It’s Sunday night in Dubbo, and we’re turning for home. Well, not exactly; but we’ve reached the halfway point of a two-week cycling trip. By we, I mean darling husband and an intrepid band of Perth cyclists from the Over 55’s cycling club. I’m not cycling; I’m one of the support crew. I drive the van to the rest stops and then onto the motel we’re staying that night. By day 2 I’d already badly scraped the side of the van when trying to execute a U-turn in a small town street. The pretty wooden stakes around the street tree were in my blind spot.
In short, it’s not been an easy experience. There’s been illness (perhaps you can hear that I have also succumbed to the cold going around) and bike issues on top of what is already quite a demanding support role. I’ve been soul searching as to why I said I would do this, and counting the days down till it’s all over.
That’s in between marvelling at the beauteous countryside and the sounds of birds familiar and strange. In the small pockets of spare time I have been working on my creative writing studies and reviewing edits for my memoir. I’ve been binge-listening to the wickedly funny Yellowface for my studies; a satire on racial diversity and writerly longings.
No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?
Letters to a young poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, 17 Feb 1903
It was another one of those “stop the pod” moments for me this week, listening to the episode of A Slight Change of Plans where Amir Lavine spoke about his latest book on attachment styles; Secure.
In extreme summary, there are four attachment styles;
anxious (craving closeness but fearing rejection), avoidant (preferring independence over closeness), fearful avoidant (a mix of the two), and secure (comfortable with closeness and easygoing.
Amir Lavine, Secure, Author’s note.
A first epiphany moment came for me in his discussion of dandelions and orchids. Dandelions are able to grow anywhere, even when their life circumstances are difficult.
Orchids differ from the dandelions of this world as they require careful nurture to thrive. If an orchid is given a lucky break; perhaps a nurturing teacher, or a change of schools, or a parent of a friend who fills a parental gap; they will thrive. A dandelion however will not flourish any more no matter what extra opportunities are thrown their way.
How often this mystery of human resilience has puzzled me. Why do some people thrive no matter how precarious or traumatic their childhood was, while others do not? Could this be part of the picture?
But the real pod-stopping moment came for me when Levine talked about how his ongoing research has revealed that our attachment styles are not fixed by our childhoods.
“Attachment starts when we’re born and it ends when we die,” he says.
Also, he clarifies that attachment varies depending on the person. You may for example be securely attached to your mother and insecurely attached to your father. The inference of all this is we can cultivate a more secure attachment style for ourselves by carefully nurturing friendships and connections with securely attached people who truly support us. While we humans can be wired to chase the avoidant type, we can override this and instead seek connection with the perhaps less exciting, but more nurturing securely attached friends. It is never too late to re-negotiate how we operate in the world.
That my Sunday message of hope to you, all the way from Bathurst in New South Wales where I happen to be staying tonight. I’ll see you next Sunday.
“Could I get one can of Swanny D?” I’d already scanned the beer fridge without finding Dad’s old favourite.
“Of course,” said the attentive young staff member, and disappeared into the cool room before returning with a single can of the beer that was the signature drink of my family gatherings in the 1970s and 1980s.
To be fair, Dad had switched to Carlton Mid Strength, but I was feeling extra nostalgic so went for the old favourite to pour into his beer mug which sits on my ancestor altar. Because today is Dad’s birthday – his heavenly 101st which means he’s been gone six years now.
I decided to make a morning of it, and visit his mother and two brothers who are buried together in another grave at the same cemetery. Down at Granny’s grave I cracked the Swanny D and the smell was hot drives in the car with no air-conditioning or seat belts, hell we two youngest didn’t even have seats; there were simply too many of us to fit on the Holden’s bench seats. It was the aroma of Christmases past with an assortment of the thirty Brennan cousins. It was the taste of Dad’s beer from his tankard at the end of the day. For Granny I liberally sprayed the Lourdes holy water from my 2025 trip. Of highly questionable taste, an actual spritzer bottle for holy water was one of the many purchases from the Lourdes gift shop I couldn’t resist.
Over at Mum and Dad’s grave, with another of Dad’s many brothers also snugly buried below the two of them, I shared what was left of the beer with the two boys and my teetotaller mother had a splash of Lourdes holy water.
To round it off I played the Eagles football team anthem; we’d played on the day Dad was buried. Meant to come on once he was safely in the ground to cheer us all up, the funeral company’s timing was off and Dad was interred to a shattering round of an upbeat football jingle.
I played it and yes, I did laugh, as I know both Mum and Dad would have. Having emerged from the straightjacket of my childhood faith several decades ago I’m still convinced humans need ceremony for these moments and milestones. So now I try my hand at making my own with cans of beer and holy water spray bottles.
I wished Dad a happy heavenly birthday and tried not to dwell on the Eagles latest season, then the song abruptly cut out.
When I got back in the car and connected my phone, the Eagles anthem suddenly burst back into its cacophony. Dad getting the last laugh?
A quote from my latest read. I thought of my neighbour whose beloved husband was snatched away within months of a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. I read it out today as we gathered to farewell him at one of his favourite places to bush walk at one of the most beautiful times of the year to walk. The grief/love overlap is all I have to share for today’s Sunday blog.
I had thought collective effervescence was a term coined by Brene Brown, mais non. It was the French sociologist Émile Durkheim who created the expression to articulate the shared experience of religious worshop. Brene has enlarged its use to encompass the feeling we get in a crowd, say at a music or sporting event, for example.
My city of Fremantle turned purple for the Australian Rules Football grand final this weekend. After three decades, the Fremantle Dockers had ended the season top of the ladder and our very first championship was just two hours of play away from becoming a reality.
Ignoring my wise child’s warnings that I would not be able to get a seat or a meal or a drink in Fremantle, I nonetheless ventured in to the choked city centre to immerse in the collective effervescence.
“Call me when you’re off the ferris wheel,” she said. I’d wanted to witness the purple crowd from on high in my ferris wheel carriage just before half-time. There was no queue, and I was delighted in the slow revolutions up among the pine trees, looking at all that purple below.
“Meet me at La Sosta”, was the gist of my wise child’s second call, and she shepherded me into the only Fremantle restaurant offering walk-ins. Weaving through the throng reminded me of my days commuting in London in the 1990s, battling against the oncoming foot traffic like a salmon attempting to get upstream.
We were ushered in to a table; we ordered lunch and shifted positions until we had a good view of the television; the wait staff accommodated our every change with grace and still delivered our food to the right table.
It just so happened that there was a slight audio delay between La Sosta’s television and the giant screen that had been erected in the cappucino strip below us. We would watch our players line up for a goal, hear the cheer and relax, knowing he’d nailed it, then celebrate when we actually saw the slightly delayed footage.
I wasn’t just experiencing collective effervescence, I was contributing to it; shrieking at the television and high-fiving strangers. I surged in the elation all the way to the last heartbreaking four minutes when the opposition came from behind, scored two goals and ripped the trophy from our grasp. Their third flag, when we have none. So selfish.
I watched a ten-year-old sobbing into her mother’s chest. Her mother bent over, kisses dropped onto the top of her head. I thought I saw her mouth the words “it’s only a game”.
Most restaurant patrons, including the by-now sniffling little girl left. We lingered in the restaurant; stayed up above the sombre sorrow that gripped the street below. Lunch turned into dinner as we were invited to joined tables with another group who rushed in to help us absorb our sorrow.
The collective effervescence, the excoriating disappointment combined with excellent wines then cocktails contributed to us sharing real issues that we were dealing with in our lives. Grief, parental worry, the big problems that are not only a game and are not going necessarily going to be OK.
And for that, I will have to be grateful. Goddammit though Fremantle. Next year, surely.
After Saturday morning yoga, I sat having a coffee with my teacher and we got to talking about cancer, and the concept of the “cancer personality” Gabor Mate explores in his book When The Body Says No. In extreme summary, his research revealed that cancer can often afflict people who do the following; meet others’ emotional needs by suppressing their own; identify with responsibility and duty; repress healthy anger when boundaries are violated; believe they are responsible for how others feel and believe they should never disappoint anyone.
While I resonated with these research-based insights, I also said immediately, “yes, but also, shit just happens. Cancer tears through a family like a wrecking ball even if they tick none of these boxes.”
“Yes, as the Zen buddhist saying goes, life is 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows.”
I had to bustle off soon after; I wanted to see the movie Holy Days before it disappeared from the big screen. There were hardly any sessions to choose from, so Saturday morning it was. How rebellious, decadent even, going to the cinema while the rest of the world are ferrying children to sporting fields, cramming in the shopping, cleaning the house.
The movie had a poor IMDb score, and the Guardian had panned it (two stars). A nun road movie with the three nuns played by Judy Davis, Jacki Weaver, Miriam Margoyles; no matter how worn the tropes might be, I knew I would love it. I marinated in the paradigm of 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows as I farewelled my yoga teacher and drove to the cinema.
Walking the alleyway between the car park and Windsor Cinema, I was accosted by memories of my last trip there, years ago with my daughter; we had chaperoned my mother. It was a three-generation outing to watch Mumma Mia. Mum tottered along the laneway between us, and because I am somewhat time-blind, we arrived when the ads were already starting to play. The theatre was dim; and Mum clutched my arm.
“I can’t walk in the dark,” she said. As a young thing in the 1940s she had gone out for a late night jaunt with friends in Kalgoorlie and was sauntering arm in arm with her best friend until she stepped on the edge of an old mineshaft and plummeted to the bottom. One broken pelvis later, she survived but so did the fear of walking in the dark.
“Sometimes my feet just won’t move forward.”
Chastened, I got us safely to our seats and promised I wouldn’t do a last minute dash to the cinema next time. But I never did get a chance to accompany her again. So I treasure the precious memory of sitting on my velvety seat, flanked by mother and half-Greek daughter. We marinaded in the poignancy of Abba’s Slipping Through My Fingers song, Mum singing for her daughters, me singing for mine, tears because our daughters always grow up, that we all have to say good bye, that we know we’re going to die.
Holy Days delved into a child’s grief of losing his mother, admittedly without nuance, but I wept all the same.
“Death is a journey, and journeys are nothing to be feared,” the Judy Davis nun said. It was trite and true and false all at the same time.
I emerged into Saturday lunch time, the flowers in the verge garden bed nodded in the sunlight, and everything sparkled.
This week, my four sisters went up to Kalgoorlie on a reminiscence tour. We lived there from 1965 to 1968. I had planned to go as well, but a last-minute change in work commitments meant I had to stay home, Cinderella-like, sweeping up the workplace hearth cinders while they swanned about the goldfields. It’s times like these that I realise my bohemian, transition to retirement plans are not always progressing in line with my expectations.
Perhaps to exacerbate my melancholy, I ferried a couple of my sisters to the East Perth station to catch their train, The Prospector. I then headed to my platform to continue my journey in the opposite direction, into the CBD.
All this week while my sisters were away, I was assailed by memories not of the Kalgoorlie home; I was only eight months old when we arrived and three when we left; but images of our permanent childhood home in Scarborough. A flash of the kitchen area as it used to be. The back yard before the dining room extension was built in 1975. See for example the image top left of we sisters in 1971. I’m the youngest one clutching the book.
As I waited for my train to the CBD on the opposite platform, I had a good view of their Prospector train ready to depart in about a quarter of an hour. Should I take a picture of it? That’s exactly the sort of thing my mother would do; take a photo of a plane or train that had no significance, other than someone she loved was on it, outward bound. Documenting partings and reunions.
Note as evidence the image she took of me aboard the Indian Pacific train in May 1990. I was headed to London via an overland train trip to Sydney. Not pictured; Mum running alongside the platform as the Indian Pacific picked up speed and we waved and waved until she fell out of sight. Neither of us knew my two-year sojourn to London would balloon out into a decade.
So I walked down the platform to get a close enough image, and I took the pointless photo of the train because Mum couldn’t, then I boarded my train to work.
Hidden in last week’s Sunday Blog where I dramatised my Kitty’s Gorge walk was another kernel of a blog that I started but didn’t finish. It was about my own long Road to Damascus style conversion to becoming someone who not only does exercise, but enjoys it.
I’m lucky enough to still be connected with people I went to school with, all the way from year one to twelve. Friends who cheered me on as I came last in running races on sports day. (See picture on right).
I was still wearing my school shoes rather than trainers as it wasn’t worth the effort of changing them. In high school, I survived sports lessons with Mrs Maggius as we shivered in our tunics and bloomers and hung our head in shame as she warned us that having a period did not exempt us from participating in sports. These friends can understand the scale and height of my Damascan road and why it has taken me six decades to arrive.
I’ve been a health advocate for nearly three decades, and have argued for a kinder, safer health system. That fight needs to continue, and its urgency if anything is heightened by the advent of digital health and AI. But what about the sad truth that staying well isn’t what our current health system is designed to do. There is no connection between our health and food systems, for example, even though what we eat is absolutely key to how well we are. Choosing to eat healthily can be an act of resistance.
One thing that helps to even out the rocky ground of taking control of our own health, just a little, is the use of smart watches and apps. The light didn’t properly turn on for me until I was sitting on a committee about health prevention apps, doing my consumer rep thang.
“Why don’t I have a smart watch? Why aren’t I creating my own personal dashboard of health and wellbeing?” I thought.
So after the meeting ended, I rushed off hatless and ordered a reconditioned smart watch (from Reebelo in case you’re interested). I downloaded an app to track what I eat and linked it up with my health app which tracks my activity. Yes, I am aware the tech overlords are milking all my data for their own evil multi-trillionaire gains, but I may as well use the tech to my advantage.
As well as my smart watch and new food journal, I’ve found the right online functional weights program for me and I just have to press the button and follow along.
I’m not sure if you needed to hear this today, but sometimes the three-year-old roaring in the cold beach water (top left image) can grow up and mature into an unlikely outdoor type. If that is the message you needed today, consider it delivered.
“It’ll seem much quicker on the way back,” darling husband reassured me.
Here I was again, hoisted on my own petard of faulty memory, thinking that this time I could add in a new activity for us to do together. Having regular beach walks, going to the movies, having dinner, or more likely, breakfast is about as far as our list extends. He’s extremely fit, and I am moderately fit; and only from the beginning of this year, when I bucked a lifetime of disliking exercise by starting, then enjoying, a weekly functional weights regime. With my new-found strength and stamina, could we add hiking onto our list of mutual pastimes?
Did I not remember our Bali honeymoon trip when instead of lounging by the pool reading, I ended up parasailing? I hung in the sky, and far below me puttered a banged-up dinghy, and I wondered if this would be my last hurrah.
Had I forgotten our bike riding trip to Cambodia, where halfway into the muggy ride I was overtaken with a migraine, and had to hail a tuk-tuk, get the driver to strap the bike to its flimsy front and ferry me on the ostentatious ride of shame back to the hotel?
No, dear reader, I did not remember any of these salutary lessons. Or instead, I believed in my new-found strength due to above-mentioned regular weights training. Hiking Kitty’s Gorge together would be a breeze. Level 4? Pshaw. No sweat.
As today’s quote highlights; “Experience keeps a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other.”
So accordingly, around three hours into the walk, we had made it to the destination where there was a carpark, toilet and tables. It’s a spot that would have been discoverable by an Uber. That was my tuk-tuk escape moment, but I let this rescue rope slip from my grasp without even reaching for it. After a short rest, we turned back to make the trek to the starting point.
It may not surprise you to know that it was not quicker on the way back. If anything, it was more taxing than the walk there, because I was already tired. By the end, I had dubbed the Kitty’s Gorge walk “Always Another Hill” because the path followed the river at times, then scaled the magnificent hills in an undulating pattern which is lovely to look at but challenging to walk. There was always another hill. Like a woman in labour, I reached the transition phase where I believed I could never make and it would never end. And then, one last hill and we were delivered to the car park.
Did I mention that Kitty’s Gorge was absolutely beautiful? (see pic) That the trees, flowers, waterways were almost enough to obliterate the sensation of blistering feet and tired legs? That despite everything, my teeth became dry from all the smiling I was doing in the forest bathing extravaganza?
I’m taking it as a good sign that even darling husband feels we overdid it by starting with a 19km level four trek. He’s suggesting that our next excursion will be a flat rather than hilly level 2, with a more manageable seven or eight kilometres length. Maybe I can slot it onto our short list of mutual entertainment.
For a while, a week at least, my body still imagines how I’ll walk through my sixth-floor Paris apartment for my nightly toilet stop; return to my low-slung bed with its blackout screen on the dormer window in the attic roof. How in the morning, I’ll slip a coffee pod into the machine, walk across the main room while it gurgles and brews. To the left is the dining table, the right is the lounge. A large space punctuated by three Turkish rugs. I’ll open one of the full length windows and step right out on the tiny balcony, above the roar of the street, and look right towards Mont Martre.
Instead, I’m in Perth. My bed is king size and is easy to get in and out of. The toilet has just one door, not the weird two door arrangement of the Paris place. The morning is a chorus of birds which excavate memories of Perth laid decade upon decade from my childhood to now. I’m back at home with my deluxe yoga altar instead of my cut-down travel version. My life is fortunate, privileged and rich with family and friends.
And yet. And yet.
I continue to wrestle with the mystery of travel and its immense hold on me.
As a fourteen-year-old, making the long haul flight back from London to Perth, sobbing the entire time in the wake of the excruciating parting with my brother, I declared travel to be destructive. It cleaved kith and kin apart. But as I wandered the empty suburban streets after landing back in Perth. They were such a contrast from the bustle and rush of European cities, and I wondered if there’d been a nuclear holocaust to clear the streets so completely.
By the time I was a young adult, I was counting down the years and milestones (degree, early career) before I could move to Europe, and was contemptuous of my peers who’d never left Perth.
Once I’d settled in London as my home in 1990, I focused not on travelling, but living somewhere else, trying on that life as my permanent future. I visited Perth twice in six years, ricocheting from one joyous hello to a tearful goodbye with friends and family before returning to my London life.
Fast forward four years to me as young mother, back in Perth while I worked out my next steps, grasping my half-Greek baby to my breast and hearing each plane overhead as another siren call of her Greek father’s abandonment.
Or not even another year when I was a jaded single mother, returning for good to Australia, having having failed at building a Greek-Australian family. Once I re-settled back in Perth, the sound of planes overhead no longer conjured abandonment; they were a neutral hum in my once again free and enjoyable life. I turned my face away from Europe and focused on building a life in Australia.
By the time my daughter was seven she’d become an excellent long haul traveller, and we made two Greek summer holiday visits to her father, until financial circumstances put a stop to that. My daughter and I both missed Europe, but what to do? By 2016, I’d rallied to be able to afford to travel independently to Greece with my daughter. I could enjoy the wonders of Greece’s beaches and islands without having to teach English, or parent a toddler.
And since 2016, it’s become necessary to get myself to Europe once a year.
“It’s home,” my daughter and I agree. A second home. Not a home we’d like to live in permanently, with its endless winters and poorer lifestyle. But it’s a place we need to visit to feel whole.
I travel and try on daily life, for weeks at a time, pushing back against the reality of my home, my life here. Like a I’m pushing against a leg press machine that will never want to return to its resting position.
And then, I come home. And am grateful. And plan the next trip.
