A year in review: Furniture and fittings, part eight

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about my house! – and the post you’re reading is the fifteenth in the series. 

A few days before 12 June I’d organised a hang in my studio (see below). The landscapes are oils bought on Facebook Marketplace, one a view of hills (Robert Simpson’s ‘Secluded Valley, Tilba Tilba’) and the other a view of trees shown in close-up (Edna Burns’ ‘Hills Gums’). Underneath I put a friend’s paired drawings and photos of native Australian flowers – grevillea (left) and banksia (right) – in order to complete an incremental zoom made by increasing the degree of granularity, each item giving a different view of the same thing until you come face to face with the flowers in the artworks Basia’d posted and that I’d had framed using a dusty, pale yellow mat board to complement the photos’ lilac abstraction.

In the first full week of September I contacted Jennifer Loubser in Brisbane, a woman who’d taken custody of dad and mum’s Japanese screen since the beginning of the previous year when couriers visited me in Pyrmont to load it on-board a truck so that it could be shipped north to the Sunshine State. Initially I SMS’d Jennifer at Studio 204 but then I called her and left a message, my recall with regard to this item of furniture piqued by a discussion with Ming about an assignment for which she had to write an essay on Chinese painting. I distinctly remember a thought, in relation to the screen, that came to me as the three of us walked down a Botany street while taking exercise when she and Omer’d stayed overnight at my place (their arrival happening on account of her desire to draw and paint). Jennifer called me back the same day as I contacted her and we discussed the item at length, with her eventually promising to send me photos of the backing cloth she’d ordered from Japan to complete the renovation, a step that had been delayed because of supply problems due to the virus.

On 16 September I added to the studio’s south wall two James Ettelson paintings that had been on the first floor, deploying a broom handle to push two drops along their rails (see below). This turned out to be a tricky operation as the ceiling on the top floor is high, and in order to clip new drops in place I had to balance precariously on my ladder, using a rung far distant from the floor and ignoring a precipitous drop because I’d placed it precisely on the verge of the staircase.

I would’ve added another item – a black-and-white photo of trees taken by great-aunt Madge – but I’d run out of hooks! I resolved this by ordering more, the quote I made sure to get from John Verhoeven (who’d done hanging for me in December) higher than the price for the same thing available on eBay, so I used my credit card again and opted for the web source, buying (from one supplier, people I’d previously used) monofilament hooks as well as (from a different supplier) wire hooks. My monofilament drops had just about run out – at this point in time I had two left in my box of supplies – and some wire drops I’d got in December were tucked away in a box in the closet.

On Friday 17 September I started looking for another small desk to put in a spare room on the first floor. Ming’d requisitioned the one I had in the middle bedroom (that her boyfriend had been using for conference calls) as she now wanted to use it in her studio in front of her Mac; she’d wanted to take calls on her computer (a painting class). So I revisited Facebook Marketplace. Two Kmart Scandi desks (one unassembled) sold quickly so I had to settle on a desk from Malaysia that a woman whose mother-in-law lives in the next street along from me, in Botany, was selling. At 10.01am I’d received notification that a white wooden desk the same woman had offered, and that I’d messaged about, had been claimed, but she notified me about a $30 brown wooden one she also had and as soon as she told me the dimensions I said I’d take it. Her mother-in-law was out of the house when we made the deal but Natalie added her to the group so she could let me know when she returned home, which she did at 11.19am. 

I jumped in the car, turned on satnav, and picked up the desk within five minutes. It’s just the right size to fit in the back of the car: I had to shove it right up inside the space so that the rear hatch could close. I waited until Omer came over on the same day before it was brought upstairs as it was a bit difficult for me to carry though Omer managed it solo. The thing is simple in its design and much lighter than the steel-framed Ikea table I’d bought for Adelaide to use, and which had been in Pyrmont before my move (I’d originally bought it so I could organise my photo albums – a task I never got to). The new table has sides that double as legs and a cross-beam for support and to prevent it from distorting when moved. 

On 23 September I drove out to Broadway Shopping Centre to pick up some of the latest batch of hooks I’d ordered but when I got home found that the packet only contained 39 of the metal fittings – out of 40 (20 pairs) ordered – so I messaged the seller asking for a refund or else for him to send another hook. He replied saying that he’d give me a refund but I then left a negative review as without a new hook I’d be left with one spare – which is suboptimal as they’re normally used in pairs – and he messaged me almost straight away because he was now unhappy. He called me directly on the phone and we discussed the transaction, in the end agreeing that he’d send an extra hook. In the end he sent an extra three hooks (presumably in order to apologise for the inconvenience he’d exposed me to) and I picked them up on 13 October.

David, the online seller, also sent me a message asking me to revise my review, which I did on the morning of 24 September after waking up and having my coffee. John Verhoeven’d wanted to charge $20 each hook and David charged a quarter of that and also refunded me the price of a hook (I found on Saturday when checking my bank balance) though his hooks aren’t of the same manufacture as John’s. This aroused my concern. I wondered if they’d be as strong as the ones I’d already been using; when you’re putting up a painting worth hundreds of dollars you should spend as much as necessary to ensure its safety ... you hardly want it falling to the floor. John promised that his’d bear a 15kg load and David 10kg, but they looked almost the same and I figured they were the same thing as just a trademark moulding was missing on David’s.

I convinced myself of their utility and privately mused as I got used to the transaction as a fact in my life. An option existed in my mind to use the new ones for lighter paintings while reserving the old lot for bigger pictures. This would allow me to get value without risking my possessions and I thought about it with such determination that it became a memory that would persist despite intervening thoughts and experiences.

On 29 September I reorganised my pictures in the bedroom, which unhomed the David Moore reproduction that’d been located above my desk. To settle things I used David’s hooks and because of the switch now had to find a place to put the Moore, deciding, because it has a nautical subject, to locate it on the edge of the staircase (see below) among similarly-themed objects. Above is a painting, bought from Arthouse Gallery, by Zuza Zochowski titled ‘Connecticut, Nov 05 #2’, a dark utterance in purple and blue. Below the Moore is a 1921 painting by Elias Petersen showing in the distance a ship with waves rolling (to a beach?) in a stiff breeze. Some of the waves are slightly brown as though rendering in colour the fact of riverine runoff.

Nearby on the same day I did a new hang in a bedroom using two paintings formerly situated one-up on the same wall and adding two landscapes that’d been up in the master bedroom (displaced by a painting otherwise poorly accommodated). See below.

The three photos hanging on the left-hand side in this layout are by my former father-in-law (still alive when this memorial was being written) and show Japanese scenes. There’s ‘Stradbroke silence (Stradbroke Island from Russell Island)’ by Ian Keats (in January hanging downstairs) above an op-shop purchase titled ‘Lake Cathie at Noon’ by Audrey Hogg that had originally been purchased by someone at the Harrington Street Gallery, a social enterprise established in the 70s (according to the website) that is now located in Chippendale. Lake Cathie is near Port Macquarie on the New South Wales North Coast and to the right of Hogg’s work hangs a rendering of Mount Tom Price (in Western Australia) by Neridah Stockley. Above this is the Danish landscape (top right in photo above) by Poul Friis Nybo that would later move to the kitchen. 

Both of the two smaller paintings’d previously been above my desk. I thought an all-landscape wall’d do well in the guest room, windowless due to its location in the centre of the first floor, but, deciding that the gaps between the pictures was too large and that the hang was too monolithic and, consequently, ponderous, added a drop of family photos on 3 October (see below). 

It’s remarkable on thinking about the assembly how landscapes predominate on the democratic source of novelty that Facebook Marketplace surely constitutes for young and old, a cornucopia, a treasure trove of bric-a-brac available sometimes for ludicrous prices. In late September when this hang was made I was reading the correspondence of the late Judith Wright, and it occurred to me how similar must’ve been the impulse that compelled the poet to spend so much of her time and patience on ecological conservation, something that she started doing in the 60s. By the same token the landscape is so compelling in our country, drawing the gaze of rapt painters looking for inspiration and novelty. One watercolour I bought online features a mountain in Wales but most of the works acquired this way, either ones done in oils or with watercolour, feature places in Australia. Wright’s poetry also contains nature, especially animals, and it struck me that since the countryside is habitat for creatures other than humankind it was fitting that the new house was filling up with landscapes. 

A year in review: Furniture and fittings, part seven

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about my house! – and the post you’re reading is the fourteenth in the series. 

On5 May I drove to Newcastle to pick up the picture hanging gear from Mark’s sister’s place. The day before with Mark via Messenger I organised the pickup, feeling confident enough to suggest doing it myself, and in any case needing a trial run as in June I’d booked motel rooms in New England on account of an event I wanted to get to (I never went). 

The Newcastle trip was brief and a touch harrowing, especially on the way back when it bucketed down and drivers responded in sometimes dangerous ways; I just avoided being collected in the rear by a roaring semi-trailer when the motorist in front of me put on hazard lights, slowing down to 60km/hr in a 110km/hr zone. For the first time I used Northconnex with its disco lights and dull tunnel, the rain more sedate once I got back to Sydney and, as I put the rubbish bins back into the garage, I complacently chatted with Chris, a friend of Joe’s and a local resident. 

I SMS’d Beaumont about the boxful of things – some I’d seen before, but others were of a kind that were new to me and had me wondering if they were to be used with monofilament or with metal cable drops – and was told that the hooks with screws in them were old-fashioned devices he doesn’t recommend using as they wreck drops and are unreliable since they can slip if not sufficiently well-tightened. The lot also contained 24 monofilament drops I could use with the hooks I was buying at regular intervals on eBay. 

On Facebook Marketplace I listed the hooks I didn’t want and in July sold a packet full of them for $25 to a woman in Windradyne, in rural NSW. She paid for postage as well and used PayPal and, having mailed them on the Monday, see below the Australia Post delivery notification that came up when I used the QR code on the printed receipt I got from the sales clerk at Botany post office.

Including roughly $60 for road tolls plus $150 paid for the lot, out of the transaction I gained a substantial surplus and as I finished with value of well over $800 it was very much worth my while engaging with Richard and his wife. In October when, in order to find out the brand of the rails, I used Messenger to get back in touch with Diane, she replied after a short delay but couldn’t tell me the name of the maker. Beaumont told me that many companies manufacture them in different countries around the world and Diane just said hers were called “Click Rail Art Hanging System” and that she’d bought ‘em in Toowoomba. This didn’t help much but in January, when dealing with her and Richard, I’d known even less about what was on offer. Months later I reserved quiet moments to think how it’d all been perfect and silently congratulated myself on a gamble that paid off. When Ollie came over on 14 October to install the rails he expressed an idea that I’d gotten good value.

I was also happy when I made another outlay on 13 May after driving – again using satnav – to Coogee to get a towel rail I’d discovered on Facebook Marketplace to replace a bedside table I’d used in my walk-in wardrobe on which, at the end of each day before showering, I’d been in the habit of placing my trousers. Ming’d asked for the return of a small table from the middle room on the first floor that’d been left when she moved out, and my red table was to go in place of it. The towel rail cost $10 and I picked it up from the father of the owner (who, herself, was on the telephone when I rocked up in the RAV4), to whom I passed two $5 notes. Back in Botany, the wardrobe got the towel rail that’d originally been in the middle bathroom on the first floor, with the new one going into my shower recess.

On 20 May an email arrived with details of the amount owing on the couch, which I learned had arrived in the country. Sitting on the light rail in the CBD I read the message then called the store and left one of mine with the aim of having someone call me back as – due to problems the last time they’d asked for money – I wasn’t sure about the amount written on the invoice they’d just sent. When the staffer called back we sorted it out and it turned out this time that they’d not made a mistake, but that, in fact, I was about to. At home I transferred the required funds to a bank account they’d specified then contacted the removalists responsible for my January relocation, asking if they could pick up the couch and bring it over. 

On Saturday when visiting her house I offered a friend the old couch which, though gratefully accepted, finally fell into place as a done deal on Monday after a conversation on Messenger about the item’s age (14 years), original purchase price ($1100 plus twice having repair work done), and place of purchase (eBay). Money would, of course, change hands. 

Removalists booked on Tuesday the previous week brought the new purple couch to my place in Botany after, at around 1pm, calling me from the warehouse to get an order number so they could convince staff there to release it into their custody.

Once everything was in place (see above) I noticed colour coordinating the sofa with Stephen Deutscher’s ‘Ulmara Creek’, an oil-on-board Facebook Marketplace purchase that came to me when I’d driven out to Coogee to visit the seller’s house – or else the house of his or his wife’s parents (it wasn’t clear at the time I was there). The sofa took more effort to situate in the broad expanse of the living room with its ornate pink curtains. For a start it’d been packed for shipping in a strong wooden crate that Adam and Sia had to disassemble using a hammer (I fetched mine from the laundry) and a screwdriver (theirs was in the back of the truck). Adam initially wanted to use a crowbar, but I said I didn’t have one (who on earth keeps a crowbar at their house?). The men carried the old sofa from the living room and put it on the pavement outside the house, then after the new one was free of its covering they manoeuvred the heavy thing – Sia said it must weigh 100kg – so that it slid through the front gate and then carried it until (the two men breathing heavily and straining at every muscle) it hung in position over the rug I’d brought from the warehouse in March. With the sofa oriented sideways and held in their hands, Adam and Sia lowered it to the floor, flipped it onto its feet, lifted it again bodily into the air, and situated it as instructed so that I could arrange my legs between the mass of its wine darkness and the coffee table. 

By 2.30pm the two of them were on their way to my friend’s house and I phoned her to make sure she was ready to receive it since Sia’d said more money might be chargeable depending on how much time was needed for the delivery.

In the event none was and my friend called me just on 3pm to show me video of her and her dog. The sofa’d been brought into her living room and now sat in pride of place in front of the TV and she said the two of them were very happy with her new purchase. 

The crate ended up in the basement in my garage and got listed on Facebook Marketplace.

I was astonished by my new couch – see photo above – which makes me feel, while seated, as though I’ve been conveyed to the Topkapi Palace. To suitably elaborate the setting as well as to better use artworks in my collection on 12 June I brought down a portrait of my grandmother (done in 1981) from where, since December, it’d hung in the first-floor hallway. Its sharp acrylics (the first and only time I ever tried this medium) in colours – blue and maroon – making it match the couch. 

Blue in the portrait resonating with a slightly different blue in ‘Bondi’ (see above). I never went to Bondi with granny though mum used to drive me and my brother to Hall Street to buy school shoes. No memories of mine tie granny to the suburb or to the beach but the arrangement of the paintings seemed appropriate, especially as the red in the portrait matched the Deutscher landscape with its warm, muted palette.

At the same time on the opposite wall I put up a small photo of my son and daughter that’d been taken about eight years earlier (see below). This went above a linocut I’d made in my youth, the blue colour in the family snapshot matching colours in paintings nearby. 

This hang would change again not long afterward (regret hounds me as I didn’t note, for the record, the exact date the change was made) after I brought two drawings from the entranceway and hung them in the living room, removing small items from underneath the river scene and putting them on a wall out front near the street.

A year in review: Furniture and fittings, part six

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about my house! – and the post you’re reading is the thirteenth in the series. 

On the Monday – 26 April – I went to K-Mart and while there I bought a towel rack. When I got home and started to put it together – you use a supplied Allen key and screws – I found the kit to be missing a rod. I put the thing back in the car and returned along Botany Road to the shopping centre, got a refund – the sales clerk was sympathetic as I’d omitted to bring the right receipt, having grabbed, in my rush out the door, a Harris Farm receipt lying on the kitchen counter – and drove home on the Eastern Distributor (I couldn’t, again, stand the traffic, and swallowed the toll). 

Kmart didn’t have any more of the product in stock and though I promised myself to check again next time I went to the store I ended up finding a different towel rack listed for $5 on Facebook Marketplace. The Kmart one was $25, and to save money I only had to drive to Rose Bay – on the 27th heading along Cleveland Street and Old South Head Road – to meet a young woman who made sure proceedings sat skewwhiff by keeping me waiting for 15 minutes. She excused herself by saying she’d been busy working to the point in time when I’d arrived in her street. I didn’t speak up to help her and avoided remarking that since it wasn’t routine for me to drive to her place my timing might be expected to be slightly off, though in the end she apologised when I took the towel rail she brought out of her garage on a street crowded with parked cars.

In the afternoon I again got on Facebook Marketplace to do a search, conscious of myself as it seemed I couldn’t do without the adrenaline rush given by a bargain. This time an outdoor table for which I located a couple of likely listings before enquiring about a wooden one that’d seat eight. The owner – John – called me on my mobile when I dropped my number into Messenger’s chat box, offering to bring it out with his trailer. He warned against trying to put the thing on my RAV4’s roof racks – he said his son has a RAV4 (I initially doubted this claim but came to believe it was true after meeting the man, who seemed entirely credible) – and I agreed to pay a $40 delivery fee on top of an $180 charge for the item, which came with eight chairs. Straight away I got off the computer and walked down the street to visit the ATM and withdraw banknotes, snapping on the way a photo of the body of a dead magpie on the pavement.

John lives near Campbelltown and just after 7pm brought over the table and chairs, helped me carry them inside, and together we put them out the back on the deck next to the pool. The trailer indispensable as the table weighs a ton and couldn’t have been transported with my car. 

By placing it square in the opening we just managed to squeeze it through the gate, though it easily went through the front door. We got the move completed with judicious wriggling through gaps, balancing on edges, and by making slow progress up the front steps. In his professional life, John looks after people’s money with managed funds and had moved to Campbelltown from Chifley, which is just down the street from me. He’d never move back, he said. “It’s a rat race around here.”

On the Wednesday morning I took a screwdriver, along with a couple of packets of screws from my hardware drawer, and went out onto the deck. With a wood screw from my collection I secured in place a buttressing rod, and used the screwdriver to tighten up several other screws that had worked loose from their grooves. I put out the new chairs and, alone and unencumbered by opinion, admired the setting, counterintuitively savouring in its absence the promise of conviviality. I just needed friends to complete a congenial tableau familiar to many from countless magazine spreads and those entertaining segments on TV home improvement shows where at the program’s end a reveal opens to surprised occupants new areas to enjoy with meals and conversation. Writing this memorial I’m mindful of the Macquarie Bank ad where a family entertains outside around a swimming pool: three generations in one place. One day, I said to myself, I’d cook something for lunch and have people over, something that could be done, if it was fine out, even in spring or autumn. I sent a photo of the setting to John and he replied, “Looks fantastic glad they went to you.” “This is a nice table,” said Ming when she saw it the next day. I sent a photo to my cousin and he asked when we should have lunch.

A year in review: Furniture and fittings, part five

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about my house! – and the post you’re reading is the twelfth in the series. 

On 24 February I was up at the framer’s studio again, this time with a friend and, this time, no heart murmurs. Ming needed to get some D-rings put in some old paintings she had and that she wanted to hang using her own rails, ones she’d commissioned Beaumont to put up in her apartment. While we were in Richmond she organised for some drawings she’d made to be framed and Amanda helped facilitate the process of choosing materials. 

The next morning I bought more hooks on eBay but with the hooks I still had in my possession Ming got me to change the hang on the first floor outside her bedroom. The final arrangement looked as you can see in the image below. I carried the Pixie O’Harris oil painting down from where it’d been hanging in the master bedroom and situated it above an O’Harris etching of a prince and a mermaid, placing alongside them a piece of embroidery which had come to me from mum, one that Amanda had recently framed. Long in the past this item’d been made with needle and thread by an unknown member of the family, the frame bought by me at an op shop for a few dollars. 

It sits under a photo of a house in Melbourne where members of the family lived. I don’t know whose house this was but mum and dad grew up in Melbourne and the photo most definitely shows a suburban scene – see the white picket fence – while to the left of the O’Harrises a counterpoint is offered by Craig Waddell’s gouache self-portrait, ‘One night in Paris’.

On 1 March I picked up the latest package of hooks from the post office in Broadway Shopping Centre. With these, and some drops I had kept aside from earlier hanging, I finished the wall inside the door to the master bedroom. Two days later Joe came over to inspect the kitchen mixer tap, which the day before had disintegrated. From the laundry I brought him a pair of pliers and he enterprisingly disassembled the end of the tap but found that, inside, plastic parts had broken. He said the man who lived in the next-door terrace had changed his tap and so might still have his original fitting, but Joe messaged me in the evening with bad news.

I go to bed early and by then I’d emailed a photo of the offending item to my plumbers – A-Style Plumbing – having phoned them while Joe was with me. They sent me a link to a supplier’s web page – a firm named Reece – and for a few minutes I browsed, making screenshots of models the appearance of which I liked. I emailed two JPGs to A-Style but a bit later unexpectedly saw an ad for a faucet in my Facebook feed. A-Style’s consultant said that choosing such a model would not allow them to include a warranty, so I capitulated though the Facebook maker’s product was cheaper than Reece’s, and asked her to go ahead and get their staff to choose a mixer tap for me conforming to my brief. On 4 March they emailed me asking for instructions – it seemed my reply had gotten lost – and I put in an order. The office manager said she’d ordered a Caroma Titan pin gooseneck sink mixer, adding, “once it comes in I will call you to arrange a time and day.” She didn’t keep her promise because when she called me on 11 March the tap hadn’t arrived, but we made a date for the plumber to visit on 22 March, a Monday.

Josh Kemp got back in touch with me on the final day of the month at around 10.20am and told me that his workshop was about to start working on my bookcase. We settled on the gauge of timber to use and I asked that the item be made with a plywood back as he’d not specified one prior to our phone conversation. On 9 April he called me again to say that the furniture had been completed and over the phone I made the payment for the balance outstanding. He said delivery would happen the following week.

I helped my housemate with packaging of furniture to go in her apartment, strapping cardboard to the roof of my car so I could transport it back to my garage for storage. On the road the thing ripped and fell over the windscreen because I hadn’t secured it properly, so on Airport Drive I pulled over in a breakdown bay and added another length of rope. Eventually I got home where I stowed my rope in the back of the car; I’d kept it there since I’d owned the vehicle but this was the first time to use it. The cardboard I put against the wall of the garage where, the day before, a coffee table I’d received as a wedding gift in 1991 had sat. A man had come to pick it up while Ming was at yoga, his partner having found my ad on Facebook Marketplace. I was paid the requested price (someone else had on a different day suggested about 50% less but I’d declined that offer) and the new owners were both glad to have completed the transaction and though the man’s car was very small the table fit inside with the rear seats down.

The plumber told me that the mixer tap that’d been installed originally in the kitchen had been modified, and that it might require me putting in a new sink. I messaged Joe to ask if he could fit a new tap that I would supply and he said his plumber’d that day be at the terraces, though this turned out to be premature. That evening he messaged me to say plumber Jack Denadija would come the next morning – the morning of 17 April – and I acknowledged the message. In the morning Jack came and took off the old tap. He said that the other plumber’s misgivings were unfounded and called the Reece outlet in Waterloo where he ordered a Nobili ‘Move’ pulldown mixer tap. I drove there to pick it up and the shop turned out to be in the same building I’d worked in 35 years earlier when I was employed by automation maker Honeywell, the building, in addition to Reece’s outlet, now housing an Aldi.

I brought the tap home and filed away the receipt – the fitting comes with a 15-year warranty – then did some errands and arrived home in the afternoon about 15 minutes before Jack turned up to install it. He’d been at another job during the day, inside someone’s laundry. At my place he spent about 20 minutes under the sink, going out to his ute a couple of times to get tools and an extension for the feeder hose, then tested the hot supply as well as the cold supply. The hot took a while to come in, but it was just a matter of time to see that it worked. 

I did the money transfer once Jack left. The tap he installed has a magnetic head and a control button (see below) that lets you divert water to different parts of the sink.

In the morning I did talk with my usual plumber and they seemed ok with me using Jack for the job but weren’t able to clarify why their guy’d judged a replacement tap to require modification or – more to the point, because it would’ve meant a further, and significant, outlay – replacing the entire sink. In the upshot they didn’t charge me for the tap they’d sourced for me and I now got to enjoy the opportunity to comfortably wash dishes. Because the new tap works as designed – its smooth action functions nicely – a trip out west I made on 19 April to pick up a doona cover found on Facebook Marketplace seemed relatively messy as roadworks hindered access in a quiet suburb close to Liverpool. Local closures – the council’s need to use heavy equipment and trucks forced me to park about 500m distant from the house where I was to go – made the final part of the voyage seem like a ‘Neighbours’ set: the little houses nestling close together on narrow streets, cars on front lawns, dogs pent up inside. The guy who greeted me at number 36 – I respectfully eyed a grey dog beside him – didn’t know the roadworks were still ongoing (“I thought they were over that”), and I passed him the money – carefully enclosed, as usual, in a white envelope – through a gap he made with the screen door. 

The tolls added almost $25 to the cost of the doona cover, which had been priced at $25, but in the afternoon on the way to pick up some tan flannelette sheets at a different address I faced no road charges, the place sitting in a quiet, tree-lined Woollahra street. This woman’s items cost a bit more at $50 and she said that because of menopause she hadn’t used them after her purchase, deciding they’d be too warm. In the evening I connected with another person in the eastern suburbs, this time with a view to picking up additional sheets for my three beds. Their address in Dover Heights would, I thought, mean a trip out nearer rush hour, but as it was clear the owner wouldn’t be home during the majority of daylight hours I made other arrangements.

A year in review: Furniture and fittings, part four

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about my house! – and the post you’re reading is the eleventh in the series. 

On the morning of 20 April the deliverymen with my new bed called me at 10.15am telling me they’d arrive in 20 minutes, and at 10.35am I opened the front door expecting them to be there; they’d just parked across the road. The two of them brought parts indoors and I showed the rounder one where the bed was to be positioned under the window in the bedroom at the back of the first floor.

There’s a desk and chair in the corner with a power point on the wall underneath. This would be useful for people wanting a private moment on a computer. 

Later in the morning I drove to Mascot – the deliverymen only wanted 30 minutes to assemble the bed – to go to the bank and withdraw an amount of money in small denomination notes and, after buying mattress protectors using the Myer website (three days later they’d arrive at my PO box), and before traffic became too heavy, I drove to Dover Heights to pick up my new sheets. As instructed I found a package made from a Woolies shopping bag inside the switch box next to the front door of the house near the cliff face. I drove home down Blair Street without any major delays.

No more delays on the bookcase the next day when, in the afternoon, Josh Kemp called to say it would be delivered on Thursday. I paid the delivery fee using my credit card and the following day a bit after midday a man called from the street outside saying they’d arrived. I guided the two of them upstairs and they unpacked the bookcase and put it in the space under Craig Waddell’s ‘The Painter – After Titian’, which, to fit the new furniture in place, I had to raise away from the floor. The bookcase is set between a tall bookcase and my desk. Once everything was ready I put away a few boxes full of books and photo albums that had been sitting in boxes on the floor since the move. Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia went in the new bookcase (dark red volumes, bottom shelf) and in the other bookcase I placed photo albums needing extra space.

You’re possibly wondering why Josh and his craftsmen didn’t use the spare planks I gave them that summer morning after the trip to Brookvale … I phoned to find the answer, left a message, and at about 2.45pm Josh returned my call. They’d gone with different wood, he said, to make the unit stronger. It had cost them “a bit more”, he went on, but they preferred making something durable. Given their generosity with regard to sourcing wood I didn’t ask what they’d done with those spare planks!

Closer to home other questions remained unresolved. For one thing, on Saturday I still had, in the studio, 13 unpacked boxes, happily down from January’s 21. Most contained photographs though there were also family documents. I thought about what to do with them and was going to let the matter rest until inspiration caught up with circumstances, but on Anzac Day with nothing to do I tidied up and put away photos and albums so that by the end of the day I only had eight boxes still unpacked, most of which contain family records from dad and most being in plastic boxes suitable for storage rather than ordinary packing boxes. 

In December the plastic boxes’d go into the back bedroom on the first floor and the packing boxes full of photos’d go into the garage.

----------------

The day before, Saturday 24 April, when I took the above photo, I drove to a part of Sydney I’d never visited before – a beachside suburb called Sandringham – to pick up a bookcase for my first-floor hallway. It’d been offered on Facebook Marketplace due to downsizing: a man and his wife selling their house since their kids’d moved out. 

My situation precisely contrary! To complement the picture hang I placed Leah Fraser’s ceramic statue ‘Full moon rising’ on top of the bookcase. With it went a wooden Japanese stamp and the Chinese box I’d had downstairs on the entertainment cabinet. There are also the rocks from Pyrmont and a flat, basalt roundel that I selected for inclusion because in its absence the rocks’d only number four (five being auspicious). The bookcase was a lucky find and is made from sturdy chipboard in an old-fashioned, low-cost, 70s style. Since acquiring it needed no cash I’d no reason to quibble over such details as the stain in the top – which I covered with an orange placemat that had been embroidered with a dove at some point in the far distant past. I’ve got a set of these remnants from mum’s apartment in the kitchen cupboard ready to use – in Pyrmont they’d been squirrelled away in the hall cupboard.

Positioning the Fraser sculpture was timely for a practical reason. Because of expenses related to the move I was loath to purchase more of the artist’s work but I’d just received an invitation from Arthouse Gallery in Rushcutters Bay for a May show – titled ‘Let her go into the darkness’ – with acrylic paintings by the same artist for sale. 

Acquiring the sculpture was not entirely intentional. I took a shine to Fraser’s work as it was portrayed in a February 2014 email sent out to the gallery’s buyer’s list, upon receiving which I bought the sculpture and had it shipped to Queensland. I was living there at the time near my mother’s house and kept my eyes peeled for value. Getting the bookcase gratis was mostly serendipitous. While in Facebook Marketplace searches made on Friday and Saturday I’d expressed a desire for a small bookcase I had a frustrating conversation with a Rouse Hill woman about one listed for $35. Reaching her suburb, on the city’s north-western fringe, would’ve required at least an hour of my time as well as tolls punishing the balance in my Transurban account so I told her – envisaging the possibility of fitting in, at the same time, a trip to my framers’ (they were still working on things of mine, and I wanted to get D-rings put into some new purchases) – I might be able to make it the following week. She then marked the item as “Sold” and when I asked if she’d offered it to someone else she affirmed it was true, adding that they’d given her a “definite” in contrast to my “Mb”. I keenly sensed her frustration but ended up getting one – not quite as fancy and not quite as wide (or as tall) – for less than a fraction of the cost and it was only a 15-minute drive to Sandringham instead of an hour to Rouse Hill. The shelves in my new bookcase furthermore adjustable so it can accommodate more large items. It’s good for either hardback or paperback books. I own a large collection accrued over many decades. It’s so extensive it permeates almost every room of the house with the exception of the laundry and the bathrooms. There’re even books in the garage. 

The image below shows walls on the first floor where hangs, to the left, dad’s old ensign with, next to it, a Pixie O’Harris painting made by swiping a palette knife over a board used as a painter’s palette, giving an image of what look like trees. This was, she said when I knew her, the only concession she ever made to abstraction. To the right, at top, is an oil painting of sand dunes by Danish painter Wolhardt Stampe Due, a work that came to me via Douglas Dean, my cousin, who’d acquired it when his father died. It has a realist impulse as well as others borrowed from French Impressionism, and signals a truce between opposed forces of abstraction and figuration; brushstrokes are visible, rather than disguised, but you can still clearly see what’s intended to be portrayed. Below this painting is an oil (on board) by Australian artist Melissa Selby Brown. Titled ‘Gazanias’ – a type of African wildflower – I bought it in Waterloo, in fact from a business located just down the street from where the Reece showroom now sits. The subject matter can help date it – a carbon price was much discussed in 2008 – as can the squiggly black mobile phone flex. 

At top is a photo of my grandmother Bea and her sister Reba in bathing costumes and below this is a crayon drawing by Ming (who’d in 2021 started studying at art school) with a view of the Maroochy River from the front balcony of the last apartment mum and dad occupied in Queensland. In the distance, to the right in this drawing, is Mujimba Island, which sits off the mouth of the estuary on the other side of which their place rose from the street.

Apart from the wildflowers and trees, pieces in this hang share a nautical theme with yellow and blue predominating in an arrangement made with diverse elements.

A year in review: Furniture and fittings, part three

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about my house! – and the post you’re reading is the tenth in the series. 

A drum sounded, one I’d never heard before, when, on 23 January at about 8.30pm, the bathroom door exploded in the front bedroom on the first floor. I was sitting at the computer in my bedroom on the second floor when I heard a crash rising out of the depths below. The sound made me get up from my seat and walk through to the study as my mind conjured up reasons for the ruckus – might it’ve been a picture rail falling and glazing shattering on the floor? – so I looked through to the green wall of the light well and saw a strange, pale, rod-like reflection. But, I quickly thought to myself, the problem wasn’t outside: it had been just a trick of the light that caught my eye for a second. Obeying instinct I turned through 180 degrees and went into the bedroom facing the street where glass had been strewn thick on the bathroom floor and had spread also into the bedroom, which is what I first saw that and led me to venture deeper inside the room. I returned upstairs and called Joe but he was busy so said he’d come over in the morning. He and I cleaned up the mess on the 25th, the job being finished by his son Tony and another young person.

On 26 January I vacuumed up the last shards of glass and on the week of 8 February Adam and his offsider and the tilers put back the bathroom on the first floor. It had been taken out of the middle bedroom to satisfy the certifier but now that that process was wrapped up it could be reinstalled. 

Three days later the two tradesmen delivered a desk Joe’d promised me after I’d gone upstairs in his house to have a look. It’d been surplus to his requirements and the men now carried it upstairs. I’d get into the habit of using it to sort my laundry before putting clothes away. I’d ordered more hooks and got additional family photos hung – see below photo of my bedroom wall – with a special place for a photo of mum kissing dad’s face on the morning he finally succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease (small photo, bottom right). Above it is a floral monotype by Pixie O’Harris, then above that a photo of granny – dad’s mother – as a child. 

To the left of these is a 90-year-old painting – by Poul Friis Nybo – of a house located somewhere in the Danish countryside and it hangs above an oil painting – 2008’s ‘Tom Price dusty sunset’ – by Australian artist Neridah Stockley (that had been in the living room). To the left of these is the David Moore reproduction I brought inside from the staircase. To the left of that sits a painting I picked up at the Sydney Art Fair. It’s by Australian artist Kate Smith, is titled ‘Natives’ that and had been in the living room downstairs. 

To the left of this is part of a series of photos (see above) taken from the balcony of mum and dad’s Sunshine Coast flat. When they lived there and when inspiration compelled they’d go out on the balcony at the front of their living room and snap photos. Some such images are, for me, redolent with meaning, showing smoke from a bushfire or a dramatic sunset, and they have the ability to create feelings resembling comfort but due to things that happened in my childhood, these feelings are somewhat complex.

It’s a sentimental hang that might suggest peace and repose, the delicate yellow and olive green in the Nybo and the Stockley complementing what’s in the O’Harris monotype. Once everything had been put in position on my white walls, it seemed as though the items had just been waiting for a chance to exhibit a pale refulgence evident in the sad, vivid yellow of the Smith, which picks up colours from the other pictures and transmits them to a viewer on the floorboards, but in fact this wall would, within a few months, change in many respects. 

The following appears elsewhere in the bedroom, near the entrance where they can be seen from inside the bathroom and comprises nine items with, at top right, Simon Collins’ 2008 ‘From Morts Road driveway #2’ and his 2007 ‘FS 101 No. 2 Oatley’ with, below them, an old photo of Vivian, my son, as a teenager. 

At bottom there’s a photo of Adelaide when she was five years old and wearing a decorative kimono. A Danish painting – to the left of it – of a sylvan scene sits under a photo taken by my great-aunt Madge showing painters working on the hull of a ship. At bottom left is a monotype-and-ink drawing I did when I was about 20. Above it is a 1977 Pixie O’Harris painting titled – with dad in mind – ‘Just Flowers’. At top left there’s a photo of Madge in a stylish coat for Japan’s winter. 

I returned to that section of wall – again, using my ladder – at the end of February to put up the photos shown below. The two at the top are by mum’s uncle Noel Kewish, with a photo of Noel and his wife underneath the image of surf. Below them, to leverage the photographs’ maritime theme, sits a photo of dad taken in his retirement in front of a body of water. Putting all these items up and making sure they hung straight was difficult, as it required careful balancing on a rung since you have to use two hands to position hooks – one to grab the drop and the other to squeeze the hook in order to manoeuvre it into place along the drop – and turning to do this without toppling off and falling to the floor is a trick I had to master.

For the past six years most of the photos – like the ones of Madge, dad and Noel Kewish and his wife – had been stuffed uselessly in a cupboard, the last time they’d been on display being in Queensland where mum had them on her walls so bringing them out now was a great opportunity although it was only possibly due to the size of the house – about three times larger than where I’d previously lived – and also due to the metal rails of the picture-hanging system I’d had installed, which provide flexibility so that, even when you are alone, with freedom you can design a make a space express something about you that can only be done visually. Words have a place – to be sure – but when a visitor walks through your front door you don’t immediately confront them with poetry. It takes time and effort to tell a story to a casual acquaintance, but with pictures it’s all done in a rush and it seemed that everyone who came into my lobby would say something nice. Without rails you have to do hangs all at once as moving things once points have been put into walls is almost impossible. Rails allow you with convenience to change arrangements. On a step ladder you can take down the pictures you want to move elsewhere, and with your hand snap their drops off the rails. Putting up new pictures is, likewise, relatively easy. To make space, slide over drops-with-attached-hooks to desired locations (you might, for bigger items, need someone to take the weight off the drop by lifting a picture at its base) then snap on new drops with hooks attached (putting hooks on a drop is a bit fiddly, but with practise it takes no time), and position the picture frames so that their D-rings hang off the hooks. Once pictures are up you can adjust their height – the distance they are situated from the ceiling or the floor – by squeezing the hooks and sliding them along their drops. 

To make a salon hang like the ones you can see in any of these images takes about 15 minutes, even including the time needed to carry pictures and paintings from other parts of the house. 

And even if you think you have finished a hang you can quickly change it tomorrow.

A year in review: Furniture and fittings, part two

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about my house! – and the post you’re reading is the ninth in the series. 

I’d gone to Bunnings on 16 January to get a latch for the bedroom door on the second floor – it swung shut suddenly if you left it open as, when the rear sliding doors sit open, a breeze comes through my bedroom – and I’d also mentioned to Joe the possibility of cutting off part of my desk so that my chair arms would slide underneath. The next day, after he installed the clothesline, Joe’s handyman Adam helped me install it and also alter my office desk. I put the final bolt into the Hills device and waited until he and his offsider appeared from where, in another terrace, they’d been working, then the three of us traipsed upstairs to my bedroom. Adam installed the door snib latch using inserts screwed into the plaster wall, then went to the desk and drew a line on the support under the desktop to mark where to cut, which he did starting with a multi tool. He finished using a circular saw and, after the two men had left the building, with a brush and dustpan I swept up the sawdust and dumped it in the rubbish. 

Another thing appearing at this time was a worktable. I’d gone down to the street one day in January to talk with Joe and we stood together for a while outside his garage – the house he used to live in is just next-door to mine – as people were putting furniture and other things on a truck bed. It turned out that he was in the process of giving away belongings and I asked him about a white painted table that, to me, looked old but, like my sculpture and my pewter Chinese tin, solid. He shuffled off for a moment to consult his wife then came to tell me I could have it. 

He’d bought it at a friend’s antique shop, he said. It has a perceptibly split top but because it appeared to be sound I asked him if he could put it in my studio as I needed a surface on which I could draw, ink prints.

On 21 January at around 8.30pm Joe called me and I asked if the table could be brought in. He said he’d give it a go, but when two men brought it over they couldn’t even get it through the gate to the front garden. It therefore went into the garage with a promise that the next day someone’d come to disassemble it so that it could be carried upstairs. As it turned out I took it apart myself using a Philips-head screwdriver and then had recourse to Facebook Messenger where I contacted a friend. Together, on 23 January, Grant and I carried the table upstairs (see below).

I’d hung more pictures as the hooks I’d ordered on eBay arrived and I redesigned the stairway to the second floor (see below) so posted on Facebook:

Family photos, my testamur (first degree), a photo by Noel Kewish, my great-uncle, a painting that belonged to my great-uncle Elmer by Fritz Kraul, a Pixie O’Harris drawing, a reproduction of a photo of Sydney Harbour by an Old Cranbrookian, a linocut I did in 1982, and a commemorative plaque given to my great-grandfather Robert James Kewish, a Weekly 

In the middle of the left-hand column is one item I missed mentioning. This is a collage mum’d made on red paper, when she was alive, from leaves and bark creating a view of hills in a way that, given her natural talent, she indulged too infrequently. I’d gotten John Verhoeven to put D-rings in this and other pictures so they could be placed on walls. 

The photo of my daughter Adelaide – bottom of centre-right column – was taken when she was about 14. I had a number of such images which had been made within one of those funny Japanese photo booths (“puri-kura”: “print club”) that allow you to add captions, stars, and hearts – visual paraphernalia of teenage effervescence – making ready-mades for friendship. 

Robert James Kewish was a Mason and his departure for Melbourne from Leongatha was regretted by the Gippsland town’s community, hence the decorative plaque (bottom, centre-left column) that has multiple nature references, including a sylvan scene complete with picturesque gum tree and native flowers. 

David Moore wasn’t a Cranbrook boy – I made a mistake when mentioning the photo on Facebook – but had been born in Vaucluse (where I lived from 1963 to 1981). On 15 February I took this reproduction down and replaced it with another of Adelaide’s goofy photos. Both were printed using a regular inkjet printer and I’d gotten them finished in recycled antique frames bought second-hand.

The linocut (bottom, left-hand side) was made by me in 1983 after my trip to Japan that year and the year before. It was over the Christmas break and dad organised it with his friend Jerry Fuseya. Japan consumed me and I was especially drawn to their reverence for antiquity. Religious structures you can see in that country form material for work such as this, which features a Buddhist temple – probably in Nara (I don’t recall exactly the one upon which my design was modelled but I’m pretty sure it is Kiyo Mizu Dera; in October this would move downstairs).

The photo of my maternal grandmother, Bea (centre-right, top of column) with her sister Reba – looking suspiciously different from each other – is one among dozens of such images put up on the walls of her apartment by mum after she had it enlarged and framed in Maroochydore. 

A year in review: Furniture and fittings, part one

This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about my house! – and the post you’re reading is the eighth in the series. 

I moved into my new house in the suburbs on 5 January, a grey day when clouds seemed to descend to the level of the horizon at a point where, like the nacreous plumes of a dove’s soft wing, they could brush the cool earth.

I was filled with a type of poetry with expectation ripe as the sun came up in the east and a sense of elation enveloped me, as though, like skipping school, suddenly anything were possible. The view in the above photo what’s visible to the west of the Citadines Connect where I was staying and the following map shows where the hotel sits relative to the bare expanse of the airport. The house is just to the south-east.

If anything’s possible then bad things, also, can happen, such as a slightly accelerated heart rate on the first morning I woke up in my new bedroom. It was 6 January and I made a cup of coffee, feeling at a loose end. Normally, back in the old place – an apartment overlooking the towers of Sydney, the bustling metropolis the airport serves – while waiting for the machine to percolate my coffee I’d place myself at my desk in front of the computer screen so that I could use social media, this item of furniture sitting, at that time, only a few steps from the kitchen facing the plate glass windows over the void and the bay. I’d been in the habit of monitoring the operation of the coffee machine while I fired up my PC and perhaps caught something on TV behind me. With the PC now on a different floor of a different building I needed to recalibrate my settings and hopefully (with the passage of time) rule in a new program to govern activities and moods. 

Ingrained habits die hard if they die at all. Because I’d normally listen to the TV while using social media, I now felt strange as in silence in my second-floor bedroom I monitored TweetDeck and at the same time wrote this memorial. The day before I’d at least solved one problem. Because I was unsure about using the floor protector bought at Officeworks some years before – to help secure it against carpet it has tiny hard pimples cast into the plastic matrix – I threw a rug under the desk and rolled on this item of home décor instead. An old rug used previously in 2008, when I was living in Sydney’s southwest, it’d been taken out of storage behind the garage. A new desk chair – bought in 2015 after relocating to Sydney from Queensland – for the first time came out because my old brown leather one’d been damaged in shipment and waited to be either thrown away, sold, repaired, or recycled. 

All those years ago – from 2015 to 2021 seems an eternity – I’d bought a desk chair because my existing one’d started to fall apart (the arm on the left-hand side starting to come loose due to a plastic fitting snapping) and only now made it useful. It’d taken six years to get here, such is my reverence for things. I’d known about the broken arm but hadn’t the heart to stop using the chair because it occupied a place in my life. 

In the new house the kitchen and the living room were the two rooms that had been even partly completed, the two photos below showing the latter’s left-hand wall with the bookcase that my friend Ming had expertly and adroitly placed near the back window.

I’d been grateful that she took charge of design on the hectic day of the move, with half-a-dozen strong men bundling objects, boxes and items of furniture up the front steps and in through the front door. By the time I came to publishing this memorial I’d forgotten about the stresses of the moving day and only remembered how my friend helped by deciding where to put these heavy pieces of furniture. The Yannima Tommy Watson print (‘Umutju Waterhole’) would, the following month, shift to the opposite wall. Below is the same left-hand wall on 18 February after I made a trip out to the framers’ to pick up some things. 

Hard horizontals a counterpoint to the landscapes’ soft undulations – all the sinuous curves and colourful irregularities – through which I’d been transported back in time 40 years – more, even – to a more optimistic, but in actual fact less sympathetic, time. It was a time of harsh realities though one of dreams. Ian Keats’ ‘Stradbroke silence (Stradbroke Island from Russell Island)’ sits on top and his ‘Quiet anchorage, Stradbroke (from Lamb Island)’ sits on the bottom. The paintings are so similar in design, and even the names refer to the same thing – a lack of noise in this magical place inhabited by spirits – that it took me months to remember which one went where, and even in December I had to check myself and verify, noting that in the latter the line of sand making up the island shore is longer. 

Both pieces would, by June, move to other spots. They’re dated 2005 and the price was included in the price of the Maroochydore apartment bought for my use when I moved up to live in the same town mum’d resided in since 1999. That modern apartment I occupied for six years had been the artist's studio and residence. Next to his work – to their right – is Joash Tuinstra's 'Bondi' (2008), bought immediately before moving north and, in fact, I’d taken possession of it direct from the framers when I moved into the apartment on Fourth Avenue with the football field out front and a paperbark mutely standing, a sentinel, in the park. The wall now offering memories of the tropics.

When I got the paintings hung I could almost hear heavy rain. The two works glitter with glorious sunshine and shimmering water – Lamb Island and Russell Island are close to North Stradbroke Island and face it across a channel at the mouth of the Logan River and because I’d previously had them stored unloved in a cupboard in the bedroom I used as my library, their colourful faces pointed obscurely at a wall – housed also in what were simply ghastly cheap frames the painter supplied – it seemed like time to celebrate. 

On 1 March I switched some paintings around and put (see above) Ming’s reproduction of a Whitely under one of the Keatses. The reproduction would be taken to her apartment in September and hung there. 

In January the dining table bolts still, following the move, hadn’t been found (see below) so at that time with my friend I went to the Supa Centa at Kensington and paid for a new table.

The ‘Chateau’ – sold at a shop called named Shack – is made with a mechanism that allows you to convert it from being round into an oval shape. Ming’s boyfriend the next day however brought me some spare Ikea bolts that he owned so, after putting together the old dining table, we all drove to Kensington and cancelled the order. The saleswoman at first hesitated to do what I requested but after I promised to look around the shop, and lingered within her view for a while – clearly finding nothing I needed – she capitulated and I left the store happy. She called me a day or so later asking for my bank account details, as I’d promised, while in-store, to email them. 

The photo above shows the Ikea table assembled in the dining area and below is a photo of the living room taken on 14 February after I’d moved more pictures around.

The little yellow Kate Smith shown in this image would the next day go upstairs. The space! Growing up I lived in a house with lots of space but since then I’d not had access to much, and now felt odd thinking about all the things that could fit into rooms which I controlled as long as my heart allowed me to and rattling around – I told people when they asked how I was settling in – like a marble in an old, abandoned desk.

To cover this piece of floor, on 3 March I contacted the Chippendale retailer about the couch and rug the previous year I’d paid a deposit on and by email the next day I was told that the sofa’d not arrive until June but that my Nanimarquina rug had just arrived in the warehouse and that I should call to make a time to collect it. I managed to find out the balance owing by driving down to the outlet – I had anyway a need to go to the area as mail had arrived in my PO box – to talk with the salesman, Clinton. By email I’d received an invoice but as they’d added sales tax – erroneously, it turned out – I had to sort the matter out in person. Arrived home after lunch I got onto the warehouse by phone and organised to go down to Padstow on the Monday to pick up the rug (the warehouse needs 24 hours to prepare for customers) asking Joe if he’d be available to help carry the thing inside. 

It measures 3m by 2m and in the end I brought it into the house by myself. 

Like the dining table bolts, the removalists hadn’t set aside the bolts for the spare bed, so on that same January trip to Kensington Ming and I’d visited another shop with a name made of a single word (Snooze) to buy a queen-sized bed frame for the back room on the first floor. Due to production disruption stemming from Covid they said it wouldn’t be delivered for 12 weeks but when I phoned the store on 5 March they told me that delivery would be in early May.

I wanted to hang more pictures so contacted Beaumont Major – who, back in December, had done the rails for my pictures – and he quoted me $1200 for 150 hooks but as this seemed a lot I texted John Verhoeven (who’d also, in December, helped with my pictures) asking him as well. Before his reply arrived I went to Facebook Marketplace and found a woman in Nambucca Heads in the process of selling hanging system equipment (including an unspecified number of hooks) for $150, so I put in an offer. I also surfed to eBay and bought 44 monofilament hooks for $123 (which came to less than $3 each – a bargain compared to Beaumont’s price) using my credit card. I found the manufacturer’s website but their shopping interface didn’t give me the options I needed – I wanted hooks alone, not hooks and drops – so I left off searching and went to bed before anyone got back to me. 

The woman from Nambucca – who’d since relocated to Casino – did and the next day I spoke with her husband Richard using the number she posted. He said the two of them’d be down in Newcastle sometime late in January and that I could meet them there if able. I confirmed my offer and agreed to wait until he contacted me closer to the specified time. Richard did later get back to me but then begged off meeting due to car problems, so I ordered more hooks on eBay. I phoned Richard in the middle of February and he said he could meet me on 1 March. 

I’d had problems driving long distances so made alternate arrangements. The ailment became obvious one day while I was out at the small town of Richmond to see Amanda Edds of ASA Conservation Framers. I had panic attacks while driving home so now asked a friend named Mark, who has family in Newcastle, if he could assist. I spoke with Richard on the phone in the last week of February and gave Mark his contact details so they could organise the drop-off. In the end I organised for the items to be left on the verandah of Mark’s sister’s house. On 5 March I confirmed with Richard via SMS that he’d dropped the items off. On the same day Mark said his sister had them in her keeping and that he’d have to organise for them to be transported to Sydney.

On 10 January I also attacked another packing box and, on Facebook, posted:

Unpacked my desk's contents. Seemingly endless boxes of ink cartridges for a pen I haven't used in 10 years, dozens of Post-It pads, more writing pads than I'll ever need letters to fill, two boxes of envelopes, half a dozen notebooks, old conference lanyards, a bowl full of paperclips (which also doubles as the container for my thumb drives), and one full of bulldog clips, some rocks that were on the balcony in Pyrmont and which I discovered in 2019 after I emptied out the library, an Egyptian cat made of some sort of artificial stone that I bought while at an exhibition in Tokyo I went to with my daughter, my voice recorder and the USB cable to connect it to the PC, old foreign banknotes, etcetera etcetera -- I can't with any consideration list everything that I've put away in one of three drawers or else downstairs in the electrical goods cabinet.

I’d gotten the unpacked studio boxes down to about 25 by the time the empty boxes in the garage looked as they do in the photo above. On 11 January I posted on Facebook:

Unpacked the bathroom. So much space for my stuff – including two beard trimmers (I had one but then with the move had to get a new one), a nose-hair trimmer, assorted unused tubes of toothpaste, a large quantity of Emory boards (for perfectly-sculpted nails), various deodorants, some scent (incl. one by Armani – !!), boxes of tissues, old Band-Aids (essential for emergencies), an extra rubbish bin (I won't need two), and of course toilet paper.

By the evening of that day I’d 21 boxes left to go, most of which contained family records and photographs, though some had books in them. To do something in the way of tidying up my studio I got in touch with Time4Timber’s Josh Kemp, who’d made bookcases for me in 2019 when I was reorganising my apartment. 

To complement the two units already in the master bedroom, and to accommodate some of the books I hadn’t had space to shelve, I asked Josh to make me a new bookcase and drew a sketch (see above). 

He quoted me a price taking into account the fact that I’d supply some of the wood as I had 74cm-by-28.5cm boards left over from a big bookcase that, in 2008, I’d added shelves to and that wouldn’t fit in the lift when in 2015 I abandoned the town of Maroochydore. I now trekked downstairs to the kitchen to find my wallet so I could do a credit card transaction over the phone, and a bit later drove to Brookvale with the boards in the back of the car, the premises sitting on a main road in a kind of garage with, lying about the interior, planks of wood and electric tools. A man there with a heart-shaped face admitted he was Josh. 

The same day’s evening – 11 January – while relaxing in front of the TV I took a snap (see below) of the entertainment cabinet and paintings hung on drops.

In fact, the bulk of the January hang would change in February and March. For example, the items on the right-hand wall of the living-room (see below for the same wall on 15 February). 

It took me time to make arrangements; to get alignments and placement just right it can take a series false starts interspersed by hours – even days – of quiet, uncaring reflection. Not only do you have to get furniture and pictures to conform to your overarching design but you also have to align the pictures’ horizontals to create harmony despite their having different dimensions, each one taking up its required space and with adequate room so that they don’t crowd each other out. An arrangement must allow the viewer to form an ideal impression of the strengths of all of them individually as well as together. In concert, the circular shapes made by several items included in the space have reverberations as artworks talk to one another. So, in the photo above, the sun in Blak Douglas’ ‘Attestant Developp-ment’ speaks with the pool in Tommy Watson’s print, and both speak to the round body of the lamp and the ochre earthenware vase I bought one day, over a decade ago, at a pottery located, in the middle of the bush, somewhere along the Newell Highway between Melbourne and Brisbane.

On 1 March I moved paintings in the living room, eventually shifting Ian Keats’ ‘Quiet anchorage, Stradbroke (from Lamb Island)’ across from the left-hand wall to the right-hand wall (see below).

Objects around the lamp – an item once found in the spare room in Pyrmont but now sporting a low-cost, white Bunnings shade – were photographed on 11 January (see below). There are figurines of Aunt Madge’s (left; I’d sell these later on Facebook Marketplace), a small teddy bear (front; I’d keep this), and an angel mum bought in an op shop. The Chinese tin (later moved to the hallway on the first floor) is metal, as is ‘Yoga man’ – I worked at Sydney Uni at the same time as sculptor Cathy Weiszmann, from whom I bought the stainless-steel statue – at right. I bought the clock in 2002; its alarm doesn’t work but its mechanism is otherwise good, so since moving to Pyrmont in 2015 I’d had it in front of the TV. 

To sort out mess inherited upon mum’s entering a nursing home in 2014 – just before my relocation to Sydney – in 2019 I’d laboriously tidied up a congested Pyrmont bedroom and found, on the balcony, rocks (shown in the photo at front right) a tenant had put there for some reason – to get them out of the house without chucking them out?, to cleanse them in the moonlight?, to hide them from a friend or lover? – before I moved in. By October only the rocks’d still be in this spot but the TV would’ve shifted to the right.