Somewhere Somehow

On a winter's day in August, I found myself back in the same lolly, preserve and soap shops that formed part of the cottage tourism of Berrima in the NSW Southern Highlands.

This time around, Mui Na was window shopping with me. Mui Na was on the last leg of her six week chill out around the eastern seaboard of the Australian continent, having been to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne in the preceding weeks. She had caught up with our other university classmates, Chao Chin and Kwi Wah. The nights had been cool, and when the winds blew, temperatures had plummeted in varying extent. This was a far cry from the equatorial climate of our campus days.

We had a leisurely lunch at a cafe of her choice. Berrima is a a one-main street village, and the sun shone with blue skies over the cool air. It offered a casualness that thrived on familiarity and a lack of a sense of time. Maybe it epitomised what Mui Na wanted on this holiday, with no schedule and just flowing with spontaneous conversation and quiet conviction on what life should - and can - be. We traversed part of the Hume Highway going south before we reached Berrima. We had home meals in Wollongong apart from the foray to the harbour to partake in seafood, and I felt this need to be up in higher altitudes to offer a contrast from the coastline fronting the Tasman Sea.

The day before, we had watched a storm come over my adopted town one evening and then we instinctively headed to Towradgi Beach. The winds had stirred the waves - within minutes, young surf wannabes had popped out in dark suits to head towards the riding opportunities evident on the ocean side, even if the skies had been forever changing in mood. At least twenty surfers waited in the changing waters for the next big wave - and then they went for it.

We caught up for dinner at my cousin's house in Carlingford on a Sunday evening before Mui Na returned to Kwi Wah's Sydney abode. I was fascinated with Ralphie, the Maltese darling pet of Kwi's daughter Kimberley. Mui Na's coming to visit us opened my eyes again to the reason for existence, to live and that everything else is secondary. Somehow, ex-classmates got together as if the intervening past years had never occurred - I did not realise how easy it was to just resume where we left off in campus. Somewhere in the past, a certain wavelength must have amalgamated, to re-surface seamlessly in another place, another time. Somewhere, somehow, this is a gift.

My Old Neighbourhood: Bennelong

Today's Telegraph Mirror recounted how a twenty year old Macquarie University student was hit by another young fellow with a skateboard in the small hours of the night in the main campus. Epping rail station has been transformed into a glittery version of its old self. Couples buy dinner in reasonably priced packs in the Carlingford Asian Village upon coming back from work - and do not have to cook anymore. The main thoroughfare of Epping Road is more choked with traffic than ever before during weekday and weekend rush hours. Higher density housing have cropped up beside the six-lane road. Prices of groceries in Eastwood are apparently a better bargain than Cabramatta and Flemington, the other competing suburbs of similar fare.

As the nineties began, I loved walking in the mornings to the then unassuming rail station just two streets away in Epping. I had my first taste of autumn biting winds standing on the platform. I cooked dinner amazed at the stillness and darkness of the road outside the kitchen window. A teenage boy, I recall, fell outside the block I was in, and there followed the commotion of an ambulance arriving and a distraught mother. I was insistent on getting a car, a Ford, as I did not want to lose the freedom of having one in my home island. The post office was so important to me as well.

Eastwood had a mall, but it was so quiet. What amazed me was how the KFC outlet in that suburb had closed, a strange phenomenon when fast food in all forms was a booming business elsewhere. I noted the elderly demographics on the streets and in the home gardens. Then the number of Korean residents increased, perhaps encouraged by the churches - and I had my contact with Koreans outside their native country, a place and culture I thoroughly enjoyed when visiting before coming to Australia. Gradually one side of the rail line had businesses dominated by Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese - but the Korean shops stuck to the other side of the station.

The day I arrived in Sydney for the first time I stayed at Waterloo Road. Macquarie Shopping Centre had free parking for all vehicles. I sat on a bus that skirted this centre on the day when Sydney was surrounded by a great ring of bush fire one January. I caught a glimpse of how high strong and high winds were fanning real flames so close to people's homes. North Ryde bus terminus was where I learnt about the Sydney state transit system.

Mum came to stay with me in my various places in Marsfield, Eastwood and Dundas. Cooking is so important to both of us - and I appreciated moreover the orderliness of things that she brings to a household. We explored together the diversity of things that only Australia can bring - fruits, blooms, food ingredients, friends and weather. Mum enjoyed her walks to Eastwood Mall - and I encourage her to see what the mall has become today.

I still frequent this old neighbourhood of mine, especially on weekends. These suburbs may have changed, but never the fondness for them in my heart.

A Kind of Hush

I had thought it had been a kind of rush for the whole day....and night. Such feelings were however mixed with doses of satisfaction and inner contentment, more of a kind of food for the soul.

It commenced with just food, partaking of vegetarian wraps with the Hindu worshippers on a mid-Sunday morning. The meal may have been simple, but the communal communion was sweet and embracing. Two little Indian boys sitting at a nearby canteen table were engaged in a banter of conversation in all innocence as childhood can bestow. The nearby temple was full of people engaged in ceremonies for an important holy day. Having grown up comfortable with this culture, to me, it was also food for the soul, even just as an observer. One of my fellow visitors, Phylis, remarked that it reminded her of elements of Jewish prayer. It struck me there and then that the world' religions can be somehow related, and that there is this invisible but strong bond of a string that connects to all things holy. The worshippers were decked in their Sunday best, holy smoke prevailed and there was the lilt of song in a sung prayer - we could have been attending the Papal Mass at Randwick Stadium in Sydney's eastern suburbs that very same morning.

The hush continued at a hilltop Buddhist temple complex which brilliantly shone under the blue sky and mid-winter Wollongong sun. The bare branches of deciduous trees and the flowering native succulents underlined the essence of Buddhist philosophy and thinking. A few of us wandered to a room dedicated to portraits in oil. The theme was perhaps womanhood. The expressiveness of the artists jumped out literally to me. A nearby pond, usually brimming with flowering lotus in early summer, had been mostly drained short of the muddy centre, which was now a playground for the resident ducks in winter.

Religion need not be organised. It can appear in the forms of Nature, and that late afternoon, I felt religion not in another man-made house of worship, but in the clean sweeping sand of Geroa, an hour by car south of Wollongong. The ocean side golf course links already put me in the mood. And then the seduction of an empty beach appeared and totally caught my heart and soul. It was windy but there were no surfing waves. Despite this, the vibes of the place appealed to my inner self and offered a calmness, just like in the Hindu or Buddhist temple earlier.

To wind up this special day, I found myself in the company of good friends a hundred kilometres from my Wollongong home, in a beloved recreation of Austria. We could not resist having our fav dishes of duck, snapper and pork, in a bush setting restaurant manned by true blue Austrians. Then we whizzed past the Sydney Bahai Temple by night, a circular structure with a light at the top. We had to return to the Austrian-German restaurant to retrieve a handbag forgotten in the midst of relaxed laughter and social enjoyment, but one of the staff members, brown-haired and blue-eyed Mario, was already waiting for us to return it.

So as it had been throughout this special Sunday in mid-July, the special kind of hush continued under the moonlight as I drove back to Wollongong late at night.