On 15 January I wanted to get more furniture. The day before I’d gone with Omer to Erskineville to pick up a small bookcase but since I hadn’t asked about the dimensions I discovered, to my disappointment, it was too large to fit in the car. The next day, a Saturday, I was in the city chasing an extension cord (the exchange in the end fell through) and headed in the car to Wolli Creek on the way home to pick up another bookcase, the seller living in one of the new apartment blocks near the railway line, near where I parked in a loading zone. The woman came downstairs but looked right through me – evidently she wasn’t expecting someone as elderly as I am – and I watched her dicker with a mobile phone as she stood on the pavement. She turned around, finally seeing me standing there stock-till and looking her in the eye and when she opened her mouth to speak I offered, “I’m here for the bookshelf,” or something along such lines. Evidently it was enough information for she immediately turned, went inside and admitted me to the lobby.
Once inside I picked up the object and carried it downstairs then along the seemingly endless pavement to my waiting car. I got it home safely but by then the back of the thing’d started to come away. This didn’t unduly concern me as it was intended to store gardening implements.
I put it in a corner of the garage and a week later brought upstairs to the middle bedroom a small cabinet that’d been found on the pavement during council cleanup (see photo below) and which’d been sitting up to this point behind my car, unused. On it I placed my old living room lamp and then also spent time putting up pictures on the east wall. On the Thursday I’d hung a small watercolour that’d been treated and framed (top right in photo), and which Amanda the framer’d brought over when she visited that day to drop some things off.
Another watercolour bought on Facebook Marketplace initially went up on the north wall in the same room. To pick it up I’d driven the year before to a distant suburb of Sydney called Kings Park where, on Madagascar Drive, I left the car for a moment outside a large suburban bungalow. It’s a pleasant street very near a main road and the motorway – handy to everything – and the man who sold the artwork to me for a small amount of money had an Indonesian name. The artist is Nancy Toovey and the title of her work is ‘Burrill Lake’ (though on the label it’s misspelled).
I moved this picture to the west wall (see photo below) after mature reflection compounded by the passage of time. This wall took more effort because of the Wi-Fi equipment that my IT contractor Tim’d installed so that I’d have good broadband coverage on that floor. Finishing the arrangement of pictures on this wall in the last full week of January required placement of three oil paintings also bought via Facebook Marketplace from a vendor out in the northwest of the city.
These little gems among the first of the items bought this way. The hang has photos of Adelaide as well as a stunning piece of embroidery that used to belong to someone in the family – I wish I knew to whom to ascribe its manufacture – with, to the left, some items brought out at the last minute from the back bedroom where they’d been lost in an overly busy hang that was now simplified by the removal of a few items. Finding a balance between variety and elegance is difficult with decorative art, but the flexibility offered by the picture hanging system makes the job easier.
On the north wall of the same room (see photo below) I put up Adelaide’s ‘Cat House’ under a family photo of a house that I took time to identify as Grandma Bea’s place on Wattletree Road, Malvern. I asked for help getting this detail cemented down communicating with cousin Trish Allen … because thank God she belongs stubbornly to mum’s generation.
Trish said things to the effect that it was Wattletree Road but – as for my part – I’d bravely imagined it might’ve been the previous Dean house at Glen Eira Road. She told me that, in fact, she thought not because of the building’s style: whereas she’d had memories of Glen Eira Road being built in the 20s or 30s, Wattletree Rd was from the 1890s.
I took a look on Google and helped myself in the process of navigation by remembering how, when I was a child staying over at Bea’s place during our family visits, the commuter trains’d be audible nearby at night. I had in mind the noise of the train as it moved along the tracks, a noise that’d successfully impressed itself on my imagination when I was small and that somehow, for me, emblematised Beatrice Dean (who’d been born Kewish), a woman I loved in a special way because I loved my mother and she was my mother’s mother.
But also because of the after-school treats she prepared when she stayed at our house in Sydney. These remnant memories of a dead woman – who remained alive in my consciousness, the paths to thoughts and images cemented in place by consanguineity – practically aided me when I wanted to zoom in on a property situated near a railway line.
So here is how it now appears in real life. Found! The hang is less simple than this photo wants to suggest, and is in fact more diverse in its effect, mixing elements having a range of different characteristics – a still life, a child’s painting, a photo of a family member, an extensively imaginative portrait showing a 19th century woman wearing a hat decorated with flowers – allowing me some peace as I arranged my room in ensembles able to communicate something indefinite but comforting to that rare person who might visit.
The tracking had to be extended to take advantage of the whole wall, and one day at around this time I got the picture hanger to come with his ute to install more rails on part of the wall that’d been left empty the last time. A wide selection of frames – some bought second-hand in antique stores or op shops, some now out of stock and no longer offered to artisans for use in their creations, some that are fussy, some that are very simple in their design – a disparate range of subjects, a set of family associations bringing back echoing years of memories to provide me with company.
I spent hours over the period of a week putting it all together, a process that made me indebted to fate. The result let me enjoy a feeling of vacancy with the caveat that – because I’d installed a picture hanging system – anything could change at the summons of the vaguest whim. It’d been a feeling of discontent – the merest sense that another arrangement’d do better – that’d inspired me to move the landscape to the west wall, so an inkling of a shifting desire could overturn the new design (dispensation) at another moment, in the same way that a ripple across water distributed by a flung stone can make a waterbird move on the surface of a lake.
Moods drove my body, sometimes further, sometimes hardly at all. Around this time (in fact on 25 January) I picked up another bookcase, as well as some oil paintings from South Africa. It was a day I’d had the cleaners over and the sheets were just about finished in the machine when, seated on the couch, I scrolled on Facebook to an ad announcing a deceased estate. The family had decided to give things away for free and I liked the look of what was on offer so I messaged the guy in charge, who turned out to be a handyman. As soon as the sheets were on the line I jumped in the car and drove to Bondi Junction, parking on a leafy street near Spring Street. I buzzed the apartment at the intercom but had to wait a while as at first there was no answer. Once upstairs I saw a bookcase and said I’d take it as well as the paintings I’d originally come for, so picked it up bodily and carried it, straining at the muscles, to the car. When I got back to the intercom there was another guy there, and I scooted into the lift ahead of him when the front door opened. The handyman bolstered my claim (“First in, best dressed”) and I moved down to the RAV4the paintings that I’d seen online.
The frames came next along with a large carved wooden mirror. Back home I put the mirror on Facebook Marketplace and almost immediately got an expression of interest, despite a $65 price tag. She bargained me down and said she’d come on Monday to pick it up. A couple of days later Ming said the colour of the bookcase didn’t appeal, so I put it up against the wall in the garage near a chest of drawers I’d picked up in Randwick the year before. For the paintings I’d need D-rings put in before they could be hung and, having promised in the future to send one of them to Japan, I packaged it up on the Saturday.
Omer said that he’d take the wooden shoe cabinet that had been in the entranceway since Ming’d moved to my place, so I measured it and found it would indeed fit in the car. On the morning of 30 January I decided to put the Bondi Junction bookcase in that room, and to move the chest of drawers that contains empty bags (singlet bags, shopping bags, Ikea bags etc) further over toward the window with the pale pink curtain. I completed the shift on Sunday 6 February after I brought Omer a coffee table I’d picked up in Ultimo from a woman named Hsiung, who’d listed it for free on Marketplace.
Omer helped me carry the shoe box to his place and on 11 February I picked up a 1m-by-1m table for Ming to use that was being given away by a business that was in the process of moving or shutting down. I matched the trip with a visit to pick up mail at Broadway Shopping Centre, the business being located in Surry Hills. Fortunate to find a parking spot in a loading zone, once at the front door of the building I phoned the staffer, whose number I’d been given, and as I was standing at the entranceway I buzzed floor 4 then went up in the lift. The young woman who met me said that the business also had a broken table to get rid of, but I assessed the sound one and guessed that even on its own I’d only just fit it in the car.
This is how it turned out. In the rain the table barely squeaked into the back of the RAV4 and having gone back to Botany I got it upstairs into the ground floor of my house without assistance. To get it up to the first floor would require another person. The next day I drove to Ming’s to pick up a small chest of drawers she didn’t want to keep in her apartment. In fact Ming’d commandeered the Hsiung woman’s coffee table to put beside her bed. Omer came back to Botany with me and the two of us got the square table up to Ming’s studio on the first floor. Another square table I picked up (from a young Glebe couple) ended up being chucked out on 27 February with council cleanup. It wasn’t stable – it wobbled if you pushed down on one side – so I rid myself of it and carried it out to the street to be taken away.
There was around this time an influx of items found on Facebook Marketplace because people were giving them away for free, including three bedside tables that I put up in the studio to hold family photographs, a bookcase from Paddington, a small side table from Woollahra, a set of drawers from Randwick, and a small cabinet from Maroubra.
The essential characteristic in all cases not entirely attributable to an origin in the eastern suburbs – though I limited myself to nearby areas on account of my anxiety attacks – but primarily because they’d fit in my car and were available without any payment. It's amazing what people will willingly give away: furniture, kitchenware, even art. They just want it gone, though some items are offered first for a price and if that doesn’t work are marked down to nothing.
By 3 March I had 12 items in the garage ready to give away, sell, or to carry upstairs to use myself. I felt like Santa Claus. Santa turned out to be the name of the steam cleaning guy I’d organised to come to do two rugs that needed washing. I’d asked my cleaner to organise his visit but they didn’t give Santa my phone number so when he arrived at my house early on 9 March he went away without contacting me (my doorbell was out of service at this time due to persistent rain). He phoned me later when he was doing a job at Arncliffe (by this time he’d gotten my number from his contact) and organised to come by at 12.30pm. When he did he parked in the basement and worked on the rugs on the ground floor. The small one took a fair quantity of work to remedy because dirt’d gotten ingrained, and when he left me he left the rugs stretched out on the floor, drying with the front and rear windows open to let air in. Circulating air helped remove moisture from the rugs and when I went out I left the house open.
Once home I carried the Nanimarquina rug upstairs to my bedroom and put it in front of my desk (see photo below) though it took until the following morning to get the orientation right so that I was completely happy.
The same day I continued a conversation started a few days earlier about a cabinet I’d picked up on Facebook Marketplace from a woman in Maroubra who was giving it away. Once I had the cabinet in my garage I saw a post in the Eastern Suburbs Buy, Well and Swap group asking for donations of furniture to help Ukrainian refugees and left a comment with an offer in a practical sense, in fact telling the woman that I had something she might like to take. In response to a message sent to me, and that I noticed in the afternoon when I was out on errands, I promised to send a photo of the cabinet. Elena told me when I did, once I got home, and when I sent details of its dimensions, that it would be too big to fit in the allotted space, so the transaction didn’t pan out as planned. She thanked me via Messenger but on 11 March I sold the cabinet to a Korean woman and her husband living in Telopea who almost didn’t take it. The woman initially said the fuel cost would be too high to justify coming to collect it unassisted so what changed her mind was my offer to meet her halfway, and on the morning of 11 March I put it in the car and drove to Campsie to link up with her on Wonga Street.
My familiarity with this part of Sydney was grounded in having for a number of years lived in the area. I parked at about 10.45am and at 11 o’clock messaged Hana, who soon afterward responded from her car saying she was on the way. But when she finally arrived – I saw her white SUV on the street as she spoke to me using the phone number I’d supplied – it turned out her baby was in the back seat so it was impossible to open up the rear of the vehicle to accept the item. In response to this crisis, and wanting a sale, I offered to drive the thing to her house for $5 more, which I did when she gave me the address. On the way north through western Sydney I suffered no panic attack, which surprised me, and I got to the quiet suburban street having gone along some busy roads at high speed. Her husband turned up not long after I arrived at the house to help me carry the cabinet inside, and we put it in a passage out of the way of the front door. The man gave me a $50 bill and I took $10 out of my wallet to make change, then I headed into town to visit my post office box in Ultimo.
The next day I messaged a woman who was in the process of getting rid of a number of household items, in fact her ad named vases but when I said I’d come and pick them up she asked what I wanted. I took this to mean she’d other things on offer so I said I’d take it all, and when she put in a set of photos for me to see, and having scrutinised them, I added that I’d take the pictured candelabrum as well.
To get to Bondi I went through Maroubra and Coogee, ending up on a crowded Birrell Street where I thanked fate for sending me out immediately as it took several changes of the Bondi Road traffic light to bring me to the main drag, on which the woman’s apartment block sits. Knowing that Bondi Road’d be crowded with parked cars I took the first unoccupied space I saw and walked down toward the beach behind a very drunk woman and a man, shorter than his companion, who was telling her off quietly and soberly. I picked up the shopping bags with goods in them, and the candelabrum, and headed back to the car, driving home through Randwick and Pagewood.
When I had it in the garage I proceeded to strip off the copper wire wrapped around it. There were batteries as well in small plastic containers, and evidently someone’d tried to turn the thing into an electromagnet. I resolved to ask Omer about it, and put a question to a Jewish friend asking if it was a menorah but when he replied saying he thought not I didn’t change my opinion and kept a promise to myself to sell it.
My great-aunt’s photos came closer to being hung on the walls as on 18 March I visited a print shop. I’d already partially dealt with them by getting a shop on Botany Road, Mascot, to make some prints but since I hadn’t liked the quality or the size had asked my framer for help finding a good outlet that could do the work for me. On this day I caught the bus to Redfern and walked to Chippendale where Pixel Perfect sits on Abercrombie Street, and once inside the shop I spoke at length to a man who sat at the front counter with a computer and a screen ready to display edits to customers. When I walked in there was a customer at the counter but he soon left, then Sam and I decided on how to process the image files, what paper stock to use, and what size to print the photos out in. He promised to send me an email with attachments on Tuesday and I left.
In the afternoon, after getting home, I drove to Bunnings to pick up Corflute, which turned out to be sold in enormous sheets over two metres long, so I had to strap a sheet of the flexible stuff to the roof of my car. All the way on the road home it flapped up and down alarmingly, banging on the windscreen and making the rear-view mirror shudder. I stopped on one road to add a rope to the rig, then took slow roads back, going through past Mascot Station, and turning into King Street to get to Botany Road. It was touch-and-go all the way and I reflected that if I’d passed a police car they’d probably have stopped me as I was holding onto the Corflute through the window of my car as I drove the RAV4 solely with my left hand.
The Corflute was needed to act as a folder for a poster I’d had worked on by the paper conservator, who lives in Lilyfield, and on the same day as I bought the Corflute I made an appointment to go out to see her the following Wednesday. After I got home from Bunnings I took the big sheet of plastic to the basement and on the concrete floor using a box cutter separated it into halves then on 23 March drove successfully – apart from a little heaviness in my heartbeat around Redfern – to Rose’s house. We put the poster in the Corflute folder she made with the materials I’d brought along with some masking tape she had in her studio and when I got back home I took off another 10 centimetres since the folder was a bit large to sit flat in the car. I fixed up the hinge with my own tape – plastic sticky tape this time, with a layer on both sides of the join to make hinges out of tape – even though Rose had cautioned against using sticky tape because the adhesive bleeds.
The framer Amanda replied to the message I’d sent telling me she’d be in the city on Friday week, and I said that it’d work to meet on that day at my place. On that Wednesday Amanda and I had a video conference where we chose some materials, especially for an embroidery with a quote from the Bible that mum and dad’d conserved in dad’s records.
I got an invoice from Pixel Perfect the same day and on the Friday I travelled down on the bus to pick up the photographs of Madge’s they’d printed for me but on Thursday I brought up from the garage a small bookcase acquired for free from a Paddington couple. It’d been picked up at the end of February but it wasn’t until the fourth week of March that I put it in the hallway on the first floor, and on Saturday 26 March I filled it with books and put photos on it, the point of the thing being to accommodate a small lamp.
I exchanged some messages with Amanda on account of some backing cloth we planned to use for the embroidery as well as for a flag of uncle Elmer’s I was having done.
Amanda had specifications for the cloth to be used and detailed those requirements in messages. I considered the possibility of going to Spotlight but she’d said that they don’t have a lot of suitable material, in any case it would’ve taken a special trip down to Rockdale to visit the store. In my kitchen I had a number of items for her to take with her when she came and I also had things in the entranceway that I wanted her to bring back to Richmond in her car, including second-hand frames picked up from the deceased estate clearance. In a similar vein, Amanda’d offered me one of her used frames to go with an item we’d discussed, a montage of photos I’d taken in 2008 featuring a shopping centre garage. The frame was gold and I’d selected a yellow mount for the print, which prominently features yellow in pavement markings put there to direct cars.
In the final days of March I put my grey twisted paper chairs out the front on the balcony overlooking the street (see pic below). Sitting here you have an opportunity to stay out of the rain but still stay outside, and you can see people walking on the street, cars going past, while listening to birds. Currawongs and rainbow lorikeets could be heard, and their chorus reminded me of Pyrmont, though in those days the proximity of other buildings made sitting on the balcony feel wrong. I remember the Rum Store, just across the street, where residents could look out their windows at my apartment making me shy and unwilling to use the balcony that sat for the most part unused for six years.
Once safely ensconced in Botany I could also sit out the back watching the rain (see pic below) on a chair kept under the overhang in a dry place, the wet by this time affecting the city for over a month, despite short breaks, and northern NSW was still, on the 29th when this photo was taken, experiencing high river levels. In fact the next morning there were reports of people again leaving their houses on account of the water.
I got an email from a commercial gallery on 7 April and it was about an artist whose work I’d long admired. Initially when I read the email and understood its contents I decided not to delve into my savings and buy a work because I had framing expenses coming that needed to be met, then I tweeted in the evening, “There is too much beauty .. The loveliness of things .. I will b patient and wait. Getting lots of things framed soon.” But early the next morning – in fact well before dawn, as is customary for me – I realised with a pang that if I didn’t move to get one of the artist’s works into my house at this moment when opportunity offered I’d regret it. I changed my mind in a welter of indescribable feelings and before 5am sent an email in reply to the staffer whose name had been in the signature position of the business’ initial missive sent to me the day before. I then waited, mindlessly checking my email client from time to time because I was forced to see if I’d been successful, the works so beautiful it was possible demand had precluded my achieving the goal I’d long set for myself.
At last near 7.30am a reply came telling me that the work I’d chosen (but they are all gorgeous, so it wouldn’t really have mattered in any case) was still available. I sent my details and retreated into limbo with a sense of trepidation looming. How would my expenses turn out over the next couple of weeks and months? What if someone suddenly asked me to give them an amount of money? And what about my anticipated tax bill? I’d sent records to my accountant not long before. I allowed all these questions to swing in the wind as I relaxed with the knowledge that I’d met with the past at a point in the road that had long had its own signpost. The fact of the matter was that I’d told my accountant about my plans the last time we’d met., at that time (talking online in February using my computer and video camera), I’d actually voiced a wish for just such a work of art and now, two months later, I was filling the order.
Who doesn’t feel a kind of anxiety when ideas become facts? When I’d refused temptation on that first day – receiving the gallery’s email – I’d compensated for resulting feelings by telling myself that, instead of someone else’s work, I should make my own, and have them framed instead. But now with the painting secured by a promise I thought about making art in the shadow of such a fabulous object. The painting was delivered at the start of the last full week of May by which time I was busily making artworks of my own which, printed in Chippendale at the same shop that did my great-aunt’s photos, sat on a table underneath Yvonne Robert’s amazing painting.
At the end of May I spoke on the phone with an artwork restorer about another work, an oil painting I’d gotten for free via Facebook Marketplace from a woman in Bellevue Hill. In fact there’d been two works picked up on one trip, a watercolour having been reframed and sent to Japan to my family. The oil is a still life featuring a cauliflower and sadly it had been neglected. Chris told me what he would do to it and what it would likely cost and I told him to go ahead with the work. On 1 June I had an SMS conversation with the paper conservator about some items I’d left with her that needed fixing and flattening but a month later still hadn’t picked them up as she’d lost a sister and was in mourning.
I met the restorer on 9 August when I drove out to Richmond to the framer’s to see about things to get done. It was a mammoth session with a break for lunch – just some roast chicken ($5) from the shop up the road – during which Amanda and I saw to 35 pictures including many that mum and dad had conserved in their records for 50 years. Some were paintings my brother made when he was small. Others were linocuts I made when I was about 20 years old. In many cases we specified frames that I’d picked up free via Facebook Marketplace. It was good to use these old things appropriately and in a way that matched the relevant images, it saves nice things from being sent to landfill.
Chris the restorer is a voluble gentleman who obviously loves art, and he showed Amanda and I a beautiful little landscape painting of a street with a horse and cart that had probably been painted in the middle of the 19th century. He’d just finished restoring it, it looked fantastic. Among the things that I loaded up in the back of my car was a landscape painting I’d bought in Coogee that needed attention, and Chris had changed the colour of the frame (the original colour didn’t go with the painting at all) so that it looks wonderful.
When I got home and the next morning I was busy putting paintings up on the walls, and it was good – I mused when I had a fraction of a second of free time – that a few days before I’d ordered more of the monofilament hooks. With all the things coming from the framers I’d need them!
Amanda also reminded me about drawings of mum that Pixie’d made when they were alive, but that had some foxing. I’d given them to the paper conservator to treat but she’d not passed them to me with the rest of the items the last time I’d been to her house, so I contacted Rose who went away and found them. On 25 August I reminded her to invoice me for items already picked up and she said she’d do this as well as adding the final two drawings.
Amanda the framer came to my place with a bunch of stuff to deliver on 5 October at the same time that a TV show pilot’s lead actor arrived to stay for three weeks. Amanda didn’t meet Saya but she met John, the friend who was organising the film shoot. I actually went to Rose’s house the same morning to pick up a newspaper clipping my grandmother’d kept in her records and that needed flattening because it’d been folded twice before being placed in an album.
The set for the TV pilot was in my front room on the ground floor, John and Zsolt removing all xthe paintings and drops/hooks from the walls and bringing in some furniture to make the room look like a hair salon. Because on one day a scheduled actor couldn’t make it to Sydney (due to the rain) I even took one of the parts, a man who comes to get his hair cut so he can look like David Beckham. The film shoot took ten days to complete and I learned a lot about filmmaking which would make viewing TV more enjoyable.
On 30 November I drove out to Amanda’s studio to pick up more things and to select materials for new items she had already taken from me as well as the new batch.
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