Hampton

 

Beachcombers inspecting what amounts to Hampton Beach glance inland occasionally, wondering amongst themselves, Hampton, does it exist? Travellers, diverted from their usual Glenhuntly, or rather Glen Huntly, route to a replacement bus to Moorabbin via Brighton Beach, wonder to themselves about the track less travelled, the stop they may never visit, the proportions, if any, of so-called Hampton. An answer, if here is one, quickly vanishes in the rear vision mirror of the replacement bus that has other destinations in mind. Rumours and stray indications arrive, nevertheless, of somewhere that is in substance what is referred to in geographic and socio-historical terms as Hampton. Artists, like Clarice Beckett, have rendered scenes with placenames very close in proximity to what is called Hampton, paintings suggestive of a village in the distance, respectably getting on with construction of residential dwellings amidst ti-tree and sandy outcrops, with period cars parked at a straight right angle to the camber on a road vanishing into trackless bush or opaque bay. Ongoing historical postcard suburb series on Google Image confirm the presence of the Lido Tea Rooms (ca. 1920), the Hoyts Cinema (ca. 1950) and Hampton Street, Looking North (ca. 1980) interspersed with frames of verifiable Hamptons in Middlesex and Virginia. Hampton Court Palace is a distant prospect. A colour piece from an old newspaper scan declaims that one of the pluses of Hampton is that it’s adjacent to Brighton. Coincidentally, I received an email from a friend who claims to live in Hampton. Quote: “Hello Philip, I would be very interested to read your suburb pieces. Hampton has changed considerably since we moved there in 1976.  More high-rise, along Hampton Street and adjoining streets. Our church has 17 attendees on a good Sunday. I don't meet anyone I know, in Hampton Street. Still, it's only a 25-minute train ride to the city, with great Bay views between Hampton and Brighton Beach.” Evidence accumulates, but still not sure exactly what to say about the existence of Hampton, it was thought opportune to make an idle detour along the track not travelled to the epicentre of the question. Half a dozen Jaded Bayside Commuters (JBC) sat at half a dozen equidistantly separate windows, staring blankly at the medium high-rise dwellings that had replaced the ti-tree dwellings of Beckett, when not staring blankly at their iPhones. From the safety of the open carriage doorway, photographs were taken as evidence of Hampton for future reference (pictured), but in haste as the doors starting beeping to remind everyone of their existence, then slid shut again. Beachcombers from distant and equally unverifiable parts (it could be said) can be assured, there is life south of South Road, a home amidst the sprawl where bayside rains fall then stall, a place of being that has survived the postcard age.

Twitter

 

Image: Chapel of the Upper Room, College House, Christchurch  Ōtautahi

These flourishes of signature ending written letters, transcending the mere guesswork of the blessed receiver with a positive name and perchance kisses, today are tied in ribbon in Shoebox 2021-2023. Now there’s talk today of mail deliveries every other day, as electronic correspondence supersedes copperplate, or scrawl even, its metallic signoff the best we will get, and a hard keyboard kiss. X, formerly known as Twitter. These emptied woodland spaces subdivided for appliance-friendly maisonettes on the plan render no regrowth for insects and peripheral birdlife. Scrub is laid low and removed, scenery turns into density suburb, the soil a polished surface crisscrossed with tyre prints. X, formerly known as Twitter. These day markets where need is met and connection is made in raucous birdlike conviviality and the smells of ripe fruit and vegetables, find the checkouts a warble of ‘cash or card?’, and bellbird scanners chiming with timing. Yet too soon come the legions of self-help gnomes, reducing transactions to the power of 1, converting the buyer and their need into a franchise’s slave and a password at a blinking screen. X, formerly known as Twitter. These skyways where migration catches everyone unaware, winging it again for dear life from here to the neural landing pad the far end of a transcontinental ocean, formally known as eggs. Byways trailed over by great surfeit weights of jet plane, satellites Leonardo-like networking the ancient star patterns way over the top, before turning to space junk in a comedy of comets, falling to Earth where they mark the exacting exact spot. X, formerly known as Twitter. These brave village habitations turned bravura by nature that today are one megacity upon another, talk the talk of unending expansion, their millions needing food, their fossil masters buying up fuel. Such megabooms and megatrends blow the megaminds of myriad visitors to megastores, crossing one wire with another for the latest fix. X, formerly known as Twitter. These sizable bytes of English, set out as if lapidary from a reader’s distance, borrow certain ringtones, certain prosodic methods familiar to Quiller-Couch Edwardians, as if in the belief the common reader had the patience to listen to this someone emulating at some level the birdsong cadences of the uncaged ages, sent from their iPhone. Whereas meantime the grammar of machine, a compliant regurgitator of unimagined humourlessness, compiles empty empires of text, turning them into a running nose of prose, sans rhyme, sans assonance, sans performance, sans experience. X, formerly known as Twitter.

Pencil

 

Pencil Role Call. Camlin Graphica Drawing 1031 5B (India) filled whole notebooks with brainstorm. Chung Hwa 6151 HB (China) inscribed erasable call numbers inside flyleaves of borrowed library books. Columbia “Copperplate” 700 2B (Australia) added to the endless shopping list that, once ended or misplaced, 2B began again with a new list more copious than the last and equally likely to be left somewhere in the rush to get to the shops, and then a third list, and it was ever thus. Conté Crayon de Couleur (Clichy, France) took to fresh sheets of blank paper with all the spread of the spectrum and detail of a prism’s pyramidal edges. Crayola Deep Blue (United States of America) was worn to a stub making depths of the ocean and miniatures of sverdrups, waves of fine wood with deep blue edges curving from the sharpener. Derwent Pastel Pencils (Aylesbury, England) conjured childhood of immense shapes in a short time, completing hours with primary highlights and muzzying backgrounds with leaflets of soft blotting paper. Eyeball Janome “Golden Sword” 780 (Japan) underlined choice phrases and entered observations in broad margins and empty end pages, an entire extension of the poetry in the book itself. Faber-Castell Watercolour 352 (Germany) outlined haloes, tea saucers and grass blades. Farb-Riesen Lyra Color Giants (Germany) heightened the graphic drama with colossally impressive results, bumping about the place. Kirin 940 Yellow (Japan) combined with Kirin 840 Silver resulted in a folding screen ensemble requiring tissue paper inserts to avoid smudging. Koh-I-Noor Progresso woodless 2B (Czech Republic) left carbon footprints all over the place. Marbig 2B (Australia) voted Yes, in a word, at the Referendum. Micador College 4035 2B (Australia) mixed with Metallic Mauve from the same stationery company delivered the customary and desired design. Mont Marte Signature Water Colour 4000 (Australia) coloured in the sky that wasn’t cloud over several hours of close attention to graded sfumato. Rexel Blackedge No. 218 (England) builder’s pencil did the job very well, thank you very much. Smiggle three-sided colour pencils (Australia) coloured our world with sunshine yellow each day, coloured our world with happiness all the way. Staedtler 110 HB2 (Australia) saved several thousands of dollars in tax. Tip-Top 319-No. 2 (United States of America) figured it out in a lined school exercise book. Toho & Co. Godzilla merchandise pencil (Tokyo, Japan) wrote the script that sank without trace as other ideas came to the surface, a sustained mixture of reason and dream. Wolff’s “Royal Sovereign” By Appointment HB (England) wrote miles of perfectly level script ever since the days of mileposts.

Christmas

 

Reflection for Christmas Day, 2023.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

Words are spare and essential from the people in the Christmas stories, if they speak at all. They are too busy about giving birth. Or else they are terrified, when they aren’t watching, sorting things outside their regular experience. They follow signs and ask directions. But really they live in response, absorbed in wonder. Words might get in the way. No one is asking for their opinion. 

Their attention is being drawn to the Word. This unlikely assortment congregate around a newborn child, like a scene off a Christmas card. Their example of adoration may be adopted by anyone, as congregations through time meet again in proximity to the stories and the all too human person generating this wondrous activity. Because this is always simply a beginning. We have the rest of the year in which to hear what this person will come to say to us, the Word speaking words that keep revealing our lives. The Word is abounding in gifts. 

Nowadays words can be cheap about Christmas. Everyone has to have an opinion, usually being all too ready to share those opinions with others: ‘December, it’s the most stressful month’; ‘I’d have it every second year but my family says, no way!’; ‘It’s just a rip off of some pagan holiday’; ‘What’s to be joyful about with the world in this state?’; ‘I can’t wait till it’s all over.’ The clichés do their annual round, as people settle for grumpiness over gratitude, consumption over consideration. 

Yet all these passing words too congregate around the surprise reminder, made steadfast in places like churches, of the Word coming amongst us. Far from sliding from view, the Christmas stories and Christmas itself are sung and preached and celebrated and emulated everywhere, as though they were a regular experience. Love is placed at the centre of everything. The Word that can explain the truth about ourselves, changeable and desirous as we are, comes into being. 

Like the little congregations in those stories, we arrive to be here now, to try and understand the nature of this inexplicable event, ever an abiding mystery, to attend as they did to something more than just the same old same old. Waiting in silence, we listen to what the Word will tell us next, in word and deed.

Richmond

 

The green-light button slides Made in Melbourne door to attention bump for passengers onto elevated platform before reverting to beepbeep door, they alighting into morning sun, bright and semi-cheery. The peppercorn crush underfoot scenting the city side ramps at North Richmond station, here accountant and shopgirl go again down to reality. The golden gateway of the migration boat floats firmly above winding stream of trams and talkback breakfast motorists, street kids about with nowhere to go but a vape pipe and bad phoneline. The transcendent techno orchestrating from wound-down windows in Victoria Street traffic, focused DJ behind his wheel revving oblivious to line dance of street walkers. The Mekong digraphs for grocer and lawyer running up rundown Edwardian shopfronts peel with time’s heat, their named humans unlocking glass doors and setting out A-frames on chains. The eucalyptus pods bursting red flame filaments in murals between dim sum cafes, background to rough sleepers getting their bearings where they sit on the footpath, in Tiger beanies. The cut-price tuxedo warehouse windows reflect passing pedestrians in daily denim and tattoo punkoid and sensible tie and cotton tie-dye, their reflections lithely outpacing stilted showroom mannequins. The lime helmet, near the brewery’s Great Wall of Abbotsford, atop a buckled road sign separated forever from its hire bicycle alone, where schoolboys too busy raving computers and the weekend would think of kicking it down the street. The Skipping Girl with timeless timing descending ascending her neon bar at her new address, that maybe the passing tram passenger, receptionist or brickie, looks up to contemplate now daylight has brought her to a standstill. The blue building foursquare of Baltic build-alls in big boxes, the monster complex of Victoria Gardens beyond beckons the hungry and greedy and lost and gainfully employed into its cantilevered entrances semi-cheerily, their hasty shopping lists look. The facadism warehouse conversions and postmodern apartments layered undulating named for premodern riverine idylls, wherewith random appearances at an upstairs window or burst of convertible from gutter level garage make for signs of life. The eights balancing on Birrarung water their oars winging and wading the sepia surfaces, last December laps downstream dreaming of future autumn carnivals. The peripheral vision cliffs of Barkers Road cutting ivy over stone, a tram driver passing through the looking glass east. The moneyed walls of jointed stone and dappled iron set emphatically against the streets of Studley Park hill, occasional front gardens with referendum Yes placards at fences, unremoved in place remaining Yes for the foreseeable future.

Iniquity

Reflection for the First Sunday in Advent, the 3rd of December 2023.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne.

 

Iniquity is not a word we hear every day. It is not the first word we use when complaining about something or someone iniquitous. It would be unusual for someone to say of another, that their problem is their persistent iniquity. Yet, when we read the paper, browse the browser, glance at news screens, a main theme is a world of iniquity. 

Wickedness, sin, vice, lawlessness, the synonyms are familiar to all of us. Though when Isaiah uses the word he seems not simply to be talking in such specific terms. Iniquity is a state that we fall into, easy to do and much harder to extract ourselves from. Our hearts are drawn into this state, such that we find excuses to prolong the condition. At its worst, “we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” We live with our wrongdoing, persist quite willingly, while longing to be free of it. Isaiah discerns this as separation from God: “there is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you.” 

Far from treating this as a simplistic equation of righteousness versus unrighteousness, Scripture takes time to describe the intrinsic relationship between ourselves and our Maker. It’s not just others’ problem, it’s our problem. Those who “remember you in your ways” will be aware that “we are all your people”, we may be forgiven and known, where our iniquity will not be remembered forever. 

This God, “who works for those who wait for him”, remains present. In this, the words of the Gospel are insistent as those of the Prophet. To know neither the day nor the hour of his arrival is to be on constant alert for that moment. Distractions and diversions, excuses and tiny litanies of iniquities, are not going to cut it. Overcoming separation, keeping watch, staying awake are imperatives. It is a message repeated often enough for anyone to hear. 

Given the choice, this makes sense of the ecstatic opening to the letter to the Corinthians, residents of a city not unfamiliar with iniquity. Thanks are given to God for the grace given in Christ Jesus, “for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind.” They are told that “he will strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord.” 

Isaiah 64: 1-9, 1 Corinthians 1: 3-9, Mark 13: 24-end.