the ’sham

On Saturday, Sue came around to record the northern border walk episode with me.

We sat in the kitchen and talked about walking. She’s starting a project interviewing Vietnamese folks in Sydney about their long walking expeditions as they fled dangerous situations in their homelands. Walks on a much grander scale than our little saunters along the local suburb boundaries.

This visit from Sue was something like a re-enactment of last year’s event. We sat and talked, we drank tea, we read last year’s blog entry aloud, and then we walked. This time, instead of doing the northern border again, we just walked “around the block”. But slowly. I told Sue about how in mindfulness class we do these walking meditations, where you pay attention to the breath, and the sensations in the feet and body as you walk. You can’t help but start to slow down as you appreciate all the small movements that go into walking. Walking becomes a thing in itself, rather than a means to an end. She said, “lets do one now!” so we did.

We exited my gate, and slowly worked our way up Chester to the corner of Audley. There we took a turn and headed down the hill, with the sun on our backs. I focused my eyes on the shadow of my head, which was always a few metres in front of my feet. We both felt anxious about “what would the neighbours think”, and whether we’d get honked at by passing cars, two slow-walking weirdos. But that never came to pass. A lady pushing a pram skirted around us, apologising. We stopped and took a breather at the corner of Oxford, each secretly hoping that the other would want to quit and call it a day. But we launched back into it, heading down towards Livingstone, where we took off our shoes to feel the concrete better. Then back around to Chester. The slight upwards incline on Chester was a surprise and a pleasure on the backs of my calves. It occurred to me that if I did this every day, I would become “just that guy who does that strange walking, we don’t know why, but he goes around each day”, a mildly tolerated and slightly amusing local event. This helped relieve the anxiety.

Sue took a cutting of sage and we said goodbye.

The podcast has plenty of thoughtful discussion following the reading of the episode.
Listen in here [12mb, mp3, 30min].

Read the original entry here.

There was a reason this post was originally “annotated” - it’s not easy to conjure in words alone, the things that happened along this walk. So there was a map which it might help to peruse while listening to the podcast: the map is here.

These boundary walks (of which there were 4, each corresponding to a point of the compass) which I completed with various friends and accomplices during the project, were an attempt to define the limits of my territory, by surfing right along the edges. To a certain extent, it was a wilfull exercise in pointlessness: the border between Petersham and Stanmore is hardly charged and political the way the Israel-Palestine borders are. I can’t think of a reason why living on one side or the other might change your life in any great way, the way it would depending whether you live in Tijuana or San Diego. Instead, these are the (largely) invisible borders of banal suburban beaurocracy, designed to make life simpler: to divide a large slab of land into smaller chunks, I suppose making them easier to “administer”. So it’s somewhat wilfull and cheeky to take these maps and see if we can find where the boundary lies.

By “following a rule” — eg to try and walk the border, no matter how tricky and silly the route might be — we shift the bounds of our normal activity, where we’d normally go, and the way we’d normally travel. We begin to use walking for something else, something non-useful, in the classic sense of “use”. Of course, there’s a big tradition of non-useful walking, particularly de Certeau’s famous “walking in the city” essay. I like what he says about how the city, when walked, is not something pre-existing, but comes into being in response to our pedestrian bodies.

To the flâneur urban surroundings suddenly become both familiar and alien, inscribed with a subjective resonance, strange associations and the depth of myth. By making themselves travellers in their own city, these writers believe that they are capable of subverting the dominant image of Paris as grid, plan or spectacle. The walker is held to invite an alternative city to express itself, one that cannot be separated from the pedestrian body.

Chatting with Tully, while making this recording, I realised that this walk, in particular (with me, Tully, Polly, Bec, and Sunny) has become a kind of myth, at least amongst ourselves. Something that bound us pedestrians together. This would not have been possible by simply sitting around drinking tea and perusing the map. We had to walk it.

Listen in here [mp3, 7mb, 17min]
Read the original posting here.

Well this is it folks. Only an hour and a half to go.

The last few days I’ve been traipsing back and forth from the gallery to Petersham, using Parramatta Road as if it were the corridor of my house.
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Hi Lucas
Bec mentined you are walking the Petersham border. I would love to join you sometime. Let me know when you plan the next walk. xxSue

Dear Sue
well, I’ve still got the northern border to go. Why don’t you come out sometime and we’ll walk it.
X L

Sue arrived five minutes early. I was just returning from WenChai publications (who are going to print my exhibition flyer) when she showed up on her bike. We drank tea, and I rolled a map out over all the dirty dishes. I don’t think Sue had realised that the northern border of Petersham is, in fact, just Parramatta Road. The boundary between Petersham and Leichhardt runs smack down the middle of Sydney’s great artery (or, as it has been described, varicose vein). I think she was a bit disappointed. Sure, on the surface, it doesn’t look as interesting as all those little variegations, twists and turns and inaccessible fenceline runs which characterise the other three borders. But looks can…well, you know the cliché…
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[A technical note about images: often within blog posts, I include links to images which are hosted at my Flickr site. If you're browsing with Mozilla Firefox, you might want to try this: right-click on the link and then "open link in a new tab". This way you can keep on reading while the image loads in the new tab.

If, on the other hand, you're still clinging belligerently to Internet Explorer, I'm fresh out of ideas.]
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[This post was written on Sunday, and "the afternoon" to which it refers is last Saturday arvo. My poor image manipulation skills have delayed the launch of this one - it took me a few days to put together the maps which appear below. Cheerio! - Lucas]

In the afternoon, the Cake Lady came to visit, bearing natas fresh from Sweet Belem. I made us coffee and we sat in the kitchen chatting away. She’s staying at the Regent’s Court Hotel in the Cross, its a kind of artist-in-residence where the hotel puts you up in exchange for watering the plants in their beautiful rooftop garden. Not a bad exchange. The Cake Lady’s working on some new animated films, which generally channel her rich vault of memories growing up in North Queensland. Recently she’s been running art workshops with the kids who travel around with circuses. But the conversation meandered wildly and I forgot to interrogate her about that. Which is a pity, cos I reckon it’d be an interesting story.

The Cake Lady had suggested an assignment to be carried out in the ’sham:

You and a friend/partner arrange to arrive in a foreign city on the same day. Take different forms of transport to get there. Do not make a place to meet. Try and find your friend/partner.

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Luciana came around about ten. She’s my nearest neighbor, from the flat next door. She’s from Milan, and we speak “recreational” Italian with each other (usually only when the topic of conversation is not too complicated, or we don’t need an urgent resolution to a practical issue). Otherwise its English all the way. Lately, though, I think she has decided that I need the practice, so there’s been more Italian, even when it gets a bit hard-going. Yesterday, for instance, we were convening to write a list for our landlord about security issues. Luciana was broken into last Tuesday. Our next neighbours across, Rachelle and Rob, were burgled on Thursday. Bec and I were cleaned out in early February. The cops said Petersham is being “done over” in a big way, lately. All this has created an atmosphere of mild paranoia, and we’re demanding that the landlords install better locks and maybe some bars on vulnerable windows. From Luciana, I learned that the word for lock (which needs fixing on her screen door) is “serratura”. Her windows have “serrature” installed, but some of them are a bit wobbly (“molle”) and hardly inspire confidence. We also need gates (“cancelli”) at the front of the whole building – there are none, and so the crooks can easily slip down the side passage and carry out their dastardly schemes, virtually invisible from the street. We made up this list, drank some coffee, and bitched about thieves (how could they be so bold?) and landlords (how could they be so stingy?) (more…)