Listening To: Something For Your Mind : V/A (Zoth Ommog)

Back in our under-grad days, before weblogs existed, my best friend wrote a rant called “Declining the Beach Invitation”. It resonated deeply at the time – I was a beach-shunning goth, and she was a beach-shunning indie-chick. In the last few weeks, the beach (and my relationship to it) has come up in a few discussions with my girlfriend, and on Friday Wegg started an interesting thread on her blog (‘Ocean Girl Goes to The Mountains’) about the beach, your proximity to it, and the art hanging on your walls. All of which has led me to ponder the beach, and what it means to me.

Today I thought I’d share some of these ponderings with those of you who are interested, and revisit my friends ‘zine article in the process …

I was born in 1977 in Prague, the capital city of the small land-locked European country then known as Czechoslovakia. The closest thing I saw to the ocean in my first year of life were the dirty banks of the river Vltava, on which Prague was first contructed back in medieval times. When I was one year old however, my father won a posting as trade attache to the Czech embassy in Pakistan. We relocated to Karachi in ’78 as a result, and I got my first few years exposure to the beach, courtesy of the balmy Arabian Sea. I don’t recall much from those days of course, being so young, but I do remember we used to go to the beach a lot with my parents and their friends, and these were some of our happiest times.

My mother and the other embassy wives would lie sunbaking in the tropical heat in their string bikinis, unable to go topless because of the ever-present threat of local Muslim men who would often come to the beach to gape at these ‘Western’ women flaunting their shockingly bare flesh. The men would drink beer or hard liquour (though the latter was of course discouraged), crack jokes and cook meat on a fire. We kids would play soccer or cricket, splash around and chase eachother on the sand or in the surf. Sometimes a Suadi or Iranian trading boat would be pulled up on the beach, and if we were lucky we’d get a ride on a camel and once or twice a sinewy Arabian pony.

Other times we’d all watch enraptured as snake-charmers performed their ages-old ritual on the sand, or watch as they released mongoose to chase cobra over the dunes. Once a year, during turtle hatching season, we’d go to the beach before daybreak to watch these ancient, yet fragile creatures slowly drag themselves out of the ocean, and deposit strings of eggs like sticky pearls in hollows they would dig out of the sand. They’d sit on them for a few hours, and then, almost dehydrated, they would painfully make their way back into the water as their leathery eggs hatched and scores of tiny, perfectly formed baby turtles scurried over the sand, sometimes into the water but often-times in the wrong direction. Fascinated I’d pick up these misguided turtle-ings, look them in the eye, then put them down gently nudge them back in the right direction towards the sea.

Karachi also had a beach set aside for the ‘hulks’ of old freighters and military ships which had been allowed to run aground, so that the locals could gradually strip them of metal and all other usable materials to re-use and resell, leaving the shells to rust over years in the oil-stained tide. My parents have a video which must have been shot in the very early 80′s, probably by the communist-party ‘ideological advisor’ to the embassy (since he would have been the only one able to afford the expense of something as ‘cutting edge’ as a video camera), of our visit to this beach. I still remember being completely enthralled by the sight of the huge, pitted orange-metal bulks of the rusted freighters and warships, and begging our parents to be allowed to climb inside and explore with my friend, Peder from the Hungarian embassy. Alas, the smiling Pakistanis in charge of the wrecks told us through the interpreter it was “too dangerous for children to play inside”.

In 1984, my dads ‘tour’ was up and we were slated to go back home. Back then Czechoslovakia was still united in communism, rather than the twin democracies of Czech and Slovak republics it is today, so my parents decided to ‘defect’ to the West in the good old ‘cold-war’ tradition. In their choice of Australia as our new homeland, I’m sure its beaches and my love of the ocean played at least a small part. Unfortunately when we arrived in Sydney, we were too poor to settle in a seaside suburb, and started off living in migrant flats in Epping, moving to our first house in Seven Hills in Sydney’s western suburbs after a year.

In Karachi the beach had a half hour drive away, we’d always gone with friends in a big group, and embassy work-hours the world over are short besides, so getting there was never a drama. Given where we lived in Sydney, and given that 20 years ago none of the motorways which Sydney-siders now take for granted existed, the beach was suddenly a good 90 minutes drive away, if not more. Living in a new country, my parents suddenly had few friends and couldn’t even afford the petrol to make the trip (indeed, we didn’t have a car for the first six months until my dad got a company car as a salesman flogging CB radios). The beach was no longer a routine outing, and became a rare, weekend-only pleasure instead.

The years went on and my parents became busier. Mum got a job in the second year which left her exhausted, and just wanting to relax at home on weekends. We got a second car and mum learnt to drive, but only if it wasn’t too far from home or she made the journey on a regular basis. Family outings to the beach became less and less frequent. After going through a few jobs, dad started working his way up through Sebel furniture and later SGS, and we started being able to afford holidays. So we’d hop in the car during long weekends and school holidays, and journey outside of Sydney. One year we decided to go to Port Stephens on the advice of some family friends, and fell in love with it. After that we tried to go to Port Stephens at least once a year for a week by the ocean … but this more or less replaced going to the beach in Sydney altogether.

A few years of this and I hit my ‘awkward teen’ phase. Being the insecure kid that I was, I didn’t want to be seen with my parents, didn’t want to spend time with them, and started doing anything I could to avoid our annual trip to Port. ‘Embarassed’ by my parents and their ‘woggy’ friends, and embarassed by my own teenage body, I started to hate going to the beach, and to indentify it with my ‘niave’ childhood. I was still avoiding the beach and my family, and generally hating my own looks, when I started uni and hooked up with my first girlfriend. She was a Greek girl, and her migrant parents and relatives, like mine, had raised their kids going on regular beach outings to the South Coast and the like.

By the time we’d met though, Maria had become a lapsed beach-goer like I had. Listening to KMFDM, Souxsie Sioux, Caligula & Def-FX, wearing black eyeliner and PVC, we became birds of a feather, feeding eachothers ‘darkness’ in Sydney’s goth scene. Although she lived at Sydenham, we had a shared history of family beach memories, so we’d often go to Bondi or Coogee, La Perouse or Brighton Le Sands. We’d make out in cars looking out over the ocean to the oil refinery at Kernell, we’d eat seafood at Brighton or we’d just to sit on the beach talking about nothing and everything. But always at night, when the suns rays couldn’t strike us and the cruel eyes of beautiful, tanned beach-goers couldn’t judge us.

We broke up after 6 months, and although I started seeing a girl who initially lived with her parents in Ocean Road at Bondi, just behind where the KFC used to be on the corner, I pretty much stopped going to the beach altogether at that point – too many painful memories. My new girl moved to Drummoyne, and together we shunned the beach like all ‘self-respecting’ goths do, with only a few night-time trips to Bondi here and there. I found I didn’t miss it. A year on, I was offered a place in our university overseas exchange program. After some deliberation I accepted it, and moved to Sweden in August ’97.

I lived in Uppsala for a year, five minutes walk from the river (Fyriss) which runs through the center of town. After 6 months there, and having come back to Sydney over Christmas to discover my Drummoyne girlfriend was sleeping with another guy, I hooked up with a Swedish girl who’d never seen the ocean. For the next 6 months we’d sit by the edge of the river, frozen at first but gradually thawing out as the seasons progressed, talking about politics, music, relationships – and talking about the beach, and what it’s like to live in a city where going to the beach is an actual possibility.

I got back to Sydney and spent another semester finishing my degree. I went to the beach a few times – mostly Collaroy, Narrabeen & Palm, and tried to date a couple of girls including an aussie I’d studied with in Sweden who lived at Coogee, and an Italian goth girl I’d known for a few years who lived at Yowie Bay. For various reasons none of these panned out, so looking at my post-grad options, I decided to move to Melbourne to study multimedia.

I arrived in Melbourne in January ’99, and ended up living there for two years. I’d started thinking about myself and my lifestyle diffierently whilst in Sweden, finally beginning to accept myself for who I was, and trying to repair my relationship with my parents. This process continued in the two years I was in Melbourne on my own, first studying then working, and meeting a girl I ended up seeing for three years (including 18 months long-distance after I moved back to Sydney in 2001). I started to miss the Sydney beaches again while living in Victoria. My then-girlfriend and I would go down to St.Kilda or Brighton … in the day-time … or we’d go for a drive down the Great Ocean Road to Torquay & Geelong.

I finally moved back to Sydney in 2001. Although I was less than thrilled about the move itself – I’d had to make because I’d lost my job and run out of money; I remember I was really excited on the first weekend back when I took myself off to sunbake and swim at Palm Beach. I lived at my parents house in Castle Hill for a year while free-lancing as a designer, before moving to St.Leonards. I went to Bronte a few times with an old uni friend, and I even found myself going to Bondi beach thanks to a client for a CD-ROM project I was working on, and whose house was a stones throw from the Old Southhead Road fire station.

In between then and now, I’ve lived in a few different places, studied again, done a few different jobs, been in two relationships, dated and been single for 8 months. I’ve gone to the beach on off, worked out religiously, visited solariums, been a fat slob and bounced back – all without ‘accepting the beach’ invitation in its full glory, and all that it entails. In all that time, I never really thought about the beach, and what it means to me. It was nice to have the option to go – sure, but I never really thought about the happy times I used to have as a kid at the beach with my family. Coming up to summer 2004, I started this blog, lost my job at the medical recruitment firm I was working at with an ex, and moved back to Castle Hill for a few months because mum had arrived from overseas and the house was vacant as their tenants had just moved out.

Then one fateful day in December, a week after starting back at the company I’d been working for prior to the recruitment firm, I met a lovely lass from Bondi named Lisa. The rest, as they say, is history. I moved to Artarmon, and spent the Christmas / Boxing Day long weekend with my parents down in Port Stephens. It was fantastic … like coming home after a long time away. True – I got an echo of my old teenage embarassment at one point, when my dad started parading around with his sunburn (they’d already spent a week there before I arrived), vodka-gut and underwear-like swimmers near the roadway … but as I drove away from Port later that day I called both my parents and thanked them for a great weekend, and apologised for acting a bit embarassed earlier in the day – something I could never have done as a teenager.

That weekend is what finally got me thinking about the beach, and its meaning to me. We’ve been to ocean a few times with Lisa, although it’s been too cold so we’ve only ‘done’ the beach properly once so far. We’ve talked about the beach in an abstract way, and I’m sure I’ve left my girlfriend with the impression Bondi isn’t my favourite (which is true – too many backpackers). However, I hope I haven’t left her with the impression I’m ‘not really a beach person’. True – from the ‘awkward teen years’ till 2001 I stopped being a fan of the day-time beach experience. However, I could never resist the beach invitation entirely, and slowly for the last four years the beach has been working its way back into my heart, as surely as sand works its way into your bum crack despite your boardshorts. Now I can truly say I’m looking forward to spending summer baking with my Bondi babe on the sand … finally, after all these years I’m ready to accept the beach invitation again like I did when I was a wee lad !