For audio files, list of players and the story so far:  ADELAIDE DAYS

29. Citizens’ Action

(for Nicky)

Gemma is a regular tram commuter. She comes home late from work on a Friday, tired and more than usually irritated by the design of the pedestrian access paths, redone only a few years ago. At her stop pedestrians are now channelled onto the road at a point where it is almost impossible to see cars coming from the direction of the city.

The stop is a popular one and the regulars have made their own decision. They leave the city tram in their dozens and inch along the edge of the platform ignoring the official exit altogether, hopping across a path and along beside the tram tracks to the boom gates at the level crossing. From here it is possible to see in both directions. And there is an island, pedestrian haven, in the middle of the road.

The only disadvantage of this route is for people like Gemma whose legs are not long. The step down from the platform beside the track is uncomfortably steep.

 Gemma, never one to tolerate loose ends, has thought of a solution. On a neighbour’s verge there is a throw-out, a large block of heavy-duty composite, probably designed to hold a market umbrella or perhaps a temporary barricade. It is the perfect size but awkward to handle alone.

Gemma rings Julia. ‘You busy?’

‘No. I’m trying not to watch Silent Witness. I hate Friday night on the tele.’

She agrees to come straight over and hops on her bike.

Between them they get the block into Gemma’s boot and drive it down to the tram stop. The only place to park is some distance away so they take it in turns to carry the block to the crossing.

‘What if a tram comes?’ Gemma asks.

‘Look official,’ Julia advises. ‘People only notice what you’re doing if you act furtively.’

Gemma giggles. ‘What could possibly be official about carrying a great block around in the middle of the night?’

‘We are dedicated tramline workers,’ Julia says seriously. ‘When it comes to the comfort of the travelling public, no effort is too great for us.’

‘Day or night,’ Gemma puffs, taking a turn with the block. ‘No job too small.’

‘Or too dirty,’ Julia adds.

They scuff the ground next to the platform to make a base for the block.

‘We should have brought a trowel,’ Gemma says.

‘It’ll be okay. By the time a few hundred people have jumped on it.’

They are admiring their handiwork and Gemma has stepped up and down onto it a few times when the level-crossing bells start up and the lights flash. The two women retire across the road to see what happens.

The city tram stops and a single elderly man gets out. The tram moves off and he walks to the end of the platform, steps onto the block without showing the least surprise at its presence and crosses at the boom gates.

Gemma and Julia high five each other and go to retrieve Gemma’s car.

For audio files, list of players and the story so far:  ADELAIDE DAYS

28. Educational Entertainment

Sarah’s fifteenth birthday has finally arrived and Anne has offered an outing for the two of them to somewhere of Sarah’s choice.

What Sarah really wants to do is go to BlackMarket. She has heard that this is the place to be on a Friday night, especially for a young Goth. It’s at the old Colonel Light Hotel and, unbeknown to Sarah, was once the site of a weekly women’s night. She could dance the night away with the ghosts of her grannies’ younger selves.

But Sarah is oblivious to herstory. She is considering the crucial gap between fifteen and eighteen. Fifteen is under-age. Could she borrow someone’s ID? With her face made up she could get away with it. But she needs a companion for that adventure and that companion is clearly not her grandmother. Sarah might pass as eighteen, but Anne is way too old. Over-age.

Sarah turns over more appropriate ideas for an outing with an aging granny. It will have to be Turner at the Art Gallery. Sarah was home sick when her Art class went and she imagines that Anne will want to see it.

Actually Anne would rather go to Les Miserables with a box of popcorn and a stack of hankies. But she is impressed by Sarah’s choice of an exhibition and always eager to foster artistic inclinations in her grandchildren.

They drift apart after the first room. Anne’s feelings are mixed. The explanations about the painting of light are interesting, but she thinks that framing unfinished experiments is pretentious. She remembers the Muddle-Headed Wombat at the museum, helping himself to mummified bread from an Egyptian tomb and then being disagreeably surprised at how stale it was.

She is charmed by the detail of the small watercolours, but disconcerted all over again by one of the large sea paintings. The life boat in the foreground is in grave danger of plunging into a deep hollow between mighty waves.  But in the background the mother-ship sits serenely upright on flat water.

Anne looks around but Sarah is nowhere in sight and the other patrons are deeply and respectfully engrossed.

Anne waits for Sarah in the last room and they go off to the coffee shop together.

‘What did you think?’ Anne asks.

Sarah licks cappuccino froth off her spoon. ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘good.’ She doesn’t want to sound ungrateful.

Anne sees that the girl is less than enthusiastic. ‘I wasn’t sure about some of them,’ she offers. ‘Those colour washes.’

‘They’re not finished!’ Sarah is indignant. ‘Like he hasn’t even begun, hardly.’

Anne laughs. ‘Yes. I thought they looked silly in frames. But what would I know?’

Sarah weighs her reactions. ‘I like the big ones that are all sky,’ she says.

‘Yes. Me too. Wonderful colours.’

On this happier note they go to Eckersleys and Sarah buys fabric paint with a birthday voucher from Julia. She and Anne make a date for the following week. Les Miserables has finished so they decide on the theatre instead. They will go to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

For audio files, list of players and the story so far:  ADELAIDE DAYS

27.  Slaughter of the Pumpkins

Anne comes home in great indignation from the working bee at the Community Garden.

‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ she says, filling the kettle. ‘Want a cuppa?’

‘No thanks,’ says Julia.

Anne ignores her, bangs two mugs down on the table and plonks a tea bag in each.

‘What wouldn’t I believe?’ Julia asks.

‘You know the pumpkin patch the kids have been working on?’

‘Yep.’

‘Six pumpkins. Good big ones.’

‘Great,’ says Julia.

‘No. Not great. A couple of weeks ago some bastard picked the lot. Cut them off the vines.’

‘No tea for me thanks,’ says Julia.

Anne pours boiling water into both mugs and grabs milk from the fridge. ‘They weren’t bloody ripe and they don’t improve off the vine.’

‘The pumpkins?’

‘Of course the pumpkins. They’re still green.’

‘Perhaps they have a special recipe for green pumpkins?”

Anne pushes one of the mugs across the table to Julia, glaring.

‘They haven’t taken them,’ she says. ‘They haven’t even taken them away. Just left them lying there.’

‘Oh. That’s a bummer.’

‘The kids were beside themselves.’

‘What about making lanterns?’

The tea is beginning to have the desired effect on Anne. She sips appreciatively.

‘That’s not a bad idea you know. But it’s not Halloween till November. Or is it October?’

‘Either way it’s the wrong time of the year. We need a pumpkin festival right now.’

‘What is Halloween anyway?’

‘All Saints isn’t it? The dead rising and all that. Skeletons dancing on graves.’

Anne frowns. ‘That doesn’t sound very Christian. Skeletons.’

‘Don’t you believe it. It’s the unsanitised version.’

‘Well we won’t call it Halloween.’

‘We could have it instead of Anzac Day. Pumpkin Day. Still have the Last Post and all that. At the going down of the sun …’

‘It’s just Harvest Home really. Gathering in the sheaves. Autumn fruits.’

Julia stands up. ‘I can feel a school concert coming on.’

‘Hmmm.’ Anne is off, ideas shooting in all directions, giant pumpkin costumes, hay bales, winter rain drops. She looks up and sees Julia pushing in her chair, and the mug of untouched tea. ‘Don’t you want your tea?’

‘No thanks love.’

Anne pulls the mug towards her and sips absently, clearly still in the grip of creation.

Julia makes her escape before any stray ideas can involve her.

She fires up her computer, thinking about the untimely death of the pumpkins. She can feel nothing but relief. She knows her feeling is shameful and that all over the world people are starving. But all she can think is that twelve fewer pots of pumpkin soup will appear on dining tables near her. Six pumpkins … possibly even eighteen fewer pots.

She must tell Maddie.

For audio files, list of players and the story so far:   ADELAIDE DAYS  

26. Loving Care and Pumpkin Soup

Maddie is home and has never liked her house more. It is warm, cosy, and filled with soft chairs and beds and lovely un-hospital colours and fabrics. A ruthless clean-up by Cassie has removed the layer of dust and cat hair that Maddie usually enjoys, but that will soon be put right. In pride of place on the sofa is Raggles, who indicates with a gracious arch of the back and a purr rivalling that of a lawnmower that she is pleased to see Maddie and that the interim foster-carers have been grossly inferior in their attentions.

Julia, bedroom door heartlessly barricaded against Raggles, is staying for a couple of nights till Maddie gets used to being home with crutches. There is no need to cook however. Anne has organised a roster for meals and the fridge and freezer are already full. Each member of the sisterhood has brought food enough for a hungry family of ten.

Julia has checked out all the chairs and chosen one that Maddie has some hope of getting herself out of.

‘I’d prefer the sofa,’ Maddie says.

‘Yeah but you’ll never get up and down. Give it a few days. This one will be okay with a footstool. Here, have some more cushions.’

As a sop, Julia has lit the combustion heater, the first fire of the winter. The effect is pleasing and Maddie is delighted but the room is soon stifling. Julia, stripped down to tee shirt, leaves Maddie dozing and retreats to the garden to get rid of the old tomato plants, pick the last pumpkins and put in some winter greens. She supposes that Maddie won’t actually suffocate or die of heat stroke.

 She comes in at lunchtime and puts the kettle on. Maddie, she is relieved to discover, is not only still breathing but is awake.

‘Fancy some lunch?’ Julia asks.

‘Yeah great. I’ll just go to the loo.’

She levers herself out of the chair, balances her crutches and with a little help from Julia manages the whole business of getting down the hall, lowering herself onto the toilet and off again without mishap. 

She settles herself on a kitchen chair.

‘What’s for lunch?’

Julia contemplates the contents of the fridge.

‘Well … there’s pumpkin soup with dill. Or pumpkin soup with orange. Or pumpkin and red lentil soup. Or vegetable and pumpkin soup. Or pumpkin, sweet potato and coconut milk.

Maddie laughs. ‘I know. Let’s have pumpkin soup.’

‘There’s pumpkin pie if you’d rather?’

‘No. no. We’ll keep that for a treat.’

Julia is stirring soup when the front doorbell rings. It’s Cass with a plastic container in her hands.

‘I made extra soup,’ she says. ‘You can put it in the freezer.’

‘Thanks,’ says Maddie. ‘You’re a darling.’

‘Um,’ says Julia, ‘I don’t suppose it’s pumpkin?’

Cass looks surprised. ‘It’s potato and leek. Did you want pumpkin? I can make some later.’

‘No,’ Maddie says, frowning at Julia. ‘I love potato and leek. Thank you so much.’

Julia is penitent. ‘Have some lunch with us now? There’s plenty.’

The three women make a start on the heroic task of soup-eating.

25. Narrative

(for Obi)

James is reporting on recent dramatic events in his Writing Book. This requires actual writing on actual paper in an actual book.

My Grannys friend Maddie he writes, then pauses.

One Granny, two Grannies.

He rubs it out and starts again.

My Grannies friend Maddie

He feels uneasy about this. Somewhere, he knows, there ought to be an apostrophe. He rubs out the s.

My Grannie’s friend Maddie

But that doesn’t look right.

He rubs out again. The paper is starting to tear so he moves down a few lines and, like many before him, takes the coward’s way out.

My Grannies have got a friend called Maddie. He is on a roll now and finishes in a rush and she fell over a saucer and broke her ankle.

That’s the Orientation taken care of. And it brings him to the mysterious heart of the story.

James has fallen over many times in his life. His knees and elbows are usually and satisfyingly scabbed. He and his friends accept that any headlong rush across the playground or the oval may end in a sprawl. But nobody in his hearing has suggested that Maddie was running when she fell over.

He thinks about saucers. He used to have a miniature tea set which Victoria has inherited but those saucers are only a couple of centimetres across. Obviously it would have been an adult-sized saucer but even those are barely higher than the tabletop. Perhaps it was the table that she fell over? But you can’t fall over a full-size table. Maybe the saucer was on a coffee table? But then you’d say that she fell over the coffee table, not that she fell over the saucer.

Maybe, and he is hot on the scent now, maybe she was standing on the coffee table and then fell over the saucer. James himself has had the experience of standing on the coffee table and overbalancing and though he didn’t break his ankle he did break some glasses and get into a lot of trouble.

She was standing on the coffee table he writes and then sits back.

Now for the exciting part, though it’s an uncomfortable sort of excitement. The broken ankle.

 James knows that bones can break, though it hasn’t happened to him yet. But every now and then someone appears at school with an arm in plaster and once a boy in the year above him hobbled around for ages with his leg in plaster. James looks at his own leg. Between the scabby knee and the knobs of the ankle it’s thin and straight and it isn’t hard to believe that it could snap in half and have to be put back together with plaster.

But the ankle is another matter. Where would it break? If all the knobbles came apart then there’d be nothing to hold the foot on.

Maybe it would be one of those things where they have to find the foot and pack it in ice so that it can be sewn back on. 

The ambulance came he writes. They put Maddie and the foot on a stretcher and went to hospital.

Not bad he thinks. He smoothes the page, which has become strangely rumpled and grubby.

My Grannies have got a friend called Maddie and she fell over a saucer and broke her ankle. She was standing on the coffee table. The ambulance came. They put Maddie and the foot on a stretcher and went to hospital.

Now for the Resolution.

The saucer and the ankle broke he writes but the cat is okay.

24. The House Book

(for Roxxy, Chia, Sal, Dinah, Madder and all)

With one friend stowed safely in hospital, and the day almost over, Julia decides to give up on work and drop in on another friend. Ro will provide good coffee and light relief.  

Julia’s ruminations about phones spill over into their conversation and Ro, squirrel or archivist (depending on your point of view), remembers that she has a treasure to show. She has unearthed an old house book from a communal household of thirty odd years ago. A lost world is revealed, with the house book at its throbbing heart.

‘There was one phone in the house,’ Ro points out. ‘I can remember when we got it. Luxury. We didn’t have to go down the street to the phone box in the rain. Or to that box outside the Norwood Post Office where you could make free interstate calls.’

‘I remember. But how did they do that?’

‘There was a way of jamming a super-glued coin in the works. Then word would get around.’

The first page of the housebook lists essential phone numbers for a feminist household: Hindmarsh Women’s Health Centre, Rundle St Women’s Centre, Women’s Information Switchboard, Women’s Art Movement, St Peters Women’s Centre, other households.

On the following pages dozens of different hands have written phone messages, hellos, goodbyes, pleas, exhortations, cartoons, shopping lists:

The landlord came today to say the Housing Trust is coming at 10.30am Wed to assess the cond of the place.

I’VE GOT A CRUSH ON EVERY WOMIN IN THIS HOUSE TONITE & C & R WHO AREN’T HOME YET. NITE NITE.

Hilton is on a Wednesday. Off today to the art gallery. Tonight in search of Brideshead Revisited and then to the Mars Bar. See you round 6(?)

Gone to Laundromat back ASAP – probably 6ish.

I’ve put the bread in the frig and the butter in the yellow cupboard cos of a plague of ants.

A rang to say the posters are not ready so there’ll be no pasting tonight.

CAN PEOPLE PLEASE CHECK IF THE TOASTER IS OFF!

I should be home by 6 – but I won’t have much time to talk – I have to finish my flag. Thursday?

M phoned to say come over Wed arvo to go through things she’s leaving behind. She’s off on Friday (!) PS rent due this week.

There’s a nut roast and pumpkin pie & pumpkins cooked in the oven – we’re at A’s for dinner see you later. Nice you home tonite!

Hello! Hello! Hello! I am in love with my bike I had a great top terrific really good fun fantastic weekend.

Dags are safe in town. Round at D’s.

M – where are you? Love T.

I’m sorry about the fed cop. I said it was police harassment and that if he came near the place again, or did any more snooping, I was going to the media.

Bye bye darlings, I have enjoyed and appreciated your company and calm hysteria very much. Am looking forward to returning too. Love youse.

Brought around the drop-sheets, brushes, paint, and one slightly-charred-on-one-side pie. Luv A

Thanxs lovelies had a great space here, started a Lesbian novel and enjoyed being in a totally new unknown place for a minute. Take care. K

I MUST, I MUST, DECREASE MY LUST

Thanks for the $10 – I forgot the saw but shall get it back to you.

BUMMER: The canoes are being used by the school that weekend!!!

‘It reads like texting,’ Julia says. ‘Or Twitter.’

Ro is affronted. ‘Much more interesting. You don’t get cartoons and coloured pencils in texts. And what about the biographers of the future? No records from social media.’

But Julia is unmoved by the challenges of biography. She is thinking about super-glued coins and other appliances.

Julia wakes to the insistent buzz of her mobile. All she can hear when she answers is sobbing.

‘’Lo?’ she mumbles.

Anne rolls away and pulls a pillow over her head.

‘It’s me,’ says the sobbing voice.

‘Maddie?’ Julia swings her legs over the edge of the bed and sits up. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I can’t move.’ Snuffle snuffle.

‘What do you mean you can’t move?’ Now thoroughly alarmed Julia walks through to the kitchen. Without thinking she puts the kettle on, a kneejerk reaction to crisis.

‘I fell over. It hurts like hell.’

‘Where? Where does it hurt?’

‘My ankle.’

‘Is that what you can’t move?’

There is a pause and then a sustained ‘owwww’ and a gasped ‘yes’.

‘Where are you?’

‘On the back steps.’

‘Shit. Are you warm enough?’

‘Got my dressing gown. Mobile was in the pocket.’

‘Listen I’m going to call an ambulance. Don’t hang up. I’ll use the landline.’

Maddie wails. ‘No. I don’t want an ambulance. Oww.’ There is an interlude of gasping. ‘Shit it hurts.’

Julia picks up the landline in her other hand and dials 000. ‘Hello? Yes I’ve got a friend on the other line. She’s had a fall …’

There is a strangled cry from the mobile. ‘But what about Raggles? If they cart me off?’

Julia juggles phones.

‘Maddie. I’m just putting you down for a minute.’

‘Juliaaaa!’

Ruthlessly Julia ignores this while she talks to the ambulance people. She hangs up the landline and swaps back to the mobile. In the bedroom Anne is sitting up looking sleepy.

‘Maddie? You there?’ Julia asks.

‘Yes.’ Maddie’s voice has shrunk.

‘I’m just going to hand you over to Anne while I get dressed. Then I’m coming over.’

Anne, realising all is not well, makes soothing noises into the phone. ‘What is it lovie?”

This produces a flood of tears, gasps of pain and a tangled story about the cat’s saucer. Twining violets, now broken.

Anne is too experienced to think that the pain is due to the loss of a saucer even if it is one of Maddie’s favourites and even if she did get it from the best Salvo op shop in Adelaide, the one in Goodwood Road. She lets Maddie ramble and gasp and signals to Julia with her eyebrows.

Julia goes back to the kitchen and fishes round in Anne’s bag for her mobile.

She takes it back to the bedroom. Anne nods approvingly. ‘Listen Maddie,’ she says. ‘just hang up and I’ll ring you straight back. Then Julia can take her phone with her.’

‘No. Don’t go,’ Maddie says.

Julia swaps phones with Anne. ‘Maddie. Two seconds. Anne’s dialling you now and I’ll see you very soon.’ She disconnects.

Anne frowns at Julia, phone to ear. ‘That was brutal,’ she says.

‘Love you too,’ Julia says and kisses the top of Anne’s head. But Anne is already back with Maddie.

Julia pockets her phone and goes out to start the car. In reckless defiance of road rules she drives with one hand and rings Cass with the other. Cass lives much closer to Maddie and could be there in five minutes.

 With that organised Julia can relax a little. It is early still and the roads aren’t busy. Julia thinks about emergency bracelets. She recently tried to persuade her mother to get one, but Zelda dismissed the idea. ‘I can always get you on the phone.’

And indeed this is true. Julia is no Luddite, but even she is sometimes nostalgic for the days when it was possible to be out of contact.

She shakes her head impatiently and turns her mind to the design of a clockwork phone charger. The challenge is to make the winding mechanism small and light enough …

Anne rises close enough to the surface of sleep to turn over in bed. Her mind moves with night’s muzzy logic to that perennial question: do you lose more heat from your back or your front? Anne thinks that the back is colder, which is why chairs have been invented, to keep backs warm.

But why is it so? The back is all bone and muscle and other packaging. Good insulation surely. The front is just a soft sac holding all sorts of organs, nothing to stop the heat draining away. Well nothing except some layers of fat. The cogs of Anne’s sleepy mind grind slowly around the familiar grooves.

  Since menopause she has lost her old nonchalance about temperature. More often than not she is too hot and she spends most of the summer sleeping alone. She remembers with new insight when her mother started sleeping in the spare room. Anne was young enough then to think that her mother was a hopeless prude in retreat from sex. Now she understands it was to do with temperature, not sex. Though sadly the two may become confused, the excess of one leading to the decline of the other.

With that fate in mind Anne has returned to Julia’s bed. The autumn nights are cooler and once again it is a pleasure to sleep curved around Julia’s body. But there is still a balance involved. Is it a night for pyjamas? Or will she have to rip them off in a sweat? And making the bed involves layers of blankets that can be folded to one side, added and deleted and added again as the night goes on.

Then there’s the other-body factor. Julia’s front gives off a lot more heat than Julia’s back. This raises Anne’s temperature too high and poses another puzzle. Does it mean that Julia, unlike Anne, loses more heat from her front than her back?

In any case it is better if Anne presses her front against Julia’s back. But then her own back is unprotected. And since she sleeps on the window side of the bed, her back may get cold.

The ideal position is not spooning at all, but lying back to back in the shape of a crab – solid in the middle with four protuberances on each side. Sometimes the legs entangle but this is only a problem if one of the half-crabs has neglected to cut her toenails.   

Julia is oblivious to all this. She wears an old tee shirt in bed winter and summer and her body pumps out the same steady heat that it has for the last fifty-odd years.

The crab position only works for a portion of the night. Sooner or later one of the halves, usually Anne, needs to stretch and turn over.

‘Stop kicking,’ Julia mumbles.

‘I can’t help it,’ Anne says crossly. ‘You’ve got your pillow stuck in my face.’

Sighing with ostentatious patience Julia fishes her MP3 player from under the pillow and attaches her ears to the umbilical cord: Garrison Keillor and the Prairie Home Companion.

Anne counts backwards to one hundred, gives in, puts on her headlight torch and fishes her book from under the bed. She is lying on her back.

With her spare hand she reaches for Julia’s hand. Julia snores once and twines her fingers round Anne’s.

Nice.

But now Anne’s front is cold. She pulls another blanket up to her chin. Does this coldness of her front mean heat loss outweighs heat production … ?

 The book slips from her grasp and her eyes close.

At the corner of Wakefield and Pulteney Brett realises that his back tyre is flat. He hefts his bike on to the footpath and wheels it over to a bench. It’s a puncture but luckily he has a spare tube with him.

He’ll be late for dinner with his mother though. He texts his other-mother Julia. Usually they meet and ride to Anne and Julia’s together.

‘Puncture. 30 mins. See you Mum’s.’

She texts straight back. ‘Still at work. Txt me.’

Brett has a swig from his water bottle and unrolls his puncture kit.

He is almost finished when a young man comes up to him.

‘Excuse me. You know where is curry?’

Brett wipes his face and considers this question. ‘Currie Street?’

‘Yes. Currie.’

Like many Adelaide natives Brett has to think carefully before he can answer a question about the city streets. In 1837 Colonel Light laid out the new city with beautiful simplicity. But the city elders eschewed simplicity, believing confusion to be a more comfortable human state. They decided that the streets would change their names part way along. One excuse was that any street crossing King William must demonstrate its inferiority by changing its name at the junction

‘Um … well go up here two blocks, no … wait … three blocks and turn left. Then keep straight on.’

‘Is Currie Street?’

‘No … er … it’s Grenfell Street. Then you cross King William and it’s Currie Street.’

‘Turn left?’

Brett indicates with his hands, palms together, straight ahead. ‘Don’t turn. It’s Grenfell on one side and then Currie on the other side.’

The young man looks bewildered but nods and backs away. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘This way?’

Brett nods. Hopefully the stranger will keep asking as he goes.

He eases the wheel back onto his bike, rolls up his repair kit and heads off to Julia’s office in Gilbert/Gilles Street.

Together they dodge the cars in King William Street, relax as it becomes Peacock Road through the parklands, and tense up again when it becomes King William Road and they must cross to the bike track. They veer off where Leah Street becomes East Avenue and continue south on East Avenue almost until it reaches Cross Road and becomes Winston Avenue.

As for Cross Road, what is the stranger to make of that name? Especially since the locals frequently refer to it as Cross Roads.

Gentle stranger, do not be deceived. It isn’t a crossroads at all. It is long. It is straight. And in its whole length it never once changes its name.

20.  Art – High and Low

Anne meets her friend Maddie at Bliss Café for date shakes, green soup and a dissection of Writers’ Week.

They throw highlights at each other: Harry Ricketts’ poets, Ramona Koval’s books, James Boyce’s Tasmania, Anne de Courcy and the Raj.

‘Anne Wroe. Biography of Orpheus.’

‘Missed her. But was Orpheus a real person?’

‘So she says. And she’s a Fellow of this and that. Lovely. Hugely erudite but unassuming and so enthusiastic. One of those mad English rosebuds.’

‘What about that Dutchman? If it’s enthusiasm you’re after.’

‘Oh yes! Westerman. Frank Westerman. Biography of Lippizzaner horses. He was bouncing out of his chair.’

‘I’m pretty sure he had breakfast on his tee shirt too.’

Perversely, this raises Frank Westerman enormously in their estimation. Anne has bought two of his books.

‘Okay. Hats. What did you think?’

For many years Anne and Maddie have been studying the hats at Writers’ Week, the Flemington of the literary world.

‘Disappointing I thought. Nothing outstanding. Over the weekend I thought it just wasn’t hot enough, lots of people weren’t bothering.’

‘It was hot enough during the week. Stinking.’

‘But humid. You don’t need a hat in that. You need a spray bottle and a fan.’

‘I suppose. A hat gets in the way of the sweat evaporating.’

‘We should plot the incidence of hats against the weather each year, temperature, humidity and wind factor.’

Anne scoops out the last drop of soup with her finger and thinks about a spreadsheet. But Maddie is not ready yet for science. ‘I did see one gorgeous one with flowers embroidered all over the crown. I thought I might copy it.’

‘Remember the year someone wore pink feathers held in place by a chopstick?’

‘Linda Jaivin was it? And that wasn’t feathers, dear. That was her hair.’

‘Well it was a highlight anyhow.’

‘That reminds me, there was a young woman with her skirt inside out.’

‘Fashion statement?’

‘I don’t think so. Not that sort of get-up. It was subtle but I could tell from the seams and the hem. The weird thing was that about an hour later I sat behind a woman with her tee shirt inside out. I could see the label.’

‘It’s a new study. We’ll watch whether it varies with the weather.’

‘Do you think we’re frivolous?’

‘I hope so. Somebody has to be.’

They turn to Nicholas Rothwell’s closing address, a wide-ranging multi-disciplinary survey of Europeans in Australia. He has distinguished himself by speaking for an hour and a quarter without naming a single woman.

‘He did mention a feminist anthropologist going up to Cape York.’

‘Who would that have been?’

‘I don’t know. Her name is lost to us.’

‘Surprise surprise.’

‘It’s because we’re frivolous. High culture is closed to women. We’re too interested in egg stains to be commemorated.’

‘He expressed himself so beautifully though.’

‘Channelling Robert Dessaix.’

‘Well I’d rather Nicholas Rothwell that Peter Goers.’

‘That’s not saying much.’

But on Peter Goers they prefer to draw a curtain. They go off to the IWD March against Misogyny to express their ire, and from there to WOMAD to express their animal spirits.