On the banks of the Murray River, Albury NSW (No date). From State Records NSW Collection.
I 
really love old photos… and thanks to the internet, I can still experience the joy of wading through some while sipping some tea (shush, I’m not a nanna!), despite Indonesia’s fantastical lack of museums and libraries (not to mention my lack of motivation in the wet season to leave my room…).
I love the feelings of nostalgia they bring back… even if it’s nostalgia for a time or place that I never really experienced. So strange. But I love it. I especially love looking at what things are still the same, and what has changed… especially the style. In the picture above, which is taken just a few blocks from my family home, I can identify the bend in the river and I love the swimsuits…
So I’ve been looking at some pics on Flickr… from government collections, and I also found a whole set from my hometown of Albury, mostly by the late Jack Dallinger, whose family still own a photography store on the main street. It’s amazing how many of the buildings still look the same. I found some old photos of Indonesia as well, here and here. The pictures really go to show that while some things change, others stay the same…
Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction, 1930. From State Records NSW Collection.
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My mother likes to buy a lot of strange things from those Homewares catalogues that get delivered to your door in Oz. Whenever I go home, I am constantly finding strange implements around the house designed to perform random menial tasks that I never realised were hard or needed special devices to undertake. Basically, take some sort of obscure problem that society at large isn’t really impacted by, then imagine some sort of cheap plastic device invented to work around it.
This is her newest purchase: a banana protector.
Helpfully modeled by my little sister, my partner in cynicism (she was at a dance comp, she doesn’t normally wear that crazy makeup)! Basically, you put your banana inside it. It’s a plastic tube that is supposed to stop your banana from getting bruised and mushy. According to my mum, it works wonders for putting bananas inside handbags, schoolbags…. her list stopped there. “It helps them stay nice, Ashlee,” she said, exasperated at my fits of giggles. “Anyway, it was only cheap.”
My questions about an exact price remained unanswered, though I believe through reading her eyebrow raises, and her telling off my sister for eye rolling and raising her eyebrows in an “up up” gesture during our little game of Price is Right, that it probably came in somewhere between $7.99 and $11.99.
I asked if all bananas fitted in it… mum said some needed to be bent. I asked if bending it to fit it in the protector sometimes bruised the banana, hence rendering the initial purpose of the product to be null and void. She declined to comment, and proceeded to rant about how I am too cynical. :p
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Back in Albury. The home town. The hood. Back for the first time in more than a year. Some things have changed, but most haven’t. Nice to see the family and all. Still has gumtrees everywhere.
We went down to Wangaratta on Sunday because my sister had a dance competition. Early morning road tip through the country, on the empty highway, the sun crawling up amongst winter fog.
It’s a nice part of the world. Quiet, but nice.
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One of the best parts about going home (besides seeing friends and family and all of that) is reading my hometown newspaper, the Border Mail.
It’s always full of interesting stories, and I do try and keep up with it when I am in Sydney (my coworkers can attest to this… I am always forwarding them crap from it).
Lately there have been a few stories that have grabbed my attention.
-There was a big story in when I was down home about how anyone caught buying Underbelly DVDs in Albury (which is in NSW) and taking them back to Wodonga (a 5 minute drive from Albury, in Victoria, where Underbelly has been banned from being screened to due to court proceedings) will face the full consequences of the law. Good luck policing that one. Are they going to search cars?
-Lately there has been a massive war in the letters page over whether it is rude to stare at baby twins in prams that has had the whole town talking.
It started with this letter;
To all the sticky beaks, well-wishers and the plain just rude people, stop looking in our pram.
We
are 4-month-old twin babies and wherever we go people are leaning in
our pram breathing smoky, germy breath on us, needing to know if we are
girls – yes we have pink dresses on. are we identical – no.
Yes we are cute and yes our mum is very lucky.
We
are human beings not a stage show for you to invite your kids or your
sister over to have a look after you have stopped us in our tracks, we
have somewhere to be as well. what gives you the right to stand in
front of the pram and stop us from walking down the street.
We are
twins and that does not give you the right to invade our personal
space, people with single babies dont get this nearly as much or if
ever.
…
So if you’re one of those people who just can’t resist
looking in someone’s pram and stopping mothers or fathers in the street
just think how would you feel if your car got stopped every five metres
on the road and people poked their head in the window and asked you a
million obvious questions.
We don’t care what your story is just leave us alone.
This controversial letter prompted a huge backlash from people who thought it was rude, unAustralian, all manner of things. Then more people chimed in to support the obviously stressed young mum, and it was going back and forth and back and forth.
And now, there has been a final part of the story. A last response from the mother;
"To all the negative people who
responded to my letter regarding people looking in my pram, I didn’t
realise that I would be the talking point at a lot of places in
Albury-Wodonga.
I did not ask in here for your opinion only that you keep your heads and hands out of my pram and leave me alone. Only I tried to write it nicely the first time.
I
don’t want people stopping me in the street and I am sick of trying to
get somewhere only to be stopped twenty times, so just leave me alone."
The scary thing is, people are STILL probably talking about their outrage over these letters.
-There is a suburb/housing estate in Albury called Norris Park. And a plucky young local signwriter then decided to rename it "Chuck Norris Park". See here. Then, someone else decided to redo the whole thing as Mr T Park. See here. (from Albury Wodonga Online, the Border Mail doesn’t have the stories online).
The council, of course was pretty pissed off. And then, the cheeky signwriters started fueding. Apparently, the first one only used vinyl stick on letters that were easy to remove, while the second prankster used paint. The first one believed that the second’s action were really irresponsible. Hilarious!
The local paper is always worth a read. I don’t know whether it’s because there are more quirky characters down there, less serious news, or the paper is a bit tabloid and maybe the editors and journos just see the humor in it all, but you usually find a laugh in there somewhere.
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I stopped at Gateway Island today, which is just on the Victorian side of the Murray River. There is a lagoon there, arts and crafts shops, the local theatre company, and a lagoon.
I took a photo of the reflection of trees on the lagoon, then turned it upside down. You know I like messing with people’s heads…
It’s quite pretty, with lots of bike and walking paths near the river. But apparently it needed some public art to spruce the place up. So now, this sculpture greets visitors as they enter that glorious state of hook u-turns and pokie machine-mania, Victoria.
Apparently the sculpture is all about gateways. I can’t explain how, and being a bullshit artist like myself, that’s a bit sad. But it still makes more sense than some of the stuff next to the highways in Melbourne. I don’t know why they bother with public art sometimes… I found a far more self explanatory work underneath the Lincoln Causeway on my walk.
I think the artist is trying to say "I have a small penis and hence spray-paint pictures of them everywhere to make up for it". Nothing too abstract about that one.
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Being back in my hometown so often reminds me of why I left. There really isn’t a huge amount of things to do except watch shows like Property Ladder, A Place in Spain, America’s Next Top Model, Hell to Hotel, Trinny and Susannah, Airline and Air Hostess School on Foxtel (sorry… Austar… the country version). Which certainly isn’t a waste of time, because I now feel fully prepared to become a property developer, hotel manager, model or airline cabin crew member should journalism not work out, and I also feel more capable at dressing myself or purchasing property in Europe, should I ever acquire the finances to undertake either of these two difficult projects.
But once I realise that it is the same two or three seasons of these beloved shows that were on loop last time I was in town, and I then flick over to Discovery Travel Channel and decide I better not watch it so I don’t start slitting my wrists in despair, I start to venture out… and that’s when I get trapped. I start to realise that it is obscenely pretty around here. And a lot of the people are abnormally friendly… and it’s so quiet. And you don’t have to look both ways before crossing the road because most of the time there aren’t cars coming and if there is one, they will probably slow down for you. And the checkout chicks chat to you about inane things, and the shop assistants generously (and with the full goodness of their hearts) try to dress you in hideous clothes and encourage you to buy hoop earrings and green glitter nail polish to accessorise because they truly believe that is what should be worn if you are ever to find a nice bloke to sweep you off your feet and into the tray of his ute (because Bluey always gets the front seat).
I spent Boxing Day hanging with some friends (most of them no longer Albury-ites either) down at the Murray River at Mungabareena Reserve and it was so lovely and pretty and quiet… and here it’s all cheap, unlike Sydney… but just when I was starting to be completely romanced by the place and was keeping my eye out for any good sorts without a sheila on the back of their ute, I remembered that I was here at the best time of the year, when heaps of people from school are back, the weather is good, and sometimes they even have live music at the local pubs/nightclubs/feelfests.
So I think the happy medium is to stay away, but come back around Christmas time… then flee before it gets really crappy again when the weather cools down…
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