On the last day, heading out for a morning
coffee, I noticed a garage sale at a nearby
house. There was lots of stuff I could have
bought - I have a penchant for old, handmade,
practical things - but there was only one I had to
have. A shallow drawer neatly made of pine and
particle board, divided into 28 matchbox-size
compartments, each row labelled in pencil with
letters of the alphabet, numerals 0 to 9, and
punctuation marks. It was clearly a typesetter’s
drawer from the pre-computer time when pages
of newspapers and books were laid out by hand,
each word and sentence built from individual
blocks in metal or wood.
As a journalist who began my career in the
dying days of hot-metal presses in the 1980s, I
was filled with instant nostalgia for the blueoveralled men who operated the typesetting
machines, the thunder of the printing presses,
In early December, before the holiday
crowds descended, I left Sydney for a solitary
week in a rented house on the NSW Central
Coast so I could clear my head of the year’s
clutter and sink into some writing for myself.
Whenever the words jammed, I went walking
through the bush or along the beach in a kind of
meditation that freed my mind and opened my
eyes.
While my imagination worked on invented
scenes, I started to notice my real surroundings
in detail, from the shape-shifting clouds to the
scribbly-barked trees and the plovers that herded
their tiny spotted chicks across a road. On my
first walk I picked up a few stray feathers, mostly
from parrots, pure white or tipped in orange or
lime green. Nature’s unpretentious perfection.