Confessions of a Bondi Blonde

“A life is made up of a great number of small incidents and a small number of great ones.”

Roald Dahl wrote this at the beginning of his autobiography, Going Solo, a book of remembrance from his time as a fighter pilot and as a member of the Glorious British Commonwealth. At 21 he was living like a king in Dar es Salaam in oil rich Tanzania, employed as an inexperienced, chinless wandering fool for BP. It was 1938 when the letters B.P. still proudly stood for British Petroleum. The company directed the flow of gushing oil from Africa into its European coffers while Dahl travelled freely as their white representative, drinking pink gin and escaping death by snake bite on more than one occasion.

My life to date has been relatively mundane. I’ve been to Africa. When I decided to see the world on my own solo journey, being blonde, 23 and Australian was a passport to places not necessarily listed in Lonely Planet. I saw Africa for the first time from the wheelhouse of a ferry out of Gibraltar. Tangier rose at dawn over the horizon, much more beautiful from a distance than its ugly, people-smuggling reality. I’ve been stoned in Morocco. But not on the hash which is more common than the toothless cobras in Marrakesh’s marketplace; no I travelled with a mate on a 150 pound all inclusive holiday to the sun, escaping a relentlessly grey London. We landed in Agadir. My girlfriend and I wore long shorts to the beach and the local youth didn’t like it, so they decided to throw sticks and stones, though we would have preferred names that wouldn’t have hurt us quite as much. Our ignorance wasn’t bliss, it was painful.

I’ve wandered the world for work as well, flying to New York at the pointy end of the plane to meet similarly suited people. I celebrated my late afternoon arrival in Wall Street with a pre-dinner martini at Windows on the World bar in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. While waiting for my colleagues I looked through my reflection in the long windows over the southern tip of Manhattan, into the waters where the Hudson and East Rivers met.

After nine years as a parent, this kind of life now seems as exotic to meet as flying a fighter jet.

I have a little life of loving kids and finding fun where I can. Nothing truly great has brushed against it recently. I’ve seen a few celebrities living in shiny Sydney and Russell Crowe sends his kid to the kindergarten next to my house; I’ve almost run over him three times exiting my garage, but I missed him, so that’s one of the small incidents.

But no matter, Dahl’s surmise has relevance for us all and, as a novice writer, it’s wonderful to stand on the shoulders of Big Friendly Giants like him when trying to crystallise my thoughts, lifting me out of the everyday to give me a greater view.

When you examine your life are you able distil the small number of great events that have set it on a new direction? Marriage, children, divorce and the death of close relatives are the obvious biggies, but what else is important in marking a life as distinctly yours?

On the weekend, my children and I escaped to a friend’s beach house. We played Junior Monopoly while leaving the washing up in the sink. On Sunday after lunch, we walked along a harbour beach with inconsequential waves and met a fisherman. He had four plastic containers set apart at an equal distance in the sand; each holding a lightweight fishing rod, aligned like skinny soliders on the beach. We said “hello” and I left my oldest son to engage in men’s talk – fish and sport and the ones that got away. I collected shells with my younger sons, admiring the hermit crabs before throwing them back into the water.

After a time my boys sought greater adventures and took possession of the man’s dinghy, going into the gentle waves with aplomb. They splashed and screamed and kicked the water a little and each other a lot. I thought of sharks and manta rays and yelled for them to be safe, take care. But they ignored me, arrogantly immortal.

The fisherman and I sat on the sand beside his rods and settled in an easy conversation. He smelt of salt and kept on taking small pieces of bread from somewhere inside his T-Shirt to rebait his hooks. He was fishing for bream, which usually swim in shoals close to the shoreline in this beautiful Eden, so each line carried three sharp hooks for the fish to swallow. He told me that while reading the weekend papers the day before, he had caught five juicy fish. He had enough for dinner by the time he had finished the business section.

Our conversation drifted easily from fishing to family and I soon learned that, like me, he was a single parent. His children were older than me and he had lost his wife a decade before, through death, not carelessness. He had successfully re-partnered with another, younger woman who sat further along the beach, keeping watch over my children as she sat in the shade of a palm tree.

My fisher-friend sketched me a brief tale of his other life as a business maverick, where deals were big and the stakes were high. After losing his wife, he had handed over the reins of the successful business he had built to his sons. Now he offered unwanted, invaluable advice to them, ensuring that the family fortune was kept, more or less, intact. As the years had passed, he said he found solace in his new girlfriend and in beach fishing.

We shared our fishing tales, mine a single story of a beach fishing expedition on my island honeymoon where my new husband and I dug the bait from the sand and caught a fish for dinner within 10 minutes of the first cast. His stories had more details and layers. His memory, honed by years of winning in the battlegrounds of boardrooms, was as sharp as steel.

As my boys played in the water the fisherman’s female companion laughed at their exuberance and silliness. The fisherman told me that his girlfriend made him very, very happy but he would never marry her. I think it was because he was content with his life as it was and though the ache of missing his wife had diminished through time, he still held the memory of the mother of his children as separate, inviolate.

The early autumn day still carried the heat of summer and the skies were innocent of clouds, but a cold wind raced across the open water. It was time for my children to come to shore and for us to go home.

We cleaned and returned the dingy and were saying our goodbyes when suddenly one of the fishing lines which had been gently eddying in the tide, snapped tight and ran out. My sons ran around excitedly at the idea of catching a fish and the fisherman directed all three boys on the art of winding in a catch. As a group, they talked and wound the fish in, a small bream, barely over the legal limit size. Quiet for once, they watched in fascination as the fisherman removed the three hooks from the bream’s gasping mouth. He killed it efficiently and then gutted and scaled it, dirtying the sand with blood and grey scales.

Much to my boys delight he presented the fish to them as a gift, telling them that I would cook it for their dinner. I fried it in butter and salt and it was delicious, though only a small, sweet mouthful each.

This small incident defined the delight of my whole weekend. And for now I am happy that defining big incidents are leaving me alone as I get my life back on track in small calibrations.

I haven’t been a fighter pilot, a revered author or lived in Tanzania. I haven’t been attacked by green or black mambo snakes, nasty hissy things with a rap singer attitudes; the Snake-I-Am’s of the non-urban jungle. But there have been many magical small incidents like meeting my fisherman friend that give me hope and substance and joy and are retained as vivid memories against the pastels of my life, washing my days in rainbow hues.

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