Added photos to photo album see South Australia file Thursday, 21 July 2005

Melbourne has always meant more to me than it could possibly live up to in my world.

When I first thought of leaving Lesia, a week after arriving in Adelaide, June 1980, I went to the Adelaide Public Library and began ‘researching’ where to live. I did not want to go back to the States because I did not really have a place to go to and I did not know what state, let alone what city, I would want to start over in if I did go back. I had shipped my few belongings to Lesia’s house and they were still in route to Australia. I did not want to give up seeing Sacha and being a part of his growth. The naturally occurring sequencing in my brain, not really a singularity as in the theory of everything Terrell and how and where it should manifest but a ‘this is the only path’ surfaced in my ‘investigation’ of what to do. Melbourne seemed the likely choice. After one week in Adelaide I had concluded that it was one of the worst places to live in the world. I did not like the Australian accent, the trends of the moment, though now, twenty-five years later, I have no idea what they were, just that I did not like them, and I did not like the city of Adelaide. I felt like I was on an uncultured island (Adelaide) with the nearest island of culture, Melbourne, about a thousand kilometres away, and Sydney twice the distance beyond Melbourne. It was worst than living in the midst of Iowa.

I read Melbourne newspapers, books on the city and surrounding areas and decided that I would move with Sacha, and set up a tofu factory in the Dandalong Ranges outside of Melbourne. I plotted and dreamt and thought about it month after month then year after year and when Leigh came along and I was divorced and the tofu business was growing I plotted and dreamt and thought about it a lot more but for all the reasons in the world it never happened. The first time I came to Melbourne I was a student at Deakin University. It was 1993 and I barely had enough money to go. I took the overnighter for $30 and sat up all night on the hard seat and attended the first of the weekend workshops an hour after I got into Melbourne. That night I found a very seedy and cheap hotel for $20 and the next day I attended the Sunday workshops and in the evening sat on the cheap hard seat back to Adelaide. The next time I went to Melbourne was in April 1995 with Sacha and Leigh for my BA graduation and we took the day bus to Ballart and the train to Melbourne from Ballarat and stayed at a youth hostel going the next day to Geelong for my graduation. That was a lot better stay than my previous one.

We never were able to move to Melbourne because ‘the mother’ would not allow us and in fact she had a court order stating we had to live in South Australia then eventually she took out a court order saying that the children and I had to live in Adelaide (we had previously lived about an hour from Adelaide in Mount Compass and Victor Harbor, Port Elliot, Middleton – actually we moved ten times in ten years). Then my Melbourne distributor of my tofu products went bankrupt owing me more than ten-thousand dollars which was the beginning of the downfall of my ‘well thought out and “planned”’ global domination of the bean-curd production and tofu-product manufacturing foray that barely seemed to grow beyond the wishful thinking stage. Nevertheless we never moved to Melbourne as a family. Sacha moved here a few years ago and Leigh was last here in 2003 before going to spring training with the Dodgers. Leigh received ‘Channel 7 Australian Junior Sports Star of the year’ award in Melbourne the same year, 2003, that Lleyton Hewitt received Senior Sports Star of the year due to his being the number one tennis player in the world. Now Lleyton is getting married to Bec Cartwright in Sydney in two days and I will be off to put some flowers on where Leigh died two years ago in Sydney on August 16.

I have been to Melbourne several times the past few years. Last Christmas I spent with Sacha and Georgia and the summer before (winter in Australia) Narda and I visited Sacha when he was living with Monica and we visited the year before too. Now Sacha has his nice apartment in the Docklands (NewQuay), he is in the Palladio Towers overlooking Melbourne and I have a couple of houses in New York and I will graduate in several weeks collecting a PhD. We all change of course and so do most cities (not Albany, New York or Adelaide, South Australia though, those are the only cities I have been in over the past several years, worldwide, that are not dotted with cranes. Beijing, Melbourne, Hamburg, Amsterdam and so many places between have a lot of buildings going up. This blog is titled ‘Albany to Adelaide to Albany’ why I would live in the two cities of the world that have no progress I am not sure. Of course I equate progress to cranes putting up buildings – maybe there is some deep metaphysical spiritual thingy happening that has slipped by my materialistic and worldly sight. I like to think my changes are in league with cities like Melbourne (voted year after year ‘most liveable city in the world’). Maybe so. Maybe no. Someday it could just turn out that I will finally live in Melbourne or close to it.