If you’ve missed it, this series starts here.
[GM: Warning: This post does mention suicide.]
Tuesday 13 February 1996
20/288 Casuarina Drive
Nightcliff 0810
“ Birthday Greetings, Mum! ” G’day folks,
How are you both? Staying out of the hot sun no doubt! Sorry we missed you on Sunday, Mum. We’re well, although leading relatively mundane lives at the moment.
Notwithstanding Greg of course being extremely busy at NTU with enrolments – he’s at work by 8.00am and doesn’t get home until gone 7.00pm on some nights.
It’s the inauguration of the computer system he’s been working on over the past year. So, he and his staff are experiencing the usual teething problems that seem inevitable with the introduction of new technological processes.
Anyway, he’s coping – with my support of course!
I’m still spending a fair bit of time mucking about on this computer, doing, or trying to figure out, one thing or another.
Which reminds me, in response to a question in your last letter Mum, about whether the creative artist in me is coming to the fore when I insert pictures in my letters, the answer is NO! I wish!
The truth is, I simply cut and paste them from other programs – unfortunately I can’t draw to save my life.
Anyway, what have you both been up to? We’re glad you’re happy with your new car. How’s the garden growing?
As we haven’t gone anywhere or done anything particularly of note for some time, this letter will consist of me just basically rambling on about, well – anything. We have already told you some of this on the phone, but I’ll recap, so as to give you a bit more detail. Be duly warned though – nothing too awesome, follows.
I dislike being morose at any time
Our balcony garden is marginally overgrown at the moment, but I’m loathe to prune it because we have an abundance of flowers. Most of which, I still don’t know, or have forgotten their names.
We have some pretty little purple flowers – which look like they’re crawling along outstretched tendrils. We have white ixora? – something like that. We have orange heleconeas? – sounds good, cascading trails of red hoveas, and our coleus has several sprays of lilac delphinium type blooms – which look particularly striking in contrast to the bright red, black and green of its leaves.
Although our flower garden seems to thrive with out much attention from us, the same can’t be said of our herb garden, which is now nigh on extinct.
Our parsley plant finally kicked up its heels some time back, our coriander plant did a pretty good vanishing trick, and our only remaining performer – basil, is hovering somewhere between death and total oblivion – we will probably assist with its demise.
Fungi is the problem – and unfortunately it’s not the edible kind. Which brings me to eating.
We have just recently, fought our way through the balcony overgrowth to our round jarrah table, cleared it of a year’s worth of accumulated junk, and have as a result, created a very pleasant garden eating area. We can now utilise this area, when the winds are far too strong to eat out on the main balcony – which is quite often at the moment.
Well, we’ve had a mixed bag over the past couple of months. Some of it has been a little trying and some of it has indeed been tragic. I’ll tell you a few for instances, but won’t dwell too heavily on any of them, as I dislike being morose at any time.
Firstly, our bank ANZ, stole $5,000.00 from our account – even though we didn’t have $5,000.00 in it. They then accused us of being overdrawn. Initially, even when we put them straight, they would not return the money, or give us access to any cash.
It was not until Greg threatened them with calling the police, that they returned our money.
Since then, they have actually charged us a fee for being overdrawn – definitely a wrong move on their part. So we’ve now written another letter to them, and if we get no joy from that, we’ll get the Banking Ombudsmen to take up our case – we await the outcome.
Secondly, our landlord put our rent up $40 per fortnight – fab! He told us, that as we are such good tenants, he would not increase it by $100 as he would if we were new tenants – lucky us!
So we now pay the unconscionable amount of $640 a fortnight – truly, truly extortionary!
But our financial woes have been devastatingly put into perspective by the tragedy that occurred next. On the night of The Student Admin Christmas party – which we attended, Greg’s secretary Lindsay, arrived home from work to find her husband had killed himself in their car, in their garage. He had also worked at NTU.
As a consequence, there have been some fairly stressful moments at work for Greg.
This time of the year is colloquially called “the suicide season”. It certainly has reinforced how fortunate and thankful we are to have such a loving relationship.
Anyway, lets talk about the weather, it’s been atrocious. The humidity climaxes between 90 & 100% daily. I’m sure you would revel in this.
Last year, being the wettest Wet on record, meant that we had considerable relief from the humidity when it rained for days on end. This year, although there has been some rain, it has been little by comparison, and not enough to bring any real relief.
We do still have storms rolling in most days, but these predominantly consist of black-as-night skies, strong winds, thunder, lightning, but more often than not, only a small amount of rain which tends to evaporate before it’s hit the ground.
We have nevertheless, witnessed a couple of really spiffy downpours. We had one particularly tumultuous storm for several hours on the Wednesday night after Christmas Day.
It was like being in the midst of a cartoon – everything was exaggerated…..fork lightning, struck every 2 seconds, zigzagging wildly across the rain drenched night sky, whilst ‘Thor – God of Thunder’, played bowls with the clouds, crashing one into the other, which culminated in a rolling crescendo of shuddering reverberations.
Then the rain really fell, creating opaque water walls around our balcony which eventually obscured and muffled the still raging storm.
This, however was nothing compared to the earth tremor we experienced on Christmas Day. We’d eaten a hearty lunch and had just sat down in the lounge to recover and watch ‘Pricilla’ on video.
It was 2.20pm. I felt the earth move, but wasn’t sure whether it was giddiness as a consequence of eating too much. However, Greg also felt movement, and then it happened– the entire building started to sway from front to back!
We dashed to stand under the bedroom doorway, our fridge started walking across the kitchen floor, our Christmas cards on top of our bookcases fluttered to the ground, as did some of our decorations – the swaying continued.
We didn’t know whether to get out of the building or what. Greg suggested we move to a more central and hopefully more fortified area of the apartment. He moved to the laundry doorway, but I was too scared to budge.
I stayed, white knuckled, gripping to the bedroom door frame swaying in time with the building, all the while having horrendous visions of “Tracey”…and then it stopped. But I didn’t. I continued to be somewhat shaken and uneasy for the rest of the day.
Darwin being Darwin had no radio or TV reports of the tremor until the next day. There had been an earthquake measuring 7, in the Banda Sea about 600 nautical miles from Darwin. Although Darwin does experience quite regular occurrences of tremors, (we’ve had at least one since) this was the strongest one for many years.
There were a number of accounts in the paper and on telly of how various people had faired during the 40 seconds of shaking. But by all accounts no one experienced any damage of note.
Whether as a coincidence or as a consequence, I’m not sure, but at 8.00pm on Thursday 28 December (Greg Mahney’s Birthday) whilst we ate our dinner there came a spine chilling crashing, tumbling from around our front door passageway. We were both on our feet in nano-seconds.
We were sure the ceiling had come crashing down. We went to investigate. There were small bits of plaster and a metal bracket on the passage floor, but the ceiling was still there.
We checked the laundry, and there it was, the once wall mounted clothes tumble drier, was now teetering on the edge of the washing machine.
We looked at each other slightly relieved and smirked, I said “so that’s why it’s called a tumble drier”.
Now, on the wild life front…
∙ Crocs – you seem to have heard more about them this season than we have. Perhaps we’ve become real Darwinite’s, and don’t pay attention to any ‘sissy’ croc stories any more. More likely, is that the story you heard was manufactured for you southerner types, to ensure that Darwin maintains its rugged and tough outback image.
∙ Lizards – Our friend across the road, I fear has gone for good. It has never been spotted since ‘Cracker night’ back in July last year. However, several weeks back, we were coming across frilled neck lizards all over the place. Out on walks, driving in the car. They were certainly more prevalent on the roads than cats and dogs for instance.
Apparently, it was egg laying season. Since then they’ve vanished. We’ve not seen hide nor hair of our resident lizards, but we’re hoping they’ll return with a baby or two in the near future.
∙ Birds – There is a casuarina tree which grows right on the edge of the cliff opposite our balcony. For some reason birds have only recently discovered it. Perhaps it’s grown and now produces seeds, I’m not sure, but anyway… the rainbow lorikeets that used to flock to the tree at the back of our apartments, have discovered it, and arrive as a noisy, chaotic colourful mass each evening around six and then leave, in their hundreds just as frantically, within the half hour.
[GM: This story from the ABC “Darwin vets hope to solve annual ‘drunk’ lorikeet mystery” reveals that lorikeets, once thought to be drunk in Darwin, aren’t actually on a bender, they have a virus.]
This went on for weeks, but has since stopped. These birds as you know are so exquisitely coloured.
The birds that really made my arms ache (a long period of looking through my binoculars) though, were a group of 17 red-tailed black cockatoos.
Usually they seem to hang out in groups of two or three, but this one particular time there were 17 – I counted them, as they very kindly perched on the tips of the branches. They’re large birds and just gorgeous.
They put on a fabulous show – just for me! They were feeding and preening themselves, and fluttering from branch to branch. When they spread their fanned wings, you can see the beautiful inlay of colour – fire-engine red on the males, and variations from golden yellow to tangerine orange on the females, they had me mesmerised!.
Greg won a couple of free tickets (from a competition on the side of a beer carton) to go and see ‘Golden Eye’ the new James Bond movie. So we went during the day on his birthday.
It was screening in the city at the Darwin 5 Cinema complex – just down the road from where the Bus transit centre was – Remember that fateful place? Well, it no longer exists, it’s just dust and rubble at the moment.
Anyway, we were keen, although a touch apprehensive as to whether my somewhat, quirky skeletal system, could last the distance. It’s the first time we’ve been to a conventional cinema for over seven years.
The last movie we saw was ‘Indiana Jones, and The Last Crusade’. Greg reckons, it’s probably more recent than when you last went to a movie though.
Times have changed, and stayed the same, since we last loitered in a cinema foyer. Gone, is the “Snack Bar” with its endless crowd mingling around the counter waiting for the attendant to – scoop out the ice-cream, pour the drinks… etc, etc.
It’s been superseded by a brightly lit, sterile and efficient self serve mini-mart. The chocolate coated ice-cream ‘bomb’ is still around, (Greg bought one) but they now like everything else are sold pre-assembled and pre-packaged.
The ‘goings-on’ in the foyer are still the same – people checking their tickets, confirming what door to go in, yelling at kids, kids spilling drinks, grinding popcorn under their shoes, kids rolling on the floor, long queues of women and children spilling out of the female toilets, whilst the men’s toilet door opens only sporadically, and then the buzzer signals it’s time to go in.
And then of course there are the cinema seats...sadly, no progress there. Although we did enjoy the banter and antics of the movie, we won’t be hurrying back for the full cinema experience.
I’m quite happy to wait for the movies to come out on video, and watch them in the comfort of my own lounge chair.
Well, life in these apartments goes on as usual. Apart from the ‘owner’ residents, we’re probably the next longest term residents now. There’s been a constant flow of old tenants moving out and new ones moving in – a month doesn’t pass with out at least one visit from a removalist truck.
This high resident turnover ensures a regular crop of letters from the body corporate manager telling us not to park on the verge, not to leave our awnings down in the wet, not to put rubbish next to the bins, not to leave household stuff in our carports, guidelines on how to use the security system properly, and so on and so on, because invariably, some ‘new chum’ always does something wrong which managers to ruffle someone’s feathers.
Our immediate neighbours in #19 haven’t been around for months. Their Fairlane is still parked in their carport, but the licence plates have vanished. Despite there not being a hell of a lot of rain, the walkways are still ‘ponding’ when ever it does rain.
We don’t go for evening walks as regularly as we used to. This is due in part to the weather and partly to Greg not arriving home from work early enough.
Greg is still very well disciplined in getting up at the crack of dawn for a walk though – but not me. However, I have taken to doing aerobics each day, so we’re both keeping pretty fit.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of experimenting in the kitchen too – but that’s not that unusual. Nevertheless as a result, I’ve increased my cooking repertoire to include a few Greek, Thai and Moroccan dishes.
I’ve also read several books which Greg bought me. Greg plays Doom 2, a computer game I bought him, whenever he can. We’ve been to the pool a few times, had meals with Lorraine and Neil, eaten out at a couple of restaurants, and Greg’s sent off a job application to UWA. We have been thinking more and more about holidays.
Firstly, Greg thought it was time we got some information about Europe – its only 1 1/2 years before our planned holiday after all! Well, we’ve now been inundated with literature after Greg had the bright idea of writing to every European embassy in Australia requesting appropriate travel info.
Our letter box has had difficulty coping with the influx of mail. We have, as a result, had to dedicate one entire section of our guest-room wardrobe to a “European Travel Info” compartment in order to hold the dozens of glossy and not so glossy pamphlets and propaganda.
Secondly, we have booked a 9 day holiday in Sydney from the 5th – 14th March, just 3 weeks away! Yippee! We are both avidly looking forward to soaking up all the features that a big city has to offer.
And that’s about it. Hopefully you’ll have a very pleasant birthday, Mum. Anyway, enjoy whatever you do.
G’day to the rest of the tribe. Take care.
lots of love
Tren & Greg
XXOOXX