Ticket

Words by Philip Harvey. Images by Bridie Harvey

 Ticket Town: Playground (Bridie Harvey)

This ticket admits one to the sound of heartbeats, the colours made broad and intricate by light. This ticket gives entrée to adventure, though discovery is about the journey, one that is singular and bound to its particular holder. Conditions of use are the responsibility of the main carers. Full details are comprehensible only to an adult. This ticket has no visible form, is not made by hands, and is pure guesswork for the ticket inspector. Handle with care.     

 Ticket Town: Campsite (Bridie Harvey)

Order your ticket through the daily encounter with new awareness. The ticket itself is nothing. Keep it in your pocket with the map and guidebook. Any costs will occur along the way but your guardian will pay the tab. In fact, the ticket is incidental, but as well to have it. Access all areas of experience. Only later will this ticket have a meaning. It is a collectible. The ticket is made from a special design developed over generations. Each ticket has a unique resistant code.

 Ticket Town: Shops (Bridie Harvey)

This ticket takes you the purchaser along the roads grown real with familiarity to the rooms made meaningful by your presence. Provides entry to the theatre of continuous conversation, the sports field of incontestable delight, the mega-festival of uncertainties. It cannot be swapped, transferred or used by another party. Inspectors operate across the network. This ticket is valid for the period of two-thirds of a lifetime. Or until unforeseen expiry. 

 Ticket Town: Park (Bridie Harvey)

The bearer of this ticket is permitted to open their eyes again. This tickets takes the bearer over the border into new sights. How marvellous they really are, where you are for the first time or have been a hundred times and thought you knew it all. It might be a dream, but it is broad waking. The bearer will forget about the ticket soon after validation. Its design is of the period, though all the bearer feels is now. The bearer is advised to keep as a souvenir.

 Ticket Town: Beach (Bridie Harvey)

The ticket you hold here must be shown to the man at the edge, who will know you well though you have never met before. He will show you how you arrived at this moment and place. The ticket has no printed destination. It holds yottabytes of autobiography. The ticket will be of no assistance where you are going. Please hand it to the man, who will address you by your true name. No return trip. No refund. In the place you are going next, you will not need a ticket.

Or

Macleod, Victoria, Australia

Sibelius

Dark turning of the earth into light.
Return of hope.
Though for a child it is again, again.
Amidst the blades of grass, a whisper.
My house has always been full of music.
Soft vibration easing air.
Earliest memories in the country.
Scratchchch of the needle.
Saturday mornings, the overwhelming volume and scale of Mahler.
Beethoven symphonies through youngsters’ house.
Great roars and rippling.
That accompanied my father, writing his sermon for tomorrow.
His sermon, his music, to all intents and purposes his house.
Like having a whole orchestra in my living room.
Personally I couldn’t think of anything worse, said Flanders.
Than having a whole orchestra in my living room.
My father would laugh at that.
Collections of Bruno Walter performances.
The township around us full of sounds.
Milk trucks, magpies, whistling.
The self is just an example.
The Pastoral Symphony.
When I came to the big city I discovered another music.
It was on the radio.
Rectangle box plugged into the skirting board.
On the advertising stations my father never listened to.
On principle.
English rock and roll.
Detroit soul.
Australian synthesis.
Friday on my mind.
This became my music.
The energy was my thing, it’s beautiful simplicity.
Under the sheets and blankets in the dark.
I was possessive of this music.
And it was the music my father did not like and did not play.
Silence on the subject.
His music was long and boring whereas my music was brief and brilliant.
Little did I know.
Little did I know that every other boy in the city of two million had the same.
Same possessiveness possessiveness.
The energy of being alive.
On Sundays we were allowed to play Peter, Paul, and Mary after dinner.
Lemon Tree, See What Tomorrow brings.
Probably at mother’s insistence a rock and roll record entered the house.
An EP of Twist and Shout.
The Fab Four, but they were acceptable, everyone bought their records.
And they were stylish.
Thereafter possibilities increased.
Followed many phases of teenage music.
Followed for a season or for a reason.
Agreement in the schoolyard.
Haircuts and little symbols of rebellion on lapels.
The resistance to my father’s music became entrenched, a habit.
A reaction to authority or wrong or disappointment.
No longer a response of the ear.
That stuff just goes on and on.
I suppose eventually my habit became long and boring, like his music.
Not a brief and brilliant attitude.
Winter returned after the brown leaves.
Black evening and golden streaks.
One cold night in my room I switched over to the classical station.
Warming.
Something to do.
I thought I knew about this long classical stuff that had no singing.
And no catchy riffs.
But for once my oedipal prejudice was ignored.
The fixed attitude was forgotten.
What is this sensation?
This music was kind of melancholy, but powerful.
It seemed to have courage.
How could music have courage?
And instead of stopping after three minutes, after three minutes it started going deeper.
Entirety of attention, bodily feeling, my head entranced.
I looked into my dark garden, nectarine bare branches.
But I could have been anywhere.
I needed to know.
Eight PM.
Checked the Green Guide.
Next evening I spoke.
“Last night I heard this amazing music. Sibyl-us, um, Sigh-by-us. Something.”
Couldn’t even pronounce the name.
“Sib-bay-lee-ouse,” my father corrected me.
I don’t remember anything else.
A correction, a reprimand: normally enough to make me go back inside.
Inside myself.
Over-sensitive to a fault.
The self in a constant process of becoming.
He was the expert.
Surprisingly though, my father had some Sibelius records.
Surprising because this was meant to be my possession, not his.
Great black discs fell out of album covers onto the player.
Selves enjoying their own game of finding.
He must have been delighted.
I didn’t see that, his interest.
But I had broken through.
I was going to listen to any Sibelius that was around.
My father had No. 1 and No. 2.
Slow moody openings.
Haunting sounds in the distance, then gradual takeover by some rush of power.
I couldn’t tell you what the instruments were or the orchestration.
Later I would read critics who called this Late Romantic.
Or Scandinavian nationalism.
Harbingers of the modern.
For me, they were moody openings and rushing sounds.
It was the way an emotion took hold inside and grew in intensity.
Technical words still mean little to me.
It’s always the music moves and takes hold.
About the first Sibelius record I bought was a couple of years later.
Symphony No. 5, with its amazing ending.
Huge strikes of sound filled with huge silences.
I played it over and over.
The fourth movement in particular.
I learnt that this ending was famous.
But what does famous mean?
This was a private discovery to which I brought all my own meanings.
There wasn’t anyone else involved here.
The sounds kept taking me places.
And I began to anticipate the changes in the movements.
It was like reading my own changing days and emotions.
On the cover of No. 5 was a picture of a Finnish lake.
Sibelius covers always had pictures of snow fields and birch trees.
Swans or flocks of ducks could often be seen in the icy distance.
Never any people, other than a picture of the composer on the back, maybe.
Young, with a stern look, swept back hair and a dashing moustache.
Old, with a stern look, bald head and no moustache.
But this music was so set in my mind that I still don’t think of Finland.
Sibelius means cold winter evenings in Melbourne.
Sunset steak-red.
A cold wind in the street.
Coated figures walking home from the railway station.
The dark garden.
A cat scratching the door to be let in.
And the light on in my own room, concentrating on the next subject of interest.
Especially Sibelius now.
Once in Stockholm I heard him on the radio.
But all I could remember was Melbourne in July.
There is favourite music I collect randomly.
Miles Davis, West African music, Sonic Youth, Claudio Monteverdi, John Cage.
There is nothing systematic about this.
And I still collect any Sibelius, when I think about it.
One day I might become systematic about this composer.
Even write something about him.
I go into Thomas’s and pick out a version of No. 2.
“Hmm,” says the bearded expert behind the counter.
“Bernstein with the Vienna Philharmonic. That’s a really weird version.”
He rummages through a CD-file while saying this.
“Are you sure you don’t want something else?”
Instant my reply.
“Yes, I know Sib-bay-lee-ose. This is No. 2. This is the one I want.”
I am the expert.
I can pronounce his name too.
He backs down.
“Okay, okay. Sure.”
I get the feeling he has a different attitude towards me.
So he wants Bernstein’s No. 2, so he must know what he’s on about.
This mind game goes on all the time at Thomas’s.
I had never heard Bernstein’s version, but it is amazing.
The cover has a picture of Bernstein, not the composer.
Either he is worried about the horns or he is zooming into the stratosphere.
Bernstein, so New York.
Sibelius, so Helsinki.
This is not a weird version at all.
It’s amazing.
It is Melbourne in the winter.
There is a funny anecdote I’ll tell you about Noel Coward sometime.
The funniest thing being Sibelius, not Coward.
But who really cares about the Book of Musical Anecdotes?
All the leaves have blown off the nectarine tree.
I’m listening to the radio at nine o’clock at night.
And it could start raining at any moment.
The cat wants to get in.

-- July 1998

Recipe

The Ultimate Insult

‘The Woman Who Met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris’ is a little movie about manners in Sydney, if manners are what you wish to call them. Frustrated by his yuppie wife’s pretensions, more particularly her constant reports of a friend who has met the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, the husband plans a confrontation in the café where this friend is a waitress. Browbeaten and drunk he retreats home later, muttering at the kitchen table the ultimate insult: “You and your Simone de Beauvoir in Paris! You and your Elizabeth David cookbooks!”

Work Place Relations

When a new male joins the staff certain rites of passage are enacted at morning tea. These normally conclude with statements like, “So in fact you have a Peugeot and a Pajero and the moke is for the beach,” or “Why would you barrack for a bunch of dropkicks like the Hawks?” When a new female joins the staff, not long after a tin of homemade orange biscuits appears for morning tea. After steady consumption of these biscuits, and general signs of approval, someone (invariably another female) leans forward and says: “These biscuits are delicious. Have you got the recipe?”

Jimmy Webb

Mississippi and a few other words sort of rhyme with Recipe, which is why it doesn’t spring to mind when singing a song. Even the famous “cake left out in the rain” rhymes rather gloomily with “again”; in fact, in that song the recipe has been lost, in much the same way as the author’s good taste. Most good recipe songs are for children, like ‘The Candyman Can’.

A Walking Dictionary

Recipe is the second singular impersonal of the Latin word recipere, to receive. Before the 18^th century any English speaker using the word meant chemist’s prescription. That is, take two before bed-time. Doctors headed their prescription with R, still the symbol seen in pharmacies everywhere. So when the Jesuit Robert Parsons writes in 1584, “Hee died in the way of an extreame Flux, caused by an Italian recipe,” he means the medicine helped him on his way. The word used for cooking preparations was receipt, which found its way into Middle English from the same source. When Chaucer asks for the bill by saying “What shal this receyt coste? telleth now”, we have some idea of where modern receipt comes from. By the time it comes to mean a list of food ingredients, not herbal ingredients, the word is being used for any combination that might effect a good end. It is really only in Victorian times that the word is used most commonly in the way we use it. First, catch your hare.

The Antidote

A chaplain of Trinity College within the University of Melbourne once gave a sermon about depression. When he was really depressed he would go out and buy the biggest glossiest cookbook available. The colour illustrations of stockpots and meringues would be enough to snap him out of his melancholy, if only for a while. He could dream of all those savours and flavours. But the real message was, there is no way you can escape the questions that trouble you by reading a recipe, there is no way in this world that you can really run home to mother.

Blank Page

Boys never learnt to cook in Australia. This was the preserve of the women and it was only the girls who were taught how to bake scones or roast potatoes. Boys came in and ate when they were called. Only in girls’ schools was there any such thing as Domestic Science, the ultimate meaning of which was to train girls in how to run households while the husband counted the beans, made the bread, and brought home the bacon. But only older men nowadays can get away with joking how they know how to boil a three-minute egg. Knowing thirty basic recipes ought to be a non-option at Year Twelve; it would help cut down the youth suicide rate too.

Bringing It All Back Home

The kitchen was the home and there knowledge was imparted that was practical and spiritual. The increase in production of the cookbook can be seen in inverse ratio to domestic life in the kitchen. Who needs a book when you have someone showing you how to prepare any meal you want? Conversely, if you have no skill as a chef and no one to show you how to cook, what else will you do but turn to a book for your guide?

Revered Tome

A house may have a hundred perfect recipe books with beautiful sketches of Piedmont, crisp explanations with exact measurements, indexes that lead you back up the garden path for that obscure mauve herb. Every house though has the battered scrapbook, especially battered at the cake pages. 1959 newspaper cuttings for the perfect minestrone stuck next to your grandmother’s illegible directions for the Gingerbeer Plant stuck next to a handout card for Hungarian Goulash courtesy of your friendly butcher stuck next to the ingredients hurriedly scribbled down at the drunken party for the famous Bombe Alaska. The spine of this book bends out and has to be tied down with a ribbon. Countless other cuttings fall out every time you open it. No matter how many incredible Italian recipe books you own you know that this shambles of a book would be the one most likely to survive the Big Cull. 

Clifton Hill, Thursday the tenth of September, 1998 

Red

“Pretty little things, necessary things …” In autumn going on winter the colours have fallen out of the branches so, going walking, the moments that are not grey-white sky or black-brown roads, are sharp. Bottle-brushes and rosehip bubbles swing before the terraces. The long side brick walls of old warehouses stretch in the sun. Everything looks understated, even unstated, but we know soon enough where the sprinkler stop valves and fire alarms can be found. The octagonal sign on St George’s Road corner effects every tail light. The colour that forbids and the colour that attracts most furiously. No Dogs. Hazchem. I continue past the skate boys as they zip down the concrete troughs in their cherry baggies. A Bombers supporter jogs through Edinburgh Gardens at a diagonal: what a hangover, his eyes look like bloodbaths. Features show out like flute parts in a symphony. I continue up the hill. There is melancholy around the lips of the moon on the corner of Rowe and Delbridge – its eyebrows flare. Now that the Ferraris and Pajeros have stamped Fitzroy they will say the Communists have gone for good. Revolutionary posters have moved into the past. Poppies on Aussie Soy boxes in Sustenance’s window. And the newsagents are freckled with attention-getting devices. A third of our life is spent sleeping  and a sixteenth standing on corners looking at a cut-out man in a little black box. I continue past the P for Post Office and the sale flag at Autorange and the Ps for Probationary. Discarded Winfield packets and MacDonalds cups are blown flat against the swimming pool fence. There is new paint on the station windows: out with the old. The underground tunnel is sprayed with rubrics: Skins Rule, STM, Callum Sux Shit, I Love Jesus Christ – True, Cunt, Pigs, Crofty 88, Magpies 91: I wonder what it will be next week. And so up and so out into Spensley Street. We live in moderate cool climes: colours soon go russet, they go by another shade. Link Clifton Pharmacy, Martin Meats: the words are faded and understated. A nose is strapped to a rusted Belmont. A street of houses with a sprinkle of cold geraniums. A carless lot emblazoned at its end with Sidchrome Metal Box Division. Fenwick corner demolition site with painted sign: Free Fire Wood. Around the corner into Dwyer, past Coke cans rolling down the camber near kids’ crossing stripes. An owl and a potoroo ask for No Junk Mail Please. I knock on the door then enter, stepping over doona covers and towels into the chaotic interior. To a glass of claret, heavy and shaped like a tulip.  

from Colour Supplement, early 1990s  

Surveillance

Somers Avenue, Macleod, Victoria, Australia

Electricity

Macleod, Victoria, Australia

 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Australia

Microbiology

Royal Parade, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

Only

Royal Parade, Parkville, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia