brunswick bits

so there I am in my masters-by-coursework class with the rather postmodern name "text time and space"...and the tutor says something like "OK, now we're going to do a little writing exercise" and hands out photocopies of Melway(s) pages, instructing us to write about them.

and despite having written 5,000 words on the Melway(s) in The Age and for the book, I found a little more to say...

This is a map that shows nothing at all. It shows – it claims – a couple of square kilometres of land along and around Sydney Road, Brunswick.
I was there this morning. I parked my bike on the left-hand – west – side of the dotted line that one the map is marked “Sydney Road.” So where am I on this paper? I’m not the little walking figure shown heading south along the path beside the railway line. I’m not, eight, the bike shown going north along the same path, hilariously riderless.
This map, therefore, is lying to me. It says it’s Sydney Road. Where’s the Egyptian cake shop, the secondhand clothes stores? where the rain that fell on me this morning?
And there, at the corner of Sydney Road and Glenlyon – at least where the lines so labelled meet on this map – is the “Town Hall.” But it’s not. It has no grand council chamber; no press desk with my name and others scratched in it; no Doric columns; no old-fashioned gilt-edged paintings. It omits the past entirely. I stare and stare at this bit of paper and I can’t see the Sydney Road festival last year and the year before; the crowds; the drunks, the music. I can’t see 1994, when the skinheads faced off against the anti-Nazis outside the town hall, armed with eggs. What a fraud.
This map says it’s Brunswick. It’s a surface, a cipher and when I die it will be no more my Brunswick than my body will be me.