The vines twisted around the pergola/in my grandmother’s backyard/were gnarled and old
Music was beginning to assert its life-long hold over me, but it still played a distant second fiddle to being a part of a team of twelve boys dressed in pads, batting gloves and protectors.
We’re on a bare mattress on the floor. The living room is strewn with sleeping bodies, toppled bottles, and sauce-smeared paper plates. I can’t look at him. I can hardly move or breathe. I’m still, concentrating on the TV.
David Wilson, of our partner site The Footy Almanac, writes of shifting youthful dreams: beach, cricket, a girl. And a dose of Paul Kelly.
Shu-Ling Chua New York City, June 2014As we slip through the inky night, from ferry to bus to my windowless hotel room, I think, I could stop this at any time. I could have stopped this hours ago.
Jeff Dowsing Inverloch, Victoria 1978An abiding childhood memory is of sitting at the kitchen bench in a holiday house at Inverloch, munching Coco Pops as Mull of Kintyre played on the radio.
Brutas Mudcake Rye foreshore, summer of 1988/89Seven years old, and I’d entered the orbit of popular culture and had an entrée to what was as the epitome of cool, teenager-dom.
Lorne Foreshore outside The Wild Colonial, summer 1968/69 Irrewarra, summer 2015Lying close together I’d held her hand under a towel so nobody would notice, and, incredibly I’d even stolen a kiss from her.
Zoë Krukpa Cleaning my bedroom window, Canberra, 1982My ear was burning in the sun, and my nose, which I had just recently pierced with the aid of a needle sterilized with a match and a handy bit of raw potato, was throbbing softly. The window rag smelled of this new stuff, eucalyptus oil, which I wanted to drown the world in I loved it so much, and my music box was precariously perched on a stool.
Colin Ritchie Traffic lights somewhere in Melbourne, 2012 Colac, summer of 62/63You could say the pocket transistor radio was the iPod of its day! Everybody had to have one and you felt so groovy walking down the street with it in your hand. Certainly a real status symbol to the youth of my day in my home town of Colac.