It seems that I'm an itinerant. I've moved around all my life - from early on, when, due to unusual circumstances, my mother, father, brother and sister took off in separate directions when I was just eighteen months old until now - and that's many years later. According to my partner Jane and her French friends, I have what they call la bougeotte - from the verb bouger - to move, or get around. La bougeotte means having the fidgets. I don't think of it this way at all - I just seem to change address fairly often. Not including various residencies overseas, and not including various addresses in the same suburbs at different times, in chronological order, these are the places I've lived :
Seymour, Victoria. Camp Hill, Brisbane. Army Base Toowoomba, Queensland. Enoggera Army Base, Gaythorne, West Chermside, Kangaroo Point, Milton, Figtree Pocket, Brisbane, Queensland. Little Bay, Paddington, Darlinghurst, Surry Hills, Sydney, New South Wales. Carlton, Melbourne, Victoria. Paddington, Surry Hills, Sydney, New South Wales. Sherbrooke Forest, Monbulk, Dandenong Mountains, Victoria. Glebe, Sydney. MacDonald Valley, New South Wales. Annandale, Rozelle, Sydney. Mountain Lagoon, New South Wales. Parkside, Adelaide, South Australia. Newtown, Petersham, Camperdown, Ultimo, Bellevue Hill, Sydney. Blackheath, New South Wales and, finally, I'll say farewell from Rose Bay, Sydney.
Sultry morning, Rose Bay, Sydney
25th October 2006
The famous saucepan (foto courtesy AWM, Canberra)
One of the stories that Rose Bay locals like to tell concerns a Japanese submarine and the damaged aluminium saucepan. It was taken from the kitchen of the place next door to where we've lived for the last four and a half years. It was demolished by a shell from the large Japanese submarine I-24. The I-24, which had launched the midget submarine in a famous attack on Sydney Harbour a week earlier, fired ten shells into the Sydney suburbs of Bellevue Hill, Woollahra, Rose Bay and Vaucluse on the night of 7-8 June 1942. The only one of these shells to explode fell outside the Yallambee Flats on Plumer Road, Rose Bay, where it caused considerable damage. Several slight injuries were suffered by civilians, and as a result, many residents of the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney took up temporary residence in safer locations such as the Blue Mountains of NSW.
Yallambee, 3 Plumer Road, today
One way to enter the building at the University of Sydney that houses Badham Library, where I've worked for the past sixteen years is via the Graffiti Tunnel. I have been very fond of walking through this particular passageway and its ephemeral imagery.
Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney, 2006
This time, we're moving south to Melbourne.
A shipping container 'Art Box', Melbourne Arts Festival, 2005
A note to visitors to The Deletions - you can click on any images that appear on the blog if you want to see them in larger sizes.
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