A day in the park

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Robyn

Before I went to bed last night, I prepared a quick-escape bag – a tote bag filled with clothes, shoes, water, snacks. Enough to pick up and grab if anything happened in the night.

Before the quake, the plan had been to jump on the shinkansen with my travelling buddy James and go to Osaka and Kyoto for a couple of days exploring. Osaka for the night life, Kyoto for the temples.

The shinkansen timetable had been stopped after the earthquake, but apparently the Osaka shink was back running on a limited schedule. But I didn’t really want to go anywhere that wasn’t walking distance to my hotel and risk getting stranded if the trains went down again.

So we decided to continue with our mission that had been so rudely interrupted by the Goddam quake – a visit to Harajuku.

The Yamanote line was running on a reduced schedule, but that seemed to mean trains every five minutes, rather than every two minutes. We arrived at Harajuku and started to explore.

It’s a cool area, full of crazy fashion shops, but today it felt quiet. Most of the shops that were open were smaller boutiques, with larger stores and department stores being closed, or opening later in the afternoon.

One icon of Harajuku is the Jingu Bridge, which is the hangout spot of the crazy loligoth girls and boys. They hang out, pose and generally be fabulous. Except today the bridge was empty. Only a few tourists wandered around, like it was a forgotten corner of an unremarkable neighbourhood. I guess a massive disaster takes the fun out of dress-up.

We wandered across the bridge to the Meiji Shrine. A wedding party was having photos taken. The bride was wearing a start white dress, her bridesmaids wore colourful kimono and the groom and his lads were in black suits. They stood, posed and looked happy.

At the shrine there were small wooden boards on which visitors could write a prayer. My eye drifted to the few written in English. On one a small boy’s shaky handwriting said “I want everything to be good”. Me too, son.

We then went on to Shibuya. Normally it’s buzzing with people. Today it was subdued, like a New Zealand Sunday afternoon. We wandered around, looked at some shops, including the truly mental Don Quijote store, a treasure trove of stuff no one needs and yet can’t live without.

I still don’t have any plans. I guess it all depends on how that whole nuclear power station thing pans out – which weirdly feels like a long-forgotten legacy of being a child of the ’80s.

QLD4: Shelved

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Robyn

So, I was halfway through posting the tales of my October visit to Queensland when it started to rain. And it rained quite a lot and started to flood all over the state. The fake beach I visited turned to mud, cars were swept down rivers, houses collapsed and people died. So it all seemed a bit weird to keep on with my tales of the fun time before the floods came; those simpler, drier times.

But slowly Queensland is recovering. In a lot of places things are back to normal; in other places things will never be the same. So I reckon now’s a good a time as any to keep on telling my Brisbane stories, looking back at how sometimes it’s the ordinary things that can seem most exotic and end up being most memorable, like going to the shops.

I was meandering around the central Brisbane shopping area and came across a Borders book store. It was a fairly ordinary Borders, only there was a big gap in the shop. The music section had recently been cleared of stock, leaving a mass of empty CD shelves.

Whenever I discover the closure of a music retailer, I always feel a little conflicted. Part of me is cheering “Viva la digital revolution, bitches!” and gleefully buying digital tracks of my favourite little bands that otherwise couldn’t afford to press CDs, but another part of me is deeply sad at the loss of the ’90s-style record shops I grew up with, all those racks and racks of music.

For Borders, ditching the CDs department probably isn’t that much of a big deal, but it probably also means that elsewhere a little record shop has also closed, taking with it some of those nice record-shop experiences. Oh well.

The mall called. My bro and I ventured out to Westfield Chermside, which is pretty much like any big mall you might have been to. I was excited to visit this particular mall because it had an Apple Store. As it happened, I needed a new cable for my iPhone, so I took the opportunity to shop there.

The place was swarming with people, most of whom seemed to be cheerfully fondling iPads. I found the cable I needed and looked for a till. The long counter at the back of the store was the Genius Bar thing, but that’s not a sales area.

I couldn’t see anywhere that looked like a sales point. I wondered for a moment that if they didn’t actually have any tills, perhaps they could just, like, intuit the money from you.

But no. Eventually I stumbled across a queue of people and at the end of the queue was a staffer standing next to a piece of minimalist furniture with a Mac on it. This was the till and they were happy to take my credit card.

Across town, we also paid a visit to the IKEA, which is still a huge novelty for me in this IKEAless land in which I dwell.

Somehow we ended up entering the IKEA maze from the exit-end, and so travelled against the carefully constructed retail flow. This meant starting with the kids area and ending with tiny-apartment ideas, which actually worked better for me.

There’s one thing that I really covet at IKEA – the Billy shelf system. It’s a really simple range of bookcases, and is one of their global bestsellers. I have books – I have too many books – and I have an inadequate bookcase I bought from Freedom furniture in 2001 (ex-display model, ’90s curled metal flourishes). All I want is a simple bookshelf like the Billy. It will house all my books and some decorative items too. Oh, globalisation, why dost thou foresake me, etc?

Instead I bought some $1 picture frames and tried to block the joy and simplicity of the Billy.

Brisbane has brilliant public transport. I borrowed a spare transport pass from my bro and enjoyed easy travel on the bus, train and ferry services. Any New Zealand dickface who thinks that trains are some sort of Edwardian antiquity that has no place in modern New Zealand, should be forced to spend a week in Brisbane riding the trains. They are splendid.

There was a curious disruption to the ferry service while I was there. A troubled man (a New Zealander!!!!) had tied up his yacht to the central ferry terminal – one of the ones that was later to be munted by the flood – and threatened to blow up his yacht. “I’ve got supplies and reckon I can stay awake for two weeks,” he told the local paper.

But it ended 16 hours later with a fire, a stabbing and the police eventually subduing him. He later claimed to have been suffering from marijuana-induced paranoia. New Zealanders, don’t smoke that reefer – you’ll end up mucking things up for Brisbane commuters.

But when the ferries were running, making the short trip from the city over to Kangaroo Point was a real pleasure, especially at night. It’s all lit up, looking like a proper fancy city, making me feel like I was in Brooklyn, or Devonport.

Secret Boyfriend II: The Return

Posted on January 15, 2011 by Robyn

In September last year, a few weeks after the earthquake, Air New Zealand had some $20 flights to Christchurch for January, so I took advantage of this sweet deal. “Yay,” I thought, “I can see the Ron Mueck exhibition and do a bit of earthquake tourism.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the city post-quake. I knew things were more or less back up and running, but I also knew that the Boxing Day aftershock had again munted things up a bit.

I went for a wander and came across the ruins of Manchester Courts. It’s a historic multi-storey building that’s in the process of being demolished due to safety concerns.

A few months ago I tweeted that demolishing Manchester Courts would be “a loss not just for Christchurch, but for New Zealand”. I don’t actually know if that’s true. I just sort of made it up because I was annoyed about it. But surprisingly enough, the Herald quoted that in an article about historic Christchurch buildings facing demolition.

The building is now a pile of rubble, blocking off the corner of Manchester and Hereford Streets. It’s still annoying that such a handsome building couldn’t be saved, but it seems like it had been unloved for such a long time that perhaps it was better to have been put out of its misery.

If I didn’t pay too much attention, I could trick myself into thinking that everything was as it was pre-quake. But it’s one thing to see “Keep Calm and Carry One” merchandise in a gift shop (in fact, it seems pretty much mandatory at the moment for all New Zealand gift shops to stock such items), but it’s a different matter seeing a crude print-out of the familiar red poster taped up on an office window.

In Cashel Mall, the Whitcoulls store had its building declared unsafe from the Boxing Day aftershock. The store was been frozen in time, its front window still displaying a cheery Christmas tree and wreath, offering slightly unnerving season’s greetings.

There was the potential of aftershocks, which I was kind of looking forward to. GeoNet logged five significant aftershocks in the three days I was in town, with the largest being a 3.8, but I didn’t notice any of them. I can pinpoint where I was when each of them happened, but I can’t recall a whole lot of shaking, jolting or thudding going on.

I did a search on Twitter for #eqnz hashtags and found a few people tweeting about aftershocks that didn’t seem to match up with any recorded ones. Could it be that crowd-sourcing is more accurate than seismographs… or is it just jumpy resisdents tweeting at every passing truck or slammed door?

The Canterbury Museum has an area dedicated to the earthquake. It’s basic room, painted in a dark colour. On one wall, some statistics about the earthquake are displayed on the wall, including a frequently updated tally of the number of aftershocks – 4254, at last update. There’s also a projection of the Christchurch Quake Map.

It’s a really simple display, and it seems like a stop-gap measure to do something, while acknowledging that the story of the Canterbury earthquake is still being told.

Christchurch looks like this: normal, normal, normal, temporary fence, normal, normal, cracked bricks, normal, normal, normal, normal, normal, crumbling parapet, normal, canvas over hole in side of building, normal, normal, normal, church steeple on lawn in front of church, normal, normal, normal, broken glass, normal, normal, normal, dumpster full of rubble, normal, empty lot where building once stood, normal.

And slowly things are getting more and more normal.

I went to the Ron Mueck exhibtion twice. The first time I was straight off the plane, tired, emotional and the whole thing was a giant emo rollercoaster. So I paid another visit the next day to fully take it in.

Christchurch Art Gallery is really cool in that they allow non-flash photography for the Mueck exhibition. But this means that the gallery is full of people holding up camera phones or pocket digital cameras. They mostly take the same sort of photo – a front-on shot of the sculpture in its entirity.

Ron Mueck’s hyperreal sculptures give gallery visitors a rare opportunity – the ability to stare at someone for a long time. If you look at a real person, sooner or later your look turns into a stare and you have to engage with them or look away. If you’re looking at a film of a person, you’re not in control of what you’re looking at or for how long.

Ron Mueck’s sculptures give the viewer the chance to have a really good look at a number of people (and a chicken). You can stare at the massive belly of “Pregnant Woman” or the sleepy eye of the newborn “A Girl” or cop an eyeful of “Wild Man”‘s genitals. You can judgementally sneer back at “Two Women” or check out the toes of “Drift”.

There was something very special about the Ron Mueck exhibition. I’m not sure what it was, but I did notice this: in most art exhibitions that I go to, people seem to spend more time reading the information cards next to the art than looking at the art itself; in the Ron Mueck exhibition, hardly anyone looked at the info cards, and spent most of the time looking at the art and talking about it with their companions.

So, I’ve been to Christchurch four times since October 2009, which led to the notorious rumour that I had a secret boyfriend in Christchuch, and in turn led to my declaration that Christchurch itself was my secret boyfriend.

Well, I’ve decided to break up with my secret boyfriend. It’s not Christchurch, it’s me. It’s a lovely city, but I feel like I’ve gone as far as I can go with it as far as casual encounters go. I feel it is time for me to move on and get myself another secret boyfriend. And I know just the place.

QLD3: The World of Dreams

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Robyn

I like a good theme park, as testified by the notorious time when I toodled off to Disneyland Paris while my brother stayed in Paris and visited Notre Dame.

But this time, the advantage was mine. Not only had I scored tickets to Dreamworld, but being a resident of the Sunshine State, my bro had already seen the sights of Brisbane so had no excuse for not jumping on the Gold Coast train and going to Dreamworld.

Dreamworld is very much inspired by Disneyland, with its “main street” entrance and themed areas. But while Disneyland gets to have classic weenies – tall, iconic structures that catch the eye and the imagination – such as the Sleeping Beauty Castle and the Matterhorn, Dreamworld’s towering landmark is the Dreamworld Tower. It’s a tall shaft that offers guests an OMG-fast-fall experience.

Oh, before I go any further, I should state that I did not go on the Giant Drop. Nor did I experience the Tower of Terror II, The Claw, the Cyclone or anything else that sounds like a horror movie and/or something that would require a Civil Defence crisis management plan.

But I did start with the Thunder River Rapid Ride. It’s a water ride where one sits in a round boat which then goes for a hoon down a water run. It was fun and had just enough OMG thrills to keep me pleased. But – crap – some water splashed over the side and I got a little bit wet.

Next was the Rocky Hollow Log Ride. It’s a classic log flume ride (New Zealanders: it’s like the one in Rainbow’s End!!!) with a ye old tin shed design and… Oh, ok – I got soaked.

The log came barrelling down the flume, plunged into the water at the bottom and a couple of giant waves flopped over the side and got me all wet. And I’d even set in the back especially to avoid the worst of the water. Dryness fail.

“Take a photo of me looking all pissed off at getting wet,” I demanded of my bro. He obliged, yet somehow I don’t quite look consumed with rage.

It was time for something less aqueous, so off we went to the Vintage Cars ride, comedy replicas of old cars that you drive around a track.

At first this seemed like a challenge (I… I have trouble with the motor vehicles), until I realised that the steering wheel wasn’t actually connected to anything.

So I just sat back, rested my foot on the accelerator, waved my hands in the air like I just didn’t care, and the car merrily self-directed itself around the guide rail.

The Vintage Cars area is one of the oldest rides at Dreamworld and it feels like it belongs to a different time. In fact, it reminds me of the old Footrot Flats theme park in Te Atatu – a bit grunty and run down, but still enjoyable for a while.

Wedged around the back of Dreamworld is the Australian Wildlife Experience, which is indeed full of Australian wildlife such as koalas, kangaroos, emus and the daddy crocodile who was giving a special hug to the mummy crocodile.

The Australian Wildlife Experience feels a bit out of place. In a park full of roller coasters and costumed characters, it’s strange to come across actual real animals. And even stranger to consider that the park is effectively build on the natural habitat of these animals.

Suddenly I turned a corner and there I was in a land I had only dreamed of – Wiggles World. Yes, this was the mythical homeland of Anthony, Murray, Jeff and The New One Who Isn’t Greg.

Me: “Let’s go on the Big Red Car ride!!!!”
Bro: “No. You can, but I’m not.”
Me: “Oh, come on. It’s not like there’s anyone cool here who’ll see you.”

My bro relented, and as you can see by this photo, he was happily toot-toot chugga-chugga-ing along with me and not at all appalled by the experience:

At one point on the ride, I was singing the “Hot Potato” song and a small girl in the driver’s seat turned around and looked at me in bewilderment.

Wot, child? You’ve never seen someone enjoy the musical oeuvre of the Wiggles? Do I shock you with my unbridled enthusiasm for the most successful entertainers in Australian music ever (probably), surpassing Savage Garden, INXS and even the Hoodoo Gurus? Yeah, think about that, little ‘un.

The Motocoaster beckoned. It’s a roller coaster with the seats in the form of a motorbike, so one must sit crouched over. There was a long-arse wait for the ride. The line slowly crawled along, as bogan rock blasted out.

There were a lot of bogans at Dreamworld. There seems to be a whole bogan class in Queensland that you don’t get in New Zealand. Flabby dads with ’90s tribal arm-band tattoos, and bleachy-haired mums with their Chinese “girl power” tats and knock-off Gucci sunnies.

There are also plenty of New Zealanders at Dreamworld. It was the Sunday of New Zealand Labour weekend, so the place was crawling with sunburnt Aotearoans, off for some Gold Coast fun.

Finally I made it to the front of the Motocoaster. As soon as the ride started, I was hit with a wave of nausea from motion sickness. It reminded me of the 110 Upper Hutt bus – the new one with the overly sensitive brakes that makes every set of traffic lights, roundabout or bus stop an extreme and joyless experience.

For a break from the hoop-de-doo, we went on the train that circuits the park. The highlight of this, for sure, was passing by the Dreamworld TV studio. It’s not even named on the map, like an unglamorous secret.

See, the Dreamworld studio is where Big Brother Australia was filmed. The tropical Queensland climate provided just the right temperature to ensure that the housemates never needed to wear many clothes.

Between seasons, the Big Brother House was open for tours, but since it ended in 2008, the tours have stopped and it’s now used for storage. But for me, it’s a sacred televisual taonga.

The day was getting on, so I took one final ride – this time on the Rugrats Runaway Reptar. It’s what’s known in the biz as a suspended family coaster, which means the seats dangle from below and – for the “family” component – it doesn’t go upside down. Because if you are part of a family, you don’t like upside-downness.

In other words, it’s a lite coaster. It’s a lovely ride without any resemblance to the Upper Hutt #110. It doesn’t plunge you backwards into darkness at 160 km/h or put you into freefall. It’s just a nice, fun roller coaster.

With theme parks having rides with movie tie-ins, I reckon Dreamworld should have an Inception-themed ride that travels through worlds of dreams. It could be a roller coaster with van-shaped cars that travel through the Inception levels, finally gliding off a bridge really really, really, slowly before splashing down into Dreamworld’s Murrissippi River.

And with that, the Dreamworld dream was over, with Queenland’s superb public transport bringing us back to Brisbane.

QLD2: Some culture

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Robyn

The Queensland Cultural Centre is a cluster of cultural institutions housed in hulking concrete behemoths. I like a good solid concrete building, so I was delighted to explore these structures.

I first paid a brief visit to the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, and saw an exhibition of ballet costumes. Expertly crafted costumes, that are designed to both look amazing on stage as well as last the wear and tear of daily performances, are a treat to see up close, but there was one thing I wasn’t quite expecting to see in detail. I gazed up at some Swan Lake tutus suspended from the ceiling and came face to face with a sea of beige gussets.

The Queensland Museum had a very strong emphasis on natural history, including a long tableau of taxidermied animals. This seems to be the challenge of modern museums – what to do with all those stuffed animals, without looking like a weird Victorian-era cabinet of colonial oppression.

It was an adequate museum, but it seemed like they were desperate for some more space to really bust out and expand beyond the olden times collection.

Next door is the Queensland Art Gallery, which was just grand. It’s a really big ol’ concrete building with high ceilings and they allowed photography in most areas, which is really pleasing. My fave was stumbling across a dark alcove playing Martha Rosler’s uber cool domestic performance videos “Semiotics of the Kitchen” and “The East is Red, the West is Bending”.

And the QAG has a really enjoyable expansiveness to it. It involves a lot of walking around, but there’s the sense the the art is allowed to just hang out and be itself without any obligation to necessarily be fun or educational.

A little further along the river is the Gallery of Modern Art, which is the largest contemporary art gallery in Australia. Yes, even bigger than the actually-not-all-that-big-when-you-come-to-think-of-it Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

The GOMA was in the midst of a retrospective exhibition of Valentino, so the place was swarming with ladies who lunch, and there was a huge queue for tickets. I couldn’t be bothered queuing, so I went off to look at all the free bits.

I stumbled across the finalists in the Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award, a competition for art that uses “video, digital animation and gaming, robotics, sound and interactive technologies”. #nerdgasm. These included a series of clever mash-ups of hip hop culture with B-grade sci-fi movies (this is known in the biz as Afrofuturism); a robot that spookily danced around a dimly-lit room; and a fruity woodland animated adventure that uses the viewer’s face as the main character.

By the time I’d finished with the free part of the gallery, the epic Valentino queue had shrunk to a lone dude, so I bought a ticket.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was a room full of frocks, and all around the room, ladies were buggin’ out over the dresses. It was amazing to feel the buzz of excitement in that room. Now, I appreciate that Mr Valentino has an eye for design and has designed many fine feathered frocks, but while I was all #nerdgasm at the new media art, I wasn’t quite feeling it for the gowns.

The exhibition was a carefully designed labyrinth of commerce, with an exhibtion-access-only restaurant halfway along, and an exit through a massive giftshop, with all sorts of lovely frock-related souvenirs. And I’m just going to confess this: I bought a Moleskine notebook. Ok.

Finally down this end of the river was the State Library of Queensland. I tried to do some sightseeing, but it’s a really serious proper research library. It was really quiet and I even felt that the simple act of walking around was grossly instrusive. Not wanting to disturb anyone’s serious study, I left.

But there is a library that welcomes mucking around. Across the river in the CBD, Brisbane Square Library is the central branch of the city library. It’s a bright, bold new building that’s really fun to be in.

If you’re returning a book, you can follow its progress via conveyor belt to the sorting room, with the help from mirrors and CCTV. The building is full of fabulous mood lighting, and there’s free wifi for all members. It just feels like a good place to be, but despite all the attractions, at its core is books, books, books.

It’s really tempting to compare the fine cultural institutions of Brisbane with those of New Zealand cities, but it’s hard to fairly compare them. For a start, Brisbane has money. It’s a boomtown with that little bit extra to add the final polish. A library doesn’t need to have a fun CCTV and conveyor belt. A performing arts centre doesn’t need to have a museum. It’s nice when they do, but it’s more important that a library has books and that a performing arts centre has good performance spaces.

QLD1: Wheel around the Brisbane

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Robyn

I’d been to Queensland twice before – once in 1988 as part of a family jaunt around Australia, and the second time in 1991 in one of those Gold Coast holidays people take when they’re feeling masochistic. My brother lives in Brisbane now, so I decided to pay him a visit in the spring of 2010.

My 1988 visit to Brisbane revolved around World Expo ’88, where the former dock land on the south bank of the Brisbane River had been transformed into exactly the sort of magical land that a World Expo should be. It contained an eclectic mix of buildings, showcasing what the participating countries of the world felt was important to show off.

The New Zealand pavillion at Expo ’88 was highly regarded, and featured a faux native forest, seats that looked like mini sheep, and paua-esque cladding on the outside. Yet when the pavilion was brought back to New Zealand for retirement and opened to the public out by Auckland Airport, the magic was gone. It had somehow become a tacky tourist disaster.

Expo ’88 had left me with a whole lot of memories but no way of revisiting them. Once the expo was over, the entire site was dismantled, and the area has been impressively redeveloped into South Bank Parklands.

There are a couple of remnants of the expo, though – the Skyneedle was bought by a local celebrity hairdresser and moved to his HQ a few blocks away, and the Nepal Peace Pagoda still stands, complete with a mini shrine of Expo ’88 memorabilia.

But remaining as only a fuzzy memory is the Knight Rider car, the cheeky Canadian AV presentation titled “Not Another Government Movie” and the annoying guy at the Australia Post pavilion who told me I couldn’t sit down on the floor, even though I’d been on my feet all day and my legs were aching.

But the South Bank site has bold new attractions to lure in the visitor. I was drawn in by the Wheel of Brisbane, like a scaled-down version of the London Eye. I figured that it would help me get oriented with the city, and its name sounded a bit like “wheel of fortune”, which gave it a slight exotic carnival (and/or TV game show) flavour. I paid the $15 admission fee and boarded.

As the wheel rotated around, a recording described sites of Brisbane. The wheel isn’t all that high and there aren’t all that many things to be seen from its location, so the choice of scenic sites were a little sparse. Oh look, another bridge.

Things got really surreal when the “Inspector Gadget” theme suddenly started to play. I tried to guess what this might signify. Could it be that a famous Australian inventor had a workshop nearby? No, the connection was that the 2003 straight-to-video film “Inspector Gadget 2″ was filmed in Brisbane, including a scene on a nearby bridge. I don’t think anyone’s in a hurry to nickname the town Brizzywood.

Ignoring the commentary and looking down on the ground, I could see some drama involving an ambulance. It turned out that a toddler in a pram had rolled into the river, but fortunately had been rescued by a passerby. This was probably the most interesting thing I saw from the Wheel of Brisbane.

Back on flat land, I went for a wander along the river and came across the beach. Because Brisbane River isn’t really swimmable, there is a fake beach to enjoy at the river’s edge.

Lush white sands, palm trees, clear waters – it’s everything a dream beach ought to have, only with skyscrapers providing the slightly less idyllic backdrop. It feels like the sort of thing that wouldn’t be out of place in Dubai – a giant fake beach because it’s too hard making the real beach nice.

I couldn’t reconcile the 1988 South Bank of my memory with the one I experienced in October 2010. But that seems perfect – the one thing that world expos and world fairs are good at doing is creating weird memories in their young visitors. So I’ll keep my old memory of the plastic raincoats, the foot-massager machines and the nice lady in the England pavilion, and I’ll add some new memories of the Wheel of Tourism, the Little Dubai Beach and the quite nice Nutella crepes I had at a cafe along the river.

Holiday snaps

Posted on November 27, 2010 by Robyn

This is a photo of me in 1988, age 13, on a family holiday in Australia.

I look miserable, like I was having the worst day, worst holiday, worst life ever. Or maybe I’m just squinting from the glare of the overcast sky. Or perhaps was I being a full-on 13-year-old girl and therefore too cool to have her photo taken by her dad and so was obliged to pull an aloof ‘wotevz’ pose.

The thing is, I can’t remember having this photo taken. I can’t remember sitting at a table outside the Sydney Opera House and sullenly looking at a camera to provide evidence of having been there. And I can’t remember the view from that table, though, having been there a few times since, I can mentally imagine what that would look like.

I can, however, remember that sweatshirt – lilac with black polka dots (it was a fave) – and I can remember when my hair was golden blonde all by itself without any chemical intervention needed.

And I do have one very specific memory of that day, but it takes place well out of range of that photo.

After arriving in Sydney, I’d had a stomach bug and had spent a day or so feeling ill and throwing up a bit and watching a weird Canadian children’s TV show called “Today’s Special“. But that day at Circular Quay was the first day where I’d been feeling well enough to get back in to the spirit of the holiday.

At Circular Quay, I’d gone to a gelato shop under the Cahill Expressway. I’d asked for a small cup of lemon sorbet, but the charming Italian bloke there had cheerfully scooped a big cup, and told me I was a beautiful girl, in that jovial Italian way.

That nice experience and the sweet sorbet cheered me up and made me feel much more energetic, and I enjoyed myself again. (Until I got sick again in Brisbane, but that’s another story.)

The whole idea of taking holiday snaps, it seems, is to record where we’ve been to help trigger happy holiday memories when we’re back home.

But even in this modern world where almost everyone has a camera on them, it’s usually not not possible to capture those lovely moments. A camera can take a photo of a cup of lemon sorbet, but does that capture the experience of a happy holiday? Would a photo of me with a mouthful of sorbet have captured my nice feeling more than I remember it?

15 years later I was in Sydney. I took the ferry over to Manly and went for a walk along Manly Beach.

I stopped at a picnic table and took this photo on auto-timer.

I didn’t know it when I took the photo, but the camera’s position made me look like Gulliverette in Manlyput. (And I’m annoyed that the little people won’t play with me. And my hair isn’t naturally blonde any more. And a seagull pooped on the table.)

I was just mucking around with my camera. The resulting photo isn’t even something I experienced there. It’s like a special bonus experience that happened solely inside the camera.

If I’d wanted a typically Manly photo, I could have taken one by the ferry or along The Corso. Instead this almost anonymous seaside photo is my happy holiday memory snap.

Without directly showing it, the photo reminds me of my favourite thing to do when I travel – going for a bit of an explore. Jumping on a ferry, walking down a street, turning a corner and not quite knowing what will be around it.

And in turn, I think that also serves as my holiday photography manifesto. Instead of taking photos as evidence I was there or attempting to manufacture a memory, I let the photos be their own experience and form their own memories.

Robyn Gallagher

Adventures in words and web

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