Harvest moon

I don't understand why the picture thing on this blog is still not working properly. I'm at the computer at my father's house on the north coast. It's a long story. I'm up here with my daughter, Henrietta. It's about an 11 hour drive from Sydney. I rememberwhen he first bought this place for $10,000 in the 1960s, a rundown passionfruit farm in the middle of nowhere that nobody but dad could possibly want. The fact that you could see the Byron Bay lighthouse in the distance late at night meant nothing to us. The charm was in its rundown nature and its isolation. And because I was born up this way, at Bangalow, it always seemed to be some sort of home coming, the vivid green beauty of the North Coast.

Fast forward 40 years and Byron Bay is one of the trendiest spots on the planet, well in Australia anyway, with thousands of tourists flocking to its transcendental hippy stores and crystal gazing outlets; and this place is now worth millions. Its ownership is now a long story I won't go into; and here; with the verse from Isaiah prominently displayed; he gave us the beauty of ashes, the joy of mourning; all of that, in the shrine to Andrew, my youngest half-brother, who went out into the orchard at the back of this house a couple of years ago and shot himself; all at the age of 15.

And that was when I started talking to my father again. You wouldn't wish that on your worst enemy, I couldn't not reach out and say, I'm so sorry to hear that. Me and the kids went to the funeral. And the gale of tears subsided. But not here; where his picture is prominently displayed in the kitchen/loungeroom area and his mother Wendy has built a shrine, small rocks, flowers; gratitude for the gift of mourning, sheeeesssshhhhh; it's hard; and his face, a constant reproach, no doubt. For it was my dad who left the guns in easy reach of the kids; against the law, against the reproaches of his wife and against all common sense.

Heading back to Sydney tomorrow and back to work on Sunday. A lesser sheeesssshhhh. The days pass and we deal with fools. Reading Who Killed Channel Nine by Gerald Stone. Great stuff. John Alexander, one of the nastiest little twirps to ever stalk a corridor, comes off looking very bad. Good.