A compacted limestone and gravel roadway borders the front of the property. Resting on gently rising ground carpeted with itch-provoking Buffalo grass is an unassuming white, mid forties, Fibro house. From the lawn, curved steps lead up to the front porch with its pillar-box red cement and two white pillars. An Australian wattle, gloriously golden in spring-time when it wantonly casts its flowers across the lawn, stands graciously in the side garden with a few shrubs on either side. Two rose gardens set within the lawn provide colour and contrast through spring to Autumn.
The main bedroom is on the right-hand side of the house, its windows facing out to the lawn. The lounge room is on the left with its chimney reaching towards a pale blue sky. From the front door a narrow hallway opens to the lounge room on the left with its polished floor boards; the kitchen with its green linoleum, bench, sink and wood stove is directly ahead. To the right of the kitchen is the bathroom while the left of the kitchen is the dining room which opens into the lounge; the only furniture is a sideboard and a banksia table and chairs, their deep blue seat coverings contrasting with the polished table and rich jarrah floor boards. The window at the end of the dinning room offers nothing more than a picket fence and a part of the neighbour's backyard.
Running off from the kitchen along the length of the back of the house there is an enclosed louvred veranda. Walk through the kitchen to the verandah and, before opening the door leading out to the back yard, look to the left and you will see that there is a room at the end of the veranda - my bedroom. If you open the door you will see a room painted in predictable soft colours with the usual splash of white on the window frames and door.
This was how I remember it until I was about ten years old and sufficiently articulate to argue with boyhood passion for a repaint in the colours of my beloved West Perth football club, blue and red. My mother demurred, strongly I suspect; I pleaded. Dad saw sense and after a weekend of painting my room was transformed.
I soon came to love this reverberating blue and red room where I could read about the feats of Biggles, the dare-devil pilot and adventurer whose actions riveted my eyes to the page as I lived with him through his many adventures; alternatively, I would pour over Phantom comics, comfortable in the fact that in both of these worlds good would always win over evil.
Although my room was not large, there was sufficient floor space near the door to build trucks, bridges and cranes with my Meccano set, leaving behind the odd screw, nut or Meccano part to be busily gathered up, along with complaints from my mother, as she swept the floor. A other times , I would fiddle with my home-made crystal set searching for a radio station or listen, totally absorbed, to the radio broadcast of cricket and football, hearing the roar of the crowd and feeling the atmosphere as it seeped through the louvres. Soon the crowd and I became one.
But that was 'inside' - it was 'outside' that called me most of the time, as it does today. The idea of the physical landscape was etched early on in my mind, which probably explains my interest in the Impressionists and landscape painting generally. From time to time the backyard of my childhood replays itself across the screen of my mind. A montage of brightly coloured images randomly sequenced. The 44 gallon drum that I used to put on its rusting side, stand on, and then 'walk' it across and down the back lawn; the old wooden fruit box I used as hurdle practice until one afternoon its rusty nails ripped open the side of my leg resulting in stitches, a tetanus needle, heavy bandaging and more time than I liked 'inside'. The wood heap that I could stand on and look into the neighbour's back yard searching for something, anything, to fire my imagination and the cool-dark underneath the house that became a refuge on hot summer days. The large apricot tree with its luscious yellow fruit, an almond tree that feed mainly the parrots. The grape vines that provided sweet juicy berries shot through with sweetness and sun light. The huge lemon tree behind the laundry thrived on the water that came from the troughs used for rinsing the washed clothes that had been boiling in the copper alongside, which, at Christmas time, was used to cook the Christmas ham.
The backyard was about activity and imagination, the playing out of the present and some undefined future amongst the sunlight and shadows, recognising that black and white were unreliable categories in such a dynamic world, where the realm of light, colour and shade that inevitably merged into darkness returned each morning and called, siren-like, to entice me once again into sunlight and shadow.
In summer, at one end of the lawn, were the dahlias - over a metre tall. Their flowers formed a kaleidoscope of red, orange, yellow, burgundy and white. Somewhere there is a sepia photo of me at about the age of eight standing in the flower bed surrounded by dahlias taller than me. I love that photo, revealing perhaps the stirrings of my early interest in gardens. The lawn space was, for a brief time, also a cricket wicket until the number of broken louvres proved too much for my parents.
Once I reached High School age I shared time between the more physical activities on the lawn and my 'laboratory', which was nothing more than a space in the outside laundry, adjacent to the toilet, across from the grape vines and apricot tree. A bench had been set up there for my Chemistry set. There was a Bunsen burner as well as a test tube rack, test tubes, a test tube holder, funnel, eye dropper, glass beakers, a couple of glass flasks and a few chemicals - safety glasses or gloves were not a part of my kit! I spent my time shaping glass under the flame of the Bunsen burner, mixing chemicals and perfecting the art of producing rotten egg gas, much to the discomfort of my friends.
As I moved into my teens it was the oval opposite that became the magnet. Here I could play cricket and football, run laps, fly the balsa planes that I made, catch tadpoles in the two swamps that that were either side of the grassed area and dream of heroic deeds on the sporting field.
Later, when playing under sixteen cricket for Scarborough the practice nets on the far side of the ground, visible from our front porch, became my focus and my training ground. I was acutely aware that my mother was not reluctant to stand on our front porch and cast a motherly glance across the oval to see that I was still there and had not slipped behind the paper barks at the northern end of the swamp 'where things happened'!
It was at the cricket nets that, much to my parent's horror, I was photographed one afternoon by the evening paper, The Daily News. They were even more startled when, later in the week, an action photo of me and one of my teammates appeared under the headline These Boys Are Good Now. Looking back over time I can only be amused by the accuracy of that headline.
The oval remains, but the swamps are gone, there are more turf wickets in the centre and the grass is thicker, greener and better groomed. When I look across its expanse I am bemused by the fact it seems not that long ago I was there, a kid, kicking a football, running in to bowl or collecting tadpoles from the swamp.
The small white Fibro house with its back veranda opening onto lawn and trees, a place of movement, sun and shade has made way for two large modern houses that stare sternly across a small patch of neatly trimmed lawn with manicured gardens containing a meticulously planted array of anonymous plants.
