What God Likes

Graffiti seen in Illawarra Rd by a friend, but sadly cleaned off before I could photograph it:

"God hates homos"

and someone had written underneath it:

"Does he like Falafel?"

The Carriage Held But Just Ourselves

I've started a new blog over the road at wordpress (blogger is great, I just thought I'd try something different). It's a bit more personal than Marrickvillia... so please come to visit at http://thecarriageheldbutjustourselves.wordpress.com/, I'd love to see you. Marrickvillia is almost an old lady now in blog-years: she is out to pasture but I will visit her often -- in fact, there is a review of a new book set in Marrickville on my stovetop as I type...

If anyone would like to write something for Marrickvillia please feel free: reviews, commentary, politics, festivals, found objects, crime, culture, transport, food -- anything -- so long as it's about Marrickville, obviously.

See you around the layers of webbiness...

mj

I hopped on the 423 at Railway Square on Friday night but the driver wouldn't take my money. Apparently while I've been away the buses have become cash-free. I was cross and hungry and not about to get off the bus I'd waited ages for so I muttered "Whatever" and headed up the back, dropping my coins into my bag. The driver didn't say anything, he didn't care. After stretching my armpits swinging around on the hand-holds all along King St I finally got a seat.

Near me were two young men, drunk as -- they couldn't really talk but they could still walk. They were twins, identical, with the same profile: a slightly bumped nose and soft lips. Nice looking, young. They were communicating almost silently, only muttering things to each other occasionally and laughing and gesturing in that funny pissed unco' way. They wore matching blue-green beanies and milk-chocolate coloured tee-shirts, but one had jeans and thongs while his brother had grey trackies and sneakers. The one in jeans sat next to me and his head lolled onto my shoulder. He jerked up and laughed, blue-grey eyes open wide, and I smiled at him.

Then, at Enmore Park, the inspector got on. "Tickets please everyone." Oh shit & buggery I had no ticket. But the inspector ignored me and focused on the drunk brothers. They swayed, they staggered, they groped around in their pockets, they mumbled to each other, and eventually the inspector took them off the bus. But in seconds they'd leapt back on, grinning, waving their found tickets triumphantly. I felt like cheering. They sat far enough away that I could take their photo, and they got off at the corner of Victoria and Marrickville Roads near the cheesecake shop.

90 Cary St

Once upon a time there were market gardens and dairy farms in Marrickville. The area was sparsely populated and still largely rural until about 1900. There's a little decrepit weatherboard cottage in my street--it's been hidden behind dense shrubbery ever since I moved to Marrickville in 2000 and as far as I know nobody has lived in it in that time. Recently the vegetation has been cleared and now there's a sign up saying that two townhouses are going to be built. I think the house must date from about the 1870s, perhaps earlier--it was most likely a modest farmhouse. I thought I'd get some shots before it's torn down. For the full set see my flickr site.

The Davis (or possibly Carrington) Dairy at the corner of Carrington Road and Ruby Street, 1899, only 2 blocks away.

View from the street.

Old stone steps near the front of the property.

The front porch.

Hank, John & Wally did a good job of setting the Hills Hoist into a concrete round in 1959.

Their inscription lasted longer than the clothes line!

A number plate, 30s? 40s?

A close up of the front fence. You can see most of the same fence on the far right in the photo below--it was taken during a fire in the park at the foot of Cary Street in 1954.

The gum in the background is often filled with cockatoos.

Through the arched window...

to have and to hold

On Saturday I attended the most lovely wedding I've been at. It was even nicer than my own, alas. My little brother, Dorian, the one I used to dress up as a princess so I could be the witch and Gareth could be the baddie, got married to his long-time-love Laura. It was a gentle, arty, thoughtful day.

It was brilliant to meet some bloggers there--I felt like two of my worlds had collided, not just the virtual and the real (which I don't see as separate anyway), but the familiar (as in family) and the bloggy, the artful-creative and the lived-history.

And how things change in that lived history...a favourite auntie who I still think of as slim and blonde and super-glamorous is now a rounded middle-aged brunette. One of my 89 year old grannies--I am hugely lucky to have two of them--who looked close to death a few months ago is now almost sprightly, and definitely back to her canny observant self. A wayward teenager who hasn't been able to face his own father since before Christmas was obliged to attend, and the two of them got on like a house on fire because they were both just so HAPPY. Therapy? forget it, you just need a good wedding.

Not everyone chooses to marry, and not everyone who wants to can do so (yet). Dorian and Laura had a rare opportunity to create a day when things and people, generations and worlds, could come together, and they carried it off beautifully. It was magical.