This has been a month of travel – for work and pleasure. I invested in my leisure and booked a solo trip to Adelaide to see old friends and enjoy the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. It was a lovely interlude. The town was buzzing with ideas, people, music, art, comedy, street performers and food. Heaven!
First stop: Will Anderson’s latest solo show, and the first I have ever seen live. He weaves themes of self-deprecating humour very cleverly, like his story about the loneliness of his COVID lockdown in Sydney, prompting him to order flowers to be delivered to himself, complete with fan message. My friend Amy collected me from the airport and we saw the show together, then we caught up over dinner at the Fringe Festival afterwards. Though we met up last Spring in my home town, we have a lot in common and it was good to hang out.
I stayed with Amy and her family, including identical twins Sienna and Ruby now aged 10, and son Lachlan aged 12 like Lara and Rhea. They are a hardworking and busy family, with some health challenges and elderly parents with advanced dementia to add to the mix. Like our girls last year, their days are choc full of after school activities. Their lovely cavoodle Boots joined the family around the same time Lotus joined ours, and is equally treasured. Their girls made me laugh, asking pointedly whether my girls have their own bedrooms. Lachlan commented dryly how tedious it is to have twin sisters. ‘Sorry about all the bickering’, said Amy’s husband the first morning I was there, with the three of them interacting at the table. ‘I can’t say that having my girls at different schools has reduced the bickering’, I replied.
The last time I went to the Writers’ Festival, I was pregnant with the girls. This time, I listened to sessions with trailblazers like Anne Summers interviewing publishing icon Hilary McPhee looking back on publishing writers like Helen Garner in the 1980s; Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and what might happen next; a panel of leading intellectuals and their favourite books; and a panel of writers who had written literary biographies. I sat with my former boss Hilda for both days, and also said hello to Steve’s aunt and her partner who were there too. For some sessions, Hilda and I sat close to the front, for others we were sitting on the hill nearby or down the back, with good audio but limited vision.
On the last night we heard an Insiders Live, as I had done last year with another friend at home. Definitely an Adelaide perspective, with the Premier joining them and other local speakers. Hilda and I had dinner together afterwards, and I heard more about her wayward youth. She’s still outspoken and outraged at the injustices of the world, approaching her seventieth year. I worked for her at the Women’s Community Centre more than twenty years ago now, after the centre had been defunded and she continued to lead it nevertheless, unpaid, creating a community for the most vulnerable and introducing me to a different world at the same time. The friend I spent the last day with was one I met there. Alice has been a good friend throughout those years, always interested in the girls too. Despite disadvantage and setbacks, she is doing well, and talks of visiting us this year. It has been many years since her last visit, and I hadn’t seen her in Adelaide since my last trip with the girls five years ago.
I first went to Adelaide while at university, attending an environmental conference at Flinders university. I loved the stone houses, proximity to the Adelaide Hills, the gloss remaining from Don Dunstan’s reforming agenda, and the Central Markets, which seemed to me a cornucopia of delights, crowning a near-perfect city. It was those features that prompted me to move there once I had finished university.
I don’t see it the same way now. The houses don’t seem as beautiful and the market is actually quite dark and a little shabby. One of the taxi drivers I had replied to my question asking how he liked Adelaide, saying that it is expensive, and basically the same as other cities. I think he has a point: the cost of living is oppressive now across the country, and many cities in Australia have the same shows, supermarkets, and markets. Lives don’t differ much between them, depending on your class or income.
But Adelaide still remains a special place for me, though I am unlikely to ever live there again. It’s where I met Steve, spread my wings further out into the world, and met people with whom I am still friends.
I would love to keep returning.
