Regress

It’s been bewildering watching Australia drift back toward a past where White Australia impulses rejected by Holt, McMahon and Fraser have re-proliferated in conservative minds. It’s a rationale more extreme than apartheid in South Africa, for, instead of segregating black and white societies within a common country, it seeks to deny, prevent and deligitimise the very existence of non-white communities. Labor, spineless in their pursuit of a perceived identity-based voter in the marginals, far from offering any impactful opposition, instead contribute to the naturalisation of these ideas since the Tampa at least. When he called the 2000 election, Howard said “this election more than any other will be about leadership”. Howard said, “Beasley does not have the ticker”. When the Tampa crossed the horizon, Beasley proved him right. Faced with that first poll coming out of A Current Affair (the Fox News of that period) Beasley fumbled for a day or so trying to work out his position, before falling behind the polls of Howard’s Australia, thus initiating a pattern which remains into this current election campaign. A Whitlam, Hawke or Keating would not have taken a breath to consider right from wrong. A generation of change toward a society where diversity is understood to be one of our greatest strengths was subverted.

Factcheck: is Labor’s policy on asylum seekers and refugees any different to the Coalition’s? | Australian election 2022 | The Guardian

A decade later, the Gillard government was very self-congratulatory about its “forward thinking” Asian Century White Paper, an Orientalist document which megaphoned that we are open and responsive to Asia, so long as there’s a dollar in it. A paper which failed to see “Asia” as anything other than “them”, oblivious to the Asia within us. The Gillard government were spruiking it at the very time that, in response to a perception that Asian kids were exploiting an unfair advantage in the HSC, the Kenneally Labor government in NSW was implementing a handicap for HSC students wanting to study the first language of a parent, thus undermining what would otherwise be our exponentially greatest asset in integrating with Asia – Australians sharing their heritage with the people with whom the ALP wished to engage. Would it be absurd to handicap kids in HSC English if one or more of their parents spoke English as their first language? Though it’s since been tweaked, Kenneally’s “Heritage Language” handicap continues to discourage kids who might otherwise have an advantage in developing language skills to a level that would equip them for Australian business, government, and cultural engagement outside the Anglosphere.

Liberal Party MP Fiona Martin confuses Labor’s Sally Sitou for Tu Le.

If you want to live in an Australia where the White Australia mindset remains wholly and consistently rejected, you will not be voting for the current conservatives, but don’t for a minute think you should vote for the current Labor Party. These are people who have lost their way.

incredible glasses cases

Who gave me this? Could it be anyone other than my sister, Lesa Farnsworth AKA Gallagher AKA MacNamara AKA Neon Goddess! The best I have known. You are a reminder that no-one is more valued and loved than a person with a pure heart. What a “Regal” gift you once gave me. Was it my birthday? What year was it? I’ve had this case a long time, maybe since the ’90s. Still looks as fresh as the day I got it. One thing about you, love, is you know quality when you see it.

Leopart skin spectacles case
Leopard skin spectacles case, Elton & Mills, Sydney.

(the blanket of course is from our mother)

The dating game

I spend a week back in Bondi now and then, cat-sitting Rollo for Toby and Steph. I’m normally on my own and that suits me. There’s a place on Curlewis Street called Speakeasy, and I keep going back there for their meatballs, their 🍄 mushroom over polenta, and their yummy wines. Tonight I was reading The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (a good read), trying not to be distracted by the gorgeous people, cars and motorcycles zooming or ambling by (I can’t help but look up sometimes).

I saw a slender woman standing on the corner opposite, not as striking as many of the women around here, but charming looking in her own way. Middle aged, with snipped hair unusually fully grey, and a sensible, stylish casual dress.

I went back into my book and I don’t know how many minutes passed, maybe three mouthfuls of mushroom and polenta, two sips of wine, a page of the book.

A couple took a table next to me, and I looked up to see it was the slender, charming, but not Bondi glamour lady and her slender, charming looking, but not Bondi hunk beau. Not long passed and though I wasn’t going out of my way to listen, it was clear they’d literally just come to Speakeasy to meet for the first time. I looked again and thought, these two look like match. His greying hair suggested a darker shade than hers in his youth, but placed him in an earlier quarter of middle age like her.

Not deliberately, I caught bits of their conversation. The proximity made it unavoidable. I overheard him say, “you’re only as old as the woman you feel”, and though I hadn’t caught the conversation immediately preceding it, I cringed as she gave an obvious response. Can’t recall precisely what she said but it was along the lines of “we’re not making bad puns already are we?”

She was a nurse, and following an awkward exchange after he’d asked her what type of nurse, he told her they could talk in terms of some medical acronym he was familiar with, as a result of some aspect of his life I’d missed. He used the acronym four or five times in the space of a few sentences, apparently the only acronym he knew from the world of nurses. She brushed the conversation gently in some other direction.

It is not uncommon for heterosexual men on the social fringe of a place like Bondi to seek opportunities to discreetly drop hints about their macho adventure lifestyle into conversation, or to drop them when the opportunity didn’t arise. Scuba diving, something else, and his bike, a KTM 390. She speculated about his motorbike, maybe she said cruiser, and he explained that KTM were known for their line of moto-cross bikes, but that his was a different style, it sat higher. Oh, so more of a racing style, she said. She apparently had limited knowledge of motorcycles, but could speak of them in an authoritative manner.

I was out of wine and meatballs so I paid and moved on. It’s probable the guy wasn’t a dickhead, but from what I caught I reckon that was her impression. I hope he was just nervous and that she realised it. Part of me wants to believe they landed in bed together in a screaming heap of orgasms, but it was not looking promising.

Kevin Rudd’s call for a Royal Commission into the “cancer” on democracy

Former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has called for a Royal Commission into the concentration of media ownership in Australia, singling the Murdoch media empire out for its aggressively monopolistic and partisan activities. A Royal Commission into the corrupting effects of the media on democracy shouldn’t stop at the Murdoch press. I’ve seen lazy, half-baked reporting, massaging of truths, and supposition from several corners of the press, including national broadcasters, the ABC and BBC, with geopolitical implications. If Australia follows the US into a war with China, ABC journalists will be equally responsible for bringing on the level of hatred and mistrust within the community that has made it possible. I detected a new editorial tack from the ABC just this week with regard to China, but the horse has bolted.

Please consider signing the petition by clicking here.

You’re fired.

Donald Trump, please resign. You’re not needed. You’re not the right person for the job, especially now. We’re about to be force-fed the second-rate circus that is a US election. Your presence will only make it more putrifying. I caught some grabs of the Democrats’ party convention this week and if it wasn’t bad enough listening to their delusionally smug commentariat the past four years, two fat greasy fingers stuffed down my throat would be a more enjoyable way to gag myself. Saddest, they seem to think it’s back to business as usual, as though the absurdity of a Trump presidency was not enough to shake them out of the stupefying orthodoxy. That’s the reason you’re president.

Obviously, Pence is an arse but he’ll scrape through the rest of the year. Anything is better than you, “leader of the free world”. What a wonderful advertisement for US democracy, for democracy in general. You’re a moron, get out, you’re fired.

team america vomit GIF

Silenced.

As much as it is possible to know a person through the media, I’ve always been unsure about Julian Assange’s person, but I believe his heart is in the right place. The unfair treatment of Assange, ironically, only serves to make him more important than he would otherwise be, and it further de-legitimises an international order discredited by its failure to deliver justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, Abu-Graib, Guantanamo, the Libor scandal, the GFC, and countless other examples of institutionalised greed, theft, criminal violence and mass murder.  

Julian Assange had a voice, irrespective of personal shortcomings, perceived or otherwise. One thing about that voice, they’ve certainly silenced it. Let’s hope it is heard again in the future. 

Pilger is a hero of mine but I had to think seriously about sharing this, as I think he’s had better days. Dare I say it, I’m no longer as confident in him as a champion of the cause. Hard to watch, I reckon. 

Sanja Matsuri

Three Mikoshi. Three deities? Not exactly. The three founders of Sensoji. Their immortal souls. Three kami. The mikoshi are moving shrines, to them.

At some point during my long relationship with Japan, I struck upon the idea that whenever I visit, I should look up the calendar of festivals, as they’re always on somewhere. Our visit to Japan this year coincided with the Sanja Matsuri. When I learned this some months before we went, it dredged up some sketchy imagery from the memory banks of a festive mass of sweat and muscle and toil, spilling through streets beneath these hoisted ornate wooden and gilded constructions, what I now know as Omikoshi.

The Japanese Embassy in Canberra used to have this magazine, a broad glossy thing, with articles from all around Japan, something like Australian Geographic. In the early 1990s I was dating Natsuko Ezoe, who I met at the University of Canberra, so for one reason or another I found myself at the Embassy now and then, and I’d accumulated a few editions of this magazine. I read articles and pored over images of things like the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge, Nozawa Onsen Fire Festival, the Yokohama Landmark Tower, Sapporo’s Yuki Matsuri (ice and snow festival), and Tokyo’s Sanja Matsuri. I hadn’t been to Melbourne when I met Natsuko, let alone to another country.

Sanja Matsuri, Sensoji north, 19 May 2019.

Like my old National Geographics and my Unique Cars, I held onto those magazines for years. I don’t recall exactly when I parted with them, but I hope they found their way into another pair of hands and eyes to fill with wonder. Since then I’ve had the privilege to visit many of those amazing places, including Melbourne.

Umamichi-dori Avenue, Taito City, Tokyo, 19 May 2019.

With traces of ink from those magazines still on my fingers, I flew into Narita for the fist time in September 1993, to meet Natsuko and some other friends who’d returned to Japan after their year or so studying English in Canberra. Straight off the plane they took me to Asakusa, so this place was my very first experience of Japan. I’ve been back a few times over the years. It’s one of Tokyo’s must-see places for international visitors, but it’s also an important place for the people of Tokyo.

The heart of Asakusa is Sensoji. The temple dates to 645 AD and you’ll find it featured in any tourist brochure or travel web site on Tokyo. The streets around it retain something of the Edo Era in which they sprung up, and among the tourist trinket shops are eating places and other institutions that have a very long history. I’m trying real hard not to fall into a tourist travelogue here…

Sensoji, Asakusa, during Sanja Matsuri, 18 May 2019.

When I told my brother-in-law, Hiroaki Yamaguchi, I wanted to go to Sanja Matsuri, he told me I’d probably see Yakuza. During the festival, teams from different neighbourhoods take turns carrying the Omikoshi, mobile shrines, through the streets. My mother-in-law, Hatsue, remenisced about being among the throngs lifting the Omikoshi when she was a young woman, and she pulled out some old photos of Hiroaki as a kid, when he hoisted the childrens’ Omikoshi.

Nitemon Gate, Sanja Matsuri, 18 May 2019
Inside Sensoji, south toward Nitemon Gate, September 1993.

Port in a storm

Short story

It started to drizzle, greasing the road as she crossed into the Hastings Valley near the Burrawan Rest Area. She was looking for somewhere quiet, for space to make some hard decisions. She wasn’t sure this was the right place. Like half the people she grew up with, Dana moved away after high school. Some returned. Not Dana. She could reel back a few hundred kilometres of Pacific Highway easy enough, but not decades of emotional separation. Flashbacks of sparkling days filled with school friends and netball, teen surf life, first loves and purity, only served to contrast her adolescence from the odyssey she’d been on ever since.

She glanced at the rear-vision, flicked her auburn-dyed hair, and looked away from the crow’s feet framing her tired brown eyes. The Burrawan trickled behind her as tallowwood, blackbutt, and flooded gum forest gave way to dilating patches of cleared land approaching Port Macquarie. Her visits were so infrequent that a decade after its construction, the broad circular overpass where the Pacific Highway crosses the Oxley near the Billabong Koala Park, still seemed improbable.

Koalas, around here, come right up to your house. From the koala’s perspective you’re on common ground. Humans are incidental. Through summer the sound of koalas mating is nightmarish. They wake you at all hours fornicating like demons outside the window. A koala will saunter across the road, sometimes purposefully and other times languidly, and hold-up a line of Christmas holiday traffic along Kennedy or Pacific Drive. To Dana it was a badge of honour growing up where this was the dominant native mammal.

She’d packed the tent, portable gas cooker, a full esky and a borrowed surfboard. Being the Easter long weekend any hope of a campsite near the beach had passed. The parks were full. She considered driving through to Point Plomer, in her teens a camping playground away from parents. Probably still was. No, that would be taking the nostalgia trip too far. There were a couple of old friends she could call on. It wasn’t like she was without offers. She normally stayed with her auntie Lorraine, but it was a last minute decision and she couldn’t just land on people. A two-person tent offered more space to think than any three or five bedroom brick dwelling anyway.

‘Jordan’s Boating and Holiday Park’ popped up at the edge of the map on an online search. Jordan’s Boatshed? She’d pictured herself waking to the music of waves crashing, paddling out under a rising sun with sleep in her eyes. Jordan’s was up-river on the Hastings’s salty reaches, away from the town’s action and away from the beach, yet Dana thought she couldn’t have picked a better spot. She could barely remember how to get there, just which direction to head, so she allowed herself to be guided by GPS, only to arrive with the realisation that she knew the way all along. She rolled into Jordan’s in pale afternoon light, darkness hastened by a brewing sky. The drizzle was thickening as she slid open the glass door of the boatshed and hopped in.

“G’day, I called about a camp site.”

The man behind the counter looked familiar. So did the woman on a picnic chair at the back of the shed with a frazzle-furred pooch by her side. Locals glimpsed or dealt with decades ago.

“Yes, I’ve got vacancies.”

He’d said it over the phone too, but he sounded less convincing now. Was it her appearance? He was salt of the earth Port Macquarie, a slender middle-aged man, soft spoken but steady, with the sapience of a fisherman and the deference of the small businessperson, a man in tune with the river, the tides, meteorology, and the tourist trade.

“You sure you want to set up a tent now?”

They both looked out through the glass sliding door at rain beginning to make rivulets across the bonnet of her car. For a moment Dana contemplated a call to her aunt.

“I’m pretty quick putting up my tent so I’ll be okay. I’ll dry off.”

He looked down at his register, unconvinced. “Two nights?”

“Two nights for now, maybe three, depending.

“Ok, site 12 up the top. That’ll be seventy dollars. Here’s your amenities key…”

At the back of the boatshed the woman with the curly-haired lap-dog spoke up. “You’re not making her put a tent up in this weather are you, Dale?”

He looked up from the register at Dana, with the slightest hint of a frown, taking a second to size her up before turning to the woman.

“She asked if we’ve got a vacancy and we’ve got a vacancy. I’m not going to tell her we don’t.”

“It’s gunna be pourin’ out there soon. She’ll get drenched. Put her in a cabin.”

A hint of distant thunder punctuated the lady’s instruction.

“It’s Easter,” he replied. The subtext: premium prices and high demand.

“Well, have you filled the cabins?”

A late call could come from a desperate tourist, ill-prepared, double-booked, or unhappy at their first choice of accommodation. Dale could ask top dollar for his cabins. Night though, would soon swallow Good Friday.

Dale looked down at his register and puffed his cheeks as he weighed up the options.

“The park cabins are $130…”

“Don’t charge her full price,” more thunder.

With rain now pattering steadily on the tin roof of the boatshed, Dana accepted the hopelessness of her tent. “Full price is okay, really. I’ll take the cabin tonight, and when the weather clears I’ll put up my tent tomorrow.”

“Tell you what,” said Dale. “I’ve got an old cabin up near the back road. It’s further from the amenities and the telly’s playing up. I’ll split you the difference.”

“Deal. Thank you.”

“Alright, that’ll be eighty dollars for tonight. This key’s for the cabin, this one’s for the amenities block.”

Settling in was a matter of dumping her bags, a stand-up inspection, and sitting on the bed. She slipped on a windcheater and took a walk, posting wet photos on Instagram of the cabin, the fishing boats, and the river rolling past greyly under a marbled sky. The tension of Sydney, and the apprehension she’d felt on the drive up, began to wash away.

Breakfast was chicken sausage and salad wraps with hommus and mango chutney, not in the cabin, but by the riverside on her butane burner, with the sunrise blasting holes through the clouds, and Hawaiian coffee from the thermos she’d filled back in Bondi.

She dusted off the surfboard and gave it a once over before sticking it back in the car with her faded beach towel and old wetsuit, then idled out onto the road. The water looked murky at Town Beach, and offshore a sharp line of muddy river outflow clashed with blue sea. The river did this after heavy rain. Beyond North Shore, Point Plomer disappeared in the hazy distance at the end of that long unbroken curve of white sand. She steered off Pacific Drive and descended toward the ocean on Tuppenny Road, which wound through Banksia scrub and opened out onto Flynn’s Beach, where she found Easter holidaymakers ignoring a ‘beach closed’ sign. She wandered up to the surf shop for surfboard wax.

“Dana? Dana Baker?”

A face can fade from memory or become unrecognisable with age. A voice on the other hand is indelible.

“Mick?”

Mick Huckleton was Dana’s crush when she was fifteen and her first lover by the time she was sixteen. Back then a lithe, suntanned, fun-loving surfer with long blonde hair and habitually bare torso, Huckie had been a dream-boat. He was older, out of high school, and owned a Mitsubishi station-wagon. By seventeen, Dana worked out she was just another notch on his leg-rope.

Huckie had lived by the seasons as a young man. The nor’easter in summer favoured the surf at Lighthouse and northern Shelley Beach, and the sou’wester in winter favoured Town Beach, Flynn’s, and Southern Shelley’s. Tourist girls were available in the warmer months, and there was always a local girl to snuggle up to in winter. The ‘tourist chicks’ had surely dried up for Huckie in recent years, Dana surmised. Which category did she fall into now, being autumn and all?

Middle-aged Huckie had not fattened like most, but the torso had atrophied. He had the wrinkles and dappled complexion of someone who’d spent too much time in the sun, or on the booze and smokes. Hair had sprouted on his chest and shoulders, and like his thinning head of hair, was wiry and grey. He looked fifteen years older than her, though he was only four.

“Wow. You haven’t changed a bit,” he said, looking her up and down.

“Wow!” Why the fuck did I come in here, she thought. “Thanks, you’re looking pretty fit yourself.”

“How long you here for?”

“Just for the weekend. Dropped in for some wax.”

“Still surfing, hey?”

“Trying to get back into it.”

“Wicked,” he said, a forty-seven year old still grasping for hip jargon.

“I can’t believe I bumped into you here.”

“I own this surf shop,” he said with a sideways grin.

“Wow,” she said, unconvincingly.

“Oh come on, Dana. You knew that.”

“No, I didn’t. Well done,” she said, looking around in appraisal.

“Come on, Dayno. Everybody knows this is Huckie’s shop. You came in to see me, no need to pretend,” he said, with the knowing smile of a self-certified yogi.

She looked at him blankly. You haven’t changed a bit have you, you prick? You think I came in here chasing you like your imaginary sixteen-year-old ‘Dan-o’. I’m supposed to know this is your shop because you’re some sort of local legend now?

“No, I actually didn’t know this was your shop,” she reconfirmed with a grimacy smile.

“Hey, we should catch up,” he said, handing her a block of a coconut scented ‘Sex-Wax’ for her surfboard.

“I’d like that,” she lied.

“Meet you at Lighthouse at five.”

“Okay.”

“How much is the wax?”

“Nah, my shout.”

She looked at the price on the shelf and jangled some change from her coin-purse, sliding it across the counter to him.

Andy and Dana were besties for a while in high school. That’s the way they summarised it for people. There had been a couple of fleeting ‘occurrences’ near the end of school and soon after, but never an ‘event’. She’d long ago put it down to a lapse or two out of the sexual exuberance of youth. Andy had dated Dana’s sister, Charli. It was unclear if that made him off bounds for her or her for him. Whichever, that’s the way it still was twenty-five years later, and it was probably why they remained close friends.

Women came in and out of Andy’s life, and if Dana’s friendship caused suspicion, there’d been little shown by his exes. She wasn’t sure if that was a relief or an insult. There had been a couple of sad women who failed to snare Andy but tried to eliminate her as a threat anyway. She’d propagated an exaggerated status for him once or twice to ward off unwelcome suitors too, and she sensed he knew it. He was as safe as a gay friend, with the benefit of being straight. As the years went by and his relationships became steadier, Dana gravitated to the periphery. Maybe that’s just what happens when besties live in different places.

He’d moved since last time Dana visited, downmarket to a worn out renter in a back-block above the industrial area. Over a late morning coffee with Andy and Paula, Dana gleaned that the rainwater tank business was weak. “Plenty of work,” Andy told her. “Too many in the game, all undercutting you.”

“Ever think about moving back to Port?” Paula asked.

“Not anymore. It’d feel weird, like the town had moved on but I was back in the past. Sydney people always moved up here to get out of the rat race. Now I know what they meant. Every day I squeeze on that lurching bus to a job that’s killing my soul, and think, ‘this is no life’. If I ever moved though, I’d go somewhere completely new.”

“I never used to feel that way but I reckon I could do with a change,” said Paula, as she watched out the front window of their paint-deprived rental, across the weedy lawn to where her five-year-old son, Marlon, played bikes with a neighbour’s kid in timid sunshine.

“I’m never leaving Port,” said Andy resolutely. “I was born in that hospital over the hill, my son was born there. Why would I leave? It’s perfect.”
It was a glimpse of the parochialism Dana found tedious in her home town compatriots, the essence of someone like Mick, and a reminder why she could never love someone like Andy. Andy moved to Sydney after high school too, worked at AMP, and might have had a different life. At around thirty he’d decided to come back, and by crikey he was determined to stick with it. Andy’s self-righteousness about living the simple life masked a sense of regression, but he’d indeed made a righteous choice, Dana knew.

A week out of high school, Dana walked into the Port Macquarie News with some photos of migrating whales she’d captured from different headlands. Editor Bob Carlisle asked if she could put together a few hundred words to go with them. She went home, dug out her old biology text book, and began her cadetship. Carlisle had been her mentor ever since.

When she moved to Sydney she wrote for The Herald on and off, worked as a barmaid, and did a diploma in TV production at a dubious private college, before getting a job as a researcher for the ABC’s Four Corners. Soon Dana was filling temporary vacancies for reporters all over Australia. She was in the right place at the right time when they urgently needed staff in the Middle East Bureau.

She pulled into the Breakwall carpark after dusk. Carlisle was at the back of his old Landcruiser going over his fishing rigs.

“Bring a rod up with you?”

No formalities. Dana knew instinctively, from the sandy puddles along the edge of the bitumen, to the clouded moonlight. The damp in the air was a fever. These were rare mulloway conditions.

“Nuh.”

“’ere, you can use this one.”

He handed her his spare rig. It was the nine foot Jarvis Walker solid tip rod and Alvey side-cast reel she‘d bought second-hand for his 50th birthday, over a decade and-a-half ago.

The tide was on the turn and they got their first hit within half an hour of casting. The rain-washed murk in the river was invisible to fishing tourists in the dark, but Dana and Carlisle could sense it. Carlisle landed the first two while Dana got re-acquainted with the Alvey. Then a twitch, she let it run, gave a precise tug, and she had one. It was a monster. Carlisle watched calmly from twenty metres up the breakwall, rolling a smoke one-handed, as excited holiday fishermen gave Dana advice on how to land it.

She heaved and reeled at the heavy old rod for eight minutes, her eyes chasing the line where it disappeared into the dim moonlight’s milky reflection on the river. A self-appointed fishing instructor with an inadequate landing net stumbled backwards on the rocks, as Dana swung the fish over his head and up flapping onto the breakwall, twenty-five kilos of angry mulloway putting a show on for the tourists.

When they’d bagged three each the run stopped. Carlisle moved closer to chat.

“I read what happened in Fallujah. Your Italian mate got killed.”

The river passed by majestically as she ruminated. “Well, he wasn’t my mate, but he died. The Irish aid worker didn’t deserve what she got, though.”

A few nibbles made the tips of their rods wiggle but not bend.

“You go over it again and again night and day,” Carlisle said, watching the river. “What if I’d done this, if only I’d said that, they might be alive. It never goes away. You can learn to live with it, no matter how much fault you find in yourself. Do your bit to fill the world with life. It’s the best honour you can pay to the dead.”

“You never told me about Vietnam.”

Another few million litres of Hastings River passed into the Pacific.

“I’m retiring.”

“Congratulations.”

“They’re having trouble finding someone.”

Dana cocked an eyebrow at him. “All those journos let go by the metropolitans? Should be beating ’em off with a cricket bat for an editor’s job up the coast.”

“They got applicants, none suitable. They’re not paying enough, lousy pricks.”

Dana steered the conversation away.

“They’ve offered me an anchor role. 7:30.”

It saved Carlisle from telling her his job was hers if she wanted, he just had to say the word to the Board.

“Congratulations to you too.”

She puffed an inward sigh, looked at him wearily. “Thanks.”

Dana turned into Blair Street, North Bondi, just after 10:00 pm Sunday. She’d come back ahead of Easter traffic. Rollo the Russian Blue welcomed her home enthusiastically, perhaps relieved. The new flatmate tasked with feeding him had left the place smelling of rancid chicken.

Easter Monday, Rollo helped Dana with her spiel for the executive producers: the gravitas and professionalism she’d bring, the energy she’d throw into her new role, how she’d wanted an opportunity like this for so long…

She’d been passed over so many times she’d given up on it ages ago. Now she didn’t know.

Tuesday morning she bustled off the crowded bus and sidestepped through pedestrian traffic to the Ultimo headquarters. She coffeed up in the ground floor cafe before heading upstairs to her desk to prepare for a 10:00 am with her new bosses.

Working her way up the emails she landed on one that came in Sunday while she was driving back down the coast. No text, just a photo of a fish fillet too big for its barbecue plate, in a bright green back yard framed by greyed timber fence palings, with banana trees sprouting from a patch of red earth, and a koala sitting in a gumtree nearby.

Dana walked into her meeting twinkling.