the flavour of Italy

at Piazza
in the cupboards
about a tonne and a half of pasta allsorts
a toaster
2 sorts of Twinings tea and some
Sciroppa (Blackcurrant)
bowls (for coffee, olives)
soup plates (not bowls, shallow)
dinner plates
bread & butter plates & glasses & cups
granular salt iodurato
carton-packs of crushed tomatoes
miele (the dishwasher brand-name.
Honey.)
corn oil (local) and olive oil (from our actual
garden). cracked pepper, semolina,
flour (3 kinds),
raspberry jam bought at yesterdayís maggio
in the woods, triple-cooked and glutinous
and bitterish like a liqueur
unrefined brown sugar
tonno (a tiny tin) and anchovies
same like at home, standing upright
in their little glass jar
peanut butter, cocoa, and a mini
food-grinder
amoretti and Nesquik and camomile tea
brodo (chicken broth)
special risotto rice and
Barilla bucatini

Under the Skin

Olga was my friend
and an object of awe
being the child of refugees
as the nuns explained

in Grade 2 she shared
this mystique with Nadia
who seemed both ageless
and very old

a sort of eight or nine
or even ten or twelve
year-old Baba Yaga
with tumbly black hair

downward-slanting
gypsy brown eyes, a
stretched-looking mouth
and air of deep exhaustion

a little old croneís face
that I recall precisely
all these years later
as she stands

by the big stump
a pepper-tree, I guess
like the others in the
asphalt schoolyard

and she has just pulled
another girl down
from it, a little roughly
as you do

in ëStatuesí (the pullee
using the momentum
to flail forwards and
freeze in an arresting pose)

There was a Dutch girl
in the Grade 2 class, like
a textbook illustration
with flaxen braids

only lacking a milkmaidís
white cap which I plant
gratuitously above her
blank, pretty, rosy face

as she sits twice as
big as any of us
in the back row
Twelve, she was

and put with the littlies
because no English
Sister Mary Alberta
doing her best but with

forty of us at least
maybe fifty. New Aust-
ralian boys come to
mind from upper primary

Godfrey Zivkov (koff?) in
Grade 7, tall and swarthy,
wiry and strong as a man, who
I can see with hands on hips

silently refusing to comply
with orders from tiny Sister
Mary Clement as eternal-
seeming moments ticked by

He was nearly fifteen
and old for his age; death
to play ëbrandyí with.
His sister, Brigitta

old for her age too
in the way parents meant
when they said it of girls
her permanent eyeliner

natural, I think. Her friend
was Barbara Gollanski, whose
sister, Lilla, played with my
sister, and died,

astoundingly, from a knee
injury turned gangrenous.
Her face was doughy against
the pillow when we visited

in her own bedroom in
Mitchell Park, not hospital,
so we didnít suspect.
We acquired morbid fears

of bumping a recent wound-
site hard, reputed to be what
Lilla did, some time after falling
from a horse.

I only recall one boy
who seemed to me worthy
of less regard rather than
more in his foreignness

his name was Tony
and he wasnít even Italian-
born. I despised him for
being fat. ëItalianí was just

something else he was,
though integral, so the dark
curls and soft smile were
part of what I loathed.

I hated a red-haired
freckled boy just as much
at the time. The New
Australians knew secrets

about the Communists
about food, about devotion
about things you kept in
families, like tablecloths,

like extra aunts.
I was always respectful
in their houses. I felt they
had clues we didnít

inside information about
how to live, where we
(I felt) were hanging on
to a semblance merely

by the skin of our teeth,
pretending to know
why we lived the way
we did. While only guessing.

Lace table runners and
china coffee cups and
milk coffee at Alf Wís
place some Sundays

after the parish Mass
would strike a kind of
hopelessness in my
heart. Such sureness

only came through
generations living in
one old country. I never
imagined I could have it

or learn it, even.
The Way was bred in you
or not, and in me,
in us, not. We were

arrivistes. If I didnít
know the word, I under-
stood it. Since then Iíve
learnt the advantages

of a paucity of tradition.
But never felt equally
equipped to construct
a life that passes muster

no-one to formally present
the sheets and quilts, pin
money to my dress, whisper
the advice of ages.

Partly Iím relieved.
Partly Iím bereft.
Now
as much as then.

Around Here

My version of Neighbourhood
Watch has nothing to do with the
official one. If I ever had a mad fancy to
join that, all I'd have to do would be to

remind myself that our local Leader's a
dentist. But I do interrogate houses and
gardens around here (as we cultural theorists
say), in a non-invasive manner,

though quite personal.
I check cars, watering systems, pets, toys in
front yards, brush or paling or fortification-type
fencing, plants, clothes-lines

geraniums, frangipanis, forsythia
(a name I could never attach to a plant till
'forsythia' was the answer to a Cryptic
clue and I had it described in detail. I

thought it was something English I'd
never encountered but it was actually
every second householder's hedge-plant
of choice when I was little)

the swimming-pool people have forsythia
the Citroen people have five Citroens and
chooks - funny how unaccustomed that
bwaaark buk buk is these days

you're not allowed to build a chook run
abutting a footpath, I know because we
built one and pretended it was a conservatory
when the council inspector came

we stuffed the chooks into an empty linen-
cupboard and they kept quiet because it
was dark in there and they assumed night
had descended

the Seigneurie as I like to think of it
dominates the whole area with its giant
introduced-species trees. I suppose it may have
included the whole suburb once

walking by last night, I noticed the mistletoe
which grows right up into the top of the tallest
trees was glowing an eerie rust-red in the sunset
dead or poisoned, perhaps, toxic-looking

the owners are two gay men, someone said
I remember the house used to belong to Mrs.
Schwabb who was the nearest thing to Miss
Havisham I met as a kid

stiff black dress, cascades of dry white hair,
a disconcerting gimlet gaze. The Mareks knew
her, and when we went there once she sat by
the grand piano and told me I'd be a nun

there's a motorbike in the drive now, with
a covered side-car, and the grounds look well-
tended, though the greenery is the
low-maintenance kind

there are plenty of Australian Native gardens
around here, and some very manicured
cottage-style ones but not many of the
rambling kind like mine

they call this a battleaxe block, and my
garden is a tearaway alright, but not just
scrubby and overgrown, all the bits are
worked-on, it's just that they escape me

as the season progresses, till eventually I
come back with new plans and start digging
again. My place is blessed in that it has tall
trees all around it

The huge plane tree on the footpath,
eighty or ninety years old and, so far,
spared by hare-brained Council loppers
The gangly Tasmanian Blue Gum

in the front yard might well fall over by itself
though only a dozen years old
it's taller than the plane, one long, longv stretch of bare leg, or neck, with

a pom-pom of leaves on top, it leans alarmingly
in a wind. The olive tree by the back room
has gone berserk and I'll probably have to
gracefully accede to it's being felled some day

it's too close to Doug and Lorna's fence
they've already lopped the branches on their
side. The roots have lifted the pavers over here
and are probably threatening their spare bedroom

Such a summery tree, the olive. Nothing else in
the yard has quite that dusty grey-green about it
and the leaves have a lovable tough shrivelledness
it's never fruited - can you pollinate an olive tree?

around here 50's front yards still abound
those give-nothing-away expanses of blandness
with a diamond or ellipse of couch grass in the
centre, half-brick borders and gravel paths

invariably roses, lots of cement or gravel,
gerberas in a strictly weed-free border by the
cyclone wire fence ('woven-wire' fences are
in again. Yuppie companies are selling them)

everything is open to view, you're challenged
to stare, dared to discover anything
disreputable. Geraniums in old washing-
machine drums, poor but honest

daisy-bushes ditto - curtains will be closed
(or roller-blinds or metal shades), the house
beyond wearing a recent paint-coat
with minimum display

it's a standard arrangement to have the
frangipani in front of the master-bedroom
in one street all the 40s and 50s houses have one
was there some idea that it was good luck

for newlyweds to plant them? They look so
desolate in winter, leafless. You can't help
seeing them as symbols of stubby, bare lives
they bring back the nasty bits of My Brother

Jack, where old George gets stuck into the
suburbanites in that insufferably superior
way. One of the more vicious bits of misogyny
in Oz Lit, his picture of Helen.

This is a suburb where lots of those old places
ultra-neat still or getting dilapidated, with their
sleepouts or 'enclosed verandahs', owner-built,
stumpy posts flaking and leaning slightly

are being taken over gradually, having huge
crenellated front walls inflicted on them
walls have gone up around here that wouldn't
look out of place on some neo-Gothic old hospital

or asylum (New Norfolk is the best in that school
I've seen). Typically they mushroom in front
of some innately modest little place, timber-frame
or asbestos even.

most of the places older still (20s and 30s)
are in the hands of earnest rejuvenators
who rarely exercise the necessary restraint
the Adelaide Error is to cutesify a house

to within an inch of its life, tying back its hair
in a too-tight pony-tail, capping its teeth
mock-oranges either side of gloss-emulsion doors
brass knocker, pergola, dinky glass extension

though some resist, like next-door-but-one
the judo teachers, who leave their yard
to its own devices, apart from some rather
Zen river stones. They have

a punching-bag hung in the drive. The
woman (fifties) teaches Self Defence to
high-school kids. Gabe says
she's cool.

Two streets away is my old school
named by young and homesick Irish nuns
for their Dublin suburb. The sternness of the
upright convent building's tempered

by a sprawl of schoolrooms, gym-hall
with its mural facing the back-boundary
fence (wire-mesh, see-through), while
the Cross Road frontage is a high brick wall

whose formal gates are as I recall
though you don't see prefects there these days
before and after school to check on
hats and gloves and hem-lines, chewing-gum

The nuns let Neighbourhood Watch hold
meetings on their grounds, according to
this flyer here. A map says enter off Hill St.
park at the Administration Centre

which used to be called 'St. Catherine's'
or 'Santa Sabina', was it? If you go
further along that drive you reach the
big old trees that flank the cemetery

Are nuns still buried there? At school
when one died, we'd line up all kitted out
in full school clobber, form a guard-
of-honour, straggling

from the chapel to the graveyard,
kindy-kids to seniors, all the nuns,
the effect a little dented when they
hoisted the coffin onto the jinkler

at other times the vehicle for Mr.
Hynes to trundle pig-bins and garbage
cans to their resting place. The thing
made an infernal din, at all events.

I thought the ghosts might populate
my dreams, when I moved here,
but they're benign, or sleeping
the sleep of the just, or overworked

It's the living nuns who haunt me,
ageless in the way nuns always are
I see them walking sometimes. Even the
oldest seem not to have aged in twenty years

some, still alive, taught Dad.

Unknown to them, I note their wanderings
guess at serenity or trouble from their faces
quiver at my own unshieldedness
observe that their walls, too, can tumble

As the Cross Road Redevelopment Project

exposes their demesne to view
the wall becomes the single bricks
it always was, in haphazard piles
like our homes, our lives, out here.