travel diary — day 245

In australia, drama & theatre, travel on 16 December 2009 tagged alice springs, australia, blackwood road, brisbane wheel, brookside, buffet, childhood, craig, cremorne theatre, drama, flight, high school, infant school, inyoung, librarian, mimosa street, mitchelton, myer centre, night photography, office lady, primary school, queen street mall, school photos, sizzler, southbank, staff, the crucible, theatre, travel with 1 comment

day 241 — i spent a lazy day at craig’s house.

day 242 — today i planned a stroll down memory lane … actu­ally, the des­tin­a­tion was andover lane, the small alley behind the house i grew up in. i caught the train across the city to mitchelton and walked along black­wood road. in the main street, i sat at an out­door café, drank a cof­fee, and tried to remem­ber what all the old shops had been. the street hadn’t changed much in the 15 years since i last vis­ited, but most of the stores had changed. the old news­agency was the same. as was the doc­tors, the pet store and a few others.

memor­ies of my child­hood came gush­ing back as i remembered all the crazy things that had happened back then. i remembered the gay hairdresser who tried to style my hair (which i hated). i remembered a kid at my school (ricky heath) who had some kind of bone dis­ease, but because his parent’s had money he thought he was tough and tried to beat me up (he was phys­ic­ally too weak to throw a decent punch). i remembered the abori­ginal kid i used to hang out with some­times and how he drowned dur­ing a flash flood (we often used to play and go walk­ing through the cul­verts and open storm water drains). i remembered the aban­doned land the coun­cil owned which we kids used as a bmx race track — we’d jump our bikes over the piles of dis­carded dirt and rocks.

i fin­ished my cof­fee and walked about half a kilo­meter to my old house. i walked up the lane and remembered the kids who were my neigh­bours (includ­ing the greek kid, nich­olas, who lived down the lane) and the places we used to play. i walked past my old house. the back fence had been replaced by a fence with more pri­vacy, but i could still see the house and it looked pretty much the same as i remembered it. it looked a little run down and the old car­port (which was just a cor­rug­ated iron roof on some poles) was still there. i’d assumed that the place would have been painted and maybe the car­port improved … but the house looked as if it hadn’t had any care since we’d lived there more than 20 years earlier.

i walked to the end of the lane and back around in front of the house. it really did look the same as i remembered it. it was hard to tell if any­one was liv­ing in it. i took a photo and turned my atten­tion to my old schools. my house was on a street that over­looked my old primary school (dir­ectly in front) and the high school (to the right, built on the hill­side). both schools were pretty much as i remembered them. the primary school had a few small addi­tional build­ings, decreas­ing the size of the ori­ginal play­ing ovals.

even though it was a school day, i had hoped that if i talk to the primary school staff they could help me loc­ate old school pho­tos. they were friendly and said they’d help if i could come back later in the day. whilst the school uni­form had changed, i did spot one little girl wear­ing the ori­ginal chequered green dress that stu­dents had worn when i was there. the office lady told me it was prob­ably a hand-me-down and the uni­forms weren’t avail­able in that style any longer.

the next stop was the third school, back across the main road. when i was a kid, grades 1 and 2 had their own school: mitchelton infant’s school. the primary school only covered grades 3–7. the infant’s school had been just down years ago and the primary school now took on the extra two grades. the infant’s school premesis was sold to a com­pany who now uses it as a mis­sion. i talked to one of the girls work­ing in the office and she said they had no old records from the school. we had a chat and i dis­covered that she knew quite a lot about the school’s his­tory. i was sur­prised to learn that the ori­ginal build­ings had been her­it­age lis­ted by the queens­land gov­ern­ment and that the build­ings couldn’t be torn down or remodeled.

giv­ing up on the infant’s school, i walked back into town and headed to brook­side shop­ping centre. brook­side was the holy grail when i was a kid. it’s where all the toy shops were and the loc­a­tion of the fam­ous ‘chocol­ate sol­dier’:  a chocol­ate and lolly shop. brook­side also had a myer, which is where i got bus­ted shoplift­ing when i was 13. brook­side is now enorm­ous. they’ve expan­ded it and i hon­estly got lost walk­ing around the place.

i finally escaped and headed back to black­wood road. i had fish and chips for lunch at a fish and chip shop which i think was the same when i used to live there. then i walked back to the primary school and met the lib­rar­ian. she showed me a massive plastic box full of photo albums. it wasn’t the entire col­lec­tion of mitchelton school pho­tos, but it was very encour­aging. dur­ing my search i found two class pho­tos from my years. i got lucky and found a class photo from the infant’s school (which didn’t even have stu­dent names on the bot­tom), but the second photo i found (year 7) lis­ted me as absent. damn!

the lib­rar­ian scanned and emailed the pho­tos to me. she told me that there were more albums of school pho­tos some­where, but was unable to loc­ate them. she prom­ised that (when she had time) she’d dig through the other boxes and see if she can find the remain­ing photos.

i was happy with the two pho­tos i’d acquired and walked back to the train station.

i returned to craig’s house and took a break. in the even­ing craig and i went to the cremorne theatre on south­bank to see ‘the cru­cible’. it was a fairly good pro­duc­tion and we had a good night. megan met us there and we drove her home afterwards.

day 243 — i spent the day at home. since i was leav­ing soon, craig’s par­ents offered to come into the city and have din­ner with us (to say farewell). we went to sizz­ler; an all you can eat buf­fet. i hadn’t done a buf­fet in a long time, and i went in hard. i had too much food and beer. i walked out feel­ing very sick. i thought i was going to throw up, so i walked off ahead to find a quiet spot to vomit. i didn’t puke, but my stom­ach hurt like hell and took hours to settle down. i have never felt so sick (due to food) in all my life and i vowed never to go to a buf­fet ever again.

day 244 — i spent the day at home and after craig fin­ished work we went to south­bank to do some night pho­to­graphy. we took pho­tos and met inyoung for din­ner. i got some decent pho­tos of the bris­bane wheel in mid spin. sat­is­fied, we called it a night and headed home.

day 245 — i returned to the queen street mall in town to get a flight to alice springs. the cheapest flights were mid week, so rather than fly­ing straight away, i decided to delay my depar­ture a few days. i met craig and inyoung in the myers cen­ter for cof­fee. we walked to south­bank and then caught the bus home.

i took a break and in the even­ing we returned to south­bank to do some more night shoot­ing. this time we decided to take pho­tos from the other side of the river, with a bet­ter angle of the bris­bane wheel. we took pho­tos and, decid­ing to exper­i­ment, i took out my torch to do some light draw­ing. this was the second time craig and i have done this (the first being at bong eun temple in korea). this time we had the bris­bane river and the wheel as our back­drop. we took a bunch of pho­tos and had a laugh draw­ing rude pic­tures (and naughty words) in the air.

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