Some bits and pieces; it's been a while.

A whale washed up outside my house today. Weighted and slack like a wet sock. I don’t know who found it, probably an early morning surfer or jogger, but by mid morning the councilmen were sending out papers on what was to be done with it.

What does a dead adolescent sperm whale rotting on the beach look like? Weeping grey and ghastly cream. Very Big. There are slashes across its guts from a boat roater. Sharks have made a meal of its sides.

The councilmen don’t know why it died, or how to get it off the beach. They announce a plan for the second day of its stay in Newcastle: they will dig a hole on the beach, three metres deep and put it there. It will become part of the dune. Children will play over it and dune grass will grow. People will talk of the day the whale washed up out the front of my house.

The councilmen tell the surfers the stink will dissipate in time.

....

The paper today congratulated 23 year old Kathryn McFeeney from Brisbane for becoming the Rose of Tralee and though she is hundreds of kilometers away I feel my mother purse her lips.

The Rose of Tralee is a beauty pageant/talent quest for the daughters of Irish families living abroad. It takes its name from the title of a 19th century song about lost love. The pageant allows Irish girls from California to Canberra to put their wares on display and to show the Irish nation what they’re missing out on.

I had not heard of the competition until last year when The Other Irish Family my parents knew from home and who also live in Sydney came up in conversation. It seems in the series of tasks each more mundane than the last, their only daughter had triumphed. Thus began the talk of one of us stepping up to the plate and winning the pageant for the family - of “rosing” to the occasion.

My youngest sister is the obvious choice; she is beautiful. All long locks of hair and lily white skin, she could stop a room. I would be the PC choice; community service credentials might be enough to steal victory and a free trip to Ireland in a lack luster field. Once there though, only my older sister would enjoy the scenery. But you'd have trouble getting her into a dress.

You see then my mother’s problem. So we do nothing and girls from Queensland win and give us one less opportunity to show up The Other Irish Family’s daughter with her earnest dreams of world peace.

And that annoys us all.

...

I interviewed a woman today who is turning 100 next week. We talked on her childhood in Glasgow and life during the war, till she grew tired. She said the world is a less happy place then it used to be. Her secret to long life? Everything in moderation.

...

For my birthday I went home to Sydney, where friends and I ran through the damp-cornered streets of Newtown, bottle of Moet in hand searching for jasmine flowers.

I like the way a whiff of jasmine hangs. The smell makes the air warmer; it coats everything around it even after rain. This also means though you know it’s nearby it can take you a while to find it.

It was one of my friends who gave me a 3am jasmine flower from someone’s front gate while we talked about the road trip up to my house in a few weeks. He said when the weather is a bit nicer we’ll go to the beach, and I told him it was nice to have a drink on the balcony.

The next day was Sunday and the jasmine flowers got a bit crushed in the rush to get back to Newcastle and to work and to my dirty laundry. I put one small bunch in the kitchen anyway and brought the other sad smudge of blooms to work. They don’t look very pretty but now I can smell jasmine everywhere.

...

I had a conversation at work the other day about migrants. Jeff and I both agreed that greater diversity was a good thing. He said each generation of Australians grows more tolerant of new comers just as the second and third generation of migrants become more adept at language, more comfortable with social customs of their adopted homelands and so on.

He said that many migrant groups that come here are violent and need to realise that they must to adapt to the ways of Australia. He said Muslims, for instance, need to know they must to treat their women better. I said it is dangerous to generalise.

He then told me the story of his niece. She married a Pakistani Muslim, converted and had five children, They live in Australia and her family is quite fond of him; he is a loving husband and father.

Things did not go so well when his parents came to stay. The mother-in-law beat the niece for not waiting on her correctly. She was told she had failed to properly manage the household. When Jeff’s brother, a big burly Anglo-Australian, heard of the beatings he immediately made the three-hour drive to his daughters house. When he got there he found that his son-in-law had thrown his parents out and had been disowned as a result.

Jeff said without generalizations we’d never be able to talk about anything.

Something angsty.

The life of Newcastle drains out after dark. At sunset, lines of cars wink down Hunter Street towards the highways or disappear over The Hill. The city, barely busy at nine, has washed out completely twelve hours later.

Stand on foreshore though, and you can watch the massive, silent hulks of container ships lumber and purge through the night. They are the one constant in what – seen by the departure of BHP – can be an uncertain place. Even now they remain the metal heart and lungs of an industrial town.

But to stand by the foreshore of Newcastle at dusk can be a lonely activity. This is not my town. At early evening its crust of terraces and knotted industrial trees remind me of the bigger city further down the coast. I look for traces of it fixed in odd shadows; it is my only, my daily escape from the fickle ebb and flow of this evening tide.

You can’t set the turn of water here, but you can decide whether or not to follow it. The doyennes of civility have long fought a losing battle when it comes to adding pretension to this grand, but essentially gruntingly working class city. In 1887 the Newcastle Morning Herald proclaimed that one of the “dullest spots by way of amusement in the colony” was to finally strut into the new century. One can only wonder if the brand new Continental Café it was introducing - another building with all the best connotations of wicker, potted palms and ladies in white - ever was any match for the sweltering practicality demanded by a North Coast coal city. As long as foggy black soot found its layered way to doors of a morning, this would always be a pub town.

But perhaps the tide, at long last, is finally turning. The region with the second highest concentration of pubs (and, one would assume, its fair share of $5 steaks and schnitzels) was visited by Gourmet Traveler this year. Stand alone amidst that achingly industrial beauty of the harbour and the sparkling but quiet aluminum and glass apartments behind you carry million dollar price tags.

“This is the yuppie part of Newcastle, so you’ll find it’s really safe at night,” says Kate. She is standing with me and Jdango opposite Merewether Baths – beautifully art deco sea pools singled out by the camera of Gourmet Traveler’s photographer. Like most of the city’s architecture, they were carefully planned and generously public, but the nearby change rooms lie derelict behind a rusty fence.“One day local government will realize this is not just a working class town,” says Jdango.

Indeed. This is why I am here. So say the faces of shopkeepers and neighbours and co-workers. “Merewether, but Sydney,” I hear at the back of the office; two café girls talk of ‘townies’ and ‘carros’ and I nod into my coffee. Compliments at the surprising beauty of the city are taken in two spirits; of course it is. It always has been.

Newcastle never really bothered with the shiny new things that its whoring southern sister always seemed to scramble for. Maybe that’s why people don’t seem so much to move here as move back here. But I am a bastard blow in from Sydney, not a treasured prodigal son. I have my morning coffee overlooking the beach and its horizon of tankers, but all it does is make me thirsty.