January 2014
Camping with small children is a whole different level of hell.
But it does make me feel much better about yelling at my kids.
The Most Amazing Man and I take the kidlets camping. Not ‘real’ camping, out in the bush with no facilities or toilets. We totally get all weak about it and book ourselves in for one (torturous) night at a holiday park, complete with a spiralling blue water slide that drops into a crystal clear swimming pool.
Thank god for that pool. It was hot and dusty and putting the tent up in thirty five degree heat required an extreme amount of patience and teeth-gritting and deep breaths. By the time that was done, the only thing we wanted to do was get in the water.
My children are fish, water babies who are so adept at floating and twisting beneath the surface that their self-confidence scares me.
Hot days lead to inevitable whinging. I get it. I’m hot and tired and cranky, too. So I do my best to keep my temper, not to yell or snap when I feel just as sh*t as they do. But my the elastic string of my patience is only so long and there’s only so much I can take.
My patience string twangs and snaps at about eight o’clock that night. The Chop and the Bump are so tired- they are clumsy and cranky. Their eyes appear to be bulging over the thin blue smudges of exhaustion beneath them.
But sleeping in a tent, in your own candy-coloured sleeping bag, is evidently very exciting. The Bump keeps the Chop awake. The Chop whinges. The Bump cries. I find myself making hollow, empty threats; taking advantage of their childish naivety. “We will pack up this tent and take you both home right now!” “There will be no swimming for anyone tomorrow!”
Idle threats. But at six and four years old, they don’t know that yet. They watched us set up the tent in an hour- in their little minds, we could pull it down just as easily.
Yelling at your kids in a caravan park is slightly different to yelling at them at home. At first, the guilt of it is intensified. Everyone is in such close quarters- tents and vans mere metres away from one another, very few solid walls to hold the irrational fights that happen in all families. You realise that people may just hear you, and what on earth would they think?
Then the twilight deepens. There are kookaburras laughing, cicadas singing in high-pitched tones. As it darkens, moths and possums come out to roam amongst camping lamps and open fires. And all around the caravan park is the reassuring chorus of other parents just like you, yelling at their kids to get to bed and stay there or we are all packing up and going home!
Parenting can be such a closed-off thing. It’s lovely to know that there are other people out there who are f*cking it up just as much as me.
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This post isn’t sponsored, or in any way affiliated with anything. It was just a really good experience that I wanted to write down.
What’s left of Pentridge Prison is a strange place.
If you don’t know, Pentridge was one of Australia’s biggest gaols. It closed in 1997 and was sold off to developers. For a while, I imagine, it just sat. Huge and looming and blue-stone grey, taking up a huge pocket of Melbourne’s northern suburbs, bleeding its violent oppressive vibes into the atmosphere.
After a while, life began to seep into it again. A small suburb began to rise there, where cells and sheds and big solid buildings stood before. You can walk around the streets of the Pentridge housing development. It looks and feels like a normal suburb would. Flowers grow in gardens. Lawns get that scruffy “I’ll mow next weekend” look to them. Children’s bikes sit in driveways. Noise tinkles from people’s houses and apartments.
The developers, to their credit, didn’t bulldoze the old structure into the ground. A lot of what was there is still there. Occasionally you’ll see a forbidding stone archway, a blue-stone wall. A guard tower left standing.
It was well worth the effort. D Division is scary. Terrifying, actually. The whole building is laced with a tough coldness that settles on your skin and creeps icy fingers up your back.
The inside of the building looks just like you imagine the inside of prison built early last century would look. There are three floors. The walls of each floor are lined with cells, both to the left and right.
One of the few photos we were able to take.
Each tiny cell housed two full-grown men. Each has a wooden door with a peep hole and a food slot in it. Floors Two and Three are not really whole floors, more corridors that stretch along the walls. It’s like the inside of a shopping centre- from the top floors you can see right down to the bottom.
The bodies are gone now. It still feels like a graveyard.
There’s a hangman’s noose in the middle of the second floor. I see it before we get to it- I spot it from the first floor. So I’m prepared for it.
On this tour there’s a group of young guys, maybe eighteen or twenty years old. The more scared they are, the more bravado they pump across and the more irritating they become. By this stage they’re assessing the noose and talking about swaying bodies and involuntary excrement and I feel myself shudder. I step back from the group and lean myself against my Amazing Man. I take deep breaths and remind myself that this is probably good for me. This is desensitising and that’s helpful, even if unpleasant.
For nearly fifteen minutes we stand in front of that damn noose and listen to stories of people hung. It’s okay. It’s okay and I do it and when it’s over, I’m proud of myself.
Besides, the next bit is where the fun starts. The final half hour of the tour is reserved for photography and general wandering. We can go where ever we like in D Division. We have free run of the building. It’s easier to feel that eeriness without a large group of people surrounding you.
Other cells feel different. They zing with energy and feel full of things that we can’t see. Some of the cells smell of cold and stone. Some of them- sixteen years after the last inmates have left- still smell of heavy sweat and blood and men living in close quarters.
I step into one cell and hear a furtive tapping. Tap, tap, tap, tap. It sounds like it’s coming from inside the wall, not behind it. And I’m the only one here.
It’s the exercise yard that holds the worst of the vibes. Standing under the stars, looking at the twenty foot high blue stone walls topped with menacing, brutal coils of razor wire. The showers and toilets are still here, the metal tables and chairs still bolted to the ground. The Most Amazing Man and I stand alone in hushed silence in the middle of the tiny concrete yard. But it doesn’t feel like we’re alone.
Having given up on the bulky digital camera, The Most Amazing Man has begun taking photos on his phone. It’s in the exercise yard that the phone camera stops working too. We both watch as the flash lights up the yard and the fence that borders it. But the photos come up pitch black. Later on, at home, we play with the exposure and the colours. There’s nothing there– not even the faintest trace of the photo that we’d taken.
As we’re soaking up the atmosphere of the exercise yard, discussing the bizarreness of that phenomenon, the flash on the phone turns on and stays on for ten seconds or so, again with no good reason.
That’s enough of this for now, most definitely. As we leave, the Most Amazing Man tries to take one more photo on his phone, from outside the exercise yard looking in. This time it works. It’s not until later that we notice what appears to be ghost faces suspended in a funny yellow light. (Pareidolia not withstanding, of course).
Zoom in, on the right, for creepy faces.
After that experience, it feels as though it’s time to leave. It feels as though the dark, bloody, violent vibes of the prison are nipping at our heels, pressing on our lower backs. Telling us to go, and quickly. So we leave, slightly terrified and feeling slightly ridiculous for being so terrified. Everything in our rational adult minds tells us not to be silly. Every instinctual vibe we have tells us otherwise.
I am still not sure if I believe in ghosts. But I believe in residual energy.
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I miss my kids so much. This two weeks is the longest I’ve ever been without them. Not that I’m complaining at all– I’m not. It was so much needed. Relaxation. Rejuvenation. Some time to slow down and reflect on the last six months or so, on what we’ve done and how far we’ve come.
But two weeks without their sweet little voices, their gorgeous faces… towards the end of it, I am craving them. Missing them with such an intensity it takes my breath away and brings tears to my eyes.
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That image is fantastic… but now that I look closely at it, not sure about the bunny head!
Hmm….that photo….was it something in my coffee???