The artist Paul Klee described drawing as a dot that went for a walk.
It’s a simple and vivid image, and one that is open to all sorts of interpretations.
For instance, the dot could be a time, and a place, and the beginning of a story.
So, let’s start with the dot.
Unless you were born and have lived in the same place all your life, never married or made any friends or had anything at all happen to you, most of us have several dots that make up our stories.
The first dot, of course, is when and where we were born. The line from this dot is pretty simple, with perhaps a few squiggles when we learnt our first gurgling words and went on our first precarious walk.
From there, things get increasingly complicated as the lines that make up our lives intersect with the twists and turns of our choices and the events that happen to us.
For the past 28 years the central dot in my life has been the house in which I live in north Shepparton. All the lines drawn during one third of my life walk out from there. From the towering Norfolk Island pine at the front to the nuzzling verandah at the back. In between, sits the old tin-roof house where our children grew, friends celebrated and now grandchildren play.
So, this dot is a physical and cultural space from which our family lines walk out to plant other dots and make other stories. I am sure all families have similar lines and dots.
As far as I know, our house was the first one built in our street about 65 years ago. All the other houses that arrived after ours now form a string of dots heading north-east, with tangled lines of their own.
Remarkably, the dots in our street have remained in place since they were first placed over the succeeding years. If this was an inner-city area of Melbourne, single dots would have been wiped out with scores of smaller dots placed over the top to make multi-storey houses and skyscrapers. The story lines there are now so entangled and dense they are impossible to trace. So far, Shepparton has avoided dense, multi-storey living, and our cul-de-sac on the outer urban fringe of Shepparton has remained unchanged. Houses have been sold, gutted, renovated and extended but the dots on which they exist have stayed put.
When we moved into our ramshackle house there were no fences at the back. You could walk out of the backyard straight into the floodplain bushland or up to the sandhill where a derelict, snake-infested house broke the horizon. Gradually, over the past three decades, new double-storey houses have marched over the sandhill to surround us and we have a fence like everyone else. In surrounding areas, land has been subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels to create space for neat houses and units with just enough room for a car port and a Hills Hoist. That’s a lot of dots. You now have to watch out for cars, and children no longer play outside their homes.
Somehow, perhaps through basic contentment with life, or just God’s grace, our street has remained a calm island among this rising tide of dots.
You can still walk up our street on a summer evening and chat to neighbours who have been content with their dots for decades.
Now there’s a planning application to turn one dot in our street into three dots. We can object if we feel the proposal would cause us “material detriment”, but it’s up the other end of the street, so three new units would not really affect us materially.
But I can’t help feeling like I did in October last year as I stood on my dot and waited for the creeping floodwaters to submerge it. This time it’s not water, but something far more glacial and permanent that threatens to bury us and our memories. The slow, relentless creep of the human dot.