Grevillea (September)

The meaningful sidestreet off Chapel Street is forever associated in my not-forever mind with overpriced second-hand bookshops and music clubs too cool for their own good, soon out of business. The bookshops survive, though how is a secret in the not-forever minds of their owners. Hot summers in Greville Street are memories of overpriced pizzas, then spillover on the footpath during the gig of a visiting jazz hero. Winters are a time to avoid, unless one goes out in search of an impossible colonial imprint or shortcuts to Prahran Railway Station. With its incidental urban affectations it is hard to accept the street is named after the same family of obscure Georgian politicians whose name was given to my favourite flowers, just about. They curl out in profusion through the air as if in defiance of gravity. They twist upward and outward as if inward were a long ago dream, a stage they had to go through. Their bodyweight is somewhere in the midst of all that mass of soft-lined curlicues and hard-edged loops and supple hooks. What has this to do with a person called Greville, the name redolent of French towns and imposing Shakespearean actors? A man who never went south of the equator, never sighted in blooming flesh the 360 different types of rosy protea, what would he have made of the words ‘bush’, ‘prahran’? As he stood in calflength boots and London woolcoat did he sign off on grevillea with a sigh of satisfaction? Did he know they kept sweet water to drink from their tendrils? Did he live for his garden? Did his signature resemble the calligraphy of a grevillea?