out and about

Two women, strangers, stand adjacent at the lights. One wears a fluorescent green face-mask, and the other has luminous red hair.

A high school boy sits with his dad at the cafe. They talk and laugh and smile. Someone approaches their table; a girl with short red hair, dark eyebrows and a smile. She places a milk shake in front of the boy but he doesn’t look at her, just pulls the milk shake close and delivers a long, deep nod of acknowledgement. He lowers his head, and sucks.

A Chinese man on York Street: white shirt, beige chinos. He’s middle aged, with dark hair and glasses, and presents as a visitor taking in the sights; strolling, casual, hands behind his back.

His eyes disrupt this image. They’re hooded, watchful, and his darting gaze is full of cold assessment.

A young woman blocks the seat beside her with an orange bag. She has broad shoulders crossed by wide, dusty blue straps, and long hair tied in a bun with the ends splayed out. She bends her head to a rising salad and shovels. Her jaws work. Her cheek twists and bulges.

Alone, an angry Korean girl leans on a bike stand by the road, raining down syllables of fury on the iced drink in her hand. The ice cream melts in despair.

Between Lewisham and Summer Hill, the trackside graffiti says ‘Bark Bark’. A little further along, it changes to ‘Barka Barka’. This is where the Italian dogs live.

At Long Reef, two big, serious dogs cross the road to the park and wait to be released. As the woman bends to their collars, another dog appears that is small, hysterical and yellow. It leaps like a jumping bean, up and down, back feet leaving the ground and body vertical in the air. The woman fights her way to the lead and removes it, standing back, but the little dog just closes the distance and bounces, bounces, every way she turns.

A small girl in pigtails twists around in a trailing hand. Destinations don’t interest her. She wants to see what they’re leaving behind.

A big black dog, densely furred and fluffy, tours Newtown with a retinue of two small girls, a grandmother and a man with curly dark hair. They pause in the shade, and the dog lies panting.

A Chinese girl in a white mask, feet together on the footpath, stands looking down at the phone in her hands. She’s dressed in a football jersey that’s way too big, and light grey tracksuit pants so baggy they’re almost comical. There is, however, some tension in the set of her brow, and it appears she’s being serious.

A tall young woman, one brow raised and a twist to her mouth, gazes down the length of her arm at a phone. She’s dressed in grey scrubs and standing with a hip cocked, redefining cool.

Walking along the footpath in Millar Street, Drummoyne, I happen upon a massacre of grapes.

At Dee Why the line for the B1 stretches almost back to Howard Avenue, and half way along it, before the bus has even reached her, a woman waves gleefully at someone on board.

Three high school girls huddle in a bus shelter. Two squeeze together on the seat and one crouches in front like a windbreak, gazing at the sky.

Girl on bus, in outbursts punctuated by mumbled replies, giggles or silence:

‘Why do you want to use my camera?’

‘No-wa!’

‘Oh! You dog! No-o! Eww! Delete that!’

‘No way! Oh my god you idiot!’

‘That is so RAW!’

A smiling old woman walks by in a big, deep, wonderfully wide and floppy hat. She’s always in the shade.

A girl dressed for summer buys a huge fur hat at the markets, and wears it as she browses in the heat.

An elderly man lowers his pot plant to the ground and lifts a foot, misses, tries again and tightens his shoelace on the chair. He goes inside to order and his wife, tethered to a seat, gazes after him with all the anxiety that dogs display when shops have swallowed their humans.

Buoys support a dangling net round part of a jetty at the Spit. A hobby farm for oysters, or is it just a private refuge from the sharks?

A girl of 8 or 9, floppy school hat and uniform tunic, idles in the arcade as her mother browses fruit and vegetables. The girl moves her hands, and sways a couple of steps as if she needs to dance. Finding herself in a clear space, she lifts her arms and turns an easy cartwheel, spinning out of sight beyond the door.

A very old man sits crumbling at a cafe table with his far less crumbly wife. He wears a red cap, and a t-shirt saying: ‘Something, somewhere, went terribly wrong.’

A man and a woman are standing in the road, risking everything to point at the club’s facade. The man wears club regalia and the woman is dressed as businesswoman-on-holiday. She has long blonde hair, sunglasses and a confident smile.

They climb to the footpath and point more pointedly, then return to the road to refine the big pig picture.

Back on the footpath, they advance from the club’s domain to the edge of the white louvre shutters of the establishment-next-door, where the man’s robust voice drops to an extended whisper. The woman nods her head, and the man nods back.

They retreat from the shutters and vanish into the club.

A woman at Collaroy, trying to walk while surrounded by jumping children: ‘Stop talking and yelling at me! Stop yelling at me!’

At Wynyard Station, a blonde toddler grins as she leads her grandfather on a merry chase along the platform.

At Neutral bay a small girl whacks her mother over and over, arms out, palms open, swinging back and forth. The mother seems oblivious.