And it’s the boxes and bags that make you suddenly aware of their burden, you carry them across postcodes, blinking away scenes from a car window, disappearing as fast as the last four years, a distance swollen and soft with potentials collapses to meet you, a cool and uncoloured reality, you are on the doorstep of a new sharehouse, with strangers to make home with, leaving your mother for the second time. 

As soon as the restlessness releases you a little, you reach for the camera and are connected to the old joy of image-making. Play-making, home-making, loud and long conversations greet you at home, and you blossom into the girlhood of your 25 years. Looking at the camellia tree through the window you catch your reflection in afternoon light, reminded of the camellia trees in a past two homes, they flowered pink, this one red, like Popo’s slippers, her favourite colour, lucky red.

Strangers lose their strangeness and you recognise your housemates by the sound of their footsteps in the hall, you share a quiet moment with Em’s cat Mo and stare out into the garden with him; and now that he is gone you are thankful for the photo, left of a time which would never repeat - Thank you for showing me the garden that you loved so much.

It takes a second look sometimes to find the specialness of your mother’s dried mandarin skins, the ritual of the star-shaped peel resembling Em’s origami stars, fondness unfolds as you realise that one day these things will be gone and missed, the camera reaches out to touch these domestic shapes, an enshrining like making movie sets of memories, the familiar and temporal and forever, the child falling asleep in the passenger seat and waking up to: home.

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@cass.hnrs

Connection to Western Sydney
Raised in, and whose family home remains, on unceded Dharawal country, Campbelltown.