Two and a half years ago my childhood home was sold in order
to pay for my mother’s care. My mother had lived there for 60 years, 27 of
those years on her own. It was a humble enough house in a convenient location
with a large parcel of land that had been home to five boisterous children and
some of the nicest trees I have ever known.
The house I live in now was also on a beautiful botanic
property looked after by a widow with 3 children. While we were building our
present property I spent some weeks living in my mother’s already sold house as
a stop gap measure between an expired lease and completion of our new home. The
house was in a poor state of repair with dreary weather coming in from all
sides and didn’t contribute much to my highly stressed state and it was
difficult to remember joyful times there. It was a ghost of itself with much of
the familiar furniture long gone or the rooms that should have had some
nostalgic hold, reeking of dampness and cluttered with half heartedly packed
boxes and bags. There was still a stack of the real estate agents glossy advertising
brochures sitting on a chair when we arrived, barely disturbed by the paucity
of buyers. After taking one for posterity and fuming about the ridiculous waste
on such pompous advertising for the little house, I set about trying to amuse
myself and make something with the posters.
One of my main drives was the dream of finally living in our
new home but to me it would not be a home without a garden and so I set about
preparing plants for the coming springtime.
I had
bags of tulip bulbs as well as ranunculus and anemones, jonquils and daffodils
which I had bought weeks before, believing I would be planting straight into
the new garden. With a bit of research I found out how to make origami boxes
and spent hours turning those posters into temporary planter boxes.
I snipped cuttings from Mum’s neglected and depleted garden
and poked these into the boxes as well. There was little point in being inside
because there was no heating, I had no studio space or things to work with and
no company and the smell of fungus and damp was quite overwhelming. And in
truth most of my life at this house had been outside.
Outside in the old places of my childhood I could remember
the history of the garden as it had changed over our lifetimes. Metre by metre
I could remember the planting or flowering of each of Mum’s plants. The place
where our twin gums (our Namatjira gums) had been and then replaced by the
sleep out, the place where the clothesline had been with its burden of bed
linen laboriously washed in the Hoover Wringer machine and lugged out, and
hauled by my exhausted mother to swing in the breeze and tempt our fox terrier.
I could map the garden by plant names as I walked around it, even though many
of those plants had long since gone. My
memory went back further than my younger brother’s but not as far as my older
brother’s but the history had been shared and amalgamated. The names formed a
chant in my mind as each day I wandered and more of the images emerged. I have
a song line for my home and now that my home is gone, that means nothing to
anybody. I understand the devastation we have committed our aboriginal people
to.
I have been reading about Kintsugi and The Tea Ceremony,
prompted by a blog I love, Art For Housewives. Kintsugi is the repair of broken
ceramics using a type of lacquer mixed with gold dust to accentuate the damage
and repair of an object thereby imbuing it with history and character. In the Tea
Ceremony a type of song line developed over centuries as these highly valued
objects passed down through families with much of their history manually or
orally recorded.
I 'd love to give credit for these images but they were already second hand when I found them.
Many years ago I read a book by Heide artist Neil Douglas
and his partner Abbie Heathcote
in which he was laughing about the tenacity of
old plants in a redevelopment. No matter how hard the new owners worked on that
garden the old plants kept springing up through their well planned landscape. My
new garden is a combination of memory and new hope. Mum’s garden (including some
of Grandma’s plants), my contribution and our previous property owner, Lurline’s,
garden. I rescued as many of her plants as I could before the demolition
and
replanted them in my new landscape so my garden is a comfortable mixture of old
and new and nostalgia. And those tenacious poppies of Lurline’s defy discipline
springing up in the middle of pathways and reminding me that this place had a
history before me.
Lurline's 60 year old hardwood floorboards came up a treat and blend beautifully with modern décor.
And why am I prompted to write about all of this now? Well digging
in my garden recently I was surprised to see my old home float past me on a
film of polyester. The origami boxes which had housed all my bulbs have
disintegrated long ago except for the plastic coating on the paper!
With Melbourne in a property frenzy for the last 5 years
these A3 glossy pamphlets are being printed in the millions and dumped in equal
numbers into our landfill. It is just one tiny part of our destructive human
nature. We must start to understand that the things that are persisting in our
lives are not the landscapes that have taken decades of love and labour to
produce but inappropriately produced items that serve no use and seduce our
vanity, boredom or laziness.
What is it you want your children to remember and pass onto
their children? Do you want them to live on a property of landfill in which
they poke a spade into soil only to discover one of their own disposable nappies
from 40 or 50 years before?
Our forebears came to this country as ignorant clots, hell
bent on recreating England and too terrified of their surrounds to appreciate
the innate beauty, but over time, their laboriously created new landscape, with its
European mementoes, has blended with the original(not much left) to create a beautiful conglomerate mosaic. It is worth
preserving and building on to create complex beauty and history instead of
ripping up and disposing of the past like toilet paper.
I hope some of Mum’s old plants rise up a create havoc with
that bland lawn around the McMansion which supplanted our house.
