"Can you please hold", said Autumn, "I will check if he's in. Fine I said. He was busy. "I'll call back on Tuesday," I told Autumn. It was almost time to leave the office to go home.

Work had finished early, for a holiday weekend. I decided to do some shopping and stopped at Bloomingdales. As I was walking through the obligatory department-store perfume section, I noticed a man with a stroller (pusher). Nothing unusual about that; but seated in the stroller was a small dog. Nothing wrong or unusual with that, either. But the dog was wearing sunglasses.

Fine. No one else seemed to find anything remarkable. I must be getting senile. Seemed odd to me. I walked on.

I found nothing that I liked and headed home again. The tranquility of the Upper East Side. Oh, there was someone I knew, entering her town house on 93rd Street. "Hi Fern", I greeted her. "Hi", she said back.

I remembered back to my Australian days. Where people were called Carol, Sue, Shawn and Jason. Where dogs were in backyards, not strollers, and didn't go shopping at Bloomies, let alone wear sunglasses. And certainly not inside. Where I though a fern was something that grew in the Dandenong Ranges.

I'm going "back home" in August. A short trip. Will it have changed? Will dogs still be dogs? Will there still be Shauns and Jasons? Will there still be women with brooches on trams?

When my daughter was about eight, she asked me about what it was like when "the world was black and white"? "What???" I asked as I removed the pot of brown rice from the wood stove - this was back in my organic days. We had no telly, We'd thought it bad for the children.

But she'd see some old movies when she'd stayed the night at a schoolfriend's place. Nowadays it's called having a playdate. Being technologically challenged, she'd taken the change from black and white TV to colour as a reflection of a change in colours of the world, rather than a technological advance.

It's strange, but that's how I remember my growing-up days in Melbourne. A place of black and white and many shades of gray. Other expats no doubt remember Australia as a land of bright blue skies and bright yellow sand. But not me.

Perhaps it is because there WAS no colour TV in Australia when I left OZ the first time. I returned from a stint in the UK to the heady days of the short-lived Whitlam area. Colour was creeping in to white Australia. But before that, it had been banned book, wowserism, men-only bars; the only colour being the DLP's belief in "the yellow peril". Later the City of Melbourne commissioned a real as opposed to imaginary, "yellow peril".

Television was Gra-Gra, The Twilight Zone and Maggie Tabberer. Here's Maggie. Yep, she's black and white still. There was something life-denying about Maggie. I laughed when recently a friend, bemoaning her mother's attitude to herself, told me he mother had told her she looked like Ms Tabberer. What an insult. I agreed. My friend looks nothing like her ... well perhaps there's a little something.

Is Maggie Tabberer still around? Gra Gra I know, has gone to god. Bert Newton? I don't think he'll ever pass on. Like a Hill's Hoist he's surely indestructible. I do know that Telstra will not let me down. Still there, and still holding Australia back to the days of pre-internet. I think Telstra should change its name back to Telecomm. Why have a different name when it's still stuck in 1992?

There were still women wearing brooches on trams when I last went home, in 2003. I hope they are still there. Along with Tim Tams and Violet Crumbles they are comfort food.

And comfort is what I need. A world of Autumns, Ferns and dogs wearing sun glasses can be a bit too much at times. What I need is a hearty dose of Jasons and Liams, and blue heelers romping under the blue skies of OZ.

Till next time,

Kate Juliff
New York
June 2007