Songs have been there for me when people haven’t. In the breadth of its short verses, it contains moments that capture everything I have loved about love and have been lucky enough to experience.
Reading Almost a Mirror is like listening with anticipation to a new mix tape painstakingly compiled by a friend.
Mid bite, it happens. There on my TV screen, just for a few seconds, doing an intense wiggily kind of jogging on the spot, is a girl with cropped spiky, reddy-bleached hair wearing an oversized suit jacket. I just about choke on my crumpet.
Before I moved South, the young people I often worked with in remote communities in Central Australia would listen to local Indigenous musos singing in the many languages of the Territory over whitefella stuff any day.
I’m watching Dad working on the huge driftwood table he’s been making out of wood that he’s found and dragged home from the beach.
We used to walk back to his house from South Yarra Station with our vinyl school bags slung over our shoulders. When we got to the top of the hill on the Domain Road corner, we’d turn onto Punt Road and head down towards the Yarra. But we never went all the way down to the river.