Thoughts on living small

This is not a story I think I’ve told on this blog before but, when I was a teenager, my family moved to a country property in the foothills of the mountains and, while my father built our house, we lived in a caravan. But mostly we lived outside. We even cooked and showered outside (until winter).

These photos are what my teenaged life looked like. The bottom photo is of our kitchen! We had no electricity or running water and at first we had no telephone (until a neighbour strung up a probably-highly-illegal phone cable for us from tree to tree along our kilometre-long, winding driveway).

My father was a social worker, not a builder, so this all lasted quite a long time. Many years, in fact.

There are so many stories I could tell you about this period of my life. Good ones and bad ones, a lot of funny ones. You can’t suddenly change your lifestyle without it changing you, possibly more-so because my brother and I were in the midst of our formative years.

From those years in the caravan, I learned how to slow down and pare back. You can't accumulate a lot of stuff in a caravan, or it will quickly smother you. And so you learn that you don't actually need a lot of stuff. Not at all. I learned to save, to conserve, and to value... everything. Every last resource was hard-won and frequently scarce, and therefore greatly appreciated.

A simple life. Days spent clearing our land for house and garden and horse, by hand. Picking up rocks, cleaning up giant piles of old glass bottles, half-buried. Digging out and gently burning off insidious lantana. Dad, throwing all his weight into the hand-held post-digger, trying to break a ground hardened by a hundred summers, but the ground almost breaks him.

Hardwood floorboards from a demolished 100-year-old farmhouse, used to build a gravity-fed tank stand. Hidden dry-rot. The tank-stand buckling under the weight of the water, and crashing down the side of the mountain.

Everything cooked on a gas burner or a hand-made, wood-fired barbecue. Everything. If you ever need to make toast on a frying pan, I can show you how.

Night-times spent gathered as a family around a single candle and a battery-powered radio, listening to old "talkies" (my favourite was an Australian comedy from the 1930s, called "Yes, What?").

Returning home one evening to find a baby sugar-glider, smaller than the palm of my hand, hiding on my brother's bunk bed.

In recent years I’ve read a lot of blogs about people undertaking tree-changes like ours. Simple living, wholistic living, tiny houses, that sort of thing. It’s funny the mixed emotions I feel whenever I read these stories. I’m not going to lie: sometimes, I feel a bit smug.

I think to myself, these people have NO IDEA how it really is when you seriously go off the grid. This isn't about making your own marmalade and spreading it on your homemade bread (I love doing those things, by the way).

It's about making a washing machine out of an old broom handle and a colander and using it for hours it to POUND your clothes clean, every weekend, until your arms and shoulders burn (that was mostly Mum, not me, although I helped. Poor Mum). Wearing headbands throughout most of your final years of high school, because you leaned too close to the candle while studying at night, and burned your hair. Showering from a canvas bag under a tree, in freezing wind. Applying the roll-on deodorant one morning before school and discovering that your mother had snuck around in the night and replaced all the actual deodorants with white vinegar. Spiders and beetles in your kitchen and bedclothes. Frogs in your drop-toilet.

We didn’t do these things by halves, my family.

But then alongside the smug is a hefty dose of guilt. Guilt because the way I live now feels so commercial and wasteful compared to the way I grew up. I confess: I love it when I can flip a switch and a light comes on. I like having the heater on in winter and I LOVE having the air conditioning on in summer. I like watching TV. I like doing the washing up with the tap running - it’s so much more hygienic! I really like to stand under a long, hot shower.

Please don't hate me but when I find a six- (or more)-legged creature in my house, I don't catch it and release it gently into the wilds of Carlton North. I kill it before it bites or spreads diseases to my children. And then I feel guilty and beg a silent, fruitless forgiveness from its corpse.

I feel like a traitor to my family, and to my planet.

Sometimes I think I find it more difficult to be a responsible global citizen because of the extreme way we lived when I was young. I’m like the kid that grows up without sugar and then makes themselves sick at other children’s parties (actually I WAS that kid, too).

But that's just excuses. I want to lessen my footprint on this world, to leave it a better place for my children. I COMPLETELY understand why all those other people I keep reading about are doing these things, and I admire them.

I have to fight with my own deep-seated selfishness, the side of me that says “I’ve already done my bit, made so many sacrifices. I've been the fourth person to step into an inch-deep bath shared one at a time, cleanest person first (I rode horses. I was the grubbiest). I've bucketed water out of said four-person bath and used it to flush a toilet. I’ve EARNED that long, hot shower, that air conditioner.” I struggle to find a compromise because I spent years not feeling properly clean, and not feeling comfortable. I’m not saying that it was all bad, not at all: a lot of it was fun. But I’m just saying… I don’t want to go back.

I don’t want to go back and I don’t know how to meet half way, because half way feels like I'm not doing enough and, if I’m going to give these things up all over again, it feels like it should REALLY be worth it. But who am I, to bargain with the world like that?

No great ideas, yet.

Dispatch from the road

Echuca, Central Victoria. Arrival time 5:20pm

Scout: I want to live in this hotel forever, because it has got Peppa Pig on television. Ralph [with glee] : Noise! Noise! [about the people coming and going from our hotel at all hours throughout the night] Me: Wow, this place has got a spa. That was unexpected. I might get a massage! Mr B: It's not that kind of spa. Tepid water. Strangers.

In the morning, we cruise around the town searching for a cafe that is open for breakfast at kids o'clock. Find a nice-looking cafe, order our breakfast, then thank all the deities on Olympus that I remembered to bring little boxes of sultanas because there is a 45 minute wait for food and NO TODDLER WAITS 45 MINUTES FOR ANYTHING.

Head out to Port Echuca and it is so cute! A horse-drawn carriage rolls past us as we lock the car. I love that touristy stuff! Race down the wooden ramps to catch a paddle steamer just in time. Scout is adamant she doesn't want to go on the paddle steamer, and boards under protest. After five minutes on the river, she announces she wants to ride on ALL the paddle steamers, ALL the time.

Scout's favourite paddle steamer activity: lying down on wool bales and pretending to sleep Ralph's favourite paddle steamer activity: watching the steam engine at work. He is mesmerised!

Also a favourite activity for everyone: drinking tea on the deck. Both children: Real tea! Real tea! (They take their tea weak, insipid, milky and barely warm)

The skipper lets the children have a turn at "driving" the boat. Scout gently holds the spokes of the giant wheel as the skipper steers. Ralph grabs the wheel and holds it, and suddenly we are heading straight for the banks of the Murray River. The skipper hastily redresses the situation. We beat a hasty retreat from the cabin.

Yarrawonga, Central Victoria. Arrival time 1pm

Scout calls it Arrow-Wanta. Ralph dissolves into hysterical giggles every time anyone says "Yarrawonga."

We walk up the main street and Ralph goes everywhere he is not supposed to and does everything he is told not to and then he puts his hands somewhere really disgusting and before I can get to him, shoves his thumb into his mouth. I lunge towards him yelling "Nooooo!" and it's like I'm running in slow motion and I swear my voice has that weird, deep sound that happens when you have the sound on in slow motion, but his thumb was just too quick. I whip it back out and clean and sanitise his hands, but the damage is already done. If he doesn't catch a hideous disease, he will have the best immune system in Australia. It's probably a 50-50 chance either way.

In the car again, later that afternoon.

Ralph [offering up thumb]: Mummy suck my thumb? Me: No way! That's so disgusting! Ralph: AHAHAHAHAHA [proceeds to suck his own thumb] Scout: Suck MY thumb Mummy! Me: [defeated sigh]

We sing 'The Quartermaster's Store' in the car approximately 37 times, at Scout's request. "I ONLY want to sing 'my eyes are dim,'" she insists. At every new verse, Scout picks a family member or friend and her father matches the rhyme to them (there was Mummy, Mummy, rubbing her tummy in the store...). "Now do Shohana Daddy! Now do Sebastian! Layla! Alexandra!

Albury, on the Victoria-NSW border. Arrival time 4:30pm

Scout: Let's see if this television has Peppa Pig! Me: Hey Ralph, Yarrawonga Ralph: [doubles over and screams with laughter]

There is supposed to be a restaurant and room service, but it is closed on Sundays. After we put the kids to bed, Mr B goes out to find some takeout. I turn out the light and sit on the bed in the dark, looking at my phone. Both kids sit up and try to make me laugh. I walk around behind our bed and crouch down on the floor behind the bed so they can't see me or the light of my phone. The kids keep laughing, but slowly go quiet. My back hurts from bending over. I start itching. I think the carpet has fleas. Mr B returns with Chinese takeout and it is so bad, but we are hungry and desperate. I grab an old blanket from a cupboard and we eat sitting on the floor of the bathroom. I wish I was kidding. Later, we share headphones and watch a couple of episodes of Turn: Washington's Spies that I have downloaded onto my computer. A very addictive show!

Gundagai, half way between Melbourne and Sydney. Arrival time 12:30pm

We find an old pub for lunch and I order a salad and convince the children to eat some vegetables, by way of giving them a back tickle for every mouthful of greens effectively swallowed. I am in dire need of salad and otherwise-healthy food. I have already put on weight from all the junk food on this road trip. This always happens when I travel in country Australia. Once I was on the road in the outback for three weeks for work, and came back six kilos heavier! No exaggeration. Everywhere we went, the only thing to eat was chicken kiev. I never want to see another chicken kiev as long as I live.

Things are almost as dire right now. Scout rests her head on my leg, lovingly, then looks up at me. "Mummy, your leg is getting nice and fat and squishy. It is like play dough!" Cue salad for lunch.

After the salad, we go for a walk and then it rains so we take shelter in the Gundagai Bakery, which happens to be the oldest bakery in Australia. It is also very cute and the food is very yummy, so we each have a doughnut. Salad plus gentle walk cancels out doughnut calories, so this treat in no way contributes to play-dough legs.

Currently typing this from Goulburn, southern NSW. Arrival time: 5pm.

Check-out time, if we can help it: 5:05pm. Or earlier. At reception, the lady coughs and sneezes directly into her hand, then picks up the keys and hands them to Mr B. We search for our room. It is on the bottom floor and outside our window, two men are smoking and drinking about eight VBs each. They smile and say hello to the kids. Ralph yells "HARRO!" at the top of his lungs. Scout hides behind my legs.

We unlock the door.

This room is SO GROSS. I can't even begin to tell you. And I have stayed in hotels with toilets under the showers, and weird smells, and uninvited wildlife, and suspicious stains on the bedding, and even more suspicious stains on the walls, and camel poo coming out of the taps (true story!).

- End dispatch -

Lost trades, diets, & coming up for air

Life has swept us up lately. Nothing momentous, but one thing is bleeding into the next and leaving little room to come up for air.

I have been making zines and snail-mail packages and painting and posting mail-art. I have also been working on the picture-book I told you about. I sketched up the pictures for the story-boards and then didn’t like them at all, and had to throw them away because even looking at them blocked my ideas for what I WANTED them to do. I think I feel the pressure because I’m not a professional illustrator, and I really want to do my friend’s story justice. I need to find a way to let go of the creative burden and just enjoy the creative process. Do you know this feeling? Does it happen to you? How do you overcome the fear of letting somebody down, when you’re doing something creative?

My little boy has been keeping us up of a night, and not just with nightmares. We don’t really know why. It is probably a combination of teething, and too many grapes during the day (that was definitely the reason on one particular nappy-dominated night), and wanting to crawl around while watching CSI with us at 11pm. Anyway CSI is not THAT great and I’d rather be sleeping and secretly, I think Ralph would rather be sleeping too. He just takes a bit of convincing. Lucky he’s cute.

Mr B and I have been ordering Lite ’n Easy for our lunches and dinners for the past four weeks. We are trying to lose some of our combined “baby weight,” and enjoy the convenience of having the food ready to go. That would be great if you could call Lite ’n Easy food. Which you can’t. At least, the lunches are mostly lovely and fresh, but those frozen dinners! Our theory is that people lose weight because they simply lose the will to eat. Seriously, I can’t spend one more night smelling that food permeating from the microwave, so I’m going to give up. I’ll take away the lessons I’ve learned in portion control and the fact that I no longer seem to desire sweet things after a meal, and make the effort to cook even when I’m exhausted rather than order take-out, and hope for the best. I should probably cut back on the wine at night, too, but nobody’s perfect.

On the other hand, I think anyone in customer service should study the way they do it at Lite ’n Easy. I might not enjoy the meals, but the people on the other end of the phone are wonderful to deal with. Consistently, no matter who I speak to, they are polite and knowledgeable and supportive and friendly and flexible and personable. That’s pretty good, don’t you think? It’s not their fault that frozen microwave food tastes like, well, frozen microwave food.

The cat has a weird allergy that is causing her to scratch her nose all the time. The dog has gone blind. I'm sure you needed to know that.

In other news, we visited the Lost Trades Fair at Kyneton on the weekend and I've never seen so many pre-hipster beards in the one place in all my life. It was a perfect day for a jaunt to the country and the fair would have been lovely, if it were not for the uninvited swarms of European wasps.

We didn’t stay long, but it was enough time for Mr B to discover the joys of letter-pressing and decide that I really needed a letterpress machine to enhance my snail-mail endeavours. So, who am I to argue? I would LOVE to get into letterpress! Would you like your next mail from me to include something lovely and tactile with that classic letterpress debossing? And maybe some kind of illustration I've created on metal plates? I found a nifty little starter number on the internet for $100, to which Mr B responded “Pshaw, you need an original!” He promptly pointed me to an antique (and very expensive) printing press, not letterpress. Now that would be seriously fun, except that we’d have to move to the suburbs to afford a home big enough to house my new hobby. Which might be worth considering. I think the world is almost ready for the Naomi Loves Times.

What’s been going on at your place?

Happy Australia Day

I know, I know, it’s controversial. It’s also a day off together as a family and we get precious little of those so we're making the most of it. To whit: I am eating lamingtons (n.b. the spell checker tried THREE TIMES to change that word to laminations). I’ll be back tomorrow with a really easy project to make your snail mail more interesting.

Image credit: Shelley Brunt, licensed under Creative Commons

Hello Bendigo

Over the Christmas / New Year period we spent a few days in Mr B’s hometown, Bendigo. In between visits to Nanna and all the cousins and a birthday barbecue out at Uncle Mark’s place where dust and snags and lollies and water fights made it Scout heaven, we decided to play tourist.

Have you ever pretended to be a tourist in your own town? It’s something I really enjoy doing now and then, just for fun, and I highly recommend it. You do all the things that as a local you would normally skip/avoid-like-the-plague. Visit all the tourist sites. Ride the hop-on-hop-off bus (if there is one). Eat the crappy tourist food in the crappy tourist cafes. The cheesier the better.

Of course I actually AM a tourist when I visit Bendigo, but I’ve never looked at it in that way before, since every visit is all about family. It’s such a beautiful and historic place to visit, when you take the time to look! And for Mr B, who was born and bred in Bendigo but hadn't lived there in 20 years, this was a fun way to reacquaint himself with what was perhaps a different side to his home town.

Bring on more iPhone photos.

Gundagai dispatch – the Niagara Café

(I tried to resist the cliché. I failed. Play this song in the background)

There is a little country town about half way between Sydney and Melbourne, called Gundagai. It has a population of about 1500. It was made famous by a folk song called The Road to Gundagai, which was written in 1922 by Jack O’Hagan (who lived, incidentally, just around the corner from me in Fitzroy). I think the song is about a soldier returning to his home town after the Great War. In my head, that's what I imagine when I hear it.

We pulled into Gundagai on our way home from Canberra last week, because Harry had just woken from his nap and we needed somewhere to sit and feed him his breakfast. Purely by chance, we chose the Niagara Café.

The Niagara is 112 years old and has been owned by Greek immigrants the entire time (not the SAME Greek immigrants, clearly). It opened in 1902 as an Oyster Saloon, and took the name Niagara in 1928 because apparently American names were considered en vogue at the time.

The décor had a snazzy new update in 1938 that made it THE super-cool and happening night-spot in all the bustling metropolis of Gundagai. And, apart from some beautiful lights lost to a fire in the '70s, it HAS NOT CHANGED SINCE THAT TIME.

I’m talking scalloped booths, gloriously narrow and uncomfortable bench seats, and lime-green table-tops. Art deco mirrors, doors and windows. And a century’s worth of newspaper clippings framed on the walls, celebrating celebrity (mostly political) visitors and other events in the café’s history.

Events overlap events and nothing is removed. A banner proudly boasting the 50th anniversary (in 1992) of a Prime Minister’s visit still graces the back wall.

The Niagara Café is SO COOL. It is the best kind of kitsch. The most authentic kind of nostalgia.

But everything looks worn and tired. It is clean, it is friendly, but it is tired. The mirrored counter is cracked and tired. The scalloped, lime-green booths are chipped and tired. The owners look tired. I’m sorry to say it, but even our food looked a little tired. [Update 7 Oct 2014: I just want to clarify that the food was neither old nor bad, and I recommend you eat here. This comment was meant to reflect a sense of weariness in presentation that I totally understand, having experienced first-hand how exhausting cafe work is.] I can hardly blame the Niagara, I reckon I’d be tired after 112 years, too.

Despite this, we fell hard for the Niagara. Mr B and I spent the next 200 kilometres (in between numerous rousing renditions of The Road to Gundagai on Madeleine’s request) discussing how we’d like to move to Gundagai and take over the Niagara Café and restore it to its former glory. Celebrating history and attracting the tourist dollar, you know?

Victorian dispatch - Sovereign Hill

It was a pivotal moment in time for Victoria. In 1851, gold was discovered in the area we now know as Ballarat. Thousands of adventurers and risk-takers rushed to the region and turned the muddy goldfields into a bustling town, all-but overnight. Within two years, there were more than 20,000 miners of countless nationalities working on the field. Visit Ballarat today and you can still see grand Victorian architecture everywhere, all built on gold. (Not literally you understand. At least probably not).

And just around the corner you will find Sovereign Hill, a place that recreates the atmosphere and events that existed in the 10 years following that momentous first discovery of gold.

I love a good historical tourist-attraction, I really do.

{Side note: when I was little I loved to visit Old Sydney Town and imagine myself travelling back in time. There was a "Time Tunnel" that you walked through to get from the place where you bought the tickets to the actual town. Eight-year-old Naomi harboured fantasies that she could do this MUCH better. For example, I would have built the Time Tunnel so that you couldn't see one end from the other. And I would have had swirling coloured lights (something like the ones on the cover of 'A Wrinkle in Time' which I was totally into at the time) throughout, deliberately creating a disorienting experience as you walked through the tunnel. Half way into the Time Tunnel, when you could no longer see the entry or exit points, there would be change rooms and the biggest dress-up box you had ever seen, with enough clothes to fit everyone. And you would have to get changed into period costume so that when you emerged in Old Sydney Town, you and everyone around you would look the part. That way, nobody (let alone a very romantically-minded eight-year-old girl), would need to suspend their disbelief. Pretty cool huh?}

Back to Ballarat...

At some point during Primary School, everyone in Australia learns about the Eureka Stockade, which happened on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854. It was a rebellion, and the most significant of its kind in Victoria's history. The rebels objected to the imposition of a Miner's License, an exorbitant form of taxation on their gold findings, and at least 28 men died, with many more wounded. It was a classic (and in this case tragic) Australian story of the common man standing up against an abuse of authority, despite the odds and regardless of the consequences.

So this is Sovereign Hill, circa last Saturday:

One of the handy things about being the mother of a toddler is that you can go to these kinds of places and pretend you are doing it for your child, when really it is all about you.

Actually Madeleine could not have cared less about where we were or the cool costumes people were wearing or the historical significance of the town. Her key interests were: climbing up and down muddy steps; looking at turkeys in a sheep paddock; imitating the calls of the crows flying above us; licking my toffee-apple and then smearing sticky, red, stains all over her face. Most of these (minus the turkeys in the sheep paddock) we could have done at home, without the entry fee.

We tried to interest Madeleine in panning for gold, but she was more interested in walking at top speed into the creek, completely oblivious to her inability to swim or the sudden-return-to-winter climate of the day.

For my part, I loved the whole shebang. In particular, the toffee apple was the first I'd had since I was about 10. It was really REALLY good. Better than I remembered the toffee apples of my childhood being. And I went home with a red, sticky face, too.

Junior fashion notes: Madeleine's adorable, furry vest was a gift from Target Australia. I must thank them (again) because it kept her warm and cosy on a very cold day, she LOVED wearing it, and I think she looked cute as pie in it, especially when teamed with skinny jeans and little love-heart sneakers (also from Target, purchased by me).

Please don't blame me for the non-matching hat (knitted by a kind volunteer at Mr B's work). Madeleine loves her hats, and she chose that one all by herself before we left the house.

My mum and the 1957 Blue Mountains bushfire

This is my mother as a child, in a snowball fight with her best friend Lorna (they are still friends). Aren't they delightful? (And can you possibly imagine how cold Mum's bare legs must have been?) She grew up in a tiny mountains town north-west of Sydney, Australia, called Leura. When my mother was 10, her school burned down. You'd think that having your school burn down would be every 10-year-old's dream come true, wouldn't you. But the day my mum's school burned down, it very nearly took the children with it.

The school fell prey to a devastating bushfire that destroyed more than 158 homes (130 of them in Leura), shops, churches and a hospital. Four bushwalkers died while trying to outrun the bushfire up a steep slope at Blackheath.

It is terrifying to think how close those little students came to disaster, back in the days before fire drills and 'orderly exits'. Can you imagine, today, a school principal racing through the halls yelling "Everybody run!" and watching the children scatter?

Recently that same school asked Mum to write down her memories of the fire, to share with the Years 3 and 4 children who attend the school today. This is Mum's story.

A fierce mountains day*

When I was a little girl I lived in Lett Street, Katoomba, with my mother and father. My dad was an electrician. His job was to put electrical wires in houses and buildings, so that the lights and ovens and other electrical things worked. He would have to get up very early to do his job, and I used to eat breakfast with him at five o’clock in the morning. Even though that was many years ago, I still like to get up early.

Every year in December the owner of Everglades Gardens, Mr Sorenson, held a Christmas party for the children. I think I remember going to that party the weekend before the fire. When I woke up on the morning of the big bushfire in December 1957, I was thinking about how much I had enjoyed that party. I remember that it was a very hot day, even at five o’clock in the morning!

I was 10 years old. After I had breakfast and got dressed for school, I met my friends from next door, Lorna and Allen, and we walked to Leura School together, carrying our school cases. Our school cases were called Globite cases, and you carried them in your hands. They were very heavy. You could buy little leather satchels like the backpacks you have today, but they didn’t hold very much so most of us didn’t use them.

To get to school, Lorna and Allen and I walked up the steep hill to the Mall, then crossed the road and walked past the church. (In autumn, we liked to collect the leaves from the Liquidamber trees outside the church as they changed colour, and use them for art projects.) Next we walked over a wooden bridge to get across the railway lines, and finally crossed the highway, which was not very busy or dangerous back then, to arrive at school. Leura School had been converted from a little house, and each class was in a different room of the house. The stairs to that old house are still in the front garden of the school today.

When the bell rang, we sat down to our lessons with no idea that this was to become one of the most frightening days of our whole lives! We worked until the bell rang for Recess (which we called Play Lunch). No-one had much energy to play because it was so hot, but we still enjoyed the short break from lessons.

Not long after we went back to class, we heard the voice of the Principal (then called the Headmaster), Mr Hartcher, sounding different and a bit panicky. He hurried into our room, saying “Run! There is a fire coming very close to the school!” We could hear him running through the hallway with the same message in all the other rooms. When we ran into the hallway at the entrance of our school, we could smell smoke and the sky looked red and angry.

Some of the parents had realised the fire was heading for the school, and they arrived to pick their children up, but they blocked the doorway of the school so we couldn’t get out! They hadn’t realised that we all had to run away quickly, and they were blocking the only door that faced away from the fire. Mr Hartcher ordered them to move, but many of us children were too shy to push past them. I think I was one of the last to leave, because I did not want to squeeze past a mother who had started to panic.

At last I ran out the door and across the highway without even taking my school case, trying to get home as fast as I could. I ran across the railway bridge and the fire was so close that I could see flames in the grass next to the railway tracks. When I ran down the stairs of the bridge and onto the street, I caught up with a little boy who was only in Kindergarten. I ran with him for a little while, and the flames came closer and closer in the bushes and gardens behind us. Suddenly, the little boy cried out and I turned around to see he had dropped his school case, which he had been clutching tightly all this while. He tried to pick it up, but the fire was almost on top of us by now so I grabbed his hand and told him we needed to get away, and that he could always get a new school case.

By this time, some of the parents had gone to the school to pick up their children, only to discover that we had all left. So they were driving around the streets of Leura and Katoomba, looking for the children. The little boy’s parents arrived in their car, and took him away with them, leaving me alone. I kept running, and was very relieved not long afterwards to see my Dad’s car! Dad and I drove back home without really knowing what was the best plan for escape, as the fire seemed to be moving behind, in front and all around us.

It was a very scary time at our house. My parents packed our car with things like clothing and family photographs and insurance documents, thinking that these were the most important things to keep if our house burned down. We had to evacuate to the theatre in Katoomba Street. A truck stopped by our house and the driver offered to pick up anything large that we wanted to save, but Dad said “No thanks,” the important things like people were his only priority. Then the Principal Mr Hartcher and his wife arrived looking hot, with burns from the fire, to check that all the children had made it to their homes safely. Finally Dad drove us to the theatre. Mum and I waited there with all the others, while Dad went back to help fight the oncoming fire.

It is interesting how different people react to dangerous times. There were a few people in the theatre who tried hard to take our minds off worrying, by telling jokes and stories. Other people were quiet, some were agitated, and one or two were crying. Mostly, we were worried about our family members – usually men – who were fighting the fire to save their own and other people’s homes.

Later we heard that one of the teachers, Miss Nelson, had stayed at the school to make sure the children all made it out. That meant she was one of the last to leave and as she crossed the railway bridge, flames licked around the supports. I don’t really remember, but I assume those supports were made of wood.

The school burnt down completely on that day, but my Dad managed to save our house and some others in Lett Street. The fire came so close to our house that our garage wall was black and charcoaled. Mum said that the truck carrying everyone’s belongings was piled high, and there were things like fur coats (which were very expensive) with a goat sitting on top!

I seem to remember we had a very long holiday after Christmas that year, as we had no school to go to when the New Year began. Christmas was always exciting, and I usually thought it was the best thing about the summer holidays. But this year, it was hard to be really excited about Christmas. Some of my friends had lost their houses as well as all their Christmas presents, and it just didn’t feel right to be celebrating. Normally we went to visit my Nanna in Sydney every Christmas, but we didn’t go this year. Everybody was a bit unsure what to do next, and how to reorganise our lives after such a big change to our normally peaceful Mountains lives.

Finally in February 1958, a few days after everyone else, we started school again. But we still had no building to go to, so we had school in the Church of England hall in Leura. We were given pencil cases to carry to school every day, and exercise books and other supplies, but we didn’t have any library books. Since there were no computers in schools in 1958, library books were the only way we could research our projects. Encyclopaedias were very important but they were expensive, and most of us didn’t have them in our homes, so we just had to muddle through until our school library was replaced.

Eventually our new school was built. It was just one building (the one your office is in now), and it seemed very spacious and clean to us. It was wonderful to have desks to store our books in again, and stationery, and a library with exciting new books to read. We missed our little ‘house school’ but soon became used to the new one, and settled in nicely.

As long as I live, I will never forget the day of the 1957 bushfires. That day, the fire burned all the way from Katoomba Hospital right down as far as Springwood. It burned down many houses and buildings and trees.

* When Mum wrote this story for the children at her old school, she called it "A fierce mountains day" because when she recently went back to visit the school, the children sang a song by a local composer called "A mountains kind of day." Mum said, "The song was very evocative and talked about mists and trees. I loved it."

(All photos of the 1957 Blue Mountains Bushfires used here are from the Blue Mountains Library's Flickr stream. The 'before and after' of the school are from an invitation to the official opening of the new school in 1958, that Mum kept.)

ps. This last photo is of a family in front of what used to be their house. The little girl's name is Marion Weiss, and she went to the same school as my mother. In the comments under the photo another of my mother's fellow students, Jean Collins, wrote this:

"I used to play with Marion Weiss when we were pupils at Leura Primary School - also burnt out in the 1957 fire. I remember running from the school that day, up the highway, with fireballs flying through the air and houses exploding. We took shelter in corner store, down past the Baptist Church. The church burned down, so did the corner store. Our house caught fire, but my brother Barrie put it out, and also saved the house next door to ours, in East View Avenue. The owners gave him five pounds reward. I have lots of memories of that dreadful day."

Gloriously lost

Sometimes you don't realise how desperately you need a weekend outside of the city until the ocean air is in your lungs, dense forest canopy shades your face, and your mobile phone is useless. We are just back from three days of hiking in the bushland surrounding the Great Ocean Road as part of a group that's raising funds to support cancer patients.

Madeleine absolutely loved it, singing lustily from her carrier as we hiked our way through the trees, and laughing every time anyone talked to her or squeezed her chubby cheeks (which happened quite often).

She kept on laughing while we trekked through rainforests, up mountains, along clifftop paths and over sand dunes. She laughed when we got back to our cabin in the bush wayyyyy past her bedtime, and laughed at the very suggestion of going to sleep while the sun was still up. She laughed even more when I gave in and took her down to have dinner with the rest of the group.

We all sat together around long tables on a wide verandah, drinking wine and eating cheese and making our own pizzas in an outdoor oven. In the darkening sky, koalas growled and kookaburras chuckled. Without warning, a big, blustery, summer storm broke overhead, sending down sheets of rain and at some point, while thunder rolled and lightening split open the sky, Madeleine finally fell asleep in my arms.

Later I put her down in a travel cot beside our bed, a gift from Baby Bjorn, and she slept beautifully all night. Slept like a baby, in fact. She barely moved until I woke her up for her next feed.

I'm so thankful to Baby Bjorn, because the cot was fantastic. You just pull it out of the case and it bounces into place: you don't need a physics degree to put it together. It was small enough to fit in our tiny cabin room, but big enough for Madeleine to keep using it as she grows. The sides are at a kind of pyramid angle, making it super sturdy and safe, something very important to me because when she HASN'T been hiking all day, Madeleine thrashes and bumps around in her sleep like a washing machine full of towels. Plus there's mesh all around which means my baby gets all the airflow she needs, and I can see her through the sides, but she still feels snug and secure.

I also used the travel cot as a playpen for her during the day when we weren't hiking, putting it out on the verandah in the late afternoon sun to give Madeleine somewhere safe to roll around and play with her toys and show off how good she is at tummy time nowadays (really good).

How was your weekend, dear friend? Have you had a chance to get out of town lately?

* This post was sponsored by Baby Bjorn and Digital Parents Collective. Thanks so much for your support you guys. We couldn't have left home without you!

Escape to the country

It was a last-minute decision to grab a last-chance getaway before Baby B turned our life into glorious, love-filled, sleep-deprived turmoil. So on Wednesday we made the booking and by Saturday morning Mr B and I had turned our faces to the hills for a weekend away in the Yarra Valley. "It's so peaceful!" we kept saying to each other, in a kind of wonder that came from the knowledge that we were less than an hour outside of the city. And I kept saying "It's so green!" in the same awed tones, because I grew up in the country during a 10-year drought. We travelled and bumped down little dirt lanes for no other reason than they looked appealing.

We strolled through rows of grapevines, all asleep for the winter, and watched our breath form clouds in the late afternoon air.

We wandered in and out of tiny galleries and quirky craft stores.

I developed somewhat of a crush on a collection of neon-coloured crayons made in the shape of little Lego men.

We feasted on chocolate coated strawberries, then laughed through dinner with friends.

We slept in.

We took books and newspapers and read in companionable silence over a leisurely breakfast of fresh eggs and steaming coffee.

Neither of us did any work.