Fay : Bondi Junction
I lived in Grosvenor Street in Bondi Junction for three years in the mid-70s while I was a student at Sydney College of the Arts. I had two rooms at the back of Number 49, on the top floor. It was the first place I lived on my own and I loved it. What is now Westfield’s huge shopping centre was being constructed up the road when I moved in, and the trains were yet to arrive. Many of the old houses near the shopping centre were boarded up. Now most of the terraces are expensively renovated and many of the laneways are cut off by the railway parking areas.
I grew up in Byron Bay and couldn’t wait to move to Sydney – it’s been a popular destination for my family – my mother and, earlier, her mother worked in the inner city when they were young and my daughter lived in Newtown for a year after school. My father also lived in Sydney for a couple of years just after World War II while at the National Art School. I wish I’d asked him where he lived. The first of my ancestors here arrived as a convict on the First Fleet and the rest turned up as economic refugees, queue jumpers and illegals before those labels started being applied.
I spent another 17 years living back in Byron Bay while my children were growing up and then moved back to Sydney a year ago – now I’m closer to the city. But eight years ago when I was in Sydney on a visit I retraced my steps to the Bondi pub where I’d worked as a student, and this street, which was so much a part of my first years here. Catching a train back to the city I ran into a former lover, a man who had emigrated only a couple of decades before. This is what I wrote then about that day:
Eastern suburbs line
I’d made my pilgrimage to Bondi
but I couldn’t find the public bar
it was new and quiet
My Saturdays were full of drunks and fights
back then, but that was gone
and so I drank a solitary toast to moving on
I knew the bus route though
and back in Bondi Junction
wandered in the early dark
down to number 49
all brightly lit and no one there
A thousand times I’d made that journey home
But if I’d climbed the renovated stairs
back to my past
I’d hold that nineteen year old girl
the way I hold my daughter
and tell her what I know at last
but would she want to hear?
Or perhaps I’d slide back through the years
and from my two back rooms (share bath)
count coins for next day’s food and fares
while Lori and her son below cooked tea
And later, very late
Ken would stagger to his door across the stairs
And so the ghosts were with me on the train
and it was no surprise that you were too
But Sydney’s blood is in my bones
two hundred years before you came
and whatever I remember
nothing, nothing stays the same
