Full Circle

I was five years old when I first arrived in my home country, Australia. The crisp, cold, eucalyptus-filled air contrasted strongly with the jungle climates of Malaysia and Thailand I was used to. I loved it, and so did my mother. We were staying with her mother, in the house where she’d grown up, and spent our days playing in the park across the road on the same play equipment she had used as a girl. Mum would sigh with happiness and say, “Look at the ghost gums! Look at the wattle! Look at the bottlebrush! Look at the galahs!” I loved the continuity of the experience- playing in my mum’s childhood garden with her old dolls. It was very special to me. Our favourite piece of playground equipment was one of those merry-go-rounds that are an enclosed ball; you sit inside and turn a wheel and spin around and around very fast. My sister and I called it our spaceship, and we loved this toy beyond all reason- it was our version of getting drunk. The aim was to get to “scribble land”: that place where all the world just looks like scribbles because you’re moving so fast. We could never understand how Mum could resist this delight, and we would beg her to join us, but she always refused. “I can’t, I’ll feel sick!”

Life has a way of repeating itself. At the end of last year, My son and I moved from tropical Cairns to Perth. On our first day in our new house, we explored our neighbourhood together. I was in ecstasies over the crisp air, and found my mother inhabiting my body- or so it seemed, as I gushed over and over, “Look at the tall eucalypts! Look at the galahs!” Then we both spotted it at the same time: a merry-go-round just the same as the one I had enjoyed so much in my childhood. I couldn’t believe this. I’d thought the health-and-safety brigade had eliminated these things years ago. I said to my son, “I LOVED those when I was a little girl! He ran straight for it, of course, and once inside, begged me to join him. “I can’t!” I protested. “It will make me feel sick.” “It makes me feel sick, too, mum. But it’s fun! PLEASE, let’s get sick together?” How could I refuse that? So for the first time in perhaps twenty years, I climbed into the old spaceship, and Lachlan and I went to Scribble Land together.