the authenticity, the characters, tragedy, beauty and atmosphere of the place just
as I had experienced it. How could someone who had not lived in Surry Hills, who
had not lived my life, affect me and other readers in such a way? A similar process
occurred with Hal Porter’s Watcher on the Cast-I ron Balcony: An Australian
Autiobiography (1963), where Porter captured not so much the exterior milieu but
the dynamics causing the inner development of the character in a particular place.
Like Porter I too meditated on my conception - under which ceiling, in what kapok
mattress, to locate that place, which exists not only as reconstruction of the past
but also as reinterpretation, as something within me that seemed to have not only a
separate or de-centred existence but also a primal creativity and energy.
At age fifteen I moved with my family to a new home on the outskirts of the
city near acres of resting paddocks with a brick pit beyond. That area has now
been developed into an up-market housing estate but its shopping mall for me is
still the place where old Mr Bamford lived in his shack with his vegetable garden on
two sides, and the artificial lake is still, ineradicably in my mind, the brick pits. I n
spite of the formative events that occurred in this new home, that de-centred part
of me still feels, interminably, connected to 26 Tudor Street.
Place simply seems to be a strong signifier in my reminiscences and memory
of events. The laneway where I played beside the house in Tudor Street, the old
Premier Cinema, the derelict houses where I played on the way home from school;
the seminary and my room there, the chapel with its excessively Baroque high altar.
Particular places that emerge through the mists of memory, a room, a street, a
building; last year, twenty or forty years ago; maybe here or in Athens, Delphi,
Jerusalem or Wollongong and one specific room, the kitchen, which despite all logic,
design and custom, is the very heart and centre of my present home.
Such recollections of place, for me, are often more than merely visual; I can
still feel the rusted chipped paint wrought iron railings on the balcony at Tudor
Street, the rough uneven stones on the path beneath my feet as I walked to the
Acropolis for the first time. I can hear the sounds and smell the aromas coming
from the kitchen on that first night, thirty-five years ago, as I lay in my bed on a
kibbutz in I srael. Then there are the imaginary places: places existing in dreams
and fantasies, sometimes composed of one place superimposed over another and
which together form a sort of composite yet which, in itself, also seems real.
Strangely, I became intensely more responsive to places at the time when
my mother was approaching her death. She was cognizant of who others and I
ron
(Ron)
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