Of times past.   (gerard oosterman)

Even in those late seventies years there were still some of the original inhabitants surviving in that part of Inner West Sydney, having resisted all lucrative offers from salivating estate agents, out for a killing. In our street, there was such a couple, the timber cottage not even connected to electricity, always those brown lager bottles on the footpath together with a slurred but friendly ‘howz’ee going matey, when walking past.

She was bone skinny, always in cotton skirt and with thongs on gnarled feet, summer or winter. I was taking down our old rotten picket fence facing the street and had the footpath littered with those  timber slats with rusty nails sticking out. She happened to come down, a bit sloshed and keen for a yarn.

She stepped on one of those bits of wood with upturned nail which impaled her thonged foot. I helped her away from the pile and wrenched the nailed bit away from her foot and went inside to get some iodine. She said, “I didn’t feel anything matey’, ‘don’t you worry the fucking mozzies for nuthin, she said.

She died well before him. Years later he was still going strong and seen, unperturbed by the “Johnys come lately’, rifling through all the Council litter bins in front of Woollies, the Town-hall, Cop-shop and parks. When he finally went to Rookwood Cemetery, the freestanding cottage was derelict and in the kitchen there was a kerosene cooker and stacks of Play Boys. That cottage sold for a fortune.