sometimes subtle but often ineffably potent influence they have played. Then I
begin to understand them not through the traditional privileging of consciousness
but in the elevation of the deeper imaginal and spiritual experiences. I remember
many of my earliest books, particularly a red covered encyclopaedia that
imaginatively transported me far away from 26 Tudor Street, where I lived from my
birth to the age of fifteen, to be with ancient Greek warriors and the I ndian braves
of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826). There were many
places during my early years: my bedroom, the nearby derelict houses, the local
funeral parlours, the wood shed at the end of the yard, the laneway; these became
enchanted places where I discovered ghosts and demons, characters from the past,
spies and enemy soldiers - places enfolded in the imaginal but not perceived in
quite the same way by the veiled eyes of the adults around me.
I t was at Tudor Street that I came to realise how biography and place are
inextricably linked in a narrative. I sensed that the derelict houses still had
embedded in their structure their stories. I imagined a past for these places
because that is what houses have. I heard echoing in them the past chatter of
voices, doors banging, children playing games. Embedded within them was the
intimate history of families and individuals, of births and deaths, loves and regrets,
of the tragedies and joys of the people who had lived in them; secrets surviving
amidst fallen ceilings and decaying walls. These now derelict houses were occupied
by men, less often women, who, themselves, had derelict lives and both individual
and place seemed to be as one, waiting for a final strike that would demolish their
existences forever.
The funeral parlours were places where the dead and everything associated
with them coalesced; they were places that could never be anything other than
marked by death and the secret things associated with the dead and those
individuals who tended them. However, one parlour has been converted into a
restaurant and the other is now a sex shop, breaking age-old taboos surrounding
death and food and sex. I n my reverie of these places, I am a child again but with
an adult mind musing over the story of my childhood and its recollections that seem
to be more of images of places or place-associations rather than of events.
The first fifteen years of my life were lived in an old terrace house in Tudor
Street, Surry Hills, then a working class but now gentrified suburb of Sydney. My
parents were reared in Surry Hills and Paddington and I knew the stories of their
lives there: streets and laneways and many buildings became places composed of
ron
(Ron)
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