JUST WALKING

The Places We Found and the Things We Never Went Looking For

Chapter 4 – Northbourne Avenue — Just Before the Festivities

Before the festivities got under way, I went for a walk. We were in Canberra for a Rotary conference, and at the time I was President of the Rotary Club of Belrose, a position which gave me plenty to occupy my head without requiring me to remain indoors to do it. There would be people to talk to and a conference to take part in soon enough. For the moment, I wanted to get out, stretch my legs and let my thoughts find somewhere else to be.

I headed from the centre of the city along Northbourne Avenue without any great intention beyond walking. There was no attraction I had decided must be inspected, no route devised to take in a set of important buildings, and certainly no plan to revisit my childhood. Canberra happened to be outside, and I happened to have some time before the organised part of the day claimed it. That seemed a sufficient arrangement.

Being a club president does not mean every hour must be spent being presidential. There is considerable pleasure in being somewhere nobody requires you to have an opinion, remember an item or consider what happens next. A footpath makes relatively few demands beyond the sensible placement of your feet. I was quite happy to give it my attention for a while.

The conference was the reason for the weekend, but it did not have to be the subject of every thought within it. Rotary had become part of my life, with its people, projects and the work which sits behind what an outsider might see as a pleasant gathering of volunteers. There was purpose in being there, and I would return to it. In the meantime, I was walking along an avenue which had occupied a place in my life long before Rotary did.

The Canberra Rex Motel was one of those places that drew the past a little closer. I had never stayed there, yet its name had occupied a rather grand position in my understanding of Canberra, formed in those years when certain buildings seemed important without your needing to know very much about what went on inside them. As children, on our various quests for equestrian glory, we always seemed to be passing it. Northbourne Avenue was one of the great thoroughfares of Canberra, and somewhere along the passage towards another show or gymkhana, there was the Rex, acquiring familiarity through repetition while retaining the distinction of somewhere we only ever saw from outside.

Our interest in Canberra then was largely determined by where the horses would be competing. The city might have had a national purpose, but we had a more immediate one, involving the possibility of ribbons, trophies and sufficient success to make the journey home a satisfying one. Parliament could attend to its affairs while we attended to ours. Along the way, however, places entered our understanding without any deliberate effort to remember them, and the Rex became one of those landmarks by which a journey acquired its familiar shape.

I could not have told you what a room cost, what sort of people stayed there or whether its position in the accommodation pecking order matched the one I had assigned it. That did not prevent me from regarding it with a certain awe. Children are quite capable of recognising grandeur, or deciding they have recognised it, without requiring a brochure to establish the particulars. The name, the building and its place along that important avenue were enough for me to furnish an impression which survived long after the journeys themselves had become memories.

There is something about a place repeatedly passed on the way to somewhere exciting that allows it to absorb a little of the anticipation. The Rex was never our destination, but it belonged to the approach, to that part of the outing when the competition was still ahead and every possibility remained available. We were going to ride, to test ourselves and our horses against whoever else had turned up, and perhaps to come home with something worth showing. The buildings along the way became attached to those expectations, even though they had no involvement in whether we cleared a fence or made a decent passage through the bending poles.

Walking past it that morning, I was encountering all those earlier passages from a different height and at a different pace. There was no horse to compete on and no equestrian ambition requiring my attention further along the road. I was an adult in Canberra for a Rotary conference, taking some time before the festivities, yet the Rex still knew how to occupy the place I had given it as a boy. I could look at it with the benefit of intervening years without quite persuading that younger version of me to surrender his assessment.

Perhaps, in the fullness of time, it had slipped somewhat from the standing it once held in my imagination. Newer establishments would have come along, with different claims to distinction and the latest interpretation of what a visitor to the nation’s capital ought to expect. I was in no position to judge the Rex’s fortunes from the footpath, and it would have been unfair to confuse changes in a building with changes in the eyes looking at it. What had once appeared grand to a child could look more ordinary to a man who had seen considerably more of the world, without either view being entirely mistaken.

The Hydro Majestic in the Blue Mountains occupies much the same territory in my mind. I have never stayed there either, yet it has always held an attraction which reaches beyond the practical question of where to put your head for the night. Some places seem to offer an idea of an occasion simply through their names and their presence. You can pass them over the years, imagine the experience of being a guest and retain a sense of their importance without ever finding out where reception is.

Perhaps never having stayed in either has helped preserve that impression. I have no disappointing room, indifferent breakfast or unexpectedly ambitious bill to place against the grandeur I supplied from outside. Nor do I have an actual stay to confirm it, which seems only fair to acknowledge. My acquaintance with both places has been conducted at a respectful distance, leaving the imagination with rather more freedom than a paying customer might allow it.

But the pleasure of seeing the Rex was no longer dependent on its being among the finest places to stay. Its continued presence had become a distinction of its own. In a world where so many familiar places are renamed, rebuilt or removed, there was comfort in finding something still there which had accompanied those childhood journeys. It did not have to impress me afresh; it had already earned its place through all the times we had passed it, intent on something else.

That morning, I had the time to notice the landmark which our equestrian expeditions had made familiar. Northbourne Avenue was still carrying me towards the showground, although I had set out with no particular intention of returning to that part of my life. The Rex had begun the reacquaintance before the grounds themselves came into view. I kept walking, with the conference waiting somewhere behind the morning and the boy’s Canberra beginning to gather ahead.

A person seeing it for the first time would have had a different walk from mine. We could have passed the same frontage at the same moment, each taking in what was there, while only one of us had an earlier Canberra accompanying him. That is something I enjoy about wandering through a place you have known before. There is what you can see now, and there is what the sight allows you to recall, both quite capable of occupying the same stretch of pavement.

I had not set out to conduct an inspection of what had changed. There is a particular sort of outing which becomes a running objection to the present, with every alteration treated as evidence that things were better when you knew where everything was. This was not turning into one of those. I was simply finding that Northbourne Avenue had more to offer me than a way of using up the morning before the conference.

I kept walking, still without a destination which needed to be reached. The showgrounds and racecourse lay in the direction I was heading, but knowing what lies ahead is different from having set out expressly to get there. A walk can gather a purpose as it goes, sometimes without you quite noticing the change. Mine began to acquire one when glimpses of the showground brought an entirely different gathering back into view.

Canberra Show, 1967, was waiting there. I had come out that morning as a Rotary club president with a little time before the day’s proceedings, and now I was thinking about being a boy on a horse. The distance between those two versions of me was measured in years, yet it took very little of the avenue to bring them together. Familiar ground can be surprisingly efficient in that respect.

At that Show I won the GJ Coles trophy for the most successful horse rider under eighteen. It was a handsome Ranleighware tray, and it still sits in pride of place in our house, having survived rather more changes in my circumstances than the boy who won it could possibly have imagined. The description of the award has become so familiar to me that I can repeat it without necessarily stopping to consider what it meant. Yet there is a small piece of arithmetic tucked into that description which deserves a moment before we move on.

Do the maths for a moment, placing the year, 1967, against the age I am now, and consider just how young I was. Then put that small boy into a category which extended to riders approaching eighteen, an age which from my position would have seemed considerably closer to adulthood than childhood. This was not simply a matter of being judged against children at much the same stage of growing up. The upper boundary allowed for years of additional experience, confidence and physical development, none of which would have appeared an insignificant advantage from where I sat.

Seen that way, “most successful rider under eighteen” acquires rather more substance than a pleasant inscription on a tray. I was a young boy doing well enough across the competition to come away with that distinction, in a field whose age limit reached well beyond my own. I do not need to improve the result in the telling, supply a dramatic final contest or pretend to remember what every spectator thought. The arithmetic makes a sufficiently good case for why it might have seemed an extraordinary achievement, and why I am still entitled to be rather pleased with it.

Of course, the boy had to get on and ride, without the benefit of an older version of himself explaining the significance from a comfortable distance. Whatever the ages of the other competitors, the work still had to be done from the saddle, where a trophy could not be won merely by appearing unusually young for the undertaking. Looking back now, I can appreciate the disparity in a way that gives the award fresh weight. Familiarity has a habit of making even something remarkable seem ordinary when it has been sitting in your house long enough.

I can look at the tray whenever I like, which might suggest that there was nothing much the sight of a showground could add. Yet the tray at home and the place where I won it did rather different things to the memory. At home, I see something which has belonged to me for most of my life; walking towards the showground, I begin to appreciate again how little of that life I had lived when I earned it. For a while, the familiar possession becomes a remarkable prize again, and the man passing the grounds can stand back and give the small boy his due.

At home, I know the result. The tray has kept it available all these years, a solid and satisfying answer to the question of whether I ever managed to do anything useful on the back of a horse. Walking towards the showground brought more of the life around the result into the picture. The award was still there in my thoughts, but it had company again.

Being named the most successful rider under eighteen meant something to that boy. I am not inclined to reduce it now merely because a good deal of life has happened since, or because the man remembering it might be expected to have a more recent achievement ready for conversation. It was a fine thing to win, and I was proud of it. The fact that I have kept the tray in such a prominent position suggests that the pride has proved reasonably durable.

But a tray cannot explain what riding occupied in our lives. It can record a result without showing the afternoons of exercise, the relationship with the horses or the way the next show became part of the week’s thinking. A person could admire it and understand the inscription while knowing very little about the boy who brought it home. Even I could walk past it and allow the title on it to stand in for the whole experience.

Out along Northbourne Avenue, the experience began spreading beyond that neat account. Canberra was part of the country we knew through riding, connected in my mind with Boorowa and Yass, with Hall, Canberra Lakes, Canberra Riding Club and Queanbeyan. Elsewhere in the circuit were Rye Park, Rugby, Frogmore and Reids Flat. Their names had a kind of familiarity that came from taking part in things there, rather than simply passing the signs on the way somewhere else.

A showground was a place where we had something to do. You arrived with a reason to be interested in what was happening inside it, and the events were not merely something to watch before finding lunch. There was a horse to ride and a competition to take seriously. Whatever else Canberra might have meant to the adults who took us there, that was quite enough to make it important to me.

The horses themselves returned to mind, with Gazer occupying the substantial place he had earned. He was my other half on a showground, although I would not assume from that long partnership that every riding memory belongs to the same horse or the same year. The 1967 award had opened the door on the broader equestrian years. Once open, it was not particularly concerned with keeping those years in separate compartments.

Gazer and I competed across hunting, showjumping and the sporting events. Bending, flags and barrels each asked something of us, as did a course of jumps, and over time we developed the understanding which made it possible to do them well together. The results mattered, certainly, but I had known the horse through far more than the occasions on which a result was announced. His part in my life could not have been adequately represented by a collection of ribbons.

There were afternoons after school when riding was simply what I did. During show season there was exercise to keep a horse fit for competition, with the work occurring well away from anyone deciding who would receive a prize. It belonged to the ordinary part of the week, which is probably why it can be overlooked when a memory begins with winning. You remember the outcome, while the repeated work that made it possible settles quietly behind it.

There was satisfaction in having a partnership good enough for other people to notice. Our parents sometimes received telephone calls late in the week asking which show or gymkhana we intended to attend, and the callers seemed to discover somewhere else they would rather be. I cannot claim to know every consideration involved in arranging their weekends. I can say that we did not regard the enquiries as an unfavourable assessment of our prospects.

Those little recollections brought more life to the morning than a careful inventory of cups and placings would have done. I was thinking of what it was like to belong in that world, to know the horses and the places and to have something you could do well. The man walking towards the showground had accumulated other roles since then. For a while, none of them needed to prevent him enjoying the recollection of the boy.

It was an unexpected use of the time I had allowed myself before the festivities. Clearing my head had not resulted in an empty head, which was probably an unrealistic ambition in any case. It had simply made room for thoughts that were not connected to what I would be doing next. The avenue was taking me further into a familiar part of Canberra, and the memories were following at their own pace.

At home there is another Ranleighware tray, presented to my father for more than twenty years as a councillor of Boorowa Shire Council. His service and my riding success have found themselves represented by objects of a similar kind, although what sits behind each is very different. Mine directs attention to an award at a particular Show. His acknowledges years of involvement, compressed into something which could be presented and brought home.

I had come to Canberra myself in a community role, and that connection gave the two trays a little more to say to each other. Years after the riding award, I was President of Belrose Rotary Club, taking part in an organisation whose work depended on people continuing to turn up and contribute. There was no need to turn the morning into an appraisal of either Dad’s service or my own. It was enough to notice how much living could sit behind a small amount of engraving.

Then there were the years with Robyn and the children, the parts of my life which did not fit neatly into an award category at all. There are things there which matter more to me than being the most successful rider at a show, however pleased I remain with the tray. They have not all produced objects which can be placed where I pass them every day. Some have developed so gradually that identifying the moment of achievement would be difficult, even though their importance is beyond question.

That was the small trick in the remembering. Nothing about my recollection of winning had to be wrong for its prominence to give a slightly uneven account of what mattered. The tray had stayed in view, and the story attached to it had therefore remained close at hand. Other things had to wait for a morning when I was doing very little in particular, walking along an avenue and allowing one thought to lead to another.

I would still have chosen the same place for the tray when I got home. A pleasant walk in Canberra was hardly grounds for rearranging the house, and I had no wish to demote the boy’s achievement because the man could think of other things to be proud of. What had changed was the space around the memory. The Show belonged to a much larger life, and for a while that larger life had been allowed to come into the picture.

The conference remained part of the day ahead, with its people and proceedings and the role in which I had come to take part. I had wanted a little room before all of that began, and Northbourne Avenue had provided it rather generously. There was nothing on a programme directing me to pass the Rex, look towards the showground and think about a horse. I had managed that part of the weekend entirely by going for a walk.

Somewhere in our house, the tray was sitting exactly where it had been when we left. Out in Canberra, I had come a little closer to the boy who won it, without needing to be him again. Soon enough I would be back among the Rotarians, President of Belrose and ready for the festivities. For the moment, I could keep walking, just walking, with no greater intention than seeing what the next stretch brought to mind.