End of year memorial: September

To make ‘The Enormous Family Album’ (TEFA) I brought down a small desk from the back bedroom on the first floor. I needed the desk to accommodate my computer, on which I had the titled files that had been used to make many TEFA prints. I’d plug my ancient laptop computer into the power and scan through file names looking for the right one, then write up a label on paper and paste it into TEFA because sometimes the only information I had about photos was in the file or folder name. 

I started doing this work on about 3 Sept when I carried down thousands of photos and dumped them on the dining table. I worked every evening doing photos (4 corner sticky tabs each photo) while watching TV, or at least I had the TV on in the background providing noise and company while I worked otherwise in silence. I think that I got the story straight, my aim to help the photos tell the story of the Dean da Silva Kewish Caldicott families – my family names, the ones I grew up with – so that I’d have something to pass onto the Yokotas and Matsumotos.

Yokota is my son’s last name, Matsumoto is my daughter’s last name.

I am the last of the da Silvas in Australia, the name subsuming Dean, Caldicott and Kewish. But Australia rejected us and we went elsewhere to establish families, me in Japan my brother in the US. The album is a chronicle of disaster stemming from my father, a malignant narcissist who, when he realised that both his children had run away out of sheer terror, went back to Portugal to find a replacement family there, even though growing up he had NEVER said a single word about any of them out there in a homeland he always seemed to despise because he seemed to hate his father. Dad used to make fun of my grandfather on account of Joao Luis’ bad English and he ridiculed things like temper tantrums not making any effort to understand “why”. Things like racism.

My Japanese family calls my father “P-chan” with “P” standing for “Peter” and “chan” being a familiar diminutive used noncommittally in Japan to refer for example to children or boyfriends. There’s nothing else to do, he’s part of our lives forever or at least for as long as anyone gives face to his memory but he NEVER once in the nine years that I lived in Japan made the effort to visit us where we lived. He could go to Portugal to stay for months to meet with family there but his own grandchildren didn’t get to see him unless WE travelled to a place that was convenient for HIM.

A sick joke.

Not a father.

The problem that P-chan offers is that everything had to be on his terms, he never met you even half-way. It was “my way or the highway” with P-chan, he was right and everyone else could go to hell. No wonder we left him alone. 

When I was working at Yamatake one time I was sent to the CEO’s office to do an interview and Ido-san was brusque if not dismissive. I slated this down to office politics because my work unit had sort of fallen into the class of being sponsored by a man in the company at a senior rank who’d been a competitor of Ido-san’s before Ido-san became CEO, and old animosities die hard I understand that. At the end of our ten minutes together he said that I should go back to Australia so my father could see his grandchildren. Ido-san knew my father they’d done business together. But though I would eventually go back it wasn’t voluntarily. 

I have spent most of my life trying to maintain a sense of agency.

TEFA started in late May and finished in early September but in reality because of the triggering nature of the exercise it’d been going on since 2019, when I went out of my way to buy dry-mount photo albums and sticky corners. I’d had them gathering dust in a cupboard.

On 8 Sept the day after sending TEFA to Japan I had regrets and wished I could’ve spent more time making it because I felt like an opportunity had been lost. My purpose in making TEFA had all along been – like with ‘Reminiscences’ – to capture and preserve. It seemed important to me because once a person is dead their memories are also lost unless they have first been captured somewhere in some recorded form, like a family photo album or a memoir, or else handed down via spoken stories. I’d lost so much when mum died, every week there were things I wanted to ask her but couldn’t. I didn’t want other people to feel my loss.

I missed my mother.

I was hard on dad in TEFA.

I miss my mother.

On 8 Sept I wrote a poem about memory, by this time in my life I had lived so long and had done so many things that it felt natural to talk about driving in the car in the mid-80s. I put nothing about that Ford Laser in TEFA, there were many things that I had left out. I comforted myself with the knowledge that my family would at least look through the album and discuss it, perhaps, among themselves. It seemed like the appropriate way to deal with life.

On 7 Sept I went to Sydney Contemporary and met with Mark Ferguson, who I knew from back in the 1980s, he was a friend of a work colleague. Nowadays he’s like me much involved in the art world, perhaps more than me. I got my invitation to the show from a northern rivers artist I bought collages from in about 2013. I don’t know where he got his invite from he told me but I forgot. On the way back home I caught the bus on Regent Street, here’s the cars streaming down the road from the CBD with their lights on, as they come over the rise their lights shine in your eyes momentarily until they pass by and go on toward Henderson Rd.

A busy stretch of road the council has just improved by inserting into it a new set of traffic lights for a pedestrian crossing south of where the photo stabs. The photo was taken looking north, the bus comes up the hill and pauses taking on passengers ready to progress down the road, I get on  the bus and ride it all the way to Botany and then get off it at my street, I’m usually the only person to get off there. Regent Street is quite another kettle of fish there are usually dozens of passengers waiting to get onto any number of different buses but I wish they’d put in a train line.

On 20 Sept I subscribed to X (formerly Twitter) it’s a bit of a process you have to add a form of ID, I used my diver’s license. The camera on the PC tries to take snapshots of the back and front of the card, it takes a bit of time to get things aligned properly. The reason I did this is because I saw a news item on the Guardian website saying that Musk would make all users subscribe and since I knew someone else badly wanted my handle I got in before it could be taken away. 

On this day Adelaide held her 100 days’ celebration at a restaurant in Yokohama (see photo below). I didn’t have any new videos to share so sent snapshots to some people instead. One friend said that Henri will be a chick magnet when he’s bigger.

I started ‘Dark alphabet’ on 22 Sept and finished the watercolour part two days later, thinking to add collage. I asked for advice on Instagram but got no response. By the end of the month I’d finished the entire thing and had it laid out on the floor for contemplation it was a mammoth task but I pulled through, the Posca marks I did in one session one after the other all 24 panels.

On 26 Sept I went to the framers to specify the items for the exhibition, there were 13 of them and I paid a deposit. The exhibition would be held in early Nov, with the opening party on the 2nd. 

My visit to the framers was to pick up some things I’d specified for my own use, and included things mum had drawn in the 50s and 60s. One of these things is a set of evening party cartoons that I got framed 4-up (four in one frame) and sent to Japan. Another was a set of drawings as photocopies for a fashion designer named Chris Jacovides (see pic below).

I chose a pink fillet for this item to add a feminine refinement, and a gold-and-black frame to give it distinction. Mum was a reader of fashion magazines all her life, I grew up with copies of Vogue hanging around the house (as well as House & Garden), and she sold fashion in her shop. I remember vacuuming the change room which was surrounded by dresses, not a curtain (the dresses were the curtain), the soft drapery of the garments adding mystique to a daily chore during school holidays. Mum was an inveterate communicator and had been the school magazine editor in her final year, she had also worked as a commercial artist for some time after matriculating. I do wonder if she was paid for her drawings or if she did it as a favour to a friend.

There were other items including a drawing of my brother when he was about 3 years old, and a photo of mum aged about 18. I have these in the hallway on the first floor where there were spaces. Another item still to pick up as the month turned over was a photo of P-chan as a small boy (see photo below).