Hello and Goodbye

This post serves primarily to record the wonderful launch of my latest book, Call Me Marigold, by Jude Aquilina, with Nigel Ford as the MC. But, sadly, it is also the last post for Wattletales. After eight joyful years talking to my heart’s content online, the time has come for me to let go.

I chose the new Elysian Fields sculpture at the corner of Jetty and Brighton Road in Glenelg to symbolise both events. The ultimate paradise is a successful book launch where life, laughter and love met the life of a deceased narrator called Marigold. And, in Greek mythology, the Elysian Fields also represent, among other things, a place of delight, and Wattletales has been just that for me.

The Launch of Call Me Marigold

As you can see, the launch was well attended. What a wonderful audience it was, over afternoon tea, the room was abuzz with catch-up chats and introductions. I won’t show the photo taken during the launch, when, as is often the case, listening causes people to close their eyes and appear asleep. But the enthusiasm with which they met Jude Aquilina’s wonderful speech was overwhelming.

As MC, Nigel got the party started by introducing Jude, and here is a gorgeous photo of Jude followed by her speech.

And here is my talk.

Jude took photos of most guests with me, during the book signing, far too many to display here which I sent to everyone so caught. I just wanted to add last one which was taken behind Jude as she took this photo by the inimitable Mark Warrell.

Farewell from Wattletales

Wattletales came to life in 2018 as my first attempt at creating an author website. I began moving beyond static content, producing tentative monthly blog posts from 2020 to the present. The first was, perhaps unsurprisingly, titled Realising Dreams Late in Life.

Since then, there have been over 90 posts, both my own monthly offerings and many by guest poets, writers, and artists who shared stories about their creative paths on Wattletales. Quite a few continue to attract readers.

To all those people, I apologise. As most of you know, I am unwell, and it is time for me to end what has been one of the most exciting and rewarding projects of my life. It is quite simple to download a copy of your page by saving it as a complete webpage. (My Mac calls the file ‘webpage complete’, and includes all the comments and your replies as a discrete file. Although it might be a bit heavy on printer ink, you can also right-click and print the entire page.

Wattletales WILL NOT CLOSE until 20 May. So there is plenty of time to read, comment and download whatever you fancy.

Many thanks to all who have contributed to this pet project of mine over the years.

All the Best from Wattletales 2026

Introducing Marigold

To get 2026 started, I thought I’d talk a little about my health and a bit more about my forthcoming autofiction novella, Call Me Marigold. As some will already know, I was diagnosed with lung cancer just as I was finalising the manuscript. So, I decided that today, 1 January, was the perfect day for a cover reveal as we enter an exciting new year.

My cover artist is Nicola Matthews, who has designed covers for three of my other books. The cover for my most recent novel, They Who Nicked the Sun (2024), was shortlisted for a prestigious prize. Nicola is also my internal book designer. She does an excellent job every time, so thank you, Nicola. You can find Nicola at Elect Printing, Canberra.

What a Health Romp

It all started at the end of October 2025, when, for the first time in Flinders Medical Centre’s Emergency Department, a nurse sat me on one of the four red chairs outside the nurses’ reception windows, which meant I was in line for fast ED admittance.

There was a time, many moons ago, when I waited ten hours in the main reception area, only to be told to go home because X-rays showed nothing wrong. A few days later, still in considerable pain, I saw a GP who ordered, I think, an MRI, although it could have been a CT scan, which showed I had suffered four crush fractures in my spine, one 60%.

On this occasion, with an infection that was spreading fast, that red chair sped me into the Emergency Department’s inner sanctum within half an hour, which led to a CT scan of the head at about 3 am after having been treated to a series of canula infusions of steroids, antibiotics and some other thing I can’t remember. By 5 am, all I wanted was sleep.

Instead, a sombre young doctor sat at the end of my bed to advise me ever-so-gently but in earnest voice that the CT scan had revealed a relatively large mass close to the aorta, at the top of my left lung.

Escalation

Three days later, at Daw Park Imaging, a full thoracic scan confirmed the diagnosis. My GP rang me immediately to see if I was okay, and so started a surprising round of medical tests, scans, home visits, telehealth consults, and support from palliative care and others right up until Christmas. Whew.

Now, I’m in a flurry of professional editing and preparing the book for publication.

Back Cover Blurb

Do not fret; the back cover is NOT this colour. The real thing is not yet available.

Planning Ahead

I’m hoping to have the launch in March, venue to be confirmed, likely at Manson Towers in the newly refurbished Common Room. Details will be finalised once I can confirm the book’s print date. It’ll be as soon as that, so keep your eyes open for an invitation.

In the meantime—

Happy New Year

A Big Thank You

Today’s post is a tribute to the members of TramsEnd Poets, my compatriots in poesy over the best part of ten years, as I pass on the baton. TramsEnd Poets has always been a powerful critique group, and I want to thank all members, past and present, for their collegiality. Click here to find a list of stories by our members and guests over time.

I founded Trams End Poets just shy of ten years ago at the Mockingbird Lounge on Broadway, Glenelg. After a while, we found the public space a bit noisy, so we moved to the Glenelg Library. When the Holdfast Bay Council in its wisdom commandeered the only two spaces available for a meeting, one being the staff room in that tiny library, we landed in the Common Room at Manson Towers, where I live.

Why Did I Leave?

I was diagnosed in November with lung cancer and felt it was time for me to let go. I’m so pleased the group decided to continue together, and I thank everybody for that. It was a joy over time to meet and work with many outstanding poets who taught me a great deal.

Members in 2025 were John Atkinson, who kindly agreed to facilitate the group’s move to the Glenelg Community Club; Valerie Volk; David Harris; Nigel Ford; Kuma Raj Subedi; Vicky Ireland; Elizabeth Salna; and, last but by no means least, Ivan Rehorek, aka Avalanche, who was a founding member all those years ago. He deserves a special mention for that.

In No Special Order

Here are the poems members submitted for this page. Thanks, guys. All the best.

Merry Christmas

What to Do?

It was one thing a few years ago, coming to terms with my need for a walking frame, and quite another getting to the stage where I felt that the only way to get around comfortably would be on a mobility scooter. When I first got my walker, I hid it in a small storage room opposite my unit for weeks, maybe months, bringing it out secretly, hoping nobody would notice I was in some ways deficient. After all, I still had a car, so it was mainly an exercise supplement at first. Soon enough, however, it became an integral part of my everyday existence. I thought a gopher would be the same.

As I stand before you, unashamedly old, the question is: how did I fare in testing a mobility scooter? In truth, it was a test in more ways than one for someone like me, who, in my 50s and 60s, drove across this country’s remote outback in a 4×4, working with First Nations people. This body, which grew up riding bikes, going bushwalking and trekking, playing tennis and competitive squash, and even skimming across lagoons and bays on a single ski, found itself all shaky in the little four-wheel electric gadget. Anyway, here’s the story.

End of an Era

After driving for 66 years, I sold my car to make way for a scooter because my health and physical strength had been declining, with a corresponding loss of confidence. The time had come to satisfy my growing urge for something new. I had long visualised flying in an electric scooter on the Glenelg Jetty and down the Esplanade, shooting across Moseley Square and along Jetty Road’s footpaths, feeling light and breezy in the sun, like golfers do in their buggies. I thought life would be fun again.

I did sometimes wonder where such a joyful imagining came from, as it was not how I perceived others in gophers. It occurred to me that my yearning for a scooter stemmed from an incident in my younger years when I showed promise as a golfer. My husband, parents and in-laws insisted that I should stop playing because swinging a golf club might harm my baby. I felt morally obliged to comply. They then used me to caddy for them in turns while they played, and I carried their golf bags on my shoulders, watching with envy as other, wealthier golfers rode in glee on golf buggies, which are not dissimilar to mobility scooters.

A Price to Pay

I could have purchased a scooter outright from the car sale proceeds, but I decided to keep a few bob in the kitty. As a recipient of a Commonwealth Home Care Package (CHCP), I could access funding for the purchase. Mobility scooters are not inexpensive and range from $ 1,000 to $10,000 or more. The one I chose—the test vehicle above, in white—was $5,500.

So far, my package has provided me with an electric chair and cheap Lite and Easy meals; I pay only for the ingredients, and I now have a Cabcharge allocation. However, as with the chair, being funded for a big-ticket purchase has side effects, the first among them being it overrides freedom of choice..

When you are funded, everything requires assessment and acquittal. My mental and physical capacities were assessed—which is to say, measured—by a young male Occupational Therapist (OT) whose role also gave him the power to veto my vehicle choice. I hasten to add, he was a delight. And I understand that, in the Aged Care system, allied health and CHCP providers must be accountable for achieving satisfactory outcomes for every dollar spent. We get scrutinised so carers can authorise our use of our funding, which also pays their wages. Interesting.

The Trial

Finally, there I was, on the scooter, in the foyer of my high-rise village building, being showered with good wishes and smiles by passing fellow residents as I was about to buy a white version of the nifty little blue scooter featured in the lead photo that the OT had recommended. I was ready: my body had been measured, my home assessed for suitable indoor parking, and I’d been given a thorough rundown on the scooter’s dashboard and how to start, slow down, and stop.

On the street, the OT and the salesman walked on either side of me, like sentinels, encouraging, helping, and supporting me along the way. That tickled me. Had I been alone, I may well have crumbled into tears of self-pity and frozen, worrying about how to get home.

But I was terrified. The handles were fine, but my arthritic hands were sore from holding what felt like a hard, skinny, plastic driving stick. With it, the scooter flicked into action like a jump start and came to an equally sharp stop, which was scary. No wonder the dashboard had a rabbit symbol button for speeding up and a turtle one for slowing down.

In fear-tinged mirth, I managed to reach a speed of 3 km/h a couple of times, but mostly crawled along at 2 km/h. It would take hours to get from Glenelg to Westfield Marion at that pace. Not only that, the footpaths in the vicinity of my place can only be described as full of bumps, humps, and steep cambers that made me feel dreadfully unsafe. Crossing roads was fraught. Need I go on?

Back at Home Base

Back at home base, convinced I’d failed badly, I was trembling. But no. Both the salesman and the OT were quite happy that I was suited to riding a scooter and would be fine after having a couple more test drives. Uplifted by a sense of fun (and being made a fuss of), I committed to making a purchase then and there. The salesman offered to be available for after-sales queries and assistance at no additional cost. That was on a Friday.

That night, I tossed and turned, having nightmares about the three worst things about having a scooter: trying to open and close the double-glazed security entrance to Manson Towers, getting the scooter into and out of the lift and turning it in my corridor. I imagined myself on a cold, bleak day outside, having to get off the machine to use the air key, only to find that by the time I got back on the scooter, the heavy front doors would already have closed, locking me out of my home if nobody was around, as is often the case.

I spent Saturday and Sunday writhing with indecision, unable to sleep. Without shame, I then wrote to the OT and my CHCP late on the Sunday to thank them and say that I would not be getting an electric scooter after all.

Acceptance

The trial showed me how very low my confidence is. Being riddled with arthritis and having lung disease are both taking a toll. I might have become more competent with a mobility scooter over time, but given that waning confidence led me to sell my car, I knew my decision was sound.

Now, I can just settle down and enjoy free Cabcharge. After all, that’s the sort of thing that CHCP is all about. I no longer have to haul my walking frame in and out of the car, look for parks or fight with the traffic and risk-taking pedestrians on Jetty Road. I can now relax into my new chauffeured life.

Facing the Day

It would be fanciful to say that this is a day in the life of a writer, because, at my age, the first order of things is to attend to my body. Forget the morning alarm, offices, gyms, and parties, in one’s eighties, your diary is more likely to be filled with allied health, medical and specialist appointments, and days organised around a regimen of medications. So, if I say to you that I write in the mornings, that means after breakfast, and an hour or so of telly, which I watch until I’m awake enough to prime my body with pills and potions. And that’s before getting showered and dressed, which is no easy matter. I am trapped in a demanding body.

My morning routine is also hampered by having to stop to catch my breath every step of the way. Everything takes so much longer than it did in youth and the prime of life. I have no recollection of having noticed the various steps involved in facing the day when I was younger. In the moments after I woke, my mind would run through what was on for the day, and I’d choose what to wear. After a shower, coffee, and toast, I was out the door. Old age demands your time and more than a tad of mindfulness, or you risk going bonkers.

Somatic Memory is a Trap Too

They say routines are made to break. Most days, I wake at 5 am. Even living alone, I notice that when I stray from routine, I feel uncomfortable. For example, I usually struggle to stay in what my father called evening wear all day. The lessons of gossip about women taking their children to the bus stop for school in dressing gowns set me straight on that very early in life.

Nor will my body let me forget responsibilities; it has its own memory, inculcated by life. When I had children, if I happened to be out of the house, by mid-afternoon, my body impelled me to get home before 3.30 to be there when they got home from school. It was a powerful feeling.

Routine Interruptus

We all have routines of one sort or another. I remember over 20 years ago in Darwin when I had to fill my 4-4 (or SUV if you’ve not heard of four wheel drives) for a long stint working out bush, I noticed a stream of solitary men who I guessed lived alone, many old, but not all, who turned up at the servo (gas station) to by fags (cigarettes) and the day’s papers in the early morning.

I see a similar stream of men heading early to a nearby newsagent now, from my second-storey balcony.

When I had a dog in Melbourne’s Prahran, I’d see familiar faces hit the parks with dogs like me at the same time each day. However, unlike the solitary men at the petrol stations and news agencies, friendships often formed from this type of routine.

Those who travel to work have routines to ensure they arrive on time, just as I have my buzz cut every four weeks on a Monday or Wednesday. My Wattletales blog posts appear regularly on the 20^th of each month. We take these little routines for granted, yet they serve to make us secure. They give life purpose and structure, without which we are often at a loss.

Nevertheless, unless we choose to do so, being diverted from our routine or even running late can make us—especially those of us living alone—uncomfortable.

To gain a sense of control over her life, my mother took her phone off the hook (no mobiles then) for morning tea, lunch and dinner. If she was lucky, her phone might only ring once a week, and it was probably me, but she did not like to be interrupted. Her life was extremely solitary and isolated until she decided to move into Kapara Nursing Home, which she loved. She loved the birds outside her window and ‘the girls’ who looked after her. If I visited while she was using her nebuliser or taking an assisted shower, I broke the institutional care routine that made her feel safe in her final years, secure enough to look at the birds and smile more often.

Puppetry

I’m sure everyone has heard of Karl Marx, the German philosopher who taught as early as the 1860s that capitalism alienated the masses from the means of production, hence themselves. I don’t think today’s corporate capitalism would surprise him in the least. Instead of being self-sufficient today (i.e, having control over the means of production), we have become nations of consumers, now controlled (and manipulated) by massive corporate entities like Coles and Woolworths for our basic needs. In Marx’s terms, we have indeed become alienated.

I simplify, of course, but alienation arises when we are controlled by externals, a bit like puppetry. It leaves one with a sense of agency deprivation, which is a danger to our health and well-being. When you start to find it too hard to go out and about to shop, you increasingly feel the power of external controls. For example, I no longer cook, so I regularly order meals, groceries and even clothes online, which sets up a whole different lot of puppet strings called deliveries.

Now scheduled by corporate computers and AI, deliveries make us puppets. While Meals on Wheels, run by actual humans, delivers to clients at the same time every day, Lite and Easy, which I use, has installed a new e-rostering system for its drivers that my regular driver of nearly 10 years told me has sent them all mad. As self-employed contractors, they are now being manipulated by a computer system. They can choose neither their routes nor their delivery schedules, and, like many other workers with little or no control over their work environment, they are technology’s slaves. (When I say that, call centres come to mind, too.)

Even though Australia Post’s electronic system delivers within an efficient two-hour window, few other delivery arrivals are predictable, which traps those of us isolated at home for hours, waiting. I live in a gated property and am too afraid to go to the loo when a delivery is due in case I need to buzz in a driver. Because they are on the clock, most will not wait more than a few seconds and missing a weekly meal delivery or a precious parcel arrival is extremely tiresome.

Just remember, if you ever get frustrated with your entrapments, close your eyes and go inside to find yourself.

First World Problems

To borrow from Gough Whitlam, ‘well may we’ joke about first-world problems, but there is a real sense of stress going on in these small everyday ways that can undermine one’s self-esteem and confidence, all of which are exacerbated for the aged and lonely by their relative isolation.

When I start to feel sorry for myself, my father’s words remind me to imagine how the other half lives. We are not being bombed to smithereens like Palestinians and, as of this week, Iran, where people have no control over their lives and are deprived of the means to protect their children. Can you imagine how exhausted they must feel, not to speak of being brutally alienated from not only their homes but also their livelihoods, their homeland, and any means to hold onto what they cherish?

While I manage my relatively trivial constraints by simply letting go. As my grandmother used to say to my mother, ‘You can’t control the elements, dear’. It is just as futile to try to control what is beyond your capacity to do so. So, when I need to find my alienated self, I have the luxury of being able to escape into my writing, where I always feel whole. This week, ChatGPT gave me a lift with this.

To Conclude

I have used puppets as the primary symbol for what I am pointing to in this post about alienation in our modern world. Clearly, there are many areas I’ve not touched on, but the idea came to me that the popularity of End Of Financial Year and Black Friday sales makes sense in these terms. They pull our strings or, in other words, alienate us from ourselves.

On the one hand, they are corporate events that offer the thrill of the hunt, so when people find a bargain, they experience a sense of control and mastery, just like any organised sporting hunt might offer. On the other hand, big sales are actually bait. We are both the hunter and the hunted because big sales are designed by corporations to entice us to buy things we may not need, allowing them to offload unwanted goods, while writing off bargain losses with inflated prices all year round—tricky stuff.

Personal Experience

I use Apple’s iPhone, iPad, iMac, HomePod Mini, plus a Sony Bravia Smart TV. As I stay home more, I increasingly live in an online world, and without all these bits and bobs, I’d be isolated and terribly alone, whereas online, I still exist. Or do I? Can we?

I’ve been computer literate for a very long time, from the mid-1980s when my PhD supervisor defiantly poked a pen into his ink-stained shirt pocket, saying, ‘This is my computer’ when Adelaide University’s Anthropology Department installed air-conditioning to protect its new computers. My first personal computer was a second-hand Epson that looked like a portable sewing machine with a click-on and lift-up top and a green screen. Epson now sells inks and printers.

Inheritance

I stuck to Ericsson mobile phones in the early days, a company instrumental in bringing internet capability to mobile phones, and I was one of the first in my world to get that. I do love my technology. However, there is a distinct digital divide now between young and old. Young people who grew up with computers and the internet are now called digital natives. My generation (war baby) is called silent, and many of our cohort are effectively locked out of the online world.

Before I moved into Manson Towers, an ECH retirement village in Glenelg, I lived for 16 years in Aldinga Beach. There, I taught oldies at the Community Centre how to use mobile phones, tablets and other devices handed down by younger family members who had upgraded to newer models.

With second-hand, ageing phones, people were forced to wade blindly through the Everglades of someone else’s apps and usage history without a password and with no access to that of their benefactor. They could neither download apps nor change anything at all without relying on others. All they could use was the phone. Over time, bit by bit, with task-based learning, they overcame this disempowering situation and, with new-found confidence, bought their own devices to set up and use as they wished.

Letter Writing is a Dying Art

I am old enough to remember the joy of writing and receiving letters. As a schoolgirl, I had overseas pen pals whom I found in newspaper and magazine advertisements and at the library. When I left home in my late teens, I wrote weekly letters to my mother. Even while living in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s doing postgrad field research, Mum and I wrote letters to each other. My friend Margaret, who died in France at 83 in 2022, was a letter-writer to the end of her days, and that thrilled me.

What about email? Is email the same as letter writing in the old-fashioned sense? Do we sit down and write about our lives as we once did in handwritten letters? We seem to email mostly on matters of the immediate moment or agree on a time to catch up. It’s fast, and if you have no computer, emailing and texting on a mobile phone is tricky for fumbling old fingers.

Resist Change or Support Failure?

My retirement village has recently installed an app for residents. We were advised of its existence, fait accomplis, by snail mail a couple of months ago. To my knowledge, there was no research among residents into how many people in this high-rise village were computer or internet literate, and I have to say from experience, it’s probably not many.

Just as I was writing this segment (which I had to change accordingly), we finally received a letter advising us of a forthcoming meeting and telling us to bring our phones (sic) for a demonstration and learning opportunity. (It has yet to occur to ECH to install a couple of computers for general use in the Common Room.)

You might say it’s better late than never, but really, is everyone going to pick up a how-to in one session if they are not already technologically literate? At least, as this pictograph shows, the symbols are simple and oversized, as SA Health recommends for us oldies, which says a lot, doesn’t it?

Will such a session dissipate the silent generation’s generalised fear and resistance to the complexity, dangers and scams of the online world? I guess few will be convinced.

I suspect institutions dealing with the elderly, such as retirement villages, hospitals, medical specialists, councils and governments, will continue to use paper until the present cohort of aged computer illiterates passes. It’s sad, really.

What is Real?

In 1991, the movie Soapdish questioned the relationship between the television screen (online) and real life in a hilarious story about a soapie production starring Sally Field (everybody’s darling), Robert Downey Jr (who in it looks 12), Whoopi Goldberg, and my favourite, Kevin Kline, as the love interest. In the soapie’s episodes, the madness of real life and the storyline blurr; real life becomes fiction, and fiction solves real problems in the lives of the actors (in both soapie and movie). I watched it again last week, and while it is a bit out of date, it is hilarious.

My interest in Soapdish is in the way it played with boundaries between what is real and what is not, which caused me to reflect on the nature of our online world as it now is. Is it real? I’d like to trivialise for a moment to observe that the proliferation of porn sites suggests the internet has the potential to breach the divide between online and real life in bodily terms.

So, what does skyping mean compared to catching up in real life? Does it bring us closer to distant friends and adult children living overseas who can show us their babies and their homes? Skype and other similar media allow us to engage in everyday conversations on a regular basis, as though we were in the kitchen or living room together. Sadly, Skype is on its way out, but something new will replace it. We already have Zoom.

We can’t hold our loved ones online, but we can see their expressions and enjoy their company. Over time, we can see little ones grow and watch each other age gradually instead of experiencing the shock of changes in someone we love at the airport after years of absence.

Options

For those of us in our later years who were fortunate enough to have acquired computer skills and internet familiarity through work, the transition to online friendships, learning, shopping, and banking was and is easy.

Online sites for people 50 and over to meet or communicate are a blessing. I recently stumbled upon Stitch, a not-for-profit entity founded by an Australian. Stitch offers a variety of gatherings in your local area, not unlike Meetup, but it is much more. It brings people from all over the world together in interest groups and discussions where there is an opportunity to find pen pals and make friends from far away. For those of us who live alone (and we are many) or don’t get out much, Stitch is ideal.  

I’ve joined two online Stitch groups; one is poetry appreciation, and the other is a writing group. Both conduct monthly meetings. The interest areas are broad, and you can create groups yourself and arrange lunches and beach or park walks.

While Facebook has changed over the years, it remains an excellent site for renewing and maintaining connections with people. I am still in touch with people in Sri Lanka after thirty-odd years. These forums both create and sustain relationships.

Is Social Media Socially Satisfying?

I have travelled to Sri Lanka, Japan, China, Thailand, Nepal, and India, but I’ve learned more about the world through Facebook and Instagram than I could have seen in a lifetime of travel. The online world is replete with videos, images and information about natural and engineered wonders, places, people and happenings that teach us so much about our shared humanity. I am sometimes agog with amazement and joy, seeing and learning about these things.

Even though it has nothing on Twitter, which it replaced, I also get instant political updates on X without having to watch mainstream TV news.

There’s no Substitute for Family

My online life notwithstanding, it is true to say that the only time I felt I deeply belonged in this world was when my parents and brother were alive, and I had three children depending on me.

Sure, I celebrated my freedom from responsibility when the kids left home, and my parents’ passing was a natural progression. We can’t expect life to stay the same. Change is inherent in all things, and we must accept that.

What I’m trying to point out is that life with people close to you who care, whether or not you disagree with each other from time to time, is more grounding and more satisfying than going online. But, when they are far away, it’s the best.

And, when you live alone as many oldies do in an increasingly dislocated world, online social life is a lot of fun, and it feels just as real. As a bonus, if you don’t like something or someone, you can delete or block them without a fight! You have complete control.

Happy Writing

Wattletales

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Poem Stories

In 2023, I published an ebook called Dressed & Uploaded: Poem Stories. The title, of course, comes from the way I ‘dress’ poems for Wattletales, both in my posts and those of my wonderful guests. Some may find this practice tawdry, but I think of it as a visual poetic feast. So, I thought I’d add a few of my new poems (and a couple of oldies), freshly dressed, to tell their tales here as I do in the book.

You can download a free copy of Dressed & Uploaded either as an epub (best for Mac users) or in .pdf format for Kindle or desktop reading. The links take you to Dropbox, where you can click to download. It takes about 30 seconds. It is also available to purchase online.

Without further ado, here are today’s poems. I hope you enjoy their stories.

On Love

I wrote A Love Poem to Myself in response to one of Palette Poetry’s regular Facebook prompts because I do not like love poems at all, especially not soppy ones, which, as it feels to me without due research, are primarily written by men. My TramsEnd Poets compatriots think I’m nuts, and I may well be precisely that, but I’m happy to be wrong to protect my belief.

As the following poem from Dressed & Uploaded shows, I do occasionally refer to love, albeit obliquely.

I read Yearning on Gabriella’s popular Radio Adelaide 101.5FM program, Poet’s Playlist. which aired on February 13th in her special Valentine’s Show on love. Thank you, Gabby. The link will take you to the program to hear me and other TramsEnd Poets on love.

Losing Control

Do you remember that old saying, used in elocution lessons in my childhood, ‘What noise annoys an oyster? A noisy noise annoys an oyster most.’ Well, today, beeps, bells, and whistles drive me up the wall. Everyone is deadly serious about mental health issues, but they only look at psychological factors like a bad childhood or a harsh mother, the ‘when did you first hate your horse’ sort of thing.

Very few people talk about the incessant demands made on us by everyday electronics over which we have no control. Most of you will be familiar with Karl Marx’s wisdom that alienation is discombobulating. Being pushed around by machines is worse; it’s personal.

Mobile phones and personal computers constantly upgrade their operating systems or software — note, the agents here are technical objects! We frequently feel out of control with these insidious invasions of our private lives by the World Wide Web (and, yes, it is a proper noun). They even infiltrate our televisions. Everything technological changes faster than we can!

As for streaming services, there’s another headache in the making lately. When you’ve paid a subscription to one provider, Apple TV or Netflix, for example, you may suddenly find the item they promoted is actually on another streaming service like Paramount or Binge. Pay up, please. There is simply no respite.

The Natural World

The Wedge-tailed Eagle

I love and admire the wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax) whose colours match our earth. The wedgie was declared the Northern Territory’s first emblem in 1975, just after Cyclone Tracy, which my children and I experienced in 1974. I have loved the bird since childhood when I was a member of The Gould League of Bird Lovers in rural NSW around Albury. Founded in 1909, the League was the first to foster and encourage a love of Australian native birds, and it is still active in schools.

Since 1975, the wedge-tailed eagle has also been a protected species across Australia. I genuinely don’t remember where I first saw a dead bird slung through fence wires, but the image has remained with me. A bird of prey can be a pest for farmers with small animals, so the image was probably burned into my mind during my preteen years in the NSW hinterland, which is sheep country. Yet, I also spent many years before (and after) 1975 in the outback, so it could well have been anywhere.

Mother Nature

Storm Enlightenment comes from my love of the wet season in the Northern Territory, where I spent many happy years. Need I say more? Even when it was hot, thunderstorms made you feel chilly enough for a cardigan. All I can say is that it is an experiential poem. Even now, I love to snuggle when it storms. They bring out the philosopher in me.

Back then, the wonder of waking in the morning as Tracy abated was like being re-born, re-ignited with joy and anticipation, emerging from a cocoon. So, too, when the sun peaks through the clouds after a storm. Although capricious, nature is precious and teaches those of us who survive its fury how fragile life really is.

Personal Journeys

Each poem I write has something of me in it. Most of my poems have a message or tell a story. I was 12-13 when we lived in Albury, where my parents first managed the Hotel Albury and then bought a guest house called Tara, which had a giant mulberry tree in its backyard. That tree and my childish musings in it stayed with me for 70 years of yearning to be a writer. I used to say that life got in the way because I didn’t write creatively until I retired, but the truth is, I needed life in order to have something to write about.

Last but Not Least, a Bit of Fun

What can I say? These odd little pieces come from story fragments, phrases or words that catch my eye and touch me somehow. The phrase ‘She married in a drip-dry dress’ came to mind one day recently after I told a friend about my mother taking me to Woolworths on Rundle Mall after my first (violent) marriage broke up to buy me a new dress for Darwin, where I was heading for the first time. I was around 18.

Mum thought the dress was suitable for a tropical climate and said that nobody up there would know it was a cheapy from Woollies (Darwin’s population when I first lived there was 14,000, and nobody had heard of Woolworths).

I wore that ghastly green floral, pleated drip-dry dress to my first Darwin job interview and got the job, which was just as well because I’d arrived with only ten shillings in my pocket. I never wore it again as it stuck to my sweating body with static electricity in the humidity. The dress didn’t last as long as the brief, failed marriage I’d left behind.

If you are curious, you can read more about that disastrous marriage at the bottom of this linked page.

Happy Writing

Wattletales

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A Wattletales Christmas Roundup

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you for your support in 2024. This year, Wattletales brought you a number of posts about ageing, which is fast becoming my specialty, as well as a mix of features, including AI, feminism, a short story, observations about the power of words, guest posts, and more. 

Each post was graced with positive feedback and great comments, and I hope our guests’ work has received just a little more exposure by being on Wattletales.

Guest Posts

Our guests in 2024 were Kuma Subedi, Valerie Volk, and Shaine Melrose.

Kuma Subedi

Kuma is an award-winning, Adelaide-based poet who grew up in Nepal. His knowledge and love of Nepali and Western classical poetry traditions give him a unique poetic voice.

In his post, ‘The Play of Nature, Love and Oppression in Poetry‘, Kuma invites us into his childhood and speaks of the simplicity and rhythms of the songs he sang during seeding and planting seasons as a young one and how proud he was that his father was a farmer.

And, in his words —

My love for writing poetry in English was catapulted by Shakespearean sonnets, W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Andrew Marvell, Sylvia Plath and P. B Shelley. I dearly admire E.E Cumming’s and Emily Dickinson’s style, and was profoundly influenced by the romantic elements in Wordsworth and Keats.

Valerie Volk

Valerie introduces us to her new poetry collection, Marking Seasons, which was published this year as a special edition of the journal Studio. She talks about how hard it was to choose poems from six earlier poetry collections (plus some new ones). As the blurb says —

Marking Seasons is a record of one woman’s life in poetry. Poems dealing with love and loss, poems telling stories of the past, poems where characters reveal their own lives, or the poet responds to the natural world — this is a remarkably diverse collection. From tender and elegiac love poems to fondly nostalgic reminiscences of past days to the misery of deeply-felt family tensions to the sharply pointed, witty and even scurrilous retelling of classic fairy tales — there are poems in this collection for every reader.

Shaine Melrose

Shaine first contributed to Wattletales in 2021 with her piece ‘What Made Me a Gardener.’ This year, in a piece entitled, ‘Slaying the Demon of Doubt‘, she talks of her declining health and how it offered a turning point, leading her deeper into her creativity. In her words —

When my life choices were critically challenged by declining health, I was forced to reinvent myself. No longer free to use my limbs and horticultural knowledge at a whim, I returned to poetry. 

It’s a powerful piece, and Shaine’s poems are superb. When her post went online, her first poetry collection, The Natural World Somersaults, was forthcoming. It is now published and available in various bookshops across Adelaide.

Wattletales Standouts

Three Posts about Ageing

In case you missed them, here are the links to 2024’s posts on aging. This subject increasingly occupies my attention not only because of my slow but noticeable decline (one cannot hide a walking frame or oxygen bottle in a purse) but also because I’ve begun working on a novella entitled By Way of Dying.

Parcelling Time and Conserving Energy in Old Age

How to Maintain Dignity with a Walking Aid

Progress or Decline: Ageing in the Modern World

By Way of Dying has a posthumous and somewhat unreliable narrator called Marigold Merriweather. Not one to hold back, Marigold (not her real name) uses only first-name pseudonyms for all her characters to avoid being sued. Stuck in a liminal space with nothing but her memories, Marigold is unable to rest in death until she understands life.

Who Are We? Reflections on a Life Half Hidden

Who Are We? Reflections on a Life Half Hidden is my favourite post for 2024. It was inspired by V.S Naipaul’s book, Half a Life, in which he explores how difficult it is to find a coherent self. As someone like me who has moved on average every 18 months throughout her life and lived in Japan, Sri Lanka, and the Australian outback, travelled in India and Nepal and lived in various Australian states, cities and towns, I explored how so much of our lives remains hidden in embedded experiences that are unseen by others when we move a lot.

The 1947 photo in this image is of the Marunouchi Hotel, where I lived as a little girl in post-WWII Tokyo. Kuma Subedi kindly took the 2024 photo of the Marunouchi Hotel as it is now. The juxtaposition speaks to the idea of hidden histories.

In Conclusion

I hope you take the time to catch up on some of these posts if you missed them.

And, wherever you are, whoever you are with, I wish you a joyous festive season.

Happy Writing

Wattletales

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What is Time?

As you age, do you ever wonder how you got to where you are as fast as you did? Time is a slippery thing. For the young, waiting for the weekend takes forever. We oldies find time slips by too soon. By the weekend, we wonder where the last week went and why the years accumulate so quickly. When I was in my late teens, I yearned to be 25, thinking that would mean I was grown up. When I hit thirty, I felt old. Fifty was fun. Sixty was not. I became creative in my 70s, but turning 80 felt like a threshold moment towards the abyss. Now that I’m 81, I alternately yearn to reach 83 at least and wonder whether I’ll hit 87, like my father. Either way, the decider is not far off.

Although we have no control over time, milestones tend to trigger memories that transport us back in an instant. For example, yesterday was my youngest son’s 50th birthday. He lives in Brisbane, so we don’t meet up, but our family all sing Happy Birthday over the phone, opening our hearts with love and laughter.

As I reflected on my son’s time of life this week, my mind travelled back and forth from now to the day he was born. It brought back the few brief weeks he was at home with me before he was re-admitted to the Darwin hospital with meningitis. It was Christmas Eve in 1974 when Cyclone Tracy ravaged our world. I had no idea he was safe until late on Christmas Day. There are so many competing memories around that event, including my mother arriving from Adelaide to support us just as our house crashed around us.

In a Day

Time also seems to be swallowed up as we get older because energy diminishes, making the days feel shorter. In other words, it takes longer to do stuff, which results in an inverse relationship between the swiftness of time travel in our minds and the few small things we can manage to achieve in a day. Everything we do becomes a project that requires planning and forethought.

For many oldies, the days when we could sit up in bed, swing a leg to the floor, rise and walk to the bathroom or kitchen while checking our phone and donning a robe in one smooth, swift movement are long past. Getting out of bed is a project, like taking a shower. Stiff or shaky legs and painful hands and backs hamper routine activities. A pain level assessment of body parts is often required, and it takes a while to check oneself out. Every endeavour needs planning and effort before action, even for something as simple as going to the bathroom, making a cup of tea and getting breakfast — in my case, toast — before settling into the day.

Freedom

My moments of freedom now come when I drive because when my body is still, it is relatively free from pain and the breathless discomfort I experience upon exertion. On days when I maintain mindfulness on the road to my daughter’s place, I soak in the natural beauty of the Fleurieu Peninsula. The trees replenish me.

On bad days, when I worry about this or that, I can get from Glenelg to Encounter Bay, quite unaware of anything but the road ahead. Driving and thinking while being old may sound dangerous, but it’s not. Thinking while old does not necessarily blind us any more than listening to music prevents young eyes from seeing what’s ahead.

Blank Times and Brain Fog

Brain fog differs from deep thinking. It is a shared experience, not exclusive to the elderly, although it may happen more often as we get older. We don’t speak about it, even though any cohort of oldies will chuckle a little at moments of forgetfulness. We treat forgetfulness in the elderly as a cultural joke. However, our capacity to remember is measured before surgery and, sometimes, on hospital admission, where authorities reserve routine cognitive assessments for the mentally ill and the aged.

In this context of power and frailty, it would be dangerous indeed to admit to longish periods of brain fog lest we be admitted to a facility or filled with pills. It is better, in my view, to simply sit with it and stare into the void and be comforted by the fact that you are not alone in this.

The Body Project

The body project has distinct parts. Those you can speak of and the unmentionables.

Permissible

Let’s start with the medical merry-go-round. Looking at us oldies from the outside, for the most part, we look normal, albeit a bit hunched and often slower than our younger selves. Inside, we gradually become a mass of bodily failures called illnesses and conditions that need management by body-part specialists, hospitals and allied health workers. Our bits and parts ping back and forth from these diverse professionals.

Our only anchor is a general practitioner who, if they’re good — and if we find one when we need one — is capable of bringing us back to a complete human being. Still, medically speaking, we are classified as suffering from multiple comorbidities, a pseudonym for the natural process of decline called aging. As inevitably as the tides, we come and go.

To anyone willing to listen, we may speak openly about a selection of medical conditions and supports. The disease and its pills, exercises, and classes that teach us how to cope with it. These are the externals.

When the time comes, most of us are also relieved to outsource routine chores, like cooking (for some), cleaning, gardening and household maintenance. Although these moments of diminishing capacity cause us to reflect on our mortality, we can talk about them. ‘I’ve got a cleaner’ sounds like a good thing.

Internal stuff is a different matter.;

Unmentionable

We might be comfortable speaking about poor sleep and, if we wish to bore others, pain. But we must stay within the framework of what’s acceptable. Talking about anguish, mental struggles, bowels, bladders, or sexual urges is out of bounds. We might jokingly mention how we furniture walk for balance, but with most of these matters, we manage ourselves by trial and error in the privacy of our own homes, often in frightened secret.

Then, we have solitary moments when we sit and cry for no apparent reason or stare vacuously into the distance. Are we really comfortable sharing how lonely we often feel when spouses and friends are too busy, become ill, frail, or die? How scary must it be to be a carer when you need care yourself? Can we lament the fact that our children often don’t understand? No, we remain silent. Not for shame or hurt but because we don’t want to burden them.

Whether we are stoic about these things or keep our hearts open with forgiveness, some secrets are destined to go with us to the grave.

Social and Mental Stimulation is a New Name for Play

Everyone tells us we need social and mental stimulation to stay young at heart. So, we go on bus tours, day trips, and river cruises and join our local community centre for mental stimulation, exercise and creative opportunities in an environment where we mingle with age mates in a process that makes it feel safe to offload what once distinguished us as individuals.

When we sell our craft, art or writing, younger folk praise it as something great ‘to do at your age’. We are commended for keeping our minds active, not for the quality of our creativity, which is resoundingly disappointing, yet we smile and say thank you.

Age sets us apart in a world of experts, where the knowledge and wisdom of elders is out of fashion. When our bodies fail, we have to give up things we once loved doing. For example, arthritis cripples many until they can’t walk, knit, or do woodwork. When frailty and illness overwhelm us, we become housebound or find ourselves in a nursing home.

Riding horses is no longer an option either, except for those oldies who have lived and worked in the bush all their lives, and I guess the time will come when even they must dismount, as we all ultimately have to in our different ways.

In Conclusion

Human paths differ. Everyone ages in their own time and way. Many are not lucky enough to reach old age, so despite the challenges, we who do are favoured. All of life is precious, and I’m of the view that retiring into ourselves to reminisce and fade into social irrelevance is okay, or possibly the right way to go, because the name of success in the ageing game is acceptance.

I keep myself alive by writing, and this post is like a prelude to my novella-in-progress entitled By Way of Dying — as long as I don’t lose my words.

Happy Writing

Wattletales

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Discovery

I am yet to uncover the extent of our new AI world and responses to it. In some areas, it certainly has its detractors. AI, in general, is causing controversy for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which is held each November. It has been ‘torn apart’ since AI was introduced as a ‘useful tool’ for writers. Some folk believe AI will take over from humans but I’m not at all sure that will happen. My interest here is specifically in AI’s ChatGPT as a writer’s handmaiden. In this area, perhaps naively, I am in awe of its capabilities.

As a writer, I share the concern that as AI develops in creative fields, it will require regulation. For example, writers, artists, and intellectuals are angry at the plagiarism factor, as artificial intelligence is already swallowing copyrighted material to use in various ways without the consent of creators and authors.

Chomsky raises hot issues that will rage for a good while until something gives, but for now, we need to recognise that AI already inserts itself into our daily lives and wait until the worst aspects come under control, for there are undeniably some good bits.

Notably, steps are underway to prevent large-scale plagiarism.

Controversy Aside

We may think we can safely criticise and avoid AI, but Microsoft already offers ten ways that AI helps you on their site and apps. It is also embedded in Facebook, which uses it, so they say, to manage Community Standards. Many Facebook posts also boast the little Meta AI blue circle, which reveals additional information about a subject. You can install this yourself on Facebook and Messenger. AI is already everywhere, whether we are aware of it or not. Here is a recent list of the top 20 models.

We could add Microsoft’s latest AI offering, CoPilot, to this list. It’s included in the Business 365 option but does not come with Office 365 Personal.

This morning, I even discovered AI image generation is an option on WordPress, my web page host.

Most of us have assimilated AI into our lives through our phones, cars, and computers with Siri and Alexa. They are helpful in answering questions when we argue about details of various sorts. For example, ‘Hey Siri, what is Australia’s favourite sport?’

Favourites

Writerly favourites like Grammarly and ProWriting Aid have long used AI to correct spelling and grammar. With all sorts of accessible dictionaries, they have a relatively slow-to-change data set to choose from, making them surprisingly accurate. However, they are both now expanding to include AI phrasing suggestions, which is a tad hit-and-miss.

For the unwary, Grammarly’s suggested phrasing, in particular, tends to change your voice — by which I mean your manner of expression — from Australian to American. An example is the way it tries to force the article ‘the’ before the word ‘hospital’. I ask you to think about how you tell someone that a loved one has gone to hospital. Do you say, ‘the hospital’? Using ‘the’ leads us to expect a specific medical institution. Doesn’t it? Grammarly’s latest trick is a tab at the end of a sentence it wants to ‘improve’. You can just press the tab, and change is wrought without a thought. Watch out for that one.

What is handy about Grammarly is its multilingual spellchecker. You can choose American, British or Australian English spelling. Still, it is not as clever as ChatGPT, which I forgive for using American spelling because both its grammar and its phrasing are pretty damn good.

Last but by no means least, I must mention Giphy. It professes to help social interaction. We all love our little GIFs, don’t we? Some of us have fun making them. Giphy works on Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Instagram, and Snapchat. AI is indeed everywhere.

ChatGPT – Three Reviews

One day, a friend on Facebook posted a ChatGPT critical analysis of one of his books, so I thought I’d give it a try. I downloaded the ChatGPT app (free version) and asked for the same thing with my two novels and one of my poetry collections. All you have to do is give the title and ask!

The first result for my novel, The Publican’s Daughter, was not bad, but the app got the protagonist’s name and the setting wrong. I figured this could have been because there is another book with the same title by a different author. Oops. ChatGPT is clearly not infallible.

However, as you read the following items produced by ChatGPT, remember that there were no reviews of these books anywhere else other than one interview-style commentary on The Publican’s Daughter in the Yankalilla News by Kathryn Pentecost.

Notwithstanding the initial errors with The Publican’s Daughter, I gave ChatGPT a second shot using my name as author which I omitted first time around. This was the result.

Although I couldn’t help but wish that someone — a living, breathing human being — had written so kindly about my work, I fell in love with ChatGPT in this way. However, there is a remarkable absence of detail in each of the three pieces. They are abstract. They use words like ‘setting’ without descriptors or specifics That’s not good writing.

The Real Value

The real value came afterwards when I decided to ask ChatGPT some literary questions about my novella in progress, By Way of Dying, about a woman who cannot rest in death until she understands life.

By way of background, I left school at 15. My PhD (as a special entry, mature student hitting my forties) was in anthropology, not Creative Writing or English Literature. While anthropology gave me a lot, as did the strict grammar I learned at school, I’ve had no literary education other than reading, and I wanted to test some of my ideas.

ChatGPT gave me options around writing a novella with a deceased protagonist as an unreliable narrator and ideas about tense and person. The process felt like a student-supervisor conversation. The app elaborated by drawing on my previous questions and its earlier answers. That’s clever stuff, and I cannot tell you how much fun I had.

One Thing I Wouldn’t Do

I just discovered this ad on my Facebook page that almost spoiled this post for me. Hmmm. I like to use ChatGPT as a resource for learning, but this Designrr ad introduces a whole other level of ‘not right’. Still, we don’t have to use these things. I am a writer and I prefer to write myself.

AI in Context

AI indeed has information benefits in our quick-quick world of the shiny and new, if only because it has the potential to save time and effort like all our pristine household goods, cars, aeroplanes, war machines, and pretty new clothes. The problem is, where does all that stuff go to die? We don’t see a lot of it, but very little disintegrates gracefully. Could AI fix that?

We rape our planet daily. Our garbage leaves our homes in sanitary green bins with yellow, red, green and blue plastic tops filled with the detritus of impulse buying from the yearnings that advertisements and promotions elicit in us. And, so, we feed the profit principle. Profit leaves us no choice but to cover the earth with rubbish and fill oceans with garbage. Most of us are fortunate not to have to scrounge in such places to survive, but we do enrich the wealthy. Can AI save us from all that? Perhaps one day, its power will be harnessed for something more than plagiarism, facial recognition technology and military surveillance.

To date, we have rendered ourselves increasingly useless and powerless with various technologies, becoming fit only to accumulate capitalism’s objects, tastes, styles and fashions as a way of defining who we are. We are feeling the pinch more now that human creativity is under threat. Unless things change, AI may accelerate the malaise of capitalism and further alienate us from our humanity beyond what Karl Marx ever imagined. Or, it could change direction at our behest. Only history will tell.

To Conclude

With Marx in mind, we could say that the driverless car has become the symbol of our AI times. It is an expensive symbol of power and status, over which we have no control! Could alienation be the reason for our fascination with reality shows like I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, Survivor, SAS and Alone on our television screens? Is that underlying unease the reason we adulate sport and gamble on everything?

Short of an apocalypse, I guess AI is here to stay. Thank goodness it is cleaner than the spent ordnance now littering our world. We need to remember this: humans invented AI. It did not and cannot make us. It serves. Right now, however, as far as creative industries go, generative AI needs to learn to play by the rules, as Justine Bateman argues.

Happy Writing

Wattletales

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Seven years ago, something happened in my life that gave me the opportunity to slay a demon and achieve a dream I had long ago.

I had wanted to study journalism after high school and was interested in writing plays and short stories. Being a very creative student, attending a high school with a strong arts and drama department was perfect.

My poetry was acknowledged at school, winning school poetry competitions, twice becoming school Poet Laurette, laurel crown and all.

That young kid also had drama opportunities, being one of ten accepted from applications state-wide, to attend Drama Careers Week in Melbourne at what was called then the Drama Resource Centre, working with MTC.

Sadly, it was in an era when pressure was on to work in a real job and not pursue art. This made me cynical towards my dreams and myself. I was a grief-stricken kid trying to become an adult and fucked a lot of opportunities up.

The need for nature and sanity tumbled me into the horticultural trade, where I remained for three decades.

Although always a writer of poetry, I hadn’t pursued writing earnestly since high school, over thirty-five years ago.

When my life choices were critically challenged by declining health, I was forced to reinvent myself. No longer free to use my limbs and horticultural knowledge at a whim, I returned to poetry.

Adelaide has been such fertile ground for a middle-aged emerging writer like myself. There were many poetry events and open mic nights in Adelaide for me to begin this reinvention and fire up some old skills in performing.

Through attending readings and then reading myself, I began to develop a little more confidence. It took over a year before I could remember the reading, so terrified of exposing myself it would just blank out from my mind, poetic amnesia.

My partner would film the gigs she attended and seeing my performance replayed helped me to remain in myself and develop stronger performance and writing skills.

I wanted to write well and perform, but I was up against time and illness. I did not want to become the multitude of medical conditions that chewed away at my body. I wanted to be a writer.

I wanted to get up and belt out poems in competitions, write books, and submit poetry to journals and magazines, hopefully to get published. The start was slow. It still is, and it is always difficult.

I suffer from chronic pain and chronic fatigue. My primary condition is Fibromyalgia, and unknown to me at that time, I also had hyperparathyroidism.

The effort to practice and perform was debilitating, but it was feeding my soul. Surrounded by a broad mix of people, young and old, all with a similar creative drive was life-changing.

I felt purpose and joy when, for the many years prior, it was despair and worthlessness.

First, I collected all my written work and transcribed it into the computer. Then, I selected the best poems and put them into a little collection I self-published to use as a CV. The process was like one long affirmation; it took a year. I called it The Road Will Take You There.

Then, I approached mentors to work with to enrich my knowledge of poetry and writing. I wrote and re-wrote, felt humiliated, threw stuff away, and read anything I could get my hands on. It occurred to me that I needed to write something more meaningful than what I was working on. I had a new plan.

For three months, I worked on an application to Arts SA to apply for a grant to pay for mentoring to create my project, attending as many workshops as I could afford. I often couldn’t get out of bed, felt ill, and lacking in confidence.

I had joined Writer’s SA, subscribed to magazines and journals, and aimed high, but was dejected, rejected, and occasionally accepted.

I read with Friendly Street Poets, critiqued work in critique groups, and made friends with anyone who would talk about writing and poetry, but I became increasingly ill. Then Covid 19 hit.

My grant application to Arts SA was accepted. I couldn’t believe it. Bolstered by that, I worked day and night on the project. My partner re-named our study ‘The Bard Cave’.

Lockdowns prevented live events, giving me more energy. Zoom allowed online events, and I attended some, meeting more wonderful people on the Eastern seaboard and in America. Learning to keep a little energy for later rather than burn it off in a fury of passion.

By the middle of 2021, my grant project was finished and “The Natural World Does Somersaults” was submitted to the Friendly Street Poets Single Poet Competition. It was Highly Commended, much to my delight.

That demon stopping me from reaching out for creative expression was certainly mortally wounded.

Towards the end of 2022, My chapbook Shooting Words From My Soul won a place in Friendly Street Poets, New Poets #23. Meanwhile, my full-length collection worked on the tiny circuit of poetry publishers in Australia and was constantly being honed with each rejection.

In 2023, I was shortlisted for the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry Prize with my poem ‘Soft Fruit’, and later that year, I was on the longlist of the 2023 Canberra University Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Prize, with my poem ‘Hold Me Together I am Dying To Live’.

A fantastic achievement from two competitions my sometimes ambitious, forgetful, tongue-tied inner poet had aimed for from the beginning.

Local achievements also helped spurr me on.

My inner voice constantly chanted, ‘aim high’, and helped me to focus on an endpoint. It’s tough; you don’t always make it in the fashion you imagine, but I broke through obstacles the whole way, and that was encouraging. I have met fantastic people, who enriched my life, made me grow and taught me valuable lessons.

Some people have shown great compassion; some offered friendship that continues, and others couldn’t care less. I like them all. We are all trying to navigate our baggage and ambition.

I am grateful I have had the love and support to get through some enormous struggles which are ongoing. I was certainly given a great dose of resilience.

I knew the demon was dead the day I received the letter from Walleah Press saying something like, ‘Hello, thanks again for your manuscript, The Natural World Somersaults. It’s a terrific book (though painful to read at times); it’ll be a pleasure to publish it if you remain interested.’

The Natural World Somersaults — my debut poetry collection — is due for release by Walleah Press in 2024.

The Natural World Somersaults collection is coming soon to Walleah Press and Goodwood Bookshop, SA. Matilda’s Bookshop stocks My Shooting Words From My Soul chapbook in both Stirling and Goodwood, SA.

AUTHOR BIO

Shaine Melrose is a queer writer, poet, and retired gardener living on Karuna Yerta with chronic illness. Her work appears in Overland, Saltbush Review, Wishbone Words, Australian Poetry Journal and Bramble Journal. In 2023, Friendly Street selected Shaine’s poetry to be published as a prize winner in New Poets No. 23. Her poem ‘Hold Me Together I am Dying To Live’ was longlisted for the Canberra University VC’s Poetry Prize, and ‘Soft Fruit’ was shortlisted for the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry Prize.

Read more about Shaine here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
'Hold me together I am dying to live', The University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International poetry prize anthology 2023, published 2024
'Soft Fruit', Overland Journal, #150 June 2023
The poet breaks Published Online, Mindshare.org.au writing, Nov 2022

Click here to read more about Shaine and her wonderful poetry.

The Collection in Context

In April 2024, the NSW publisher of Studio Journal gladdened my heart by suggesting a collection of my poetry of the last fifteen years to be selected from six of the poetry volumes I’ve had published (his choices) plus a seventh section of new or unpublished poems chosen by me. The last was difficult: to go through the 1500 poems written during these years and cull to 25 final choices for the book was a trip down memory lane and both a delight and, at times, an embarrassment.  The outcome was my thirteenth book, Marking Seasons, a selection from several decades of writing.

Back Cover Blurb

Marking Seasons is a record of one woman’s life in poetry. Poems dealing with love and loss, poems telling stories of the past, poems where characters reveal their own lives, or the poet responds to the natural world — this is a remarkably diverse collection. From tender and elegiac love poems to fondly nostalgic reminiscences of past days to the misery of deeply-felt family tensions to the sharply pointed, witty and even scurrilous retelling of classic fairy tales — there are poems in this collection for every reader.

Drawing on six poetry collections and a range of new and selected poems, some previously published and others appearing for the first time, this book offers poems from two decades of writing. With an observant and sympathetic eye, Valerie Volk brings scenes and characters from her world to life, real and imagined, sharing both the joy and the pain of contemporary life.

My Introduction to the Collection

Seasons come and go, and for any writer the awareness of passing time and inevitable change, though potentially depressing, is also stimulating. The creation of this volume, Marking Seasons, has been a fascinating chance to consider the poetry I have written over many decades and to recognise the changes that the years have brought.

It has also been a chance to remind myself that, as my late husband, a wise and perceptive reader, once had occasion to remark: Not all your geese are swans. True, but his comment, however kindly meant, led to the opening lines of this poem:

“Not all your geese are swans,” he said.

Now that’s a hard thing to accept,
especially when it comes to verse.
This child that I have laboured to create,
that I have carried deep inside, 
swelling pregnant as it grew, developed, 
took on a life that was its own,
no longer of my making,
in travail flung into the world …

While remembering and accepting the validity of his comment, this opportunity to review my life in writing has been a source of real pleasure, and I value the chance to share with others the poems in Marking Seasons.

From childhood on, time spent writing has been one of the greatest joys, as well as the greatest sources of frustration, in my life, and it’s significant that the original version of a poem included in this book, ‘Shedding’, was written forty years ago. The sentiments expressed in that poem are ones I feel even more acutely today!

Although my twelve published books are an equal mix of poetry and prose, it is to verse that I turn most readily when the need to write is too intense to resist. For, let’s face it, writing is a need, even an addiction, for those of us who experience the happiness of seeing words appear on paper. Or, in this age of modern magic, the screen of our computers.

It is our way of satisfying many deep demands. The wish to understand our own feelings is central: I have always agreed with Flannery O’Connor’s famous comment: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”  Writing gives me the opportunity to explore, clarify and, ultimately, record what is in my mind. Equally important is the wish to communicate. I have always found it hard to comprehend the mind-set of those who can put their work away in drawers to be found years later by heirs and executors. The response of readers to what I have written is something I value deeply. It validates not only my work but even, at the most basic level, my existence. For me, it’s not Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, but the more I write, therefore I am.

Since the unanticipated publication of my first book, In Due Season — poems of love and loss, written during and after the dying of a much-loved husband, I have found poetry the way of living my life on a deeper more conscious level and finding myself through discovering the past. People fascinate me, and my ancestors have provided a rich minefield of lives to explore (and create), though in that writing I turned to prose, and two historical fiction novels were the result.

Verse, however, has allowed me to do what I enjoy most, to live many other lives besides my own. In two verse novels, A Promise of Peaches and Passion Play – the Oberammergau Tales, people in all their richness and diversity have been the focus. A critic’s comment that Passion Play creates a tapestry of life and people similar to Chaucer’s capturing of medieval people is one that I cherish. Not always pleasant people, though, and the social and sexual deviants who are the characters in my Even Grimmer Tales are justified by my conviction that it is only by understanding people that we can deal with the oddities and evils in our society. And perhaps also, in ourselves. We may not like or accept these characters, but we need to know them.

Excerpts from later books, such as Marking Time, which tells of living through cancer years with another loved partner, have brought moving responses from others who have found my words articulated what they could not say. These poems are very different from those that come from Of Llamas and Piranhas, written during my travel time in South America. In many years of travel, I have revelled in a sometimes maddening, usually exhausting, ritual of writing a poem a day, wherever we may be. “Why?” friends ask in wonder and disbelief. I know that this is my way of capturing experience, often only trivia of the day, but something that will make it live for me in future years through the travel books that have resulted.

While the excerpts from the published books that have been chosen for Marking Seasons give a sense of these larger works, the selection of individual poems in the final section has been a most difficult task. From the thousands of poems I have written over the decades, to choose a set of 25 is equivalent to ‘Sophie’s Choice’ impossible to choose one child for saving. I am glad that Paul Grover, Studio editor, has made a perceptive and sympathetic culling of the ninety I offered, and I know that readers will understand the feelings that lie behind the closing lines of ‘Not all your geese are swans’:

No swan, perhaps. But oh so hard 
to turn away 
from what I have created. 
Impossible to say
“You are rejected by your maker.” 

Let other hands, more cruel than mine,
crumple these sheets, consigning them 
into the rubbish bin where my fond heart
will grieve to see them go ……

Valerie Volk 
May, 2024

Two Poems to End On

AUTHOR BIO

I’ve always been a closet writer. With an academic background in English, History and Education, when I retired from teaching and lecturing, I completed two long-held objectives: a PhD and an MA in creative writing.

Now I write! In recent years I have published several hundred award-winning poems and short stories and twelve books: historical, verse and biblical fiction, plus poetry collections and travel books.  

When possible, I love to read and enjoy the cinema, plays, music (especially opera and jazz), travel, cooking — and the company of friends. But one of my greatest pleasures in life is simply to write! 

To read more about Valerie and her writing, visit www.valerievolk.com.au 

Overview

As human beings, we all get triggered daily by various feelings, emotions and events. Nature’s beauty does wonders for many, and it is even true for those who are entangled in the material nexus of our globalised modern world. Expressions of feelings in poetry can have a cathartic effect, primarily for the poet and secondarily for readers who identify themselves in a poem or when somebody narrates their story. The Greek-derived word ‘catharsis’ literally means purification or cleansing. Therefore, creative writers and their readers can both purge or assimilate powerful emotions. 

Influences in My Formative Years

I grew up reading poetry and other genres by luminaries of Nepali literature such as Bhanu Bhakta Acharya, Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Lekha Nath Poudyal, and Balakrishna Sama. The earliest poems that inculcated my love of poetry was Kishan Ko Rahar ( A Farmer’s Desire) by the poet laureate,  and founding father of modern Nepali poetry and literature Lekhna Paudyal’s Pinjada Ko Suga (A Caged Parrot).

Because of A Caged Parrot, I dedicated my time to the preservation of birds and their habitat; I felt utterly uncomfortable seeing caged birds in the community I grew up in. Chitwan National Park (CNP) in Nepal is considered a paradise for bird watchers as it houses over 700 bird species, even today.

I have read all of these poems many times and sung among peers during the rice seeding and planting season and in gatherings. The simplicity and highly rhythmic nature of the poems made me proud to be a child of a farmer and a political activist. Later I read significant works of BP Koirala, Bhawani Vikhchhu and some contemporary Nepali writers like Ram Babu Ghimire, Dhan Raj Giri, Bijay Kumar Pandey and so on. 

My love for writing poetry in English was catapulted by Shakespearean sonnets, W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, Andrew Marvell, Sylvia Plath and P. B Shelley. I dearly admire E.E Cumming’s and Emily Dickinson’s style, and was profoundly influenced by the romantic elements in Wordsworth and Keats.

Nature

My childhood days were well spent in the lap of nature’s abundance. I swam fearlessly in the rivers Rapti and Dhungre infested with crocodiles: gharial and marsh magar, be it in the monsoon or in the summer. Goat herding in the vicinity of the Chitwan National Park as a young boy and exploring the nooks and corners of it as a naturalist in search of rare flora and fauna with enthusiastic travellers. 

My first published poem in the newsletter of the then King Mahendra Trust was about the beauty of the CNP and birds. The poem was titled “Suryodaya Sangai Chara Ra Ma”. It was the only poem published in that edition. My affiliation with the Bird Education Society (BES) and time in nature to study birds helped me exploit vivid symbols and imagery in my poems.

Bygone days and coming of age are also evident in the poems I have written in adulthood. 

Love is an obscure and abstract symbol commonly used in creative writing. In human history, we have seen now it can cause great wars and settle disputes! It is another frequently occurring theme in my poetry. This instinctive human emotion can bind two souls as one and give hope to move forward. At the same time, love is agony for a person denied. In both its physical and metaphysical sense, a human heart can bleed and experience exaltation. At both extremes, it triggers unique emotions such as nostalgia, euphoria, intimacy, passion, and commitment, which have the power to heal a troubled monkey-mind. My own intense jealousy and companionship always played a crucial catalyst in my early love poems.

Exploring these emotions mingled with the natural beauty in a pristine and peace-loving country, has resulted in a number of my poems being well-received internationally.

Oppression

It would be a lie to say that I’m apolitical. Politics has a direct impact on people’s everyday lives. A country bumpkin like me, I gained political awareness as a teen, listening to the BBC news in Nepali on Dad’s licensed radio. I also experienced a major political upheaval in 1990 and again at the beginning of this century. 

For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to exercise freedom of speech when democracy was restored in Nepal — in 2046 by the Historical Hindu Calendar, Bikram Sambat or, in Gregorian terms, 1990. My family supported the freedom fighter of the time rebelling against the Panchayat Governance System, and Dad occasionally had to go underground to escape arrest. His politically oriented stories and events of the 1990s movement impacted me profoundly when I was at school. 

I started writing poems and short farcical political satire on big cardboard, released weekly and erected them on a wooden display board by the roadside for villagers. I received some inspiring feedback! Political awareness and restoration of freedom of speech worked as catalysts in my creative writing until now.

Later, in my college days, when I was also working as a lower secondary level English language teacher and Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) activist, my political satire, write-ups and interviews on Information Technology were published for some years in The Chitwan Post, the oldest national daily in Chitwan district.

Women’s Suffering

Nepal is still a developing country. Although women have been given equal rights in rural villages, they are still subservient. The Patriarchal structure of conservative communities does not allow women’s voices to flourish. There have been recent changes in the situation due to education and government initiatives, but up until a couple of decades ago, women mostly busied themselves daily with household chores. They had neither financial freedom nor the freedom to protest polygamy.

In some cultures, polygamy is still practised. Female education has largely been neglected in conservative societies that regard males as the charioteers of family life!  My mother was fortunate enough to attend school, but she was utterly subordinated like other women living in a joint family: looking after younger siblings, working on farms and adhering to rigid cultural practices which were barriers to their smooth education.

Later, working as a permanent government English language teacher, I witnessed the effect of prevalent social practices on young girls. Some of my poetry echoes the voices of these voiceless gems of the Nepalese societies.

AUTHOR BIO

Kuma Raj Subedi, born in 1997, is a bilingual Australian poet and translator. He is also the recipient of The Best Poet of the Event Award at the International Nazrul Poetry Festival 2023, in Bangladesh. As an ESL lecturer, Kuma often writes about nature, female suffrage, religion, memories and identity. His numerous poems have been featured in a variety of international journals, magazines, anthologies and reviews. Subedi’s debut anthology, The Colours of Spring, was published in Nepal in 2023.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS