Travel: Of Mothers and Daughters and Safe Returns

When I was four years old, my parents moved their young family from the bottom of a park to the top. My parents never moved again.

The sun setting through the trees overlooking a park

Half a century later, my mother still lives there, surrounded by all five of her children within a ten kilometre radius. Her dreams are of forays into her beloved garden, not of travel adventures abroad. Everything she needs is within her castle walls. She left Australian shores only once and didn’t see any benefit in doing so again.

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Black Saturday reflections ten years on

Speeding down the Calder Highway on a scorching Friday in February 2009, I wondered briefly whether this long-awaited weekend away was such a good idea. The brown fields on either side shimmered and the road ahead looked molten. The words ‘bushfire weather’ hovered in front of my eyes like the steam rising from the bitumen.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash
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