Theodora wanted to see the Harbour Bridge before the arches met. It was the only time to sketch it, she said. She’d take her brother’s car and …
‘Take?’, I said. ‘Or borrow?’
She’d ventured north on a similar jaunt in ’26, and supposed we’d need a week.
‘A week. Each way’, I said. ‘At least.’
‘It’s because of your parents,’, she said. ‘Isn’t it?’
I began to make a list – to prove it was not. ‘Map, cheese, bread, wine, Middlemarch.’
‘Sketchbook’, Theodora added, ‘pencils, paints.’
As soon as the Melbourne suburbs melted away, men appeared like trees, edging the roads, gray, thin, dusty, with seek work signs slung around their necks, or huddled beside dry creeks under hessian scraps. I clung to the map, my bird’s-eye view, unable to look at the men, at the hunger, the desperation in their eyes, not knowing if it was better or worse to stare instead at the haze of paddocks, or laugh as we skidded into another pothole.
We stood in salted winds on ocean cliffs. Theodora shouted over the thumping surf, ‘Ultramarine, cobalt, cerulean’. Some days after lunch, we dozed briefly in the clicking stillness of ferns. Once we woke to find a lyrebird parading its tail of lace. At night we lay awake to the cough and gulp of plumbing in beer-brown hotels.
Sydney’s inky late-night flicker. Neither of us spoke as the ferry chugged beside the bridge’s ghosted silhouette. We then nosed towards my Lavender Bay aunt, who was peeved at the lateness of the hour. Theodora eased open the curtains, crept out to the balcony and declared it a front-row seat.
All night she leapt up, as if willing the sun to banish the moon and drag its chariot across the sky. I stayed in bed, seeking surety, solace and perspective in myth. I’d lost count how many times the newspapermen invoked the Colossus when waxing on about the spectacle of the bridge, and imagined him lumbering down from his pillars, wading from Rhodes to our antipodean harbour, capsizing ferries, politicians, hopes.
I woke to a dawn chorus. Not the tympani tram-clang rattle of Swanston Street, rather an industrial orchestra tuning up. I wondered if my parents knew I was here. The bridge had found its form since my exit to Melbourne three years before. Had they? Had I? Additions, losses, accusations, denials, abandoning the falsified ledgers of my life – the price of independence.
The sun flared bronze. The vanished houses and gouged sandstone now erupted with pylons, cables, two competing metal claws. The creeping cranes perched, daring each other to pirouette. Men climbed, knelt, danced across the weave of steel high above the ruffled harbour silk.
I discovered Theodora hoeing into breakfast under the radiant eye of my aunt, who seemed transformed by the sting of burnt toast, an appetite for argument, her cheeks redder than her prized geraniums.
‘But is it art?’, she said, waving a breadknife. ‘I suppose you both rush to see exhibitions denounced by the critics as “Modernist Again. Dodging True Art”. Last week I read …’
I didn’t say – yes, dear aunt, we’ve all read. Even a world away in Melbourne, or in Europe, where people like Theodora and me dreamt of taking refuge in antiquity, modernity, anonymity, despite walls crashing, and suns setting on empires.
Theodora shrugged, kept ploughing through her bacon and eggs. I hurried away to dress. By the time I came back, Theodora was gone.
I followed her down towards the clamour of the harbour until I saw her stop, and scramble up a slope towards a woman, an artist, a sketchbook on her lap, her face shaded by a sunhat.
I looked back at my aunt’s house. My mother and father were on the balcony. Perhaps it was the changed scale of the world or the morning’s luminosity, but they looked smaller and greyer than I remembered.
Theodora shielded her eyes as the artist waved her pencil across the sky.
When she finally strode back to me, she was elated, silent. For a moment we stared up, as if at some shared vision hovering between the forceful, graceful curves – a splintered halo of light and possibility.
Emma Ashmere’s short stories have been shortlisted for various competitions and published widely. Her debut novel The Floating Garden was shortlisted for the 2016 Small Press Network MUBA Prize. Her short story collection Dreams They Forgot was published in September 2020 by Wakefield Press.
This article first appeared in NGV Magazine, issue 5, September–October 2017, and was reprinted in issue 24, September–October 2020.