On the final day of the last school holidays, my friend and I went to the Royal Melbourne Show. Neither of us has young children any more but a while back we were reminiscing about times we’d gone as kids – and then as teens, and later as parents with our own small people – and we decided we wanted to experience all that again.
The last time I’d been to the show was pre-pandemic, when I took a tribe of my own and other people’s children and I trailed along behind as they ran from ride to ride, from showbag stall to showbag stall, spending all their pocket money and eating as much sugar as they could. I was a sort of hanger-on that day, a chaperone, only needed to ensure nobody got lost or wandered off with somebody else’s family.
But my favourite show experience was when my children were little, and we met my mum at North Melbourne Station and travelled on to Flemington on the train. I hadn’t been to the show for many years and this would be my kids’ introduction to it.
Mum clutched one little hand and I clutched the other as the kids led us through the gates and raced from alpacas to piglets, police cars to spinning teacups, their mouths open with wonder and their fingers sticky with the single Bertie Beetle they’d held on to for too long. Through them I rediscovered the magic of the crowds and the noise and the smell of the animal poo, remembering back to when it was a highlight in my teenage calendar.
This year, while watching the stunt motorbikes flip airborne somersaults, my friend and I talked nostalgically about those days, the dreamy lost time of young children, where if you managed to dress in clean clothes and leave the house before two in the afternoon it was considered a success.
Back then, distracted by chatty neighbours and friendly dogs, I’d lose half a day just walking down the street for a coffee in the Italian supermarket. My son would find a stick he had to collect, and it would come along for the ride. My daughter would start out walking but her legs would tire and then we’d have to sit down on the footpath for a while until she had the energy to go on.
Sometimes we never made it further than the end of our street. Sometimes we had daylong adventures that wound around the neighbourhood and took us picking figs in laneways and jumping in muddy puddles.
In those days we’d head along to story time at the library, the literary highlight of any week; parents crowded in, sitting cross-legged on the floor as children clambered out of laps to listen to the picture books being read. After an hour or more we’d borrow a stack and wedge them under the pram to push home and read later.
Some days we’d meet friends at the button museum, my son’s childhood name for Scienceworks. There we would watch the microwaves exploding eggs and start the giant tumble dryer turning clothes, happily forgetting we had done it all only weeks before. After pressing every button on every floor we would head outside to the playground for the lunch we’d bought from home.
Visits to the Melbourne Museum were similarly distracted, and often involved nothing more than wandering through the forest of giant trees and then staring up at the whale suspended from the ceiling as my son tried to work out how it got there.
To mix it up we would cross town on the tram and head to Ikea to bounce on the beds. But there was always the risk that you’d lose one of your children – or yourself – as you tried to find the exit.
At the time it didn’t always seem so memorable. Bundling kids into car seats or prams; remembering snacks and nappies, drink bottles and teddies. Navigating hunger and tiredness. I remember wanting to see actual paintings in the National Gallery and not just chase kids in circles under the stained glass skylight in the great hall, and having to explain to my daughter that visiting the Vic Market involved buying all our weekly shop and not just a stick of cabana sausage for her to eat. And once my son kept yelling out more on a playground swing, so I pushed for maybe an hour until he fell asleep. I nearly did too.
But now there is such fondness to my memories. The easy joy of those times when days felt endless, unstructured and loose, and it was as simple as just being present. It didn’t matter much what we did.
When the kids both started school, those lost days changed their rhythm. And now they are teenagers, they have changed again. But on the long summer break I still seek out those days: no longer visiting museums or parks, instead playing chauffeur on secondhand shop tours of Melbourne. And they are the best days in my week.
• Nova Weetman is an award-winning author of books for children and young adults, including The Edge of Thirteen
