April 2021

In today's Age Sunday magazine, Lily Brett writes about returning to her childhood home, and I remembered doing the same thing when the house that I grew up in was being sold. At the time, I hadn't lived there or been inside for close to 40 years.

Having been tenanted for such a long time, the place was uncared for. Unrecognisable. The floors and windows were bare and dirty. The rooms, which had seemed spacious, were in fact tiny. The one I shared with my sister was about the size of my ensuite bathroom.

Our outside toilet was only three steps from the back door. I remembered running across this space, telling myself I had to reach the outhouse before the screen door slammed. It would mean Malcolm in my class liked me. Such is the mind of a child – obsessive, compulsive, making sense of the world by inventing causes and consequences.

Surprisingly, the backyard still seemed quite big, but where once we could see almost nothing of our neighbours, now modern extensions rose above the fence like nosey intruders. Meanwhile the trees that still swayed in my mind’s eye were nowhere to be seen. I remembered the debris that dropped into our yard from an enormous gum tree that overhung from next door, and the first time mum asked me to sweep up—when I struggled with the long broom handle.

Then just before we left I glanced around the corner to the side of the house. Of course the wooden gate that dad built had long since disappeared. In its place was a generic metal one. But something else caught my eye. Something seemingly inconsequential: a concrete gutter with sloping “v” sides, that ran along the ground. I balanced and scuttled along it in bare feet every day in summer.

A feeling of warmth flowed over me as I remembered playing outside with Trevor from next door, with Betty and her sister Jennie, with John and my sister Christina. I remembered rushing home early one evening, balancing along this very gutter, anticipating a new show starting that night on telly: “I dream of Jeannie”.

This stretch of concrete was all that had remained unchanged, and that alone transported me to the place I had hoped to find when I came here: my childhood.

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This photo is of the actual house, since demolished/renovated, in Thornbury.