Category Archives: Gerard Oosterman

Magdalena Duma

17 Saturday Jul 2010

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Just yesterday we managed to take some time off to get our kitchen chairs re-rushed. The chairs were part of our farm  in Holland together with most of our other furniture, generously thrown in by the previous owner who was an antique dealer and father of 14 children. Those kitchen chairs were old then, and the rushed seating, through all the years with growing kids, together with a series of cats plucking at them from underneath had finally given way. We tried sitting on just the frame with the help of some string and cushions. This was hard going. Finally, as we could never find anyone who knew how to re-rush or re-thatch/cane them we gave up and stored them away. 

Last week we walked into a shop in Bowral with similar looking chairs. I asked about  the state of the rush and I got the address of someone who could do this. It was a phone call with a strong York-shire voiced answer with an address in Newtown, Sydney, that finally gave us hope of being able to sit in comfort around the dining table  again soon.

After arrival, we met this very old couple living near one of the quaintest and busiest car and pedestrian thoroughfare in Sydney, the extension of King Street towards the Princess Highway. The Yorkshire couple were almost as old as our chairs but a lot livelier. He immediately knew were our chairs came from, the type of rush used and the method. He already told us the rushing material is not allowed to be imported anymore and all those type of chairs including rocking, wicker chairs are now done in a paper product, very strong and similar in looks. The wife, Angela was the secretary and keeper of order, lifely as a finch, and  Chris her husband,  could hardly walk but was also very animated, full of knowledge about the different rushes and where they actually grow. Their small cottage was chockers with old chairs. She told us, their bed and the kitchen table were the only areas free from the clutter of cane, rush, chairs, tools and all sorts of other stuff.  

After dropping the chairs off and being entertained by this very hospitable couple we strolled around the corner and passed a Polish cafe/ restaurant. The people inside tucking into their food looked Polish and a little further was another shop with very fashionable looking clothing, it was called ‘Magdalena Duma.’. Inside the shop window was a sign by  Magdalena giving credit to her Polish born mother’s influence and inspiration, which we thought was a nice thing to do so  publicly.

Magdalena is some lady: Born in Poland with her family migrating to Australia. Looking in her shop she sure makes original items, seems gifted with a desire to cut the cloth and make fashion her world.

Anyway, if you ever are in need of re-rushing your old chairs, go and see Angela and Chris. But do have a look at Magdalena’s collection at 547 King Street, Newtown. They are works of art!

A Sort of Life

13 Tuesday Jul 2010

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The picture above is of my paternal grandparents wedding, back in the 1890’s or so. The tall rather forbidding looking man on the right at the back  is my Grandfather, sitting next him, his lovely bride with the gown, my grandmother. A rather sombre looking bridal party. In those days taking interior photos must have been difficult. Perhaps the party was fed up with posing and wanted to get stuck in the vino and food. One of the males seated at the table is Huib Luns. He was the father of Joseph Luns, a future Government minister and Secretary General.

Picture number two is the house that I stayed in after the war, and can still smell the turps and linseed oils that my granddad used for painting. My grandparents had all their six children there and lived there during their entire life.

Next a photo with buckets of  idealism; granddad seen through the window mixing a palette of colours while grandma is seen in the garden carrying some cups. I suppose there were quests seated in the garden. I feel granddad is posing here. He like to smoke and lived to an old age.

The last photo is them in old age. They both wear slippers and are now stooped.

The Wives of Fishermen

25 Friday Jun 2010

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Years ago I had a 12 ft Brooker on a trailer with Yamaha outboard, in which I would take my son outside Sydney heads to go fishing. I used to catch buckets of ‘roughies’. They were those orange coloured fish with large sad looking eyes. Looking back, what a dangerous thing to do!  Still, the 4am drive to the ramp at Rozelle, and then the slow trip outside the Heads I am sure he remembers.

It all started from our regular camping trips at Bendalong on the South Coast, where scores of campers and their wives used to line up at the only ramp and take out their boats. In those days, the wives tried to be as much as their husbands to be part of the ‘fishing scene’. Both feet shod in thongs, feet firmly planted apart and tits flattened, fags dangling from waver thin lips; They tried to be as blokey as possible while pulling the rings on their husband beer cans. If they wanted to be accepted, their female-ness had to be hidden.

It was the only way then. It made one wonder if those males were not homosexuals disguised as fishermen. Perhaps I am unkind here or intolerant of the different cultural aspects of varying societies. It was at the same time when at social parties, mixing by men with women was sometimes also seen as having ‘poofter’ inclinations.

Reading the plethora of comments about Australia having the first female Prime Minister in Julia Gillard, I detect certain misogyny. Perhaps those old fishermen’s ideas of women should still be the notion of adherence and conforming to their maleness instead of blatant feminism. Be one of the boys, as it were. Did you read Bob Ellis article on the UL?

Still, those notions have failed in parliament, at least on the ALP side. Just have a look at the line-up of those glorious looking females. As feminine as one could possibly hope for.

 Certainly nothing like those fishermen’s wives.

Of Porkies and Kiddie Porn

22 Tuesday Jun 2010

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Is it not amazing that certain people are deemed to be beyond being human and possess a quality that not even the purest of cherubic angels could possibly ever own?  Not just most times, but twenty four hours seven days, and over their entire lives. There was Justice Einfeld being caught speeding and telling a porky that most of us are more than capable of and probably doing most of the time. Yet, he was jailed for being what we all are, fallible human beings. The fact of being a retired superior High Court Judge, a former President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission and a Unicef Ambassador for children did not stand in the way of his punishment.  In fact, that was precisely why he was given such a harsh sentence.

There we are all cheerfully filling in our tax forms telling lies that will probably give us a nice little earner in refunds, hiding a few grand here and there in dodgy trusts or splitting income with our friendly stumpy Cattle dog  ‘Bitem’. All very legit, as they say.

 Good onya mate, Bob’s your uncle.  But for a mere bagatelle of a porky, poor Marcus in jail, hopefully with enough wisdom in contemplating the irony of it all.

Lately there has been remarkable diligence on the part of a blood hounding mob of do-gooders sniffing out scents in the discarded underpants of ethics, never of just ordinary folks like us, but only of those in the public eye.

Some time ago, the minister for Defence, having enjoyed a paid trip to China, compliments of a friend, apologizing for his lapse of memory or simply having forgotten it all, was being pursued by batteries of video cameras raised and aimed for his face from journalists with the well practised sensitivities of belt sanders. 

Where do the expectations come from that people in the limelight or of high position are somehow better or above the rest of us? There is the French President, divorcing his wife in full flight, taking a new one and being rewarded by a surge in popularity.  At the G8 Summit Conference he was allegedly filmed drunk. Such panache!  Are the French so much more sophisticated and tolerant and we in Australia so hypocritical?  Could a prime minister have gotten away with the’ flair and nous’ what the French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to have managed so far?  Remember the uproar about young Kevin at the nightclub incident in the US? Where was our pride in our PM being one of us?

Is it also perhaps a fact that others elsewhere are more capable than us, of allowing even people in high places still to be human? The French President, after all, divorcing, taking another partner and sometimes getting pissed is what most of us intrinsically do as well.  Why the hypocrisy here when it involves only people in the limelight?
 
Those that get caught with child porn on their computers are also invariably ‘normal’ as well. From ABC employees to judges and magistrates, police officers, priests and prosecutors, and even ‘stranger danger’ educators. They all line up, worldwide, being charged, with having downloaded and/or spreading child porn. Now, if ‘normal ‘people are all so feeble and weak to fall prey to doing bad things at times, why are we always pretending those things are being done by others? Is it not true that we are all capable by just a hair’s breadth of doing unacceptable things? We can’t say that people caught are all seemingly respectable  pillars of society and absolutely ‘normal’ and condemning them, without also allowing and accepting that we are all capable of doing those bad things as well.

In the period of Queen Victoria, there were estimated to be over a hundred thousand child prostitutes in London alone. It is a fair bet, that those that abused children then were the judges, teachers, religious clergy, cabinet ministers, and regarded then as ‘normal’ as those now that are now caught with kiddie porn on their computers. Not that long ago, we stood by with terrible things being done to refugees, for years on end. The indefinite detention without trial of one of ours for many years, D.Hicks. The humiliation of Dr.Haneef and Cornelia Rau.  Basic and blatant breaches of human rights. All evil things done under our noses and with the apparent approval of most of us ‘normal’ people, without as much as a single prosecution so far. Where were the bloodhounds then?

Next time we hear or read about bad things, small or large, it is more likely to be ’us’ rather than ‘them’. We are ‘normal’.

Hookers and Prosciutto

20 Sunday Jun 2010

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Even in the 1960’s, Potts Point and Kings Cross next door, had a rather bohemian tinge to it. It was a happy mixture of hookers and poets, criminals and cafe habitués with some of the best delicatessen in the whole of Australia. A butcher shop with all sorts of European condiments, smoked hams and jars of anchovies, prosciuttos and home- made sauerkraut, rookworst et al, and with a fragrance that permeated to the pavement outside which one could only have found either in Budapest or Vienna. I think the shop was named ‘Hans Continental Meats’ or something and the customers were lined up from morning till night. From memory, Pott’s point and Kings Cross were also an area where some shops were allowed to be open after 6pm, which in Australia was groundbreaking for the time.  We loved living there and for me it came closest to living in a kind of Piazza Garibaldi of Naples.

The apartment that I had bought in 1963, cost Lbs 9.500. It came fully furnished and even had a Bakelite radio, all crockery and cutlery, small gas operated fridge. The bedroom had a curved bay window and the queen size bed had a bed head and foot end of the imitation wood laminated variety, very popular for the time and now sought after by collectors. The floor was carpeted by another Australian favourite phenomenon ‘wall to wall’. It could not look worse. The whole building had been used in the past by a company for daily rental as a kind of inner-city hotel but without restaurants or services. While I went about re-building the decorating business with printing of letterheads and matching envelopes, buying a car and connecting with previous clients, my wife started to make our living quarters less like a place whereby couples would have a quick horizontal folk dance and more like reflecting our own life. The ‘wall to wall’ was the first to go under which we found a delightful hardwood floor. We stained it a darker colour and put a Finnish hand-woven rug on it, which we had bought from Artes Studios in George Street, Sydney, together with some strongly coloured material to re- cover a simple settee. We re-painted the whole place and hung some of my paintings and wall hangings that we had been given in Finland

Of Cheap Wine & Jigsaw of Apartment living

17 Thursday Jun 2010

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 We were there at the tail end of summer and the wine vintage was in full swing. The region of the Languedoc is one of the largest red wine growing areas in the world. Apart from those working in shops or businesses, everyone else, during vintage, all and sundry are into grape harvesting and wine making. No matter where we went or where we stopped, the streets and kerbs were red with the flow of must and wine. We were stepping in it.

 The local farmers were immediately selling the freshly made wine and for less than the cost of a bottle of milk. The larger the quantity, the cheaper the price was. We ended buying the red wine in a five litre plastic container for which one had to pay a deposit. The drinking of those five litres had to be done fairly quickly because as air entered the container, the wine would oxidize and spoil rapidly. We would soon adhere to the routine of buying fresh trout with stick bread from the local boulangerie, fry up garlic in some very excellent olive oil, barbeque the trout and with the dipping of the bread into the oil and garlic mixture eat the trout washed down with copious quantities of the cheap wine.

 The Languedoc area is the largest wine producing area in the world and this region alone produces more wine than the entire United States. During its frenzied vintage height, while we were there, our shoes and car tyres were red from the flooded roadside kerbs and guttering with the spoils of the wine making. I don’t know how, but during the couple of weeks of trout and red wine consumption I found enough sobriety reading a book found on the shelves in the dining room. It was George Perec’s; ‘Life, A User’s manual’. A  great story that involves a large jigsaw puzzle with people and their lives living in apartments forming the pieces of the jigsaw coming together bit by bit, a marvellous story

Home Birthing in the Inner West

14 Monday Jun 2010

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Home birthing.

In the same street but opposite, lived a man and a woman. She an artist, he an artist by exterior only. You know the type, totally esoteric in giving answers to even the simplest question. Unable to straight talk and everything imbued with a deep meaning but totally away from comprehension. He was on his third marriage and happily ignored his kids from previous encounters but always ready to criticise the terrible ‘middle classes’. His latest wife was pregnant and ready to ‘unpack’ the baby. Both were ardent believers in the alternative world of Bach remedies and early morning Chakras aligning themselves to magic columns and circles. The birth was going to be a ‘home under water birth’ in the garden and  after baby just born but still attached to umbilical cord, would be kept under water for the first five minutes of his or her life.  This was all part of the essential but incomprehensible deeper involvement of mysticism and very Sufism related multiple and opposite meanings.

The whole street would be kept informed and noise be kept to a minimum. The husband had rigged up an old cast iron bath with an empty 40 gallon drum elevated on bricks with a wood fire underneath next to the bath, and our old above ground pool pump would be circulating warm water from drum to the bath. The time had arrived and being mid winter the fire under the drum was kept up with a never ending supply of old timber remnants from renovations that seemed to be going on all year around everywhere.

Majestically and totally very hirsute, the huge form of the wife appeared. We had front stall looks from the upper storey of our house direct into their garden across the road. She plunged into the bath, ready for the delivery of this sub-marine baby. The moaning started and the husband was flat out stoking the fire and holding the wife submerged. The pump was revving at fever pitch circulating the water that was getting so hot at one stage that the wife had to get out letting things cool down a bit. In the meantime, the husband in an act of supreme solidarity, (his astral travel the night before had taken him to powerful and hitherto unknown regions) stripped off and stepped in the bath behind his wife. Both squatted down and he held her from behind, shouting ‘push, push’, you bitch, push!

She now had much less space and was holding her legs up in the air above the bath but also sometimes against the rim to help the pushing and straining. The screaming increased in intensity and volume, the timbre of her voice not unlike a badly tuned hurdy gurdy being played in a tiled underground rail tunnel in Moscow. Our kids and their friends were hanging out of the windows and still no sign of the underwater miracle. The dogs were howling and barking in tune with the screaming wife. This went on for a few hours with both getting in and out of the bath, adjusting the temperature and fire. Some of the neighbours were shrugging their shoulders and others voicing disapproval. Not a baby in sight and the crowds started dissipating. Out of the blue, a siren was getting closer and closer. An ambulance appeared, a stretcher was produced and the poor woman dripping and with skin like a plucked chicken was without further ado strapped in and carried to the ambulance. The husband still starkers standing on the road near the ambulance, with hanging testicles like walnuts in a sock, was muttering incantations, but the baby was delivered at the hospital, a little girl.

Up until this day no one ever found out who called the ambulance. I am still wondering myself!

Neanderthal Urgings

27 Thursday May 2010

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Why, of late, are people throwing rocks from overhead bridges at cars? A few have got killed that way. The government is now spending tens of millions putting metal mesh panelling several metres high and curving inwards to try prevent people hurling objects from bridges to cars being driven below them. In New South Wales at least, some of the mesh panels have native flowers impressed on them. I suppose in the hope that beautification of material, even as bland as mesh wire on overhead bridges, might deter rock throwers.

 There are now bridges over highways that are completely enmeshed with an all-round cage structure excluding the possibility of those Neanderthal creatures throwing anything at all. Where does this rock throwing urge come from and why? Some, with a bend to psycho babble, might argue it is men’s innate desire to go back to the cave. … Others might conclude that those that get up in the morning wanting to engage in rock throwing at cars would have to be diagnosed as being mentally unstable. With Australia’s poor record on mental health, it would not be at all surprising this to be the case. It mightn’t just be those rock throwers that are walking around in need of help.  Our jails often perform a duty belonging to mental health. In fact, many agree that our high rate of incarceration is due to those unfortunate enough to suffer from mental health problems ending up in jail. Those correctional institutions are lumbered with the extra role of a de-facto mental health institution as well as catering for genuine law breakers

The other habit for which no answer has popped up yet is the compulsion to scratch windows with sharp objects.   I presume many people must catch trains in the morning, not just with sandwiches in their briefcases, but also with Stanley knife, perhaps battery operated tools and routers, to put and engrave their weird messages on the windows. There is hardly a train that hasn’t had their windows scratched.  Even the top windows are given this treatment.  It means the vandal travellers are standing up on seats to do their work, or some might take stepladders as well. It is not just a single scratch in a moment of madness or a fleeting post relationship or failed marital flash-back, no, a continuous scratching backwards and forwards over and over again. The letter Z seems to dominate. Is it the literate joy of operators for the letter Z or is there some subliminal message that only the initiated understand? Again, analyst might well argue that this desire to leave messages has always been with us from the pre-historic scratchers of the Palaeolithic cave art of the South of France or the Egyptian Hieroglyphics’ of more recent times. Our own indigenous rock paintings are proof of people wishing to put feelings onto surfaces and make engravings or paintings.

The problem is that those trains will hardly be viewed in thousands of year’s time and one can only surmise, if no sense can be made of the messages now, how will it in anno 10510?

Almost all trains, even brand new ones, are damaged by those carving scratchers. It means there must be thousands of travellers engaged in this strange ritualistic social behaviour. Or, are we all close to being at the edge of suffering mental disorders? We pretend to be ‘normal’ and civilised but how close are we in being totally out of control? They certainly are out of control on our overhead bridges and suburban trains!

 We have seen the rioting and looting by people in countries suffering from enormous natural calamities such as earth quakes and tsunamis. In a relatively wealthy country such as Chile we saw TV footage of people fighting over cans of soft-drinks, carrying away radios and TV’s, items of clothing. Police and Army with guns at the ready were called in to restore order. In other words, people engaged in behaviour they would otherwise never engage in.  It is far easier to understand those people letting emotions get the better of them. Thousands of people lost their loved ones. Children, parents, friends, neighbours, all those gone in a flash. Hundreds of thousands are without home or shelter. Lives totally disrupted.

Here in the perennial stableness of Australia we do not have those natural calamities, oh well, the drought excluding, or a call back on some new priapism suffering cars, the cancellation of a cricket or footie match!

 I doubt though that drought stricken farmers have taken to hurling rocks or scratching train windows. We complain about public transport but at the same time thousands who use the public facility also damage them. Who does all that scratching and why?

 Is there despite this stableness and calm an undercurrent of terrible frustrations only a nano moment away from people close to the edge? Do they see hurling rocks or damaging properties as a way of getting contentedness or a fulfilling of lives otherwise lacking?  What goes on in those minds that open their Stanley knife and start scratching or slashing the windows and seats? Perhaps we ought to be tolerant and accept a behaviour that releases some stresses which would otherwise express itself in random dog strangling, bouts of faeces throwing, or worse, in homicide.

It is hard to put a reason for vandalising. I sometimes wonder if drugs might have something to do with behaviour that make people do certain things.  Are they having meth crystals melting away in their cavities somewhere?  Look at those sprayers on suburban fences and private property. Spray cans are now kept behind lock and key in shops and proof of age is required. Some of those spray paint pictures are nice, especially on endless boring and forgotten walls adjacent to railway lines.

Anyway, next time you are in the train it could well be you who can’t resist the urge to start scratching ZZDIOt Zr^) Za##mbod on the window.

Apropos; do women scratch windows or hurl rocks?

Neighbours and Weddings

15 Saturday May 2010

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May 15, 2010 by gerard oosterman

Neighbours.

It was during those turbulent years when it seemed there would never come a time whereby the jackhammers and air compressors would finally be silenced during the Inner West Renovation Revolution, roughly between1968-1996. Yet, and out of the blue, there was a period of eerie quietness coming from next door. We managed to get a couple of neighbours, highly respectable journalists, who were not only quiet and disinterested in extending bathrooms or bedrooms, they also never seemed to talk to each other, never uttered a sound. The only time we were annoyed was at 4am each morning when loud music would be put on. It was a commercial station with lots of washing powder jingles. Our house was solid but did have a section joined onto theirs. Our bedroom shared a common wall but of solid sandstone. The radio started to rattle me and subsequent to holding out for a few weeks, (for the sake of good neighbourly manners) I asked for the radio to be turned down or preferably switched off. The request remained unheeded. With rising anger, reaching the stage I would now wake up at 3.45 am, in anticipation, I rushed out with murder intentions having grown fatter. I banged on the door. She opened and I announced; if you don’t fucking well switch of the radio I will fucking well ram it down your throat. Not a single note, ever. Total silence, almost!

One morning, at a decent time, a shrill voice from next door; Oh my god, I’ve got jelly all over me, oh no, no! Male voice; it is normal; it is normal, take a shower. Woman’s voice; No it is not, I was sleeping, go to Hospital; go to see the doctor, you bastard. You sicken me.

 My guilt went into automatic. Is this why the radio was always on so loud, hiding sounds of healthy domesticity? Would it have made a difference if a classical music station was being played?

It was after the ‘jelly all over’ couple had moved out that a couple with a child moved in next door. They were very nice but did decide to have an in-ground pool and extension to veranda being built. The in-ground was in-rock, and the jackhammers were feasting on it for months. Finally, they ceased and water filled the pool. With the pool and the very large veranda eating almost into our lounge room space, the couple decided to have a friend’s wedding at their place. I suppose, it was also a way of showing off, with pride, the glory of their renovated and extended house.

 The wedding would be day time and scaffolding with planking was erected over the pool and bride and groom would be joined in matrimony above water. Next door, on the other side there was a very large and high timber house of many stories and balconies. It was a perennial construction in progress with entire floors or verandas being added at the owner’s whim. The architect owner had a loose arrangement of many people living there, including students, musicians and others with undefinable aims or jobs. It could almost be seen as a neo Haight-Ashbury commune of The Inner West. It was totally predictable that the wedding would be overlooked by the hordes of marriage sceptics next door and it was. The architect owner, the essence of Aussie larrikin, in torn shorts and underpants bulging out on one side, shouting friendly greetings and best wishes to the couple to be married right underneath. Others joined in but with disparaging remarks such as ‘the best of luck’ or ‘you’ll be sinking it to-night’. All in all, it subdued the dignity of the occasion, lowered the standards a bit. The best was yet to come!

The evening was going to be the giving away of the bride with the bridal dance and then the white limousine with chauffeur would take the wedded couple to their honey moon abode in Terrigal. We were told that Spanish maids would be doing the serving of drinks and food. My brother who lived next door to the architect’s place had twin sons into their teen years.  Being close to Sydney’s harbour foreshore and so many already doing the composting of scraps, there was an overabundance of rats which were often seen scurrying from bin to bin. One such rat had died and been lying around for a couple of days. The brother’s twins had decided to exercise balance and ingenuity by tying the rat with a piece of string to the end of a large bamboo stick. The architect’s house had a small forest of very high bamboo growing wild. The sound of the bamboo brushing up against each other during windy weather made a lovely sound. Anyway, the rat on a string at the end of this long stick was attached to the entrance gate of where the wedding evening was getting in full stride. The stick with rat hanging was cantilevered in such a way that whenever the gate was opened, a string that was tied over the back of a tree would raise the stick with the dead rat at the end in full view of the arriving quests. The quests did not want to spoil the trouble that the host had gone through and no one mentioned this strange welcome when going through the gate. It was only after the bride and groom were taken to their limousine that the rat popped up for its last time. My brother’s sons were immediately suspected and confessed after some questioning the next day.

 Our friendly next door neighbour mentioned the rat debacle to me and I answered with a very insipid,’ oh you mean that rat, the one that has been lying around for a couple of days’. As if?