Sid knows stuff. All the important stuff anyway. Sid’s almost 4 now, and as far as I can see he’s […]

I like to think of myself as non-judgmental and open to new people. That’s how I like to imagine myself. I’m a people person. People are my thing. “After all” I think to myself, “I was the fat, spectacled kid of arts people” … as though this somehow implies a birthright to compassionate acceptance and understanding. Every now and then, however, I meet a person who so instantly sets my heckles up that I have to work unbelievably hard to be civil to them, for no apparent reason. When this happens, I find myself affronted by not only the person in question, but also by the fact that I am capable of feeling so instinctively, and yes, judgmentally, revolted. “How can I hate a person I don’t even know?”

She was an entrant in the 1965 Miss Australia Quest. She was Miss Central Northern Suburbs. She was clearly the most beautiful woman in the damn pageant, but no one liked dagoes back then. Italian was NOT in. Despite Sofia Loren. Despite the 19-year-old Italian-Barbarella who would one day be my mother. My mother’s beauty was always something I was proud of as a kid. Proud, in the depressingly defeated way, that only the overweight, spectacled child of a former Miss Central Northern Suburbs can be. I spent hours looking at her technicolour 1960s model-shots wondering how I had sprung from the same genetic well as her. Wondering what, exactly, my hippy-tastic mother had taken in 1970s that produced my “uniqueness”.