Precious Things

A Walk on the Child's Side

2012-01-17T08:07:00.002+11:00

'There will be rainy days with umbrellas and gumboots,
and hot ones with sunscreen and hats,
but I'm looking forward to the early morning amble.'

After nearly a month of sleep-ins, school's just about to return. But very few students will be walking there. The mundane foot-slog has been in steadily decline since the 1970s. Why, given health concerns about childhood inactivity and obesity, is this the case? And what might concerned parents do about it?

I've an opinion piece on this issue in today's Age newspaper : 'Healthier, happier families take a walk on the child's side'. Here's a sample of what I say:

'Most parents will have earnestly asked their child about their day, only to meet with a mumbled ''good'', quickly followed by ''I'm hungry''. This is also my experience. But somewhere over the daily walk more about my son's day tumbles out, prompted by association from the things we see. I hear him making sense of friendship and its limits - his moral code being constructed just as solidly as his cardboard and sticky-tape box constructions. This is the unexpected and rare parental opportunity to hear more. As we walk, the space for emotional support and empathy opens up.'

And if you'd like to do more walking in your area in 2012, but it doesn't appear walk-friendly, take a look at these resources on assessing walkability from the Heart Foundation and Victoria Walks. They cover comfort, aesthetics and safety issues, and what you can do to improve any problem areas you find.

The Fashion Race

2012-01-14T07:48:00.001+11:00

(Source: Sue Clark on Wiki Commons)

I've an opinion piece in today's Age newspaper on fast fashion, Maybe it's time for a change of gear in fashion's fast lane.

Most of us know that constantly refreshing our wardrobes is a wasteful enterprise. Even if the clothes are produced under the best of environmental conditions, it still results in an enormous amount of textile waste. In the UK, for instance, each person throws out 30 kilos of wanted clothing each year.

So: if we know the costs, why do we still do it? What do new clothes offer other than a bulging wardrobe and a lighter wallet? Is it just novelty-seeking, fed by the constant supply of new, cheap fashions?

And, if we do want to change our ways, how might we steel ourselves against the urge to keep up with the fashion Joneses and the nausea of out-of-date styles?

Read more here.

The Lost Soul of Home

2012-01-05T14:35:00.004+11:00

(Image source here)

I've an opinion piece in today's Canberra Times, 'Selling the very soul of our homes'. It looks at the popularity of styling and staging houses for sale, its virtues and vices.

From a selling point, it makes sense - styling offers a competitive edge. It also helps us to break the bonds with our property.

But, is this the new normal? Do we want to live in an anonymous stylist's fantasy of the good life?

My Year Without Blogging...

2011-12-31T20:30:00.000+11:00

(Photo: Eddie Jim, Life+Style, The Age)

'A short break', I naively thought. 'I'll get back to it once I've done this.. and that... and finished the next...' Yes, that's how a busy year goes by without blogging.

Of course, it's perfectly in spirit of making deliberate decisions about how best to use time. Even in a relatively simple life, something has to give. I had to prioritise working on an important task, but also the project of how best to live.

So what have I spent my time on instead of blogging?

: putting pen to paper and writing, re-writing, editing.
: keeping an hour a day quarantined from washing clothes, cleaning dishes, vacuuming, to do the above.
: finishing the occasional uninterrupted conversation with my husband.
: walking and talking with my son to and from school.
: hanging out and getting to know a very sociable two-year-old who has suddenly become three.
: read Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, still in the third volume of The Diary of Virginia Woolf, and have recently begun Alexandra Harris' Romantic Bohemians.
: feasting on the London Review of Books - easily the best thing to arrive in my letterbox each fortnight.
: doing the odd spot of sewing and creating.
: making furniture with my son for his sister's dolls house.
: spending weekends at lots of kids' birthday parties.
: doing a minor spot of commenting for Lindy Percival's piece on the simple life, 'The New Age of Old', recently in The Age's Life+Style. I'll expand on the renaissance of making by hand, and what it means, soon (I promise).

Sounds like a simple, easy-going year, doesn't it? Yet, somehow it was jammed-packed, hectic and full-on. And now, as we rocket towards the next year, of kindergarten and grade 1, I thought I'd better stop by to re-connect and commit to blogging in 2012. Warm wishes for the new year!

Thing People - Kirsty Murray's Clock and Snow Dome

2011-02-23T20:09:00.004+11:00

A little while back I invited Kirsty Murray, a writer of books for children and young adults, if she'd like to do a Thing People post. Since then, she's not only been busy writing, but also managed to pack up her entire house and embark on a year-long road trip with The Professor and Mr Punch. One of the attractions of a gypsy life is not being saddled with too many things. But what did she choose to bring along with her? Here's her story from the road.
You can vicariously travel with Kirsty, and find out more about her many books at her website or blog Magic Casements.

In Melbourne, our house is full of clutter. Facing the prospect of paring down to just a handful of objects was a pretty scary concept. What's important? What's useful? What to take? What to leave behind?
Last year, Ruth asked me if I'd write a post about a precious object to crosspost on her blog. My first idea was to write about the three Buta (giant) Indonesian puppets that stood in our hallway at home. But when we packed up the house last month only one Buta made it into the Professor's road case. And I realised, as much as I love the puppets, they're not that precious. Sometimes its the things you take for granted, that you become so used to living with that you don't see them any more, that prove more precious than you'd imagined.

At home on our kitchen wall there are two things that I look at every day. One is what we call 'the wall of fame'. It's a cobbled together organic mish mash of family photos that grows and changes from one year to the next. All the kids are represented at various stages of their growing up as well as godchildren, friends and other family.
The second thing is the big railway station clock above the doorway (there's always someone in our house running late to catch a train).
We told our kids not to give us objects for Christmas because we'd just have to put them in storage. But Romanie and Elwyn were particularly cunning about the directive. They looked around the house and recognised the things that we would miss and, very cleverly, created 100% caravan friendly versions of two very precious things.

Romanie's version of our wall clock is even nicer than the original. She made it from a corkboard placemat (unbreakable!). The background is a map of Melbourne with the lovely arc of Port Phillip Bay at the bottom. Rom pasted it down on the board and fixed the clock in place. The red circles on the map are where our kids live: Brunswick, Northcote, Preston, Collingwood - no one moved far from home except for one who is so far away, Romanie could only write "Paris" with an arrow in the top left hand corner.

When we unpacked the caravan for our three weeks at Bundanon, the clock was one of the first things I brought inside. It looks very elegant and very "Melbourne" against the white liner boards of the Bundanon Writers' Cottage.

Elwyn's Christmas present to us is a little less travel friendly but has amazingly survived a month in the caravan without springing a leak. I suspect it will safely make it all the way around the continent. It's the snow dome pictured at top and bottom. Elwyn bought the dome online and then found recent images of all the kids which he photoshopped into a funky design and inserted into the dome. Whenever we pull into a new campsite or destination, the first two things that come out of the cupboard are the snowdome and the clock.

It's too easy to be pragmantic when you're attempting to live like a gypsy and to think that objects don't matter. But in a way they matter more. One of the best bits of caravanning advice I had was from a friend who spent too much time in them as a kid. She said "Don't let anything inside this caravan that isn't beautiful."

Our clock and snowdome are utterly beautiful to me. If I'm feeling maudlin and homesick, I can give the snowdome a good shake and think about the kids (which usually improves my state of mind, rather than making me bluer). And every time I check the time, I think of them too and wonder what they're up to or where they might be in that moment in time.

Objects can represent so much about our connections to time, place and other people. Even gypsies need their precious things to make them feel at home.

(Photo source: Kirsty Murray)

Shaping the days

2011-01-05T09:53:00.002+11:00

This is my new un-pink diary. It’s simple, undated. Last night I wrote in all the dates and months for 2011.

This probably sounds like an old-fashioned thing to do, especially when I could’ve picked up a perfectly good one with the dates already printed. But writing out the year ahead gets me thinking about what May and June will be like, or how big my kids will be in October and December. It connects me to this vague new thing called ‘2011’ (even though I know I’ll keep dating things ‘2010’ well into March).

I had the same type of diary last year, except the smaller, thinner, grey linen one to the left in the photo. Initially, I bought it because of its grey linen cover – I liked the feel and look of it. The year before I’d had a gaudy mauve one, and felt almost ashamed each time I took it out. But the grey linen rewarded my touch each time I actually managed to retrieve it from the trap of my bag.

Last year it took me a while to fill in the dates. This time last year I was still in hospital. And even when I returned home, things were uncertain. I doubted whether I had any need for a diary. At a certain point, a few weeks in, something shifted. Whether it was my health, or simply my mood, I can’t say, but I committed to the year ahead by filling in the days of my diary – it took a week, rather than an evening, one of my first acts of will in 2010.

I’ve found that this year’s diary-dating carries with it some of that feeling: a weighty, tangible, and hopeful commitment to the year ahead.

Last year, a subdued combination of a grey linen diary and blue ink suited my workmanly approach to getting on with life. This year, though, something new was in order, something more joyous, fresh, alive: a faded, almost pink cover - the hue of a petal about to fall - combined with a vivid green ivy of an ink. (The frailty of the petal, and the strength of the vine?)

Is this work worth the effort?

When I open my diary, each day starts with me - my writing, rather than an impersonal font. It's a small thing, but it's a small thing that makes a difference. My own hand-writing alternately taunts and reminds me to take up the challenge to shape my days, instead of leaving it up to an anonymous planner to do it for me.

Rather Run Wild

2010-12-05T15:09:00.003+11:00

'I wish you'd leave Wissett, and take Charleston,' wrote Virginia Woolf to her artist sister Vanessa Bell in May 1916. 'Leonard went over it, and says it's a most delightful house... It has a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely.'

I suspect Virginia Woolf could make any place sound entrancing, even a house lacking hot water and with wallpapers that were, by her own description, 'awful'.

Vanessa took her sister's advice, not because of any great love of Charleston but, in large part, because her lover Duncan Grant faced a difficult choice. He had to either go to war or farm; to work the land or go to prison. Theirs was a move forced by circumstances.

Yet, Charleston would go on to become a well-loved, bohemian and artistic centre; a meeting place between the art of the Omega workshops and the broader world of the Bloomsbury group of thinkers and writers. The awful wallpapers would be quickly erased by Omega designs and stencils. The rooms peopled by a who's who of the Bloomsbury circle: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot, and others.

Charleston, as a creative opportunity, has been very much on my mind of late. The last three weeks have been fully occupied with the task of house-hunting, packing, and moving. A move forced by our landlord deciding to sell at short notice, I wish I could say I'd received a letter about a rundown country house to lease. Instead we found the new place rather more prosaically searching on the internet.

Moving house doesn't come easily for me - I'm not a natural nomad. I like planting a garden, putting down roots. But moving is a direct result of how I've chosen to labour: to leave the illusory stability of one well-defined career track in favour of the flexibility of cultivating my own direction; to move a couple of centimetres off the certain road, with all the uncertainty that entails.

Investing in myself in this way means that my creative labour feels more valuable, to myself and others, but it isn't ever likely to ever pay a huge mortgage. Like most others who choose a creative life - without the expectation of a huge inheritance or generous benefactor - renting is simply part of the trade-off.

And this is why Charleston is such an important symbol for me. It translates what I see before me. It means using a different eye for look at the rental market. To see past the gloss of floorboards and new bathrooms that require sacrifice of time to pay for. To stop upturning my nose at old carpets, vertical blinds, and the unknown wilds past the greenhouse. To see the 'large rooms,' through Virginia's eyes, to pay attention to the 'one with big windows fit for a studio'. To ask myself: Will I be able work and create things here?

(Vanessa Bell painting source: Little Augury Blogspot)

Five!

2010-10-29T08:41:00.000+11:00

Five, already. Wow!

Making Room

2010-10-28T13:00:00.001+11:00

The great danger after doing a big clear-out is the temptation to fill that the new-found space with new stuff. I've been tempted, but haven't succumbed.

I've seen some beautiful objects, but so far I've been able to admire them without having to drag them home with me. I've treated them more like objects in an art gallery or museum. I don't have to own them to appreciate them.

I've also discovered another reward of having less: making room for a few small, very specific additions that complement and extend my current projects (and I now have a clear sense of what these projects are).

These four blue-based fat squares (50x50cm) of Japanese fabric from the Kimono House in Melbourne are a good example. I'd had them a day and they were already put to use before the sun went down, adding the final touches to a certain, soon-to-be, five year-old's birthday present!

Primal Spring Cleaning

2010-10-27T17:49:00.005+11:00

'So, what's brought all this on?' A perfectly reasonable question from my husband, one dark, early morning near the end of winter. At a time of day when I'm usually foggily waking up to the chatter of young children, I was awake bright and alert, running through quite the to-do list. I had yet another day of clearing-out ahead.

Now this isn't usually something I'd approach with gusto. I've always been on fairly happy terms with my things - and admit to having quite a bit of clutter around. (Objectively speaking, I know I don't have that much. I don't have a collecting fetish, vastly space-consuming hobbies, or a shopping addiction.)

I've also always had an unthought, gut-opposition to rigid order. It seemed to make homes become rigid, military, and cold houses. But I know now that I was wrong.

How did all this primal spring cleaning start?

It started small and innocently, to begin with. I never knew I was embarking on the mother-of-all clean ups. I simply began by grouping together some medications that had sat on my bedside table while I was ill. During that time, I was too weak to tidy the room. And in the months that followed, it just wasn't a priority.

So, to start with, I just picked up the tablets, with the intention of putting them away. But where? There were some stored in the bathroom cupboard, others in the back of high kitchen cupboards, out of the reach of small hands. Logically, of course, they should all be in the same place. Soon they were joined by the first aid book, the thermometer, and... and... you get the picture. I was on a roll.

The spice corner in the kitchen came next. And once these were ordered in neat, shiny jam jars, every time I looked at this tidy area I felt good. Something seemed to shift in my long-held comfort with clutter.

So I did a little more. I tackled the hall cupboard where I had narrowly escaped injury from a quill pen falling from the high shelf. It was like doing an archeology of all those things I hadn't got around to repairing, throwing away, or putting in their right spots. Gifts, broken toys, redundant printers and mobile phones.

By this stage, I was well and truly in the swing of this clearing-out business. I moved from shelf to shelf, repairing a good many wooden toys, returning others to their kin in baskets of cars, Lego and plastic dinosaurs, and letting go of all the things that I had put off doing anything about.

The bags for the op shop began mounting in the hall. It started at two bags a day. And still I kept going, room to room - the bags kept filling with decisions made, things let go. My estimate is that about 2 and a half skips worth have gone to the local op shops.

What brought this all on? Initially, I thought it was my reaction to our particularly cold winter, and the mustiness that inhabits a house which is closed-up and heated. I wanted it to be clean, sweet smelling, and easy to move through. I wanted sunshine.

In hindsight, though, I realise that the largest motivation was, like in most other things this year, how I wanted to live. I didn't want a huge gap between what I'd like to be and what is. I didn't want to live with projects unfinished, mess and disorder, things I'd like to do deferred till a theoretical later date. If I wanted to live in a certain way, it was me who'd have to change things.

Now spring has arrived, and with it I've lost some of the energy characteristic of my early cleaning frenzy - it just wasn't sustainable, and I want to be outside on those sunny afternoons sitting in the dappled light. Still, I'm reasonably happy that I've done the bulk of the hard yakka.

The rewards? Shedding so many useless (to me) things has given me a renewed focus and energy. Many projects that up until now been vague ideas or sketches are now afoot - as evidenced by these neat piles of sewing plans and fabric bundles. It's a good feeling.

Resilience

2010-10-13T19:44:00.002+11:00

What do these common geraniums have to do with this blog? ('They're actually pelargoniums', my husband adds.)

I recently transferred these hardy cuttings from the parched pot in which they've sat for close to two years. In that time, spindly storks have become woody and thick as my wrist. I never suspected this was possible. In fact, I never thought they'd even survive. They didn't have the best start. How did I come to have them? The bushfires.

On that day in February 2009, everyone knew it was far too hot and windy, the bush too dry. My mum stayed at home as advised. She looked out her back kitchen window, listening to the sirens and watching the trucks race up and down the mountains a few kilometres away. A not uncommon summer occurrence, but still worrying.

By the afternoon, she was looking anxiously out of her loungeroom. It looked like it was snowing. By evening she could see the hills glowing red. It wasn't until the next day when she, like the rest of us, heard of the full scale of the tragic events: friends without homes, unprecedented and unexpected deaths in the hills, and all that still remained unknown.

I was anxious for her to leave - to come and stay with us. But she needed to take her time. To work out what to bring, to say goodbye to her home; to not feel like she was abandoning her friends and community.

I kept watch on the Country Fire Authority website. I told her when spot fires were streets away from her. We watched and waited, and hoped the wind wouldn't change. Finally, she left and came to stay with us for several weeks, until the urgent threat subsided, even though the uncertainty was to remain much longer.

How did she choose what to bring? I'm still uncertain. She's promised to write about it for me one day. I only know that it took her a long time. Hours, when time seemed critical.

What did she bring, of all her possessions? Very few things. Photos, a picture that was my dad's favourite, and some other small things. I don't know exactly what else she brought along because she left them, all of them, in her car the entire length of her stay. They'd become far less important to her on her journey - less important in the circumstances.

One thing she brought into the house with her surprised me: a bunch of common pink pelargonium stems. These geraniums were hidden down the back of her large garden. My late father had planted them as a marker of sorts, dividing the cultivated garden off from the raw bush. I know they aren't her favourite plants - they aren't the finest examples of pelargonium - and yet, she wanted to make sure I planted them, and gave them a good chance to live.

Why? Well I'll have to speculate as I doubt she truly could explain it. Perhaps because they were simply a little bit of her garden that she could bring with her. She couldn't bring the August daffodils still in bulb below the surface, or the September freesia, or the Lily of the Valley, or the dappled Liquidambar trees. But she could bring these robust stems, in full knowledge that they stood a fighting chance. Even as her daughter, new baby in arms, hastily stuffed them into a pot of baked old dirt, and would then neglect to water through that summer of 40+ degree days (104+ fahrenheit).

The geranium cuttings are now too big for their pot, and have a new home in a ramshackle garden bed that I too generously call a cottage garden. And the original ones are still there out the back of a country house and garden, amidst a valley of new green, even if there is no forgetting.

We might not always be able to put our finger on why certain objects are precious. Their meaning might exist below our psyche's wakefulness. That said, we might not always need to consciously know what we need: we might just choose the objects that best exemplify the quality we need at that time. And that might come in the form of a woody, shaggy, Barbie-pink, common garden pelargonium.

(Photo: Pelargonium.)

Home Work

2010-10-09T17:34:00.004+11:00

I've been a most neglectful blogger lately - you might have noticed. Not for lack of wanting to sit down and write, and not for want of things to write about. My notebook has a stack of ideas hastily scribbled down.

But life, as they say, has intervened: family dramas, primal Spring cleaning, Kindergarten holidays, bursts of creativity that need to be followed, sunny picnics on the front lawn. Eeep! Still, I think I'm right to prioritise these things. Sometimes blogging, like work, ought to take a back seat.

It's easy to get into a bit of muddle about what's important and necessary - everything seems important and necessary when you're in a hurry, without the time to truly stop and reflect. It takes time to unwind and reassess patterns. Nothing has helped me sort out my priorities like this year spent recovering from serious illness. I wouldn't recommend it, but it has its upside: I'm no longer deferring decisions.

A friend asked me the other day if I fear getting sick again. It's in my mind, this possibility, but I don't fear it in the same way. I know that I will die someday - that's a fact - but I do worry about not having lived well.

When I was sick, I knew that I was living most of life well. With one exception: work. My natural aptitudes hadn't lead me down a path to which I was well-suited, even with supportive and friendly colleagues.

Now ten months down the track, this is where my thinking has taken me: the home office. I promise to blog about it in the future. Until then, if you'd like to, you can read about my reflections as a Generation X employee in today's MyCareer section of today's The Age or Sydney Morning Herald. Or online here, (unfortunately, without the print copy's cool illustration). Here's a taster:

'It's also almost a year since I last stepped foot in a corporate, grey, silent and glassy office, in favour of the home office. And I keep asking myself: what's changed, for the better or worse? What are the things I miss most about the violent jolt of working in a city office? It's not the decor or the professional dress, or the overheating in winter and freezing in summer.'

(Photo source: Wiki Commons)

World Car Free Day

2010-09-22T16:07:00.003+10:00

Turn off the ignition. Take off that seat-belt. Step away from the vehicle, ma'am. Yep, folks it's World Car Free Day.

To celebrate this under-celebrated day, I've a piece on the ABC's The Drum Unleashed: 'Can we can the car?

Here's a tidbit:

'Car-travellers of the world, unite – you have nothing to lose but your…cars.

Haven’t heard of it? That’s hardly surprising. As a nation, we Australians are well and truly hooked on our cars, trucks and motorbikes. While most of us aren’t revvheads, shining the duco or detailing the interior, we do have a love affair with using our vehicles. Only 20% of Australians are regular car free commuters, with 14% taking public transport, 4 % walking and 2% cycling to the office on a regular basis.'

And if you feel inclined to get walking and talking, you might be interested in this competition: Talk Your Walk, being held by Victoria Walks. You have to live in Victoria to enter - let's give a new meaning to 'Victoria on the Move'.

Photo source: wikicommons

Green Dilemma #2

2010-09-17T08:00:00.000+10:00

Where have all the patched knees gone?

Every kid I knew used to have the knees of their jeans patched, especially after a busy afternoon of outdoor adventures. Iron-on patches, and the more elaborate kind that featured embroidery, seem to have gone the way of Tang, dunagarees and Milo - no longer cool enough.

Or is it simply that most people can afford to buy new, cheap things - that they value their time to shop rather than to mend what they have? Or could it be that we like to feel affluent and like we've got it all together - patches remind us of financial uncertainty, they are an old overt sign of poverty, they speak of the veneer which they cover up?

These some of the speculations that ran through my head as I took ten minutes to make a quick felt, leaf-shaped patch for my daughter's jeans, using antique gold thread from my own mother's sewing box.

Green Dilemma

2010-09-15T20:21:00.001+10:00

Somehow I managed to destroy my ultra-warm, 100% wool, green roll-neck jumper. It'd become a shrunken, felted shadow of what it once was. While it was only a $1 op shop find, the make-do-and-mender part of me couldn't bear to throw it out. And it wasn't really op shop material anyway, given the major shrinkage.

So I put off doing anything about it. On cold days, I'd regretfully find it in the back of the wardrobe, and wonder what to do about it. Then I'd quickly put it back in its hiding place.

Then I came across this book in the local library, and resolved to rescue my green friend. While I've always been a bit scared of remodelling anything knitted, this book reassured me that if I'd truly felted the wool, then the fibres would have matted. This meant that I could safely cut into the wool without fear of it unravelling.

I took the scissors and cut off the thick collar and hem, and reshaped the front into a bolero style (inspired by the book's cover). Great idea, but it didn't really work for me - my jumper had simply shrunk too much.

But rather than give up, when I'd already come this far, I picked up the ribbed collar and hem, sewed them around the bolero's raw edges to give it a few more necessary inches on the shoulders and across the front. Then I added a distinctive, locally made, wooden button to finish it off (and hide a join that was in the wrong spot!).

I'm told that the resulting cropped cardigan is in fact called a 'shrug'. Whatever it's called, it's great for fickle Springtime weather. A green dilemma solved.

A Reverie of Matter III

2010-09-05T09:21:00.004+10:00

"My sister Susan, more widely known as the writer A. S. Byatt, said in an interview somewhere that she was distressed when she found that I had written (many decades ago) about a particular teaset that our family possessed, because she had always wanted to use it herself. She felt that I had appropriated something that was not mine."

- Margaret Drabble, 2009, The Pattern in the Carpet.

A small gesture for those who come to look, pause and dream...

A New-old Chair

2010-09-03T07:00:00.004+10:00

I have it on good authority that a competitive Bridge Club once existed a couple of streets away. Elderly Bridge players would spill into the street after their evening games, hurling abuse at one another. I like to think that one of them once owned this chair that I found a year ago in the local op shop. A steal at $15.

I've been thinking about Bridge chairs quite a bit this week. Or, more accurately, I've been sitting in them a lot, and the thinking has come second. You see, a horrible cold, and then a wretched cough, was followed by a back-spasm-ouch-can't-move-without-pain-thing (yes, it was thrown in thrown free as an added extra).

Now I'm not telling you my tale of woe to share the misery around. No, a couple of visits to the local physio will set me to rights again. (Physios work wonders by helping you learn what to do to become aware of your own body.)

The things I learnt yet again were the many merits of the old Bridge chair. Simply put, these chairs are fantastic.

The 1920s and 1930s is described by Steven Parissien as 'a stirring tale of Men and Their Chairs'. Each big name architect and designer did a chair - think Breur's 'Wassily' Chair or Le Corbusier's chaise lounge. And, yet it's these unbranded chairs from that era and the one that followed that are the clear winners in the good posture stakes: well-proportioned so feet can touch the floor, comfortable upright back, arm-support and amenable to a bit of easy recovering (in both senses of the word).

This particular chair is one of four in our home. It's probably the newest and most recent, judging by the simplicity of its arms. It originally came in a vintage floral fabric so vile that I felt my stomach churn every time I looked at it. I'm no expert, but I successfully recovered the chair in this whimsical Korean fabric, which reminds me of windswept dandelions.

But I'm not convinced of this fabric's merits. It's stayed for a year, but I still am doubtful. Some hate it, others say they actually like it. What do you think? And if you hate it, any suggestions for the next covering?

Handmade #2

2010-08-22T16:19:00.003+10:00

A quick post of the easy, cord dress I made my little girl yesterday. It has one small pocket which is for... putting rocks in, of course!

Handmade

2010-08-21T13:22:00.008+10:00

Some of my favourite childhood clothes were handmade. I remember playing, watching the dust swirl in the sun, as my mum fussed away over straight seams and rolled hems. The results: drop-waisted dresses, aprons, and holly-hobby bonnets. My older sister also made me simple sundresses and a knitted hooded duffle coat - the latter of which is about to go into service again for a soon-to-be five year old.

Homemade clothes were far more common back then. I loved the fact that these things had been made especially for me, with special little details and colour choices.

There were other bonuses too. I didn't go to school wearing the same thing as everyone else.

I also wasn't dressed exclusively in all the shades of pink and cartoon prints so common in today's mainstream girls wear. While there is a vast bulk of cheap op shop clothes around, much of it is in various shades of pink. This is cute in the first instance, but it grows monotonous after a while.

I always hoped to make a fair bunch of my own kids' clothing, and have a suitable stash of second-hand fabrics with which to do so. I'd like to confidently take the hand made pledge as blogger Jorth has done, at her daughter Grumbles behest. However, two active preschoolers don't always make this an easy option. Perhaps this is something I'll try for in another six months or so.

That said, I'm trying to make the time to do a bit more, even though little Sophia stands impatiently by the sewing machine saying 'Dita's turn now'.

I'm very happy with the smattering of imperfect things I've made them: a duffle coat, two toy rabbits, doona covers and patchwork quilts, a couple of summer dresses for Sophia, and another winter cord one made today (picture to come, when the model awakes).

And Nikos and Sophia, for their part, have worn their mum-made things to death. It's very satisfying to see my creative labours in the world, appreciated by the little people I love.

One extra thing I like about making these things myself is that it puts the brakes on the impulse to have too many things. A few lovely things, made with care and love, are more than enough.

Scrapbook

2010-08-20T09:58:00.009+10:00

A few months ago, after a few false starts, I decided to actively wean myself off magazines. Women's mags had gone years ago, along with any interest in fast fashion. (In fact, I think the two things went together - cutting out magazines helped win the battle against manufactured need.)

But the home ones stayed, even if only bought or borrowed intermittently.

So I tried a new tactic: creating my own. Mining my stash of magazines for the images, shapes, colours and ideas that really got my attention and putting them all in the one place.

This isn't a particularly original device. When I was an art and ceramics student I kept a visual inspiration diary of all the things that attracted my attention, keeping them alongside sketches, plans and ideas. I was writing my PhD at the time, and the visual and tactile were a good counter-balance to being in my own head much of the time.

In the years since, I've mostly worked in the world of words and ideas - I've quickly lost my visual language. Hence my passive reliance on magazine stylists' assemblages of things, rather than creating my own. I think we all need some outside inspiration, it's a matter of degree I'm speaking about here. For me, it had gone too much the other way.

Of course, I still know my inclinations for natural textures, warm woods rather than steel, organic and serpentine shapes instead of perfect geometry, the oddly handcrafted rather than the perfectly manufactured. And my favoured colours of reds, browns and greens.

But this all came home to me with more clarity and in a more immediate way when, on a sunny afternoon, my son and I sat on the front step, scissors and glue in hand, our two scrapbooks in front of us, selecting and cutting and sticking images from a swag of old magazines. Ideas of things to make, shapes and colours that have grabbed our attention. His scrapbook was chiefly filled with maps, boats, cars and kids, and lots of red and blue (his favourite colours).

Now months later, when I flip through my scrapbook, the collection of images make me strangely happy: flowers, driftwood creations, pottery, children's toys. I can see my idiom reflected back to me from its pages. It isn't just a random collection of things - there is a language of objects at work. And that language is mine.

It allows me to see these inclinations, likes and hopes in a somewhat objective way. To question what is there and why. And if it is there, should it be something I live with in my home? Would it make a difference? Should I try to close the gap between what is and what I enjoy?

One of the things I saw repeated in its pages, was something I was always planning to make, for years! And so I actually made the slipcover of a few blogs ago as a result of the scrapbook materialising a vague plan. (The slipcover has, by the way, been a fantastic washable, cheap, home-made investment.)

My next task for myself is to try to further fathom what this language is telling me. What does it say about me to me, and to others?

Escapist Feasts

2010-08-18T14:23:00.003+10:00

I'm a sucker for the occasional home magazine, especially country ones. Despite my view that they are a waste of money and my resolve not to buy them, they still get me when I'm having a low moment. They're like a paper chocolate biscuit, they pick-me-up.

What's the appeal?

First, they're a visual feast of homes, objects and gardens. I don't like everything I see in them, but they offer aesthetic food: colours, shapes and combinations. This nourishment is handy when I can't see my own home clearly - when I've swept and washed up for the umpteenth time, and it all seems a little too much like hard work.

Second, and more problematically, they allow me to indulge in a little fantasy of life elsewhere; of the classic tree-change; of village life, Bloomsbury-inspired interior decoration, and jersey cows.

Now having lived in the Australian country, I know the reality of the good and bad. The crisp air and mountains that are always up, as well as the smoke spirals over the hills and the tiger snake by the letter box. But in a sedate British country magazine, the more difficult aspects of rural life are always rendered in a charming way. It is all hedgerows and squirrels.

This aesthetic and imaginary escapism is two-sided affair. 'All modern people have their own repertoire of eleswheres, of alternatives,' writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, 'the places they go in their minds, and the ambitions they attempt to realize - to make their actual, lived lives more than bearable. Indeed the whole notion of escape, that it is possible and desirable, is like a prosthetic device of the imagination. How could we live without it?'

Yet, it isn't all escape and then return to a brute and unwanted reality. No, a brief imaginary holiday can bring me back to where I am, stronger for the break, clearer in the sense of who I am, seeing the ordinary world around me anew.

Despite these benefits, I don't think buying them is a particularly good use of limited funds, so I've found a way to stop buying them new... 20 cents at the op shop!

A New Right?

2010-08-15T19:25:00.006+10:00

I am a committed second-hander. Hand-me-downs, op-shopped, and cast-offs make up the 99 per cent of my wardrobe. It wasn't always this way, but I like it. I like discovering what I like amongst the jumble; realising that I am drawn to certain colours, textures, fabrics. Decades of not buying new has made me realise that my taste isn't sovereign or rigid. I have made happy discoveries of new things about myself amongst other people's cast-offs.

But about once a year I find myself in need of the other one per cent. You know the things: socks, undies and bras. Which brings me reluctantly to an average chainstore.

Imagine my surprise as I stood in the cue with my essential smalls to confront a large, wall-size sign. It informed me that it wasn't just a plain old fashioned economic exchange that was about to happen. No, I was exercising my right. A rather new right, one that I'm sure you won't find in any UN statement: 'Every Australian has the right to look good and feel good about the way they dress and live'.

Phew. I feel better already. Much relieved. Now I won't have to worry about being such a second-hand rose. Or not doing my bit for the economy. After all, it's my right, you know!

On Motherhood

2010-08-08T20:00:00.000+10:00

A few weeks back I went to the local park with my two kids. Nothing out of the ordinary here. What was exceptional was how I felt. Sitting on the park bench, I had what seemed like an epiphany: I realised how amazingly easy it was. That I was a 'good enough mother' to have two preschoolers playing happily.

Usually co-parenting my two youngsters, despite its highest of highs, can feel like being stuck in a Dr Who episode, narrowly averting one catastrophe after another. You know, the simplest things: 'Look for cars', 'You'll fall off your chair', 'No, don't stuff walnuts in your ears.'

Of course, my husband and I fail as often as we succeed in this parenting gig. Minor disasters occur, there are tears, and guilt. The only way to deal with the latter being humour. We cast the terms 'Bad Mother' and Bad Father' around ('BF' & 'BM', for short), as a way to lighten the mood, to show how trivial such lapses really are.

But not on this sunny winter's afternoon. No, on this afternoon it was a 'breeze', a 'cinch', it was 'a piece of cake'. I was that ghostly apparition of advertising that haunts parents everywhere. I was the 'Good Mother'.

Now it felt wonderful, but moments of such comfortable ease are rare. That's not to say that parenting is all slog and burden - it's not. It's wonderful. That's why we have two kids, by choice. But understating the hard yakka involved doesn't help anyone.

This is my long way of saying that Jo Case's piece 'Motherhood: a piece of cake?' in today's Age is a good read. Jo's defending the need to whinge about the parenting gig from the oppressive 'mustn't grumble' ethos.

A whinge, every now and then, helps us put the things that trouble us into words. It brings them to consciousness, although this isn't necessarily transformative. At it's most simple, a whinge relieves the pressure. At its most transforming, it's the first step to trying another way, looking for a solution, whether this be big or small.

(Image: Stilfehler.)

Virginia Woolf's Dress

2010-08-03T08:47:00.003+10:00

"Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves. For example, going to my dressmaker in Judd Street, or rather thinking of a dress I could get her to make, & imagining it made--that is the string, which as if it dipped looked into a wave of treasure brings up pearls sticking to it." - Virginia Woolf, diary, Monday 25th April, 1925

(Photo: Brocco Lee)

A Reverie of Matter

2010-07-30T12:20:00.006+10:00

A small gesture for those who come to look, pause and dream....

The organic, searching swirls and upright leaves of the ironwork archway at Milton House, one of Melbourne's first TB hospitals.

A Little Break... Now and Then

2010-07-29T08:53:00.009+10:00

If I were a more superstitious person, I'd stop all this blogging business straight away: it's endangering my precious things.

After 7 or 8 years, my favourite blue bowl was dropped and broke into a neat crescent with assorted smaller pieces. And now my lovely teapot has a fracture in its once robust handle, thanks to my clumsiness.

Even just thinking of blogging about an object seems to spell its doom. The other day I had the merest thought I'd do a blog on what makes the handmade so appealing to me. I thought I'd photograph a porcelain pendant to accompany the piece.

No sooner had I had this thought than it crashed to the ground from the place where it has sat safely for 6 or so months. Not broken, thankfully.

So I rushed to capture its screen-printed decoration, which reminds me of the blue and white willow pattern.

Cue: crashing, breaking sound from the kitchen.

Surely a coincidence, but it also seems like something blue and white was destined to break. This one, a little cup and saucer, met its fate at the hands of a curious 19 month old.

And yet: I have no regrets. These favourite objects are things I've well and truly enjoyed living with everyday, writing about, and thinking with. They're not simply for display in a home museum. So I will keep blogging about them.

That said, I'm now off to pay my home contents insurance, just in case...

Hard Rubbish Collection

2010-07-27T19:31:00.008+10:00

The hard rubbish collection is on around my neighbourhood, signalled by the small, neat piles on nature strips.

Interestingly, there aren't any huge piles of other years, and part of me wonders if this is a side effect of the Global Financial Crisis: less bought, less thrown away.

There also don't seem to be the same gleeful gleaners searching for gems amongst the broken plastic paddling pools, old TVs, and flowerpots.

But I must confess that I haven't really paid it all as much attention as usually do.

Ordinarily, I am fascinated by the hard rubbish collection.

This fascination stem in large part from the sociologist in me who asks questions about what it means:

What does is say about what is produced? So many broken plastic tables and chairs, which probably once seemed robust and cheap.

What does what people throw away say about them? About what they can afford to throw away, rather than repair. About the time versus money, deep investment versus shallow consumption.

And then there's the odd, obviously emotion-laden object that one strays across. The cot that was kept in the shed for years, only to be cast out onto the nature strip decades later. Why wait so long, to keep it until it is useless?

These questions are still circling around in my head, but my attention has turned to exploring the other side of the coin. Not what people throw away, but to what they use, keep, value. The things that nurture and stimulate them. The things that resist being disposable in a pile out the front.

It might sound a tad twee, but these are the precious things. And I want to know what makes them so.

The World's Dictionary

2010-07-26T20:23:00.006+10:00

It's Sunday morning, but we're all here. Fossickers, wanderers, seriously determined buyers.

I drop my gold coin into the Rotary Club entry bucket, and turn right into the crowd.

There are glints of copper and brass straight ahead: old fireside woodboxes and copperart reproductions.

Thickly glazed, orange and brown ceramics, straight from the back of someone's mum's kitchen cupboards.

Trendy young things wearing Ray Bans rummage through piles of 'authentic vintage 1980s' clothing.

I am not here to buy, but to research: to browse, watch, and get a feel for the place.

And yet, I still come away with three bunches of fresh flowers, six vegetable soaps, and five of the rarest Richard Scarry books ever to bring a smile to a four year old boy's face.

And before I know it, it's all over. An Orwellian voiceover - BBC English mashed with broad Australian - announces:

'It is 12.30pm and the market is now closed. No more sales are permitted.'

And slowly the cars reclaim this space.

Winter Walking in A2 - II

2010-07-25T20:02:00.002+10:00

Here's the link to my piece 'Living One Step at a Time' in the Saturday Age's A2 lift-out...

Winter Walking in A2

2010-07-24T06:00:00.006+10:00

Our car sits like a big white Lego block in our driveway. It isn't going anywhere.

Why? Because we walk, almost everywhere. And, we've discovered it's very good for us as a family, even in Winter.

I've a piece about our family walking experiment in today's AGE, in the A2 liftout: 'Living one step at a time'. Here's a bit of what I have to say:

'Have you seen glowing moss sprouting in the footpath cracks? Or spider webs glistening in the morning dew? The fungi, their foot in the door? If you’re a driver, chances are that you haven’t. These are the rewards of that rarely-seen and endangered creature: the winter pedestrian.'

The comfort of things

2010-07-19T06:00:00.001+10:00

I am under no illusions about the style of our home. More shabby than chic, it’s been described by polite folk as ‘eclectic’.

Almost every object within its walls is second-hand: hand-me-down, cast-off, or op-shopped. Nothing is perfect, which is my preference. Although some things are long-term stop-gap measures I’d prefer to replace. (Yes, mdf bookcases, I’m talking about you.)

But my latest buy of a supremely ugly, but immensely comfortable, high-backed couch, had me wondering: When exactly did comfort, rather than beauty or convenience, become so important to me?

I’ve never bought a couch before. We’ve always been grateful recipients of hand-me-downs. And the few weeks when we haven’t had one, while moving house, made me realise how important they are. Simply to be able to sit somewhere comfortable at the end of the day is a pleasure you do not appreciate until it is not there.

But none of these couches have really, truly worked for me: too low to support my neck, too deep for me to sit without slouching. They felt like ‘machines for sitting’, as Le Corbusier put it, rather than dreaming and resting in.

Then I sat on this couch in the local op-shop while the kids rifled through the 50 cent box of toys. And I didn’t want to get up.

I sank, but didn’t slouch, into it, my neck supported, my legs able to easily reach the floor. A physio’s dream. I’ve since noticed visitors gravitate to this couch from our other sofa.

In addition to its virtue of supreme comfort is that it is Australian made and second hand. Just a pity it was so incredibly ugly.

So ugly that my ‘one day’ plan to make slipcovers has actually eventuated, with the help of two $4 calico curtains and this blog tutorial. Not a creative challenge, although I do confess I did have a moment or two where I thought: ‘This isn’t going to work.’

But the resulting slipcover did work (even if it isn’t perfectly stitched). Now we have comfort and a blank canvas to work with. Although some new cushions might be in order…

A Reverie of Matter

2010-07-17T13:39:00.006+10:00

A still life of pots on the kitchen windowsill.

A small gesture for those who come to look, pause and dream...

Tea Pot

2010-07-15T13:42:00.004+10:00

Tea was once my friend: Earl Grey, Lady Grey, Russian Caravan, Orange Pekoe. Greeting me every morning, sitting down at the computer with me, even going for strolls around the block. Mixed with soy milk, honey, or straight, always hot, pouring from the pot.

Then came one pregnancy, breastfeeding, and then another, and finally illness. After that, I found I didn't want my caffeinated friend any longer. Plain water or Aktavite came to take its place.

But I have been missing my cup of tea. The other day I had tea of hot water, fresh mint, honey and cloves. It was so good, I've used up all our mint. It reminded me what I've been missing.

Today I took my faithful old teapot from the cupboard, and made a brew from a stem of the perennial basil from the garden, and a teaspoon of homemade chai spices.

You can add whatever spices you like to the chai mix, but mine had 3 parts cinnamon to 1 part each of coriander, ginger, cardamon. I then threw a few cloves and a sprinkling of fennel seeds into the pot.

But it was the handmade teapot that really topped off the experience. In that moment I poured my tea, I experienced what ceramicist Shannon Garson describes as that 'intimate, familiar feeling'.

This feeling is the way the right object can connect you with your past and present, can remind you of things you've forgotten, and can heighten your appreciation of the things right under your fingertips.

For me this means that the old tea days are worth bringing back, just without the caffeine.

The Salvaging Instinct

2010-07-05T11:03:00.007+10:00

If you look closely at my DNA, you’re likely to find the strands responsible for my gleaning, saving and salvaging instincts. Well, it certainly feels as if these traits are somehow innate, a hardwired, an unavoidable part of who I am.

I was given reason to reflect on this recently, wondering if I was, you know, taking the salvaging a bit a little too far. There I was, chopping up an old nappy mat so it would fit inside the wheelie bin. I removed the plastic cover, and found myself thinking: ‘Hey, that cardboard inside looks fine and clean. The kids could use that.’ Ten seconds later, they were drawing up a storm, and cutting out cardboard factories inspired by Richard Scarry stories.

Then I was about to throw one of those pretty looking, disposable tissue boxes into the recycling and a thought struck. I lopped off the top with the scissors, added a label, and used it to organise the medicines in our cupboard.

And, of course, there’s all the old print-outs that are cut up in a basket by the phone, ready to write shopping lists and notes on. The washed, attractive glass jars ready for our family cumquat and grapefruit marmalade-maker. The old toddler clothes refreshed for my daughter with new stencils and pretty material sewed over stains.

And outside my window, pot after pot of gleaned red geraniums, a baby bath of struggling marigold seedlings, a strange plant grown from the seeds offered by an elderly neighbour. And, my favourite, the salvaged trio of decaying sewing machine drawers, in a most glorious red, filled with radish seedlings (and I'm not sure what else).

My son seems to have this instinct too: as we stroll along the wilds next to the railway line, pretending to be archeologists, searching for interesting sticks, stones, and rolls of bark from the gums. He brings them home, he says, 'to study', but what he means is to bury them and dig them up again.

One thing I do know is that there's a certain pleasure in all this gleaning and salvaging. It isn’t done strictly out of necessity. I imagine it would be less enjoyable if it were. It was simply the done thing in my family: working with what's to hand, generation after generation. I know that my make-do-and-mend is a freely chosen one, which contrasts markedly to other times and places.

What do you do? Have you gleaned, scavenged, saved or salvaged anything recently?

My Father's Spoke Shave

2010-06-29T10:21:00.006+10:00

On my desk sits a woodworking tool: a spoke shave, ‘designed for smoothing curved surfaces’. It is slightly wider than my outstretched hand and made of carved wood: yellow, hard, warm and smooth. It was probably itself made by a craftman’s hand. Its sturdy hard blade appears to grow from the wood itself: wood and metal entwined.

The spoke shave is an oddity. A remnant of yesteryear’s toolbox. A reminder of a time before power tools and cheap DIY hard wares like Bunnings; when skilled hands worked rather than tapped keyboards and pressed buttons.

Its purpose isn’t immediately obvious to the uninitiated. Yet to pick it up is to give yourself over to the shape, to feel how this small instrument wants to be held. To work out how to skim, scrape and shape edges.

These days, the hand that wield it are uncertain, unskilled and clumsy. Distinguished by not being the hands of a craftsman. I use it, I’m sure quite incorrectly, in a way that would make a skilled woodworker cringe, to shave the top edges off my warped desk drawers. In winter, the drawers bloat and stick so that I cannot open them without force. In the summer heat, they shrink and stick at odd angles. I cannot win, it seems.

My memory of Year 8 Woodwork class tells me that shaving the top and bottom of the drawers will help, but it is always a quick fix. The drawers feel like they have an energy of their own, one that renews with each shift in the weather. And so I keep my father’s spoke shave on my desk.

Yet it is not for this most purely practical of reasons that I keep this craftsman’s tool. I know that I keep it most purely because it was my father’s and I want to keep something of him, of his essence, with me.

Cool Emptiness

2010-06-16T12:33:00.010+10:00

Melbourne's winter makes our house feel cluttered, too heavy with papers, books, and incomplete projects.

I know it isn't that bad. Yet I know that I am not a juggler. I cannot do everything, let alone do it very well.

Objectively, I've invested my self into too many things. And when that happens, it's easy to find

myself not knowing what to do next.

The difficulty with investing in things is that I feel attached to them. In the things I see something I would like to do, an ambition as yet unrealised.

This calls for a certain combination of honesty and brutality: How important is it to do this sewing? Does this fabric need saving, or can someone at the op shop find a use for it? Why am I still holding on to these books?

This is why I've spent the last week vanquishing possibilities. Piling up and sorting through various sewing, writing, reading projects I planned. Sifting the realistic and important from the trivial and insignificant.

Off to the op shop went all the fabrics that I didn't love.

Ditto the things I was never going to wear.

Ditto the theory books that weren't primary texts. (I had to remind myself that I do know enough now not to need them.)

Out into the recycling went all the old drafts that I'd been keeping just in case.

Out went the notes of academic papers I'd write. As I shredded them by hand, I felt the weighty emotions lift that go hand in hand with such long projects.

In to a pile went a small assortment of sewing projects. (Some of which are now complete.)

On to my desk went the small selection of books I'm reading and writing about.

Into a single drawer went my very helpful notebooks, where I can now find them easily.

And my desk: now I can sit at it and write again. I feel on top of things, rather than swimming amidst them.

Where did this impulse - to clean, sort and vanquish possibilities - come from?

I'm sure that it's been brewing in my psyche for some time. A sort of periodic need that comes because I don't have the habit and time to do it regularly enough.

But the most recent spur was literary. I'm reading Joan Lindsay's memoir, Life Without Clocks. Joan was an Australian painter and writer, who was married to painter Daryl Lindsay.

In the Depression, Daryl and Joan had to rent out their idyllic and antique-filled farmhouse in Baxter. They moved to a cheap and basic cottage in Bacchus Marsh, where the rent was cheap and the area suited for painting.

Living on camp beds, in a house furnished with only two crates for sitting on, Joan discovered that the house was perfectly suited for a writer and a painter:

'It was not only a house without time - it would have been the same if it had been crammed with striking clocks. It was a house so adequately and uniquely filled with its own emptiness that nobody... seem to notice that it was never furnished... emptiness was not a negative statement but a positive affirmation of truth and beauty like the holes in a Henry Moore sculpture... Twenty years later in a Florentine monastery the memory of the empty cottage in the Marsh came suddenly back and I understood, almost as if I had painted those exquisite frescoes with my own hand, how a masterpiece can be conceived in the cool emptiness of a whitewashed cell.' - Joan Lindsay, 1962, Life Without Clocks.

My room isn't a whitewashed cell, although it does feel as cool as I type away from the heater. But it does feel clear and clean. The sort of place I want to sit down and work away in on one of the projects easily ready to hand.

The Bean Cupboard

2010-05-30T09:49:00.008+10:00

Our house is small. Ten or eleven squares by the reckoning of the guy who did our home energy audit. Space is at a premium. With two home offices, two small children, books and toys competing for space, our rooms have to work multiple roles.

Enter the bean cupboard. I've had this old, little wardrobe for eleven years. It's been painted multiple times, worked as a storage space, an 'entertainment' unit (back when we had a tiny TV), a wardrobe for the kids' clothes, and in its latest incarnation: craft cupboard.

My husband and I painted it with simple non-toxic acrylic paints just before our first child was born, four and a bit years back (he painted the praying mantis). As we painted, we imagined our yet to be born child adding his or her bugs and birds to the bean storks.

So it seems only fitting that the cupboard has lately become a repository for all the scrapbooks, paints, pencils, scissors, salvaged cardboard, coloured paper and raffia that have been cluttering window sills, cupboards, the fridge top, and book shelves. (Of course, as these photos show, the bean cupboard already has new clutter on top, but at least it is creative work-in-progress, and all in one space.)

The cupboard sits in our kitchen, ready to transform our dining table into a creative space.

The impetus for this little transformation came when my son, Nikos, said: 'You know what I like best in the world, Mum? Being creative.' This little phrase made me take my son's creative life more seriously (much more seriously than I have my own, with my pencils and paints hastily stored under the bed!).

I realised that if he was to going to enjoy creating, when he wanted to, then he would need to have things ready to hand. (Nothing disperses the urge to create than having to wait for Dad or me to get them ready.)

Without space for an art room, I could have despaired. Instead, I found Soule Mamma Amanda Blake Soule's excellent book The Creative Family at our local library. Inside its pages I founda very simple solution: a kitchen art & craft cupboard.

And, of course, I had just the cupboard for it, ready to take on its new, kitchen-transforming role.

Greek Terracotta Vase

2010-05-26T14:32:00.010+10:00

It was the Greek terracotta vase that did it. Chipped on the rim, a tourist's cheap keepsake, mine for $1.

Why did I buy it?

Because I didn't want to move house. In the midst of morning sickness, we were moving. Somewhere. Our landlord needed to sell our house to buy a home of her own. In my more dramatic moments, I thought of it as having to leave the only home my son had known. I was gloomy.

And this is how we found ourselves, at the height of 2008's rental crisis, on the cusp of winter, traipsing across Melbourne to see yet an another unknown house in an unknown village.

The house was white, old and small, nothing to look at from the street. It had large windows. The gateposts stood at awkward angles. It was easily the worst house in the street. But it had a ramshackle appeal - the garden was large, with old trees that promised to be leafy.

While we waited for the open inspection, we perused the tiny strip of shops. Then it seemed like a place that time had forget: cafes frequented by elderly patrons, which closed at 4pm, and all the shops closed on Sundays - like Victoria of twenty years ago.

Yet a place with two op shops couldn't be all bad, could it? It was in one of them that I chanced upon this lost piece of the plaka. I'd never have bought it as a tourist, but to encounter it here in this foreign place?

What exactly did the terracotta vase do?

It reminded me that I was capable of changing - that I could leave the safety of the familiar and known. I had done it before when travelling - a journey to Greece, in particular, remains pivotal to my adult life and relationships. And this vase must've had its own journey to end up here. Did someone who lived here own it?

And so finding the vase, for me with my clay feet, seemed like a good omen. It helped to shift my perspective, to remind me that change - like travel - can be an opportunity, an adventure.

Object Lessons in A2 - II

2010-05-25T16:32:00.003+10:00

An online version of 'Object Lessons' can be found here. Thanks to everyone for their kind comments.

Object Lessons in A2

2010-05-22T15:45:00.000+10:00

I've a piece in today's A2 in The Age.

It's about my recent stint of ill health, exploring how a humble trio of objects helped me through it.

This is an excerpt about the simple, white stone my husband brought to me while in hospital:

It is cool to pick up at first, but it warms slightly to the touch and sits perfectly in my palm. It’s not in the least skin-like, but it comforts me like holding hands with my husband does. Perhaps it’s got something to do with its weight. It’s easy to forget how much we need everyday physical contact; how the simple act of a kiss on the cheek or an arm around the shoulders can put us at ease: ‘Without touch,’ writes American author Richard Louv, ‘infant primates die.’

Thing People - Michelle's one little unassuming painting

2010-04-27T14:25:00.004+10:00

What can we learn about ourselves when we create an object? Do we express our enduring character in the things we make, or simply what we're feeling at the time? And can the making help us reflect on who we are and have been?

Our next 'Thing Person', Michelle, tackles this tricky terrain, talking about her 'one little unassuming painting'. Michelle's blog Living with Bob (Dysautonomia) is filled with black humour, and occasional silliness, about life with a chronic illness. As she puts it: 'I can't relate to my illness any other way, so there is no touchy feely, inspirational message or epiphanies.'

Can you describe this, your first painting?

My first painting was inspired by the representation of nature in Asian artwork and the Victorian interpretation of Asian styles. I've been attracted to the style since I was a child, with my love furthered by travels through Asia in my 20s and early 30s. There is a simple joy and appreciation for the natural world that appeals to me. Whilst I chose to use birds and butterflies, I decided to move away from natural hues to simply use the colours that felt 'right' to me at the time. Being ill I think many expected that I would paint something filled with anguish and despair but I simply couldn't. I wanted something that was joyous. Something that was the opposite of my reality, something that spat in the eye of illness.

Do you know where you first 'met' this style of asian artwork/Victorian interpretation of it?

As a child I spent many an hour watching classic movies and documentaries, or with my nose in a book. I was always drawn to the rich eclectic look, where traditional motifs were merged with the exotic, and every piece held a story. It was so far removed from the farm house with bland white walls and functional brown furniture that I grew up with. I was a bit of an odd child, as my vision of my future always included a dark wood paneled library, with shelf upon shelf of books, rich tapestries, tiffany lead light lamps and bric a brac I had collected from around the world. I have always loved the Asian notion that the most mundane object can be a thing of beauty. For example, I have a conical straw hat from Vietnam which looks very simple and practical but when you turn it upside down there are richly coloured pictures of beautiful women from the 50's stitched inside and the chin strap is a piece of deep purple velvet. All completely unnecessary in the functional sense yet completely essential to the soul. For me there is nothing like losing yourself in the middle of a remote village market surrounded by clashing colours, patterns and sound which miraculously balance each other.

You said that the bright colours felt 'right' when you were painting. Are bright colours things you're drawn to for a long time? I note the red wall in the background of the painting. In using them, were you expressing an enduring aspect of your self - your personal idiom - rather than simply expressing the despair of illness?

There's something essentially comforting in deep rich colours, they have 'life'. Be it the deep emerald of the tree ferns outside my window, the purple of the statice flowers in a vase on my fireplace, or the deep red of my loungeroom walls, I've always been drawn to the richer tones. Combine that with pattern and I've found my little bit of bliss. There is a tactile nature to deep colour, a warmth that envelopes you and invites interaction, whilst many neutrals and pastels can feel 'remote', especially when used without contrast. Being ill is akin to all the colour leeching out of your being. You feel like a shadow of your former self, a walking outline with no substance. Sometimes you have to artificially inject colour to feel alive again.

When did you create this painting? How important was making this it at the time?

I painted this in June 09. It was the first painting I had done since I was in my late teens and early 20s. Life, marriage, children, and work meant things like painting or writing went on the back burner. At the time I decided to pick up painting again I had been seriously ill for about 2 1/2 to 3 years. My illness had impacted upon my life dramatically. I was forced to leave work, and became essentially home bound. I could no longer drive for more than about 10mins, needed others to accompany me for simple tasks like grocery shopping, and was unable to be the mum or wife I wanted to be. Emotionally it was overwhelming and crushing. I decided at that point I couldn't let dysautonomia rule me any longer and needed to take back my life, whatever that may be. I have no idea how I came to that point, but I simply knew I needed to reclaim me. I was going through the cupboards downstairs and found my old paints and knew I had to try. It took me about a month to complete. My illness means that my body has trouble being upright, so sitting for long periods is very difficult. Additionally, poor blood flow means my muscles spasm and send paint brushes flying. Not particularly conducive to painting, but I did it. The sense of accomplishment when I finished was overwhelming. When you are having trouble walking from the bed to the bathroom, it's hard to believe that you can accomplish anything anymore. I knew it was no masterpiece, but it simply didn't matter. I had finished something, despite my body's protestations. Sometimes you just have to concentrate on winning the battles, when the reality is that you will never win the war.

Is it still significant to you now?

For me it continues to represent that mental and emotional turning point. I spent my working life helping those who had suffered brain injury and illness and their families come to terms with the social, physical and psychological changes that occur. I knew the theory. I was good at my job, but I was simply unable to apply it to myself. I was unable to resolve the conflicts associated with going from professional to patient. I still struggle with that, but I am now in a place where I can laugh at the absurdity of my life. All of that is wrapped up in that one little unassuming painting. I have it hung in our lounge room in pride of place, and feel happy every time I look at it.

(Photo and text: Michelle)

A life's treasures

2010-04-12T11:54:00.000+10:00

"Another day, many days really, were devoted to going through my father's tchotchkes - small statues, figurines, odd bits of driftwood or stone he'd picked up - and, finally, throwing them into a trash bag. I might well have been with him when he chanced on these things, in junk shops, flea markets, or just lying there on the ground: his treasures. This was what pleased him most in life, I think, hunting for these bits and pieces that he found intriguing for one reason or another. No, not for one reason or another: they were all lovely, all interesting; he had a wonderful eye. But they were of no value to anyone else, except perhaps me, and I don't have room."

August Kleinzahler 's poignant Diary essay in the London Review of Books

Thing People - Hayley Lau's Upcycled Clock

2010-03-29T06:00:00.007+11:00

How should we relate to objects? Are there better and worse ways to live with inanimate things? In a time when so much is bought and quickly thrown away, these are the inherently ethical questions that underpin the Precious Things project.

This week’s ‘Thing Person’ Hayley Lau of Remade in Melbourne blog knows a thing or two about this. Her blog details her journey into ethical living, focusing on 'creating, thrifting and making do.' Until recently, Hayley also designed and mades clothes for her ethical fashion label Heidi & Seek.

Here Hayley talks about her beloved upcycled clock, decoupaged in vintage fashion papers from prettygreen.etsy.com. I also asked about how personal style, making, consuming and ethics fit together for her.

You rarely see clocks in homes and public places these days - most people consult their mobile phones to check the time. What's this clock's significance for you?

Well, it depicts vintage dresses and fashion, which I'm very interested in, so it's meaningful in that way. I also adore the look of it. It's my style exactly. I'm really good at changing my tastes, but I can tell that I'll never get tired of this clock. Most of the other things I own can be replaced pretty easily, but not this. It's one of a kind. Whenever I look at it I'm grateful and happy that it's mine.

Do you see your style as something that's unique to you, uninfluenced by trends?

My style is colourful, earthy, natural. A vintage sort of feminine. I've really only come into it in the past two years or so. Before that I felt confined by generic styles in catalogues and things, although I don't think I realised I was confined - I just felt that the decorative things I bought were lifeless. It's important to connect with the look and feel of something. Back then I didn't really look at interior inspiration, but now that I've done so, I can define my style much better and see where it differs from the catalogues.

Is your clock inherently ethical?

It's handmade and upcycled. I think I appreciate it even more because I didn't make it myself - if I did, I'd see it as replaceable and it maybe wouldn't be so special. Plus, I really enjoy supporting other people's ideas when I think they're amazing.

Why do you see the things you make as replaceable and less special?

I think one reason is because I'm a relatively impatient maker. I don't make things that take more than a couple hours to complete - so that means if I need another of whatever I made, I can make one up fairly easily in the same style. Maybe if I made a big complex quilt or something I'd feel like it was a lot more special. Also, I always see the fault in things that I've made. I'm a lot more judgmental. I suppose I'm less appreciative of the individual objects that I've made, but I do really love the spaces I've created in my house where it's a mix of self-made, handmade and vintage. The self-made is part of the package, but if one particular object went missing or got broken, I could easily replace it with something else I'd make without too much heartache. But I couldn't get this clock replaced. If I made one myself I'd probably think it was inferior, haha.

Handmade has enormous ethical appeal for buyers, but being a small producer exacts its own personal toll on makers. How do you see buying handmade now, in light of having been a creator?

I learned that the makers have choices. I learned that there's a problem with equating handmade with ethical. Some 'handmade' sellers put together jewellery from mass-produced pieces, and who knows under what conditions they were made. In that way, buying handmade can be just as damaging to the environment as those in the shop. There are 'big' businesses (like People Tree and Etiko) that are probably more ethical than some handmade sellers. So it's still really important, as a buyer, to know what and who you're supporting.

As to the personal toll of makers, understanding it firsthand doesn't really change my opinions as a buyer. I've always been appreciative of the making process and the creativity that goes into it. If a handmade item truly catches my eye and, particularly, if it is made from recycled materials, then I'm willing to buy it. The maker has a choice to take my business or not. Their hardship is their business unless they choose to share it.

Has becoming an ethical consumer changed your sense of what you like - your style and taste? Do mass-produced things still have an appeal, or are you now drawn to the unique, unusual, one-off?

Mass-produced things have definitely lost a lot of their appeal. Not entirely. I still appreciate really simple things. Simple furniture and clothing and useful things like that. I find that simple things matched with unique can really bring attention to the unique thing. I like that. But I tend to think that I can find simple things second-hand, so I try to refrain from buying them new anyway.

I don't think being an ethical consumer has changed my style, but I'm not 100% sure on that. Being exposed to many different interiors and fashions has helped me work out that I love a certain vintage style. Am I drawn to it because vintage is more ethical or because the style is simply better to me? I'm not sure. I'm just glad that I can really appreciate things which have the option of being much more ethical.

(Photo: Hayley Lau).

Tea Towel Dreams

2010-03-25T14:20:00.006+11:00

My son is a dreamy little boy. I'll often see him just gazing off into the distance. I know, for good or for bad, that he and I are alike. My disposition, you see, is often to daydream about the future, and to view the past in the golden glow of nostalgic longing.

I struggle to fully inhabit the present, although I've learnt to do this better these days. Running, gardening, spending time with the kids, all mean I am here more fully in the moment.

But the world of action also poses its own challenge: not enough time for reverie, not enough time for enjoying the present. It's easy to get so caught up in all the things that need to be urgently done that I forget to daydream, or forget about the dreams I do have. Occasionally, it's helpful to have an object that reminds me of these 'dimly perceived possibilities'.

Others in the 'Thing People' series have already offered beautiful accounts of how their objects are talismans of sorts: Sandra Leigh Price with her photo of Sarah Bernhardt as a reminder to spend yourself to creative ends, and journalist and blogger katiecrackernuts' ring as symbol of kindness in the world. For me, this vintage linen Tasmania tea towel might serve a similar end.

For many years, I've had a dream to live on an island with mountains and overlooking the sea. Hobart seemed to be the perfect place. But this dream, which once seemed so concrete, and was almost realised, has receded in the face of everyday life: work, study, children. In other words, it's been replaced by other things I value more than what it would take to achieve my island home.

But when I found this quaint linen tea towel in our local op shop, I knew it would be helpful. It's bright and cheery colours work well in our 1950s kitchen. And as I look at its map, it allows me to probe that dimly realised possibility - that dream of earlier era - to work out exactly what it was that I was dreaming about, and to try to realise it in small steps, every day. To keep the dream alive.

Thing People - Shannon Garson's Teapot

2010-03-15T06:00:00.000+11:00

This week’s ‘Thing Person’ is ceramic artist Shannon Garson. Shannon began her career as a painter, but from the minute she started throwing pots she knew she wanted to make the ‘fine, white vessels’ for which she is now known.

Shannon has a very clear, creative vision of what she wants from a pot: ‘I want the whole pot to be experienced, from the weight of it as you pick it up, the texture, the drawing, colour, smoothness of the glaze, all the elements draw the viewer into experiencing the vessel. Everyone who owns one of these pots has an experience that no-one else can share as the owners get to pick up the vessels and hold them and interact with them intimately.’

And it is precisely this kind of tactile intimacy that she experiences when using her favourite Jane Sawyer teapot.

I really love my contemporary Jane Sawyer teapot. I use one of Jane's pots every day. The finger marks in the slip give me so much pleasure as my hand washes the pot out brushing against the marks in counter rhythm. Even though her work is really different from mine she captures the sensuality and joy in the materials that I aim for.

Jane’s work is a contemporary interpretation of hakeme brushwork popularized through the Japanese mingei movement. She uses line in a loose gestural way, which accentuates the soft form and also the very nature of creation of the pot. The three "meager" elements, terracotta clay, white slip and clear glaze combine with the movement of the artists body and hands to create these powerful statements on the physical world. Carrying these pots to the table encourages me to consider the link between the human body and the inanimate object in my hand.

One thing I really admire about Jane’s work is that despite their abstract, sculptural quality these pots retain their original purpose by being usable tableware. In this way, her pots are using form and brushwork to draw attention to the process of making. But their tactility also seduces the user to contemplate the process of using the pot.

For me, a teapot needs certain qualities. The pot has to have a soothing quality to the handle. I like a teapot that when full is easy to lift with one hand. Nothing about the way it works must jar me or make me feel as if I am about to drop the pot or hot water on myself. The colours must be harmonious but also intriguing because a cup of a tea is essential in the afternoon.

I also have tea first thing in the morning, every morning. Since I've had children it is mostly WAY too early. Making tea is such a lovely activity for me, my favourite tea a mixture of English Breakfast and Broken Orange Pekoe is drunk alone, with milk and Tasmanian Leatherwood honey staring out the window into the trees and thinking my thoughts.

(Photo and text courtesy of Shannon's blog Strange Fragments)

An 'unkind' photo

2010-03-09T10:25:00.006+11:00

I’ve never been on the cover of a magazine – I’m not pretty or famous enough.

But I know a strong photo when I see it. And the close-up of Germaine Greer, captured mid-sentence, on the cover of the current The Monthly magazine is one such photo.

Greer fuels and often courts controversy. She gets our attention. She divides opinion. We either love her or hate her.

In the Fairfax press, Anne Summers and others have been quick to defend Greer’s contributions to women and feminism in light of Louis Nowra's article for The Monthly.

For Summers, the magazine's cover image is also a problem. To her, the photograph of Greer is ‘just as unkind’ as Nowra's article - a pictorial attempt to ‘ridicule’ Greer by brutally capturing ‘all the lines of life on her face.’

Perhaps, as Summers suggests, this was the intention. I do not know. But it is not how I see it. And this is why.

Where Summers sees unkindness and ridicule, I see a strong, forthright woman. It is obviously not a crafted studio photograph, shot with soft lighting and heavy makeup. It is an action shot. It is clearly, very obviously Greer. It’s a photograph not unlike the archetypal images of her in full-swing – addressing an audience, her hands distinctively expressing her point.

I acknowledge that it is not the most flattering portrait of Australia’s expat celebrity feminist. She does look like an older woman, even if she doesn’t look the like the average septuagenarian. She might not like the image, but how many of us like all our happy snaps?

Can you imagine the outcry if The Monthly had used a subdued, weak or airbrushed image of Greer? I’d have been disappointed. In using this image, Greer looks like she can take Nowra’s withering criticisms. That she will fight back. That she is the strong public woman. That, whatever we might think of her, she is not playing at being a public feminist, but it the real deal.

But the image is more than this. It is a welcome break from the odd poses struck by young things on magazine covers and the narcissist self-photography of MySpace and FaceBook.

It is also out of the ordinary. Older women are usually absent from our popular culture, present rarely, and and usually presented as passive. Greer’s presence on the cover of this magazine stands in stark contrast other images we are accustomed, especially those photographs of older women as victims off violence, their faces bruised and overblown, cowering in their hospital beds.

What are the implications of Summer's point? If Greer shouldn't have been presented in this way, should we too banish the ‘lines of life’ from the digital record? More than a few of us do this already, guiltily deleting unflattering digital images, or seeking softer lighting for the family photos. But is such pretence helpful? Is there not some power to be gained from facing what we look like, warts and all?

I'm not naïvely saying that photos are always true representations of who we are. Or that we can be or are completely ‘natural’. For women, pretence stalks us at every turn. Plucking, waxing, dyeing and cosmetically enhancing are not new, and every woman throughout her life makes decisions if, and how, she will change their appearance. Should I wear makeup? Wax my hairy legs? Cover that pimple?

Yet I think that looking our age in photographs, and accepting our lines, is a slightly different issue. Surely some honesty here is necessary, in both our private lives and the public realm.

Honest ageing is not in vogue in everyday life, let alone in photographs of celebrities. I am half Greer’s age, and I know some of my contemporaries are already hooked on ‘preventative Botox.’ Botox devotee, actress Rebecca Gibney, likens these injections as ‘like having a facial.’ Commenters on beauty blogs try for the same result by keeping their face as immobile and emotion free as possible in order to avoid character lines from forming. (I kid you not.) Little wonder that they photograph well.

That said, I also know the ego-shattering effect of an unflattering photo face, and why we might want to avoid it. We can be more vulnerable and sensitive when it comes to our photographed image. An unflattering frozen image of ourself can catch us off guard, reminding us of the march of time in a way we don’t notice from day to day. It offers the objective evidence of a furrow between the brows, decent crop of grey hairs, and tired eyes.

I know this from experience. For my recent birthday my husband had a family photo emblazoned on a cup. In the image I am thin, gaunt, my normally pale skin stained dark, my eyes sunken. My sickness stands out all the more next to the healthy smiles and glowing skin of my two young children. At the time I recoiled from the image. Couldn’t he, I asked, have chosen a better one? Or waited until I was better?

And then I realised that no, he couldn’t have. This was me: an honest, sincere image. This reflects who I am. I am not about pretending about my age, any more than I would lie or deceive about the facts. I might enhance how I look with cosmetics, but facing and telling the truth is essential. I am strong because I’m not pretending.

Greer’s photograph says something similar. It is of a strong image of a woman with something to say who also looks her age. There is merit in this. Can you imagine Greer still being Greer without her face being free to express herself? Her rage, anger, and humour?

I know I could go down to my local hairdressers and have my ‘lines of life’ erased in five minutes (yes, they do Botox as well as haircuts). But Greer’s image is a reminder that such a flight from truth is trivial and unimportant. That, at the end of the day, it is my professional and personal achievements that will be more enduring than fighting a losing battle to look younger than I am. This is a no-brainer, yet it needs restating.

I might not always agree with Germaine Greer, but her image on The Monthly’s cover is liberating. It's anything but a ‘cheap shot.’

What do you think?

Thing People - Sandra Leigh Price's Bernhardt in Paris

2010-02-16T13:00:00.012+11:00

I had a sense that Sydney writer Sandra Leigh Price would be a 'Thing Person'. Her screenplay Dear Dove Divine is currently in development in the U.K. And 'The First Seduction of Billy Little' from her forthcoming novel, Tabernacle of the Birds, was published in the Winter Edition of Wet Ink. Here she shares her tale of finding her precious object - a Sarah Bernhardt photograph chanced upon in a Paris antique shop.

When asked to write about an object, my mind spins with the clicking excitement of a clock overwound, for I am object obsessed. Not with objects that have monetary value or even always aesthetic value, but objects that have the weight of history and story attached to them. For me, these sort of objects act as blue objects for a bower bird. Three objects came to mind, a fox tooth, a blessed rose petal and a signed photograph of Sarah Bernhardt.

I grew up in Canberra. My Grandmother was born in a one street town outside of Canberra. Her Grandmother was born in Ireland married and lived with a notorious bushranger, in the hills outside Canberra, the same year that Sarah Bernhardt made her debut on the Parisian stage. Worlds apart, or so it seemed.

I was in Paris in 2003, my first visit to the city of my imagination. It was so different to the one I had built myself. What my first visit to Paris confirmed was, one has to really visit a place to let its soul mingle with your own, to really have a sense of it.

Paris came at the end of a long trip that included Vienna, Prague, Venice and London. I had been in London on screenplay business and couldn’t believe how far I had come – I had pitched my screenplay to several major Companies, I had met the Director and was impressed by her vision. I had been on the phone with the agent of the Academy award-winning Actress who we had in mind for the lead and then I found myself in Paris, exhausted. A decision was made, that for the five days we had, we would explore the heart of one neighbourhood.

In the middle of winter the place was misty with the past. We walked quiet lanes and discovered small treasures in the faces, the spaces and the very air. In one creeping Arcade, the sort that Zola’s Nana would rack up her debt, we stumbled across a photography shop that still had its portraits of the boyish Rimbaud, stills were propped as advertisement for a professional photographer long since taken to photographing the earth from heaven.

For me photos are always portals to another life – I have been known to purchase lonely brides from junk shops to decorate a mantle or rescue albums from relatives who know not what treasure they have. So when I stumbled into an antique shop and saw a pile of Sarah Bernhardt’s photographs I had to have a closer look.

Sarah Bernhardt always pops up on my radar. Bernhardt was a twenty-first century woman in a nineteenth century package. She saw restrictions as stepping stones. She toured the world including Australia, performing in Sydney in her native French to sold out audiences. She lost her leg to gangrene and continued to perform, including her Hamlet. Bernhardt was the subject of a play at the Canberra Rep, the image of Madame Bernhardt was enlarged to the proportions of a giantess in the foyer by the director Corille Fraser who, bitten by the Bernhardt bug, had written her book Come to Dazzle detailing Bernhardt’s 1891 tour. When I was later in a production of Wilde’s Earnest, an elderly lady from the audience sought me out and declared that I was born to play Bernhardt – a strange compliment. For many years I had her quote on my wall “Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich”, until it became a personal mantra.

The photos had all belonged to one individual, and were addressed to Feydeau in her long slopping hand. Could it be the playwright Georges Feydeau of a Flea in her Ear fame? Whoever had owned the stack of cabinet photographs had been adored by Bernhardt, for she had taken the time to inscribe each one across a career. I just knew I had to have one, burst the bank balance, a reminder to spend myself, to beget more life. I chose the one I did for her gaze – unwavering, her fingers jaunty in her belt, her clothes like a Muscovite prince, the satin like snow. Of course the store owner was very kind enough to lower the price and discuss the wonderful Bernhardt in English, while over her shoulder a stuffed Bear head loomed. Clarifying we were Australian and not British, she rushed to gather a book printed by the Bibliotheque Nationale about the portraiture of Bernhardt and to show us a paragraph about her tour in Australia, only to show us a quote from Corille Fraser’s book, written in Canberra. I had traveled half the world to the City of Light, to the past of Bernhardt, only to have the place where I was raised offered up to me, the world suddenly seemed as small as a pearl.

I am still waiting for that Film to be made, I hope it is a when more than an if. Yet Madame Bernhardt hangs on my wall, and with it her unwavering stare to remember that by spending oneself is how one becomes rich.

(text and photo: Sandra Leigh Price)

The Writer's Wife

2010-02-13T14:46:00.008+11:00

'So, Dad, you're a writer, right?' enquired my son one morning in his thoughtful, searching voice. 'And Mum,' he paused, searching for the right word. 'Mum's nothing.'

I gasped. I didn't know whether to laugh or hide. It only took him a few words, but my 4 year old son had accurately taken the measure of how I was feeling.

Of course, his revelation isn't and wasn't correct. I've worked continuously throughout his young life, but have had the good fortune to do so flexibly while still being at home. The downside to this is that my professional identity is invisible to him because my work is done in the evenings, at nap-times, or when he and his sister are out to play.

Recently, a stint of acute and serious illness has given me cause to reflect on his words. While sick, I became known more purely in terms of my relationships to the people I love: the children's mother, my husband's wife, the sick sister.

As I recover I find I'm missing that sense of me that is defined by what I do. Some of this has been restored as I start to take my place again in the domestic routines of family life. And yet, what I'm missing most is that deep personal satisfaction that comes from finishing a day and knowing I've put my efforts to something more enduring - a creative and productive end, like solving a problem, seeing a theme in a mass of data, or even writing a tricky sentence.

This is not 'identity as job description' or how much I earn, but identity that comes from creative labour or self-expression. I doubt I'll be able to do this in the form of a conventional job for a little while yet.

But the urge to work is still strong, and I'm taking small steps. This week it has been fulfilled by this creative purse project that came my way from Nicole Mallalieu Design. This project was just the right size and challenge for my waxing and waning energy. Being a freehand sewer and rule-breaker, I didn't think I'd be able to stick to the instructions. But stick to them I did, with the rewarding result of a new Japanese seersucker purse. Putting my efforts into something tangible was incredibly satisfying.

My enjoyment of the satisfactions of work will be stinted for a while still yet. I have to remind myself to take it slowly, slowly... Until then, I'll be content to be the occasional crafter, the recuperating mother, the recovering sister and, as my son has cast me, the writer's wife.

Thing People - Kate's ‘one small beautiful thing’

2010-02-10T16:55:00.003+11:00

This week’s 'thing person' is Kate, of the delightful blog katiecrackernuts. Kate is a community newspaper journalist and committed op-shopper, who lives on the NSW Central Coast.

I’ve been a regular visitor to Kate's blog, following her adventures in op shopping and gardening. Here she talks about her ‘one small beautiful thing’: a hand-crafted silver and gold ring.

Kate, you scour op shops for objects to add to your wardrobe and home. The objects have often belonged to someone else. How then do you find a home for them?

Funny, when you asked me to do this interview I struggled to name a “thing”. I would have thought it easy to name a "thing" I was attached to, but actually I think I like a particular aesthetic at a particular time. Things come and go in my house. As I buy and give back to op shops I imagine who owned the item before me and who will next use what I’m passing on.

But you've settled on something, and surprisingly it isn't second-hand. Can you tell me a little more about your ring? Why this one?

The ring is silver and etched with the pattern of bare tree branches. The bird is gold. It’s made by Northern NSW jeweller Kylie Gartside and is from her Fly Away Home collection. I’m not even sure how I stumbled across Kylie’s work but I very uncharacteristically bought it based only on photographs.

I paid an amount I’d never spent on jewellery for myself. In fact, it’s the first piece of let's say "fancy-pants" jewellery I’ve ever bought myself. To this day I can’t explain my reaction to it. I sobbed when it arrived and didn’t fit me.

Kylie, whom I'll add was at the time a new mother, graciously allowed me to return it and refitted me – all from a distance – and remade a ring that when I slipped it on my finger felt like it had always been mine.

This is a ring I wear every day. I have other rings, one in particular given to me by my partner and one from my sister that I am fond of but don’t tend to wear daily. I only wear one ring daily, and it’s this one. I feel naked if I haven’t got it on. I only wear it during the day, at night it sits on my dresser among a collection of thrifted jewels.

Given so many of the things we buy (even in op shops) are mass-produced, is it important that this ring is bespoke - made especially for you?

I do happen to know Kylie has made more than 100 of these rings, so it’s not necessarily unique to me – though each one is made by hand, so somewhat different to all those other Fly Away Home rings.

No, it’s not so much that it was made “for me”. Initially it was about supporting Australian designers and jewellers rather than buying from a store that may import from India, or wherever.

Does the story of Kylie's refitting the ring perfectly for you add to its meaning?

It does. There was a lot happening in my house when I bought that ring. It was like a little secret I had with myself, and Kylie. I was feeling very lost. My partner and I were struggling with a difficult teen and the conflict was unrelenting. This was just one small beautiful thing I had coveted and wanted. In a world that felt ugly, I wanted something beautiful and tangible and this was my choice.

When it didn’t fit – it was too small – it felt like the fates delivering another crushing blow. I did literally wail. Kylie, a trooper, just fixed it. In some ways her response restored my faith in good, kind people. It’s a talisman, a reminder of that one small act of kindness, when really it could have gone the other way. Kylie could have washed her hands of the transaction. She’d made the ring I ordered and it not fitting was really my fault, but she was gracious and sweet and kind.

Is it just the look of the ring that matters to you? Does the feel, shape and weight of it matter too?

I knew nothing about the feel of this ring when I bought it, but have rather fondly noted the etching is wearing thin and the silver is always so bright. It never seems to tarnish or dull. My nana said the best way to clean silver was to wear it and seems she’s right.

What would it mean not to have this particular ring? Is it replaceable?

Kylie knows my ring size now and it’s still a piece that can be ordered from her, so yes, it’s replaceable. That said I’m not sure I would replace it. I don’t know if I’d feel the same way about a replacement piece. I would be saddened by its loss, but I guess when it’s gone, it’s gone. I hope I’m not careless enough to lose it because I’d like to think when I’m dead and gone, or when it no longer fits over my knuckles, one of my girls will wear it – or that it will end up in an op shop for someone else to buy and enjoy.

Before she was robbed, my nana had precise succession plans for her rings. Do you think there is something about jewelry that makes us think about lives beyond our own?

My mother, who is still a feisty very much alive woman, gave me her favourite ring when I turned 18. I was scared to death of wearing it initially because I felt it still belonged to her and in my head it does. I am a guardian of it.

I have already handed on a piece of jewellery given to me when I turned 21 to my eldest step-daughter. I gave it to her on her 21st and shared the story of how it was given to me. Being a step-parent, there are dangers in giving precious items. Will they care? Will the story, a story of my family, mean anything? But gave I did. That’s what giving is, isn’t it?

Thank you, Kate.

(Photo supplied by katiecrackernuts)

Thing People - Mary Parker's Green Bowl

2010-02-02T14:34:00.000+11:00

I have a confession: I'm a 'thing' person. I don't have heaps of possessions, and only a few are very important to me.

But in an age when so many things are easily within reach, it can be a struggle to understand why some things are more important than others.

In this new blog series, I'll talk to 'thing people' about their beloved objects and the stories behind them.

The very first 'thing person' is Mary Parker from the delightful new commuting blog Beaut Commute. I recently spoke to Mary about a beautiful green, glazed bowl found on her travels.

Mary, this is a lovely bowl. Can you tell me a little more about where you found it, and why it attracted your attention?

I spent a long time choosing this bowl in a little shop in St Remy in Provence. I was young and travelling with little cash but knew I wanted some crockery of some sort to take back home to New Zealand with me. I finally selected this bowl for its perfect shape but imperfect glaze. I carefully carried this bowl with me for the rest of my travels through France, Italy, Amsterdam and England and managed to get it safely back to NZ in one piece. About two weeks after my return I walked into a shop on Ponsonby Road in Auckland and saw… exactly the same bowl. And yet, this didn't diminish the value of the bowl - it gave it a story and I liked that.

Why did you choose perfect form and imperfect glaze ? Is it something about the combination of perfection and imperfection?

Absolutely. Items of immaculate perfection don't sit so comfortably with me. But I did like the lovely round shape.

Most people don't tend to bring personal objects that they value into their workplaces. Lunchrooms are often dominated by novelty mugs, tupperware, and throwaway plastic forks. Yet, you have your beautiful bowl sitting on your desk as an active reminder to stop work, sit down and enjoy lunch. What came first: the bowl or the attitude that lunch should be enjoyed?

Part of me loves the office kitchen paraphernalia - the 'World's best Dad' and 'Corporate Golf Day 1998' mugs. They tell the story of the workforce who reside there. Originally I took my bowl to work, along with a beautiful ornamental plaster pear from Florence, to remind me of my travels. I think it is good to have visual references reminding you why you work, at your work place. This is why people put photos of children or cats on their cubicles. However, over time the bowl became less about the travels and more about reminding me that at some time I would pick up the bowl, fill it with something delicious and sit down and enjoy my lunch. I love cooking and love food so thinking about food usually makes me happy. I also like the ritual of hand washing the bowl afterwards. Putting your hands into warm, soapy water and washing a beautiful object is quite a therapeutic thing to do in the middle of the day.

What does this particular bowl add to the eating experience?

Pretty simply, food looks good in it. Minestrone looks good, left over pasta or paella looks good, a salad looks good. It gives me more pleasure than Chinese out of a plastic container or a sandwich on a white plate - although these both have their places.

Is it just the look of the bowl that matters to you? Does the feel, shape and weight of it matter too?

Yes - I like the weight, shape and texture of things. I like jewellery that is a little bit heavy, like silver bangles that clang around. I like picking up stones from riverbanks. And I like holding my little green 'nosh' bowl as I eat and the way it sits in my hand.

I notice that your bowl has a couple of nicks and chips. Do they add anything to it - for instance, in a kind of wabi-sabi way? Or are they just incidental knocks that detract from its original, perfect form?

Over ten years, through many countries, in many offices has bowl travelled! I don't remember when the nicks happened but I like them, in the same way I like scars and wrinkles on people. S'more interesting innit?

What would it mean not to have this particular bowl? Is it replaceable?

It's totally replaceable. It's a bowl. If it broke I would feel a tinge but I would find another bowl. I would rather have used and appreciated this bowl every day, at the risk of it breaking, than had it stuck safely in a cabinet. The value of the bowl to me is not just how it looks but that it is a beautiful part of my everyday working life.

Thank you, Mary.

Making Constraints

2009-12-12T19:41:00.011+11:00

'The good craftsman,' writes sociologist Richard Sennett, 'places positive value on contingency and constraint.'

I'm pretty sure that he didn't have these rabbits in mind when he wrote this. And I'm pretty sure that I'm not a particularly good rabbit-craftsman.

But I have a sense of what he means. And these rabbits are the result.

I had only planned to make one of these little fellas for Sophia's first birthday (tomorrow). But when Nikos saw it, he decided to place an order for another. ('Is my rabbit finished yet Mum?', he'd ask each day.)

And, to my surprise, making another one wasn't a problem. In fact, I really enjoyed it.

Lately I've found myself compelled to sew and make things. Each day my mind is buzzing with plans of what to make next, and I scribble down quick sketches whenever I get a chance.

And part of this compulsion comes from working within constraints of time and materials.

I've realised that I can sit down while the kids are having lunch and sketch out a pattern, sit by the sandpit to hand-sew a detail, or get them involved in playing with materials.

I realised that I can also work well within the limits of my material stash. I already had the op-shop wool flannel that these bunnies are made from, and the old polar-fleece jumpers that they are stuffed with. The only thing I needed to buy was the thread for their noses.

(As an side: when I make things, I've noticed that my son does too. He wants to make things rather than go out to look or buy them. He keeps surprising me: he is becoming his own maker, with his own distinct tastes and ideas.)

Constraints aren't always the problem I take them for. They can awaken a sleeping imagination. Contingencies are often opportunities.

The resulting home-made rabbits might not be everyone's cup of tea, but they work for me.

Pen Wraps

2009-12-02T19:46:00.006+11:00

Yesterday I found myself out and about with a few spare moments: one baby asleep, one toddler in his own sandpit world. I knew I had to make the most of it. I reached into my bag. No journal, but there was its back-up – the tiny, spiral-bound notebook. I started the search for my pen. Ink, yes, a full bottle. A dead biro, yep, but not my writing pen.

I don't think the pen has any special powers. I don't write better with it. It's enjoyable to write with, but in many respects it's a symbolic pen I use when writing for myself. When I write for others, for pay, I use a robust steel jotter. I like to mark the distinction between the two modes, to highlight the shift in audience.

Once upon a pre-kids time, this lost pen wouldn’t have been a problem. I’d have gone off to the shop buy a biro, borrowed one, or returned home at a relaxed pace to retrieve the misplaced one. But now such moments are precious. There is no certainty of time ‘later’ when I know I’ll be able to write. And it’s both frustrating and disappointing to face a lost opportunity.

Especially when it’s my fault for being pen-less.

What did I do?

I wrote anyway. Engraving the page with the dead biro to leave traces - a hidden message to retrieve later on with the nifty use of a pencil.

Even if I never look at these words, I feel much better for writing them, to have worked when I had the time.

Now I shouldn’t have found myself in this situation. Afterall, I’ve just spent the last week making these pen wraps. Made of fabrics I’ve collected and gleaned over the years – Japanese and Thai blues, grey wools and navy cotton, roads and cars for little writers doing their letters – they exist precisely so my friends and family have no excuse for not taking their pens out with them.

And so tomorrow my wrap will take its rightful place in my bag, alongside bibs and nappies, on the off chance…

Girlish imagination

2009-12-01T19:15:00.004+11:00

Shortly after my daughter was born, my work colleagues sent her a gift: a very girly, flowery jumpsuit. It was then that it finally hit me that I had a girl-baby, and this outfit was the first step in my socialisation.

Socialisation is the on-going process where sex becomes gender. Pink is for girls, blue is boys. Girls like cots and boys like trains. Of course, in reality, it's often far more mixed up than this. But with each pink or frilly outfit that followed, I was reminded of this process.

When Sophia was four months old I came across this little dress in an op-shop for the grand price of 20 cents. It was size 2. I knew she wouldn't need it for quite some time.

But, suddenly and more forcefully, I could imagine this heavy, snoring bundle as the little girl she might become. I could see, for better and worse, what it would mean to watch her grow - of how this baby would become her own little person.

Fast-forward 7 months, Sophia's not yet one, but already big enough to wear this dress. She's no longer the relaxed, casual baby. She's busy chasing her brother around with her crawl-walk, dragging her pretty outfit across stones, through mud, and in wet sand. I don't think I could ever have imagined her.

Yet I'm grateful for the dress, and the small role it's played. She's a lilac lightening strike!

Summer nights

2009-11-17T20:45:00.006+11:00

One of my most vivid memories of summer evenings is of mowing: the smell of cut grass, 2-stroke, and the neeearrrrgggghhh noise of the machine.

Like most others living in a bushfire prone area, my Mum was (and remains) burdened by the need to keep the grass short. As soon as there was a cooling evening breeze, she would be out there in her short-shorts and wellingtons, striding back and forth across that threatening, dry expanse.

I haven’t mowed for what must be a decade. Metropolitan living, followed by pregnancy, left me alienated from the garden (even though I’ve enjoyed other gardens: parks and boulevards, borrowed views balconies, and walks through others nurtured gardens).

But now that I have a garden, some deep, almost primal urge to conquer the grass has kicked in: part enjoyment of getting out amongst it, part a somewhat irrational fear of snakes in the suburban grass. (Bit of trivia: my two sisters and I have all been bitten by snakes - each a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

All of which led me to buy one of the first brand-new objects I’ve had in quite a while: a hand push (or reel) mower. I’ve long felt that I didn’t want a motor-mower – a polluting noise and fumes menace.

But I didn’t feel confident that I’d be up to using a push mower, and treated it as an experiment. I bought the cheapest push mower in the shop, assembled it, and haven't looked back.

What do I like about it?

First, it’s just so incredibly simple, almost elegant. There’s no need for petrol, no fumes, no winder to pull. While it’s more noisy than I expected - like a bunch of scissors taking turns to snap - that doesn’t bother me as it stops whenever I stop moving.

Second, it works, which I hadn’t expected. It churns through long clover, and is very simply to use. It does struggle with the long weedy, thistley grass and gets stopped by the liquid amber ‘conkers’, but I think that’s just a matter of getting it the grassy areas under control. I can already see improvements.

Perhaps it’s the novelty of having a new toy, or the fact that I’m on holidays, but I’m loving getting out there: mowing. I reckon that the very physicality of gardening is crucial to my enjoying it so much - it feels like a liberation from sitting at my desk, deadline looming, manipulating words on a screen. I feel out in the world again.

Who'd have thought it possible: mowing as a liberation rather than a burden!

(BTW: Please excuse the work-induced blogging hiatus.)

One Perfect Day

2009-09-14T21:53:00.003+10:00

I've never owned a cake-stand before. I didn't think I was the kind of person who would ever need to own one. In fact, I thought I was quite the opposite. At best, I'm an informal host, quite happy to serve up rice crackers or dips from the packet they came in.

So when this tiered cake-stand arrived recently in our home as a gift, I never expected it to bring such glee. But by some strange alchemy of its delicate floral print and candy stripes, it set my imagination to work. In an instant, a whole world of afternoon teas and leisurely bohemians, complete with cucumber sandwiches, dappled light and spring blossoms, sprang forth. The perfect picnic.

Of course, the imagery isn't particularly original. I can see it's drawn out of a hodge-podge of paintings, books, films. It's my imaginary take on the creative Bohemian crowd, without their private miseries, feuds and mortal pains; the photo of their one perfect day.

The point of this: sometimes an object is less about what it is for and more about what we make of it. For me, this cake-stand is an opportunity, an invitation to play. Rather than simply refuelling on coffee and biscuits, stopping for afternoon tea re-enchants the unforgiving late afternoon - when it is impossible to properly finish or start anything well, except cucumber sandwiches and tea.

Blue Solace

2009-08-10T19:06:00.014+10:00

This winter we've done our very best to avoid getting sick: flu vaccinations, furious handwashing, eating well, and getting plenty of sleep (as much as a new baby will allow).

But this wasn't enough. So, in the same week, everyone had a fever: flu, tonsillitis, and one mysterious baby-temperature. Luckily, except me.

Instead, I was kept busy doing all the regular household, kid-wrangling, run-of-the-mill stuff that my husband and I usually divide 50/50. (I know some mums do this full-time, full-on day in day out, and I don't know how they keep it up!) I was exhausted, worried, harried.

Yet, when everyone was comfortably snoring, I found solace in this blue-glazed, hand-potted bowl.

This surely must sound odd. What on earth could be consoling about a bit of mud and glaze?

To start with, there's its simple beauty. While the sun may have been busy shining outside, I didn't have much time to appreciate it. In a week devoted to necessities, it was easy to overlook beauty, to see it as superfluous.

Yet, it was precisely the everyday beauty of this bowl - its arabesque lines and limpid glaze - that I needed. It was this beauty without obligation that lifted my spirits out of the daily grind.

Even if I was just having cereal for dinner (which was more often than not), it transformed eating from simple nutrition to an experience - the tactile, smooth curves of this bowl making it the perfect partnership of weight and form. It revived senses with its combination of pleasure and surprise - a match rarely found in uniform, mass-produced products. It rests in your hands so comfortably. At first, you barely notice it, but over time, you realise how it's giving you something more.

What's more, while the potter might have made a 100 or a 1000 in this style, I know this pot's distinctive - like it has its own personality. How do I know this? Well, once there were two, and I swear I could tell the difference: a little bit more glaze here, a slightly heavier base there.

Then there's the glaze, which this photo doesn't quite do justice to, which calms the eye. It's limpid blue-flecked sheen is more like gazing into the sea than at a block of solid colour. It was this blue that first drew me to the pots. The blueness reminded me of the John Campbell vases of my childhood home, with their glazes so rich and thick that could get lost in.

For these reasons, this blue bowl is not just another functional object, or faddish consumer product. Even when I was dog-tired, its physical presence was able to comfort me, to wake up those senses dulled by everyday work and worry. It reminded me that, even in difficult times, comfort can often be found close at hand.

The Ethics of Things - ABC Unleashed

2009-07-13T18:06:00.007+10:00

I've an opinion piece up online today on ABC's Unleashed, 'Charity begins at the cash register'.

And behind my op-shop ideals is a story.

When I was little, my parents had an auction room. It wasn't anything fancy - not a Sotheby's or Joel's. It was a big, dusty corrugated iron shed, in a suburban market where every Monday something wonderful happened.

My dad, as the auctioneer, was a like conjurer, the slight English strains in his accent, keeping the show running. People would bid frantically - possessed by the urge to possess, you might say. Some went there looking for a bargain. Others were searching for treasure amongst the boxes of sundries.

It was there that I learnt about the thrill of discovery. About finding a Barbie townhouse in box of junk. About people who'd pay any price because they'd fallen in love with an object. I also formed an ethics of buying and selling: about making a fair profit, about not seeking a bargain at any cost, about going home empty-handed.

I still love the thrill of discovering some old object hidden amongst the clutter of an op shop, but I'm often disappointed in my fellow treasure-hunters. In my piece on Unleashed, I'm arguing that often finding something rare and beautiful is reward enough in itself - we needn't wreck it with greed.

Vintage wooden workbox

2009-07-06T21:16:00.012+10:00

At my desk, there's sort of a collision happening: between work, interests, bills and stray lego. Books lean nervously together, left for the urgency of mucky toddler hands or muddy wellies. Folders and handwritten notes clutter. My poor, sleek modernist desk was never designed for someone with such torn priorities.

And so today I bought myself a special treat: an antique wooden workbox. It's fairly simple - basic wood, with ornate carving. It's made with what look like simple iron nails and a steel latch. The top opens halfway at the top, and it's simple, sparse and unembellished inside.

It was my husband who first noticed it in the op-shop window. But it was pricey. And because of that I ruled it out. I even said so to the ladies in the shop. Yet that didn't stop me from looking at it, from coveting it, thinking what I could use it for. I don't think I'm alone in this: when you really like something, you will sometimes find a convenient justification for it. I didn't realise that this was what I was doing, and I don't think it was the only thing I was doing.

In fact, I think I was daydreaming a little when I realised that the workbox could be a practical muse. Daydreaming about working away on my little project, and fearing that it will come to nought without some protection from the 'survival of the fittest' competition of daily life.

So to sustain it I need not only a space for it, but also a symbol. A way to carve off space but not put it away. This box represents an opportunity to get things organised, but also to sit on my desk as a beautiful, craftsmanly, flag reminding me to do - urging me on.

The challenge, of course, will be to keep opening the lid. I am the animating force that will keep the project alive. And this is crucial: if I don't, the box will just become a coffin for a dream.

The sacrifice in question

2009-06-30T21:12:00.005+10:00

'The best things in life aren’t things.’ British artist Michael Landy seems to have taken this motto to heart. In his exhibition, Breakdown, he piled up all his worldly goods and destroyed them.

His teddy bears and childhood toys were all fed into a mulcher. They met the same fate as bland official documents, furniture, and cutlery - all 7,227 of them reduced to debris of daily life. All in front of a public audience.

Most critics saw Landy’s artwork as a comment on our materialistic society. One saw it as ‘euphorically liberating’ us from our sentimental attachment to ordinary objects. But it made my stomach churn.

Could I live without the photos of parents or my son’s first paintings? Are we really freer with less stuff? Can we really end our relationships with intimate objects of our acquaintance so easily? And, if we can, with what consequences?

Moving house is one of those few occasions when we're forced to physically engage with the dust and detritus we have accumulated over time.

This in itself can be enough to ask the hard questions about what we value – what should hold onto, and what things simply aren’t worth the effort. Most of us are able to say farewell to our old things with little fanfare. The old fridges, wardrobes and couches littering kerbs and filling skips are evidence that many of us answer such questions with a resounding ‘no’.

This is also the time that exposes how we feel about things in general. There have been few times that have so clearly revealed the different relationship that my husband and I have to our possessions as when we were last moving house.

‘Are you sure,’ he questioned, in a voice faint with exhaustion ‘that you want to keep it?’ It was, in retrospect, a reasonable question - the item in question was a heavy antique wardrobe. Ordinarily I’d have been in there lugging and lifting alongside him. But, at 5 months pregnant I was reduced to the useless, frustrated foreman. It was my poor, Sisyphus-like husband who was bearing the burden of my attachment to shoes, books and large antique furniture.

Perhaps in hindsight I was wrong. But the stubbornness with which I clung to my old wardrobe - bought with my first pay - suggests that some possessions simply aren’t negotiable for me. And I suspect others share similar bonds. Some objects are worth a great deal of sacrifice – so much so that we’d annoy and exhaust our loved ones to ensure their safety.

What do our attachments to certain objects – particularly precious ones – tell us about ourselves and the world we live in?

The promise of Ikea

2009-06-25T20:24:00.007+10:00

Yesterday a new Ikea catalogue made its way into our letterbox (despite the 'no junk mail' sticker), and into the house courtesy of my three year-old.

And I couldn't help sneaking a look inside. It got me thinking: what's the appeal of Ikea?

Sure, it's cheap, functional furnishings, but the catalogue is offering something more. Well, for me, anyway.

Its pages promise a better home, and a better you. Where things are new, bright and perfectly working.

The picture-perfect rooms are untainted by real life. There are no messy toddlers, tedious vaccuuming, or cold winter mornings. By comparison, my home seems like too much hard work.

But there's more to this promise.

When I look through an Ikea catalogue there's a kind of inner battle going on for my self.

My old objects are like old friends. My childhood music box, the pottery cups that holds my tea, the chair I'm sitting on. They're nothing expensive or rare, but each one tells me something about myself. These old, imperfect things help me to maintain the thread of who I am.

But as I leaf through the Ikea catalogue I test out another self. The modern self. This self is unshackled by the past. It desperately wants to be modern, rational, without sentimentality. This self can chop and change styles and objects, as easily as it can change continents and jobs. It is without the moorings and difficulties of everyday life.

But I know, at heart, that this promise is a false one. As I turn each page, life as a modern self starts to look alien. Life without history, commitments, a sense of integrity, and the burdens of daily life seems less than human. Real life, with all its struggles, returns to my mind in a new sweet light, complete with a jumbled couch, dust and toddler toys.

Ikea isn't really offering a perfect life, just some new stuff. Life cannot be assembled with an allan key. And if it could be, would we want to?

Stupid Silly Stuff

2009-06-14T21:15:00.012+10:00

Philosopher Karl Marx had a way with words. Private property, he once wrote, has made us stupid.

These words have continued to rattle around in my brain, long since severed from their original context. They no longer exist for me as part of Marx's critique of the relations of production throughout human history.

No, Marx's ghost haunts me in an entirely different way. It accuses me, it accosts me, it tells me that I am stupid to pay any attention to the objects that surround me.

It is the censoring voice over my shoulder that says I am spending too much time window shopping rather than being productive.

It tells me not to be sentimental and nostalgic. To not fetishise the object. To throw out the broken things. To leave the op-shop empty-handed.

But I want to tell this ghost that he is wrong. That these things do matter. That what's important is having the best relations I can to them. Of working out precisely why they're valuable.

So, in large part, that's what this blog is. An open-ended, one-sided conversation with Marx's ghost on what things matter and why.