DSC_2774, a photo by Goop on the lens on Flickr.

Yup. That’s us all right.

As if falling in a creek, climbing a tree, diving off a diving board and gazing at stars weren’t enough of a spectacular day for Claire, she also got to make the best joke. I was chasing Jeremy across the pool when he stopped fleeing and started laughing: “You’ve had a nipple slip,” he said. I was mortified, so I pulled my swimsuit back up over my wayward left breast and went to tell my sister all about it.

Back story: we’ve been sharing the Playhouse Hotel with Skydive Maitland. Their toll free number – 130013 JUMP – is plastered across their van in a font that makes the digits “13” look like the letter “B”. Yeah, that’s right. B00BJUMP.

That is why Claire said to Sarah: “Mama had a boob jump!”

I was so not in the mood to go into Tamworth this morning. I IMed with my sister about it last night and she understood, but I was still worried my mum would be hurt. When I said to her at breakfast:

“I’ve been having second thoughts about Tamworth…”

she interrupted to say “Oh thank God.”

So that was that sorted. Instead, we loaded Dad into the passenger seat of my rented Mitsubishi Lancer (his name is Boy Racer) and drove back up to the Horton Falls, where we’d spent a happy morning last year. We all clambered down to the waterhole and Dad and I sat under a tree talking for an hour while Jeremy dangled himself off cliffs with his camera and the girls fell into the creek. It was exactly what I needed. Using my words! Asking for what I need! It’s no guarantee that I will get what I need, but it makes it a damn sight easier for people to give it to me if they are so inclined.

We came back and had lunch and Claire climbed a tree and Dad joined us for mah jongg before we headed down to the pool, where Julia swam the width and Claire leaped off the diving board about one thousand times. And then we went back to Sarah’s for chicken and wasabi prawns, and Sarah’s friend Jane had made the world’s single greatest pavlova, so we ate the heck out of that.

Sarah and Mum had organized for me to buy a painting by Rupert Richardson, and I finally got to see it on this trip. It’s acrylic or oils maybe? A landscape with a mass of mountain hulking across it in cobalt. It reminded us all of the drive back from Upper Horton last year, when we drove through country so beautiful it hurt your eyes. When Dad brought the map of the Horton River for us to study, I noticed that Rupert Richardson’s property sits at the crossroads there. Curious, I googled the strange name written on the painting: Grattai. It is a mountain in the Nandewar Ranges. We would have passed it when we drove to Narrabri a couple of years ago.

Jeremy’s Dad was the best man at Rupert Richardson’s wedding, and Jeremy remembers driving out to that property to watch Halley’s Comet. Tonight was clear and instead of coming straight back to the Playhouse, we drove down to the river park to look at the stars. For every star you can see from San Francisco, Barraba has a hundred. Jeremy pulled up the star map on his phone and we discovered that the star, big as a fist, snapping at Orion’s heels, was Jupiter.

I watched Claire watching stars with a glad heart. It was my Dad who showed me the Galilean moons, my Dad who taught me to navigate by Orion, my Dad who stood next to me when I looked at Halley’s comet. I chose my father well and am so grateful.

I spent New Year’s Day as I mean to go on: at a Welsh pony farm. We first visited three years ago and these pictures are from that first visit, but Ruth and her red stallion Paris haven’t changed a bit. Jeremy’s pet name for Paris is “Boy Band Hair.”

Dad didn’t come with us this time but he and I enjoyed our last visit:

That was a good day.

1. On the way to visit Jeremy’s aunt and uncle in Nana Glen we borrowed an iPod from Kelly, who is seventeen. Her musical taste overlaps with mine at a single point – P!nk – so we played “So What” and I changed the words: “Nanana nana nana, nanana Nana Glen!”
2. Wollomombi and Chandler Falls are very spectacular, and nearby there is a general store and cafe where we had meat pies and strawberry milkshakes, sitting in a butterfly garden. I promised to recommend it to my friends and so I do.
3. When I was at university I dreamed of entering a very specific adult world that was represented by excellent parties in Newtown terrace houses with original Martin Sharp Nimrod theatre posters hanging framed on the walls. I was talking to Mum in the lounge of the Playhouse Hotel when Andrew, the owner, brought me a glass of wine. “Is that a Martin Sharp?” I asked him, gesturing with my sauvignon blanc to a very good picture on the wall. “Yes it is,” he said. “Martin’s my cousin.”

I always forget how big and generous the sky is over Barraba. The town is surrounded with rolling hills and beyond it to the west is an extinct volcano, Mount Kaputar, that marks the edge of the Northern Tablelands and stands above an escarpment to the Western Plains.

Since we’ve been here the escarpment has been pushing magnificent cumulous clouds into the air above us. Yesterday a cold front came over, iron-gray and purple. We timed our swim perfectly to finish before the storm broke over the town. Thunder and lightning and the dumping of five inches of rain into Dad’s rainwater tank and the putting out of power. My poor brother-in-law and niece were at the supermarket trying and failing to get the generator up and running when the lights came on again. Let us now give thanks for refrigerators full of unspoiled food.

Barraba after the rain smells like hope.

In April next year I will be eligible for American citizenship, and it will be fifteen years since I left Australia. If love of family is as this beautiful essay says the act of bearing witness – and I think it is – then I have not done very well either by my family of birth or by my families of choice. I am an intermittent presence in everyone’s lives. I suspect now that going voluntarily into exile is unforgivable, but I suspect, too, that I wallow in how unforgivable it is, as a way to avoid the hard work of doing the best I can under the circumstances.

In Sydney. The flight over was great, because the girls are big now and self-entertaining, and because J gave me noise-canceling headphones so I slept nearly all the way to Auckland. A puddle jump to Sydney and then roast lamb and summer pudding and presents with the Fitzhardinges. Jan gave me a new piece by Rachel Honnery, to my delight. In the evening I looked over what Claire had packed for the trip, and as a result this morning we caught a taxi to Bondi Junction to stock up on clothes for her.

I’m chagrined to say that shopping in the Boxing Day sales has been one of the best parts of Christmas so far. We got Claire a super cute new wardrobe for basically no money. She bought a present for Jules. J and I got shorts and J got a new pair of shoes. We had flat whites and babycinos and talked about the likelihood of Cory Booker running for president in 2016. Bourgie enough for you?

It’s overcast and rainy but still way warmer than San Francisco. I am deeply, deeply tired, still shaking off the long tail of my cold and the end-of-year push at work, let alone the jetlag.

In an otherwise creepy and depressing thread, I found this wonderful comment:

A girl needs to learn how to perform “what boys like” in order to attract and keep boys’ attention, and boys take it for granted girls will be doing this, that girls exist as objects for their attention to pick and choose from (this is why many guys, especially young ones, feel perfectly at home evaluating women, any woman at all, with “I’d hit it” or not – we are surprised at their presumption, but from their POV that is their role as selector). Boys and girls (and men and women) will “punish” girls who aren’t trying to fulfill their given role.

This was such a strong pressure in my adolescence that specific instances of gender-enforcement stand out in my memory: Christine saying “It’s past time you started shaving your legs”; Aaron and his friends forming the Itty Bitty Titty Committee to give marks out of ten for our bust sizes; Cameron saying “I wish you hadn’t cut your hair; your long hair was the good kind, with curls.” And many more. Women were the biggest enforcers. Jan, the minister’s wife, was the worst. Anne Summers wrote a book I still haven’t finished, about women in early colonial Sydney, called Damned Whores and God’s Police. Those were our only options. Jan was God’s chief of police.

Girlness was a performance judged by a panel of assholes. I sucked at it, which turned out to be my salvation. Being a horsy girl was a recognized loophole on the tomboy spectrum (although, again, Claudia, when we were all of ten: “You can’t just talk about horses all the time, you know.” HAHAHA SUCK IT.) The panel of assholes still in full flight in Australia, by the way, where the gendered slurs against our Prime Minister boggle the mind. (Anne Summers, on point again.) But whenever I get to bitching about this on IM, Liz sensibly points out: “It’s not Australia. It’s the patriarchy.”

Argh! I have daughters. I drag them along to barns and science museums and give them math books and read Swallows and Amazons to them at bedtime so that they can have Mary King and Limor Fried and Fan Chung and Nancy Blackett as alternative role models to Jan-the-minister’s-wife. But they’ll need the hearts and stomachs of concrete elephants all the same.

And still. More vividly than I remember all the putdowns, I remember the day I realized I was a free agent, and could exercise a choice. I want that for everyone.

An old buddy is Facebooking about his mountain biking adventures on the same Ku-ring-gai Chase trails Alfie and I knew so well: the Perimeter Trail, the Long Trail, the Cooyong-Neverfail Trail. I got to remembering what it felt like to let Alfie go. He was blindingly fast well into his twenties. He outran a 3yo QH filly once, I remember, my grand old Arabian king. Yet I don’t ever remember being afraid sitting on his back. I held the rein like a gossamer thread.

I realized in my body, in a way that’s hard to put into words, that I need to find that same feeling of openness when I point Bella and Jackson at fences: the same light contact, the same absolute lack of fear.

Marr is Australia’s best journalist right now, as far as I can gather. He is acute on both what makes us different…

David Malouf has a wonderful theory that it’s the English we carried in our baggage that makes America and Australia such different places. In the early seventeenth century, settlers took to America a language of abstractions: “Passionately evangelical and utopian, deeply imbued with the religious fanaticism and radical violence of the time, this was the language of … dissenters … who left England to found a new society that would be free, as they saw it, of authoritarian government by Church and Crown.” Malouf argues that by the time Australia was colonised, the language had changed. What the First Fleet brought here “was the language of the English and Scottish Enlightenment: sober, unemphatic, good-humoured; a very sociable and moderate language; modern in a way that even we would recognise, and supremely rational and down to earth”.

…and what makes us boringly the same as everyone else.

Wherever the Tampa tactics lead Australia in the years to come, those of us in the City Recital Hall yesterday will remember the sight and the sound of a white, prosperous audience baying for border protection. They know it’s the winning ticket and John Howard has found it for them. He is a genius of sorts: he looks this country in the face and sees us not as we wish we were, not as one day we might be, but exactly as we are. The political assessment is ruthlessly realistic. Only the language is coy. But who has ever admitted to playing the race card?

I know I was rude about the SMH just a fortnight ago, but it really was my first window into the adult world, and for many years the name Fairfax held for me the ring of integrity. I’m gutted at the layoffs. The innocent are punished while the guilty walk free.

I do get that it’s totally my fault for reading the Sydney Morning Herald (which I remember from my childhood as a fun, sophis window into the adult world, but which today (possibly without its even having changed!) reads as a gross crawly-bumlick to wealth and power, as unrepresentative of most of Australia as Fox News and the NY Times are of most of America.)

Nevertheless!

When St Pauls College (last seen waving a flag for rape!) holds a party at which the white guests are served by Indian waiters in colourful dress in celebration of the “colonial” theme, the appropriate headline is not: “Was this uni Raj night racist?” The appropriate headline is “Fire everyone responsible for racist uni Raj night.”

And! If you are the principal of one of the major private schools, and you say aggressively racist shit like this:

Dr Paul Burgis, the principal of PLC Sydney, where 34 per cent of students are from other cultural backgrounds, said there was a huge level of exposure to, and acceptance of, other cultures at the school.
”It would almost be offensive if I, as a principal, was to talk about it: ‘Why do you have to raise it as an issue? We’re past that now, we’re just friends’,” he said.
”At a school like PLC it’s almost an invisible question.”

…your racist ass should be fired, rehired only to write an essay explaining exactly why making cultural difference “an invisible question” is itself part of a set of racist strategies, promoting whiteness as the cultural default and problematizing any person or experience that deviates from that racist-ass norm, and then you should be fired again, with no pension.

You know what’s offensive? What’s offensive is that people like Paul Burgis are awarded doctorates and given influential jobs in education when they exhibit ignorance of the most basic facts about institutional racism or systems of oppression or the cultural transmission vectors for all of the above. How do you even wade self-importantly into a discussion of race and privilege in Australian classrooms and throw around a word like “invisible” with no apparent awareness of its, you know, meaning?

To be fair Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, a book about the racist use of invisibility, is ONLY SIXTY YEARS OLD AND NEWS OF IT MAY NOT HAVE CROSSED THE PACIFIC YET.

DEAR AUSTRALIAN JOURNALISTS, NEWSPAPER EDITORS AND PRIVATE SCHOOL PRINCIPALS: YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ THAT BOOK, IF YOU GET A MOMENT.

IN CLOSING: AARGH.

The mister is off building a robot thunderdome with the downstairs neighbor, so I called the wife and invited her and our boys over for dinner. While she was here her phone rang and the ringtone was Weezer’s “My Best Friend.”

Me: sharp intake of breath. “That’s MY ringtone. You have ANOTHER best friend???”

Salome: “I am totally busted. It’s my default ringtone.”

“YOU TOLD ME IT WAS SPECIAL FOR ME. I GOT ALL TEARY.”

We had BBQ chicken from a place on 24th Street with arugula and avocado salad and broccolini and brown rice. I made a compote out of leftover strawberries and we had that with cream for dessert. Salome and I got a little tipsy on limoncello from Lucca’s deli.

This is what my life is like now. Yesterday I was weeding our little front flowerbed and Colin the carpenter stopped by and we chatted about the shelf he is making for Claire’s yarn, because Claire took up crochet after Rose taught her how. Then Kathy came by on her way to pick up Julia and Martha from the math circle Vali runs in the place on the corner. It’s been difficult to blog these past few months because happiness writes white and I have never been so happy before in my life.

I showed the wife pictures of the house I grew up in.

“But it’s beautiful,” she said.

“I see that now. It’s a jewel of mid-century modern, and it was full of teak and Hans Wegner originals. My mother had flawless taste.”

“I pictured you growing up in a place with no light! Like, a dungeon!”

“But that’s what it felt like. I look at it now and all I can think about is how miserable I was back then. When I was a teenager I could not put together a simple declarative sentence about my internal state to save my life.”

“You were a bit like that when I met you.”

One of my catchphrases nowadays is that closure is bullshit. Scar tissue is what it is. I still feel the cold where the broken bones in my ankle fused back together. But the other California cliche, validation, is not so much bullshit. Having a third party acknowledge the you that has spent the last umpty years tunneling out from underneath all your own garbage: well, that’s not nothing, as we say. It’s a thing, as we say.

It’s even possible I will forgive her for her lies about the ringtone.

We’ve been back in Sydney for a week. I’ve been working and trying to get the kids to do their independent study, all while missing my family sorely. We had a few sunny days but lots of blustery windy ones and now, humidity and rain. Hi, Sydney.

Ugh! None of that. Good points of Sydney include the fantastic playground with the huge water feature in Centennial Park, with a cafe right next door; Nielsen Park, which is one of my favourite places in the world; and Rushcutter’s Bay Park, which also has a yummy cafe and a vast playground, and back from which we have just come.

Yesterday I got up early and flew to Melbourne for the inaugural AdaCamp, which was excellent and lots of fun. It’s a feminist unconference with the goal of promoting the participation of women in open tech and culture. The sessions were lively and the women were clever and funny and insightful. Best of all was getting to spend solid time with Skud.

Skud maintains that I am a larval Melburnian. Her argument is cogent. She’d chosen the venue for the conference, Ceres, which is basically Ecotopia and which pushed all my tech-hippie buttons. I want to go to there! Oh wait! I already did.

I flew back to Sydney twelve hours after I flew down. My Kindle was almost out of battery, so I ransacked the terminal’s sadly atrophied bookstore twice before finding, on the bottom shelf, the last copy of Mark Dapin’s new novel, The Spirit House. WIN. It is funnyangry and brilliant and you should all read it.

Today we scattered Ric’s ashes, and I don’t know what to say about that.

…it turns out half the things I think of as My Personality – my taste in sandals, the way I pile my hair on top of my head in a messy bun – turn out to be so generically Australian it is not even funny.

I drove from Barraba to Nana Glen and back, an 11-hour round trip with a sleepover with Jeremy’s Aunt Brenda and Uncle Richard. We had a rest day, then I drove to Sydney in 8 hours.

New South Wales is very, very large and also unbelievably beautiful. I am more tired than I can say.

A thunderstorm boiling up from the west. Ozone smell in the air and rain on the cool breeze. Tea and Christmas cake with Mum and Dad on their screened-in back deck.