire delicately between thumb and forefinger, inspected it absently, and  threw it carefully onto the acre wide pile.  “Yairs, scrounging. Fair gets in your blood, it does.”

I looked out across the great mound of garbage and it looked, of a sudden, like a pile of unimaginable wealth, a king’s ransom, throbbing and pulsing with hidden treasure, you needed only take the plunge and dive in, deep down, swim around with eyes wide open, breathing in the foetid stench, waving off the swarms of flies, always searching, picking up and turning slowly over, rattling, weighing, evaluating, sorting, sifting, accepting, rejecting, extracting order and value from the chaotic and worthless.

I could see so easily how it would be to spend a life here, picking through the ever changing sea of refuse, oblivious to the  shiny modern world, living only on and in and for the garbage. It’ll be there, under the next can, inside that carton; the old filing cabinet is stuffed with banknotes, gold and pearls, rubies; that broken column, it’s hollow, a treasure in sovereigns has been waiting inside it for a hundred years. Partly it’s a matter of luck and persistence, this scrounging, partly knowing what to look for.

I pulled my eyes away. I could feel myself sinking into it. A couple of seagulls overhead cawed in the gathering gloom. “Yeah” was all I said. We waved goodbye and drove up the mountainside in silence.

V. She’d sent a telegram saying she was arriving the next morning, by train. The Gold Coast Motorail pulled into the platform fifteen minutes late. Tired and crumpled second class passengers heaved cardboard suitcases held together by rope onto the platform. A fat lady in a floral dress gingerly lowered one foot from the train, hanging grimly onto the hand rail. Nervously, I paced the platform, still wondering whether she’d be there. Maybe she’d missed the train, changed her mind. Then I looked up and there she was, and all the love I felt came welling up. She was pulling a suitcase on wheels, dressed in grey overalls and a sloppy pink T shirt, her old striped hessian basket slung over her shoulder. Filled, I knew, with crumpled tissues, loose make-up, dried out felt tip pens, scraps of papers with notes and phone numbers, her old wallet stuffed with junk, some seeds, a packet of lifesavers, a half empty contraceptive pill container, a spare jumper, photos of the kids.

I gathered her up in my arms and held her close to me, drinking in the perfume of her sweat. I kissed her, held her back and looked into her eyes, those curious eyes that turn up at the corners and hide far more than they reveal. She smiled a thin smile

“Good trip?”

“I met an amazing bloke. We talked all night. He got off at Byron.”

My heart did a bellyflop. I had a sudden flash of her and a big surfing hippy rooting on the floor of the railway carriage, in the dust. I looked at her overalls when  I bent to pick up her suitcase. They were clean. Perhaps they did it on the seat.

“Oh” was all I said. I saw her looking at me sideways, aware of my stupid jealousy. Later that day I admitted  my feelings about the bloke who got off at Byron. “Yes darling, I knew” she said indulgently.

Funny, she always called me darling. Right up to the very end, as if she meant it. The last Christmas card, only two weeks before, read `to my darling, with all my love’.

There was no one home when we arrived. Neil and Laura had taken Chris to pick up their second boy, Simon, who was in tennis camp. I made a cup of tea. She changed and unpacked, and we went for a walk along the ridge towards Coorabell. It is awkward, and has been since she arrived. I bite my tongue, and stop from saying what it is I really want to say. She absorbs my silence and reflects it. We talk small, about the camphor laurels that have taken over the roadways, they and the coral trees, from the natives. We try unsuccessfully to find a road to take us into a patch of rainforest on the creek’s edge. We turn and walk back. By the time we arrive, Neil and Laura and the boys have filled the house. I’m relieved we are no longer alone. She is tired from the trip she tells me. I understand. We sleep apart in our narrow single beds.

VI. The next morning I am back in the Snake Shed with my cup of coffee. I sit and stare at the clouds billowing in the southern sky. Where just two days ago I sat covered in sweat, today a cool breeze blows and I must shut the window at the southern end of the shed. A storm is brewing, and there’s tension in the air. And I have decided  to meditate today upon the nature of love. Perhaps an explanation of this will help my abandoned reader, waking in his cold bed. How about this?

`What does love mean to us? It begins in desire, it’s born in fire. Like a ceramic bowl, the rough clay is glazed, and put into the kiln. If it survives that initial fire, if it cools without cracking, it emerges as a precious and fragile object to be cared for. If it’s dropped, it can be mended. But the cracks will always show.’

Sure. Excuse me while I jerk off. I rip it out of the machine and fling it in the overcrowded bin. The first globs of rain hit the tin roof of the shed like the gathering drum roll in a fanfare, slowly, then with staccato rapidity. The lantana bends under the force of the rain, the red earth boils and kicks up. Now there is no valley outside my window, only slanting shafts of silver rain. I reach into the memory dump, and dredge up a handful of scenes.

VII. The first year. We are in Spain, she and I and her ten year old son. She has only just arrived, we had been apart for a month, and the reunion, so far, is a happy one. We are, on this day, walking the back lanes of the nearest town to our village. We have been to the market, and our baskets bulge with yellow skinned chickens, goat cheese, bunches of baby leeks, tomatoes, kilos of oranges from the valley, and bottles of local red wine. Now we walk with these laden baskets past the little bric a brac shop. Amongst the prints of saints and plates from Valencia hangs a heavy cotton pleated dress for a baby girl. She insists on buying this and I bargain with the shopkeeper.

“Tiene cien annos esta traje senor”, it is one hundred years old I translate for her ” y vale solo mil pesetas”, and it’s only a thousand pesetas. We buy it. “Who’s it for?” I ask thinking it a gift for a friend. “Molly” she replies giving the name of our future girl child. Later that same week she tells me “we’ll have the baby when  I finish my course. It’ll stop your mid-life crisis. You’ll be too busy heating bottles and changing nappies.” Our baby that will never be. Where did her love for me go? Where does love go when it leaves? Is there a dump for love? Old, broken, down, tired, worn out love, lorn, unrequited, heartbroken, unspoken. Her love for me was chucked on it, wherever it is, and it shuddered like a corpse dropped from a charnel house truck.

VIII. Outside the rain has gone. I can see it sweeping up the valley, heading north towards Brunswick, a dark smudge of rain hanging beneath a black cloud. Right now, it would be soaking into the garbage in the municipal dump. He’d be sheltering in his dun coloured truck, peering through the rainstreaked dust on his windscreen. Outside my window, a whipbird sings in a strangler fig to celebrate the passing of the wet. He ends his elongated song with a double crack. He is answered by his hen `choo! choo!’ Mine is silent in the house. I have found no gritty pieces for the magazine. No words of wisdom for the lonely men. A writer’s block that’d stretch from Circular Quay to Central Railway has settled on my shoulders.

IX. “How’s it going?”

“No bloody good. Nothin’ but junk. I dunno, maybe those bastards are sneakin’ in at night and pinchin’ all the good stuff.”

I heaved the black plastic garbage bag onto the pile. He looked at it morosely. He chewed his plaited leather chin strap. The flies flew round his head. He kicked at the ground with a dusty gum boot.

“Yeah” I agreed, “I know what you mean.” I drove back up the mountain. Too bloody hot down on the flat.

X. The morning it ended I lay on my side in my narrow bed. We slept side by side in two single beds. Before she came, I’d chosen the single beds, knowing she preferred hard beds, and knowing my snoring irritated her, and wanting this, our summer holiday, to be perfect, a time for healing and reawakening. Anticipating again. “I never anticipate” she once told me “that way I’m never disappointed.” I lay awake, peering across the chasm that separated our beds, at her sleeping form, lying on her side, her back towards me, her thighs swelling to the perfect curve of her arse, thinking of the silken velvet feel of the inside of her thighs, desire flooding through me as it always did at the sight of her. I slipped as quietly as I could from my narrow bed to hers. It was late in the morning, and although her back was towards me, I guessed she was awake, and hoped for some small crumb my Odette may flick my way. My arms slipped around her. My hand cupped her breast beneath her nightie

(a present from her mother, for a year she wore nothing, telling me she had never slept naked before, I didn’t mind the nightie, it was somehow rather spicy, to lift the nightie, memories of Mummy, the forbidden sight, who knows?). I felt her stiffen. An annoyed and exasperated sigh. She flipped suddenly on her back and stared at me through cold and narrowed eyes.

“It’s gone” she said, “you know that, don’t you?”

“What?”

“The sex. The love went when the sex went. You knew that, didn’t you?”

Of course I did. But I lied to myself. I pretended it had only gone for a walk outside to look at the moon, that it would tiptoe back inside any day now, crawl into bed with us, wrap around us to keep us warm. It was the last thing I expected to go. In the beginning, for the first time in my life, I looked at no other women. I remember the sheer wonder I felt at this phenomenon. If Penelope Cruz had walked into the bedroom and offered herself to me, begged me to take her, I would have politely declined. I would, when parted from her for any length of time, masturbate to her image. I would fantasise making love to her while making love to her. My marriage had had everything but sex. This one, I would tell myself, had nothing but sex. It was the last thing I expected us to lose

“It was you who told me how I feel. You said `you know intuitively what you want.’ It came to me like a flash. I’ve been trying so hard to love you because it would be perfect if I did. But I don’t love you. I can’t love you.”

“I love every part of you. There’s not one little piece of you I don’t love. I love the wrinkles round your eyes. I love your lips.”

“My lips! You can’t love my lips. Even I don’t love my lips.”

I lay there with my arms around her knowing this was for the last time and hoping that this moment would never end. I sought scraps from our past to comfort me in this our last naked time together. I took off her nightie, she didn’t stop me. I caressed her one last time. I rubbed my hand along the length of her body, around her perfect thighs. I parted the lips of her vagina with my hand and explored its folds one last time, remembering my many voyages of discovery there. She looked down at me, horrified and fascinated.

“What are you doing?”

“Remembering.”

XI. The last morning I drove to the beach alone. The sky and the sea were two shades of grey, merging to black on the horizon. The tide was high and the surf had shaped up magnificently. Long curling left and right slides swelled up from a glassy sea, an offshore breeze sent spumes of spray against the waves as they rolled in  long lines of elegant symmetry into the shore.

I ran in a blind fury along the beach. A man and his son were surf fishing, their legs braced apart as they faced the booming waves. The father turned to yell at me as I ran past. “Don’t give up!” I waved back at him, the grin on my face hiding the pains in my heart and chest.

I ran as fast as I could and then collapsed, bent over double, hands grabbing for support at my legs, sucking in great gulps of air, my heart pounding. Crouching, gasping, squinting out to sea, I saw something that made me forget my pain and bought my heart leaping into my mouth.

Right in my line of vision a porpoise leapt straight out of the ocean and into the sky, its huge body shuddering and straining against gravity, its tail breaking the surface. It curved mid-air and plunged headfirst into the water sending up a shower of spray. Again, it shot shining into the thin sunlight like some huge silver bullet aiming for the stars. Then I saw another dozen fins heading north beyond the breakers.

A powerful wave swelled up, its inside edge a pale grey green as it gathered bulk and momentum for its rolling journey to the shore. Then another porpoise (or was it the same one?) sprang out of the water, twisted against the sky, dived back under, and burst head first out of the face of the unbroken wave. It flew ahead just as the wave broke, hung suspended in mid-air a fraction of a second, then twisted to surf down the long left break, sliding and turning, its sleek body shimmering against the surface, slipping back under the wave as it petered out.

I wanted to swim out and away with the porpoises, to leap and surf and swallow whole the little fishes. My feet sinking deep into the soft sand of the shore reminded me of the burdens of humanity and gravity. I had to go back to the farm, pack, drive with a woman who no longer loved me back to a city covered by a poisonous green cloud.

XII. “Well, see you then.”

“Yer goin’?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Back to Sydney.”

“Right.”

“Happy scrounging.”

“Too bloody right. Gets in your blood, eh?”

“Too bloody right.”

XIII. We drove the entire trip, eight hundred kilometres, in almost total silence, exchanging perhaps twenty words. We sat side by side in our separate cocoons of thought, me in my agony of indecision, analysing each possible statement as it left my brain, rejecting them all before they made it to my mouth. Everything I thought of saying seemed dangerous, perhaps destructive. I couldn’t get out of my mind the possibility that there was something I could say that would make it all right again. But what?

So I said nothing. She sat and stared out the window, more of a mystery to me than ever before. And then I began to feel relief, as it gradually sank in that there would be no more tension, apprehension, searching for feeling and meaning from this tangential, secretive, elusive woman. Perhaps I could learn, given time, to say what I meant again. And then I began to feel the horror of separation, the agony of the wrench, the bloodcurdling sound of live flesh being torn apart reached my ears and I screamed in silence. I scrounged around inside the junk heap of my memories,

I searched and searched. I held up scraps of evidence for inspection. Hundreds of empty tissue boxes (handfulls of tissues used after lovemaking) twenty four empty contraceptive pill boxes (low dosage tailor made) sweat stained sheets soaked in the juices of love, the clean smell of semen, the rich warm smell of ripe vagina, old airline tickets, broken wine bottles, a terracotta amphora full of spring water, the scent of orange blossom around the Alhambra, a bloody foetus, torn up letters never sent, poems filed in a white steel cabinet, a broken Lalique perfume bottle smelling faintly of Joy, one or two broken promises (remarkably few of these after two years) but I found nothing of real and lasting value, nothing I could hold onto and polish up.

And in the painful silence of that car somewhere just north of Taree I recognised that I had no idea of what I was looking for, and that the golden rule of scrounging is to know at least that before you begin your search. Otherwise you shall bypass gems, two thousand dollar opal rings the least of them. I never did finish that piece for the glossy magazine.