Solace

The mess that I alluded to last post is still not resolved. It's unlikely to be resolved for some time probably. Messes generally aren't.  I liken it to a ball of wool that's been played with by a kitten (or a toddler, as the case may be). It takes time, patience and a couple of episodes of Game of Thrones to untangle the mess. But eventually you do get there. And we will too.  

I start a new job next week and I'm quietly optimistic that it will be good. It will be different at any rate and at the moment different is good. 

If you're curious about the photos - I took them as part of my latest photography assignment - the Yarra River by night.  Despite owning a tripod, I've been quite lax in using it and have almost never ventured out after dark with photography as the main objective. The Yarra takes on a split personality at night - all sexy on the south bank with a quiet, slightly seedy undertow on the north. I found myself drawn to exploring the industrial lines and the solitude of the north side which somehow perfectly captured the sentiment of the river on a cold, wet night in May. 

Mess

I keep dipping in and out of this space.  I want to be here but I’m not quite sure how. It seemed much easier before. Life seemed much easier, in general. Before Melbourne. Before Canberra. Before I decided to uproot up our little family halfway around the world and demand that we call it ‘home’. 

Life is a bit messy at the moment. It’s messy and I’m a little reluctant to write about it for fear of sounding a little self-absorbed and pitiful. Perhaps the hardest thing about writing about ‘the now’ is the admission that 18 months into our Australian adventure it still doesn’t feel like home. There are so many reasons why - some of them have to do with us - but many of them are about Australia. I love this country. I dragged M and E here because I thought we could love it. Perhaps not immediately but I really, honestly thought that we could grow to love this place and that Australia would love us back. But it hasn’t. And we don’t.  I feel guilty for that, and somehow responsible too, even though conceptually I realise that there is nothing I can do.

There’s other stuff too.  An unfulfilling job, the anger of time spent away from E in an unfulfilling job, the push and pull of motherhood, of career, of tending to friendships and relationship, of finding time for ‘me’ only to realise it means less time for them. It’s normal stuff mostly but there seems to be a lot of it at the moment and it’s messy and a bit ugly and when you’re not feeling entirely peachy about your own life you don’t exactly feel like writing about it. You definitely can’t imagine anyone else wanting to read about it.

But today a friend posted this on her facebook page. And then I read this. And then this. I also listened to all of Patti Smith's interview here. She's cool. Actually all of these ladies are cool.  They made me  realise that maybe I might have something to say after all. I'm particularly smitten with Dear Olive, she might just be a new blog crush of mine.

Cranbourne

I went on a school excursion to Cranbourne Botanical Gardens a few weeks ago. I was a little sceptical at first - Cranbourne doesn't exactly spring to mind when you think about beauty or adventures of a photography kind - but it turned out to be wonderful. The gardens are new, the last section was only opened last year, and they still have a bit of growing to do before becoming properly established but even now they showcase Australian flora in a way that I haven't seen before and it it's really quite wonderful. 

The structures of the garden are supposed to take you on a journey from the outback to the coastal inlets and out to the sea. Personally I didn't really buy into all that, I just enjoyed wandering around and discovering what was around the next corner.  All of the plants have been carefully selected to represent the different parts of Australia and yet none (none!) have the ability to seed at become weeds in the surround bush. This in itself is an amazing ecological feet.  If you're Melbourne based, the gardens really aren't so very far away and they're well worth a visit. I'm already looking forward to my next trip back when the trees have grown just that little bit more.

Love and Adoration

You have no idea how besotted E is with her cousin. No idea. Every single thing that Rowan does she thinks is awesome. Jumping - awesome. Running backwards - awesome. Sniffing snot back up your nose - awesome. We spent the day hanging out together on Tuesday, it being school holidays at all, and I have to admit, he was pretty awesome. Especially to her. He didn't mind one bit that all she wanted to do was hold his hand, sit on his lap, lean up next to him and snuggle. And we're not just talking about for a little bit of the day - we're talking six solid hours of in-your-face toddler love. When he asked why E always needed to be touching him, I said it was because she thought he was the coolest, funkiest boy to have lived. His response? "I'm not the funkiest boy I know; there are boys who dress funkier than me".  When he said that my heart jumped into my mouth and I had flash backs to school and the cool-kids and all that angsty stuff that I'm so glad to have left well and truly behind.  Part of me thought that he's far too young for all that and I was tempted to just dismiss the comment and pretend that it never happened. Or say some complete 'bull' about how he was wrong and everyone was funky in their own way or some shit like that.  Instead I told him that being the funkiest or the coolest didn't matter too much as long as you had good friends.  I don't know if it was the right thing to say but it seemed better than a lie.  And besides, even if he's not the funkiest kid, being patient enough to tolerate E trampling all over him and his toys for the day - Awesome!

Autumn Harvest

My Dad grows grapes. Not professionally but as a hobby. He planted the vines from seedling almost seven years ago and this is the fourth year he's been able to pick.  Goodness me, it's a fickle business this farming! Last year the wind got to most of the blossom before fertilisation this year it was the foxes. Yup, foxes.  Despite netting the vines well before the fruit ripened about 10-20% of the total harvest was scurried away by a family who, I think anyway, has taken up camp under the wood shed. Despite the small crop we went up and helped pick a couple of weekends ago. All in all it took less than half a day. E spent most of the time taste testing directly off the vine. I spent most of the time documenting photographing the occasion. We celebrated at the end with a bottle from the 2008 vintage and declared the weekend a success. Foxes and all.

Sunday... or is it Monday already?

I am sitting here in a quiet house. This is rare now-a-days. Usually my "alone time" comes when I am going to or from somewhere. And then I'm not really alone anyway. I'm on the train or the tram or walking on a busy street. In this deliciously quiet house I'm supposed to be working. I have a deadline for a project I've been working on for the last few months.  I'm a consultant for a project looking at health systems in low and middle income countries. This is a rather fancy way of saying that if I do not produce 'something', I will not get paid.  I need to get paid. But in the delicious-ness of a quiet house, on a quiet street on the last day of the long Easter weekend, what I actually feel like doing is eating some more chocolate and curling up in bed with a book.  It feels like Sunday. Only it's Monday, and I should be working.

On Parks and Photography

One of the things that I've started up this year is a photography course. A proper, whizz-bang, fancy one that takes a few years and if you finish it you can call yourself "professional". I've done a few short courses over the years - both online and 'in person' - and always felt that I wanted more. So I bit the bullet and signed up. Two nights a week I sit in a classroom full of wonderful, friendly, creative, full-time working crazies who are passionate about photography and really, really, really want to learn the craft. I'm loving it. We're about a month in and we've just started getting to the juicy bits of 'camera craft' (the technical bits) and 'design theory' (the arty bits).  I'm increasingly finding myself multi-tasking with E, taking pictures for my assignments while taking her to the park or walking her to childcare.

So here she is, absolutely loving the park and getting super dizzy on the whizzy-dizzy (is that what it's called?).   And there's me, crazy Mama, trying to perfect a technique called 'panning' while satisfying a 1 year olds need to go high (but not too high) on a swing so that she can feel the wind in her hair.