The terrible truth is that I don't know when my parents married. I will ask, and correct if necessary, but it's the middle if the night here and the middle of a workday in Sydney and now really is not the time.

The years, in case you hadn't noticed, are only the flimsiest pretext for these entries anyway, and this one is not really about the wedding, though I'm starting with wedding photos. It's about the world before I arrived in it; about the unknowable.

These pictures are fascinating for any number of reasons: they're so dated, so ordinary, and (especially) so Australian. Peter and his brother Michael, here, could not be from anywhere else -- the smiles, the tans, the squints -- it is almost as if the photographic emulsion has captured their accent.

They also look amazingly alike, as they never have in my lifetime. I imagine this as the moment they started to diverge, with a final, irreversible breaking point two pictures down.

It was a Catholic wedding, and my mother is in white. There are things we just never think -- or, perhaps, dare -- to ask, but looking at pictures like this, how can one fail to wonder? Did they do it by the book? Are they on their way to a fumbling first sexual experience? Given Peter's eventual sexuality, had he fooled around with boys before this? What was their courtship like? How did any of it ever happen at all?

I have to imagine, certainly to hope, that it was happy. That the marriage -- which despite the matter of orientation lasted decades and left a continuing affectionate relationship -- and the journey it began were a positive thing.

Oh yes, the journey.

This next picture -- the breaking point -- is from January 3rd 1967, so in some conceptual way I suppose I am in it. My parents are boarding the ship that will carry them -- and me -- to new lives in England. For such an occasion you'd clearly want to make an effort.

Isn't this a gem? A gift from another world?

There are the clothes, of course, and the hair, and (say what?) the guitar -- but above all there's the commitment of it: the act of travelling across the world was so much more remarkable then. Just getting there would take weeks.

There's not much, really, to say about these last two. Both are from April. My arrival is only a few weeks away. It seems to me that my parents' metamorphosis has begun in earnest, but probably that's just my own neat little fantasy.

Perhaps the change wasn't, after all, as great as it seems to me; I have a tendency to romanticize. Perhaps there is no incongruity between the seemingly-straitlaced suburban Catholic couple above and the radical hippy intellectual communards they were to become, nothing more than the slow accretion of experience that reshapes us all.

Perhaps. But I like my version better.
Posted by matt at February 20, 2004 01:18 AM