Sydney

'Brave', like 'courageous' for a politician, is a double-edged description. At first when people told me I was brave doing what I've done all I could hear were warning bells from my personal thesaurus - foolish, thoughtless, risky. I'm far from brave in my own eyes having lived a safe, ordinary, quite privileged life. There's always been someone at my side to turn to, a roof over my head, my experience of unemployment has been brief, and the places I've travelled to have been relatively safe, despite some poor judgement and an unexpected threat of insurrection giving me more thrills than anticipated. I don't like fairground rides and can't cope with scary movies so what am I doing out in the world all alone, without a safety net?


I've come to realise that brave is comparative, it's how we perceive people who do things we wouldn't/couldn't do ourselves. Now when people call me brave I listen to them, not my internal voice, to find out what they are saying about themselves and what I can learn from that. Do I feel afraid of what I'm doing? A little, but I'm driven by a sense of necessity, that if I don't do this now maybe I never will, and if I don't do it at all I will feel my life has been less than I wanted it to be. I may fail spectacularly but that will not hurt as much as not trying.


Sydney is as close to my second home as an alien city can be. To use a well-worn but valid cliche (or is that a definition of a cliche - tautology alert!) I have a love/hate relationship with it. The siren beauty of the harbour and beaches, the overwhelming evidence of a soul sold to Mammon. When I lived there I felt I had to work hard to retain my social conscience and constantly justify my rejection of the material - well, the excessively material as I wasn't exactly living in a cave wrapped in a scrap of cloth! This time I don't get to see much of the city as I spend my time going from one rellie to the next, feeling like pass-the-parcel at times. It was fabulous spending time with everyone, and really precious to reconnect with two of my step-children.


Now that I no longer live with their father I have been uncertain about my relationship with his children. They have remained special and important to me but I wasn't sure how they would feel about me now that they are all grown up and living in Australia (well, two of them have always lived in Oz but Lindsay lived with Ian and me in New Zealand for a while). Amanda, the eldest, and I have kept in touch but it had been a couple of years since I'd seen Lindsay or Stephanie so I texted them with some trepidation about the response. Magically they were both keen to see me so I had a drink with Lindsay after he finished work at the posh harbourside cafe he is working at, and lunch with a very pregnant Stephanie and her partner.

I guess all you real parents will smile to yourselves when I say how amazing it is to discover that your children have grown up! I was so impressed with the way they are managing their lives and learning to understand themselves and others, such a change from the self-absorbed (but (mostly) charming) teenagers they were not so long ago. And not long afterwards I received photos of the most beautiful baby, courtesy of Stehanie and Steve. If only I could see her...



My Sydney nephews are both as much fun as ever and I was flattered by the amount of time they were willing to spend with me, especially as I am not the best of aunties when it comes to remembering and marking their birthdays. But I guess they know I love them anyway! And I guess by the time you're forty you get over it!



I was also able to spend time with my own stepmother, Jane, who, thanks to the efforts of my sister and her husband, now has a new life in Sydney. After my father died she was alone in Melbourne except for my niece, who then very selfishly moved to London! (Fortunate for me tho, as she has been my saviour recently!) Jane is living a semi-independent life not far from where Ian and I lived in the inner west. It's the perfect arrangement for her as she has a private apartment where she can read and live the life she enjoys, but has her meals provided and some support when she needs it, unlike the previous establishment in Melbourne where anything and everything was a problem, except for taking the fees. Please let me not be dependent on such people!




Marianne and I had a very typical outing with Jane that involved coffee, book shops and lunch in a bookshop. (I met up with Dad and Jane in Oxford once when Terry and I were staying in London. The entire day consisted of coffee, bookshops and libraries - bliss!) On my last night in Sydney we had a different outing and in the late afternoon went down to Circular Quay where we meandered until dusk at which time the public buildings from the Opera House all the way up Macquarie St (sp?) were illuminated with light shows, projected text and illustrations to mark 200 years of, well I'm not quite sure now - should have made a note! It was called Vivid Sydney and you can see more about it at http://vividsydney.com/



It was Marianne who provided the warp and weft of my stay in Sydney, who hosted me, picked me up from the airport and dropped me off, chauffeured me around and kept the visit log so I knew who I was seeing when. Someone to share family history with, although our stories don't always match up and infuriatingly we often both forget the same important detail. But the 3am memory usually kicks in and one of us will triumphantly produce the missing name or place over breakfast.



We had planned to go to a movie but in the end nothing caught our imagination sufficiently to make it top priority, so we shopped, ate, drank coffee and went to the beach, although it was too windy and chilly to swim.



It was Marianne's bookshelf that made me put aside the Mark Haddon book I had been trying to read for a couple of years. After The Strange Case of the Dog in the Night (sorry if that's not quite right!) which I adored, I had bought A Spot of Bother but hadn't enjoyed my first taste of it and put it aside. Surely now its time had come, but no, for my eye was caught by something I'd been meaning to read - A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka. I stole it from my sister's grasp and enjoyed the ride! And while having coffee in a bookshop in Glebe I found a $1 copy of Peter Duck, a Swallows and Amazons book by Arthur Ransome that I hadn't read for decades. I have revisited many of them but somehow this tale of ocean sailing and treasure-seeking in the Caribbean had not crossed my path. I was enchanted with the description of the journey along the east and south coasts of England in particular; it had much more resonance now that I know the geography and gripped me through the rest of my journey to London, making a very strange companion to my adventures in KL, about which more soon...