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A Month of Sundays

Page 13

by James O'Loghlin


  It’s easy to describe the North Shore as the North Shore and leave it at that, but the Castles and the other Middle Harbour suburbs, Middle Harbour and Northbridge, have their own distinct character. The North Shore that runs either side of the Pacific Highway from North Sydney to Hornsby is all about trees, big flat backyards, trees, tree-filled gullies, smart shops clustered around train stations, long driveways, trees, leaves, and big suburban house after big suburban house that look as though they’ve been transplanted direct from one of the American big-family, feel-good 1970s TV shows like The Brady Bunch or Eight is Enough.

  In the Middle Harbour suburbs the houses run out along ridges to the ends of points. There are water views but very little waterfront (except in Northbridge) as the bottom third of each point is pure bush. No private beaches here. The architecture is more adventurous than on the rest of the North Shore, and it has to be because so many of the blocks slope steeply. You can climb up or down into the garden, but in many of them kids can’t run wild without a helmet and abseiling equipment. Because everyone wants to be able to see the water, the houses stand up on huge stilts and peer over each other like a group of giant spiders looking down a hill.

  Like Castle Cove, Castlecrag is shaped like a cigar and is surrounded on three sides by water. Edinburgh Road is the only way in and it runs from the main road all the way to the point. The shops are at the main road end, which is where we parked.

  A sign on Edinburgh Road told us that if we turned right we would be walking towards The Rampart, The Parapet, The Battlement, The Bastion, The Bulwark, The Citadel and The Redoubt. I wondered if we should be carrying shields and crossbows. Had all these different parts of the castle been spread about Castlecrag like a giant jigsaw? No. We turned into a street and found that it didn’t contain a bastion (a projecting part of a fortification), it was The Bastion. They were all, it seemed, just weirdly named streets.

  A little way along The Bastion, a track turned off into the bush. We followed it and after a few minutes popped out into a clearing filled with tennis courts and racquet-wielding middle-aged women with sculptured hair, wearing all-white clothes and all-gold jewellery. Each wore a sun-visor. No hats, they’d play havoc with the perm.

  The track continued back into the bush and the tennis courts vanished as abruptly as they’d appeared, as if they’d been a mirage, except that mirages are usually of things you want to see. It emerged at The Battlement, which is not a battlement (a notched parapet built on top of a wall) at all but another street, and we passed a classic example of real estatism on a sign advertising big spidery houses on a steep block: ‘No Lawns to Mow, No Gardens to Tend’.

  In real estate speak, every minus can be a plus. Not having a garden becomes a lifestyle feature. No doubt somewhere else in Sydney a cupboard was being advertised as,‘No Floorspace to Vacuum. No Bathroom to Clean. No Windows to Open’.

  Running off The Battlement is The Citadel, supposedly ‘a fortress in a commanding position in or near a city’, but actually a short dead-end. It does, however, actually contain something castle-like, a house that looks like a small version of, or a part of, one. From the rough stone walls to the square shape and flat roof it looks like the real thing and if we were in Europe I’d think it was a genuine restored castle remnant. But we aren’t so obviously it isn’t. It must be one of the sixteen houses Walter Burley Griffin and his wife, the architects responsible for Canberra, designed in Castlecrag in the 1920s and 1930s. They designed the whole shape of the suburb, the idea being to incorporate as much of the native bush and landscape as possible, a novel concept at the time. It worked in that it’s one of only a few Sydney suburbs in which, wherever you are, you see more trees and bush than houses and road.

  The flipside is that, as with Canberra, what is sacrificed are places for people to bustle about and bump into each other in, and which provide a means to create a sense of community. In Castlecrag you’d have to make an effort.

  Walt and Marion wanted to create a place where people could live in harmony with nature. Of course, if they had been really into this idea they would have designed tents and lean-tos rather than houses, and banned electricity and shops, but Castlecrag does feel a long way from the city. I certainly felt more in harmony with nature there than I did walking past a row of head-high front fences in Bondi.

  But their ideas wouldn’t catch on today, I’m afraid. They don’t sit comfortably with the new ‘build to the boundary’ Sydney style of architecture. When you want five bedrooms and a void, it cuts down on the space available to integrate seamlessly with nature. How do you seamlessly integrate a double garage, giant airconditioning unit and home theatre?

  Out of the front of the house Walt and Marion designed, at the roundabout at the end of The Citadel was a white-haired man cutting flowers (freesias, Lucy said) with a pair of scissors. I wondered if that was allowed if you’re living in harmony with nature, or if you should wait until they die of natural causes before you take them away and put them in a vase.

  ‘Having a look around are you?’ he asked. His tone was suspicious, as if concerned we might be scoping the place for a raid. Unusual to do that carrying a baby, I would have thought.

  He gradually thawed as it became obvious we weren’t carrying crowbars or wearing gloves, and told us we must see Castlecrag’s amphitheatre which he himself had helped restore. I was sceptical, given how un-battlement, bastion, and citadel-like The Battlement, The Bastion and The Citadel had been. What was the amphitheatre going to be, a sloping park with a bench?

  He was adamant it was worth it, though, and directed us down a path back through the bush and behind houses. We emerged at The Bartizan (a small battlemented turret), turned right into The Bulwark (an embankment built around a space for defensive purposes), right again into The Scarp (a steep artificial slope in front of a fortification), then came to the corner of The Scarp and The Barricade (a war measure that isolates some area of importance to the enemy). They were all just streets. I wondered, though, if living among them would eventually have an effect, and you’d start watching out for gangs of Goths and setting passwords to gain entry to the kitchen.

  At the corner of The Scarp and The Barricade was a lush gully falling down towards the water. On one side were rock seats cut into the bush slope above a levelled stage surrounded by trees providing acoustic support. It was a perfect amphitheatre. It left the one at Martin Place for dead.

  It was built by Walt, Marion and the Castlecrag community in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Back then they held plays, study groups, gramophone evenings, seasonal festivals and lectures there. (Wouldn’t you just love to go to a gramaphone evening?) There’s your community space.

  Now that it’s been restored they once again hold poetry reading and lectures there. The temptation was too much for Lucy and she did a bit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Bibi and I formed a supportive yet discerning audience. It was a powerful performance made even more moving by the lawnmower accompaniment in the second half.

  We wound our way back up the point along more parts of castles—The Barbette (a mound of earth inside a fort from which a heavy gun can be fired over the parapet) and The Barbican (a portable toilet that can be taken to barbecues; no, not really, it’s an outer fortification or defence to a city or castle) to The Rampart (an embankment built around a space for defensive purposes). There is only one street in this part of Castlecrag without an irrelevant castle name, Rockley Street. Rockleys don’t have anything to do with castles. In fact Rockley isn’t even a word. I thought the street may be a new addition but it was there on the original plans. Maybe the Burley Griffins ran out of castle bits.

  The Rampart is like one of the steep, winding mountain roads you see in movies with someone in a red sports car driving too fast along it just before they lose control and crash. There were no cars driving too fast in Castlecrag, though. In fact we saw hardly any cars, and definitely no red sports cars, so the absence of footpaths wasn’t a problem. The few cars
we did see, in the middle of a cloudless day, all had their lights on for extra caution. It’s that sort of place.

  My time was running out and we weren’t sure of the way back. If only there was someone to ask. But no. The streets were as empty as empty gets. Eventually we found a woman on the low side of the street in her front garden, gloves on and digging weeds with the radio on a sensible talk station for company. I asked how we could get back to the shops.

  ‘What way did you come from?’ she said.

  I pointed.

  ‘Well, you can just go back that way and you’ll get there.’

  ‘What about if we keep going this way?’ I said, pointing the way we were going. ‘We’d prefer to go back a different way.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked at me as if she thought that was very odd. ‘Well, you can get there that way too.’

  You do get odd looks walking around Castlecrag. Not the sort of odd look we got (and gave) in Lakemba. Those were because we looked different. In Castlecrag we didn’t look different. In fact we looked like a typical Castlecrag family except that I wasn’t wearing boating shoes and my shorts didn’t have a belt, and Lucy had no jewellery on and her Indian shirt wasn’t quite leisurely aristocrat enough. And maybe we were a bit young—although I’m bald with glasses so that would have helped. (That may be terribly unfair. There may be street gangs, text-messaging, loud stereos in too-fast second-hand cars, lots of parties, messy ignored gardens and all the other clichés that arrive with a twenty to 30 population in Castlecrag. We were only there for a couple of hours. But we didn’t see any of them.)

  In Castlecrag we got the sort of look that suggests that whoever is doing the looking can in no way imagine why you would want to take a couple of hours to just walk around and explore Castlecrag, and that the idea of doing it for no better reason than to see what is there is entirely weird. It’s not a place that seems to contain a wild spirit of adventure.

  On the way back in The Postern (a small gate in the rear of a fort or castle) we saw another of those impressive castley houses, this one with parapets, and a Steiner school, which fitted neatly into the back to nature idea.

  As we drove out along the one road in (which rather than Edinburgh Road should be called The Drawbridge) and waited at traffic lights to turn back onto the busy highway that would zoom us back to the city, it occurred to me that perhaps the castle theme in Castlecrag wasn’t as incongruous as I’d first thought. Drive down The Drawbridge and you leave behind the rest of the world and replace its bustle and unpredictability with stillness and staidness and peace. You find nice, safe, normal people who you can be confident will never do anything weird. The odds of seeing an Arab or an African face or someone wearing a baseball cap backwards or a beggar or someone with holes in the jeans, either designer or otherwise, are about the same as they are of seeing a dolphin sitting in a kebab shop in Lakemba. Castlecrag is safe, secure and homogeneous. The old castles used walls to keep people out but today we have a different type of barrier, just as effective: money.

  thirteen

  the dealer’s mum

  Bibi and I sat up the back one morning and watched the tilers on the roof at number twenty-two. Both were dressed as 1970s tennis players, in t-shirts, really short shorts like they had back then, and Dunlop Volleys. Maybe it was fancy-dress day.

  Roof tiling is the glamour job in the building world. Every job has a view and fresh air, you gain status from being higher up than anyone else and there is that alluring hint of danger provided by the fact that one slip means death or serious injury. And you’re virtually boss free. No one down below can tell what you’re doing, and even if the foreman did want to tell you off, it is virtually impossible to establish authority over anyone 6 metres higher than you. If you tilt your head back to see up onto the roof you can’t shout properly.

  Plumbing, conversely, is at the shit end of building jobs. They’re often unrealistically happy, though, plumbers. When our drainage system was buggered up by an ambitious tree-root a couple of years before, the 62-year-old smiling Scotsman who rescued us advised us to stand back, then used a whizzing metal hose that he fed down the drain to unblock it. As he pulled it out, still whizzing, it flung shit (ours) all over him.

  ‘Got the bastard,’ he said with a huge smile. ‘Ah ha, that was a tough one.’ He wiped his sleeve across his face, smearing the shit over a wider area. ‘Got to be careful in this game,’ he continued cheerfully. ‘Most of us get hepatitis in the end.’

  The tilers worked at a leisurely pace, had English names like Pete and Dud and a conversational range as wide as sport.

  ‘Davis Cup final’s on soon,’ said the one in the red shirt.

  ‘Been on already, hasn’t it?’ said the one in the white t-shirt.

  ‘No, no. Not yet. Not the Davis Cup final.’

  ‘Yeah. The Davis Cup final. It’s been on. We beat Spain.’

  ‘No. That was last year.’

  ‘No, I know it was on last year but I thought it had been on this year as well.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t been on. They had the semi-final.’

  ‘Oh, I know that.’

  ‘But they haven’t had the final.’

  ‘I know they had the semi-final.’

  ‘But they haven’t had the final.’

  ‘I thought they had the final. After the semi-final.’

  ‘No, that was the semi-final.’

  ‘How could they have the semi-final after the semi-final.’

  ‘No, I mean . . .’

  ‘If you win the semi-final you go into the final. You don’t go into another semi-final.’

  ‘I know that but . . .’

  ‘That’d be stupid.’

  ‘I know that, but what you thought was the semi-final must have been the quarter-final.’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘And after that, what you thought was the final was the semi-final.’

  ‘What . . . you . . . thought . . . was . . . the . . . ?’

  ‘’Cos they had the semi-final . . .’

  ‘I know they had the semi-final.’

  ‘But they haven’t had the final.’

  ‘I thought they had the final . . . After the semi-final.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Yeah. No.’

  ‘Oh. I thought they had.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? Okay.’

  Red shirt laid a tile. White rubbed his chin, then picked up another tile.

  ‘The semi-final was the one that was just on,’ said Red.

  ‘Right. I’ve got it now. And we beat Argentina.’

  ‘No. We didn’t beat Argentina.’

  ‘Yeah. Argentina. In the semi-final.’

  ‘No. We beat Argentina in the quarter-final.’

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘We beat Portugal in the semi-final.’

  ‘I thought we beat Portugal in the quarter-final.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought it was the quarter-final.’

  ‘No. We beat Argentina in the quarter-final and Portugal in the semi-final.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’

  White handed the tile to Red. Red bent to place it.

  ‘So who are we playing in the final then?’

  Red stood up again, tile still in hand.

  ‘Of the Davis Cup?’

  ‘Yeah.’Cos I thought it had been on already.’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Who are we playing then?’

  ‘In the final?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fucked if I know.’

  Red laid the tile. White pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and offered one to Red. They both lit up and stood back looking at the seven tiles they had laid so far. Time for a break.

  After a few minutes they continued laying with an accompanying conversation that began with trying to work out where exactly Portugal was (‘I thought it was between Spain and
France.’ ‘No, that’s Andorra.’ ‘Where?’) but soon found its way onto the merits of watching golf on TV. They only had the back section of roof to do, so even at their pace it didn’t take long to lay the rows out. The tricky bit was the edge where each tile had to have a corner sliced off to fit exactly the space at the end of the row. Red brought up the tile shears, like a paper-cutting guillotine but for tiles, and without anything more than a quick glance at each space, cut each tile to a perfect fit. No talking in this bit, concentration was required.

  Another smoko and then a bucket appeared up the ladder. It was on the shoulder of a third tennis player who did the dud job, mixing cement at ground level. He was the one the foreman could shout at.

  Two parallel plastic lines 3 metres long, connected by four rungs so it looked like a ladder for little people, was laid down on the edge of the roof where the new and old tiles met. It formed a guide along which the cement was laid and then on top of it other bigger tiles that locked all the others into place.

  All three were involved in this job and the conversation left tennis and moved to English soccer, specifically on what new players Arsenal had and who they had lost. Again, the emphasis was on getting the facts straight (‘Hobbs has retired.’ ‘Retired? I thought they sacked Hobbs.’ ‘No they didn’t sack him. He retired.’ ‘Did he? I thought they sacked him.’ ‘No.’ ‘No? Okay.’) rather than on any sort of analysis or opinion. Still, maybe, when one slip can mean death, it’s safer that way.

  Two days later number eighteen’s roof tilers arrived. Theirs was a far bigger job, a full mansion’s worth of tiling, and they looked like they meant business. They were younger, in their twenties, and wore boardshorts, workboots and bare chests. They were fit and in a hurry, they didn’t have time for small talk or smokos. And yet they didn’t get things done any quicker, mainly because where old Red at number twenty-two had been able to cut a tile exactly to fit by sight and experience, the youngsters had to first slot each into place, then scratch a line across it at the right place, then take it out, cut tentatively along the line, slot it back in and finally bash it with a hammer because it still didn’t quite fit. More haste, less speed.

 

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