Spotto

Living in a reasonably small town is still fascinating to me. I’m terrible with faces and names, but I know that they will stick in my head eventually, so I smile at everyone just in case. I like making my own fun, and don’t get lonely easily, so I’m actually terrible at wanting to find fun, but when there’s easy fun to be had (criteria: walking distance from home), I’ll be there.

I bought my house to (a) support and encourage my parents to move off their 20-acre prickle farm and into town, and (b) live in the house myself when they moved out. I couldn’t afford to buy in my city. When my parents lived in my house and I visited, or eventually lived with them until they moved to their new supported-living villa, I would sit on the front porch with my mother and watch the world go by. She’s got dementia, but she loves looking at things, even if she doesn’t know the words for them anymore. She would look upwards and say, ‘look at that…’ and move her hand in a soft swirly motion. I’d say, ‘cloud?’ and she’d say ‘oh yes, isn’t it lovely’. Yes, yes it is. I still sit on the front porch and enjoy the clouds. And watch my neighbours get out and about, and wait for the ute that drives past with a dog in the back that says hello to us all joyfully at full voice. I keep missing the ute, it’s quite random in its movements, so I don’t know what kind of dog it is, but I always say hello back when I hear it.*

Recently the local arts org, South-East Arts, announced that they’d won funding for a ‘main street festival’ and that they had various creative competitions we could enter—photography and poetry—with the prerequisite being that it had to feature the main street (Carp Street). I flirted with the idea of writing a poem about Mum and I watching things. Walking together one day, I told my idea to friend, block neighbour and excellent performance poet Gabrielle Journey Jones, and she encouraged me to enter the competition. So I did. I showed the poem to my father, in case he had objections to it (he is a Respectable Citizen), and his only response was ‘it doesn’t rhyme’. *insert eyeroll here*

Dear reader, I won! I wasn’t expecting to—there were some excellent finalists and we all read our poems in the local bookshop to an enthusiastic audience. I told the audience what Dad had said and that got a great laugh.

The best fun of the evening—which was a riot of people wandering up and down the main street talking to each other, looking at the photo competition entrants hung on shop windows, listening to the many buskers (also a competition), getting faces painted and lining up at the food trucks—was reading my poem again later on a more public stage, because I was standing amongst a troupe of school-band kids waiting to perform, and they didn’t really care that there was some ‘old’ lady reading amongst them until I started chanting the main section of the poem, louder and louder. Because this poem, in the spirit of GJJ, comes to life when it’s performed. They stopped canoodling with their instruments and turned to look at me. MONSTER UTE, I shouted at them. They probably ride in one every day and have trouble getting in and out of the thing. They looked quite bemused.

So here it is. You have to imagine my mum being a bit childlike but enthusiastic, and me getting quite bored with the cars until my frustration has me chanting loudly, almost shouting, then calm again. I hope you enjoy it. 

SPOTTO
Mum is sitting beside me in Carp Street with a coffee, watching the world.
She doesn’t know much these days, but once she knew it all.
She was the Bega Pioneers Museum, until she wasn’t.
Memories can do that: they just fall away.
She still likes looking at the world, though.
Cars are so boring these days, I say.
Are they? she says.
Well, let’s play Spotto, I say.
What are we looking for, she says.
You’ll know when you know, I say.
Grey, grey, dark grey, light grey, silver.
Truck, ute, ute; truck, ute, ute.
White, white, white, white, yellow!
Flag red, flag red, flag blue, flag blue, flag white.
Hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, ute, ute, ute, hatchback.
Grey, grey, dark grey, light grey, green-grey.
Monster ute, monster ute, monster ute.
Flag white, flag blue, flag red, black.
Oh! Now THERE’s a car, says Mum,
as Caitlin’s pink sports car turns the corner.
Yep, I say.

Spotto.

[This was originally published on Substack on 11 November 2025]