on childhood streets

It’s Australia Day. Patriotic fools drape flags around themselves and wander round the supermarket.

In the afternoon while my good woman sleeps off some jetlag, I cycle to my sister's place, Vermont to Hampton, a return distance of 50 kilometres and one metre. I zigzag my way south and west; Warrigal Road is the watershed between Melbourne’s east and south-east.

The south-eastern suburbs—Ormond, Carnegie, Bentleigh, McKinnon, Murrumbeena—are the streets of my childhood. 

I pedal along Woornack Road where my father played Sunday morning tennis in his early forties. He gave up smoking 60 untipped cigarettes a day at 41 and just survived a massive heart attack at 44. He’s 85 now.

Oakleigh Road is shorter than childhood legs measured it. I look for the house where two female cousins lived as university students; it had a tennis court I was allowed to play on. I snuck though a window as a thirteen year-old to examine their underwear, as any self-respecting thirteen year-old would.

I ride the bus route I took to school for nine years; the streets now have traffic-taming devices no bus could negotiate. Two blocks from the house my family occupied for 17 years the private girls school my sister attended now occupies the entire block.

The small park next to McKinnon Station where Mike Tamblyn and I played Test cricket is gone. A multi-storey monument to residential cubism squats there. The squash courts where Stiffy McLaughlin beat me sixteen straight games one hot summer holiday afternoon are gone. So is squash.

The genteel California bungalows of Ormond were just houses in my teens. I scan Grange Road for 16 year-old Prue, the doctor’s haughty daughter, pert breasts and shapely brown legs in a blue and white checked school dress. Gone.

At the other end of Grange Road I wheel into Lyons Street—cement pavement instead of bitumen—alongside my primary school. No fourth grade kid could get the footy off Jackie Krafcek or me in 1961.

In Koornang Road Iranians, Indians and Indonesians cross at the lights on this Australia Day evening. There were no migrants in exotic Murrumbeena when I ventured that far from home in the 60s.