Write the Day: Tide
The weather looks a bit precarious when I arise to get ready for my trip to Watsons Bay. A special trip to the Bay on the second anniversary of the death of my partner, Loma Bridge, who passed away suddenly on 2 May 2024. She always loved going to the beach at Neilsen Park, where our friends Carol and Mary had taken us over the years, but when I was thinking about how to mark the anniversary, that place felt gloomy after the recent shark attack death of a young boy. Watsons Bay is just around the coast a bit, a place where friends Coralie and Luke took us for afternoon tea not too long after Loma finally returned home from a long time in hospital. It’s also a place full of early memories for me. The outdoor cafe is just in front of the Swimming Baths where I learned to swim when I was about six or seven.
This year the second of May falls on a Saturday, and I thought the area and the transport would be too crowded with visitors and tourists on a weekend, so I am going the day before the actual anniversary. For my itinerary I will avoid too much focus on such touristic sites as The Gap, the place of so many suicides, and the location of the famous shipwreck of The Dunbar, now memorialised by the heritage mansion ‘The Dunbar’, with its history of weddings and ‘fine dining’, and which is situated on the grassy foreground of the bay and harbour.
The weather remains a bit iffy as the bus races along through Double Bay, Rose Bay, Vaucluse and various spots that were part of my childhood. Finally we arrive at Old South Head Road along Christison Park, the cliff edge, and the famous Lighthouse. It is an epiphanic moment. Suddenly above the lighthouse, the cliffs and the ocean, a massive band of long gleaming white and silvery clouds rolls across the sky like a divine apparition. I think of the visionary engravings of Gustave Doré in my book of Christ and the Essenes. I am so surprised that I laugh as I glue my face to the auric sky beyond the bus window.
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Settling down at a cafe table opposite the swimming baths I feel immediately relaxed. The smells of the seaweed on the shore at a moderately low tide replace the Doré moment. The food prices at the cafe are sky high but here I am, calm. I’m thinking of the gritty man who ran the Watsons Bay Baths for decades – Alf Vockler, wrestler and swimmer, who taught many to swim in the 1950s. A tough guy who harnessed little you to the belt attached to a long rope, as you learnt to swim in the deep water alone, while he, with zinc-creamed lips and tough-man face, walked along the curved platform way, way above, chatting to a mate and yelling down swimming instructions to you way, way below – kick yer legs/stretch yer arms. On smelly low-tide mornings you felt all alone in your speedo swimsuit. But I got there. Got my badge to be sewed on my cotton speedos, and then in a few years joined the Bondi Ladies’ Amateur Swimming Club.
It isn’t long before I leave Alf to his afterlife and return to Loma. Way across the harbour just peeping through the vegetation of the Northern shores is a tiny view of the top of the curved Sydney Harbour Bridge. Loma. Loma Bridge. Where are you now? If you google ‘Loma Bridge’ you will first get listings galore of the La Loma Bridge in Pasadena USA, a ‘Neoclassical open-spandrel concrete arch bridge’. Then there is a Loma Bridge in Montana, a Loma Bridge in Ladakh, India.
Sydney poet Eileen Chong wrote a poem about Loma titled ‘Open Spandrel’. She read it at Loma’s funeral. An extract:
Your body is a marvel of engineering. You unfold yourself
from the couch, form an arch to take the plates, and straighten
your back.
Another reason for choosing Watsons Bay as the place to honour Loma’s second anniversary passing is the literary history that Watsons Bay represents. Loma was an artist, film maker and writer. Whenever I go to Watsons Bay I recall the experience of seeing the film of Dickens’ Great Expectations at the Village Cinema there. I translated the opening scene, where Pip encounters the convict Magwitch in the coastal marshes of Kent, into the landscape of the cliffs and the ocean below the cinema, whose heritage building is still there today. And then there’s the site of Christina Stead’s childhood home along the Watsons Bay Promenade and its proximity to the beach and harbour, not far from the wharf and the gory shark weighing station. That setting was transformed into the East Coast of the United States for Stead’s novel The Man Who Loved Children. Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway features the Watsons Bay area and its inhabitants, and climaxes with the sinking of a ferry in the harbour. Patrick White’s novel The Eye of The Storm has a very amusing scene set at Doyle’s Seafood Restaurant on the waterfront, where Sir Basil Hunter takes his mother’s night nurse, Mary De Santis, to lunch, during which time a dead dog washes up on the beach in front of them. The historic Camp Cove just around from the bay I always associate with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, with its rock pools. My first encounter with Loma was via her kaleidoscopic poem ‘Swamp Song’, about menstruation, which was published in the historic anthology of Australian women’s poetry ‘Mother I’m Rooted’, 1975. I was supposed to review the anthology, but spent most of my review focusing on her poem. Watsons Bay is a literary bonanza, a place to share with Loma’s spirit.
I think of all these literary presences as I sip a cup of fish chowder a little way back from the wharf and the hordes of visitors – Friday not so quiet after all. I try to continue to focus on the rich presences and memories and not on the loss of my partner in this holiday atmosphere, where the tide is slowly refreshing itself. And suddenly a friendly couple of overseas travellers come and sit next to me in a spot of shade I have snared. It turns out that she runs a swimming pool complex in Hong Kong. I sit comfortably chatting to them about my time teaching swimming to children over many summers as part of the education department’s swimming school scheme. I have written about that time in my book blowing bubbles in the 7th lane (1988). It’s a surprising encounter – a respite from the hovering gravity.
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The bus that takes me back to Kings Cross rushes along the roads. All the magical clouds above the lighthouse have gone, and the flowers I intended to buy were so expensive I decided to wait till next morning, the official day of Loma’s passing. But I’m not ready to go home, so I sit at the bus stop at the top of Greenknowe Avenue and relax, amazed that I got to Watsons Bay and back in a smooth progression. There I sit for what seems quite a while, just watching a guy carefully unloading a stack of white boxes from the rear of a delivery van onto a trolley with such patient precision – the scene like a small movie of perseverance. The vision of this is so strangely soothing I lose all sense of time. Eventually I get up and walk down the hill home, past the building where Loma stayed when she first came to Sydney in the early 1970s. Most days when I walk down that hill I need to pause and gather my breath, but on this occasion the descent seems easier.
Postscript:
The next day, on the afternoon of the second anniversary of her passing, I lie on the bed resting after being out to the Potts Point markets with friends in the morning. Suddenly my phone lights up with a trio of photos on the screen, the first of Loma being moved to an ambulance beneath the autumnal trees outside our building, and then two photos of her final moments in Emergency, followed by one of her just passed away. I don’t know whether to cry or to laugh at such a technological intrusion! But writing this I remember the last words in a once-favourite novel The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary. The injured main character, the quirky old artist Gulley Jimson, has fallen off a ladder, and says to the nun looking after him, concerning the options of ‘to laugh or to pray’: ‘same thing, mother’. Loma’s copy of this novel sits on a shelf behind me as I write.
Quoted poem from Eileen Chong, ‘Open Spandrel’, Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours, eds Jessica L. Wilkinson and Cassandra Atherton, Hunter Publishers 2021.
Inspired by a long passage in The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, and by the great diarists of literature, Write the Day invites writers to document a single day in their lives, from waking to sleeping, capturing as faithfully as possible all that passes through their minds and senses. Sign up to our newsletter to receive this and other online series in your inbox.
Series illustration by Ben Juers.
