A Short Long Story

At 70 years of age, my story is long. Still, it really began after my incomplete high school education, a fitting and turning apprenticeship, a Cert IV as a mechanical technician and senior detail draftsman, a mature aged undergraduate in senior secondary teaching, drop-out, traveller and mentals with hospitalisation before graduating as an English teacher 1987 and taking a pool teacher position in the NT at Tennant Creek, 1989. Whew.

Last century, Tennant Creek was still a frontier town and its high school both a symbol and home for white children of enterprising parents who’d fled the Australian coastal mainstream with a lukewarm education when they saw an opportunity in gold mining, public service, retail, or education. There I began to cathartically write away the remainders of my encounter with schizophrenia while imbibing and socialising, only to fall under the outback spell — relaxed, distant horizons, blue skies, heat, smashing rain and quietly spoken Indigenous Australians with their damaged lives; Australians, or as Ruth Park noted in The Harp in the South – real Australians.

I wrote this poem later, but it was an experience of those days —

The Alice

Three years in Tennant Creek was enough to have me aspire to the big smoke, and so a transfer to Alice Springs lasted until four years ago when I returned to SA with my wife Jenny while daughter Jess joined us a few years later leaving the only home she’d ever known — for the city.

Alice rounded my understandings about the one size fits all blanket of mainstream education. Unlike Geoff Goodfellow (whose poetry I used to good effect) I began to question the whole kit and kaboodle. I read about his struggles to make his way, denied by a system that should have reassured him much earlier. I watched gifted students who’d been dismissive of their teachers, sail onto University and professional lives.

At the same time, most of our cohort found the academic curriculum unsuited to our immediate lives, environment and needs. Yet, a VET-Academic mix was not what employers required, nor did it challenge those mid-range students. The next poem was also written later, but what I describe was evident in the classes I taught and my school life years and years earlier —

A Constant Companion

During those years, with stress, my constant companion stayed only at weekends with drinking binges and conversations that reinforced I was not alone. Jenny’s wonderful meals and social acumen made time with friends who dined and shared their lives with us memorable. So many friendships were created during those years that my mind boggles at the arithmetic. Jessica was growing, schooling, sporting. She was activity minded, and so, the harnessing point for my sanity that didn’t falter. Then in 2006, I sought my second, long-service leave entitlement at half pay to secure a writing space.

Financial security was critical to my move but taking leave on half pay proved impossible with a mortgage and family expenses. So, I approached a colleague at Charles Darwin University for occasional work thinking to use my English language teaching qualification to leverage a casual (VET) lecturing opportunity. That began the story and continues to light my way — daily.

A Different Horizon

I’ve never had a day without thinking about Indigenous injustice and disadvantage. I bought a painting called ‘Calvina’s Class’ by Dr Al Strangeways (Head of Education, Alice Springs campus Charles Darwin University) that sits above my writing station depicting an Indigenous student in a mainstream classroom. It prompted the poem beneath, which appeared in New Poets 19. That part of the story follows.

For six of the next ten years, I was involved with adult Indigenous literacy and numeracy students on community or in organised Alice classrooms. I worked to enable English language and number skills for paid employment. I am unable to include names due to cultural sensitivity. Still, I have a mature view of Indigenous self-determination thanks to those people. Similarly, I seek no homes for the poetry I have written about them, as it is like speaking for a friend or neighbour — I don’t and can’t speak about their need, their pain or their experience — it is not mine to own.

On Country

Community life was not — in my experience — as described by the document released to governments prompting the Intervention although dysfunction due to European colonial abuse was rife; alcohol, gambling, domestic disharmony, school absenteeism, outrageously expensive store food and underemployment pervade the Territory landscape. All this mapped over traditional life preferences.

Yet, while Indigenous men are more than capable of trade-related housing repairs, both local and federal governments insist that tradespeople travel from larger centres at an exorbitant cost that chews up Indigenous funding but blames countrymen for their circumstances, leaving them unfulfilled — all contributing to this picture.

We might well push harder to include Indigenous history of colonial genocide as curriculum areas for exploration and understanding, leading to a more committed reconciliation path.

Did you know most Indigenous children speak more than two languages before they enter formal classrooms, but that carries little weight and doesn’t seem to count toward educational recognition or outcomes for esteem, confidence, belief, and achievement — not to mention capability?

From Outback to Urban Life

In 2016 we placed our Alice home on the market for a second time with almost immediate success inviting our return south to recouple with extended family. I had taken to monthly open mic poetry readings in the year before departure at The Totem Theatre on the Todd River banks. That lifted my confidence and belief in poetry, me, and a future writing commitment.

On a February evening in 2017, I wandered into McLaren Vale’s The Singing Gallery and met Julia Wakefield (FSP New Poet 20) and Maria Vouis (FSP New Poet 19), who run the
SPIN open mic there. They introduced me to this part of the South Australian poetry scene, and from then, my life has fruited. I have shared my experiences with so many open-eared creatives that I thought I had woken in heaven.

I won a place with Maria Vouis and Bruce Greenhalgh as a 2019 New Friendly Street Poet. I am grateful for that acknowledgement and for the support and encouragement from SPIN, Nigel Ford, David and Veronica Cookson and others too numerous to mention. I have maintained Territory friendships relying upon my agricultural scientist mate Roger, who has applied a right-brain eye to my poetry for many years and I always thank my Redback Productions brother who built and maintains Jenny’s and my website.

My poetic epiphany came as an undergraduate while studying Wilfred Owen’s writing. His stark descriptions of a glorious war startled and shocked those back home who had no notion of the slaughter and inhuman environment on those battlefields. Remarkably he denied any acknowledgement for himself maintaining that ‘the poetry was in the pity’. Lesser players have come and gone, although one should seek wisdom in the best literature. Here, I sought humour and social commentary so, British comedy with its warnings about appropriate behaviour that better reward good times has been especially present.

My passion is expressed in the ironies of life, the wry humour I try to find that exemplifies the struggle that life can be. Kurt Vonnegut is still my favourite author though Ray Bradbury invited healthy respect for untrammelled authority when I was young, while Billy Collins is a standout contemporary poet.

And, Now

These days I write and submit to poetry calls (as do my contemporaries), attend open mic readings, read other successful local poets, engage them in conversation. Of course, I continue to share food and wine experiences with anyone keen to take the time.

I have been acknowledged internationally and locally. I take strength in those successes. I am still a newcomer whose minimalist industrial signature often surprises and may confuse editors, readers and listeners who need time to adjust to the brevity. Compact observations require attentiveness and imagination, not always satisfying to traditionalists.

And so, finally —

I have been genuinely fortunate to have Jules Leigh Koch as a supporter, mentor and confidante whose own writing, recognition and advice are inspiring. I also thank Dr Steve Evans, who has been a believer like no other, with words that resonate, target, and diminish my uncertainty. My wife Jenny knows the whole messy but happily resolved story, and I am incredibly fortunate that she is by my side. You, too, Jess – always.

This marvellous opportunity to share my story here was made possible by Lindy’s too kind invitation to contribute – my gratitude, Lindy.

AUTHOR BIO

Geoffrey Aitken is an awarded South Australian poet and retired educator. His debut industrial signature styled chapbook, I want that in writing  (Ginninderra Press 2020) was generated from his open mic spoken word poetry. He won a place (of three) in the Friendly Street Poets Anthology New Poets 19 (Rainbow Press 2018). You can find him by visiting   https://poetryfeasting.com/ where you can view his poetry credits that include AUS, UK, US, CAN, and Fr. He does not test his poetry on caged animals nor is he after dinner congeniality. His experience of schizophrenia increases his concern about mental health along our avenues. 

Beware if you see this bloke around, he’s a poet.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Photos by Geoffrey or Jenny Aitken. Profile image by Martin Christmas. All poems and text remain the property of Geoffrey Aitken.

My First Love

I grew up with my head in books. I loved them so much it hurt, and they echo in me still. To this day, I read not with my intellect, but my heart and the curiosity I had as a child. I evaluate novels in terms of my attraction to characters and the strength of my wish that the story would go on forever; a salutary lesson for writers right there.

I remember conversations at university where people overwhelmed by status imperatives declared before they dared open a book, ‘oh, there’s so much I have to read’. When I replied that I read what I like, it was as though I’d farted in public. Truly.

Books speak to me through their themes and settings which attract me in an almost mystical way. I tingle with recognition when I find something I know I’ll enjoy. Of course, I check out what’s around, but when it comes to conscious selection, if anything, I am an author fan. I pre-order books by writers who take me on a journey. That’s it. The minute I see a writer showing off on the page, I’m gone.

Reading remains for me, a visceral activity. I’ve never read a book twice unless, as with academic texts, for comprehension. Nor do I feel shame if I don’t finish a book, unlike one of my favourite Australian authors, Richard Flanagan. Nor do I judge the many unread books around me as good or bad. I am a simple soul who knows when something is not for me.

An Aside

Of the great number of books I’ve read in my long life, I have chosen only a few to mention here because, despite some perceptible patterns, this post is about how and why I read, not what. My question to you is this; do you read like me?

Books that Grew Me Up

Like most girls of my era who grew up without television, I imbibed Enid Blyton’s Secret Five and Secret Seven books (later banned for 30 years for being racist despite selling 600 million copies in 90 languages). Boys read Biggles.

Blyton instilled in me a love of mystery and adventures that included girls. Yes, Enid Blyton’s heroes were mostly boys, but that’s the way life was when she wrote, and it was the way my generation expected it to be. It was the 1980s before I realized that life was up to me alone!

In fact, in my 20’s in Darwin, I taught water-skiing for a guy with a boat and an outboard motor and yearned to join a yacht sailing to South Africa as one of an all-female crew for a male skipper. I had no inkling I could ever own a ski boat or sail my own catamaran around the world, with an all-male crew.

Nowadays, girls like Aussie teen Jessica Jackson in 2009-10, can navigate the world solo in their own yacht. (She now features in a 2020 Netflix biopic.)

Stories are Living Things

Stories belong in time and touch those of their time. Even today, an author’s success comes from speaking truth, present yet inchoate in the populations they address. This explains why books echo in us. Of course, we read to learn. But we also affirm or transform who we are in our emotional refraction with a narrative.

Most of us choose to read what we already like. If you have a penchant for ancient civilisations, you will read such books as did my brother. If like me as a child, you are bewitched by an idea of the Australian bush, well, go no further than Mary Grant Bruce. Back then, nobody knew that her work would later attract controversy for racial stereotyping. Nor did I then know anything about her belief in the now-debunked theory of Social Darwinism.

If Bruce answered my romance with the bush, earlier, May Gibbs bewitched me with Snuggle Pot and Cuddle Pie, her little gumnut babies and their struggle with Big Bad Banksia men. I feel a nominal kindred with Gibbs too. Like my mother, my middle name is May, after my maternal grandmother of Gibb’s generation; May Evans nee Woods.

May Gibbs has a top spot in my heart, and I was thrilled to read just now, as I searched for a link to include here, that she once said, ‘It’s hard to tell, hard to say, I don’t know if the bush babies found me or I found the little creatures.’ Wow!

In passing, I must add that my favourite fairy tales were those of the Brothers Grimm, especially Rumpelstiltskin, which terrified me probably because I was blonde.

Youthful Attractions

During my early 20s in Darwin, I lived in the library as I had at school. Its two levels of book-lined shelves in an old colonial stilt house drew me in. The bound promises and secrets it held bewitched me, taking me on an adventure from a single room in a government hostel and life as a stenographer to Aldous Huxley and his father, Sir Julian and beyond.

Nearly 60 plus years later, I can’t remember which Aldous Huxley books I read apart from Island and Brave New World or whether I fully understood them at the time. However, I still thrill at their memory. Aldous Huxley invited me to step beyond my own small life. He took me to tantalizing horizons I’d never imagined. Sir Julian was my first brush with the philosophical theory, Humanism. Being of a more spiritual bent, I read only one of his books.

While the Huxleys introduced me to notions that heightened and expanded my curiosity, I also discovered Fyodor Dostoevsky in those formative years. My favourite book of his was The Idiot.

I reckon this early exploratory reading fits with who I’ve become, with my somewhat depressed leftie and philosophical outlook on life, despite the wicked influence of Enid Blyton and Mary Grant Bruce. Don’t you?

Once an Anthropologist…

As I said in An Accidental Life, anthropology opened the door to magic for me. I experienced that discipline as coming home to myself, even as it took me to other worlds. An important byproduct of my tertiary study was the discovery that there are no definitive answers in life. New questions constantly arise, stretching and pulling one on and on.

I learned from so many remarkable scholars whose ideas are now part of who I am, how I see, interpret and understand. Here are just a few of my favourites.

All these writers, philosophers and anthropologists alike, gave me a love of learning. I fell in love with their loftiness of vision and innovative ideas. They brought me down from hard-fact kinship diagrams and other theoretical abstractions to real people and helped me understand other people’s ways; in their terms.

Eliade and Heidegger illuminated non-linear conceptions of time. Michael Taussig, my favourite Australian anthropologist, exposed the pulsating nature of social life, which he describes as a nervous system. In earlier works, he revealed that criticisms of the danger of native peoples by those trying to control them are false. Taussig argues that such colonial portrayals did not describe reality. Instead, they reflected the colonial fear of darkness itself — what a marvellous lesson.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin thrilled me with his notion that the world is ‘aswarm’ with words, and each time we speak, we select; each utterance creates something new. Language, in other words, is a living, creative thing, not a grammatical structure. He also showed how the novel changed from static classical tales of heroes who emerged unaffected by ghastly wars and woes to stories about characters who change because of their travails. The latter is his definition of the modern literary novel.

Just as a character changes in a novel, texts belong in the world, not above it, in some eternal and unchanging fashion. Like us, they change in meaning as they are engaged by readers who are similarly socially situated. The world of words is a two-way process.

Michel de Certeau explores how we walk the city, illustrating how we map our personal city as we traverse it. To me, this is iconic with Bakhtin’s notions about words; in life, we choose our own paths, from a trillion possibilities to create our own meaning. We create maps that we construct and reconstruct as we move around. Like social language, meaning is always in motion.

I met Clifford Geertz once, in Hindmarsh Square’s Jasmin Indian restaurant. We sat opposite each other at a long academic table, in a two-person bubble, sharing our distaste for loud voices and false laughter. A prodigious writer, Geertz confided in me that he wrote 300 words a day, not more, not less. In his image, I set my daily word goal at 500, which reminds me of him each time I reach my target.

Geertz’ work on Balinese cockfighting is a classic and a great read that will remain on syllabuses forever with his wonderful lyrical prose. But I loved Works and Lives because it strips all mystique from theory. One way or another, he argues, all writers, including renowned philosophers, write from their biography. Theories in philosophy, the arts and linguistics, are not as rational as we have been led to believe. No theory is culturally innocent.

Back to Novels

I have read so many books over the years but remember only a few, like The Herries Chronicles by Hugh Walpole’s six books of a family saga that I could not put down. The last book in the series is entitled Vanessa, and at 19, when I read it (borrowed from the Glenelg Library, which has barely changed), I vowed I’d name a daughter Vanessa, should I be lucky enough to have one. And I did!

Jumping to my university years, when I’d already fallen in love with South Asia through study, I snuggled into my flamingo pink armchair one winter with Vikram Seth’s story, A Suitable Boy, set in India. (It recently came out on Netflix). I did the same thing, albeit in a different chair and house, with The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz. Who could resist books with names like The Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street?

Seth taught me so much about the Partition of India and Mahfouz, the history of the Middle-East. But, by the story-magic of their writing, I lived, cried and loved in those places for a while. As authors, they took me on journeys that inhabit me now.

Another somewhat different love came with Patrick Suskind’s disturbing, humorous and oh! so intelligent novella, The Pigeon. A book about an ordinary man who locks himself in his room to brood (sic). One day he opens the door to a pigeon which terrifies him with its red eyes and legs. When I dismantled my library, I kept a copy because it reminds me of the proximity of madness in us all. I love that.

The Pull of Poetry

I was inattentive at school (outside the door a lot), but I met poetry at childhood elocution classes which I liked. Despite having to walk back and forth with a stack of books on my head for good posture (leading to a good character they said), reciting excerpts from TS Elliott’s, ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and William Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, my love for those poems is ineradicable.

One of my favourite poets is Michael Ondaatje and his sensual poem, ‘The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife’ in The Cinnamon Peeler. Another is Australia’s own Judith Wright and her Birds, beautifully illustrated with images from the National Library of Australia Archives. Both poets clearly wrote from the heart; their lives, loves and experiences are in every poem.

By giving me Australia in poetry, Judith Wright belongs in the same parade of my beloved figures, May Gibbs and Mary Grant Bruce. Ondaatje stands in succession to my love of Sri Lanka, where I researched traditional rituals of the Goddess Pattini and Buddha for my PhD. My heart is never far away from a place when I read.

How Books Make Me

A week or so ago, I watched Michael Portillo’s railway adventure through Sicily. I cried. It wasn’t a sad show. Indeed it explored Sicily’s fascinating history but, although I’ve never been there, I adore Sicily because, during my undergraduate years, I studied the decline of its classical land tenure system, the latifundia, and the early emergence of mafia to fill the void created by absent landlords.

Sicily’s bleached atmosphere, pale stone buildings, bright sun, and industrious people overwhelmed me on the page. Years later, I fell in love again with Sicily on television, watching Sicilian Inspector (Salvo) Montalbano, a marvellous character who sprang from author Andrea Camilleri’s pen. Thus compounded in my heart between word and screen, Siciliy lingers as the love of a place I can only imagine.

We are what we love. What we love, we become. This makes reading transformational, a view I seem to share with some pretty famous writers. Click here for their words.

Writing Tip

It won’t surprise many people that writers, playwrights, artists and film-makers use books as props to convey a character’s nature. But, have you ever thought of examining yourself in these terms. What does your reading say about you?

When I taught life writing, I’d often ask people what their favourite fairy tale was and then identify an aspect of themselves that resonated with it. It was a revealing exercise so give it a shot.

You don’t need to work with everything you’ve read, just those books, poems or stories that jump out at you when you sit down to write. As always do one thing at a time; one movie, book or poem.

When your collection grows, find commonalities, themes, points of divergence or similarity and ask, is that me? How did this or that reading change you, make you?

Following Smoke

On the way home from Westfield Marion on Christmas Eve 2020, I tailed a small red car, not vintage but an older model that emitted clouds of white tobacco smoke from the driver’s window at regular intervals. As it reached for the sun before dissipating, the smoke reminded me of yesterday’s freedoms; a nostalgia in today’s COVID-19, hog-tying context. The moment spoke to my youth, forcing me to reflect by comparison on how I feel now, in a restricted pandemic scenario.

Who’s a Quitter Then?

Being born and bred in pubs as I was, cigarettes were simply part of my life. We emptied full ashtrays into tins so that glowing butts could not ignite. They smouldered a bit, then magically smothered each other.

It was once a deadly put-down to call someone a ‘quitter’.

In my Dad’s day in both the Navy and Army where he served, cigarettes were combat issue. In my late teens, I learned in the bush that smoking would clear your sinuses. At work in my twenties, my cigarettes sat proudly next to my typewriter. Nobody questioned the fact that we smoked at our desks, either in front of or with the boss.

My father, Stanley James Warrell, the boy sailor sitting second from the R in the first row.

Did you know that smoking had gendered rules?

The offer of a cigarette was a romantic overture. Any man who lit your cigarette before his own was a gentleman. When a post-coital lover lit two cigarettes simultaneously then took one glowing fag from his mouth to put into yours, it was a gesture of, well, of something. Anyone else who did this was a creep.

Doctors and Nurses

Throughout my youth and early motherhood, general practitioners would offer a ciggy from the pack on their desk, light it for you and push the ashtray forward so you could reach. Once, after I’d had major surgery in the Wakefield Street Private Hospital, two nurses produced an ashtray in my private room, sat it on my tummy and joined me in a smoko. What a giggle! The pain had not yet set in.

A timely cigarette used to allay hunger but now, waiting to be seen in the emergency department is a special form of torture.

In the early seventies, when my first two children were born in Adelaide’s Calvary Hospital, and my third in the Royal Darwin Hospital, mothers smoked in the wards with newborns. Doctors, matrons and nurses joined in at bedside while we fed our infants.

Here are two generations of children thus raised in smoke. As daughter (L) and mother (R), I am the articulating generation. Our cat was called Christmas, and the dog, Melly. The cat got its name from wrecking its first Christmas tree as a kitten and of course, as a pair, they became Melly Christmas.

The Winds Changed

By the mid-1970s, it was becoming acceptable to find smoking unacceptable. I often found myself mocked for my previously unquestioned habit to the extent that I wrote an angry letter, published in ‘The Advertiser’, suggesting it was about time people gave more attention to the deadly dangers of alcohol for individuals and families.

The abusive replies defending the booze were a thing to behold. Grog was, and remains a national icon!

Argue with me if you will, but we can do a pretty good social analysis based on who drinks how, what, when and where. Thirty-plus years on from my letter to the Editor, there is still ambivalence about alcohol; refined drinking is OK, drinking from casks, not so much. In elegant restaurants, yes, on the streets, no. Boozeups are apparently still OK for the right occasion.

Nobody questions the taken-for-granted nature of alcohol consumption. Nor do we as a culture, ask why that is true. The question seems almost silly. You only have to consider how indulgent we are towards schoolies week. There is even a dedicated website for that licence for adolescents to get drunk. Judgement around alcohol remains focused only on method and quantity of intake.

In contrast, as the onslaught on smoking grew, cigarette packets were branded with monstrous images nobody really needs to see. Tobacco promotion at sporting events is now banned. From the mid-1980s, smoking became prohibited in workspaces and public places. Some took these steps as justification for abuse. I remember sitting outside the Morphettville Medical Centre at the corner of Anzac Highway and Morphett Road once when, from ten feet away, people waved ostentatious hands past their noses. And the looks!

In 1993, social analyst Richard Klein published a remarkable book provocatively entitled; Cigarettes are Sublime.

As a struggling quitter, he explored cigarette smoking’s history and culture to argue that one of the reasons that cigarettes taste so good is that they are bad for you.

We could question how the hell people grew up at all with cigarettes all around for so long but, enough of the smokes.

Let me take you further back to speak of past freedoms.

We Got Away With Heaps

As a primary school child and younger, I lived in a boarding house in Melbourne’s busy suburb of St Kilda where Clysdale horses left hot, steamy droppings when the iceman and others delivered goods on carts. As a pre-schooler, I could stay out until dusk with friends. Nobody worried about us; the dying sun told the time.

7 Redan Street from Google Maps. This is the building, now a posh residence. We had the room facing the front on the top left.

As primary-school kids, we sometimes collected acorns on suburban streets all weekend to feed the zoo elephants, or so we thought. I actually believed that was what we were doing until I wrote this here. Perhaps our parents were telling porkies? In my mind, though, an ethereal poster asking kids to do this still wafts in and out, but I have no recollection of how the acorns got to the zoo.

In Albury NSW in my early teens, a friend and I treadled our clumsy Western Star cycles for miles out of town on weekends to roam in paddocks with dry creek beds, pretending we were explorers (No fancy gears on bikes back then.) We were warned of hermits and given sandwiches, but there was no family car to collect us — no mobile phone to keep tabs. We were on our own. Our parents trusted us in a world that seemed trustworthy, and the frisson of fear served only to heighten the adventure in our imaginations.

Despite the potential risk to their vehicles, various Port Lincoln men taught me to drive at night. Make of that what you will, but there were no permits, L or P plates as I recall. One day, a local policeman called in at the Pier Hotel where I was living and working as a receptionist in dad’s pub to say I’d better hop into the station to apply. All I had to do was answer questions on road rules—no driving test.

No matter that I have come and gone many times over the years, my SA driving test gave me permission, with a transfer, to drive all over this country. It gave me my international licence. I’ve driven free across thousands of kilometres here and elsewhere, on and off-road in the outback and up and down between Darwin and Adelaide many times on the basis of a simple test when I was 16.

The Past is Another Country

As you can see, the past, my past, is another country in ways other than the smoky place my recalcitrant driver sent me to. As I burrow deeper into this rabbit hole of memory, I turn to food; history is there, too.

My parents (born 1910 and 1919) came home from school to a box of seasonal fruit on the back porch: apples, pears, oranges, sometimes stone fruit. It was a challenge to empty the box before the fruit turned brown or succumbed to worms, but this was wholesome tree-to-home fruit. Another snack they had as kids was thick, hand-sliced bread smothered in butter if they could afford it, or dripping when money was tight. Good times saw spreads of honey, jam, Golden Syrup or Vegemite.

Can you imagine eating bread and dripping? Sometimes, as a meal?

I remember watermelon treats, sitting in our St Kilda guesthouse gutter as a small child, red juice dripping, spitting seeds as far as we could and laughing out loud when horse shit hit the road steaming behind the carts of the iceman, milkman or baker. When refrigerators superseded ice-boxes, fruit disappeared from the verandah along with the earthy fragrance of fresh horse dung.

In our Melbourne pails, fresh milk had an inches deep layer of cream on top. When milk was delivered in bottles, the cream was less but was still there for my children as it waited on the front door-step every morning. Before I married, we used to stop the milky’s van after parties (often on Port Road) to buy milk that we joyfully swigged on the way home in the wee hours. Does anyone else remember that?

My kids grew up on home-cooked meals at the kitchen table. Takeaway food was a weekly treat, not the norm. Now, I order frozen meals from Lite and Easy, with Uber Eats on occasion because I like to indulge myself. I also dine with friends in local restaurants and cafes at The Bay, which costs too much but celebrates friendship. On this merry-go-round, the next step could be Meals on Wheels. Oddly enough, though, I just bought some new saucepans. Revival is perhaps afoot.

Then Came COVID-19

Writing this post is a reminder to me of my mental escape routine; a trick of the mind. The puff of white smoke from the red car in front of me last December invited me to look back in nostalgia. The cigarette smoke was just a way in. Had I felt free in the present rather than constrained by the virus, I doubt I’d have needed to take the journey. Indeed, I may not have noticed the driver at all.

My mind likes to take me elsewhere when I am unwell or feeling low. It especially likes to travel back to Darwin and Sri Lanka in yearning for times when I felt loved and happy. I associate feelings with places. I find it hard when thus entangled, to remember that, when I was there, and things got tough, I would sit in the same heaviness, aching for Adelaide or Australia. Anywhere I was not.

To visualise what I am describing, think of the smoke arising from Aladdin’s lamp. That is a metaphor for my mind’s wish to leave the present or depart my weighty, miserable body. My mind drifts or floats away to better times and places. Smoke in this sense really is sublime and, after all, doesn’t Aladdin promise to fulfil wishes?

A Cambodian Buddhist monk friend of mine always laughs at my escape habit. That is the human life, he says. Another friend teases me, saying it’s time to bring out my spotted cloth of belongings on a stick and run away. It only takes a few puffs of white smoke from a red car to send me to another place or, as today, to that lost country called the past.

As for COVID-19’s strangle-hold on me, this little poem says it all.

Try This

How about telling your truth about the 2020 pandemic year to a page? Don’t let it swirl in your head where it can make you crazy. Grizzle on the page about everything you lost, missed or regret. Write your heart out about what you yearned for.

Tell the page how you feel now, what you felt then, and what happened or didn’t come about. Did these experiences change the way you view others? Yourself? Are you who you were before March 2020? What’s changed? What have you learned?

These questions are merely a guide.

You must write in a ‘stream of consciousness’. That is, without trying to be intelligent or creative, without trying to control the narrative. Just start wherever and write and write what comes to mind until the impetus fades. This could take 10 minutes or an hour. Write until you run out of things to say. Write through tears and laughter, just write.

Then —

— Try to extract a theme. Did you learn something about yourself during 2020?

— Do you view others, and your life differently now?

— Take an incident, a moment and write a poem about it.

Repeat each of these steps until there is nothing left. Tell as many stories as you like, as vignette or in short form, but work on one story at a time for clarity’s sake.

Writing like this helps us understand which is the first step on the path to overcoming.

Questions Without Answers

When I was young, the notion of personal choice had yet to take hold of the collective imagination. Life happened outside of us, by accident. We worked with the hand dealt. Growing up without TV, let alone social media, I was an avid reader, filled with curiosity. I hid in the high branches of our mulberry tree, dreaming of becoming a famous author. While I didn’t get that far, I am a writer in my old age, and my question is, how did I get here, by chance or choice?

I left school at 15, married at 17, and divorced the first time at 21. I did not start writing poetry or anything else until my late 60s.

In my early twenties in Darwin, the curiosity that still drives me led me to sit up all night with government hostel friends debating Big Things over beers. A little pissed we may have been, but we explored questions like, could any act genuinely be altruistic. We argued about why humans were on earth and what it meant to be one. Deep shit! The fact that there are no absolute answers to such questions kept my curiosity gig going.

At University many years later, I achieved my first distinction in a philosophy course called Free Will and Determinism. It may, in some long-forgotten way, implicitly underpin this post. At uni, I also fell in love with anthropology. It helped me to understand that there are no answers, further stimulating my magical curiosity. I lost it a few times over the years but, when I retired, it appeared again in my stories and poetry.

What choice, marriage and children?

At school, I was elevated to a higher ‘humanities’ class for being bright, then dumped into the commercial stream dedicated to shorthand (at which I excelled) and typing because my creative writing did not conform. My first job when I left, was situated in a new building, the 19-storey ICI House in East Melbourne. I wore a hat and gloves for that interview, as you then did to go into the city, and my father sat in on it.

I never got to work at whatever job I was interviewed for because my parents decided to move to Port Lincoln in South Australia for my brother’s health. Resentful about being forced to leave Melbourne, I applied for a job as a stenographer in New Guinea, then under Australia’s auspice. When that failed, at 17 and desperate to leave home, I married a man 13 years my senior whose proposal came out of the blue. He was violent. The marriage ended after six months, and by 21, as I said before, I was a divorcee.

By the time I was 26, everybody had started asking why I — ‘a pretty girl like you’ — didn’t have a husband. My mother sent me to a psychiatrist to see if there was something wrong with me for that very reason. True! The psychiatrist had me sit the Mensa test, where I learned that I had an IQ of 160.

My problem, if I had one, was that I felt undervalued in my own right, so I became openly brash like the publican’s daughter I was. Rather than feeling shame for being single, I’d announce to the curious that if I were still unmarried at 30, I would find a suitable sire and have a child by myself. That demeanour was a choice.

I soon refined my ‘quick wit and smart answers’ repertoire, developed growing up in pubs, as a means of protection during my reproductive years. Having actual children was never a decision for me. I had no idea what having a child meant and did not yearn for a baby.

Times and Tides

Many equally unthinking years later after my second divorce, when people still had not learned it was rude to enquire after my marital status, I heard myself proclaim that I’d had three marriages and three children. I thought I was funny. For me, having my children was not a choice; it was just what you did in marriage. My husband deserting me, as they used to say, started another phase of life that was beyond my control or choice.

Admittedly, when my first baby arrived in this world, I fell so profoundly and unexpectedly in love that I wanted more. That dear child, who died six years ago this December, asked me when he was a little boy how could I have known that I’d love all of my children. I replied that love expands and grows, which it does, and, it never fades.

The Fates Also Give

Sometimes, an accidental life brings good things.

One day when I was managing my brother’s ballet school in Whitmore Square, a woman who heard me grizzling that each day was exactly like the last, scrambled eggs for breakfast, kids to school, onto the tram for work, suggested that I apply to undertake tertiary study. To qualify for special entry, I had to write a 500-word essay — the first I’d ever written — in the intimidating atmosphere of Adelaide Uni’s Bonython Hall.

The subsequent interview asked why I thought I would succeed. And incredibly, given that my marriage had broken down just weeks before, I replied that I had never failed at anything in my life.

While taking the entrance exam was my choice, Gough Whitlam gave me my chance. As Prime Minister, he made tertiary education free for those who could not otherwise afford it. Without his generosity of spirit, the tertiary study path would have been closed to me. Today, students who don’t have wealthy parents must acquit huge fee-debts the minute their earnings meet a defined threshold. The cards then were definitely in my favour.

Anthropology’s Gifts

Once I had the chance to go to university, I chose anthropology. I first heard about it in an orientation lecture that made me feel as though I’d come home. The discipline combined my interests in philosophy and language. Plus, it allowed me to question everything as I once had in my youth.

I was entranced by other cultures, worlds, cosmologies and identities and the way culture is constructed in practice, narrative, and interpretation. I studied the intricacies of magic, shamanism, mythology, mysticism, belief, Eastern religions, esoteric philosophies and Indigenous stories. Who wouldn’t love that?

Still, it was a tough gig being a full-time student and working part-time as a single parent of three youngsters. I was poor and very much alone except for the support of my parents. I once commented on this to a young, single male student, a competitive guy I thought of as a friend who stopped speaking to me after I got an extra paid teaching tutorial when we were postgrads. He told me angrily that it was my choice to have ‘all those children’. Well, no!

Anthropology took me to Sri Lanka for fieldwork. I took my three children. Opportunities later arose for me to travel to Singapore, Thailand, Nepal, China and India.  

By the time I retired I’d also had the immense privilege of working for many years with Aboriginal people in most states across outback Australia: tales for another time.

As For Destiny

Many things in life are accidental, unforeseen, unbelievable or unacceptable. Some bring joy, as anthropology did for me. And, although I had to wait most of my life for it, I am living my dream of being a writer in retirement. While I experienced most of my life as a series of accidents, I wonder if the universe took time because I needed to learn things before I could write anything worth reading. My life has always been dislocated, an odd mix of choice and chance, and I still don’t have too many answers.

Contra Prime Minister Morrison’s silly attempt at an aphorism, ‘if you have a go, you’ll get a go’, I believe the reverse. It is by chance that we are born with varying degrees of emotional, physical, familial and social capital. So my comeback for the PM is, ‘one has to have a chance to make a choice’.

Only one thing is certain. We all die.

When You Write

Remember culture, politics and history are implicit in our lives and identities, we cannot disentangle from them. To paraphrase Shakespeare, we are all players on the stage of life, and we cannot escape our context.

Try This

List 10 incidents, events, happenings or things that transformed your life irrevocably or affected you profoundly that you could write about as a memoir.  In movie parlance, I’m talking about ‘sliding-door’ moments.

The trigger for this event might be something someone said or overeating chocolate one miserable night, to marriage, childbirth or menopause, the death of a loved one, a significant illness, travel experience or finding religion — anything at all that led to realisation and change.

How has this incident transformed you? Try to tease out the contextual factors and include them. Are you where you thought you’d be when you made decisions ‘back then’?

TIP

Be honest!

Forgotten and Hidden Stories

My posts over the past two years have explored different ways we can think about life, poetry and fiction. I have asked how each creatively informs and interweaves with the other to bring insight into our writing and ourselves. Today, I look at how our minds bring forgotten and hidden stories to life and how life gives its gifts to memory.

So, come on a journey into the notion of mind with me as the control group. Not a very scientific approach, I know, but it suffices for talking about the workings of memory and story, life and the page. As a cultural anthropologist who meditates, I am intrigued by the interdependence of such nebulous things.

A Buddhist Approach

I know little about the psychology either of memory or mind and apologise in advance to specialists in those areas.

My approach is to call the activity of memory, our consciousness if you like, ‘mind’ — in the Buddhist sense. I take mind as a sensory organ that responds to both external and internal stimuli like sound, touch, taste, smell, thought and both physical and emotional feeling.

Mind in Buddhism, Ceta, (pr. ch), is seen as a sensory organ like the ears, eyes, nose and so on. Although insubstantial, the mind is not unlike the brain in that it can be understood metaphorically as having conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces which we might relate to memory. Like grammar, though, while it is necessary for comprehension, it is not the story.

The mind remembers, forgets and performs the archaeological search otherwise known as recall, to produce memories which, in Buddhist terms, are ‘thoughts’. Both the mind and the stories it remembers are sublime; each as elusive as the other. As a sense organ, the mind responds not only to internal but also external stimuli, some of which vary in kind.

Listening vs Hearing

How often do we as individuals stop listening to someone the moment they say something that resonates with our experience? I think we all do it to a greater or lesser degree. I call this the ‘I remember when’ syndrome. In these acts of remembering, we pay less attention to our friend as we turn inwards to our memories and, more often than not, we will fail to comment on what they are telling us and start talking about ourselves.

I am sure I’m not the only person who is put off by the inflammatory phrase of disinterest: ‘I hear you’. However, I raise this not in judgement but to demonstrate for it tells us a lot about how memory, mind, or if you prefer, consciousness operates.

In meditation, specifically Buddhist inspired reflection, we learn how to relinquish the need to hold and examine our every thought as it comes to mind by learning to be mindful. Mindfulness practice trains us to attend to others wholly. From it, we learn not only to ‘hear’ but also to heed, or listen deeply for greater understanding.

Landscapes of Remembering

For Australia’s First Nations people, intricate connectors trace nature’s landscape, creating stories of place and substantive ideas of selfhood. In other words, through centuries, they have walked collective meaning into their world by telling the stories and enacting rituals of Ancestral travels to create a unique and numinous landscape.

In a related but inverted vein in The Practice of Everyday Life, French sociologist, Michel de Certeau speaks about the way we in the West create meaning as we walk the city. Within the pre-existing context of power’s grids and layout of the buildings, boundaries, roads and institutions that confine us, we lay down individuating meanings and thus embed ourselves in place in the everyday affair of living. My story is like that.

My Story as Example

When I drive around Adelaide and surrounds, my biography rears up to greet me. Admittedly, I usually drive alone, and, after years of meditation, I am attuned to how my mind is behaving. But I guess that even with others in the car, you might experience a similar thing.

Words are clumsy in explaining this but, every time I drive down Port Road, a straight, pine-tree-lined stretch of bitumen leading to the Port Willunga and Aldinga Beach Esplanade, my first, violent husband comes to mind. The angry detail of the past arises in my mind even though it is over 60 years since he taught me to drive there.

A place can evoke memories as alive today as they were when laid down. When I pass a couple of houses in Adelaide where I partied as a university student, I smell dope.

Profound external events have a similar effect. When my eldest son died at 43 in December 2014, my grief took me on an internal journey through his life from newborn to adult. If you asked me to tell that story from ‘memory’, I simply could not do it, but memories surfaced to meet the moment; in that moment.

Getting Real

If the mind is fundamentally a connector, no matter how real our memories, how true is our story, how much of what we remember can we trust? To answer this we need to look at how we tell stories.

The everyday stories we tell about our lives, both to others and ourselves, constitute our identity. Over time, they combine to give an impression of who we are in the world and there is no doubt that we edit as we go! 

In developing a presentational self through stories, we create reality as we want it to appear. We create a persona; a front or a mask. However, when it comes to life-writing, we need to dig deep to go beyond such conscious constructions of self.

To find the truth, we need to bypass rehearsed stories, those we ‘see’ in our mind’s eye as though we were watching television with ourselves as the hero.  Such stories do not read well on the page precisely because, as products of the intellect, they tend to bypass the senses.

Even in fiction, unless we pay attention to sensation, we can never access the rough, smelly, tasty, noisy, colourful, tactile and marvellous world we really inhabit, and through which we hook readers.

To take readers on a journey we must evoke the senses. But, how do we access the sensations to create magic on the page? The best lessons come from Life Writing instruction.

Original Memory

In fiction, we bring personal experience to play to evoke events and moments in a character’s journey. It is not just ‘write about what you know’. To make both fiction and a life story real for readers, we need to draw on what we know at the sensory level and let the intellect provide ornamentation.

In The Memoir Book, Patti Miller tells us that original memory is poetic, not prosaic! It works through metaphor and symbol by linking things that we otherwise keep separate when we think about them or analyse. Notably, as she argues, poetic memory is triggered by the senses.

Miller argues that, given a chance, the right circumstances or a sense-trigger, the mind searches the core of our bodies and souls to bring the past into the present replete with its smells, tastes, sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings; original feelings. The truest stories come after.

The Archaeology of Mind at Work

When poetic answers come, time disappears. Given that we are accustomed to seeing our lives as a chronology or ‘real sequence’, I find this pretty interesting.

Your memory or mind, Miller says, is a poet…

…it has stored experiences in imaginative patterns where the sound of marching music will lead you to the school verandah and the teacher leaning over you smelling of ink and the boy pulling a face in the next seat who later died in an accident. Go into life writing via this door of memory, rather than the door of topics, and you are entering into the imaginative, creative part of your mind. You are much more likely to write with vividness and clarity.

Patti Miller in Writing Your LIfe: p.79

Embodied Memory and Associative Recall

I spoke earlier about remembered stories, those we rehearse in order to show the world who we want it to think we are. Patti Miller shows us a productive way past that. What I am largely talking about here is embodied memory and, by extension associative recall. Similar ideas, slightly different descriptors.

Embodied memory, like Miller’s ‘original memory’ is something like knowing how to ride a bike, or drive a car without all the clumsiness that goes with learning to do these things. Embodied memory comes into play, as I described earlier, in the face of significant events like the death of a loved one. It can erupt unbidden in particular places or while watching a movie, as in deja vu.

Triggers often bring to mind something you had forgotten, which is so deep inside it is part of you, and I call this type of remembering associative recall. I first recognised associative recall when working in the field with Australia’s First Nations people and, the story stuck.

A man in his forties suddenly stood up to speak at a meeting about sacred sites on Country, that he and others had been working on with me for several weeks under intense political pressure. I was there to create the record.

Everyone became silent when, trembling just a little as though in awe he began to speak about the way he had tagged along out bush with his uncles and other Old Men as a kid, often a bit bored. He didn’t realise the significance of what they were passing on to him.

Close to tears, he went on to confide to those present that in recalling and telling those old stories during fieldwork and at the meeting, their true value struck him for the first time, like a bolt of lightning.

Speaking of Country brought him to the realisation that he was on the way to becoming an Old Man for the next generation. The external moment triggered memories that brought realisation; associative recall.

Summary

It might be strange to see the world through an anthropological and Buddhist lens, but it offers an alternative way of accessing the truth of ‘what we know’. It opens doors to our inner selves in ways that the intellect doesn’t allow. Of course, whatever we write must be scrutinised, crafted. But authentic detail comes from original or embodied memory.

Before publication, we need technique and a reliable editor!

A Tip

If you are writing about your life, remembering the past can be both poignant and painful. Some people must take pills and potions. But for most of us, medication merely masks the truth. So if you don’t need it try writing about the bad stuff. That can be productive and helpful.

Try This

Take a piece of memorabilia, a precious object or a treasured photograph. Hold, touch, view and then reflect on it with eyes closed for 5-7 minutes. Put the item down, and write ‘stream of consciousness’ for 10 minutes.

Next, choose an item with an odour, aroma or fragrance that you either like or loathe. If you don’t have one at hand, close your eyes and focus on a smell that evokes a particular memory that resurfaces at each encounter. Examples include a storm building, fire the beach, the stench of alcohol, hospital, food, perfume, flowers or even formaldehyde.

When you’re ready, write whatever comes into mind about the moment evoked by this smell. Write furiously until you run out of puff, without pausing to edit or think. Then, take the two pieces together to create a poem or story.

Putting the two pieces together is a trick that bypasses the thinking process, and allows you to find wonderful new stories. Perhaps give one moment of recall to each of two characters. Play with it.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially if you find the post and exercises useful.