An excursion into shared memory… a house, a mystery package and a……
BOOM! The drum shudders and leaps a little and a plume of grey stuff billows from its top.
We’re a little surprised… well, that’s an understatement… we’re really quite stunned. What had been an old fuel drum of quietly burning stuff just a second or two ago had suddenly become something more explosive.
On a long road, long ago
Yvonne
The story begins on Glebe Point Road, that long, undulating strip of asphalt that starts on the shore of Whites Bay and ends abruptly where it collides with the constant traffic stream that is Parramatta Road. And the story starts at what now seems a long time ago, the early seventies, perhaps. Neither of us is sure of the year.
For reasons I don’t quite recall I was walking down Glebe Point Road with Yvonne, who for just a short time in those days was a partner of mine. She was an outwardly vivacious girl with a deeply hidden vulnerability inside. She wasn’t short or dumpy but in no way could she be called tall… she was more compact and trim than anything else. Dark, chestnut colored hair fell to her shoulders and she parted it in the middle so that it flopped to either side, framing her face and green eyes.
Sartorial elegance was not her scene. Her wardrobe didn’t change much between a khaki, military style jacket over a T-shirt or over a plain grey pullover in winter. And blue denim jeans all the time were finished with sandals or sneakers, depending on the season. Dresswise, Yvonne was a child of the times.
A Saturday in summer
That warm, sunny day — a Saturday in summer perhaps — we were heading for a nondescript house of late Victorian vintage somewhere on that long road, a building typical of those that line both sides of the thoroughfare.
This was before the time when so many of those old houses would be remade as cafes, coffee bars and pizzerias.
Just where it was neither of us remember. I thought it was towards the Parramatta Road end but Yvonne isn’t so sure and, now, neither am I. When I’m in the area and I remember to do so, I search for some clue, some sign of vague familiarity. But so far, nothing.
“I believe it was a double-story, shop-front building, with a small, untidy backyard”, Yvonne recalled decades later.
A microcosm of femmes
Yvonne takes up the story…
“The newly-formed Women’s Liberation movement was one of the groups that met there, in that old house. People lived upstairs.
“One of the organisers was an American woman, Martha Kaye, also called Martha Ansara… she had wild, black, curly hair and was also involved in a feminist filmmakers group.”.
Social microcosms like this could be found around the Inner West in those days. Inevitably political, though not in the party sense, they were coalesences of like minded young people. And being political, they were given to schism over minor doctrinal matters.
“There was a split, as commonly occurred in small leftist groups at the time”, Yvonne wrote to me. “And one faction had barricaded itself inside the building to prevent being evicted. At least, I think this is what happened.
“For some reason or other, you and I went to the building late one afternoon after everyone had left it… but we weren’t alone, I do recall one or two other people being there at the time”.
I remember the house because Yvonne would sometimes attend meetings there. But on other things memory differs. I have no recollection of others being there that day.
But I do remember the package. It sat there on the floor in what passed, I guess, for the living room. In memory, the room was bare, devoid of furniture or anything else. Except for that package.
Yvonne’s memory is clearer. “On the floor of one room of the now abandoned building was a strange object. Naturally, it attracted my attention and I went over to it.
“I crouched down in front of it and read the inscription scrawled on it — ‘THIS IS A BOMB’. Ha ha, funny joke.
“So you and I took the ‘bomb’ into the back yard and threw it into a bonfire that was going in a rusty 44-gallon drum.
“That’s when it went… BOOOOOM!… and blew up the drum! “.
Neither of us recall why we bothered to take the thing outside and cast it into the fire. Such are the vagaries of memory, and it was shared memory that led us to reconstruct that incident of the package in the bare room.
Shared remembrance and reconstructed memory
Yvonne and I had resumed more frequent email contact following her return from Beijing. She had spent some years there, first teaching English, then doing journalism. Now that she was home in Tasmania, where she had moved to not long before going to China, we indulged in late night emails. This is how we got around to our shared past and our theory that memory might be a collective reconstruction.
Our communications were made late at night because that was when Yvonne finished work and made her way home. Back in Tasmania, she had abandoned writing and reverted to her original profession of cooking. At the time, she cooked at a small hotel near the city.
I find the late night hours conducive to writing. It is quiet then, when the day takes on that sense of enclosure that comes with the darkness. In the hours approaching midnight the distractions of the city are cloaked and this makes possible the focus needed to write.
So it was that we would sit in the pool of light cast by our desk lamps in our respective cities, bathed in the blue-white glow of our screens, clicking at our keyboards and sending messages all those kilometres to and fro across Bass Strait.
We had been discussing what had become of people we knew all those years ago and discovered that we had each completely forgotten about specific incidents.
When one reminded the other, it was as if separate pieces of memory slowly coalesced to create a picture of the past. Our discussion over those late night sessions was whether this reconstruction, as a collective effort, actually revived authentic personal memories that had long laid buried in mind or whether we were negotiating some collective reconstruction, a synthesis, a simulation of actuality.
So it was that, stimulated by Yvonne’s remembering, those separate pieces of memory came together in my mind to create a sequence of images around that package in the bare room. It was a memory without dialogue; it was like watching ourselves going through the motions, as in a film without soundtrack.
I had more or less forgotten about the incident although I did retain that image of the bare room with its scuffed, white painted walls, the one in which Yvonne had crouched down to read the inscription scribbled on that package.
I also remember — we both do — that BOOM! as the thing went off that fine, warm afternoon so long ago in a building now long forgotten somewhere on Glebe Point Road.
The occasion of ‘The Bomb.’ I assume it’s the same incident as I recall, except I remember the premises being leased by a Sydney Uni leftist group calling themselves Ramparts – or maybe I’m thinking of the radical magazine of the time. Quite likely the feminists were there too but they weren’t on my agenda then. Sorry girls. Anyway, the Ramparts mob were to be evicted because the landlord considered them undesirable. I remember it being a routine for folks to drop by & assist with the ‘occupation’ as the occupants defied the eviction notice. I was sharing the rear of the upper floor at Wigram Rd with an ex-Melbourne lad I’ll call ‘Mick’. I’m reluctant to post his real name, this might be a sensitive memory. By this time Rudy was probably occupying the front rooms with the fair Belinda.
So… I came home one evening to find my room-mate actively stirring ingredients – flour mostly, or entirely, in a large basin. I asked what he was up to because it didn’t look like dinner. With much excitement & wide bright eyes he replied “A bomb!” He then explained how the situation at Ramparts was coming to a head & that the schedule was set for the eviction, cops & all. His plan was to detonate his giant firecracker flour bomb in the house when the excitement was taking place. “No not dangerous at all,” he answered my concerns. “It’ll just make a big bang. Just noise & smoke.”
From there your story gels everything. The evening after the event a rather subdued Mick told me he didn’t set the thing off as planned but that it was taken into the yard after all was done & dusted & set off there. I kinda believe your take rather than Mick’s.
Hey Russ – the Women’s Lib building was towards the Parramatta Rd end of Glebe Pt Road: great story!
Thanks for filling in the details Earle. Connecting the dots in time helps make sense of events like this that are remembered by different people.
And thanks for the location of the building Megan. I thought it was at the Parramatta Road end of Glebe Point Road but Yvonne asserted that it was off in the other direction.
Ramparts… now I DO think that WAS the name of the place!! Don’t remember a “Mick” being there, but I am sure there WERE other people… No cops…. and a vandalised RedPhone….that Russ and I ‘removed’…
‘Big bang… just noise and smoke…’ well it DID have other ingredients other than flour! It blew the 44 gallon drum up!!! And we were standing nearby! Yes Earle… this MUST have been the same story!!
It was called BARRICADES. Earl was/is always very rightly scared of explosives! Nice memory!
Love to all
Belinda
I remember going to Barricades too, for Womens Lib meetings and possibly a party at some time. Wasn’t there at the time of the bomb however. I agree that it was the Parramatta Road end of Glebe Point Road.
Love these memories,
Bron
Hey Yvonne…. No it wasn’t really a ‘Mick’. That’s a pseudonym. The flour bomb on that occasion was at least intended to be harmless. On another occasion the lad came home with a carton of weeping gelignite he’d found dumped under a bridge. Now that was scary. Took a while to convince him the stuff was volatile. I believe he put it back where he found it eventually.
Cheers to all.
Why do I imagine I have heard the story of the weeping gelignite somewhere? Did you tell it to me Earle?
The stuff was probably quite unstable. Glad you two didn’t play catchies with the box to and fro across the room. What would have happened to your music career Earle?
Well… if I didn’t tell you about back in the day Russ, the gelignite would have come up in our chat at Manly (reasonably) recently. Re the music “career” – the event contributed a line to a song… Wigram Rd. Anyway, it was more of a hobby than a career though it sure focussed me for a few years.
And hey, what happened to your Resistance pages?
Yes, it WAS ‘Barricades”!!! Now I remember that someone (Fred or Russ??) had a photo of people standing on the roof during the eviction!! Maybe I can use the details of this ‘story’ in one of my ‘fictional’ short stories…. I just entered one story I ‘adapted’ in a ‘sisters in crime’ competition…. no Russ, you didn’t get a ‘part’ in that story. I cut you out of it!