Today I handed over the princely sum of 1500 Euros to fly to Sydney in May. It was particularly expensive this time round as my trip across the sky to the red dirt coincides with no less than four French public holidays. I wouldn’t normally choose to travel at exactly the same time as half of France, especially the half under the age of 14 as I’m not very calm inside aircraft, but duty calls. My sister is having a baby.
Like Mick hollers in the Rolling Stones classic Beast of Burden; my little sister is a pretty pretty girl. She is also a very beautiful woman, but her resemblance to one of Michelangelo’s cherubs is a minor detail. More significantly, the Art-Sist-ologer is a talented scholar, a gifted painter and a dab hand at mixing a Martini. All of which are essential life skills when you share 24m2, one towel, one bed and a plastered right leg.
We came to Europe together to share the world’s smallest living space in France not that long after our father went to share a celestial flat with John Lennon. Pooling our wealth, our three languages, our brown curls, our dimples and two suitcases we went in search of herring, Hammershoi and life experience in Europe. After trundling around the freezing north in frozen trains for two months we settled in Paris, in an attic apartment with a bed and a bath and walked the streets of Paris until the fateful day a bike diverted its path across my right ankle. She went home 8 months after we arrived and I am still here. She browns her freckled face under a luminescent blue sky while I go blind in weakening sunlight. Sitting here after two weeks of sub-zero cold, I wonder who made the smarter decision.
Whatever the answer to that question, I have only one sister so I can say without bias that she is my favourite.
A dedicated enthusiast of the Mafia, she is more than a little obsessed with all that is Scorsese, de Niro, Pacino, Corleone and Soprano. I’ve known her to say on more than one occasion that she wished she had been a gangster’s moll. Not for the money and danger but because they had better clothes than we do today and her just-so-bobbed hair would have suited the Prohibition Era fashion for headbands. Or maybe, like her elder sister, she has a thing for muscled Italian guys with guns? Guns between their shoulder and wrist, not the more deadly lead variety.
A graduate of one of Australia’s finest art schools, she is naturally a keen observer of all that is visual, balanced and beautiful. She has taught me about the significance of the naked woman who sits beside her clothes and stares at the voyeur in Manet’s Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe, the importance of the division of space in David’s The Death of Marat and the beauty of shadow and light as defined by Raphael and Vermeer. Lessons I memorised and have since put into practice, visiting Europe’s art galleries without her as my personal tutor. I’ve heard her voice in my ear last year when I stood in front of the Girl with the Pearl in The Hague and she silently advised me again last week as I was transfixed by Venus’ eyes in the Uffizi. Her encyclopaedic knowledge of European Art History does not explain why she spent a year painting putrefied rotten potatoes. Although I will admit that their extra-terrestrial otherworldliness fascinated me when they hung on the walls of our shared apartment. I think I miss them.
Pomegranates - 2006
For 10 years I carried one of her earliest oeuvres, a cigarette and a cup of coffee sketched onto the back of a Post-It sized bus ticket, inside my shiny red wallet. A wallet that was distressingly stolen one night while drinking in a bar close to the flat we shared in Glebe. Crying to the police officer as I listed all the cards and ID that had to be replaced, the constable couldn’t understand why I was so upset about losing a bus ticket.
Ironically it is I that writes upon these pages for the world at large to read, while she is far more talented at articulating a discourse, logical and pragmatic, to convince the reader of her chosen argument. Sitting in the back seat of a sweaty Sydney bus, I remember her asking me once to proofread an essay that she had written for her history class. An essay unclouded with my melodramatic emotion but balanced with an eloquence she inherited from our parents that I unfortunately did not. She, reason to my passion, we do make a formidable pair.
Our adventures as little women in a house lorded over by a macho carpenter had their highs and their lows. Sisters, only 20 months apart, there were times when I was just that little bit older and the sight of her reminded me of the Barbie Dolls I had outgrown. A few years later, we reached the point post puberty when we became partners in crime, partners in love and defenders against the oppression of the parental unit.
After a year as exchange students in France (me) and Sweden (her) and under the European spell of nicotine, we would lock ourselves in her patchouli-scented bedroom, the only room in the house that locked, and smoke illicit cigarettes. We shared secrets and lies, stories and rumours, a brother and two parents. I find it uncanny that what we share is only equal to that which we do not.
She sees the world via the stars and milky impressionist images, I see it as an interminable range of mountains to climb and battles to win or lose. She has made many friends for life; I am the transient traveller who has never settled. She observes and acts with prudence and careful judgement while I jump in head first, often breaking something (leg, arm, heart) upon landing.
Today, the Art-sist-ologer shares a proper-sized home with the Professor, and her protruding belly ripens with their progeny. I’ve not seen her in her latest incarnation as Persephone of Petersham, but I talk to her often and I have no doubt that she’ll make a wonderful if slightly offbeat mother. A child of two artists, that little person inside will most definitely have an eye for all that is spectral, balanced and aesthetically pleasing. My childish curiosity wonders only if she will inherit her mother’s melodic giggle, fantastic hands and tight-knit curls.
As the eldest, there is something unsettling about the reality that I’ll soon be an Aunt to children of both my younger siblings. I’ve come to accept that life has laid a long road before me that won’t necessarily include the milestones of marriage and children of my own. In the confines of my overactive grey matter, I’ve learned to imagine what I don’t have. It comforts me and provides me with plenty of inspiration for what I hope will one day be a novel in my name, the closest thing I have right now to a child. All the same those three little people growing strong under the Southern Cross are among of my life’s greatest treasures. I just wish it didn’t cost a king’s ransom to go and see them.
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