I was an hour into the chemistry exam but it had been pretty clear from the first ten minutes that this was a big mistake. Florence popped in with a glass of cold lemonade.

‘How is it going?’

I shook my head and sighed. It was pretty grim actually. Taking on a semester of first year university level chemistry was a very bad idea. I hadn’t studied any stream of science since my middle secondary school years and chemistry has been particularly baffling, particularly in a dusty workroom, on a 38-degree day in a small village in North Syria.

I gulped the lemonade and my head pounded. Just get it done…

The idea of object conservation had been on my periphery for a while and I’d already written, yes written (back in the day when writing meant pen and paper, and overseas mail meant stamps and a three week wait) to universities in the UK which offered conservation courses.

I’d even done a short stint of work experience at the National Gallery of Victoria, painstakingly describing the condition of an Egyptian mummy case. Object conservation seemed a good idea at the time. The chance to carefully clean, protect and perhaps even display ancient objects; skills that would let me build my dig resume.

But I’d not taken into consideration the need for some understanding of how substances react to one another, and despite my scientist cousin’s best efforts to tutor me, I just couldn’t get my head around the subject. I wrote essays instead of lab reports and the tutorials I was hoping might comprise sitting around a table discussing chemical issues were instead self-guided ‘learning modules’ done individually on computers. I hated them and regularly failed the tests at the end of each session.

I persevered and begged the department of chemistry to allow me to sit the end of semester exam at Tell Ahmar during the 1995 season of excavation. After all, this was the scenario in which my future skills would be used and there was an actual conservator as part of the team this year. Jacob, from a world-famous art museum in America, had chuckled when he saw my diagrams of chemical compounds and I was so ashamed of trying to be like him that I steered clear of his work and focused on the cataloguing of objects coming in from the field.

Dr B tapped at the open door.

‘Time to finish now’.

I sighed again and put my pen down, closed the question booklet and piled up my answer sheets. I knew I’d failed.

It was time to rethink this archaeological conservation idea.

I spent the rest of the year pondering what to do with my life. I’d finished my honours year and been overseas for eighteen months with money earned working for a year when I finished my degree and during that time had excavated twice at the University of Melbourne’s site of Tell Ahmar. I was tired of research and wanted to do lots of field work, figuring that a qualification in object conservation might be the way forward but now I wasn’t sure. Perhaps further research was the answer after all.

Some of the other members of the Tell Ahmar team were doing master’s degrees and were looking at objects found there; the pottery and the iron pieces and the Bronze Age graves were all subjects for postgraduate study. I began to wonder if this wasn’t the direction for me.

I went to the library to look for articles about Iron Age tannurs. They are squat cylinders of baked clay a couple of feet high. I’d excavated a few but never found anything particularly interesting, no old bread rolls or stew congealed at the bottom. I did try, really hard, for about three weeks to get excited about tannurs and then went back to Dr B.

‘I’m not sure about these tannurs…’

‘Ah! They don’t excite you.’

‘Not much….’

‘Well...there’s the figurines...’

‘Oh!’

Sometimes in the afternoons when the field work was over for the day, I would go into the workroom at Tell Ahmar and hold the little round pots.  Their bases fit neatly into the palm of my hand and for me the experience connected me immediately with those who had made them. Some 2500 years ago a person, like me, had held this pot in their palm.

For me, archaeology has always been about people, and archaeologists have the chance to come ‘face-to-face’ with ancient people through human images such as figurines. Archaeology offers not only the artefactual remnants of ancient lives, but chance to enter directly into those lives, if we choose to and what better way than through miniature clay figurines.

Dr B gave me copies of small computer disks with the data about the figurines; description, dimensions, find spots. I still couldn’t quite believe it, but I was certain I’d been offered the opportunity of a lifetime.

I got 50% for my chemistry exam, quit the course and threw myself into figurine studies.

January 2009

We seemed to find the restaurant all right; it was the getting home that was the trouble.

We headed for the blackened sky; a sky that took me back over thirty years to the Ash Wednesday Bush fires. Then, we sat in the science lab of my eastern suburbs school and watched the topsoil and ash come rolling in from the Mallee. It had been a bad bush fire summer. Our fear was at arm’s length, fascinating and exciting in that way scary things are when you don’t really believe you’re going to be part of it. We wondered if it would roll right over the school and on to the city.

Now it was happening again. It was Black Friday, that wave of ash from bush fires darkening the sky; a thick band of black, like a burned destruction layer in an archaeological excavation. We drove towards it. As long as the dark horizon was in front of us we were heading in the right direction. We resolutely headed east to the Chinese restaurant where we were meeting the rest of the family for dinner to celebrate my cousin’s wedding.

The ceremony was lovely, the bride look gorgeous in red, the happy couple danced for us and the food was wonderful. Then we started for home.

I sat in the back seat, where children usually sit, Mum next to Dad in the front passenger seat as is normal and right. It was when we were driving over the eastern arterial road instead of entering it that I knew something was wrong.

‘Dad…I think we’re meant to be on that road down there…’ I started.

It’s funny because at that moment I was eight years old, ten years old, perhaps fifteen years old. You don’t tell your Dad where to go when you’re that age. Dad had been driving all his life. He knew the city like the back of his hand.

But suddenly my Dad didn’t know and aged thirty-eight going on fourteen, and filled with unexpected foreboding, I had to tell him. Using the road map of the city I guided him onto the arterial and then he knew the rest of the way home, the blackened sky now all around us.

About eight months after my cousin’s wedding, I moved to China to be an English teacher.

China was not a country I’d had much interest in previously but jobs seemed plentiful and it would a new experience, a clean slate and a new start. I began reading job discussion boards for teachers who had taught in China and quickly learned the good, bad and ugly of applying for and working for Chinese schools and universities. In the end I opened the atlas and shutting my eyes, twirled my finger above the page, dropping it down randomly. It landed in Inner Mongolia.

I had two magical years in the capital city of the Autonomous Province of Inner Mongolia, Huhahaote. The campus was on the outskirts of the city and surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The summer was hot but the winter bitterly cold and ridiculously long. I wore a duck-down coat with fur around the hood and layer upon layer beneath. It was 25 degrees below zero and walking to the teaching building the dribbles from your nose froze into tiny icicles. I vowed I would not do another winter in Inner Mongolia and in February 2011, went home for a holiday in the Australian sun. It was the coolest summer on record.

February 2011

During my February visit, I spent a short time with my brother in Central Australia. The airport is right in the desert; the red earth inches its way towards the airport terminal. This time I had told Dad I would take the airport shuttle bus to the city and a local train from there, which I did.

A few days later I had an appointment in the city. I took the train to and from the CBD. I tramped down the ramp from the platform and pressed my ticket to the turnstile. Walking through, I saw Dad waiting in the arcade which led to the street.

‘Oh hello Dad! Out for a walk are you?’ I greeted him.

‘Yes, did you have a nice time?’

‘Oh well, it was ok, just a boring appointment’.

‘Where’s your luggage?’ Dad asked.

‘Luggage?’ 

‘Yes, well, I came to help you with your suitcase’.

‘Oh Dad, I’ve just been to the city! I came back from Central Australia two days ago’. I was shocked that he could have forgotten this. ‘Not to worry!’ I said brightly, despairingly. ‘Let’s go home and pop the kettle on, shall we?’

And so it went. Dad making mistakes, me trying hard to hide my shock, me trying to make light of it and hoping it wouldn’t happen again.

August 2011

Dad drove back to the airport to see me off on my final year in China. I had moved to Xian, in the province immediately south of Inner Mongolia because I felt like a change and Xian was an ancient city, the eastern end of the Silk Route.

We had a cup of coffee and ate chocolate brownies at the airport. Dad looked so lost; he barely spoke. I don’t remember what we talked about; that silly, ‘trying to put a brave face on it’ type of conversation you have before doing the thing you don’t want to do, say goodbye.

I do recall a real sense of foreboding and looking at Dad with such dread in my heart. I remember thinking, ‘He’s so frail looking, so scared somehow. I’m worried about him. My dear old Dad’.

I remember walking through the big automatic doors to clear security and looking back at them. Standing there side by side. My parents. My old-looking parents. Bravely waving and smiling. I wanted to rush back to them, to tell them it was going to be all right. 

August 2012

Its late summer in Xian. The students have been doing their washing and have hung their towels and bedsheets on the shrubs around the dormitory building to ‘bask’. There’s a knock at my door.

‘Hiya!’ I greet Tammy, the teacher from New Mexico, the one who is still speaking to me.

‘Hey!’ She replied. ‘I have gin, do you have any tonic?’ She wiggles the bottle at me. Her round freckled face is covered with a broad smile.

‘Ahh…’ I open the fridge. ‘Yep, one tonic. I also have orange juice?’

‘Ok, bring that too…’

It’s fun in her apartment immediately across the hallway from mine. Her window overlooks the basking towels and sheets. That’s what the students called it; not drying, basking. I feel like basking in the late summer sunshine too. I saw the sun so rarely during that twelve months in Xian.

Tammy prepares strong G and Ts and we settle in for a chat. We’ve known each other for just a few months but during this conversation she tells me about her childhood in New Mexico, her family and how she got this job. She casually mentions that her teaching certificate is a fake and she has no teaching experience. Tiddly with gin, I giggle. Later, this annoys me, this faking of certificates and experience, but that evening it just seemed amusing.

‘Let’s try gin and orange!’ She bounces off the couch and grabs my glass. There’s music playing. I think its salsa.

I don’t know where the second gin goes but suddenly we’re drinking gin and cranberry juice from her fridge. We’re up and dancing. I’m spinning around the room, drunk and happy. Until I start crying. The tears are torrential, uncontrollable. I excuse myself and rush back to my apartment, falling into bed fully clothed.

I wake the next day with a massive headache and small smear of vomit on my pillow. I drag myself up and realise I’ve left my flip-flops in Tammy’s apartment. I knock on the door and she looks as dreadful as I feel.

‘Think I left my flip-flops here…’ There’s a pause. ‘I cried a bit last night, didn’t I?  Was it about my Dad?’

She nods.