Student work

Senior students begin work on the QUTE in Term 1, by dismantling the engine and removing parts prior to an environmentally friendly re-build.

Loukoumia

This exercise in creative writing was inspired by Anna’s reading of Boey Kim Cheng’s Stamp Collecting Anna is the descendant of Greek migrants; this and Australia’s broader history of immigration inspired this piece.

I’ve never liked Turkish delights – or loukoumia, as they’re called in Greek. Yet whenever I see them, I’m compelled to buy them. Occasionally they’ll be stocked at the local supermarket in boxes with gold decals or Persian-inspired designs. Once, on visiting a Turkish deli in the outer suburbs, I was childishly delighted to discover that they came in flavours other than rosewater – like pomegranate, lime and mastic – and returned home with a paper bag full of bright, kaleidoscopic hunks of the stuff. David is amused, and then exasperated by how I’ll always have a tin of them, somewhere in the pantry, left to congeal for another year.

This odd habit of mine is a little like how my mother always kept a bowl of lemons in our childhood house; like her mother and her grandmother before her, in memory of a famine that took place in another country in another century. For them, there was comfort in being able to afford things that they’d never need to eat. For me, there’s comfort in tradition worn threadbare.

If anything, the loukoumia conjure memories as gelatinous and overwhelming as their sweetness. Whenever I catch sight of them stacked in pinkly glowing pyramids, heaped with mounds of sugar, I am immediately transported back to my godmother’s café. Although it’s long gone and a nail salon now stands in its place, I remember it so vividly. It was one of the few places that I thought would never change. My great-aunts always sat at the front table, permanent fixtures, crocheting interminable blankets. Whirring fans barely moved the viscous air. There were framed photos of Santorini, and a plaster model of a Greco-Roman statue. He was nicknamed Mercury, after the god of shopkeepers and thieves and he served as a sort of repository for lost property – there’d always be a jacket draped over one of his arms, or a pair of sunglasses on his head.

Whenever we’d visit, my godmother would let my brother and me pick sweets from the display cabinet humming bluely at the back of the store. The melting moments were my favourite. My godmother would always urge me to have a second, or a third, yet my mother would glare at me, shaking her head. I was too young to realise that everything had a price; that the shop was my godmother’s sole source of income. I couldn’t pick up on the tension between my mother’s tight-lipped courtesy and my godmother’s seemingly boundless generosity; I didn’t understand the social niceties and polite disagreements spilt between them on the tabletop like so much powdered sugar.

Once, I remember that I filled my plate with every type of delicacy I could see in the display cabinet as I thought it was the best way to please my godmother. In a childish way, I was trying to express my gratitude through greed.

After picking at jam-drops and chocolate-coated pistachio biscuits, I bit into the loukoumi. I was used to bubble-gum ice-cream and the chemical taste of strawberry flavouring – not something as rich and intense as this. It tasted like the midday sun in a foreign country or cut flowers on the point of rotting. I could barely swallow, let alone finish what was left on my plate.

I was nauseated as I suddenly realised how much food I’d wasted. The claggy way the remnants coated the insides of my mouth, the residual sugar sticking to my fingers were, to my seven-year-old self, as damning as spots of blood.

Yet there’s no need for this saccharine self-indulgence. I treat loukoumia like chunks of amber that will store my memories for another thousand years, when in reality, they’re little more than something to pass around on platters after a shared meal.

I stand up to clear away the plates, abruptly breaking from my reverie. The dinner party is dying down, and most have gotten up from the table, moved out of the snapshot frame. I’m much older now, we all are – my godmother relies on a walking stick. Some of my cousins have grey hairs and children.

I begin to stack the plates, some of them chipped from much use. In the kitchen, aunts and great-aunts are preparing coffee – there’s the clinking of cups and saucers, and the sound of English and Greek interweaving.

From the living room, I hear the crowing jubilance of my youngest cousin, granddaughter of my godmother – she lost her first tooth during the meal and is retelling the story to a crowd of adulators.

She’s left the tooth itself discarded on a plate, embedded in a gem-like, half-eaten chunk of loukoumi. The sweet glints, resinous, as moist and pink as a gum coated in saliva; it’s the catalyst for another childhood memory, already setting like jelly. •

Junior School Art Gallery

Year 11 Textiles & Design