Cold suns in water
A reflection on the Botanic Gardens; or, my little childhood park.
Image Credit: Eamonn Murphy
Lie with me. I lie by the steps, watching the green leaves cut up the sky. I lie by the pool, and the saltwater puddle on my chest dries into white. I lie in the rose garden. I lie among the jacarandas and the pines. I lie against the chair, the ledge carved into stone, and I watch the cold suns fall into the water. I lie in the place I have known and loved since my earliest days.
When I write about Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, my mouth cannot comfortably pronounce its name. These are the Botanic Gardens (plural), the gardens, that little park. In the same way, Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool is not the pool I know, despite the countless mornings I have spent in its blue water. It is Boy Charlton, the pool. I find it difficult to extricate the landmark from my personal attachment to it: the renowned Royal Botanic Garden cannot be found in the little garden of my childhood. However solipsistic these thoughts may be, I want to reflect on my place.
My first memory of the gardens is blurred by tears. A black standard, bearing the name Weasel Hall, has been plastered across Mr. Toad’s stately home. Skulls and crossbones are hauled into the garden, and the Chief Weasel darts around behind me, cackling. I cling to my father. This is not one memory: our family — cousins, friends, neighbours — would walk to the gardens every summer to watch Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. My yearly visits have since morphed into one production, the music and the singing and the frights and laughs all a single recollection of the past. At some point in my childhood, I followed my older cousins into Wild Wood, the trees and rocks behind the makeshift amphitheatre, and we watched Mole and Rat get terribly lost. I remember the sandwiches that my mother would pack, and the sour Persian treats that we would share as the play unfolded. I remember a warm year, and how we dipped our faces into the lake during the intermission. I do not remember Grahame’s story in its entirety. I remember the gardens.
If you wander up from the Wild Wood, you will find the track where I learned to cycle. My family would ride down Bourke Street, and place our bicycles in the lift that climbs to the matchsticks. We would walk our bikes up to the gallery. We would fall into the gardens, by the pool and the chair and the harbour and all the way around again. When I was younger, I loved Pamela Allen’s Alexander’s Outing, and any ride through the gardens would spark thoughts of Alexander hopping out of the lake, hobbling down these very paths. While riding, my father would call out for my brother and me to emulate Alexander: just as the duckling followed parental instructions, we were to follow the invisible traces made by Dad’s wheels.
As I have grown, Alexander has stayed with me. I ride under the same fig trees, through the same greenish light. I bring a novel in my backpack, and lie by his lake to read. In recent summers, I have stuffed my backpack with swimmers and a threadbare towel, and after my ride, I swim. At Boy Charlton, I only ever breathe on the side of me that faces the harbour. I glance at the dark green waves, the whitecaps in the distance. I try to peer through the windows of the wharf. The salt water of the pool always gets through my goggles, stinging my eyes. I tend not to mind. The water is clear, and I concentrate on the navy line before me. When my arms ache, I lie in the sun for my body to dry. I ride home. The cold sun sets in the water behind me.
I wonder whether these memories of the gardens are too perfect. I will confess to tight chests and shivering arms in the rose garden, awaiting an exam at the Con. I remember looking at my little fingers, and thinking how blue they were from practice. In my final days of high school, the gardens played host to my first love. I will confess that I cannot ride through the Wild Wood, through Alexander’s path, without thinking that this is where that ill-fated relationship began. I resent how my childhood memories have been so tarnished. I do, however, recognise that all of these experiences make this my place. I have grown and grown up in these gardens.
In her diaries, Helen Garner writes that she’d like to go to Sydney — to “walk in the Botanic Gardens and see the Opera House eggshells shine, water and ships sparkle.” In his poem, “Elegy in a Botanic Gardens,” Kenneth Slessor longs for this same beauty: the “smell of birds’ nests faintly burning,” and the “thousands of white circles drifting past, cold suns in water.” To both authors, the garden is not a locality of historical note, or even botanic interest. It is instead a place of splendour and love, and of deep personal significance. I could not agree more — that little park is my place.