Stories, Songs and a Harlem Post Office

December 2025 marked the fifth anniversary of Every Second Tuesday, the anthology released by Elwood Writers in 2020. In the middle of a crazy lockdown – particularly tough in Melbourne – my group launched its book through an online event with Readings books.  

One story included was my personal essay ‘The White Woman’, written after a visit to the Harlem post office one freezing day during a New York January.

Unusually perhaps for an Australian, I’d grown up hearing songs in the vein of African American spirituals sung to me by my veteran father. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d wager that he — of Irish heritage — had been born Black in a previous lifetime. He sang ‘Ol’ Man River’ as if he had written it himself. He would often lull me to sleep with the strains of ‘Summertime’ from the musical Porgy and Bess*. Summertime, where …

the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high

Perhaps because of his own four-year wartime imprisonment, Dad identified with the lament of an enslaved people and their enduring need for faith.

He adored the gravelly voice of Louis Armstrong, whose song ‘Blueberry Hill’ was my first ever single, worn to a smooth disc on my portable player.

Dad’s fondness for gospel and jazz could be a reason I love Harlem so much.The post office at 232 West 116^th Street, where the story is set, hosted a cast of characters all worthy of a Broadway production. I once read ‘The White Woman’ for a spoken word event at Bart and Urby’s in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, where the bar crowd quietened momentarily for the counter scenes. I suspect that the frustration of waiting in line at a post office has universal appeal.

Every Second Tuesday has sold out of its print run. However, an entire edition of Cover to Cover on Vision Australia Radio featured stories from the anthology, including The White Woman (read by Alison Davies), which you can also read the story here.

*Porgy and Bess, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin