Reminiscing about the first house we lived in, in Canberra

I wrote this roundabout a year ago now - January 28, 2008 to be precise.

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This is “home” for us in Canberra. It’s the sight that greets me as I walk up from the bus stop from work. This is the view from the street looking down over the front garden and driveway.


If you walk down right now, and walk up to the front door, this is what you will see…As you can see, the walls of the house are covered in foliage, which I personally think is nice and very homey.


If you stopped at this point and looked to the left, you will see the balcony off the main bedroom. It’s one of the endearing features of the house. We actually hardly ever open it up because of the noise off the street… But when we do pull up the blinds in the bedroom, it lets in a very pleasant amount of light into the bedroom. Can’t help but think of that scene…. … “Romeo, o’ Romeo, wherefore art thou? …or alternatively….“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!!!”…take your pick!


That door there is the front door. Adjacent to the door, on both sides are floor to ceiling glass panels, which are draped with soft translucent curtains. So you can see this area is quite bright and cheery with heaps of light. The bookcase on the left appears to be in a dark spot, but really it’s only the camera compensating for the extremely bright sun coming through the glass. These pics were taken at 9.30am, and this side of the house gets the easterly sun, so it’s bright. Excuse the towel.





Here’s another shot of the foyer from side on. You’ll see our ‘snake” there on the floor, and the steps leading to the bedrooms in the background. It’s a little blurry, but in the timber panelling in the back, you might be able to discern a cuckoo clock we bought at Berry a few years ago. I like the idea of a mechanical clock tick-tocking away in the house.

A snake is a necessity for a draughty door. I’ve never felt the need for one in Sydney but here in Canberra, it gets mighty cold and we had to get these for quite a few of our doors.

That door in the background leads to the garage downstairs. There’s a 1 ½ car garage there, and then we also have the laundry and there’s the kids toy room/TV room. We keep a second fridge in there so Jen can buy up in bulk for her cans of coke and eggs, and frozen food.



See what I mean about the bookcase not really being in a dark spot? The thing everyone likes about this house is it’s so bright and airy. It’s really gorgeous to wake up in the morning and bound down into the living room and there’s all this light around you.



Here’s another shot from a slightly different angle. Again notice how bright it is. We love books. Caitlin worries me sometimes she is always reading. Most weekends we are here we go down to one of the libraries and spend a few hours borrowing a set of books. The ACT lets you borrow about 30-40 books on one card, so Jenny and I have one each that we put the kids loans on to.

One of the things we noticed about homes here, is that people appear to be well read, most have walls and walls of books. In 13 years in Sydney I only saw one house with so many books, and my theory is that’s only because the owner, a barrister, grew up in Canberra. We aim to have walls and walls of books too over the next few years. We’re not there yet but in time….



There you see our reading chair. An old IKEA POANG I think I bought way back in ’93. Pre-marital asset!!! The storyboard on the wall is from PNG. I bought it as one of the few mementos of working there from ’87 to ’93. It depicts the ubiquitous crocodile with some pigs and village life. Below that is a leather work that belongs to Dad and Mom (really Dad). I borrowed it from San Rafael way back when I was still in PNG. I love reading there, there’s always heaps of light. You can see we probably have about 2 weeks of newspapers to get rid of behind the chair.



The view from the kitchen door... what pictorial would be complete without a pic of my babies??...my stereo. They are a pair of Fostex PM-2s hooked up to a Wadia 6 with PSC silver cables. The rubbish bags on top of the speakers conceal (?) bags of sand I picked up from Bunnings (the hardware store). They make the speakers sound better! Honestly! I am not nuts! Thus far Jenny hasn’t asked me to get rid of the sand…

In the background is yet another window with more light. As Paul used to say about sport – “too much is barely enough!”


Here’s a shot going the other way, from the stereo looking back towards our dining table and kitchen. Can you spot Jenny?

In case you are wondering, the kids are in Sydney with Auntie Miles. How do you think I got the time to do all this??? Jenny was with them yesterday but had to come back to Canberra on the bus to retrieve Euan’s spectacles. Euan is seeing an occupational therapist for his eyes on Wednesday and of course he forgot his glasses didn’t he? She’s bussing it back to Sydney at midday today – a 3 hour trip.



The mosaic is a present from Jenny’s class at Northside when she left. I think it’s very very nice. Those sticks on the PNG basket are not sticks, the long one is an unstrung bow, and the smaller ones are arrows. These are real and were a present to me from my officemate in PNG who hailed from Enga province. I think these have been used in anger (not by me).

The sketch partially obscured is a real drawing from a PNG artist. He was hawking his wares one afternoon, and I remember buying this one when I was still with “Yu Kisim We? – Steamships Hardwe!” in Waigani.

The charcoal drawing of the kids was done by Dianne – Jen’s niece. She is a real artist and can capture the soul of her subjects, as she has done here. Caitlin has a plaintive expression and Euan leans protectively over his older sister. Emotionally it captures the relationship dynamic between the two siblings that most people don’t ever even see. What can I say… Diane is the real thing… it’s very humbling to see her work. This world should have more like her.



So this is walking down towards where we have the rest of our stuff. Euan received a slot-car racing set from Santa, which you can see in the foreground, this Christmas. He wonders still how Santa knew just exactly what he wanted. He loved it but quite possibly Dad had just as much fun with it. Isn’t it amazing how good Santa is? Caitlin was given a pink dollhouse.

I fired up the chimney last winter when Jen and the kids were away, and succeeded in smoking the house out. I suspect that fireplace will have a TV in it within the next few months.

We tried living without a TV by putting it downstairs where you get lousy reception so we never watch. I am just about ready to throw in the towel and buy a nice big one and put it where that fireplace is. What do you say to that?



Who’s that!??! It’s 9.30 in the morning here and we’ve thrown the doors wide open to let the fresh morning air in. Jen’s sitting where I am tapping away right now.



This is a view from the verandah door looking back in…more windows!

Do you realise that the actual “Three Musicians” by Picasso has much more vibrant colours than the print on top of the keyboard? That print is another one on “loan” from Dad. I have to get a new one. I should get him one too.

I bought that keyboard way back in 1992 in PNG. I knew I would be itinerant so bought a weighted keyboard instead of a real piano. Before I pass from this Earth I hope to have a Yamaha C-7 grand in my living room and the chops to play jazz.



The tour is almost done, we’re going to the back. This is taken from the vegetable garden looking back towards the back of the house. You can just see the clothesline on the right side of the picture.

We set up a camp table in the rear verandah and had a few al fresco breakfasts on this rear verandah this past Christmas summer break. That was very nice and the sun was just as you see it here – coming over the top from the front of the house so we had enough time in the shade to finish breakfast in the cool morning air. Jenny grows tomatoes in those large pots.



On the left side of the garden, Jenny started a veggie patch last spring. That season has finished. We were well fed from this garden, getting strawberries, lots of different types of lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, English spinach, and other things. This was Jenny getting rural. I myself have never had, and never will have, any inclination to work a garden. I’ll just be the taste tester. The kids loved it though – they were always very excited in helping Jen.



To our right you can see the trampoline, which is always popular with the kids. Our neighbours over that fence keep chickens for eggs. In Sydney we used to wake up to birdsong, because we lived in a very leafy area – Sydney’s North Shore. Here we wake up to chickens squawking.

That’s Canberra for you. We live very close to the city, but just think, our neighbours keep chickens…. Is that rural or what! By the way, the chickens are never noisy, although you hear them in the morning, and they don’t smell… hmmm I am told fresh eggs are the best…hmmmm ….maybe I can encourage Jenny…. Jenny? – what do you say to that?



Finally, this is a composite shot of our backyard. It’s patchy as we aren’t allowed to water our lawn because of water restrictions, but we love it. The kids love going out here and playing. That’s our Weber Baby Q on the right, which gets a real workout – it’s very easy to clean and very economical and it cooks fantastically well with that Weber smokey flavour!

That’s it folks. As Hal David said, “a house is not a home”… It’s what you can’t see that makes a house a home and I hope I’ve shown you what can’t be seen with ours.

This is our home in Canberra. We love it here, but that said you never know, we might pull up stumps again at some point. Canberra, like any place, has its good and not so good. If we ever decide to leave, I remember Dad always telling us about PNG, that he looked at it as a vacation. If it ended tomorrow, well and good, if it ended in a few years, that was good as well.

© JayGantor

Post from New Year 1 Jan 2009

I wrote this literally New Year's Eve, and sent it off, and had a pleasant surprise a month later to see that it was published in the letters to the editor in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

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Where has the year gone, a friend wrote me a week ago. I had meant to set aside some quality time to write a reflective tome on the year, but here I now find myself in the interstitial spaces of life, trying to accomplish one of the tasks I feel are truly important.

Rina Jimenez David wrote with disarming honesty about a sense of gloom amidst the celebration, of a darkness ahead borne on winds of uncertainty, underlined by a disturbing apathy in the nation.

We have more to be worried about these days, beginning from the President's impunity in the face of substantive allegations against her cohort, and immediate family. We nearly had another martyr – GMA at least, had learned her lesson from recent history. And of course, the rice shortage, and now the global financial crisis have undermined the hopes we would have held for a more prosperous year ahead.

Apprehension about the New Year is not such a bad thing. It at least hints that the realisation is taking hold that doing nothing will only exacerbate an almost intolerably bad situation. There is much to be concerned about, and the question that may be at the back of people's minds may be: "how much more of this can I take"?

No on ever wants to go backward, so there can only be one answer to that question. Once that question is resolved, the mind turns to the issue of what action to take.

The first priority

Barack Obama's victory as president-elect must be the good news story of the year – an inspiration almost, but not quite as uplifting as was Pacman's two triumphs. But the one thing that struck me as I watched Obama give his victory speech, was this: there was a man who had just felt the world's weight fall squarely on his shoulders. Was it just me, or didn't Obama sombre face belie the burden he had just assumed? So showed the man's nature, that public office was a matter of immense responsibility, and not simply a matter of triumph or victory.

In the wake of Obama's victory we have had no shortage of those who claim to be the Philippines version of Obama. But that victory was not his, and to see it as such is to miss the point about the Philippines issues.

Walt Whitman wrote in his poem "Election Day, November 1884" that America's greatness was not in the grandeur of its landscape, the geysers of Yosemite and the Niagara fall, but in the quadrennial choosing. The most powerful force in that great nation was that "still small voice vibrating – America's choosing day"

The benefit out of that process, what Whitman thought was the greatest force in America, is what the Philippines is denied today. It was corrupted four years ago with Garci's kind assistance. GMA barely escaped that crisis, and here we are four years hence, seriously contemplating giving up that force again through the debate about Cha Cha.

There is a lot that's wrong about the Philippines, but change must begin somewhere, and change must come, if the Philippines chooses to fight against the forces of corruption and darkness, from its "choosing day".

Too often, as good catholics, we rely on simply having good intentions and convictions. But the challenge we face, if we want change, is to start somewhere. To that end, I think there should be a national concerted civic focus on implementing timely, reliable, transparent, centrally tallied, technology-based vote counting systems in the next presidential election. The nation must take an active interest in protecting the integrity of the Philippines "choosing day". The continuation and integrity of the voting process should be the concern of every Filipino who can see that there must be a better way of life than what GMA offers.

It is far too important a step to be left to those who would profit from another Garci episode.