The Allensons.
The closest thing in Belfield to hippies lived up the street and around the corner.
Janelle and Marlon Allenson were the cool parents in our neighbourhood. Marlon had shoulder length hair, was tall and lanky and good looking, with a casual air, a broad toothy smile and bell bottom jeans. His wife Janelle was slender and brown, with long dark waist length hair, a typical hippie mum in suburban Sydney. There were three children, Jodie, the eldest girl, and two younger brothers, Bryce and Benjamin. Jodie was very beautiful, with high cheekbones, straight chestnut hair, boyish in jeans and a check shirt. Bryce was freckled and my age, we would share games with our space toys, and Ben was the youngest, quiet to the point of being almost mute, dreamy and soft and always in a world of his own. Ben would follow us wordlessly, smiling, and behind him, their dog beau, a poodle who seemed to be doing a continual head count of his young charges, anxious and kind.
Their double brick house had been built at the same time as mine, just after world war two ended, and the suburb sprung up to house returned servicemen and their growing families, at one time in the late 1940's boasting the most children of any street in the state. The baby boom. By the 1970s, young couples could be granted one of these homes and slowly pay it off, as my parents were doing. Their house was dark, and built close to what had become a very busy road, so it was rarely quiet, the front rooms rarely used, and most of the living was done in the dining room and out in the back yard, where, of course, a rope hammock swung in the breeze under the carport. I spent many Summer afternoons playing in that yard with Bryce as he was closest to my age, but it wasn't unusual for all the kids in the street to be in and out of each others houses, screen doors slamming open and shut and the buzzing of flies.
Janelle always seemed to me to have crash landed in this suburban enclave against her will, and she slithered around that dark house with its potted palms and macrame planters like a snake trying to find the way out if its cage. Her dissatisfaction was palpable, her sexuality simmered at about the same temperature as her anger, which often spat out of her without warning at her husband, her children, and the neighbourhood kids, if you happened to call in to watch Saturday morning cartoons on the wrong Saturday.
Carrying what I know now was a hefty joint, Janelle wafted, a few inches above the ground, from room to room on a cloud of patchouli wearing nothing but a big string of beads, angrily mumbling some vindictive curse or conjuring some spell at the husband who had marooned her in that house, in this boring suburb. She would pass the doorway of the kids rooms as we were playing in there, her kids never batted an eyelid at the fact their mother was completely naked in front of their friends. There was no embarrassment in their house about bodies and naturalness. They weren't like the other people on the block.
It was always an exciting time and their house came to life whenever there was an impending visit from Janelle's sister, Aunty Beryl. Their house seemed less dark and foreboding, more light and green. Beryl was yin to her sisters yang, a breeze to Janelle's storm clouds, in blonde hair and blue jeans and seemingly not a care for anything in the world. I don't know where she lived or where she came from but it may as well have descended direct from the clouds of Xanadu for how different she was to any adult I knew. Janelle and Beryl would huddle together, smoking cigarettes and lying in the hammock, and Janelle was less intense and laughed and didn't mind the kids so much, that or she was to stoned to care/notice them. Too stoned to care or notice them seemed a way of life.
Once during one of these visits, I found myself in their dining room at their rattan table, giant wall-sized Hawaiian tropics photo mural adorning one wall, with Bryce and Aunty Beryl. She was holding court on the advantages of natural eating and raw food. Eating your food, raw. She had a basket with some mushrooms in it. I had never seen one and certainly never eaten one. There were no mushrooms on the menu at my house or anywhere we went to eat. Beryl taunted me that I had never eaten a mushroom and that they were delicious. Especially raw. Slowly she sliced a big field mushroom, about the size of her palm, into pieces like an orange. "Go on, try it, they're good for you " she said. I picked up one of the leathery looking pieces and slowly took a bite. I chewed it, swallowed, it tasted awful, its texture how I imagined it might feel to eat a spider. Beryl laughed good naturedly and shrugged, her cowboy boots up on the edge of the chair. She wore lapis lazuli jewellery and big blue orbs of it hung around her neck and from her ears like planets, standing out against her blonde streaked hair, which seemed permanently back-lit and flowing in the breeze, even indoors.
Occasionally as a child you have fleeting glimpses of the different ways in which adults can live their lives, different from anyone you knew, from anyone in your family, making their own choices with nobody around to stop them, and it is tantalizing.
Their furniture was hippie heaven. Apart from the batik bedspreads, rattan furniture and Hawaiian murals, their toilet was wallpapered with black and white bare breasted ladies, Aubrey Beardsley knock-off prints, potted palms and yet more macrame, and on the back of the toilet door, I kid you not, a full length mirror. As you sat on the toilet you could see yourself, sit down and take a long hard look at yourself in those moments when you waited on your body to perform its natural functions. It was so hippie. A mirror. On the back of the toilet door. My mother thought it was the weirdest thing in the entire world and mentioned it often. My parents hated hippies, anyone seeking an alternate lifestyle was an idiot, as far as they were concerned.
The one thing their house did have in common with all of the others in the street was that here were often rowdy fights between Janelle and Marlon, and I can recall escaping one at my house for theirs, and just happening to arrive at the wrong moment, with one in full swing, being screamed at to go home by this distraught banshee whose long brown hair flipped and flared. I remember Bryce being so embarassed. Downcast we took the dog, went to a neighbours yard and played under the tree until his house, viewable at a distance but still within earshot, seemed quiet enough for him to return to. In the baking summer sun of those long school holidays that went on seemingly with no end, too hot to play outside but too heated inside. The mint green fibro rear of their house would eventually breath a heavy sigh of relief as Janelle crashed and Jodie, Bryce and Ben would slink back into it's mouth, grounded for a few days, quiet over their corn flakes at breakfast.
Their time on our block came to an end as Marlon got a job with a very fashionable sunglasses company, and they moved to the coast. I don't recall saying goodbye or seeing them before they left, and perhaps I didn't. I never knew what became of them. Their house sat empty for a while before a new family moved in, with two sisters Sandra, short and round, and Susan, tall and skinny like an emu. How strange to go to your friends home and enter their bedrooms only to find a new family and new children in their place. Where there was once Hawaiian palms, now Mission Brown paint, the mirrored toilet and naked lady wallpaper long gone, banished to another era with the bell bottoms and the macrame owl wall hangings. Not the smell of vegetarian cooking but of a house that needed a good clean and some air, but still often the hushed hum of parents trying to row slightly out of earshot, not in front of the neighbours.
Fifteen or so years later and I am in my twenties and living in the city. My best friend at the time, Mitch, is having trouble finding a place to live and moved into a share house with a guy he didn't know well. He was there for such a brief period that I didn't visit him in this new flat, and he quickly moved into a new terrace with some English girls who worked in a pub just a few weeks later. Catching up after his two moves I was sitting in his bedroom which overlooked busy Kings Cross road.
"So why didn't you like the other place?" I asked.
"Oh, the guy was always stoned, he honestly was a bit of a loser and it was a bit depressing, he was really quiet and strange and we really had nothing in common. I think he moved out anyway and went somewhere else"
As he told me the story, I flipped through the tv guide. There on the competition pages, someone had filled out, but not cut out and mailed, a competition coupon, the address, Mitch's brief abode, the name: Bryce Allenson.
Then I realized: my best friend had moved in with my old neighbour and playmate, and having not been to the flat (I always visited Mitch at home, why had I not been there?) I had missed him. In the brief instance I may have had to join the dots of what had happened to my friends, I went one way, he went another, so close by. Gone like a quick beating of wings.
I quizzed Mitch. Yes, there was a sister named Jodie and she had become a model in Italy and moved to Europe and the mother, who was reportedly still beautiful and wild, had accompanied her there. The younger brother, dreamy little Ben, had turned to hard drugs, apparently without much recourse for a happy outcome. The father, remarried elsewhere.
On a mailbox in black ink close by after thirty years it can still be read "SUSAN IS A STORK", but Susan is not in that house and neither is her sister Sandra and neither is her mother and neither is Jodie and her family and Beau the dog and neither am I, sitting on their toilet with my elbows on my knees and my jeans around my ankles, between potted palms and macrame taking a good long look at myself and wondering where I fit into this world where I will be able, hopefully, to make my own choices about who I am and how I live and what I put in my house and live like a hippy or a person who doesn't care what other people think, if I want to. So many possibilities.
Janelle and Marlon Allenson were the cool parents in our neighbourhood. Marlon had shoulder length hair, was tall and lanky and good looking, with a casual air, a broad toothy smile and bell bottom jeans. His wife Janelle was slender and brown, with long dark waist length hair, a typical hippie mum in suburban Sydney. There were three children, Jodie, the eldest girl, and two younger brothers, Bryce and Benjamin. Jodie was very beautiful, with high cheekbones, straight chestnut hair, boyish in jeans and a check shirt. Bryce was freckled and my age, we would share games with our space toys, and Ben was the youngest, quiet to the point of being almost mute, dreamy and soft and always in a world of his own. Ben would follow us wordlessly, smiling, and behind him, their dog beau, a poodle who seemed to be doing a continual head count of his young charges, anxious and kind.
Their double brick house had been built at the same time as mine, just after world war two ended, and the suburb sprung up to house returned servicemen and their growing families, at one time in the late 1940's boasting the most children of any street in the state. The baby boom. By the 1970s, young couples could be granted one of these homes and slowly pay it off, as my parents were doing. Their house was dark, and built close to what had become a very busy road, so it was rarely quiet, the front rooms rarely used, and most of the living was done in the dining room and out in the back yard, where, of course, a rope hammock swung in the breeze under the carport. I spent many Summer afternoons playing in that yard with Bryce as he was closest to my age, but it wasn't unusual for all the kids in the street to be in and out of each others houses, screen doors slamming open and shut and the buzzing of flies.
Janelle always seemed to me to have crash landed in this suburban enclave against her will, and she slithered around that dark house with its potted palms and macrame planters like a snake trying to find the way out if its cage. Her dissatisfaction was palpable, her sexuality simmered at about the same temperature as her anger, which often spat out of her without warning at her husband, her children, and the neighbourhood kids, if you happened to call in to watch Saturday morning cartoons on the wrong Saturday.
Carrying what I know now was a hefty joint, Janelle wafted, a few inches above the ground, from room to room on a cloud of patchouli wearing nothing but a big string of beads, angrily mumbling some vindictive curse or conjuring some spell at the husband who had marooned her in that house, in this boring suburb. She would pass the doorway of the kids rooms as we were playing in there, her kids never batted an eyelid at the fact their mother was completely naked in front of their friends. There was no embarrassment in their house about bodies and naturalness. They weren't like the other people on the block.
It was always an exciting time and their house came to life whenever there was an impending visit from Janelle's sister, Aunty Beryl. Their house seemed less dark and foreboding, more light and green. Beryl was yin to her sisters yang, a breeze to Janelle's storm clouds, in blonde hair and blue jeans and seemingly not a care for anything in the world. I don't know where she lived or where she came from but it may as well have descended direct from the clouds of Xanadu for how different she was to any adult I knew. Janelle and Beryl would huddle together, smoking cigarettes and lying in the hammock, and Janelle was less intense and laughed and didn't mind the kids so much, that or she was to stoned to care/notice them. Too stoned to care or notice them seemed a way of life.
Once during one of these visits, I found myself in their dining room at their rattan table, giant wall-sized Hawaiian tropics photo mural adorning one wall, with Bryce and Aunty Beryl. She was holding court on the advantages of natural eating and raw food. Eating your food, raw. She had a basket with some mushrooms in it. I had never seen one and certainly never eaten one. There were no mushrooms on the menu at my house or anywhere we went to eat. Beryl taunted me that I had never eaten a mushroom and that they were delicious. Especially raw. Slowly she sliced a big field mushroom, about the size of her palm, into pieces like an orange. "Go on, try it, they're good for you " she said. I picked up one of the leathery looking pieces and slowly took a bite. I chewed it, swallowed, it tasted awful, its texture how I imagined it might feel to eat a spider. Beryl laughed good naturedly and shrugged, her cowboy boots up on the edge of the chair. She wore lapis lazuli jewellery and big blue orbs of it hung around her neck and from her ears like planets, standing out against her blonde streaked hair, which seemed permanently back-lit and flowing in the breeze, even indoors.
Occasionally as a child you have fleeting glimpses of the different ways in which adults can live their lives, different from anyone you knew, from anyone in your family, making their own choices with nobody around to stop them, and it is tantalizing.
Their furniture was hippie heaven. Apart from the batik bedspreads, rattan furniture and Hawaiian murals, their toilet was wallpapered with black and white bare breasted ladies, Aubrey Beardsley knock-off prints, potted palms and yet more macrame, and on the back of the toilet door, I kid you not, a full length mirror. As you sat on the toilet you could see yourself, sit down and take a long hard look at yourself in those moments when you waited on your body to perform its natural functions. It was so hippie. A mirror. On the back of the toilet door. My mother thought it was the weirdest thing in the entire world and mentioned it often. My parents hated hippies, anyone seeking an alternate lifestyle was an idiot, as far as they were concerned.
The one thing their house did have in common with all of the others in the street was that here were often rowdy fights between Janelle and Marlon, and I can recall escaping one at my house for theirs, and just happening to arrive at the wrong moment, with one in full swing, being screamed at to go home by this distraught banshee whose long brown hair flipped and flared. I remember Bryce being so embarassed. Downcast we took the dog, went to a neighbours yard and played under the tree until his house, viewable at a distance but still within earshot, seemed quiet enough for him to return to. In the baking summer sun of those long school holidays that went on seemingly with no end, too hot to play outside but too heated inside. The mint green fibro rear of their house would eventually breath a heavy sigh of relief as Janelle crashed and Jodie, Bryce and Ben would slink back into it's mouth, grounded for a few days, quiet over their corn flakes at breakfast.
Their time on our block came to an end as Marlon got a job with a very fashionable sunglasses company, and they moved to the coast. I don't recall saying goodbye or seeing them before they left, and perhaps I didn't. I never knew what became of them. Their house sat empty for a while before a new family moved in, with two sisters Sandra, short and round, and Susan, tall and skinny like an emu. How strange to go to your friends home and enter their bedrooms only to find a new family and new children in their place. Where there was once Hawaiian palms, now Mission Brown paint, the mirrored toilet and naked lady wallpaper long gone, banished to another era with the bell bottoms and the macrame owl wall hangings. Not the smell of vegetarian cooking but of a house that needed a good clean and some air, but still often the hushed hum of parents trying to row slightly out of earshot, not in front of the neighbours.
Fifteen or so years later and I am in my twenties and living in the city. My best friend at the time, Mitch, is having trouble finding a place to live and moved into a share house with a guy he didn't know well. He was there for such a brief period that I didn't visit him in this new flat, and he quickly moved into a new terrace with some English girls who worked in a pub just a few weeks later. Catching up after his two moves I was sitting in his bedroom which overlooked busy Kings Cross road.
"So why didn't you like the other place?" I asked.
"Oh, the guy was always stoned, he honestly was a bit of a loser and it was a bit depressing, he was really quiet and strange and we really had nothing in common. I think he moved out anyway and went somewhere else"
As he told me the story, I flipped through the tv guide. There on the competition pages, someone had filled out, but not cut out and mailed, a competition coupon, the address, Mitch's brief abode, the name: Bryce Allenson.
Then I realized: my best friend had moved in with my old neighbour and playmate, and having not been to the flat (I always visited Mitch at home, why had I not been there?) I had missed him. In the brief instance I may have had to join the dots of what had happened to my friends, I went one way, he went another, so close by. Gone like a quick beating of wings.
I quizzed Mitch. Yes, there was a sister named Jodie and she had become a model in Italy and moved to Europe and the mother, who was reportedly still beautiful and wild, had accompanied her there. The younger brother, dreamy little Ben, had turned to hard drugs, apparently without much recourse for a happy outcome. The father, remarried elsewhere.
On a mailbox in black ink close by after thirty years it can still be read "SUSAN IS A STORK", but Susan is not in that house and neither is her sister Sandra and neither is her mother and neither is Jodie and her family and Beau the dog and neither am I, sitting on their toilet with my elbows on my knees and my jeans around my ankles, between potted palms and macrame taking a good long look at myself and wondering where I fit into this world where I will be able, hopefully, to make my own choices about who I am and how I live and what I put in my house and live like a hippy or a person who doesn't care what other people think, if I want to. So many possibilities.