Liptrap Loft Feature, in The Age
It's the time of year when I find myself locked to my laptop late at night, sweaty-eyed and scrolling through the listings on holiday accommodation websites. Hours are spent entering random dates, cursing the calendars with their little red squares of taken days. I have left it too late – anything with Ikea furnishings and floorboards went weeks ago. I'm down to Bazza's Beach Shack with the blurry photos of the mancave and no reviews. But anywhere is better than nowhere. Summer just doesn't feel like summer unless I can spend three to five days of it sitting on a stranger's deck, pretending it's my own. In my mental polaroid of past and future calm, I'm wearing something beachy-comfy and reading populist fare from the house "library" - Agatha Christie or Ian Fleming, a spine-split Stephen King.
Holiday rentals used to be the place to catch up on crap DVDs but I've noticed this is on the wane. The modern dwelling seems to be more aspirational, with WiFi and Foxtel, and a coffee machine, "all the comforts of home" (or as a friend says, same shit, different house). All of which makes me wonder, where am I really trying to go? To quote John Travolta from Look Who's Talking - a likely candidate for Bazza's shelves: It's weird, isn't it? You spend the first nine months trying to get out and the rest of your life trying to get back in.
In the 1970s my parents and my aunt and uncle bought a beach house at Inverloch for about five dollars. It had two bedrooms and a fireplace, a cement porch and four panels of coloured bubble-glass in the front door. Every school holidays we'd pile into the car for the two-hour journey to our other life. We'd play I-spy and Who Farted? We'd drone, "Are We There Yet?" Those car trips are the reason I know the words to songs like Day-Trip to Bangor and A Long Way to Tipperary.
We kids had no sense of geography. We knew the trip by markers: an old hotel, a railway crossing, a farmhouse surrounded by pine trees, signs to places with funny names like Kongwak and Poowong. At the three-quarter mark we'd stop at a roadhouse. The building is still there but it looks like it was taken over by hippies and left to ruin. I know this because come summer I find myself wending the way of Gippsland like some migrational human. The drive seems quicker now – possibly because I'm the one driving. Rounding the bend to Kilcunda, seeing the fierce blue forever still makes me catch my breath.
Memory is like a sea, vast and choppy. My memories of Inverloch and the beaches around are outdoorsy and wild. They are about discoveries: the Brigadoon lagoon my cousin found – we swam in it one summer and never found it again; mushrooming in fields that now hold beige and unspectacular houses; hiding in wind-tunnelled tea trees.
Once, I found some curious bones and gave them to my art teacher. She said she'd research them but never got back to me. (Adults, huh. Always disappointing.) At Inverloch kids roamed the streets until sunset. I learned to ride my bike on the bumpy half-built roads behind the surf beach singing Hey Jude in my head. (Everyone in the family was OK with the Beatles.)
We made up for the lack of TV by endlessly quoting from The Goodies. We read Enid Blyton and Mad Magazine. We played cheat and chase the ace. Jigsaws would be completed over slow weeks - and the summer was like that too - an accumulation of days making a big picture that was indistinguishable from the one before.
In my memories, I am always the adventurer. I am scrappy and uncivilised. Tough. You'd never catch me crying. There was boredom, too, but today I find myself yearning for this particular variety of boredom, even as I resent the cliche of The Good Ol' Days. I miss Spam and tinned spaghetti. I miss sunburn and sandflies, the black bakelite toilet seat, the melamine egg-cup-plates that resembled futurist flying saucers. Revert. Revert. This is what I'm looking for.
Claire Cooper Marcus in The House as Mirror of Self has this to say about childhood spaces: "For most of us, the childhood dwelling and its environs is the place of first getting in touch with who we are as distinct personalities. Indeed, we may have a clearer, more accurate sense of our true selves in that time than in later years, when the demands of social and familial expectations create mask-like overlays on the psyche, hence the critical importance of looking back at childhood places as sources of understanding more deeply who we are."
Sometimes I resented the holiday house. It's true – I didn't even know I was lucky. Years later I found an aerogramme sent by a British relative, steeped in snark: "So, does everyone down under have two houses?". My parents and aunt and uncle sold the Inverloch house in the 1980s for about 10 dollars. It's still there, looking remarkably like it does in our old family photos. On more than one occasion I have idled outside it, pinioned by lightning bolts of memory. I have thought about knocking on the door and asking for a tour but fear that if I see it as some place else, I will lose forever the place that it was.
Summers keep coming. We sleep in squeaky beds in random houses that all smell of the same cleaning fluids. We bring the dog or we leave him at home. We fail to remember keycodes. We attempt to leave devices at home, but always crack at the last minute. I have failed to reproduce my childhood – there are no hordes of kids, sea-washed and sand-crusted, colonising the laminex table, drinking cordial and eating doorstop slices of white bread fresh from the bakery. Now, if we go away, there are more adults than children. The balance is out but I have left that too late too.
Cooper Marcus writes about domophobes, people who are perpetually leaving home. Sometimes I feel like Goldilocks, trying to find the place that is just right. And then I find it: a wooden house near Walkerville. It has a king size bed and a Japanese bathhouse, acres of green, no TV. Everything in the house has been built by the same hand, right down to the dishrack. Light floods in from the sawtooth roof. The house is just an oblong, it could be a dance-studio or a warehouse. It has minimal furnishings and is completely devoid of doohickeys and whatsits. It is like nowhere I've ever lived and yet it feels very much like home.
Leafing through the guestbook I realise I am not the first person to think this. We spend days rock-pooling and nights star-gazing. We beachcomb, gathering stones, bones, feathers, driftwood, sea-glass and cuttlefish shells and arrange our treasures on the table. When the holiday is over I try to replicate the displays at home, but they are soon lost in the detritus of everyday life. I dream about the house. My son draws its zig-zag roof, over and over. I think about how as parents we are in the business of memory-making, and no one put that in the job description, but this is where the sweaty-eyed stress comes from. There is the dream and there is Bazza's beach shack. I step away from the laptop and engage in magical thinking.
Maybe someone will cancel. Next year I will be more organised. Our future nostalgia depends on it.
- Simone Howe, The Age
