Self Portrait

In November 1984 when I left Queensland to come back to Victoria, Kathy de Bono, a friend from the Yoga school, followed me to Murwillumbah where I was catching the train. She told me that because my car was old she’d drive slowly behind me in case I broke down. Now my Lesley McGinley doesn’t look much, but it goes like the clappers. Out of mischief I flattened my foot when I’d crossed the Tweed, and Kathy soon became a speck in my rear vision mirror. When she reached Murwillumbah she said ‘I brought a packet of tissues in case you cried. Instead you’re all lit up and laughing.’

I must confess that it was not only the thought of coming home that’d lit me. The trip to Murwillumbah would light anyone. It’s one of my favourite slices of Australia. The cane fields were soft jade green, the mountain range blue. In the banana plantations bunches of ripening fruit, enclosed in plastic, had become giant flowers of a wilder blue. In Murwillumbah the jacarandas were in bloom – everywhere.

I caught the rail motor and travelled home with Lesley McGinley coming along the track behind so that I could look back on the bends and see it. On the trip I remembered my first visit to Melbourne. I was ten and on my way home to the Apple Isle from Adelaide where I’d been holidaying with my father. I was wearing the first pair of suede shoes I’d seen, dark brown ones, and Dad took me to a film called Wings of the Morning. It was set in Ireland and about a racehorse. Tyrone Power undressed a French actress called Annabelle beneath a tree. She’d been running around disguised as a boy and the foliage of the tree disguised the undressing scene as well. It was great stuff though. In the end Wings of the Morning won the right race and the two undressers got married. We should all be so lucky …