Fiction from The Literary Review

The Australia Stories

TODD JAMES PIERCE

My grandfather was a free settler; that is, he was not a convict. He came to Australia because his family did not have much land. For a while, he built stonework houses then later, when the economy turned bad, helped build the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Sydney Harbour Bridge is a beautiful piece of architecture: sandstone pillars at either end, the bridge itself a bronze arch, the road passing along the bottom. Because of its shape, locals call it “the coathanger.” He worked six days a week, first on the foundation then later spot welding. On Sundays, he went to First Anglican and spent his afternoons in the yard, trimming the lawn with a small pair of hand clippers because a lawnmower was an unnecessary expense.
      My grandparents had two children, a boy and a girl. They both attended The Christian Brother's School, were baptized in the Anglican faith, were brought up to believe in the official history of Captain James Cook and of Governor Arthur Phillips. Australia, at that time, was a wide open space, the bush, the black stump, the end of the civilized earth. Its main exports, wool and minerals. Its population, less than five million. Its one dream, to come into its own so that its citizens might be made whole again. Above my grandfather's bed hung both the cross and a picture of Queen Elizabeth, as though the two, in some larger scheme, might be equal.
      After finishing the Harbour Bridge, my grandfather had difficulty locating work, even part-time or what he called casual labor. For a while he worked as a carpenter's assistant and later as an interior painter, but by then he drank most nights, Bitters his favorite beer. The days he spent in his bedroom, the curtains drawn, his life bankrolled by the dole. The nicest thing he ever did: he gave my mother money for the trip to America so she could be with my father, Robert Browne. The meanest: he forbade her from dating her first love, an aboriginal man of mixed blood.
      My grandfather spent his final days walking along the North Heads. There has always been speculation about his last years—why he moved north, why he did not try to win back my grandmother—but my opinion is this: he wanted to walk along the shore, looking out to the Pacific, and remember the land of his childhood. When he was seventeen a ship brought him from England to Sydney; he married at nineteen, had two children, worked for years, lost almost everything by the age of fifty. The only visible remains of his life, a few houses he helped build in the Western Suburbs and the impressive bridge that connected the two halves of the city. He died in bed, June 14, 1972, his hands folded neatly across his chest, his eyes already closed, his liver no longer able to support a man of his habits. Beside his bed, The Book of Common Prayer. On its first page, an inscription, “To my large-hearted son who always placed his hopes in the colonies—love, mum.”

     My grandmother descended from convicts. Convict lineage is now a mark of pride among many Australians, though it was not always that way. She rarely spoke of her own grandfather—a Welshman sentenced for pickpocketing—except to say he had a fine sense of humor and came good in the end.
      My grandmother, herself, was born in The Blue Mountains. The Blue Mountains are an hour west of Sydney—sharp granite peaks forested with gum trees so thick they give off a light blue haze. She attended a small, one-room bush school up through Year Six. After Year Six, she helped her mother who worked as a seamstress. During the day, my grandmother sewed woolen jackets and ankle-length dresses—she was particularly gifted with lace-work—and in the evenings, she read by herself: The History of British Kings, Bleak House, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice. She loved histories, romances, and almost anything to do with England.
      When my grandmother was sixteen, she met my grandfather, a man who ventured into the Mountains only to help build the old May Cottage, which is in the township of Katoomba. The May Cottage overlooked the Jamison Valley—the gum trees, the streams, the ancient stone pillars. My grandfather built two stone fireplaces and two stone chimneys, neither of which are still present today, but were considered exceptional during his time, fine English stonework, a good eye for arrangement, careful overall design. My grandmother was enamored by him—his blue eyes, the turn of his accent, his diligence and handiwork. His first words to her: “How does a bloke keep the bloody mossies off himself on a day like today?” His second: “If you don't mind me noticing, Miss, you're prettier than any of the girls I knew back in London.”
      They were married six months later, my grandmother believing they'd one day move to England and start a family. My grandfather wanted to return home, money filling his pockets, and purchase a small house. He pictured himself as a man who migrated to the colonies then returned, success evident in him. The twist to their tale is summed up in two words: The Depression.
      After my grandfather could no longer find work as a stone mason, he took government work, building the bridge. My grandmother raised produce in her garden: mandarins, kumquats, tomatoes, and cauliflower. By now, her two children had been born, William and Sarah, their hands attached to the hem of her skirt as she stood at the farmers market each Wednesday, selling fresh fruits and vegetables. Each week, they were lucky to leave with enough money to buy fish or a small chicken.
      It was during this period, everyone figures, that my grandmother developed her interest in horticulture. The lawn, which my grandfather cut every Sunday, was gradually replaced by rose bushes, petunias, snap dragons, and when the depression was over, a sandstone birdbath and patio table. Spanish roses corkscrewed up through the trellis; tulips emerged each Spring; alyssum blossomed white as snowcover along the ground. It was all terribly English, everyone said. A rose garden. A tea garden. A place fit for the Queen.
      It was as though she were preparing herself for her life overseas—that English life, a Welsh cottage, perhaps a Cornish country home. That life, however, never emerged. There was the depression, the children, the Second World War. In photographs, my grandmother appears hopeful, then distanced, and finally removed. The plants in her backyard gradually changed from roses to wattle, from watercress to warratars, from an English to an Australian sensibility, the ground filling itself with plants locals called “natives,” until my grandparents, late one May, lost their house to the bank, the two of them retreating to a two-bedroom unit.
      The rest is not difficult to understand. My grandmother had a growing fondness for Sydney, for The Blue Mountains, for the state of New South Wales itself. At night, she no longer read Dickens or Austen, instead works of local history: Australia, Our Home and The Founding of a Southern Nation. My grandfather continued to drink, selecting a pub where other men like himself gathered, men who left England only to find a disappointment too great to carry home. At this time my grandmother began to write: essays on her experience at the bush school, a memoir of The Blue Mountains, one chapter beginning “As the granddaughter of a convict, I have the burden of isolation, the longing to be reunited to England, but only now, as an aged woman, can I see the foolishness of such desire.” She was not able to publish her work, many original pages remain missing. After giving an account of her life in writing, she decided to leave my grandfather and return to the Mountains, where she purchased a small cottage not far from where she met him, his two stone chimneys still standing, finely crafted monuments to his earlier life, though they would soon be torn down.
      She spent her final years leading public bushwalks into the valley of her childhood—down The Giant Stairway, past the stony Three Sisters, past Sublime Point, on toward Wentworth Falls. She showed visitors how to make bush-devils; she pointed out wallaby dens, rosella nests, places where the aborigines once walked. At night, she made campfires: she grilled snaggers and onions; she made billy tea in a large metal pot; she bedded down beneath a canopy of gum trees, the electricity of stars her only light, her dreams of merry old England a distant memory, nothing more than a silly girlhood desire.
      During these years, my grandmother wrote her now-famous essays. In them, she talks about the happiness she found alone in the mountains. “There are many things I did not know,” she wrote. “I was brought up to believe a good English woman found contentment in marriage and in family, but here I am, in my own cottage, perfectly content. I have never felt so at peace as I do now. I miss my husband, I miss a family house, but I wouldn't trade what I have for any of those things.” (Bush School, page 23)
      No one knows how my grandmother met her death: two weeks after my grandfather passed away, she simply left her house for a private bushwalk—no tourists this time, just a solo walkabout. The last person to see her, Mrs. Judith O'Neal, watched her descend The Giant Stairway then make her way east, moving slowly through the underbrush. Four days later, servicemen searched the area, discovering only her scarf and, three kilometers later, her hat. The police report officially listed her as missing, not dead. People later claimed to see lights in her old cottage, but that was never confirmed. After her disappearance, my mother moved back to Australia and lived in my grandmother's cottage for eight years.
     

     My grandmother's cottage was a small two-bedroom house, centered on a nice plot of land. It was made from wood, roofed with corrugated metal, a beautiful verandah across its front, windows opening to the east and west in such a way to catch the sun. Inside, she had a potbelly stove as well as a stone fireplace similar in style to the ones my grandfather once built, but not as well crafted. During her final years, she painted her cottage Federation Colors, that is, green and gold, as a way of showing pride in her native land. The colors, as strange as they sound, were popular for a time, blending well with the surrounding gum trees and wattle.
      Following my grandmother's death, my mother made numerous trips to Australia—summer trips, Christmas trips, a few weeks squeezed into March, trips to see my uncle and old friends, but trips mainly to visit the cottage which held the mysteries of my grandmother's life. As best she could, my mother assembled my grandmother's writings, collecting some essays into one published book: The Bush School and Other Early Experiences. The collection was favorably reviewed in The Sydney Morning Herald, earning a coveted Phillips Award for Historical Memoir, and sent back to press eight times by its publisher, MacMillan Australia, in its first year alone. Later, it was published in England, in Canada, and finally, a small paperback edition in America, its title changed, of course, to Outback Australia: One Woman's Tale.
      In Australia, her book was scripted into a six-part radio drama, broadcast over the ABC—that is, the Australian Broadcasting Company—which proved to be one of its most popular shows that year. In it, she is depicted as an early feminist, a woman who, once her children were grown, left her husband and lived by herself. In many ways, she turned her back on tradition: she made enough money to buy a cottage, she became the first female tour guide in the Mountains, and she solicited the friendship of many aborigines, mostly women. Around Sydney, she became known as “the woman who walked off into the valley and did not return.” People speculated that she joined a group of aborigines. She fell in love with Australia, they said, then with its original inhabitants, stripping off her Western adornments—her scarf, her hat—and following them out past the mighty Murray River, perhaps beyond. Shortly after the initial broadcast, an anonymous person posted a sign atop The Giant Stairway, stating that my grandmother was last seen “at this spot, before she willingly traveled east with unknown aborigines.”
      In the wake of its success, many Australians found an idol in my grandmother, a woman who said things they felt but were afraid to say. She questioned English rule, frowned upon the masculine code of mateship, and believed women had a great untapped strength inside themselves. At the end of one essay, she writes, “I wish I had my life to live over. I should've been strong earlier. I should've know what was inside of me.” Here, I find her words easy to hear, easy because of their simplicity. Though unpublished in her lifetime, she seemed to sense that someday many people would read her work.
      Encouraged by the book's popularity, my mother tried to assemble my grandmother's early memoir, but large sections were missing, left behind or destroyed by my grandmother herself. After three years, my mother was only able to assemble sixty original pages. Enough for two magazine articles, not nearly enough for a second book.

     My mother was born in Burwood. Burwood, at that time, was a growing suburb of Sydney, a place of parks, corner milkbars, and open air fruiters. In many ways it was the heart of the country, a home for the growing middle class, hemmed in by other suburbs, yet far enough from the city to maintain its country feel. She was given the name Sarah-Anne, but most always went by Sarah or just Sare.
      As a girl, she loved to draw and play the piano. Her drawings often featured my grandmother, a woman who usually appears taller than anyone else represented, her hair falling in straight dusty strands, her eyes blue, though in reality they were brown.
      When she was fifteen, my uncle led my mother into a more active social life. They had been close, children pressed together by bad times, a father taken by drink, a mother struggling with disappointment, so together they attended movies, dropped by parties, went to gatherings that were, at that time, called “fetes.” They beached at Bondi and later Coogee, where sitting on the ashen sand they could see a small plot of land, surrounded by seawater, called Wedding Cake Island, a rise with decorative white bluffs and cliffs like icing. They rode the harbour ferry to Watson's Bay where standing beside the water they could see, on one side, the imperial North Heads and, on the other, the Harbour Bridge. On such days, they ate meat pies in paper take-away bags, they picnicked by Town Hall, they ducked into a bottle shop and pinched two beers when they thought they wouldn't be caught. For a while they were a family within a family, a bond based on equal parts necessity and pleasure. My uncle had an early sense of himself, that he'd not marry. My mother, however, gradually found herself enamored by the opposite sex.
      On one of these excursions to Watson's Bay, my mother met a half-aboriginal boy named Toby Broome. He worked at a milkbar which also served hot food. At first it was merely a casual relationship, the two of them talking every week or two, him in his white apron, my mother and William eating fish and chips which later on became “compliments of the house.” Not long after, she went there each Saturday because she was starting to fall for him, his eyes like coal, his face thin, his upper lip covered with the sparse hairs of an adolscent mustache. He was sixteen, having left school only three months before to apprentice himself. He lived above the milkbar, a tiny room that opened to the water, wooden crates for a bookshelf, his clothes folded neatly under his bed.
      My mother fell in love slowly. She was wooed by his large gesturing hands, by the way he said, “compliments of the house,” and by how he looked at her when he thought she wouldn't notice. He had tender eyes. She liked his full name, Tobias, and thought that spoke well of him. When he asked her out to a movie, she accepted. It was the first Saturday in months my mother hadn't spent with my uncle. She was with Toby, downtown at a George Street cinema, while my uncle, covering for her, saw a movie across town.
      After that, they saw each other every Saturday night, often meeting at Town Hall, beside the large stone columns. They kissed once then walked to Pitt Street or perhaps to The Rocks where they wouldn't be refused a drink. On these nights he told her the secrets of his birth: he'd been born to a young aboriginal mother, an older English father. For a while, his parents lived together, north of Sydney, in a place called Newcastle, but his mother, only seventeen, ran away one night, homesick for her own people, leaving Toby in his father's care. For two years his father searched, but couldn't find her. Only then, resigned to separation, did he remarry, this time choosing an English woman closer to his own age. They continued living at Newcastle, Toby attending a public school filled mainly with aboriginal children, his parents sectioning off land for a dairy farm. When he was twelve, his father sent him to live with his uncle near the city. He lived there until he was fifteen and moved to Watson's Bay, where he hoped to learn about business. “Someday,” he said, “I'll leave this place. Open shop elsewhere. The city's no place for a man who's half Abo. No one particularly likes us here.”
      The affection my mother felt for him was a sweet, girlish affection—or so I've been led to believe—one filled with flowers and candies, letters sent through the mail, the stamp on each turned upside down to indicate love. They met always in the city, my uncle tagging along for an early dinner, maybe one drink, then he'd leave, taking a taxi up to The Cross or perhaps to Luna Park where he'd meet friends. My mother, however, always stayed in the city, charmed by its lights, its gardens and artwork. Toby was her protector, her love. They planned to tell their parents, planned to marry, but must've sensed, even then, that their families would disapprove and that the pressure would divide them. Even Toby's father, when told, would look away: “Such a thing,” he'd say, “will only bring you sorrow.”
      My grandfather was drunk when he found out. He walked around the house, yelling, “I'm a bloody stupid man—bloody stupid to let things get this far.” My grandmother stood up to him in a rare demonstration that none of them, not even my mother, would understand for years. “Stupid, yes,” she said. “Stupid because you don't know the value of love. You no longer have the decency to hope for anything, except another schooner of beer. I can only hope Sarah's life ends up better than mine.”
      After this, they arranged secret meetings in the city, but slowly my mother lost her joy in it, not being able to please both her father and Toby. She spent many afternoons crying in her room, her head supported by a damp pillow. Toby, too, must have felt this sorrow because he let her leave him so easily. After the night she did not meet him in the city, he only sent two letters: the first asking her to run away with him, the second saying he would soon finish his apprenticeship and leave. My mother didn't return either letter, but kept them in her jewelry box, where my uncle found them years later, the lined paper yellowed, Toby's slanted handwriting difficult to read, a certain carefulness in the tone as if he drafted each letter many times.
      Afterwards my mother fell into a depression. She went to school. She spent time at home. Sometimes she went out with my uncle, but she was never again allowed curfew past nine o'clock. After my mother finished her schooling, she worked at a fabric store, following the family tradition of sewing. Only at the age of nineteen did she venture again into the city at night. She no longer went to Watson's Bay or even Town Hall, but wandered around The Cross with my uncle. She met my father in 1964, towards the start of The Vietnam War. He was an American, on R and R. They met on the second day of his leave. This time, she was not slow to fall in love. Not slow at all.

      One of the missing sections resurfaced years after my mother tried to find it: it was found slipped into the stuffing of a Queen Anne chair, a piece of furniture that Mr. Cheeseman, a Blue Mountain antiques dealer, had purchased from my grandmother's estate. On local talk radio, he explained how he discovered it: “It was a bloody strange thing. It really was. I was stripping back this old chair, when I sees this envelope in with the stuffing. I pulls it out and find out it's typing, a good twenty pages at that. I didn't think much about it at the time, not until I sees the daughter again in town. I tells her I found this typing, and that's when I know it's valuable. I reckon it's about the woman who went a-walking. The one who was never seen again.”
      This missing section is, in some ways, a departure from the strong, overly moral woman depicted in the early writing. My grandmother emerges as a woman in need of love and unsure how to find it. Her parents, by now, have passed on, her husband unavailable because of drink. She spends the majority of time in her garden—the roses, the annuals, the small fish pond. She has yet to fill the ground with Australian “natives.” Likewise, she has yet to question her role as a wife, as a woman, as an English mother. She sits beneath a jacaranda, its violet blooms in season, when the nursery deliveryman enters her yard, a Turkish immigrant named Yasar Hasim. He carries two sacks of peat moss, two more left on his cart outside. For the first time she offers him a cup of tea. It is an odd gesture for my grandmother, one that must have been preceded by days of forethought.
      The manuscript is unclear on many significant details. We merely know this, that Yasir's family immigrated from Turkey, that he lived in Sydney for ten years, that he was not married nor did he care to be. He simply enters as the large-shouldered deliveryman for Thompson's Nursery, a man who dropped in on Tuesdays, again on Fridays. My grandmother's own words tell it best:
     

     Twice a week, I wonder at his body, at the sheer beauty of it. He comes in through the side gate, wearing a nice long-sleeve shirt and pressed khaki pants. He has the most pleasant disposition of any man I've ever known. He sets my purchases by the verandah and sits with me for an hour or so, drinking tea and looking out over my garden. In Turkey, his family was employed as gardeners. 'The roses are good this year,' he tells me.
      'I'm glad you think so.' I say.
      'Roses are very hard to grow here,' he explains.
      'That's what makes them so beautiful, all the hard work.'
      He considers this for a long while, sitting there with his tea saucer balanced in his palm. I have seen this expression many times, his mind in deep contemplation. I learn what I've learned before, that his wisdom is not like my own, that his family is from Turkey, mine from England. 'That's the funny thing about the English,' he tells me. 'They all want Australia to be England. Australia is not England. It is not Turkey. It is only Australia. It cannot be anything else.' (Manuscript, pages 21-22)

     It is amazing that his family has overcome in ten years what my family has not accomplished in three generations. He doesn't thirst for his old country the way I did. He doesn't live within the elaborate rules we've made for ourselves. On walks, he identifies native plants for me. The warratar, gravillia, silver gums, a violet creeper. He picks up seeds and calls them by their common names: a gumnut, a gooseberry, a bush devil. A bush devil, I've learned, is a small round seed, a face really, complete with horns and eyes and pointed nose. For me, the whole country expands, filling itself with mystery. I'm a Commonwealth citizen, but the life I now long for is a new life. I'm too old to be falling in love with a man, a country, and myself, but I am. I don't know how to stop, but already I see the danger. (31)

     In the mid-1700s, the English understood that a Great South Land existed beyond the equator, down deep into the Pacific, where the water was turquoise and rough. Like most famous explorers, Captain Cook was not the first, but his arrival occurred at an opportune time. He charted the coast, surveyed the shore, and claimed the continent for King George III. New South Wales, it was called, soil thick with vegetation, water teeming with life, inhabited by natives who, in Cook's own words, appeared “far more happier than we Europeans.” Cook returned to England with the information that the South Land was not an island of wealth, but one of rich soil and simple life. In the end, though, the continent was designated as a penal colony, the first prisoners transported a few years later.
      My earliest Australian ancestor, my great-great-grandfather, was sentenced seven years for pickpocketing. By all accounts, he was a small man, barely over five feet tall, gentle hands, a face that blended easily into crowds. He was caught in Picadilly Circus, his fingers stretched into the pocket of a man who, when uniformed, was also a constable. He did not fare well in Australia, damp weather claiming his life just six months after the completion of his sentence. His one footnote in history: he helped run the first stagecoach line between Sydney and Newcastle as part of his forced daily labor.
      My great-great-grandmother fared much better. A convict herself, she became a much-admired seamstress, a skill she was able to pass along to her daughter and grandchildren. My grandmother started as a seamstress, her afternoons spent in her mother's shop, but eventually other things interested her more: gardening, reading, trying to find a life of her own.
      Here I see the first indication that my grandmother would be the person she became: she descended from a line of strong, determined women. While living, she could not have known about her posthumous success, but each time I read her book, I think she must have sensed it. Her better essays read like advice, a wise woman revealing what she has learned. She critiqued the government, business structures, and social customs; she criticized the nation's treatment of the aborigines. “My biggest regret,” she wrote, “was that I believed the lie. I believed we, as English, were somehow better than other people, but now I see how this belief limited me in so many ways.” In the end, though, she was best remembered for her advice to women, that they shouldn't be afraid of leading their own lives, that happiness wasn't limited to marriage, and that strength often came from being alone.

     When my mother was nineteen, she followed my father, Robert Browne, to America where I was born. I had a good childhood, but I knew, even then that my mother was not happy and regretted leaving her family. She checked the mailbox regularly, she called home every other weekend, some days she would drive to the Pacific and look across it, her eyes scanning the horizon, where water curved around the earth and, some seven thousand miles later, connected with Australia.
      After my grandmother's death, my mother returned to Sydney many times, and in 1979, decided to stay for good, claiming as her inheritance my grandmother's Mountain cottage. The other missing chapters, perhaps four in all, were never found, though my mother searched diligently, only to uncover numerous notes and a partial draft of Chapter Six. It begins:
     

     I am a woman in Australia, and that, I've always thought, is a difficult thing to be. Since its beginning, Australia has formed itself on the idea of mateship and other alliances between men. The place of women is relegated to the home, to the children, to the backyard garden. For years I've wanted to step beyond this, but did not know how, perhaps still don't, but staying in such a small space is a failure I'd rather not accept. I'd like to think this is my own personal failure, but as I look around I see other women who have failed like me. (Uncollected Works, 8)

      I was nineteen when my mother died. At the time I'd just started college and was living with my father. After divorcing my mother, he married and divorced again, and was right then thinking about love for a third time, but it never happened. Eventually he slipped into retirement, his days spent reading and attending veterans' functions. His initial love for my mother had been too great to be replaced: he'd been an infantry man on R and R, down in Sydney, drafted into a war he didn't support; she a small town girl, both of them needing love for reasons that, years later, turned out to be incompatible.
      My father and I don't talk about her much, though she's with us. On long June days, I occasionally catch him staring into his backyard, where jacaranda trees display gossamer blossoms and scrub jays dart through the air repeating their songs. I understand he's thinking of her and of some greater happiness he was never to get beyond. Happiness has its own legacy, as does longing. There are many types of exile in the world, and most of us have a penchant for at least one.
      On that cold winter's eve of 1987, after my mother's tour guide returned to town, a rescue crew was dispatched with dogs newly trained for such emergencies, experts examined the campsite, planes crossed the sky, one of which spotted her sleeping bag abandoned by an unmapped pond. Crews located her body, 5:45, Tuesday, just as the sun dipped below mountain peaks, draining light from the valley and replacing it with ice. The headline in The Sydney Morning Herald read: “Daughter Follows Famous Mother To Her Death.”
      I come from a family of strong, expansive women—women who hope for what they don't yet own and have hearts too tender to absorb the loss inevitable in this life. My grandmother wanted to change her world, and in ways, she did. At the age of sixty-seven, she walked into the valley, and a few days later, her body transformed into nothing more than air and light; the person most mesmerized, my mother, could never shake the image from her mind. Fifteen years later, long after leaving my father, she retraced this journey, her spirit a custodian of history, though history didn't grant her the same mythic grace it had my grandmother, leaving her body to be discovered by modern search techniques, after which it was cremated, the ashes spread over the valley, near Wentworth Falls, which was where, weeks before, she'd originally intended to travel.
      Years later, while visiting Australia, I returned to The Blue Mountains and stood atop The Giant Stairway. The valley stretched as far as I could see, long and narrow, commemorating ancient glacial progressions, the floor thick with gum trees, their withered limbs supporting clusters of leaves and, every now and then, the white plumage of a cockatoo. I didn't descend the steps, feeling I was no longer entitled, but merely looked. I singled out streams and distant boulders, I heard the sorrowful laugh of the kookaburra and, a few minutes later, the sound of a woman who, projecting her voice, waited for its return.
      That afternoon I left the Stairway, sadness settling like a stone within me. I sensed, even then, I might not visit the mountains again: the last of my family, my uncle, had left two years before. I had a girlfriend I loved and a retired father, both of whom lived in America. I looked back only once, seeing trees sewn together and a cliff like cut glass, the sight which in my family often defines an end. I was completing the last part of the journey, the portion which my mother and grandmother could not accomplish, walking up the poorly paved road which connects the Stairway to the township of Katoomba, passing familiar milkbars and pie shops, then finally the green and gold cottage which years ago was sold. I was returning, but returning I've found is a lonely act. It's another way of starting over.