The Wonder Room

The exhibition brick vase clay cup at the Art Gallery of New South Wales includes a work called The Wonder Room – a house decorated with terracotta tiles made by communities of the Shoalhaven, NSW, in a project with Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Nowra.

The first iteration of the work was shown at that gallery in late 2022 to early 2023, in an exhibition titled Plant your feet, curated by Glenn Barkley, who is also the guest curator of brick vase clay cup.

A short story was commissioned from well-known local author Allison Tait for the Shoalhaven exhibition, and it was that written piece that inspired the title for the yet-unnamed terracotta house installation.

We’d like to share that story with you.

‘How much?’ Mum asks, rummaging in her straw bag.

‘Three dollars each,’ the attendant says, without looking up from his book. ‘Cash only.’

Mum sighs. ‘Wait here.’

I watch her silhouette dissolving through the doorway into the bright light outside. Lucy looks up at me, biting her bottom lip, and I take her hand. I’m the big sister and I need to look brave.

The old-timey clock ticks and, as I watch the second hand wind around, I wonder what time it is. I’ve left my phone in the car with Dad, who refused to come inside.

‘It’s your trip down memory lane,’ he’d told Mum.

Truth is, Dad rarely goes inside. We’ve got lots of pictures of the outside of museums, galleries and historic houses that we’ve never set foot in.

This time, though, Mum insisted. So here we are, using up our annual ‘Go Inside’ credits on her hometown museum.

 Or will be, if she ever comes back.

As though reading my mind, the attendant looks up and slams his book shut.

‘Why are you standing there?’ he asks, raising one straggly eyebrow. The magnification in his thick-rimmed glasses is so strong that his blue eyes are enormous in his wrinkled face.

‘Er, Mum’s gone to get cash,’ I remind him, as Lucy presses against my side like Velcro.

His face distorts and I realise he’s smiling, long yellow teeth on display. ‘Go in, go in,’ he says, waving a hand towards the ‘Enter’ sign. ‘I doubt she’s going to run off and leave you here so it’s a safe enough bet.’

We are sidling past him, when his hand shoots out again, grabbing my shoulder.

‘Don’t miss The Wonder Room,’ he says, one eyelid sliding down in a magnified wink. ‘It’s a must-see.’

***

Five minutes later, Lucy and I have been in and out of all three rooms, taking in the faded photos of boys in uniforms, the shelves of plates and jugs, and a glass cabinet full of boomerangs. We are standing in the hallways, which is lined with watercolour paintings by someone famous enough to warrant a large information poster on the wall near the corner.

‘I can’t see any Wonders,’ Lucy whispers. ‘It’s just old stuff. Where are the Wonders?’

 I shrug. ‘That guy probably thinks these are the Wonders. Lots of people really like old stuff. They collect it.’

Lucy frowns. ‘Like Pokemon cards?

‘Kind of,’ I say, with a laugh. ‘More like, you know, Gran’s dancers.’

Lucy’s face lights up. She loves the porcelain figurines that line our grandmother’s window sills, caught mid-pirouette forever.

‘Ohhh,’ she breathes, jumping up. ‘Maybe I’ll have another look in the room with the baby.’

Lucy bounces off into room one, where a baby doll is tucked into a pink bassinette, and then I can hear her singing as the swinging cradle creaks.

I linger in the hallway, deciding I might as well read about the artist while I wait for Mum. As I get close to the poster, I notice a deep crevice in the wall beside it. Kneeling, I dig my fingers into the crevice – and almost fall sideways as the wall behind the poster swings inwards like a little revolving door.

A tiny brass plate affixed to the back of the wall is exposed to the light. It reads ‘The Wonder Room’.

Without thinking, I crawl into the darkness beyond. As soon as my heels are through, the door swings closed behind me. I freeze. Did I knock it with my foot? I twist around, running my fingers over the wall in the darkness, looking for the crevice.

But there’s nothing. I’m trapped.

+++

Thirty seconds later, I’ve explored the entire Wonder Room:  an empty room with one wooden chair at its centre, facing a blank white wall. The ceiling is high, a skylight filtering weak light into the space, and I can almost touch both walls at the same time.

I slump on the hard chair taking deep breaths, trying not to panic, trying to think of a way out.

‘Hello? Sorry, it took a while to find some coins.’

Mum’s voice is muffled, as though she’s speaking through cotton wool. I hear a low rumble and realise that she’s in the museum foyer with the old man.

I jump to my feet and run to thump my fist on the wall. But it’s solid brick and all I get for my troubles is a light slapping sound and the beginnings of a bruise.

‘It’s just so lovely to be back in town,’ Mum is saying. ‘My family left years ago but as soon as we drove over the bridge it was like coming home.’

As she speaks I become aware of a glowing light in the room. Half-afraid to look, I turn towards the chair and notice that the white wall is no longer blank. Instead, an image has appeared, larger than life but faded, like the old photographs in the next room.

It’s the bridge we drove over this morning, but not quite. The roads aren’t the same, the cars are like something out of a 1970s cop movie and there’s a weird little pergola-thing with a rowboat under it to one side. I don’t remember seeing that this morning.

‘The row boat isn’t there anymore?’ Mum half asks, half states.

‘The flood boat,’ the old man says. ‘Stuck in a storage shed. Vandals wrecked it and it never came back.’

As I watch, the rowboat fades away, leaving the pergola-thing empty and forlorn.

‘Pavilion went to make way for a new bridge,’ the old man said, and the pergola-thing dissolved from the wall. Mouth dry, I creep over and sit on the chair.

‘That’s a shame,’ Mum says. ‘I noticed the rocket was gone as well. We had such fun there as kids.’

A new image flashes on the wall, this time bright and colourful. A sparse playground with a metal swing set at one end and a towering construction of metal rods shaped like a rocket at the other. Kids are hauling themselves up spindly ladders over four levels or halfway down a slide towards the bottom.

‘Death trap,’ says the old man, and the picture fades, taking on a sinister feel. ‘Too many kids fell through those holes in the floor and the metal got as hot as Hades in summer, remember?’

‘I’d forgotten,’ Mum says, as the image darkens until the sky behind the playground is grey and uncertain.

There’s a pause as the image shimmers on the wall, and the clink of coins on the glass counter.

‘Your kids are inside,’ the man says as bells ring from the old-fashioned cash register. ‘First room is household items, then natural history, then military. The newspaper archive is over there.’

Mum squeals. ‘The paper! I was in the paper a few times. Even had a poem published. I reckon my mum bought twenty copies.’

I clap a hand over my mouth, a chill settling over me, as the image on the wall changes to a six-line poem called ‘The Anzacs’, mum’s name underneath and her age, eleven.

The old man snorts. ‘The collective memory of the town. Remember the big cat in the hills around Berry? The city coin? The social pages? Everyone was in the paper.’

Mum’s poem dissolves into a kaleidoscope of front pages and photos, spinning wildly, faces and names a blur as the years whiz by.

But mum is silent for a moment. ‘Not everyone,’ she says, and the kaleidoscope slows, bit by bit until I realise that most, if not all, the faces are white.

There’s a pause. ‘Selective memory,’ Mum says. ‘But the paper was good for wrapping hot chips. Nothing like hot chips at the beach.’

A new image comes into focus on the wall, and I recognise an old photo of Mum as a kid, that she keeps in a frame on her desk. She’s about eight, standing on a beach wearing a frilly swimsuit and a frillier hat. She holds a newspaper-wrapped package in one hand and a big, crispy chip in the other. A seagull is caught mid-air, flying in from corner of the picture, orange beak open.

I realise I’ve never asked her if she managed to save her chip.

‘We don’t have a lot on the beaches here,’ the old man says. ‘But you’ll find some beaut photos of the river in the natural history room. Ben’s Walk and the like.’

I hear a thump and realise Mum has dropped her bag as the image changes. The mouth of a cave appears, all but hidden by a forest of thin, white trunks. Footprints in the muddy track lead to the cave, but ferns squashed on either side of the path suggest more than one person The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up.

‘We used to go up there as kids,’ Mum all but whispers. I have to strain to hear, as I watch the mouth of the cave loom larger on the wall in front of me. ‘It was so close to home, but a world away.’

The old man harumphs. ‘Always full of yahoos, that’s how I remember it. And don’t get me started on Big Red.’

Now I’m looking up at a towering rock face, a teenage boy in baggy shorts and zinc cream jumping from the top, his long hair streaming above him, a maniacal grin on his face, frozen in time just as his toes dip into the water.

‘It’s funny,’ Mum says. ‘All of my school friends now talk about jumping off that rock, but I don’t really remember any of us being there.’

The image disappears as though someone has turned off a projector.

‘That’s just human nature,’ the old man snickers. ‘If everyone who remembers being at Woodstock in 1969 was actually there, I reckon there’d have been three million people in that field.’

‘Mum, mum!’ Lucy’s voice breaks into their laughter as I frown, trying to work out what Woodstock is. ‘Come and see the baby!’

I hear mum’s footsteps through the wall behind me, and realise that I am once again staring at a blank white wall. Jumping up, I try the little door again, and this time it swings open as though on oiled castors.

I crawl out into the hall and feel the door close behind me. Turning to look at the poster, I realise I can’t even see the crevice anymore.

‘There you are,’ says Mum, emerging from room one. ‘Did you see the milk carton in here? It took me straight back to our kitchen table as a kid.’

‘I did,’ I manage. ‘Can we go now?’

But, of course, it’s another thirty minutes before she’s finally ready to go. Thirty minutes for me to watch her exclaim over this old stuff and think about the fact that I’ve seen her memories from the inside.
‘Thanks for coming,’ the old man says as we file past him. ‘Find the Wonder Room, did you girly?’

He's looking straight at me, so all I can do is nod.

‘The Wonder Room?’ Mum asks.

‘It’s what we call The Cabinet of Curiosities,’ he explains, straight faced. ‘A collection of extraordinary things. Rare, eclectic, no two are quite the same.’

‘I must have missed that,’ Mum says, turning to me. ‘What was it like?’

‘Memorable,’ I stammer, desperate to get back to the safety of the car.

‘I’ll have to see it next time,’ Mum says.

‘Next time,’ the old man agrees with a broad grin. ‘Who knows what we’ll have in there by then?’

I swallow, and follow Mum and Lucy out.

‘Well,’ says Dad, starting the car as we pile in. ‘Was it worth it?’

‘Actually,’ I say, buckling my seatbelt and looking at the back of Mum’s head. ‘I think it was.’