Columns from The Weekend West

Ros Thomas 09/05/2015 Ros Thomas 09/05/2015

Going Up

The traffic lights at Labouchere Road flipped to orange and I slammed on the anchors. The car in front sped across the intersection. In the distance I could see cars choking the freeway on-ramp.

“This could take a while,” I said to my three noise-makers in the back, but they were busy singing out of tune to the radio.

Up ahead, I spotted the block of flats I lived in as a four-year-old. I flipped up my sunvisor and counted up four floors to single out the two bedroom apartment Mum rented us after her divorce.

Ros Thomas 04/04/2015 Ros Thomas 04/04/2015

A Line to the Past

Kulin seems deserted this Sunday morning. The town’s womenfolk are sleeping-in after last night’s dinner dance. The kids on bikes yesterday must be watching TV. Two brown honeyeaters pirouette noisily overhead. They bank sharply before alighting unsteadily on a power line. Theirs is the only movement on Stewart Street.

My newly five-year-old daughter, keen to explore, kicks up a shower of red pebbles from the gravel footpath. We wander past a derelict shop. In the window is a faded sepia photograph of a swarthy bloke wearing a mug-shot smirk. His white shirt-sleeves are rolled up above his elbows, business-like. My pint-sized companion is captivated by his eyebrows, which sit on his jutting forehead like two hairy caterpillars. I read the caption:

Ros Thomas 06/12/2014 Ros Thomas 06/12/2014

Bite Your Tongue

It was the first roadhouse I’d seen in forty-five minutes and I needed coffee and petrol. In that order. I swung off the Brand highway and pulled up at the pump, feeling dwarfed by the half a dozen road trains stretched out across the carpark.

At the counter, I stood beside a truckie who made me feel petite.

“A coupla cheese sausages and a pie n’ sauce,” he said.

In the bain-marie, two shrivelled sausages with wrinkly red hides lay sweating behind the glass.

“How’d they get the cheese in?” I said, thinking out loud.

“Beats me,” said the truckie, “but they’re bloody good,” and he slapped a ten dollar note on the counter and gathered up his two paper bags.

Ros Thomas 09/08/2014 Ros Thomas 09/08/2014

Talking Shop

Grocery shopping isn’t as fun as it used to be. My local Coles is efficient, but impersonal and bland. I hanker for the shopping strips of my childhood, when a tray of fresh peaches smelt of the sun. Mum would test the ripeness of a rockmelon by lifting it up and pressing her nose against the fragrant dimple where the vine once fed the stalk.

In 1975, all the shopkeepers in my suburb knew me by name. Even when Tracy Sabitay and I got sprung trying to light matches in the laneway behind Mr Rudrum’s electrical shop, Mr Pearlman the pharmacist had no trouble identifying us: “Well, well, well. Tracy and Rosalind I see! Shall we put away the matches or shall I call your mothers?”

Ros Thomas 12/04/2014 Ros Thomas 12/04/2014

Rolling in Nostalgia

Last Sunday I had my first encounter with a Chiko Roll since 1988. We met by chance, that Chiko Roll and I in Cockburn Sound, on a jetty I hadn’t set foot on since I was in pigtails.

Two hours earlier at home, the man of the house had yelled through the back door: “Hey! Let’s go fishing in Safety Bay!” Of course, I knew the fishing was a subterfuge – what he really wanted was to marry two of his favourite things: his Holden ute and a long drive.

Regardless, the kids know to pounce when an adventure’s in the offing. Inside ten minutes, they’d found their shoes and loaded the hand lines and buckets into the ute. They were sitting expectantly in the back seat by the time their father had jemmied loose some squid bait from the back wall of the freezer.

Ros Thomas 15/02/2014 Ros Thomas 15/02/2014

Double the Fun

The Two Ronnies were a Saturday night institution when I was eight. At 7.25pm, my Nan would untie her apron and announce: “Off you go then. Do the honours!”

That was my signal. I’d race down the hall to the good room and switch Nan’s hulking Thorn television to ‘ON.’ We didn’t call it TV in those days because Nan was a stickler for formalities: “Abbreviations are uncouth. We have a television set and a refrigerator and a lavatory and a lounge suite. These are their proper names!” Nan referred to the on/off button on her television set as the knob.