out of office

As the weather warms up and we begin to count down to sun-filled end-of-year breaks, four writers reflect on their most memorable summer holidays

Four writers reflect on their most memorable summer holidays.

Even when you were still a fair way away, once you’d crossed the bridge over the Murray River, you could smell the orange trees. Even when they weren’t in bloom, that sweet scent lingered.

My grandmother’s house was surrounded by rows of these trees and, at certain times of year, sunflowers too, Van Gogh style. My siblings and I played among the trees with cousins, ate the dripping fruit in our fists and lined them up along the road to be squashed by a car or ute when it passed, which was rare. We played by the river, too, catching yabbies on a string, getting our fishing lines hopelessly snagged in the towering river red gums.

My grandmother was born in this place. She was sent to boarding school in England. At the end of her schooling, she was offered a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London to study theatre directing, but her father ordered her to come home. She spent the rest of her life growing citrus, raising five children, painting and writing, and directing plays for the Country Women’s Association. She also co-wrote a history of the area – hers was the first book launch I went to.

Throughout my childhood we always holidayed at her place. When we moved interstate, it became the constant; so, too, when I moved overseas. Then one day we visited for a different reason. My elderly grandmother was dying. She lay prone in the nursing-home bed. Without her false teeth her mouth looked like a dark, sinking chasm. I told her anyway that I had started writing a novel.

After she died, my sister and I drove back to her house along the familiar roads winding between the orange trees. We slid all the windows down, that scent seeped into the vehicle.

The house and land were put on the market. I peered at photos of the place on the online real-estate pages. They’d taken the photo of the carport on an angle that made it look enormous, comically so, like some great modernist piece of architecture. The rooms my siblings and I once slept in were empty; my grandmother’s bedroom indistinguishable without its high bed and the Oil Of Ulan on the dresser. But none of this could disguise the place. Out the windows of those denuded rooms I could still glimpse the big, empty, white-blue sky.

My grandmother once told me that every story needed a love interest. She said this after I had submitted some snippets of writing to a London agent and they’d been rejected. She herself was not a woman who articulated love frequently, or even vocally, but it was still felt – in the way she would wait up for us to arrive for our holiday, for example, opening the side door as soon as our car crunched up the gravel drive.

Years after her death, I was lying awake in bed feeling nervous. My debut novel was about to be launched and I was having doubts. My work was in academia and advocacy where I could hide behind intellectualism and other people’s thoughts. This book was fiction but it still felt... exposing. Then the weirdest thing happened. I had this sensation of an elderly woman’s hand coming closer to mine in the dark, and then holding it.

I had never missed anyone or been truly alone before, and because my protagonist experiences isolation in the novel, I wanted to know what it felt like to really yearn for someone. I wanted to be able to empathise with her. I knew it was going to hurt, but the reality of this holiday was that my mind tore open and my soul ached.

When I first arrived, I met a Balinese family and lived with them in their compound until I found a house to rent. Inside the compound were five families, their lives intricately entwined. There were children, dogs and chickens running around everywhere. The eldest man in the family was almost 90 and he gave up his bed for me. I asked him where he would sleep and he told me he’d sleep outside under the stars, and that he preferred to sleep there anyway.

I fell head over heels for Bali. I loved the way women caressed tails of smoke to cleanse their hands before prayer. And I loved the gratitude of the Balinese people, offering flowers and sticky rice to their gods. The family I stayed with took me to their cousin’s wedding, which was three days of music, smoke, flowers, gold leaf and delicious Balinese buffets. I was given a traditional corset to wear – it buttoned so tight I could barely breathe – a lace top, pink lipstick and bold clip-on earrings. The outfit was unlike anything I had ever seen or worn and I felt beautiful.

THE DRIVE TO MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE WAS LONG FOR A KID. WE’D LEAVE WHEN SCHOOL BROKE UP, AND THEN DRIVE THROUGH THE NIGHT. BUT SOMETHING ALWAYS WOKE ME BEFORE WE GOT THERE. I THINK IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE SMELL. ZOË MORRISON is the author of Music And Freedom ($32.99, Vintage) WHEN I MOVED TO BALI TO WRITE MY SECOND NOVEL, I WAS 20 YEARS OLD AND READY TO TAKE ON THE WORLD. I ENVISIONED HOT YOGA CLASSES, WALKS THROUGH RICE PADDIES AT SUNRISE AND A MANUSCRIPT TO WOW MY PUBLISHER. IT WOULD BE THE ULTIMATE HOLIDAY, COSMIC BLISS. WHAT I GOT WAS VASTLY DIFFERENT.

In the days after the festivities, I explored mountain paths looking for a house. The place I ended up renting was a dream. It looked out over jungle, volcanoes, fruit trees and wildflowers. When I rode down the street on my motorbike, children ran from their houses, squealing and laughing, chasing after me. Everything was perfect, and then suddenly it wasn’t.

I have bipolar, and unexpectedly, I had a toxic reaction to one of my medications, which forced me to come off it completely. I experienced the worst highs and lows I’ve ever had, and I experienced them alone. Over the next two months, my world unravelled, but I stayed in Bali, determined to stick it out.

When I came home, I had 25,000 words, a mere fraction of the finished manuscript and what I’d hope to achieve. I was disappointed, but here’s the important bit... I held on to the threads of myself. I held on to the threads until they knitted back together. And when they did, I had the emotional experience to write a story that validated human suffering.

I haven’t lived through the same life events that my protagonist, Grace, has. But I have felt pain. Someone said to me recently, pain is pain and it doesn’t matter why you’re feeling it, if it’s real, it’s real. I matured a lot that holiday, and it allowed me to write a story that’s honest, because pain is brutally honest. I wrote a novel that shows how teenagers respond to grief and how messy that can be. Why? Because I wanted to show how things can be beautiful again.

The holiday didn’t go to plan, but how I felt on that holiday makes my story authentic. And though at times darkness seemed all-consuming, when I looked above the jungle to the night sky and saw the same stars as my loved ones, I didn’t feel so far away. The light was still burning, and it was as beautiful as ever.

I FELL IN LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT AT THE ARRIVALS GATE OF BERLIN AIRPORT NINE YEARS AGO. I LEFT MY VIBRANT, BUSY LIFE AS I KNEW IT IN SYDNEY FOR MY PERFECT-STRANGER SOULMATE – A CARING, FUN-LOVING AND HANDSOME GERMAN MAN, MR LINDEMANN.

Our conversations were made ridiculous by language barriers. We knew nothing of each other’s pasts, very little from our then-present lives and indeed nothing much of anything else at all about each other. Regardless, we were truly and madly in love at first sight.

I landed in Berlin just after Christmas for one week’s business, expecting a middle-aged woman to pick me up from the airport as a favour for my agent. Unable to make it that evening, she sent a colleague on her behalf, Mr Lindemann. Waiting until the arrivals gate cleared and no-one had collected me, I was ready to make a few calls and find my way to my rental apartment through the snow. Alas, I was approached by Mr Lindemann, asking, “Might you be Mademoiselle Gaston?”, apologising for his colleague’s absence and offering to carry my suitcase to his car. Mr Lindemann was expecting a middle-aged Australian artist in a turban with strings of earrings. We were certainly not looking for each other, yet all our stars aligned, and my heart was leaping quietly out of my chest as we wove our way through the terminal and to the car park. En route to my apartment, we could not stop laughing. Little did I know, he took the most circuitous route home on purpose.

Having had very few relationships in my life, I amazed myself by moving in with Mr Lindemann straight away, after knowing each other for only 45 minutes. Everything happened almost back to front – we were committed for life, then we got to know each other. I had never felt so comfortable and sure of anything. It was by far the craziest, most spontaneous yet wisest conviction I’ve ever had.

We lived for more than three years in the middle of Berlin in bohemian Kreuzberg, nestled above a falafel joint and a swingers’ club. I learned to speak German, continued to draw and paint, published my first book and sent large bodies of work around the world for shows. We went out dancing, spent time with friends, took regular trips around Europe and explored the German countryside. We stayed in old castles and pottered on pebbly beaches. Berlin is a restless, dynamic and intense city. It’s a creative mecca, and a fascinating melting pot of cultures and ideas.

Seeking something new and catering for my homesickness, we moved from Kreuzberg to an 1865 slab hut, the oldest home in NSW’S majestic Blue Mountains. We restored the historic home together, revived the orchard, sold it when it was done (no easy experience) and moved to Melbourne. For Mr Lindemann, Melbourne felt like the closest thing to Berlin in Australia.

On our seven-year anniversary, Mr Lindemann turned the back of our SUV into a bohemian caravan with floral quilts

SOPHIE HARDCASTLE is the author of Breathing Under Water ($19.99, Hachette Australia)

and cushions, knitted blankets and a couple of bottles of nice wine. He whisked us away to a quiet beach, proposing to me with heart palpitations at midnight. We got married in a paddock at an old country butter factory in Euroa last December, and now live on the Mornington Peninsula, between the bush and the beach. I’m painting, drawing, life-coaching and celebrating the release of my fourth book,

The Art Of Gratitude. Mr Lindemann coordinates weddings and events locally among the picturesque vineyards of Red Hill. I can hardly wait for him to come home from work every day.

Not that as a child I worried too much about the vagaries of managing an agricultural business. I was too busy running wild in the bush. In 1976, aged 10, my two brothers and I were enjoying the last few days of a long, adventure-filled summer holiday. And we hadn’t travelled anywhere. No packing cars, back-seat squabbling or “Are we there yet?”; instead we stayed on our family property. We swam in the creek, fished for yabbies, rode our motorbikes and built go-carts, crashing them magnificently as we raced down the side of the dam. Returning to school, albeit “at home”, wasn’t something to look forward to. All too soon our fortnightly lessons would arrive from the correspondence school, with Mum as teacher. My brothers and I grumbled at the thought of going back to school. Who wanted to learn when we could be playing in a 25,000-acre backyard?

I remember vague conversations between my parents of above-average rainfall to the east and brimming rivers and creeks that had the potential to swell the waterways downstream. However, when the rain began we kids paid little attention. We liked a bit of mud. We were experts at fully clothed mud starfishes and one of our specialties involved making mud-balls that we pelted at the long-suffering jackaroos from our treehouse.

Days later we stood at the rear of our garden looking across the paddock to where a moving sheet of water glistened. That afternoon we helped stack furniture and other items in the house in case the worst occurred. A massive job in a 22-room homestead. My brothers and I talked into the night of rising water, of sitting on the roof, of the house floating away on a muddy high tide. Luckily by mid-morning of the following day, although the water lapped the floorboards, the house remained dry. The shock of our land becoming a vast waterway was soon replaced by the novelty of a flood-imposed holiday. We were marooned on an island. There was no chance of a mail delivery and so our dreaded school lessons couldn’t arrive.

Excitedly, we made tents on the verandah with sheets and threw soft toys at the gauze windows dislodging the massing insects desperate to get inside. During the height of the flood, we took turns to motor out in the boat with Dad to collect the helicopter-dropped food parcels, and on other days we watched him fly away in the whirring machine to check on stranded livestock. There were snakes to be wary of as they glided across the water, wildlife to care for, such as baby birds we placed in the outside laundry to keep dry, and our dogs, which we rubbed down with eucalyptus oil and lemon to protect them from the mosquitoes and sandflies.

When the water receded, the countryside was a land of smelly sludge. Dad and Mum’s faces said it all. We’d lost 12,000 head of merino sheep. They melted away, weighed down by their wool. We understood what disaster meant. This, combined with the monotony of spending days indoors, safe from water-borne diseases and the dangers of submerged objects, meant we didn’t complain when the mail finally arrived.

MEREDITH GASTON is the author of The Art Of Gratitude ($24.99, Lantern) I WAS BORN IN A DROUGHT YEAR. WITH MY BASSINET PLACED ON THE HOMESTEAD VERANDAH, LINED WITH WET TOWELS AND AN ELECTRIC FAN PLACED NEARBY, I LEARNED FROM AN EARLY AGE THAT LIFE IN THE BUSH REVOLVED AROUND THE SEASONS. NICOLE ALEXANDER is the author of River Run ($32.99, Bantam Australia)