Free The Best Australian Essays 2014 by Robert Manne Page A

a new start, a tree-change – another world – my parents had packed up their busy city lives for the freedom of the country. My father, a psychiatrist, worked only three days a week. On days off he toiled in the garden. He began fantastical tasks and finished them in one day. Covered in sweat and dirt, with an aching back and a tired body he came in and told my mother of his progress. A Japanese garden, with a real slated pond and giant lilies, huge boulders and bamboo. An orchard with endless rows of citrus humming with bees. A rainforest, shady and ancient-seeming, strewn with fallen coloured leaves.
    When I was small my father brought me special things he found in the garden. I sat steaming in the bath one evening, naked and easy, the flickering leaves of the growing forest outside whispering wordless secrets in my ears. The bathroom sat among the trees, the sliding glass doors open to the green. Coming in, dirt-speckled and sour smelling, he showed me a tiny white ball. With a delicate tug my father pulled this small sphere apart and thousands of spiders fell, sprinkling down upon me. Minuscule, they spread across the water, floating determinedly towards the edges, their legs braced against the sway of my careful movements. Hurriedly, the masses of baby spiders climbed out and along the top of the old enamel bathtub. With concentrated joy I scooped up the stragglers and flicked them gently from my fingers and out the long open doorway into the forest. I stared in wonder that so many lives had come from such a small white seamless pouch.
    I understood that my father had held the power of their lives – and deaths – in his gentle hands, and felt in a subtle way that he had created them. I searched my father’s face for signs of meaning, but he was unreadable and unexpectedly quiet. My mother came in from the kitchen to see what had caused my squeals, and I checked to see how deep the crease between her brows became when she saw the delicate wafting spiders.
    â€˜They’re not biting ones, Mum.’
    My mother’s face broke into a sun-like smile. ‘They’re amazing.’ Her words were soft, and she looked at my father with a gentle warmth. ‘Where did you find them?’
    He motioned out towards the garden and my parents wandered off together in search of the very spot.
    My father was a man living in the moment. Before my sister died I once spotted him doing a lap of the town, ghetto blaster on his shoulder, wearing his bright yellow Esprit shirt, on an afternoon errand. Hanging around on street corners after school as a young teenager, I got a glimpse of him in the distance.
    â€˜Isn’t that … your dad?’ my tittering friends asked. When he jogged right past calling ‘Hi, Possum!’ it was a hard question to evade.
    â€˜But what is he doing?’
    Now, I suspect he was rushing about trying to get that beloved ghetto blaster repaired, and jogging with it on his shoulder just seemed a natural time management strategy, but the yellow woman’s Esprit T-shirt was harder to explain.
    My father loved that shirt. ‘Esprit is French for spirit!’ he’d proclaim, ‘S-P-I-R-I-T. You know, spirit, life, strength. That’s me!’
    â€˜But why does it have to be bright yellow?’
    â€˜That’s my favourite colour!’
    â€˜But it’s a girl’s shirt, Dad.’ All I got for that objection was a slight roll of the eyes. For my father, gendered clothing was irrelevant, but in my small Australian country town a yellow woman’s shirt was enough to set a man apart. Add a ghetto blaster and a zappy jog, and the word ‘lunatic’ easily sprang to mind. There are advantages to growing up in a family with a high tolerance for eccentricity. Boundaries are loose, undefined. Odd fashion choices are celebrated, experimental artworks championed and socially inappropriate expressions of authenticity never shunned or