Travelling up to Sydney from the south coast of NSW, my Mother and I stopped into an antique warehouse in the charming township of Bowral in the Southern Highlands. I share my Mother's love of old things, antique jewellery was her passion. She'd once had an antique jewellery business, Greentree Antiques, housed in a corner of an old theatre in Windsor. A cavernous and magical place filled to the brim with the most fascinating objects. A place you could spend hours and still not feel like you'd seen it all. My sister and I would get lost in that theatre during school holidays. Upstairs there was an area which was off limits to the public to house the overflowing horde. It was, of course, the most intruiging place of all. There was a heavy dusty theatre curtain that drapped across the stairwell to stop customers going up. We would sneak up there whilst nobody was looking and spend hours trawling through boxes and admiring obscure curiosities. It was here we once happened accross a box of vintage erotic photography. We'd never seen anything like it in our lives, little eyes popped out of their heads, we swore ourselves to secrecy and emerged unusually sheepish from our regular adventures. That old school erotica is still so much more exciting than the modern adaptions. It was an era when less was more, the imagination was allowed to create the fantasy.
That day, with my Mother in Bowral, was probably the last time we mooched about an antique shop together. Some months later she was gone. I'd been searching for little bits of Australiana to take home to London, it had been the general theme of my holiday purchases. It was in that antique warehouse in Bowral that I came across an old painting of three kookaburras sitting on the branch of a gumtree. A little rough and a little damaged but framed in a beautifully carved wooden frame. I fell in love with its rustic Australian charm and had to have it to brighten the walls of my dark basement flat in London. It would be a little reminder of our sunny roots. Mum had always been a brilliant business woman, clever and charismatic, I called in her help to negotiate a good deal.
That painting has adorned my walls ever since. It's a symbol of so much more to me now than my Australian heritage. It represents family and memories, respecting the past and taking care of the future.
The kookaburra is a family orientated bird living in small units with the older generations taking care of the youngest. The famous kookaburra laugh is both a greeting and a territorial warning, but once one group starts off it seems the whole neighborhood will join in, often just as the sun is rising or setting. I like to think that both ends of their day are marked by this calling to one and other, a good belly laugh enjoyed with family and friends.
Where I currently live in Australia we have a family of kookaburras in our backyard, they seem so confidently assured and majestic in their domain and I feel somehow that we have become a part of their family too, so intently they keep watch over us.
So why have I called my blog Kookaburra Laugh? I felt like life with a family of my own was constantly throwing up a variety of amusing and often challenging situations. At the end of the day it's often a case of: if you don't laugh, you'll cry. I prefer to take a leaf out of the kookaburra's book.
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