Monologue written and performed by Zara Hashmi
QR code located at LA Moosh Bakery Cafe: 1/9-11 Bankstown City Plaza
Browse the tour
Route A
1) Pho Minh Temple | 2) Marion Street | 3) Bankstown Gospel Hall | 4) Bankstown Library | 5) Bankstown Library | 6) Paul Keating Park |
Route B
7) Bankstown Arts Centre – RS1 | 8) Amitabha Buddhist Association | 9) Bankstown Train Station | 10) My Dads Work | 11) Bankstown Centro | | 12) Bankstown Arts Centre – Gallery
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Transcript
SFX: ambient station noises with announcements
It was a small, sullen summer that marked my introduction to the T3 line. It was just me and the semi-regulars; a skinny man with a parrot half his height perched on his shoulder,[SFX: parrot] a group of teen tracksuits with a speaker, an elderly women who insisted on jerking her trolly to the upper deck of the carriage and me, alone mostly. So it was that us delirious mid-afternoon pilgrims would all hop on from somewhere, which didn’t matter, but get off at Bankstown.
SFX: train arrival chime and ambient station noise fading out
Could there be a place built so you’d never look up? That’s what it was like. To alight at Bankstown Station was to be beneath your surrounds, the suburb could be on fire and you would’t know as you where, so out of sight, so bereft of a view. I could be so terribly alone and it could be natural. So really the station was just like any other.
[SFX: train arriving]
It was complete with nimble children who vaulted the gates and the older life-hardened commuters who dragged their dreams behind them. I was outgrowing one and too stubborn to resign to the other. Thankfully, the summer suspended my choice. No rush hour, no tweens to claim their 3 til 5 dominion and no flood of the real working world to swallow them thereafter. At Bankstown Station, at least for a short while, it would not be as it otherwise was; me and the endless crowd of people I didn’t want to, or could no longer, be.
SFX: Train departing on platform plus “roar-whistle”
It would just be the transport officers and mothers, cries, hums, the steady growing roar-whistle of [sfx: roar] the train, fluid gone tacky on the grey tile, the heroes and the villains, the gentle waft of food stuffs, the crinkling of bags [sfx: crinkling and nothing further than the afternoon’s plans. Sloppy, plebeian, but just that. I wouldn’t muse or wallow. Or think. Bankstown Station was not a place to think; a conduit, not a destination.
I was meeting friends or I was eating or I was on my soapbox about public school funding or I was faffing beyond the gates, but for now I was in simple, predictable transit. In many ways, it is deeply important that stations are predictable. Non-places navigable by any persons and belonging to no one. Bankstown proper was many things, but it was clear who traversed it and clearer who it belonged to. Unpredictable, unstable, the lawless migrant firing range replete with love and food and people who have always known who they are and know for sure what people see them as.
SFX: Ambient station noise with announcements returns
Those careless, nothing months I may have played pretend self-assured out at the Central, but it was the Station that saw me lonely and lost and took me where I might forget and then welcomed me back. Bankstown Station, just like any wisened elder, took one look and saw I didn’t have a clue who I was and not hope of finding out and dropped me off anyway.
