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1. the encouragement and regulation of the appropriate use, understanding,
and enjoyment of each national park and historic site by the
public;” (Camm, Camm and Irwin, p. 146). The regulation of enjoyment,
the encouragement of understanding, the encouragement of enjoyment,
the regulation of understanding... Each of these suspiciously hollow
words, surgical words, as it were, had hurt where it hurts, had caused,
day after day and year after year, each blade of grass to be less of a
blade of grass, each nasturtium flower in the sunny recesses of rocky
coves to be as devious as all they humans (Jacques, herself, Fred, Youssef,
Sylvie, Jill and others) and their pictures of the world, had been all
along. Even when she had met Jacques in the ground floor hall of the
Mungo McCallum building one early afternoon at the end of the Easter
holidays of 1973 —was that after she had kissed his hand?—, and what
had happened? Was it when they had planned to have lunch together at
the Wentworth cafeteria on Tuesday? Now they were building a “long
overdue” multimedia complex and teaching and research structure for
Fine Arts and the Humanities just opposite the ugly McCallum-Brennan
bar of greyish bricks and aluminium windows. The early sixties were
becoming historical. Now they would not cart away the rubble of their
wild room in Chippendale ($9 per week, was it the rent they paid?).
Now she went out to the yellow concrete balcony where the sheets
(hers and those from La’s cot) were drying in a weak easterly breeze. She
had a look at the patchy greyish grass of the vacant lot across the old black
palisade and the high mesh fence. Some day they would build another
block of flats there, someone would look at her balcony, which would be
done in natural ochre and light pistachio. The kid would try to guess the
naked shape of the young long-haired blond woman inside through the
thin white curtains. But she would not live here any more, she would be
converted into a Norman Lindsay of our time, the eccentric wife of old
Fred, the former nurseryman of French’s Forest, painting Aboriginal
girls playing the flute among beds of kangaroo paws. It would be called
“The Return of the Kurrajong Nymphs”, unframed, not for exhibition.
She would touch the flabby skin under her chin with the sticky tip of her
thick fingers stained with bright green and red. She would not think of
those savage kisses which used to draw blood to their necks, between the
mesh fences of construction sites in Chippendale, on the deserted sandy
strip under the Long Reef Gold Coast, on the blond straw matting of her
Mona Vale flat... Or would she? She would not. She no longer thought
of it, she barely named it. She was far and safe. Poor old Jacques, his
hair and beard all grey, almost white, wears eyeglasses, Kathy had said.
Lucky me that these two love each other.
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