When I grow up,

      Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick, tick, tick. Ti    .  
      Not long now.

My mother is really grown up now - she's been boundless and infinite for at least 5 years. I remember being shocked when I first began to give her the mini mental tests they use to assess dementia.

The Alzheimer clock face flies apart like its whole logic has been flung out from an ever widening gyre, blowing apart like a puff of dandelion.

We were sitting at my veranda table. I was conscious of her enlarged sphere of concentration. She could not focus her attention on the task at hand because her mind was taken up by awareness. Here, in the swirling unfamiliar environment of my place, she feels lost. Although she pretends to be content, I can see her glance at heavy clouds looming. She startles when a shriek of greenies in flashing bright feathers, wheel out of the tree tops, then her eyes widen with the same wonder mine did at the kaleidascope she gave me to look thorough when when I was her little girl. 

I am the sum total of everything she filled me up with - her songs, her joy, her vast, bottomless chocolate-eyed adoring gaze. She never took her yes of me, after all that time waiting and longing for me. She poured so much of her energy into into me I was practically airborne. If she believed I could fly, I'd be a bird.

But here she is, with her exploded clock and a fist full of coins that may as well be buttons, for all they mean to her. She thinks she knows the lady's face, but can't quite remember her name. She knows the kangaroo is on the other side.

She sleeps a lot more now. She gets tired after the exertion of the tests and agrees she might be thirsty - whatever I think. I say she should come inside and lie down while I get her a glass of water and by the time I'm back she's sleeping heavy as child, toes outpointed, with a balled up hanky descrunching in her uncurled palm.

Faces look down from the paintings on the walls. All their eyes have followed her into this room and pinned her to the bed. Her grandson, six years old in his Lewis Miller portrait watches her from the depths of the too-big chair he is trapped in; a red face screams out of a Davida Allen Mother and Child from the mid 1980s, and directly above, monsters and ghosts lie just beneath the surface of a black, purple and red David Kirk.

She hasn't had much practice looking at paintings. She doesn't think the pictures hanging in my house are for decoration and I wonder what she makes of the dreamscape world of imagery I have walled myself into. She loved to watch me draw, I could draw anything I saw. Drawing attracted her attention, this thing l could already do. Like breath.

I hear her snore. She hasn't forgotten herself completely. She still knows all her favourite songs, but can only catch them once they are already in the air, in process. Once she hears the pattern, she's away, pitch perfect. If we are not singing, it is difficult to keep a conversation going. I try to remember to stay in the present and only talk about things we can both see; birds passing overhead or the ant she's been watching cross the table, feeling with the tip of her tongue for words that never arrive. Everything is only what it appears to be - pre-Adam, before it all got divided into names. Reading is pointless. But as she says, she's happy just sitting. 

Tomorrow, I am looking after my mother while my father has day surgery. She can't be left alone now. She knows who Dad is, but she's not 100 percent sure. I am a complete stranger, but she will believe me when I tell her he'll be home soon.

The drought has just broken. Its been raining hard on and off all day while the tilt of the Earth turns a notch closer to winter. I will make her banana on toast for breakfast and we will drink tea on the veranda. I'll draw some shapes for her to colour-in with the lovely Derwent pencils what turn to bright pools of pink and red - her favourites - under her wetted brush. While she paints, I'll watch the rain do the same to the land and try to imagine her story, her forgotten life, into a book.

White wall fever, indeed.

Goodness, 'who knows where the time goes'? Almost a whole year later, and here I am, back at my blog. I was reminded of it because my son has just begun his own here at blogspot.

Coincidentally, an art exhibition opened last Friday in my very own country town and my son is in it - actually, a picture of him and his father - the art dealers Evan and Ray Hughes. The image is by the Queensland painter Ian Smith, though at the time it was painted, only one of them was an art dealer, the other is only about two foot long, bald, and crawling around the gallery floor.

 Confusing? Time is like that, a tangle of coincidences. For me, to be in that gallery full of paintings was a time warp or artists and old friends I've not seen for ages. A visit to the foreign country of the past doesn't happen every week out here in the sticks.

It was the opening at the Cooroy Butter Factory of an exhibition of the McCrea Collections - Then and Now. Back in the late 70s-early 80s, the McCreas were part of the Ray Hughes Gallery inner sanctum of collectors, artists and lovers. Once a month, we would all come together at the Red Hill Gallery in Enoggera Terrace to launch a new exhibiton. The McCreas joined the scene in the early 80s. At 6pm we'd crack open the Coolibah casks and for a couple of hours we'd all be in thrall of Ray Hughes, the maverick bad-boy art dealer, feeling the full force of his fire and brimstone passion and faith in contemporary art.


Smithy (Ian Smith) was always there. He and Ray were firm, fast friends, and Davida Allen, my painting teacher, and a host of collectors who had learned that admission to Ray's salon only cost them the price of a picture. The McCreas were not alone - there was Athy Nye, the bikie who'd stacked his bike and spent his insurance pay out on art; Ben Peel, a tradie who put his purchases on lay-by and paid them off at $50 a week; Shane and Sally Thompson who made the effort to come up for the show have an equally excellent art collection, as do many others. Jim Baker, who opened the show had a spectacular passion for the art he saw in that terrace shop in Red Hill. He went on to become our biggest collector and was instrumental in brokering the finance for our move to Sydney in the mid-80s. He went on to set up the private Museum of Contemporary art in Brisbane and like David Walsh in Tasmania, put together a fantastic collection that he shared with the people of Brisbane.

As I looked out across the crowd, searching out familiar images - that's  Peter Powditch! Steve Killick! Gavin Chilcott! I realised that the scene in Brisbane back then was about the same size. Our mailing list was only about 500 people (I know, I hand addressed the envelopes). Today, people have more facebook friends than that. But what we had was real - real people would receive that monthly post card in the mail, put it on the fridge and plan their social life around it. The Ray Hughes Gallery was IT, edgy and interesting as all fuck. I feel deeply honoured to have been part of that circle of acquaintance.

So, while it was a weird blast from the past kind of a thing, it was also a fantastic testament to the love and faith John and Lyn McCrea placed in the possibility of where a work of art can take you and how it can change your life. Ray asked his collectors to dig into their pockets to support the artists in their midst - not only to buy the work, but to befriend them and continue to keep and care for their work, and thereby actively participate in its ongoing appreciation in value. By becomming the 'premiere' audience of the work, Ray's collectors were invited into the studio to be the first people in the world to see a new show, to be the front line curators of their own personal museums of art and ideas.

I am blessed to have my own collection of work from that time, my own personal visual diary of my life and times in relation to the great artistic minds of my generation. It is the diary of a large, exuberant love, the major product of which is our brilliant son, Evan - the baby in that picture by Smithy. He has the baton now and runs The Hughes Gallery.