Lately, I seem to write a lot about ageing and old age. It makes me wonder if I’ve exhausted my earlier life as a source of ideas or whether, indeed, old age brings the focus home to the body in ways that others might only experience during illness. Old age may not be a sickness, but it is the gradual breakdown of one’s body, which increasingly demands more attention and time. It certainly brings focus into the now.
I realise old age is unromantic, often unattractive and, for some, a taboo subject like death; something they’d prefer to avoid. So, rather than rabbit on, today I’ve decided to post six of my most recent poems on some of the awkward truths of old age without comment. Make of them what you will.
Six Poems for your Consideration and Entertainment
It tickles me to write about being old. At times, I suspect people may find my interests a bit odd or of no interest whatsoever to anybody under the age of 50, 60, or even 70, when bodies are still relatively intact. But if I don’t talk about the last bit of life, who will? For what it’s worth, here are my contributions for today.
To me, stories come from the sandpit of life. When you dig your hands in, sift grains through your fingers, fleeting images and ideas appear. You try to grasp these ephemeral moments with words that may at first be inchoate. Yet your mind soon flashes with what feels like brilliance, and off you go with a story. Capturing these flashes is more complicated than it seems, but oh! what fun trying.
Sometimes, a story comes to you complete, and you quickly write or record its bones as though you are channelling. It is not yet literature, but it is the germ from which a poem or novel might grow. Unwritten ideas can dissipate fast, so it’s worth hanging onto them. I tend to record my flashes of brilliance (as they initially seem) on my iPhone when driving or those times when I wake at night. It scares me a bit to hear my sleep-ridden, old woman’s voice, but my clever Voice Memo app allows me to later save what I caught in print without having to type it up.
Ideas and Stories
I can’t remember for the life of me (sic) why I chose to write anything resembling a memoir, but my work in progress, entitled Call Me Marigold, is a novella-length piece I’m calling autofiction until someone corrects me. The only way I could think of to tackle this material was to unsettle the protagonist as a posthumous narrator, an 81-year-old woman who could not rest in death until she understood life.
As I so often do on Wattletales, I decided to write from experience about the changes that take place between childhood and old age, using my life as an example. In other words, I wanted to explore the arc of life, similar to that depicted in the following poem, to ask what it really means to grow, age and die. We can’t know death, of course, but old age is a unique journey to consider anyway, as we move from the inside out. Or, as time goes on, outside in.
The Prologue
In the novella, Marigold (clearly not her real name) is a somewhat unreliable narrator stuck in a liminal space between life and the everafter with nothing more than memories. The story unfolds as a series of vignettes, texts and poems. Marigold refuses to name her characters. In her view, she is telling her story, so others are included only by role in relation to her. This is important because although she speaks of the joy of having children, she does not want to talk about them. After all, as she tells us, their lives are not hers to discuss.
Here is an excerpt from Marigold’s Prologue.
The most significant other character in this tale is Marigold’s mother, to whom she speaks in an italicised throughline called Conversations with Mother.
As a Writer
There is no doubt that writing from one’s life while alive is no easy task. When writing close to the bone, finding the words and purpose of each story you tell takes you deeper into your emotions. Strangely enough, this teaches you what you have forgiven and what you still need to let go of. Writing intimately about your past is a bit like time travel; it takes you there, often with intense emotional impact.
Although I’m nearing the end of the first draft of Call Me Marigold, when I got bogged down a while ago, I decided to start a new novel for respite. Sometimes, letting one story rest for a while is refreshing.
Something New
My imaginary sandpit occasionally yields the oddest things for poems and stories. Still, my writing in general tends to explore ways in which we fall through the cracks. Under the heading Questions Over Coffee in my introduction to Wattletales, I ask what it means to become broke, mad, ill, destitute, deserted, disillusioned, or denounced. What happens to our sense of self and our identity when life wreaks havoc with our intentions, plans and happiness? How porous is our mind? Is there really a line between sanity and insanity, and how do we know when we tip over the edge?
In that vein, the first idea for a new novel was to write about gaslighting in marriage. My two previous books, The Publican’s Daughterand They Who Nicked the Sun, lived in me as ideas for years before coming to be on the page. Why, then, when I was seeking respite from the emotional drag of writing Marigold, did gaslighting come up?
Gaslighting
Part of me feels that the notion of gaslighting has haunted me ever since I watched the 1944 movie, Gaslight, with Ingrid Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 Dial M for Murder with Grace Kelly. I have no idea when I did that, but the portrayal of gaslighting by both actresses whom I admired and adored remains clear in my mind to this day. Another part of me knows the idea came from being raised on the idea ‘what will other people think’ which inclines one to disbelieve in oneself, and my first marriage, bearing in mind my husband was 13 years older than me at 17.
Nine Banksia Street
My gaslighting book’s working title is Nine Banksia Street. The main characters appeared in my mind simultaneously with the basic story concept, which came to me in a sandpit rush, pretty much word for word, as below. The story entices but remains unwritten for the time being.
The Latest from Lindy’s Sandpit
I was talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago, asking why I tend to focus on misery in my writing. When I suggested I might write something humorous about old age, she agreed.
One title that emerged from my sandpit years ago is The Grizzle and Giggle Club, which I’ve had in mind since middle age, when my women friends and I used to feel better after a grizzle and giggle together. But the more I think about it now, I’d rather use something like The Secrets Old Girls Take to Their Grave.
After several recent conversations with age-mates while waiting to see doctors and specialists, and in the Manson Towers Retirement Village, I’ve learned that we all have experiences that most of us would prefer to keep to ourselves. When I finish Call Me Marigold, it may come down to a toss-up between this idea and gaslighting.
This post is a slightly modified excerpt (in other words, a ripoff) from my work-in-progress, Call Me Marigold, a novella-length piece of autofiction. I’ve chosen from a section called My Six Buddhas and Three Husbands. While I may refer to husbands indirectly here, details will not be revealed until the book’s publication. However, I leave the references in because they indicate that husbands are treated in that book (in a literary sense) somewhat like ornaments, albeit with a modicum of respect.
I’m talking about ornaments because our ornaments refract time, memories and emotion. Our favourites satisfy us for years, if not a lifetime. While my Buddha figurines and statues are not my only ornaments, I have decided to discuss them primarily because they collectively create a presence or aura in my living space.
My Six Buddhas
By the time I moved into my retirement village with the mass murderer’s name (Manson Towers), I only had six Buddha statues. I donated a large brass sitting Buddha, similar to the one pictured above, which was important for teaching meditation in my post-retirement days, to a Cambodian Buddhist monk, Bhante Ly, who was a dear friend. He blessed my eldest son’s ashes before we spread them at Aldinga Bay.
A small, transparent resin statue pictured later, given to me by the head monk of Adelaide’s Sri Lankan Buddhist Vihara, found a new home with my youngest son.
My First Buddha Statue
My first Buddha statue, shown in the lead photo of this post, entered my life half a lifetime ago, when I was in my early forties. I bought it in Chinatown while in Sydney to attend my first academic conference as a postgraduate. (My paper entitled ‘The Booze, the Bouncer and Adolescence Down Under’ (1994) was accepted immediately for publication and is still often accessed.)
Looking back, I fell in love with it, not because it sort of reminded me of my second husband’s desertion, but because this rotund Chinese laughing Buddha in blue robes has five little children crawling all over his bare shoulders, a profound symbol of the love and joy I felt for my three young children. At the time, I had not discovered Buddhism; my choice was both aesthetic and emotional.
Place is Important
The place of purchase carries more significance. I found the blue Buddha near Paddy’s Markets, where I worked when I was about 18, after the first of my three failed marriages ended. I found a job there with Pardy Providors as a stenographer and cord-and-plug telephone console operator. My boss was a tall, well-statured man who constantly hitched his brown trousers at the crotch. Being in my late teens, I had to stifle the urge to giggle at this unfortunate habit.
Still, I never mocked, as he was a kindly soul who looked after me when I had a telephone flirtation on the console with a supply officer from Ingleburn Army Camp, a WWII, purpose-built training centre that was wound down in the mid-1990s. I don’t recall his name, but we flirted when he called to place an order. The soldier finally persuaded me to meet him, until my darling boss saved me by telling me the guy was married with two little ones.
I was going to suggest we meet at The Broadway Hotel on George Street, where I worked a second job as a barmaid at night. Being a publican’s daughter had its benefits for much of my life; I could always get a pub job for extra money. In Sydney at the time, I first lived with my aunt, my father’s sister, in North Ryde, which was then considered the countryside. We had an outhouse and a dunny can.
Much as I loved my aunt, I disliked going to the loo on cold or wet nights with spiders and newspaper for toilet paper, or travelling to work and back each day, which entailed long, hilly walks, trains, and trams. With a second job, I was able to move into a rooming house right on the curve of Bondi Beach, next to the saltwater pool.
My first Buddha holds all of these memories.
In My Sixties
When I was in my sixties, after encountering Buddhism in Sri Lanka, I bought a 60cm-high, gold-coloured resin standing Buddha, with a ball aloft in each hand, held high, representing prosperity, happiness, and good luck. I found it one day after wandering the length of Melbourne’s Victoria Markets, already a lost soul after leaving the Northern Territory and the workforce for what seemed like forever, and looking for my car on the wrong side of the vast, sprawling marketplace. The statue’s golden smile winked at me from the window of a shop, drawing me in.
Inside, the shop was cool and calming. The old Chinese shopkeeper was dressed in what I guessed was traditional Chinese rural garb of loose trousers and a top made of rough hemp or cotton. He greeted me with a smile. ‘You like?’ he asked. ‘I’ll give it to you for a special price. You are my first customer, and that is my good luck.’ It was good luck for me, too, at a time when I was utterly drained by life, having found myself on an invalid pension and living in high-rise public housing in Prahran.
The luck of my gold Buddha was pivotal. It served me well in my transition from anthropology to a retirement filled with meditation, poetry and writing. And, as it turned out, the high-rise experience was a special time that both led to and informed my second novel, launched in 2024, They Who Nicked the Sun, set in Prahran, in Melbourne.
What may seem bad at the time often augurs better times to come.
From Sri Lanka
I concede there was an aesthetic impulse behind the purchase of the beautiful King Ebony figurine seen to the right below, which I bought for Rs 900 in the early 1980s from an expensive jeweller close to Colombo’s vibrant outdoor market, the Pettah. It is exquisitely carved to the correct proportions for a sitting Buddha and represents a country I lived in and loved, and where I met my third husband. On the left is the clear resin Buddha now treasured by my son.
From my meditation room at Aldinga Beach
The central Buddha in the photo above is a traditional Sinhalese Buddhist statue crafted by artisans as a gift from the man who was my research assistant back in the 1980s, with whom I became friends during my PhD research in Sri Lanka—a time and place that changed my life. My friend went on to become an international consultant and lifelong friend. He sent the statue unannounced, close to 30 years later. Even in our old age, we email a few times a year to stay in touch. He has a very special place in my heart.
Aldinga Beach
The Chinese gold and white porcelain meditating Buddha in the next photo evokes memories of my 16 years in Aldinga Beach. After being blocked for many years by local protests and the Council’s ignorance, the Nan Hai Pu Tuo Temple was built at Sellicks Beach.
At that time, I led three meditation groups: one at Aldinga U3A, another at the Aldinga Community Centre, and a private group at home. With my meditation students, I occasionally visited the Temple on Sundays to participate in the Temple’s Dana lunch. They were good years. People from all three groups also came together at my place monthly to share a vegetarian meal.
Childhood Memories
A few years ago, I scoured the internet to find a miniature Daibutsu Buddha, a replica of the giant bronze statue in Kamakura, Japan, built during the Kamakura period. It was first constructed in wood in 1243 and later recast in bronze circa 1252. We visited the giant Daibutsu Buddha when I was an Army kid, and I adored it even then. My tiny bronze statue, at 60mm high, is smooth, cool, and weighty in the palm of my hand. It calms me.
There’ll be more about my three husbands in Call Me Marigold, coming as fast as I can write it. They, too, have times and places that evoke experiences that, in retrospect, were transformative. Even taking into account the sad and bad bits, my memories come together in glistening vignettes, like brilliant gems of life. Till then —
On Ornaments
Ornaments are serious business. While I’ve focused on my Buddha statues today, my home contains a number of other special artefacts from my life, including wall hangings passed down to me by my mother, brother, and lost son, as well as gifts from my other children. We also keep mementos, such as letters, emails, and perhaps books by friends, as well as our own publications.
Just as museums are a testament to a culture, our ornaments give witness to our lives. What do you see when you look around at home? Do you have a favourite item that tells a deep story? Which pieces do you hope your children will cherish when you’ve gone? Do they know your history?
I was going to call this post Things I Ponder and had to change to ‘think about’ because there are so many ways of using ‘ponder’; ‘ponder upon’ (a little old fashioned), ‘ponder on’, which, like ‘ponder’ suggests particular topics and is therefore constraining), and ‘ponder about’ which is silly because the word ‘ponder’ means’ think about’, but after reading these variations online, I decided that, if I leave the word ponder dangling, it might be confusing. These are a few things that literally stick in my mind.
I mention this tiny research moment on pondering as a way to show how my mind works. Where once, post-childhood, when I daydreamed a lot, I didn’t ponder anything much, preferring to think I was right (which I often was, although it made me unpopular). Now, in old age, I find I second-guess myself to the extent that I search the World Wide Web to check most thoughts that may, to my shame, go viral if they’re wrong, like my poor failing body, so often told it’s not right by medical science. While I don’t like to be incorrect, I am aware that few things in life are straightforward, as my little ponderings today exemplify.
Welcome to Country
The Idea
The idea to ponder Welcome to Country ceremonies in a post originated from my son, who encouraged me. These traditional ceremonies got a lot of bad press in the pre-election political discourse. Unlike me, he has travelled to New Zealand, where he was impressed by the way traditional Māori culture is integrated into daily life, from a visitor’s perspective. He wishes Australia could be like that towards First Nations culture and peoples here, as do I.
I am not an authority on this matter, but I am, as many know, an anthropologist and have worked with First Nations people across Australia. So, while it is not my place to speak for them or on their behalf, I can say, both as an anthropologist and as a publican’s daughter who was raised and worked in pubs for the first half of my life, I understand Australian culture at various levels. Well enough, I trust, to make a few general observations while sidestepping the specifics of recent journalistic and political discourse and similarly grossly ill-informed social media discourse.
It’s All To Do With Semantics
Much like my earlier discussion on the effective use of the word ‘ponder’. The term ‘country’ appears to be the main sticking point for those who perhaps operate under the notion that it means the same thing as ‘nation’. Such a flawed conflation leads many people to ask why the Australian population at large should be invited to their own country. They find it offensive.
The answer depends on what you mean by ‘country. Failing to understand this fuels racism.
Welcome Ceremonies
Bear with me if you know this already. A Welcome to Country ceremony is offered by a small group of people whose ‘country’ is defined by the stories they hold for a particular tract of land. The traditions of that land are part of their being, defining First Nations people as who they are. Tradition places the responsibility on them to take care of that land, their ‘county’, just as we look after ourselves and our homes.
Seen like this, it is easy to see that Welcome Ceremonies are more like opening the front door to welcome someone into your home than taking over Australia or speaking on behalf of the nation to which we all belong equally. Indigenous country is the literal territory of ‘their mob’ or ‘my mob’, and it does not threaten anybody’s rights as a citizen one iota. Everyone should know this by now. Those with a public megaphone should report it that way instead of fuelling division. After all, most of us are by now familiar with the name of the First Nations area in which we live.
Compiled over many years of research by the anthropologist Norman Tindale, the Adelaide Museum’s Map of Tribal Australia shows us the traditional lands occupied before conquest. You can find what is likely to be an updated version of this map in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Library (AIATSIS) if you want to scroll through it for a closer look.
Other historical maps show First Nations songlines crisscrossing the entire continent like a great big web. It is a shame that these trade and ceremony routes are rarely shown or talked about by the mainstream media, as they would encourage understanding and a greater respect for First Nations traditions.
Smoking ceremonies are a special gift from those who still live in or know the ancient stories handed down over generations about the lands of their ancestors. It is the gift of welcome to a history that precedes the nation we all compose, and now resides within the island of Australia defined by national borders.
In Conclusion
I think the confusion comes because we tend to think of Australia as a country, our country. Whereas we are, strictly speaking, a nation, which is a nation-state. It says so on our passports. And, as an aside, the whole concept of nation and nationality is itself fraught when you look into it. We all get into high dudgeon about ‘my country’ and ‘my nationality’, but, after all, as Benedict Anderson said long ago in 1983, nations are imagined communities.
Historically and politically, a nation is far removed from the face-to-face networks of traditional community life, where kinship-bound people together as political entities. We divide ourselves by class, political persuasions, sports affiliations, and other cultural identities, including race, as well as age. Such cultural distinctions serve capitalism’s marketing purposes well. Extended kinship ties would be a threat to that.
Our island provides a natural national boundary, and our states are clearly delineated by jurisdictional boundaries. Anyone wishing to cross our national border must hold a passport or have the necessary right of entry (and exit) documentation. Crossing state lines requires us to comply with that state’s jurisdiction on entry. If our move is permanent, we must change our electoral entry, our driving licence and so on. Though we roundly resisted carrying a national ID card when the idea was mooted in the 1980s, we take all this jurisdictional ID stuff for granted. Our strings are pulled by bureaucracy.
In traditional Aboriginal society, as I understand it in the simplest of terms, groups passing through the ‘country’ of others don’t simply crash the campfire; they wait to be invited in. Now, all Australians are welcomed into traditional local areas (a First Nation’s traditional ‘country’) with a smoking ceremony that has transformed to meet the contemporary world. Things have to change to stay the same (a phrase that stuck with me from a book I read many years ago about Sicily as it moved away from landlords and peasants, giving rise to the Mafiosi and political bureaucracy).
Thoughts that end up in poems
This first poem came from my meditative ponderings on living in a high-rise retirement unit that was built before soundproofing became a thing. It reminds me of old hotels in George Street and Chinatown in Sydney, many, many years ago. You didn’t need a glass to the wall to hear what was going on next door or anywhere else, for that matter. Even pipes creaked.
My Turn is something of a contemplative dream sequence predicated on my love for and experience of camping in the outback, often when working with First Nations people on their country. How could anyone forget such a privilege?
Thoughts about Hospital Stays
Toast
Toast has vanished from Flinders Medical Centre’s (FMC) breakfast menu.
Nobody will starve with cereal, fruit and a cuppa, but who eats pale white bread, butter and jam for breakfast? That was a treat (sans butter) for my father, born in 1910 to an impoverished family living in Sydney’s Glebe, then a slum, after his barefoot walk of three miles each way to school. To me, therefore, a single slice of white plastic bread is tantamount to workhouse food. Have hospital authorities never heard of croissants or muffins? I don’t like either—I’m a toast girl in the morning—but hey, I’d put that dislike aside in favour of flavour.
Showering
What has also disappeared, at least from the public wards at FMC, are white shower-chairs for the frail and elderly. Instead, some bright spark in finance has decided to give commodes a second use, minus the potty.
At 152 cm nowadays, I’m not very tall, so my feet do not hit the floor when I’m perched on the front edge of a bariatric-sized commode. (Most wheelchairs nowadays are bariatric too.) Furthermore, because of its size, the commode must face outwards from the cubicle, which requires you to shower sideways using a handheld shower rose; your arms are constrained by high armrests from which soap slips to the floor. A commode might almost be acceptable when someone else is washing you, but on your own, it’s a bugger. And yukky, too.
FMC’s commodes also feature shiny metal footrests resembling those of a wheelchair. Without a counterbalancing weight, these make it extremely hazardous to stand up. They cut into the back of your legs as you reach for the floor. You dare not put weight on them.
I was so appalled by this turn of events that the matter went beyond mere pondering. I wrote a letter of complaint to SA Health.
Unexpected Germs
I’ve since learned that I have been colonised, yes, that’s the right word, by pneumonitis. Although it is a non-contagious inflammation of the lungs, I must now advise hospital staff of this, if and when I am admitted again, as it can exacerbate other afflictions. I also had to undergo tests for a bug that colonises the digestive tract because SA’s Local Area Health Network (SAHLHN) advised that I may have been exposed during my last stay at FMC. Fortunately, that little bugger did not gain traction in my old body.
Ironically, hospitals were historically built to remove the populace from infectious community environments to promote healing and reduce the spread of disease. It would appear that this cycle is reversing.
Another Surprise
In addition to sneaking in their mandatory cognitive test for the elderly and the insane, no matter how cogent and intelligent you might be, one is always weighed on admittance to a ward at FMC.
It turned out that I had lost 6 kilos since my previous stay a few months earlier, without realising it. (I gave up on home scales 40 years ago.) Instead of congratulations, however, I was advised that I would be put on a special diet, because such rapid weight loss indicated that I was malnourished.
The nurse and I had been talking about white bread for breakfast until her remark about my weight loss had me roaring with incredulous laughter.
‘At least you’ll get scrambled eggs for breakfast,’ she said, laughing with me.
Can you imagine scrambled eggs on plain white sliced bread?
Happy Writing
Wattletales
If you'd like to be added to the Wattletales post mailing list, make a request in the comments below, your email address is always hidden from public view. Lindy
We oldies must first give thanks for being here. For those like me, with bodies burdened by the limitations doctors call multiple comorbidities, the best luck in the world is having a strong mind. By that, I mean I am still curious about the world; I get upset by wickedness and excited when good things happen. I follow politics with a keen eye and am lucky to have a good education, a computer and the will to write. I thank my new MacBook Air for inspiring me this month to showcase what I’ve been up to, both reading and writing-wise.
Many computers have centred my world and orchestrated my daily life for a long time. In fact, I spend more time on one in retirement than I did at work years ago, but I’ve been lusting for a new laptop as they served me well for many years as a roving anthropological consultant. Although I’d been saving for one, my son, who lives far away in Queensland, surprised me with his generous gift of a new MacBook Air. As I’d hoped, it makes the act of writing more intimate, more like handwriting. I like that.
This Time Last Year till Now
Although it seems like yesterday, this time last year, I was busy with the launch of my novel, They Who Nicked the Sun, a delightful occasion with Devonshire Tea. As the poem Braindead, written in March 2024, tells you, I was utterly lost for a while after that, with no book to work on.
Slowly, an idea seeped into my mind for a story about ageing. Initially, I came up with the title By Way of Dying, a story about a woman who could not rest in death until she understood life. It took time to formulate and find its shape, but now I think I have it!
Meanwhile, the title, By Way of Dying, morphed into Call Me Marigold. It is a novella, and yes, the narrator is posthumous; and yes, it is about me, despite the pseudonym, because, clearly, I am still alive, while Marigold is stuck in limbo and can only look back on life.
Call Me Marigold also morphed from memoir into autofiction, a genre that combines elements of true stories with fictional tools. We all draw on our lives when writing fiction, but memoir and autofiction should be distinguished from each other. To quote from the linked article —
The label of memoir comes with a promise: that the events described happened to you. Autofiction, on the other hand, promises an exploration of self. It is not just a fictionalized account of the author’s life, but a rendering of true experience in the midst of fictionalization, in which embellishments or deviations from reality may provide a commentary on the author’s journey. (my emphasis. American spelling in the article.)
What I am Reading
The universe is supporting Marigold. A dear friend gave me a book this week that I had borrowed from the library but had badly wanted to own: Nobel Prize-winning Orhan Pamuk’s wonderfully illustrated Memories of Distant Mountains. I’ve only read two of his earlier novels, My Name is Red and The Museum of Innocence, but I am a fan. In this 2025 coffee-table delight, he draws on a lifetime of personal notes and paintings to offer insight into his writing and himself. It is neither memoir nor novel, yet through his reflections, he shares his inner world.
Another genre-bending, multi-award-winning writer I admire is Australian author Michelle de Kretser, whose recent work, Theory & Practice, according to author Nicole Abadee in the Australian Book Review (Nov.2024), is not autofiction but a novel that introduces ‘a splinter’ of memoir. My de Kretser favourites are The Hamilton Case and Questions of Travel.
Last on my recent reading list, although I read it first, is The Chinese Postman by Brian Castro, a former Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. I love this book because it also challenges taken-for-granted literary assumptions and reflects on ageing. I could not do justice to Castro’s story in a few words, so here is the publisher’s blurb (I have the eBook).
Abraham Quinn is in his mid-seventies, a migrant thrice divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In The Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative, inaction of age. God, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions, and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship, and time. He ranges widely with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine. As the correspondence opens him to others, the elaboration of his memories tempers his melancholy with a playful enjoyment in the richness of language, and a renewed appreciation of the small events in nature. This understanding of the experience of old age is something new and important in our literature. As Quinn comments, ‘In Australia, the old made way for the young. It guaranteed a juvenile legacy.’ (my emphasis)
I came across a sensitive and insightful article, “The Chinese Postman,” by Professor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia. In case you missed it in ‘The Conversation’ last year, Hughes-d’Aeth identifies a key ambiguity in the narrative, emanating from Castro’s transposition of his biographical data — ‘born in Hong Kong of mixed European and Chinese heritage’ — onto the protagonist, Abe Quinn. Is it Castro’s story, which Hughes-d’Aeth sees as a lament, or is it fictional to the core?
I am reading these books by authors who brilliantly cross genre boundaries to understand how top writers do it. Truth be told, I find the various ways they upend convention both fascinating and freeing. Their works gave me the confidence to experiment in my Call Me Marigold narrative, which takes a scrapbook approach to various aspects of my life, serving as an exploration of the self — a defining feature of autofiction.
A New Novel
During the lull that followed the publication of They Who Nicked the Sun, when I was floundering and trying to figure out how best to tell my story as autofiction, I began to yearn for a new novel to work on. My earlier novel ideas came to me long before I started writing them. I then met a fellow writer who works on several projects, alternating between them. I’ve usually stuck to one at a time, but as soon as I wished for a novel idea to come to me, an idea burst upon me in rough synoptic form, and I am now alternating between Marigold and a fictional story.
In the Welcome pages of Wattletales, I write about what fascinates me as a person and writer—
What does it mean to fall through the cracks, to become broke, mad, ill, destitute, deserted, disillusioned or denounced? What happens to our sense of self, and our identity when life wreaks havoc with our intentions, plans and happiness? How porous is our mind? Is there really a line between sanity and insanity, and how do we know when we tip over the edge?
So, it should not come as a surprise to say that I’m fascinated by gaslighting, which is what my new novel is about. The provisional title, On Banksia Street, tells the story of an everyday couple, Wendy and Peter Wilson, who live with their children in Warradale, where I raised my children (ordinary suburban life!). There is no real Banksia Street in Warradale, so the setting is fictional, as is the story. The Banksia reference is, of course, about our lovely native Banksia flowers and the scary Big Bad Banksia Men of Mae Gibb’s marvellous imagination that terrified me as a child.
New Poems
In between writing projects, including this blog, I have recently written a few new poems. Here is a small selection as part of this show-and-tell post for April 2025, my favourite month of the year for its promise of cooler weather.
Before you go, why not check out our wonderful Guest Posts, featuring some great stories and poems from local Adelaide poets? For a complete list, click here.
Happy Writing
Wattletales
If you'd like to be added to the Wattletales post mailing list, make a request in the comments below, your email address is always hidden from public view. Lindy
I have never been what you might call a shopper. I’m not a committed browser. I’ve always searched for particular things when I needed or wanted them, and I’m pretty much the same online, although I browse more. In my ageing lazy-bones, I do not fancy, nor could I cope with going from store to store seeking anything. The very thought of a trip to the vastness of Bunnings or Ikea fills me with dread.
From the cover of soft Toys for Grown-Ups, a poetry collection. See the eponymous poem later.
As for trying on clothes, well, I have long forgone that unpleasant, sweaty task in stores with tiny dressing rooms. I don’t wish to surrender my ageing body to the surrounding mirror gaze ever again. Still, as you might imagine, there are downsides to trying clothes on and assessing quality online.
My Shopping Story
There are continuities in my shopping habits, one of which is to change furniture more frequently than most. There is a reason for this, which has more to do with my circumstances than the shopping medium, as the trifecta of office chairs below indicates. I bought the chartreuse office chair in the gallery below from a posh office furniture store at Mile End. It nearly got old, but I stopped loving it before it had a chance to do so. I ordered the other two online.
Chartreuse White Ruby and Black
The white chair from Temple & Webster was very smart, but it wasn’t comfortable. I am now sitting on the Office Works black and red chair on the right, but — dare I say it — it is also uncomfortable. All this may remind you of a little girl, beds and three bears. But there are differences.
First, my old body is hard to please nowadays. Second, buying such items online might be easy, yet it is a trap for innocent players. The nightmare is facing up to your errors. In choosing the bits and parts of this chair online, as I had to do, I failed to consider its size and weight properly. While attractive enough, it is big and too heavy to roll smoothly on my carpet! All we can do, as the adage has it, is live and learn. But there’s even more to it than that.
Choosing Furniture is a Serious Business
My penchant for changing furniture may have you thinking I’m a dilettante, but I’ve come to see that it reflects my current state of being. Let me unpack that, starting with a poem.
When I left Darwin, where I lived and entertained for many years, I had to relinquish a second-hand treasure: my beloved Jarrah dining table, which had so much history inscribed upon it.
Rapid changes in lounge furniture years later, after I moved to Aldinga Beach, marked my initial ambivalence about settling back into South Australia while I still yearned for Darwin! At first, I had an apple-green three-piece lounge setting, which I soon replaced with two expensive American oversized camel-coloured armchairs. After a few months of discomfort, I sent them for auction, and the pair brought an embarrassing fraction of what I’d paid for them.
I replaced the California chairs with a lovely brown and tan leather and microfibre L-shaped lounge that settled in very well, and that was when I seriously got into writing — honoured by the chartreuse office chair.
And, Again
Furniture similarly symbolised my rocky start to retirement unit life in Glenelg. Clearly, the brown L-shaped lounge had to go, as it wouldn’t fit into any unit in Manson Towers. So, too, did my pre-bought fashion item, a King Living press-button but totally unsuitable sofa bed. After heaving those giant back cushions on and off morning and night (when they dangerously filled the floor space), I soon switched to a single bed—which I still have nine years later!
King Living Furniture press-button sofa-bed.
Pre-ordering, even in-store, is a risk best avoided. It is hard to imagine how small some of these units are until you are in them.
As Serious Nonsense describes, since losing the sofa bed, I’ve gone through three armchairs. Next month, a white leather electric recliner, more suitable for old ladies, will replace the Scandivanian Ruby Leather.
Shopping Satisfies
Shopping, in various forms, pertains to different stages of life, but it also gratifies inchoate yearnings.
We all tend to buy for emotional reasons at times. Shortly after my mother died, I bought an expensive Coogee cashmere cardigan that I wore for many years. Without Mum, I was desolate and in need of comfort. I had no intention of buying anything when I stumbled into the Coogee shop on a side street off Adelaide’s Rundle Mall, but I treasured that cardi until it was threadbare, and I had to discard it.
I was so sad when Coogee went out of business. Today’s airport rip-offs simply do not match up in quality.
As December 1994 marked 30 years since Mum died, I hope you’ll forgive me for including here a little tribute to her adventurous spirit in old age.
Shopping Online is still Shopping
Whether in a showroom or online, shopping is easy. Credit cards work instantly when you pay for something. Online, however, refunds — if you can get one — take between five and ten working days. Hmm.
Most regular shops and stores have well-designed websites, and online business websites are equally tantalising. However, some are utterly disreputable, wherein lies the hidden nightmare of online shopping. A good website can lure money from your bank as fast as any shop might empty your purse, but the risks differ.
Online, we sometimes get it right, and, at others, we can lose as drastically as any gambler.
Getting it Right
I adore Persian rugs and have owned a few small ones with the Bokhara design. Browsing carpet websites on dull days lifts my heart and excites my passions. It takes me back to the carpet stores I visited in India, piled high with rugs of all qualities, shapes and sizes, including exquisite silk pieces of craftsmanship.
It is an immense privilege to enter those stores (better than any website by far), where staff and management treat you like someone significant, offering you a seat, a cool drink or a cuppa while peons roll out rug after rug for you to view. It’s not easy to extricate yourself without buying. I am sad that I didn’t buy a silk rug that I loved when I had the chance. Here, they cost many thousands of dollars more.
Yet a couple of years ago, I found a little treasure: a small Zardozi embroidered rug, a glittering delight that I found online one day when aimlessly browsing Persian and Indian rug sites. (Yes, I do browse online, where it is so much easier to fill tedious hours among tantalising possibilities.)The gilt frame I chose to set it off cost as much as the rug.
Zardozi Embroidered Feature Rug
You can’t see the gems shining in this photo, but they do. The poem below speaks of the Zardozi tradition.
Getting it Wrong
As simple as online shopping can be, it is easy to get it wrong. While I moon over rugs to fly away on or bags (my other favourite thing) to gather my personality in one convenient package — you know, phone, license, credit cards, poems to read and, lately, pills and potions rather than mirror and lipstick — there are pitfalls.
For example, take clothing. I once ordered what looked like a long, loose Jacob’s striped cardigan that looked gorgeous online, only to receive a shrunken piece of rubbish in tacky, unrecognisable fabric, its sleeves so small they could only fit a broomstick. Returns and refunds were impossible.
To avoid such a nightmare, choose your sites carefully. Check them out, and ask Google if there are risks or complaints about them. The same garment is still frequently advertised on Instagram by several different ‘companies’. All appear legitimate and offer lovely things, but pictures tell lies.
I now buy my clothes from Taking Shape. I order online, but I know my sizes and recognise the fabrics. Even if I get something wrong, returns are guaranteed, and you can even return by post.
Online Banking
I do all my banking online, and when a company is reputable, the bank is there to help you recover your money. However, you can’t trust official-looking renewal notices arriving via Australia Post.
Last year, I received a notice to renew my three-year business name registration for $198. I paid the company online, only to discover soon afterwards that the actual cost of business name registration through ASIC was $98. I fought with them but failed to get a refund. I only discovered my expensive error after a second company sent a similar renewal notice closer to the due date, causing me to check things properly.
Read the fine print; these things have twisted policy wording to entrap you.
Grocery Shopping
I even mess up my Coles orders at times. Only a couple of weeks ago, I accidentally bought a giant pack of Uncle Toby’s oats, enough for me for two years. I gave it away. Then, I purchased a four-litre liquid laundry detergent that I could not even lift to decant and had to ask my cleaner to do it for me. This week, I bought Arnott’s Shortbread Cream biscuits instead of Scotch Fingers! Yes, both are shortbread, so I’m not totally losing it, but these silly errors put a frightener on a girl in her 80s.
Deliveries
The worst nightmare for me with online shopping is the endless procession of deliveries. Living as I do in a ‘gated’ high-rise building, I need to stay in to let drivers into the building, which is a pain. Fortunately, Australia Post, Coles and other entities now give notice of a two-hour window for when things will arrive, but it’s tricky if you want to go out on that day or have plans for the time they allocate. I guess it is the price I pay to avoid shops.
I still go to Woollies, Coles, Baker’s Delight, and Caruso’s Greengrocer for top-ups or to the chemist for a visit, so my soul’s need to shop in person remains satisfied.
I’ve yet to find an online way to fill the car with petrol.
Happy Writing
Wattletales
If you'd like to be added to the Wattletales post mailing list, make a request in the comments below, where your email address is hidden. Lindy
We live in a world that encourages us to grow, follow our dreams, develop our creativity or achieve goals, pushing on to change, renew or better ourselves, but is there a time to stop? Moneymakers. powerbrokers and insane world leaders governed by iron egos don’t change as they wreak havoc upon us all. But as mere mortals, should we persist in seeking acclaim or find acceptance by turning inwards as we face the inevitability of death?
Does moving into a retirement home develop or limit our potential? What does it say about our society that the elderly gather, locked away, albeit in comfortable circumstances? We may be isolated from family, but we can reach out and do community work and creative stuff despite being subtly pointed towards the grave the moment we retire. TV ads don’t tell the full story.
We move into retirement living voluntarily in the expectation that smaller dwellings might save us from a nursing home. People in my building certainly live longer. One man will be 100 in February 2025. But who are we, really, when we leave our houses and pets behind? The overarching aura of independent retirement living often feels more like being institutionalised than independent, as I’ve written before.
What Does it Mean to be Old?
I first thought I was old at 30, fearing I’d lose my figure with my imminent third baby (born on Cyclone Tracy’s cusp of fury). When I turned 50, that same baby boy gave his mother a single red rose when I hosted a party for women friends; a powerful women’s party. After a tipple or three, some guests broke down at the thought that they had, indeed, achieved power and insight through tertiary education yet wondered who they’d become and mourned the innocence they’d left behind. Others bemoaned their failure to follow suit with excuses for not having achieved anything because of children and bad choices in men. It was an interesting evening.
Rejuvenated at 75, I published my first poetry chapbook with two novels and several other poetry collections to follow. Living the dream. I turned 80 on the Marina Boardwalk in Glenelg over lunch with my daughter, but this year, my 81st has seen me turn inwards. I find myself wondering whether that is a natural progression or a portend of decline.
I have come to believe we tend to settle into ourselves more as we age, but is that by adaptation, cultural isolation as we drop out of social things or something else altogether? When I see elderly friends who are younger than me but with healthy pockets and living partners tripping around the world or visiting interstate all the time, going places and doing things as though nothing has changed, I can’t help but wonder if the changes I see in myself are peculiar. But, changed I am.
Change Brings Grief
When I look back over the posts I’ve written over the years on Wattletales, I realise that I have often summarised those parts of my life that I’ve most valued, using them as a trigger to make a point about something that was niggling me at the time.
Recently, however, I’ve worried because, since the publication of my second novel, They Who Nicked the Sun and its recent launch at Manson Towers, where I live, I have not written a word until today. An article on grief gave me a clue as to what’s going on.
When I told my doctor recently that I often cried for no apparent reason first thing in the morning, she looked at me blankly. The topic got lost in the more important stuff that she thought a test or a different pill might assuage. It must be hard being a GP for the elderly in a discipline predicated on the heroics of scientific medicine more suited to acute conditions. You simply cannot fix ageing; most conditions thereof resist the force of nature.
But the grief article showed me that I am grieving for parts of myself now defunct, and living in the confined space of my independent unit seemed the most suitable thing to grizzle about. Instead of taking pride in myself for being content with my lot and commending myself as I usually do for not fearing death, I sought to blame.
Like those women at my powerful women’s party years ago who blamed husbands and children for their failure to achieve, I have been blaming retirement living for pretty well all the changes my mind and body have experienced of late. My tears dried up the moment I understood that fact and once again accepted who and what I am at this moment. Then, my words —these words — began to flow.
The Truth Is
I grieve the diminishment of my mental acuity, my way with words (when speaking), and the decline of my physical strength and energy. I have been independent for so many years and now have to go slow, take it easy and ask (or pay ) others to help. Yikes! We need to listen when they say ageing is not for cissies. Frailty and weakness are simply not valued in our world, and I’m not too shy to report that old age sucks at times. But, then, so can life.
Nevertheless, old age has rewards. I am content not to be on the constant ‘doing and going’ merry-go-round. Even if I had the money and energy, I know I’ve had my turn, and I’m still here. My mental meanderings always find answers, and there’s nobody around to tell me I’m wrong. In writing, I found my home, and that is true freedom.
Happy Writing
Wattletales
If you'd like to be added to the Wattletales post list, make a request in the comments below, where your email is hidden. Lindy
Early this year, a friend of mine travelling in Japan was kind enough to take a photograph of The Marunouchi Hotel in Tokyo where I lived as a child for several years post WWII. The contrast between that hotel now and how it was in 1947 during the British Occupation moved me profoundly. It raised the issue of one’s hidden side. No matter who we meet or where we go, our life travels with us, but so much is silenced in the company of others without similar experiences. I want to explore that today by asking, for example, why these before and after photographs affected me so.
Photo of modern Marunouchi Hotel by Kuma Raj Subedi
An Australian student of mine in the 1980s adopted a Vietnamese child. For his dissertation, he explored the complex issue of cultural identity for those thrust between cultures by adoption. I’m sure many dissertations have since appeared on this topic, and crossing cultures is a complex lived reality for those who emigrate or are displaced by war and famine. It also raises important questions about our sense of who we are.
Whatever our culture of origin may be, I suggest that we are one thing to ourselves and quite another to everyone else, and it is not only across cultures that we find parts of ourselves hidden. It also happens through time unless, perhaps, we had the good fortune to live with the same people around us from youth to old age. Even then, as my father would say, ‘The whole world is weird, except you and me, and even you are a trifle odd’.
Japan
SBS recently screened a short but delightful series set in Tokyo called Three Star Bar. It got me thinking about the book I planned to write, Beyond Ginza, based on my childhood in Japan. I’ve mentioned this before in Dislocation, which explores how I moved a lot as a child and throughout my life.
I may never write Beyond Ginza, but I attach a few character sketches of the child protagonist, Alice May Caulfield (not quite Lindy Warrell, but close) in the attachment below. The two photos below form the setting of the first sketch.
Not many seven-year-old girls would have the experiences I drew on for those sketches, and yet, here I am, at 81, with the sensations and feelings as alive today in my memory as ever. I learned so much in Japan, not about the politico-military goings on, but about the people who were kind to me and those in power who were not kind to the Japanese. I still feel connected to Japan, but it is to a place that no longer exists, as my photos of the Marunouchi attest. I know nothing of contemporary Japan.
I lived in a hotel co-opted by the British Commonwealth, managed and operated by my Australian father to serve non-Japanese military officers and gentlewomen, hardly the ‘real’ Japan of the 1940s. However, my mother’s forays to the countryside, villages and markets introduced me to perfumed Geisha beneath cherry blossom trees. With Mum in Shinto and Buddhist temples, I smelt incense for the first time.
I remember thinking the Geisha was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, everything so perfect: her dress, makeup, perfume and graceful movements, like a cloud dancing. I felt blessed.
My point is that I was an outsider in Japan when it was at its lowest point, and I lived in relative luxury amid great suffering. My ‘inside world’ entailed arrogance and people who mocked Japanese products like cigarette lighters, then seen to be inferior to the British Ronson and, later, the famous US Zippo (which was found in the 1980s to have used asbestos).
These vignettes from my life don’t resonate with anyone I know. These moments, these memories and others are somatic memories hidden from others. My ability to share these things died with my parents.
Sri Lanka
I have written in some detail about my life in Sri Lanka as a postgraduate researcher, but no matter how deeply embedded in that world I felt, I remained an outsider. Nevertheless, the outward experience is internalised as both vital and valuable. If I speak about that inner journey, people often become uncomfortable. It’s not easy to appreciate other people’s experiences.
Living white in a black country means you are the one who stands out. Occasionally, in the streets, someone would call out ‘suda’, meaning ‘whitey’, and laugh. People laughed if I jumped around at a bus stop when a snake — a common occurrence — slithered between my feet. These were small things. More often, people were kind — curious, yes — but welcoming and, over time, one acquires a certain confidence of movement that tells locals you are not a tourist per se.
The people I worked with protected me from uncomfortable moments. At a week of an all-night street ritual called the Perahara, when performers from other areas of Sri Lanka tried importuning me for cigarettes or cash, my friends shooed them away (in a bugger-off tone). They were told to leave ‘ape Madam’, ‘our Madam’, alone. You see, with few exceptions, I wasn’t Lindy Warrell. I was Dr Lindy Warrell, the researcher of their rituals. They used the honorific even though I was far from having the PhD at that point.
Caparisoned Elephants in the Kandy Asala Perahara 2019. The Temple is called the Dalada Maligawa or, in English, The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic of the Buddha. Photo by Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Please understand me. I admired and grew close to the people I regularly worked with and their families. They were genuinely generous and caring towards me. I still have friends from that time on Facebook and email. My point is that it was my status that people responded to, either as a tourist or Madam.
It makes sense, doesn’t it, for an outsider? Parts of who we believe ourselves to be, are rendered invisible when interpreted in other people’s frameworks. Sri Lanka was not interested in my Australian identity and by the time I got home, nor was Australia interested in how Sri Lanka had re-formed me. I felt different, but the internal changes in me largely remained hidden.
Outback Australia
I lived in Oodnadatta for a decade and the Territory for more years than I can remember. I have also worked across outback Australia with a variety of First Nations groups. These experiences changed me, as all experience does.
Photograph by Steve Parish
I fell in love with the Flinders Ranges in my late teens and early twenties, from the windows of the Ghan on the way from Oodnadatta to Adelaide. In the early morning, the magnificent purple ranges rose beneath blue skies to take my breath away and steal my heart. My experience of red dirt and gibber plains was as the publicans’ daughter in Oodnadatta, riding horses to show off to boys or partying in the claypans at night. As we lay back, slightly tiddled beside a dying campfire with a lazy guitar playing in the background, I’d gaze at the stars and believed the world to be filled with magic and destinies unknown.
I’ve never camped in the Flinders Ranges, but I’ve camped across this land, working in the Northern Territory, Queensland, NSW and South Australia. The stars brought back my youth, the red dirt still filled my heart and Queensland’s stony river plains called to me of my father at the precise time my mother was dying in Adelaide far away. I have posted this poem before, but this is its true moment.
Secrets
We all carry secrets, parts of ourselves that we dare not share for shame or simply because such secrets are treasures we prefer to hold dear without others knowing. Secrets are conscious parts of our hidden halves. But all experience becomes entwined, creating our sense of who we are.
I would go as far as to say that who we are is a tangle of stories, some of which we recognise as such, others that we don’t understand or would deny. Our stories tell us who we think we are, but some stories remain suppressed because they find no audience in our present. They are hidden.
As I started to write this, I remembered the works of VS Naipaul. My favourites were A House for Mr Biswas, about alienation and Half a Life, which matches today’s topic. I now see why those books resonated so well with me.
This link will take you to several reviews for Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories. I’ve excerpted two comments from the linked article as they pertain to this post.
On Being Invisible
We talk about being invisible in old age, and we are. I remember many moons ago, in my forties, dancing with a seventy-year-old man to please a mutual friend at a dinner party. The guy was an adventurer, his skin deeply tanned, and he wasn’t bad looking as far as wrinkles and rough skin allow. He’d travelled and more, yet gauging him as I did only as a potential love interest, all I could see was his age. How shallow was I? However, the incident lets me rest comfortably now when I am invisible myself. It is, I believe, in the order of things to an extent as we age. His exciting life remained hidden from me. It did not count then, as mine often does not now.
This invisible business is in the structure of our world. I was in hospital for a few days recently, which invites reflection. Lots of lying around doing nothing frees the mind to float wherever it may. To medical practitioners and nurses, I was an old lady with a touch of pneumonia who had to be medicated, stabilised and discharged most efficiently according to the medical lexicon, and that is how they treated me.
Lindy Warrell, mother of three and thrice a wife, barmaid and anthropologist who has travelled, written poetry, novels, blog posts, essays, a PhD dissertation, and academic publications, is not in their lexicon. She tried to raise her head a couple of times only to find that views from a different framework were unpopular among authoritative professionals in expert positions. They declare but do not discuss.
In the movie, ‘Shall We Dance’ (2004), Susan Sarandon spoke a line that has stayed with me for years; ‘We all need a witness to our lives’, and we do. Is talking about my hidden moments in this public forum betraying what I write? Possibly but, more importantly it comes from getting older and trying to understand one’s life in hindsight.
An Afterthought
Let me finish with an invitation: Take a moment to examine your life to see if there are contexts where experiences, especially times that have profoundly changed you, are silenced in the absence of an appreciative witness.
Happy Writing
Wattletales
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As life forces me inwards in old age, I find I have less and less to talk about. We complain, of course, that society renders us invisible as we age, and so it does, but are we complicit in that process when we make our world smaller?
I first noticed this turning-in business in my mother years ago. Even though her phone (a dial-up) might ring only once a week — if that — she used to take it off the hook for morning and afternoon tea and at mealtimes. She would say, “As sure as eggs if the phone rings, it will do so when I’m busy”.
Even if you are lucky enough to find yourself in old age (I don’t say ‘reach’, for few of us aspire to that state), the decline is likely to be there in one form or another, like it or not and retreating inward is probably a natural part of that process, as is resisting onslaughts that prevent peace.
Why is My Life Limited?
Mum also took the phone off when she showered because the sensuality of hot water flowing over her ageing body brought comfort by dissolving the rest of the world, as it does for me. Still, when you are alone in a limited social and physical space, your sensitivity to others and outside forces increases. I hope articulating my irritations here will alleviate boredom, if only for a moment.
Electronic Communications
The Imperious Buzzer
Living as I do in a multi-storey retirement village, I am often on tenterhooks when a delivery is due, waiting for the imperious buzzer that tells me I must let someone into the building. When I’m expecting a delivery, I’m scared to go to the loo in case I miss it.
From buzzers to ring tones, my new iPhone rings as infrequently as Mum’s old green handset used to. Yet it beeps with endless messages around deliveries, first of all advising me something is due. A second message telling me a parcel has been delivered comes after delivery, as though I couldn’t guess that from buzzing someone into my building.
Mum’s Life as PalimpsestWe think we have time to do it all.
I signed up for an Australia Post Parcel Locker to avoid the tension of waiting beside the buzzer. Like other deliverers, Australia Post texts to say something is ready for collection, then emails a thank you once I collect, as though I’ve done it a service. The first two texts are followed, often by email and text, by a request for a rating. These nuisance texts — misnamed communications — allow the source of goods to give itself points for good customer relations.
As I order most things online, this triple electronic bombardment surrounding deliveries is bloody invasive. Does it forestall loneliness? No! It is not communication but an interruption to one’s peace on par with noisy neighbours.
Noisy Neighbours
I am often subjected to the continuous sound of someone’s radio or television in the background when I am trying to write. Not quite loud enough to hear what is being said or played, it is a muffled but insane-making thrum of media cadences that penetrates not ears but the mind. For someone like me who loves silence, it touches all the wrong buttons. It may seem odd if I tell you that identifiable sounds, like traffic and trams outside, don’t bother me. I can even withstand the weekend invasion of motorbikes, but I’m allergic to evidence of neighbours.
One person on my level is 97. She leaves her door open day and night unless she goes out, which is rare. Every morning, two people from Meals on Wheels shout cheery greetings at her door at 11:30 as though they are Father Christmas. She is deaf, and her TV regularly drowns mine out through my tightly locked door, as does the indecipherable chatter and laughter that erupt from her unit on weekends and the late afternoon gossip fest she seems to host with others on our level every afternoon — in the corridor outside my door.
When I hear Meals on Wheels’ daily happy-clappy voices, the word patronising leaps to mind. It’s fine to feel good for doing good, serving the elderly as a volunteer, but I prefer the genuine friendliness of my harried commercial delivery drivers from Coles, Lite & Easy and Uber Eats, for they treat you like a person in control of your faculties. That said, if the day comes that I need or want Meals on Wheels, I may allow myself to enjoy that jollity.
Then There’s the Laundry
I used to silently mock my mother in Glenelg’s Kapara Nursing Home when she begged me to wash her tiny nighties (she was four and a half stone when she died) because she didn’t want her clothes washed “with the dementia patients’ stuff”.
My problem is similarly laundry-related. I loathe the cloying odours of someone else’s stale fabric softener and soap scale lining the rim of the shared washing machine’s barrel. I wonder if the offending residents believe there is a magical staff member who will appear in a cloud of stardust to clean up after them. I should write a poem about that.
Does anybody remember these old clotheslines and machines or days when the poles fell over, and wet washing hit the lawn?
Not everybody on my floor is inconsiderate, but one new resident adds insult to injury. Despite a prominent laundry roster, she seems to think her washing can stay in the dryer, in the machine or on the line forever. I could go on about my laundry blues, but I don’t want to bore myself so much that I won’t finish this post.
My Solutions
How do I turn inward? In the laundry, I limit myself by washing around 5 or 6 in the morning when nobody else is around. It’s not hard as I am always awake at that time. I also refuse to store anything in each floor’s small residents’ storeroom. (I don’t want my stuff leaning against theirs!) I lock myself in to luxuriate in solitude and comfort to write or look out at the City of Glenelg from my balcony.
In recent months, I’ve had two new friends across the way, two cranes. One is blue and the other yellow. I watch in wonder as the operators work high in the sky with such precision. What a job. They must climb hundreds of zig-zagging fire escape-style steps in a small vertical cage to get into their pod.
Seeing novel things up close like that is a delight. My balcony view excites my imagination. Sadly, the yellow crane disappeared last week as its building nears completion, but the blue one will be there to entertain me for months to come.
External Factors
While hiding or retreating (looking out from within) offers a solution at home, external factors also play a role in diminishing one’s quality of life.
Health Checks for the Elderly is a doozy. Like Meals on Wheels, the intention of geriatric (75 and up) checkups is good, but they create a profile for posterity denuded of history and personality. All identity is effaced as formal detail constructs a failing body for management.
In my sixties, I scorned the idea of these tests, but by 75, after my first, I learned that they could help provide access to support services and funding. Recently, I asked for an 80-year-old assessment. The completed 10-page form appears in the photo. After seeking consent, the assessor probes your life against these headings —
Background information (domicile) — Medical History — Relevant Family History — Medications — Immunisation Status — Allergies — Alcohol — Smoking History — Social History (a misnomer)— Other Health Care Providers — Mobility/Activity — Home Safety (can you bathe yourself)— Nutrition — Frailty Screen — Oral Health — Vision — Hearing — Personal Wellbeing and Safety Assessment — Cognition — Continence — Skin and Feet — Assessor Comments and Assessment. (my inserts in brackets)
Wow! What a profile it makes. I have now been screened as pre-frail.
Not so long ago, I was also required to undertake a supplementary assessment with My Aged Care. They lost the original done seven years ago to access subsidised ancillary services such as podiatry, physiotherapy, a nutritionist and exercise classes. The recent assessment took 1.5 hours. The assessor had no medical or nursing training, yet the last thing the questionnaire asked of me was to demonstrate how I get in and out of bed. That took me by surprise.
Forgive me for breaching taboo by writing about these things. I cannot imagine having a scintillating conversation over wine about the potential impact all this measuring of ageing bodies can have. Faced with such facts, it is instinctive to fall silent and turn further inward. These are not popular topics for lunchtime chit-chat chat, even though they start to fill one’s life in old age.
Time
Ageing disorganises our success calendar as book launches, theatre, concerts, poetry gigs, parties, and coffee or lunch on the sidewalk with friends give way to a merry-go-round of medical appointments. The slow loss of social identity that ensues tends to limit acceptable topics of conversation. Relatedly, people increasingly speak to or address us by age grade rather than in terms of our character or personality, which is painfully patronising.
I say we turn inward as we age, and I certainly have. It may not happen to everyone or at the same time for all. The sad thing is that it would be so easy to succumb to the official view that we are nothing more than our failing bodies. It is a form of silencing when people cease to find our history, achievements and experience interesting because of our age.
For Sanity’s Sake
In the meantime, I have poetry and creative friends in my life with the TramsEnd Poets critique group. I run a poetry workshop at the local community centre, and the first draft of my new novel is nearing completion. Then, there is Facebook, and I have Wattletales. While my writing keeps me happy, I am once again pretending I can paint.
Paints and the beginning of something on my kitchen bench.
I prefer sketching, but the Glenelg Community Centre offers a watercolour group at a good time, so painting it is. I thought it was a sign of regression to use block paints as we did in childhood, albeit in a plastic ‘tin’ as pictured above, but I’m told they are more acceptable now.
Playing with desert colours — unfinished and naive but lots of fun
When I moved into my retirement unit, I gave away hundreds of dollars worth of art supplies I’d accumulated over the years. So, I nearly died of shock to discover that a small tube of Winsor & Newton watercolour paint now costs around $23. Still, paint is paint, and I’m no artist, so what the heck? You’ve gotta live while you can.
To read more about Retirement Living, click here. For further insight into old age, click here.
I am a doggy person who has never written a doggy poem. Today’s post, therefore, rests on photos and snippets about the dogs in my life. Humans have always lived with animals. I remember learning as an undergraduate that African herders love their cattle. Although the size of a herd signifies wealth, men name and know every beast intimately by its markings. Throughout history, people have cohabited with or domesticated goats, chickens, camels, birds of prey, and more. As city dwellers, we now live in the era of fur babies and experience dogs (and cats) as part of the family.
Meet Clarrie
The cost of keeping a pet in food and health has risen proportionately to the degree we anthropomorphise them. We may no longer safely chuck the dog a lamb chop or chicken bone from our plates. They have dietary requirements. We can’t get away with flea collars from Coles. Instead, we pay substantial monthly amounts to protect our pets from fleas, worms, ticks, and other parasites. Like our children, pets get regular inoculation against disease. They sleep with us. We buy specialised cleaning equipment to rid our homes of fur, and good councils provide free plastic bags so we can scoop their poop. Stepping in dog poo is an almost forgotten experience.
First Loves
Even the friendliest dogs bite. I grew up without pets. We lived in hotels and moved a lot. When I was ten, I fell in love with my best friend’s Cocker Spaniel. One day, I tried to hug him with all my yearning, and he snapped and bit my face. I had 13 stitches, and although the scar got lost in wrinkles over time, my right cheek sagged slightly after that. The emotional damage was a fear of dogs that persisted for many years, with one or two exceptions.
We had a greyhound in Albury. Well, Dad, a gambling man, had a greyhound, and for the life of me today, I cannot recall his name, although I remember vividly how soft his silver-grey fur was to the touch. He was a gentle creature with pleading eyes, and I hated muzzling him for walks. I felt for him when he was chasing the electronic hare and wished he had a better life. He used to look after Petty-Pie, our hen who was so clucky she happily laid on old golf balls. What sad creatures they were. After laying an egg one day, Petty Pie finally had a single chicken, and my infant brother, bless his soul, loved it to death. We were a needy pair, all right.
Mum’s Dog
Jump years to Oodnadatta, where Mum and Dad had the Transcontinental Hotel for over a decade. A station owner gave Mum a puppy, a little ball of white, a Bull Terrier-Blue Heeler cross she named after the giver. I was charged with his care. He slept in my room and went everywhere with me until I fled the nest at 19 to live in Darwin. He was a happy, gentle soul and a damn fine watchdog.
Oodnadatta, dog and jeep.
I should mention that I also had a pet budgerigar in Oodnadatta. He had a cage, but we let him loose when we were in the kitchen, playing cards or games like Monopoly, Scrabble and Dominoes. He loved to sit on the lip of a glass of beer and often got drunk — awful animal husbandry on our part.
You may notice that my early life had a paucity of pets. They were not then considered essential to well-being as they are today. Nor were they officially considered sentient or to have feelings like us. It is one of life’s cruelties that my generation was raised long before the lessons of interconnection and the Gaia principle came to the fore, believing humans were a superior species, not part of the animal kingdom.
Doomed Creatures
My first dog as a married woman was a Silky Terrier. We lived in Glenelg then and bought it for my mother as a gift. She didn’t want it. Warnings about buying pets for others were yet to be on the radar. That dear little puppy ran under the front wheel of the garbage truck in front of our house as my husband, children, and I watched on helplessly. It was devastating.
I must add that our piglet died in the same house. My husband brought that tiny creature home one day after rescuing him from a truck to the abattoir. What a dear little poppity he was, but so small, so frail and as always, I had no idea how to look after it properly.
That house was doomed. My marriage broke up there as well, and I left it soon after with my kids.
Absences
The Kid’s Dog and Cat.
In our new home, sans father and husband, I felt my children should have a dog and a cat. We got Melly first, a little poodle-bitser from the RSPCA in Lonsdale. His mother was dumped when she was about to burst with puppies. We met her when she was pregnant and selected our puppy as a newborn. We visited him every week until it was time to take him home. That was a special time. The cat came later, and the first thing it did as a kitten was destroy our Christmas tree. We called her Christmas.
Vanessa with Christmas, Mark in the middle and Grant with Melly
It broke my children’s hearts that we had to let Melly and Christmas go to a new family — our neighbour — when I needed to take them to Sri Lanka, where I undertook 18 months of fieldwork in a tropical world of drums, myth and ritual. Life was different for us all after that.
Half a Life Later
When I was young, I thought of myself as a cat person. I loved their independence. In my late 50s, while living in Darwin, I began to yearn for the companionship of a dog, something to lean on and love me. Once back in Adelaide, I hiked back and forth between two pet shops at Marion Shopping Centre, one at the Myers end, the other near Woolworths, trying to decide whether to go with a Scottie or a little Maltese-Poodle. I chose the latter because of his non-allergenic woolly coat.
Just as I had no idea how to look after a newborn baby — my three children are lucky indeed to have survived — I had no idea how to look after the tiny little puppy that he was. Soon enough, he was riddled with fleas. What an awful admission, but I took the vet’s advice and began to look after him properly after that initial scare.
Poor Lolo came into my life in Adelaide. I invented the name as a twist on Lulu, which my father called me when I was young, but the ‘l’ and ‘o’ were in memory of my brother whose star sign was Leo. One day, a derelict fellow on Wrigley Park asked what I called my dog, and when I told him, he got angry. How dare I call him ‘low’? Later, I discovered that Lolo is a Dutch girl’s name.
Lolo in the Territory
After an out-of-work stint in Adelaide, my lovely routine with Lolo got pushed out of shape. A job came up in Katherine in the Northern Territory. The move meant I had to put him in kennels for several weeks while he was still very young. He was such a darling, and I missed him, but he was excited to see me when I finally got him back. In Katherine, we lived in a furnished domestic garage during the week and spent weekends in my flat in Fannie Bay. Lolo and I became roadies, driving between the two towns twice or sometimes three times a week when I had to visit the head office.
Our next stop was the beginning of retirement — on a Disability Pension — in Melbourne, where the clever little fellow learned to go down two flights of stairs to do his business and return without me going with him. Lolo died in Aldinga Beach.
Along Came Clarrie
With Lolo gone, I missed having a heartbeat in the house, so I set out to find a puppy. I’d decided on an Australian Terrier. I bought from a breeder this time and visited regularly until the pup was ready to leave his mother. All my mistakes with pets over the years made me a far better dog owner, and Clarrie was spoiled, but he was an independent little soul. Still, I thought of him as my pussy-dog because he did love to snuggle. I called him Clarrie after CJ Dennis or Clarence James (Michael Stanislaus) Dennis, whose poems my father recited to me when I was little.
Clarrie at Aldinga Beach.
Clarrie died last year, but he had a long life, albeit only the first half with me. After I moved into a retirement unit where pets are banned, he spent the second half with my dear friends Rowan and Tina, who loved him as their own. I knew I could visit him any time, but that was painful at first. Still, we met up from time to time till the end, and Clarrie always seemed to remember me.
In Retirement
Nowadays, I get lots of love watching passing dogs on fine days when I can sit in Moseley Square and pat those who come close. I also have my daughter’s dog, Obi, who is always pleased to see me when I visit, or he comes to me. Her other fur baby, Paisley, is no longer with us, but she knew Clarrie well. They were puppies together, and I loved her to bits. Obi still misses his companion.
Paisley as a puppyObi as he is now.
Being old licences me to take pleasure from a distance in the parade of dogs (and other creatures) that find their way to my Instagram. Ugly dogs, clever dogs, old dogs and puppies and before and after videos of animals brought back from near death. It seems trivial, but these photos and their sharing bring joy. Some are a bit over the top, puffed-up poodles and the like, but hey, it is reassuring to know the whole world is as enamoured of dogs, koalas, pandas, sloths and other animals as I am.
A Final Word
Love others unconditionally, as your fur babies love you. And, be kind. We can never give enough love and kindness.
I am of the view that poetry refracts who we are. If stories constitute us as humans, then poetry’s words and lines distil and distort them, yet find truth through variations of content, tone, imagery, and style. In this way, I am often my father’s ventriloquist, my mother’s mood or even an earlier self as I write. Such complexity bears no resemblance to frozen moments captured in photos like the one below. Our poetic voice works with a rich recollection of sensory details, people, places, and times.
The Essential Me
My favourite poem is ‘My Skeleton and Me’, where I appear alone, albeit with my skeleton. I post it here in contrast with other poems below. This one is just me. The poem earned a High Commendation certificate for the Nova prize thanks to Murray Alfredson, one of the Friendly Street Anthology Editors, in 2016.
This poem wrote itself in my mind during a lazy afternoon on my couch, where I experienced my skeleton as integral to my being and as my lifelong compatriot. It came to me during a period when I meditated regularly, so it was a close-to-the-bone moment of clarity, which made me giggle with delight. It still does.
Change and Continuity
My parents seemed unchanged throughout my childhood and much of my adult life. Their gradual ageing became noticeable only after an absence. The setting for the following poem is a downstairs, inner-city flat in Melbourne where my parents lived after they married in 1938. Dad was a kitchen hand at the Hotel Windsor in Spring Street before becoming restaurant manager, and Mum was an apprentice hairdresser.
I was not yet born, but their oft-repeated words about those days allow me to portray something about the treatment of women in their time. My father’s voice and Mum’s reply still reverberate in me.
The poem records two actual moments but is not ‘real’. For example, nobody in my parents’ circle had a car until 30 years later. What is true is how Dad persuaded Mum she was the best at anything he didn’t want to do himself and that Mum joined the men’s poker school. Such remembered fragments make the whole.
As Confidence Grew
Only a few years later, the Australian Army promoted my father to Major in the Catering Corps and sent him to Japan with his family to refurbish and manage the Marunouchi Hotel in Tokyo, commandeered by British Occupation Forces.
As a girl from inner-city Melbourne, Mum arrived in a world of top military brass wearing a fox fur stole to socialise with generals, high-ranking political figures, and their arrogant aides and staff. She stands in the second shot, full of confidence in mink. In her mid-to-late forties, the third photo is from Oodnadatta, which Mum always said was the best time of her life.
Fox FurMink (with American brass)Shorts (with her sister)
Here is my elderly take on Japan with a child’s eye triggered by a penchant for Arnott’s Gingernut biscuits and clotted cream; my little-girl romance with the post-war era in Japan is clear. (Should I live long enough, I hope to write a third novel about that period. My title is Beyond Ginza, and my protagonist is a seven-year-old girl with synesthesia. It is OK to wish.)
Found Things Go Deep
People always think the following poem is literally about my mother and me, and they respond to it with sympathy, kind voices, and even tears, but, strictly speaking, it is not real. Of course, relationships between mothers and daughters and, most likely, fathers and sons talk to universals, and I hope the poem does that. However, this poem arose from a random line I read somewhere about hands touching across the abyss.
To Finish
For ‘Nana in Sepia’, I used an old photo and shards of memory about my maternal grandmother and a child’s perspective to evoke an image of an earlier time.
I have talked mostly about my mother and maternal grandmother, the women who made me who I am. Indeed, like Mum’s mother, I raised three small children alone, albeit in different circumstances. My father’s voice only appears through words he gave me as I grew up, so I’d like to end with a poem about his parents for a bit of balance. It is another heritage-style poem about an old photograph, more ekphrastic than anything else. And, so, I give my father the final say.
For Reflection
We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.
My doctor recently sent me to the Emergency Department (ED) at Flinders Medical Centre as my oxygen saturations were extremely low. I have a lung condition, and I was struggling. It is not unreasonable to be jaundiced in one’s view of a hospital when ill. Pain, debility and loss of dignity in that environment all contribute to bias, even, I suggest, for those in private rooms in private hospitals. Forgive me then if I sound a little dark as I expose the borderline farce of my recent night in a public hospital ward.
My Sick Bed
The Journey Begins
I called a taxi on the day to take me to the ED to avoid being ramped in an ambulance. The waiting room was relatively quiet, and because I wasn’t too good, I was quickly ushered into a cubicle where a thoughtful specialist respiratory registrar admitted me. I then waited. And waited for a bed.
The nursing staff breezed in and out, regularly checking my oxygen status and heart rate and taking my temperature. Fortunately, even after being there for many hours, I wasn’t hungry as nobody offered sustenance, not even a cuppa, and I had to ask for water.
Once the hospital found a bed, an orderly wheeled me to a four-bed ward, each bay delineated by dark grey, folded all-around privacy curtains. The first hint that things might not be OK came when the orderly brought the ED blanket to the ward with me. Was it always like that, or was it a new cost-cutting measure? Worse was to come, and this is the tale.
The Setting
The Ward
According to the headboard in my bay, I didn’t exist. Indeed, it looked as though nobody had been in that bay for a considerable time. It was a grungy, scrappy affair.
Client Information Board in Bay
The next photo is of the ward taken from my bed. It may seem familiar or unsurprising, but closer inspection shows a large, suspicious puddle on the floor. The staff said the roof leaked. Indeed, rain during the night was heavy enough to wet my walking frame and the foot of my bed, let alone create a slip hazard for the infirm.
Please note the mysterious yellow stain on the ward’s windows.
Ward Clutter and Yellow Windows
The following two photos combine with the first to show a forgotten ward with dirty, peeling skirting beside my bed, plywood on the wall, and piles of pigeon poo on the ledge outside my window. At least I had a window!
Disintegrating Skirting Pigeon Poo View (peep between the blinds)
The Bathroom & Toilet
The solid doors on the ward’s bathroom were so heavy I could barely slide them open and shut, especially while holding a walking frame with one hand. The door’s tiny, out-of-date snib was nigh on impossible to manoeuvre with arthritic fingers like mine. Standard accoutrements like a pad disposal unit, rubbish bin and spare toilet rolls were absent.
A further challenge confronted me about how to move the clumsy, over-the-toilet commode left in situ by the previous occupant. Even when the cleaners finished in the morning, they replaced it over the toilet as though that was where it belonged.
There appeared to be no daily bed-making routine or effective cleaning in the ward while I was there. One cleaner ran a dry mop over the floor, skirting around rather than under chairs and beds. Another came before lunch to remove the accumulation of unsanitary hospital gowns on the table under the yellow-stained window.
The Cast
Stage Lights Up
Let me introduce this little drama’s key players. Opposite me was an extremely unwell elderly man who slept heavily unless roused for treatment or food (which he refused). The aged woman beside him was desperately ill, too, constantly calling to go home. Although hooked up to oxygen and pumped full of pills and potions, I was comparatively fine.
Then there was the star, a mystery man in the bay to my right. Let me call him Jim, who kept his bay curtains closed tight day and night. He was the invisible man.
The Invisible Star
The Drama
Scene 1
My first encounter with Jim was indirect. I needed the toilet. I’d completely forgotten Jim’s earlier announcement to the ward that he was going to take a shower. Indeed, he made a loud, sound spectacle of the fact, but I hadn’t expected him to be in the bathroom for two hours. A kindly nurse led me to a different ward on the other side of the building, quite a long walk, even with my walking frame, when I could hardly breathe. She explained he was ‘like that’.
In earlier times, senior nursing staff or even an orderly under a nurse’s direction might have marched the Jims of the world to and from the shower within an allotted time. But, according to a reliable source, the client (sic) nowadays can do no wrong.
Scene 2
Being separated from Jim by barely two metres and a thin curtain, I was intimately privy to his non-stop cacophony of self-pitying self-talk, shouts to nurses, wailing about pain, crying or moaning and screaming to unknown demons in his head, alternating with tuneless singing and ugly bursts of laughter. It was unpleasant, loud, and persistent.
At one stage during the night, I woke in shock at the sight of someone taking my walking frame from beside my bed. The poor bugger was trying to walk backwards with it. Not understanding who it was in the dark, I called out that it was my frame and pressed the nurse’s button. Jim then shouted at the nurse who came, saying they should take no notice of me because I was a mean bitch.
I detest nastiness, so I ‘made friends’ with Jim through the curtain, being conciliatory for not having realised that the walking frame ‘thief’ was the elderly man opposite’. Jim played along, being affable and understanding.
Later, a nurse explained that the older man opposite me, whose frame sat beside his bed, was severely disoriented and confused. All rather sad.
Scene 3
I got my first and only fleeting glimpse of Jim in the early hours, short and wiry, like an ageing jockey, lifting the chair beside my bed to take into his bay. He already had two, and with bleary eyes, I said the chair belonged in my bay. He raved, saying I thought I owned the place, then rang the nurse’s bell incessantly. In high victim mode, he bad-mouthed me to her in a loud whisper. Boy, did he give it a go?
Later in the morning, he attempted to seduce the young nurse as she discussed his imminent discharge. He wanted her telephone number and had some peculiar logic for why she should give it to him. A cunning manipulator, Jim knew the poor girl was out of her depth yet became obsequious when a senior nurse came to put an end to that bit of nonsense.
Shortly after that incident, I overheard the discharging doctor listing Jim’s ailments, and I felt sorry for him. We may all have multiple comorbidities as we age, but Jim was not that old, and he had a lot going on and should have been in a ward better equipped to deal with his idiosyncrasies. This was a failure of an underfunded and understaffed health facility that was probably severely over-stretched well before COVID.
Denouement
I confess to finding the ward’s disrepair and overall uncleanliness distasteful. The nighttime walking frame and chair antics entertained me. But, remember, I was a sick old lady too, and these things rattle you a bit.
As for Jim’s incessant noise, I am lucky to sleep through most sounds, probably from growing up in pubs. More so, perhaps because years of meditation taught me how to switch off the irritation factor. Noise, the Buddha might say, is merely sound — be grateful you can hear the world and the myriad ways it makes itself known.
The nurse who walked with me to the loo twice because of Jim’s periodical co-opting of the bathroom told me that nursing staff must also use ward toilets because black mould had taken over in the only staff toilet within cooee. She also confided that Jim had been in her ward for six weeks.
I asked why Jim got away with so much, and she replied it was easier to give in to clients like him. We laughed. The situation would be ludicrous if it were not so serious, as his needs took up so much of the limited nursing capacity.
Secrets in Plain Sight
In the abstract, we all know the health system is in crisis. But the secret in this tale is that neglect is now visible in crumbling facilities and probably was so before COVID. It takes time to get as bad as it is, and it reminded me of the sorry state of the old Adelaide Airport before we got the new one.
That is sad for me. I typed the mechanical and electrical tender specifications for the FMC prepared by Mark Tostevin & Associates of North Adelaide in the early 1960s, when I was in my early twenties. Back then, the future looked so bright.
While I have no complaints about the medical care on this one night over the 24-hour period I’ve described, I must also mention the 10-hour wait I had the last time I headed to the ED with four crush fractures in my spine in 2020. Ignoring my pain level, the ED doctor, who consulted me in a corridor at 2 am, sent me home at 5 am. I arrived at 5 pm the previous evening.
The x-rays didn’t show what an MRI subsequently proved, that T6, T7, T8, and T9 had broken down. One was a 60% fracture, and the other three were slightly less severely crushed. That was tough.
The Moral of the Story
Getting old is inevitable, and bodily decline is an increasing part of that journey. Three of the players in my little drama, including me but excluding my friend ‘Jim’, were elderly, not to put a finer word on it, to appease grammar editors. When sick, we are often not in complete control of our faculties. I am lucky enough not to have lost it altogether yet, but time is closing in, so I wrote a futuristic poem about being in a nursing home. Let me end this story with that.
As for the Future
Flinders Medical Centre Precinct
Of course, SA Health has recently delivered two magnificent extensions to FMC, the Centre for Innovation in Cancer, which shines proudly over old buildings. Along Flinders Drive is a new, state-of-the-art Aged Care Rehabilitation and Palliative Care block joined by walkways from the old hospital and a discrete Older Persons Mental Health Unit.
The new Federal Labor Government has committed substantial funding for upgrading, and the SA Labor Government is also determined to create world-class facilities. May these welcome fixes come soon to rectify the maintenance decline I allude to here, which coincided with SA’s previous LNP government’s privatisation of hospital maintenance. No surprise there.
PS I noticed that the 2023 forward plan for Southern Health, which embraces FMC, speaks of patients in bureaucratic terms, not as clients as nurses are now required to do, but as consumers — a fascinating philosophical change.
A couple of years ago, after discovering a website that hosted guests, I expanded Wattletales, initially my author page, to hear more about other people’s creative journeys. At first, I asked close friends to contribute to my blog as guests. When that proved successful, I found the confidence to invite others whose stories I fancied reading, and Wattletales is now a growing showcase of Adelaide’s artists, writers and poets, and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
An Invitation
If, on reading this post, you are interested in including your creative story in the Wattletales creative showcase, please message me on Facebook or email me at lindy@wattletales.com.au.
2022 Guest Roundup
Four of my five guests this year — Steve Bell, Warren Porter, Susan Thrun Willett and Roger Rees — are from Sand Writers, a Goolwa-based writing group I enjoyed immensely as a member for a few years. Academic, artist and author Kathryn Pentecost, who hosts the South Coast Writers and Friends Facebook group, recommended Jade Wyatt.
February
Steve Bell
Our first guest this year was renowned mountaineer, now writer and public speaker Steve Bell. In his remarkable piece, Reaching for the Highest Fruit, Steve describes the perils and rewards of climbing to the highest points on our planet, the dangers and deprivations of which ‘open the mind to regions inaccessible in everyday life.’ Always a reader and good at English at school, Steve’s new adventure is writing, which he describes as a challenge similar to climbing.
March
Warren Porter
In his first article on Wattletales in 2021, Heading Out Along the Line, Warren told a story about finding a job in his youth as a fettler on the Trans-Australia railway line that crosses the Nullarbor. While the fettler story is a slice of almost-forgotten social history, Warren’s 2022 contribution, Blood on Their Hands, offers profound insight into the violence he experienced in state-run institutions as a child. It is a harrowing but necessary read, but Warren writes to help things change.
June
Susan Thrun Willett
In her poignant tale, The Free Pom, Susan Thrun Willett, evokes the poverty into which she was born in the UK before her parents migrated to Australia as Ten Pound Poms. Susan was only five, so she travelled for free, but her story shows she also has a free spirit. After putting herself through university, Susan became a teacher and deputy principal, teaching literature and language. She later taught English as a Second Language in the UK, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and China. Now, she is exploring her creative writing seriously.
August (a)
Jane Wyatt (aka Elizabeth Snow)
The Scent of Hope by Jane Wyatt (aka Elizabeth Snow) is a delicate story that starts with the ‘unashamedly ostentatious nature of lilies’. Their scent, she tells us, fills her with hope. Jane finds inspiration in flowers and words, which she describes as magic, and in her children and family. Jane’s prose is as poetic as her poetry, and any attempt to capture its beauty here is bound to fail but leaves us with the message that ‘hope is where flowers bloom’.
August (b)
Roger Rees
My last guest for 2022 was Flinders University Emeritus Professor and multi-talented sailor, musician and writer Roger Rees, who talks of science and creativity in People and Their Lives are Fascinating. Roger is a riveting writer of what I think of as literary portraits. In prose and poetry, he praises others for their achievements, personal courage, and creative contributions to life. Roger’s energy and original thinking are inspirational; as a pioneer in his field, he has shown how creativity contributes to healing.
A Memorable Year
Despite losing creative time doing ‘business’, this year has been one of the most satisfying of my life, almost up there with being blessed with three children. At Wattletales Publishing, I saw my first novel, The Publican’s Daughter, and my first book-length poetry collection, A Curious Mix in Free Verse, in print. Both books are in the South Australia public libraries catalogue.
Launch 2Rade and MeLaunch 1
Jude Aquilina launched both books with Nigel Ford as MC at the Elatte Café and Restaurant in Glenelg. I thank Rade and the Elatte staff for looking after us so well on busy Saturday afternoons on both occasions.
Meeting Steve Parish
This year, I also had the distinct honour of being invited by acclaimed nature photographer Steve Parish to write about how the Australian landscape enters my writing. You can read what I wrote on Steve’s brilliant web page, Inspiring Nature Connection, which holds an encyclopaedic visual collection of Australian landscapes, flora and fauna.
Cawnpore Lookout South West Queensland — A Steve Parish Photograph
Steve used this image of the Cawnpore Lookout in Queensland as the feature photo for my story. I fell so in love with it I followed up with a post entitled, Photos & Words — Is Their Creative Contrivance Numinous? Using Steve’s generously shared photographs, I asked what it is about images, be they art and photos or words in narrative and poetry, that is moving. Why did this photo bring me to tears?
Image as Symbol
The short answer lay on the map Steve sent me, pinpointing where Cawnpore Lookout is. It is at the heart of all the places in Queensland where I’ve been lucky enough to work with First Nations people, from the Cape of Carpentaria in the far north to Mount Isa, Cloncurry and Julia Creek and further south, past Boulia and the Cawnpore Lookout, to Eromanga, Quilpie, Charleville and other places to the east.
But the image symbolises more for me. While working out from Windorah, from Dajarra in the north to Boulia and Bedourie in the south, I returned to my hotel room after being incommunicado out bush for three days to a message saying that my mother had died. The people I was working with knew that she was old and unwell, and I’ll never forget the solace one man offered when he said with great kindness, ‘That old girl couldn’t wait, hey?’
Special Posts
This year’s posts include two reflective pieces, one honouring a dear friend and another to commemorate the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.
The second revisited Adelaide’s first International PEN‘s Day of the Imprisoned Writer on the lawns of the State Library in the city. Several internationally renowned poets living in Adelaide, Juan Garrido Salgado, Yahia Al Samawi and Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen, allowed me to reproduce their poems for this retrospective.
In March, I commemorated my dear friend Margaret Luginbhul who died in Paris a few months after leaving Australia to live with her children. COVID prevented her from migrating two years earlier, then took her life three months after she moved.
Queen Elizabeth’s death moved me to write about the pomp and splendour of the royal funeral and the ritual surrounding her death with a focus on the opposing voices of grief and derision they aroused. As I show, her life loomed large as a background to my generation. These things are complex indeed.
A Recurring Wattletales Theme
While I wouldn’t usually cover all of my posts in a Wattletales annual roundup, I wanted to include those that covered issues in old age this year, as my most-read post on Independent Living did in 2021. As we all know, ageism is rife in today’s world, and it needs to be exposed, so I’ve included links to two new pieces that refer explicitly to the issue and two that explore what it means to have a long life.
Forgive me if I finish with a poem I’ve posted before about having Christmas Dinner with my dear old dad in Adelaide’s War Veteran’s Home at Myrtlebank close to the end of his life.
What is it about an image, a narrative or poem, tactile only to the eye and mind, that has the power to move us so? Why do we let artistic contrivances fool us into thinking they represent reality? What about them gives us a spiritual lift when we know they frame, pan, or use sharp focus in soft light for visual effect? How do the contrived words of a writer arouse emotion? I can’t answer these questions, but I want to interrogate a few things to see what’s beneath this lovely flush of waterlilies.
Wetlands, Top End, NT
Our response to photos amuses me. ‘That’s the real me’, we say, eliding dimension from a small flat, shiny photograph. How is any representation real? Are words the things they represent? Indeed, isn’t reality a mystery? Is there not magic in this beautiful photo of a waterlily wetland with the sun rising (I think), as though imbued by divine power? Whether divine or not, there is magic in those glorious lilies.
I often wonder at the way the tourism industry has parcelled the planet we live on and the landscape we love into products. We always see the flower, not the watery murk beneath. TV advertising works hard to elicit yearning in potential customers with artificial constructs. For example, the promotional imagery for outback Australia fails to prepare us for the scorching heat, prickly grasses, sticky flies or the fine red dust in our baggage. Sound, smell, taste and touch don’t get a look-in. As anthropologist Michael Taussig tells us —
…the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically correct, socially created and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. We act and have to act as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real. (Mimesis and Alterity 1992)
Engaging an Audience
Nourlangie Rock Kakadu NP NT World Heritage areaNourlangie Rock Kakadu NP NT World Heritage area
Which of these two gorgeous photos by Steve Parish is the real Burrungkuy or Nourlangie Rock? Both are beautiful, and both are of that rock and its surroundings from different vantage points, but Burrungkuy is a sacred place not because it is natural but for the culture it hosts. The numinous quality we experience when visiting such a place comes from both nature and culture, and First Nation sacred sites remove any boundary between the two.
On Representation
Any representation is framed, parcelled, limited, and directed to an idea or a feeling in the producer; it is a contrivance, as anyone who has painted, taken photos, or written creatively knows. I still say I am a ‘realist’ writer, but have you ever read anything real? I once saw two versions of a story in a literary journal, one ‘real’ and the other contrived, a fascinating read. The purportedly real version was overly long on the page, confusing and boring to the point of making little sense. The representation or contrivance, by contrast, evoked a believable reality that was a pleasure to read.
I was a court reporter (stenographer) many years ago, an experience that taught me that people do not speak in ‘lines’ in court as they might in film or a novel where dialogue has multiple purposes such as conveying character, evoking emotion, heightening tension, building suspense, moving the action along or heralding something. On the page, dialogue is not about two people communicating. It is the author communicating with a reader. Writing and photography are similar; both are directed at an unknown gaze.
Nevertheless, when I taught life writing, I got people to write from their guts in exercises that provoked them to pour their reality onto the page. Splat. Like that. It is then easy to get to the kernel of things. The gold is always there, to be polished with the contrivances of the literary craft to give it style and embellish to turn the story around to face a reader, to show, not tell. This work must be done because to say, ‘It broke my heart’ talks about the narrator but has little to no effect on a reader seeking their own experience.
Heart and Mind
Stories and images can linger in one’s mind or heart and assume a flag’s numinous, almost spiritual qualities. A flag is really (sic) a piece of colourful fabric, but people have laid down their lives for one they love while burning one is an expression of rage. Why? Because, flags, like photos and stories or poems, are symbols that condense inchoate meanings in a way that arouses emotion.
To return to nature. When I lived in Oodnadatta in my youth, we often travelled up and down to Adelaide on The Ghan. There was no romance in buying a ticket, for they used to ask if we were male or female, black or white, so as not to permit the mingling of what then was supposed to be kept separate in cabins. True!
But, waking up to the mauve and purple glory of the Flinders Ranges against a red earth foreground in the morning was one of those views that, 60 odd years later, is still as alive in my heart now as it was then as you can see in this little poem, written in 2017.
Outback SA
Take a moment. What do you see in this arial mage of the Lake Eyre and Simpson Desert area?
Lake Eyre/Simpson Desert aerials, Painted Desert west of Lake Eyre SA
Over the years, in different parts of the country, I have been lucky enough to fly over our vast landscape, witnessing a multitude of configurations not unlike this delightful photo of South Australia. The Queensland channel country and the Diamantina that flows towards Lake Eyre are most spectacular when it rains. I’ve always thought that such country, riven with channels, tree lines and multicoloured earth, is what inspired the original Coogee woollens I wrote about in this eponymous poem in my second chapbook.
Being There — Kakadu
Wetlands, Yellow Waters Lagoon, Kakadu NP NT World Heritage
Believe it or not, when I was in my early twenties, we used to water ski on Yellow Waters in Kakadu National Park during the Top End Dry Season. Crocodile hunters abounded back then and advised that it was safe. Crocodiles mate and produce their young between October and April — at the same time when waterlilies grow. If it does nothing else, this is a testament to the fact that surfaces cannot always be trusted.
In the early 1960s, the notion of national parks was seminal — if that — even among the educated classes. We knew nothing of the sacred nature of Kakadu.
If you think about it, it has taken over 200 years for this nation to publicly begin to recognise the numinous beauty of our land as understood by First Nations people. Steve Parish’s ground-breaking nature photography in particular has been instrumental in developing our appreciation of that and I was recently honoured when he invited me to write a piece for his website.
Then There’s Litchfield
Florence Falls Litchfield NP NT
On the other side of the track (the Stuart Highway) and a bit closer to Darwin is the magnificent Litchfield National Park, where I regularly swam for many years when I lived in the Territory. I took my eldest son Grant to the Buley Rockhole nearby when he once visited me from the UK, and he revelled in its beauty and took this photo of a black water goanna.
Taken by Grant Warrell
My favourite place to swim in Litchfield until I left the Territory was Wangi Falls which was closer to home than Florence Falls, and I mention this because Steve Parish’s photo elicited memories. Memories of sitting for hours beneath the fall, allowing the pounding rush of water to cleanse, destress, and make me feel whole again when I felt terrible. I loved that place, that fall and pool, which I understand to have traditional feminine associations.
A photograph often has the power to trigger memories, and take us back to love, and that is a decidedly spiritual experience.
My brother Phillip in 2000 at Wangi Falls when he wasn’t well enough to swim.
Numinosity, I would argue, lies in the interaction between the contrivance or creation and the observer or reader, even with tourism ads. Bugger the flies the heart says; I want to go there.
The tropical Top End of the Northern Territory is one of my great loves. The desert in the far north of South Australia is another. They are my history. Both exist as characters in my life, vibrant, living, breathing and giving. I mourn that I cannot be there now even where there might be green frogs in the toilets.
My brother died in 2004, and Grant in 2014. It was long ago that they visited me in the Top End where I always felt most like my true self. I have since renewed, of course, but I often wonder why I’m the one who has had the privilege of living a longer life.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank Steve Parish for sharing his photographs with me for this post.
A little girl, aged 23 months, recently smiled at me from beneath her bonnet as she toddled by with her parents on Glenelg Jetty in a fashionable pink gingham dress. I smiled back, saying, ‘hello baby,’ and the family stopped to chat. The little girl was carrying a baby-sized boy doll in preparation for her new brother, due to arrive soon. That moment was as satisfying for me as it was going to nightclubs, achieving professional goals or, more recently, standing up in front of an audience to get its take on my poetry.
My daughter, Vanessa, at the same age in a party dress made by her Oma.
To see such a happy family brought memories of my childbearing years. By the time I was 31, I had two toddlers, thirteen months apart, and a miscarriage soon after. A year later, I had a third child who liked to poke his head high under my ribs for the last few months of the pregnancy. My mother scolded me for breeding like a rabbit. I wondered as I waddled past a dress shop in discomfort one day if I’d ever get back into the sleek little number on display. I did until time took its chance with me.
A Long Life Has Benefits
The diversity of baby bumps around today fascinates me; some protrude naked from bikinis, others are swathed in Lycra, and a few, perhaps less fashionable, reside beneath loose summer dresses. I wonder whether appearing sexy while pregnant is easy.
Being pregnant was not all about baby bumps or glamour in my generation. We wore maternity dresses that hung stiff as an A-frame from neck to knee to hide our changing bodies with what felt like shame. On reflection, I give thanks that we were at least physically comfortable.
I reflect a lot now. My mind bobs from present to past and back in a way that revises views. There’s much to play with after a long life, and it brings joy to view things in perspective to find they don’t matter too much now. Shame diminishes with age, too, when one’s vital force has pretty much left the building, like Elvis.
Body image has always been an issue for women, but I suspect it is a transforming one. When I was 13, I wore a blue check halter-neck dress once before throwing it away. So ashamed was I of my budding breasts that 50 odd years later, I wrote this poem.
The Inevitability of Ageing
Most people my age quit work long ago, and what younger people may not know is that being old is itself a job; it takes work to maintain body and mind. It does not matter how good one’s diet is, how well we exercise or follow health rules. The aging body declines.
In the medical world of the ageing and elderly, not everything is as it seems.
So, I decided to introduce the article below entitled ‘Body Ritual Among the Nacirema’, which was on the syllabus as a cruel joke to tease first-year anthropology students in my day. ‘Nacirema’ is, of course, ‘America’ spelt backwards, but the detail is precisely how an anthropologist might render the lives and activities of what was once called primitive society.
Taking an indirect queue from the article, I describe below some taken-for-granted medical processes to explore their power to disempower the elderly.
Age Stripped Bare…
Patients must strip then don a blue gown that opens at the back for day surgery. Our heads sport a blue mob cap, with feet covered in matching disposable slippers, like those used at crime scenes.
Thus clad, patients are invited into a nurse’s room for a consult about ailments and medications. This is followed by cognitive testing. My nurse told me she had to ask some ‘silly questions’ without advising me that she was actually measuring my mental acuity. Notably, cognitive testing is a treat reserved for concussion patients and, without discrimination or consent, the elderly.
When the nurse is finished with us, we return to the waiting area to be summoned next by an anaesthetist. My young male doctor explained what he would do to me in breathless haste designed to defray questions. So keen was he to be in command, he literally arced up when I asked what sedative he proposed to use.
At the Noarlunga Hospital’s day surgery hub (which offers a splendid service), patients (young and old) in blue are each issued a warm white cotton blanket to keep them from shivering while they wait in anonymity to be called for their procedure. I counted about 20 blue and white figures sitting in rows on straight back chairs with me, facing a blank wall with blank eyes as though attending the theatre. I experienced a strong urge to take a photo, but my iPhone was under lock and key. The identity strip is complete.
The only trace one leaves as an oldie, it seems, is the unknown result of an involuntary cognitive test.
…then Trapped
Whatever our age, as humans, our backs are vulnerable. We keep them to the wall when confronted, and most people don’t like having an open door behind them, but on the operating table, our backs and bums are exposed under bright lights, open to the gaze of several strangers.
Whether for day or life-saving surgery, the moments before you lose consciousness are curious. As you lie on the operating table, unable to move, a nurse’s hand creeps beneath your gown to affix sticky heart monitor leads to your chest while the anaesthetist inserts a cannula in your arm from behind. Your masked surgeon hovers above, asking if you consent to the procedure. Another nurse tells you to recite why you are where you are, what is about to take place and to repeat your full name and date of birth for the umpteenth time while checking your armband; probably a good idea.
Recovery team members are always friendly. It is nice to come back into the world to the sound of your name, a call that proves you’ve survived. That first cuppa is sweet and hospital sandwiches remain one of my favourite old-fashioned foods.
Medical Pin-ball
At home, we oldies begin to feel like the ball in a pinball machine as our declining bodies usurp our time. Our calendars fill with appointments; for the GP, specialist clinics, podiatrists, dentists, ophthalmologists, physiotherapists and more. Hospital admissions become more frequent, and the possibility of ending up in a nursing home lurks.
Death is on the horizon as we spin from one speciality to the next, none of which communicates with the other. The risk is high for losing our sense of identity in proportion to the increasing height and weight of our medical files. The myriad determinants of what we are in various doctors’ notes in these bulging documents begin to define us.
Measuring the Mind
In youth and middle years, a therapist might be helpful as we confront disturbing things or need to find direction. However, at my age, it becomes tedious to repeat well-rehearsed stories that have long lost heat, as it were. Time, as they say, does heal even though memories linger and are frequently triggered, as I found with my little girl in pink gingham.
We spend more time reflecting on the past, but that does not mean that we have abdicated our former intelligent self. Indeed, it would be nice at times if others would treat us as people. Being old suffers more than invisibility; being unseen and unheard is dehumanising.
Yes, we make typos in emails and social media, but they are arguably more signs of deformed, arthritic fingers than a loss of faculties. Failing eyesight and forgetting the specs don’t help. And, senior moments are trivial in the scheme of things when one’s memory has reached capacity.
Comprehensively ignored is the wisdom that accumulates in a long life. Few are interested. We live in ‘going forward’ mode where specialist and expert knowledge abounds; reified. We search Google before we ask an older person anything of note. Valuing the experience of elders does not pertain.
Care
The assumption that we are unsafe to ourselves and others increases in medical circles as we age. At 70, 75 and 80+, we are again measured like we were as babies. Our General Practice nurse visits us at home to make sure we are coping with things like shopping, diet, personal hygiene, etc. These jollified interviews with kind practitioners make for a nice visit and may produce official supports you didn’t know about. But, it all adds up as a way of seeing old people as diminished physically and mentally.
Any recognition of intellect is predicated on age. Our achievements are deemed significant because we are old (aren’t you clever for your age), not because we are good at what we do. For the elderly, such thinking infantilises; denies old people their full status as adults.
Most people think I’m nuts when I say these things, but how could we describe it when someone asks with a false smile and the royal plural, ‘how are we today?’ Well, lady, I’m fine, I want to say, and I don’t care a whit about you. But we behave. We accept and say nothing. It’s easier than fighting with people in power who cannot understand or won’t listen (as my aunt used to say when her husband abused her). Any sign of anger risks a mental health assessment.
Of course, dementia can take us away.
Current studies are ongoing into the extent of ageism in health care in Australia. The health sector is the second most likely place for the elderly to experience ageism.
Over Time
When my children were little, I remember thinking about how they first moved out from my body and into the room, then moving from cradle to school in graduated steps towards the wider world. Being old — if we are lucky enough to make it to this unlikely state of grace — is the reverse.
I watched my mother approach her dying by closing in on herself. Where previously she walked longish distances every day, she ordered Meals on Wheels. No more shopping, no need to go out.
She started taking the phone off the hook to make a cuppa, eat and shower. ‘Sure enough,’ she’d say of a phone that never rang, ‘someone will ring the minute I can’t get to it.’ Bit by tiny bit, she moved closer to her inner world where there was no more worry. She didn’t entertain, had less need for people and towards the end, became peaceful in herself.
My gradual social withdrawal over the past couple of years could be due to COVID or be the result of my having to take greater care of my pennies. The pension doesn’t stretch to as many coffees and lunches with friends as I would like. But there’s also the fact that my calendar is filled with increasing numbers of medical appointments. Given how long it takes to get to the top of a specialist’s list, you can’t mess with those.
A Last Word
We who live long lives are lucky to experience the distress and wonder of human life. We are also fortunate to have the health care system that exists in Australia. Abroad, I once witnessed a patient die alone on a corridor floor, mewling in vain for succour. Here, infants, children, young people and adults of all ages with chronic and life-threatening conditions have a robust medical system that works well most of the time; often for free. It has its flaws, but doesn’t everything?
Writing Tip
Never fear grovelling in the underbelly of things when you write. It is so important to reveal what goes on beneath the surface, to open wounds and have a good look. We would never know what the sunnyside is, without the rain.
Warren Porter became an involuntary Ward of the State when he was four years old and was institutionalised and nicknamed Rocky in what he calls hellholes until he turned 18. For a lad who had no formal schooling, Warren is now a long-term member of Sand Writers in Goolwa, South Austalia and has written two books. The first, Brutalised is pictured below, the second is A Tormented Life. Blood on Their Hands is a holding title for this, the synopsis of Warren’s third book.
You can find more on Warren’s adult life and discover his joy as an adult, even in hardship as he tells his story of working on the Trans Australia Line as a railway fettler in his piece called Heading Out Along the Line. Warren has led a remarkable life, and his stories highlight and expose essential aspects of Australia’s history.
The Synopsis — Blood on Their Hands
Upwards, and possibly more than 500,000 boys and girls during the last century spent most of their childhood growing in institutions run by governments and the churches; hellholes as they were known. Four-hundred and fifty thousand of these children were Australian, 40,000 Indigenous and 10,000 were those sent out to Australia from England under the child migration scheme. How these children were dealt with by bureaucracies and laws meant to protect them is encapsulated in what’s written below.
For good or bad, many, many children were sent forth into the unknown, with a brief history of each one being presented to the superintendent in charge of the institution they were to remain in. There had been many reasons for why this happened to children: being born to single mothers, domestic violence, divorce, separation and family poverty. And for those made Wards of the State, it was mainly because these children were deemed uncontrollable, neglected or in mortal danger that landed them in institutions.
But, not all children finished up in these hell holes for having done something wrong. No. It was just the circumstances in which they found themselves; they were classified as status offenders!
For most children sent to these hell holes like me, life for them was never the same ever again. Years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, neglect, and backbreakingly hard child slave labour forever live within our minds. We cannot escape the memory of the shocking atrocities we were forced to endure throughout those childhood years of ours.
There are also the memories of the hundreds of once innocent boys and girls who disappeared from out of those hell holes, never to have been seen or heard of ever again. They are buried there, in unmarked graves beneath those very grounds! The blood of these missing boys and girls is in the hands of the bureaucrats responsible for their disappearance.
Forgotten Children
By the time it came for us to be released back out into the community, we’d gained an inheritance of moral confusion, abiding anger, psychological scars, depression, distrust, recurring nightmares and the determination never again to allow anyone to treat us the way those criminals treated us as children!
It was sickening to learn that many who developed severe emotional problems and depression committed suicide. Others became addicted to hard drugs and alcohol; many went on to become some of Australia’s most hardened violent criminals. A lot of girls became prostitutes. Many to this very day, are wasting their lives away in prisons and mental institutions! And there are others I know of who still carry a chip on their shoulders, even after all these years.
Over the years, there have been many inquiries into the abuse of us children. It was found that most had suffered all forms of abuse (some not mentioned above). Children were left so hungry they were forced to eat scraps out of bins; others were only permitted to take a bath once a week and in shared water, same with taking a shower.
Children were locked in dark places to be punished so severely as to draw blood.
No Escape
Children were used as guinea pigs by the Commonwealth Department of Health, injecting us with full adult doses of vaccines, mainly to trial influenza vaccines and antigens for toxic effects. Tests were done first on us before allowing them to be used on children out in the wider community. These vaccines failed to protect us, the institutional children. Instead, we developed adverse reactions, mainly that of vomiting and abscesses.
There weren’t too many of us when as children in those fucking institutions, ever got the chance of receiving an education!
Over the many years I spent growing up in those notorious hell holes, I got to know hundreds of children and found most had been honest, decent boys and girls, who should never have been in these miserable joints in the first place. The authorities believed that these children were neglected and abused in their own homes.
Those fucking Morons! Why couldn’t they’ve gotten into those stupid heads of theirs, that even if these children were being abused at home, the abuse they suffered at home was nothing compared to the rapes and the brutality committed by the parasites in charge of the hell holes these innocent children were sentenced too.
This story is dedicated to the thousands of boys and girls who, like my dear brother Graham, sadly never had the chance to tell their stories about the rapes and the brutality they endured while as prisoners in those concentration camps. Concentration camps for children!
I blame these atrocities for so many children now laying graves. May they RIP.
Rest in Peace
AUTHOR BIO
It was the 24 of May 1948 when my mother dumped my brother Graham and me at W R Black Home for Girls in Chelmer QLD. Our lives changed forever. It burdened Graham until his early death in 1974 aged 28 and affects me to this day. I later found myself in the Presbyterian, the Salvation Army’s and for no reason Mt Penang Juvenile Justice Centre in Queensland. There was no schooling in those places.
Rowan and Tina Brown came into my life over a wishing well. Or, it might have been a broken dining table or chair leg fix. I can’t remember which came first. What I do recall is being delighted to find small, hand-crafted wishing wells for sale on their front lawn, which made me stop to chat soon after I bought a little donga in Aldinga Beach in 2005. I always wanted a wishing well, and it seemed like a good omen to find one so quickly. Rowan made mine full-sized, like their own.
A recurring dream brought me to Aldinga Beach. It started in Darwin when I finished a contract there and persisted during a 15-month pit stop in Melbourne. Most nights, I flew, swooped and soared with a magnificent wedge-tailed eagle that never landed until, one night, he alighted on Aldinga Beach’s silvery sands. That was it.
Taking the dream as a prophecy, I bought my house on a day trip from Melbourne. It had three rickety steps to its front door, no verandah, and bare yards. With a little bit of money to spare, I added a veranda back and front and fitted out the garage as a studio.
Arrival
At the end
Once I’d settled, Tina and Rowan became my mainstays. They turned bare yards into the gardens of my imagination and were always there to fix things for me, do a hard clean, replace fire alarm batteries on the ceiling, and do all the things an old lady finds difficult by herself. They drove me to and from the hospital on occasions when I was not allowed to drive or take a taxi.
In the beginning
Towards the end
Rowan and Tina did so much for me, including putting Ikea furniture together. They packed and unpacked for me when I moved into Manson Towers in Glenelg. Rowan was always patient as I sat back in my throne of age, issuing instructions about where to hang pictures and playing with the location. Sometimes Rowan’s arms nearly fell off before my eye found the right place.
Apart from friendship, Tina and Rowan’s greatest gift was giving my beloved dog Clarrie a forever home when I moved into a Glenelg retirement village. They knew him from when he was a tiny pup, and he always adored them. They care for him so well as he declines.
Clarrie as a tiny pup.
A Love Story
Rowan is an Aboriginal man whose family, when he grew up, refused to speak about their heritage. Tina is Caulfield Jewish. They met in the Gippsland region of Victoria near the Latrobe Valley. She lived in Traralgon as a new bride, and Rowan stayed on his best friend’s grandfather’s farm in Morwell-Traralgon. Rowan is a few years younger than Tina, and, at first, they were friends.
Rowan said that, on the farm, there was no water, no power, nothing. The old man kept a couple of gas bottles, and that was it. He was loaded but stingy. Tina used to feed Rowan, his best friend and his brother in exchange for helping her around the house and when she became ill.
Although newly married to her first husband, Tina lived in fear of his violence. One night when Rowan visited, he found her collapsed with a broken nose and bleeding profusely. He pushed Tina’s husband up against the wall and warned him never to touch her again, gave Tina his caravan key to keep and took her to the Lionel Rose Aboriginal Health Centre the next day. Their love grew from there.
Aldinga Beach
Six years later, Rowan and Tina moved to Aldinga Beach for work opportunities. Tina’s family was then living in Seaford, where they stayed until the couple settled. They both worked at Metro Meat, owned by the Adelaide Steamship Company until the Chinese bought them out.
After that, Rowan worked for an odd-jobs man for some time, and then they branched out on their own, together. Over the years, they built their own thriving home maintenance business that brought them to me.
Rowan’s bridge gave way to ponds for turtles
My replica bridge over a water run
The Brown Family
The Browns married in 1988 but have been together for 38 years. Their family is close. In Tina’s words, ‘Everything we do, and everything we did without, has been for our boys, Nick and Alex, who live nearby.’
Their eldest son Nick is a long-distance truckie, a job he loves. He is dedicated to the CFS and adores his partner Emma and their girls, Alana, 15, Chelsie, nine (but thinks she’s 21) and Kayleigh, six. Emma is an enrolled nurse soon to be a Registered Nurse. When Nick comes to collect the girls from their grandparents’ place on Friday after his latest trip, they cling to him because they haven’t seen him for a whole week! Tina and Rowan look after their grandchildren whenever they are needed.
Son Alex took a different direction. He started working as a ‘checkout chick’ for Woolworths (promoted to management) while still at school. Alex is now at Flinders University, completing a BA in Environmental Studies (Geography) in the College of Science and Engineering. He is also doing a Diploma in Photography. Alex identifies as Aboriginal and Russian (but not Jewish like his mum). He records his travels in Japan and Bali and is a superb photographer, as his Instagram attests. Alex is the proud owner of two beautiful Huskie fur-babies, Sammy and Fidget, both girls.
Tina’s two sons from her first marriage, John and Nathaniel Howes live with their partners, Jalina and Petrina, in Melbourne and Perth, respectively. Each family has four children. John and Jalina have Jessie, Jorja, Maddie, Emmylou. Nathaniel and Petrina’s children are Makayla, Aidan, Eva and Addison. The families stay in touch, travelling to and fro when possible.
The Home Maintenance Business
Tina said she first joined Rowan in his fledgling home maintenance business because she hardly ever saw him because he worked so hard. They still work together, as a team.
For years, they have travelled as far out as Salisbury and to the end of the Fleurieu Peninsula. They go where the work takes them, to Mount Barker and the other side of town. Some jobs are casual, others more permanent for real estate agencies and holiday homes, plus Airbnb and individual but regular customers, like me. Their business grew by word of mouth, and they are very much in demand.
Garage Sales
A home-maintenance spinoff is the accumulation of gifts, goodies, and consignments that Tina and Rowan put on front-lawn display in quarterly garage sales. In addition, Tina is a confessed bowerbird who loves shiny, pretty things, which means that their shed is full of unique treasures waiting for someone to give them a new home. It was, of course, at one of these garage sales that I first saw Rowan’s hand-made wishing-wells.
The garage sales take three hours to set up in the morning and as long to put everything away. They are hard work. Tina said the best part is meeting all sorts of people, from different walks of life, those who are regular scavengers and those who drop by out of curiosity. The worst thing is that some people steal, which Tina thinks is silly because she is the genuine 20c lady if only people would ask. There are times, though, when it seems like too much. One day, she said, she may call an op shop and ask them to collect it all — one day.
The Menagerie
The Brown’s home is a sanctuary for dogs, cats, birds and turtles. Their garden is lush and beautiful, as you might imagine for people who make others’ gardens (and homes) lovely for a living.
Turtles
Rowan built a beautiful bridge in his backyard, just like the one he made for me, but he had to dismantle it to create separate ponds with a pathway over the top for his five turtles because they are territorial. (The last turtle he picked up off a white line on Chalk Hill Road, close to death. He nursed it back to health in the bath for five days.)
Turtle 1 of 5
Ponds that replaced the bridge
Turtle 2 of 5
Dogs
In addition to five turtles, the Browns have three dogs, two cats and nearly 50 birds. Tyko, called Psycho Tyko because he’s nuts, is a heeler cross Kelpie. Tierra is a chocolate Labrador who is overweight. Like Clarrie (adopted from me), they are also older dogs, but he’s skinny. They all live inside.
Three dogs L-R Tyco (the Psycho), Tierra and Clarrie
Tyco eats anything, books, sponges, shoes. You name it. He is eight years old and not a puppy, so he shouldn’t do these things. Tierra has a lovely nature and is a beautiful, caring girl. The smallest, Clarrie, rules the lot. Because Tierra has meds morning and night, Clarrie thinks he’s getting the medicine as well, and it is he who alerts Rowan that it’s pill time, so the Browns call him a junkie. Tyco and Clarrie get a placebo, cheese on bread minus the pills, but Clarrie sets the pace.
Even though he’s the smallest of the three, Clarrie is so bossy, he stands in front of the food cupboard at 4 pm, staring at it, demanding food. He vacuums his meals. He is also the alarm clock for walkies. His life is not only in tune with the day’s rhythm, but he dedicates himself wholly to it.
Cats
As a cattle dog, Tyco tries to round up the cats, named after parts of a cat gym where they hid for three weeks before they were game to come out to play. White and black Choobie is so named for chewing the tube of the gym where he hid, and black and white Shelfie got his name for hiding behind the gym’s shelf.
Choobie
Shelfie
Birds
Of the birds, there are two flightless lorikeets, L1 and L2, surrendered to the RSPCA after someone cut off one of their wings. They were about to be put down until a friend interceded to give them a chance with Tina and Rowan. The Brown’s 45 other birds live in huge aviaries, a mix of finches, budgerigars, cockatiels, princess parrots, superb parrots, grass parrots and quails.
Maggie 1
Aviary
Maggie 2
Peekaboo
I’m watching
Ring-in
The Scariest Thing
A little over three years ago, Flinders Medical Centre admitted Rowan with delirium. He spent eight days in ICU and 11 days in the hospital. After four days, doctors told Tina that Rowan could die if his fever didn’t break. Tina, Alex, and Nick thought they would lose Rowan. Both sons supported their mother, and Nick took her to the hospital every day as she doesn’t drive.
On day five, doctors diagnosed Rowan with waterborne Legionnaire’s pneumonia. They recognised that the symptoms had appeared in him, in reverse. Rowan’s lung function is now significantly impaired. Health authorities never found an official outbreak source.
After such a fright, Rowan and Tina now enter the House and Land lottery every year, and they alternate between hope and exasperation when they don’t win. Even the St John’s lottery has failed to bestow its favours on them. Although their landlord is good to them, they would love to have their own home before retiring.
A Final Word
Rowan and Tina Brown are dear friends. When my daughter Vanessa arrived back in South Australia earlier this year, they helped her settle into her new home as they did me when I moved into a retirement village. They treat us like family. Home maintenance may be their work, but everything they do is an act of love and attention. Just as they shower their family and animals with love and care, so too do they spread a little magic wherever they go.
Writing Tip
I wasn’t sure whether to add a writing tip to this post as I usually do because it is about friends. But I will, and I beg Tina and Rowan’s indulgence.
When you write about other people, honour them. Yes, this post is about my journey with the Brown’s, but it was they who showed me what was important to them; their love, their family, surviving illness and, of course, their marvellous menagerie.
Happy Writing
Wattletales
Click here to read another post about a beautiful garden.
My mother’s songs seeded the starburst of my poetry. Like a bird sings to its eggs, she sang the melodically and rhythmically fertile songs of the Aegean Islands while I was in her womb. When I hatched, she continued to prime me through infancy and childhood. I still sing and drum the haunting modes and hiccupping rhythms of Greek music. They feed my poetry with metre and syncopation.
Maria reading at SPIN 2018
Oral and Musical Roots
It’s tempting to believe my pilgrimage with poetry began at Flinders University, where I completed a Creative Writing Graduate Diploma. Academic learning validates. It teaches the craft, but the richest source for poetry for most poets is ancestral.
I inherited a deep, unconscious, but musical and poetic pulse from my family; my mother’s voice permeates my writing. More than theory, I draw power from this heritage. It lends authenticity to my poetic voice, which comes from deep within.
Many cultures, Greek, Ethiopian, Arabic, and Irish, to name a few, have strong oral traditions. Poetry in our Anglo-Celtic society does too, both in form and musicality.
Before Europe invented the Guttenberg Press, poetry was sung and recited in communal groups. The rhyme and metre we know from traditional poetry were mnemonic devices. Today, slam poetry which is almost a sport, has a similar musicality. Being performance, it is popular among young people and attracts large audiences and cash prizes.
I run an open mic with Julia Wakefield called SPIN (Southern Performers Interactive Network). We celebrate the connection between music and poetry and support early and emerging poets and musicians to develop their craft and confidence. I performed at the Goolwa Poetry Cup in 2017 with my show, Little Poems about Kisses. It was thrilling to win an award for Mr Lizard Lips.
Stones of Dislocation
My father’s forced migration as a political refugee is a troubling childhood memory. My family travelled from cosmopolitan Piraeus, a traditionally built home, to a Housing Trust duplex in Whyalla, South Australia, where Dad worked at the BHP steelyards as a rigger. His ship’s captain qualifications were not accepted.
Dislocated like many migrant families, fractured clan roots caused suffering. I felt I did not belong. Already bi-lingual, my father picked up English as his third language of necessity. My mother struggled.
The Strange Gift of a Double Tongue
Torn as a child between my Greek mother tongue and English was bewildering. I morphed into a bi-lingual child and quickly qualified to act as an amateur translator of adult medical mysteries, a junior social worker for my mother and a legal document reader for my father: a common situation for migrant children.
School classified me as ‘English-less’, which was a shock at five years of age. However, I graduated with the Year 12 English prize and have written mainly in English since. I gravitated towards creative writing and drama and was always the top performer in most English classes. Sadly, my Greek language is now much weaker than English, an expected loss for migrant children.
A Life Raft
Poetry was a life raft for me during my mid-thirties when I experienced a series of traumatic losses. My father died of cardiac arrest on a public health waiting list. My mother committed suicide. I left my de-facto husband, lost the job I held in our business then lost my own business and singing career. Even my cat died. For a time, I was homeless. Grief choked my song. Anxiety set in, and panic attacks still plague me.
Poetry, for me, was firstly a therapeutic tool. Though I rolled punch-drunk with grief, I scratched my sorrow into journal scribbles. Later, many of those raw feelings turned into published poems. I captured trauma in words, which eased the pressure of that catastrophic period. As Bessel Van Der Kolk notes in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma is visceral. Creative practices such as writing, painting, singing, and exercises like yoga, dance, walking in nature and ocean swimming are healing remedies.
What is poetry? Who knows?
Poetry can be anything, everything and something in words. It is mercurial. I use Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition to guide me: ‘The best words in the best order.’ His words are my mantra, and I ask the question constantly as I practice. Is this the best word in its best place? It helps me progress through a poem, especially if my writing is stuck. Of course, the judgement of ‘best’ is often a personal one.
As a poet, I like traditional poetic forms. Form in poetry is like a corset: it restricts but gives support and shape. I enjoy the challenge and practice of villanelles, haiku, sonnets, tanka and sestina.
Even free verse is not as liberating as its name might suggest. When I write freeform poetry, which I do a lot, it forces me to make an oppressive number of personal choices about rhyme, metre, lineation, punctuation and many other things. Decision fatigue happens even before the engine of a poem — its literary tropes, metaphors, similes, hyperbole, personification and others — fires up.
How I Craft a Poem
In 2007 I returned to university to study poetic craft, history, and traditional forms with Professor Jeri Kroll and A/Professor Steve Evans. Learning poetics enhanced the instinctive skill I inherited from my ancestral heritage.
While studying, I held down a job and acquired my first dog, Dora, a beautiful companion. The discipline of crafting a poem helped me order my thoughts and shape my journal scribbles into readable poems. It also aided my recovery from the previous decade’s ‘personal holocaust’, as I now call it.
My best poems, I think, do two things at once. They draw with clarity on raw personal situations and emotions that link to human universals when honed. My first poetry collection, Eye Print, won the Friendly Street New Poets 19 manuscript prize.
Keeping Poetry Muscles Fit
Poetry is a continual practice for me. I often get it wrong and sometimes get it right. Some helpful things are participating in critique groups such as Ochre Coast Poets and TramsEnd Poets and elsewhere. Collaboration and critique are invaluable in the journey to polished poetry.
A poem in GRIEVE
Musical Trio, Maria on Drum
L — Parents, Antonios and Kalliope Koukovas R —The Trio includes Demeter Tsounis and Mary Raptis
In the Community
But, all engagement in poetry helps me learn as I build my profile as a practising poet.
I professionally edit manuscripts and mentor young and emerging poets like Asher Seiler Simmons, a Year 12 Steiner student whose project culminated in a published poetry collection.
Between 2019 and 2020, I conceived the idea of poetry as a Life Writing project for seniors. The seed for this came through many fruitful conversations with Dr Lindy Warrell, who successfully ran Life Writing workshops in her local community.
In creative partnership with Steve Evans, I successfully sought funding from the Onkaparinga Council and SA Health, resulting in ‘Your Story Life Writing’, a workshop series we delivered throughout regional South Australia. I used poetry, mainly haibun, and prose to help participants create memoirs and record family histories. I loved working one-on-one with participants; the learning went both ways. We had fun.
Another initiative was my‘Frolic with Forms’workshop. In 2020, I collaborated in the publication of Ochre 10,an Anthology. Running school-based workshops in poetry across four schools in the South was an exciting experience. The local poet Virgil Concalves won an Onkaparinga Council grant for this project.
Where to now?
Over the last fourteen years, I have poured a lot of money, time and energy into poetry. But poetry is a fragile axle to drive your life on. Very few people earn money from it, and the satisfaction derived from publications and prizes is fleeting. Banging your odes against gatekeepers like editors and judges is a formula for disgruntled disappointment. To run the long race and stay sane, a poet needs to have a deeper purpose for writing poetry than publication.
The pilgrimage is about binding the ephemeral to words then sending them out to bond with another. It is a sacred linguistic process.
Poetry continues to lure and torment me. Its language compression, sinuous syntax, magic metaphors and rhythmic heart prey on my time and energy.
Like a true addict, I quit poetry 20 times a day and return to it for one more line.
AUTHOR BIO
Maria is a child migrant. The schism of a two-tongue world fuels her poems. Maria is polishing her manuscripts Two Tongue World and Dogolalia, bothering editors, publishers, and literary friends alike.
Her poetry won a place in the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2020 Anthology and a manuscript prize for Friendly StreetNew Poets 19. Maria’s poems are also in the Canberra Times, Victorian Writer and SCUM Magazine, Poetica Christie, Friendly Street and Ochre Coast Anthologies.
There is a lot to be said about having a comfortable place to go. For me, it’s my red armchair. Most of my writing and digital art happens from there.
Living with a rare and chronic disease, daily nausea, cramps, bone pain, joint and muscle pain, gut problems, headaches, PTSD, anxiety and depression, I often retreat to the embrace of the red armchair.
It was from this place of chronic disarray, impacted by COVID restrictions, that just over a year ago, at the tender age of sixty, I found my creative side.
I started to write somewhat prolifically, a few short stories and lots of poetry. This productivity coincided with my digital doodling becoming full-on abstract digital art.
On Poetry
Throughout my life, I’ve admired and somewhat envied talented people who could paint, sing, play a musical instrument or write. For me, poetry was a flowery thing requiring a dictionary to understand strange words. It therefore never appealed to me, so to be a year down the track, having had multiple poems published in journals, blogs, online newspapers and read on the radio, and having some of my art exhibited in galleries, is surreal.
Now, I find poetry a great way to tell a story or explain something, as in this poem, ‘I Look OK’, one of my earliest about the rare disease I have.
Poetry over this last year hasn’t been one-sided. I’ve found great enjoyment in reading other poets’ works. I joined Friendly Street Poets and, with my wife, went to a few open mics at Goolwa. There we met a wonderful and charismatic man, Nigel Ford. He is a wonderful poet and has been very encouraging to new poets.
I don’t go to many poetry events due to my poor health, but for several months I was involved in a weekly Zoom poetry workshop with a group of poets in New Jersey, USA. Here I the first poem I had published in Pinky Thinker Press, Mignolo Arts Group, New Jersey.
One of the first poets I read was Geoff Goodfellow. His writing inspired me. A few months after my writing started, I was very fortunate to have a phone conversation with Geoff, who was very encouraging and gave me a few tips.
I’m a storyteller who has a lot to learn. However, after a long life, I have a lot of words trying to escape. So hopefully, I will be writing for some time to come.
Over Last Year
Abstract digital art, sometimes combined with photo manipulation, has exploded with colour over the last year. From digital doodling, I’ve created brightly coloured abstracts like those below. Art and writing have been therapeutic for both my physical and mental health.
What I Write
I’m sixty-one years old, a husband, son, proud father, and grandfather. While a lot of what I write is about life and actual events, albeit somewhat patchwork, I’m not yet quite prepared to write about some things.
Last winter, I emerged from boredom and depression when a counsellor suggested that I look for something to do as a hobby. Working with my hands like woodwork or some craft was very quickly ruled out as I have ten thumbs and would have lost fingers.
So, I joined the University of the Third Age (U3A) online. The first course that caught my eye was about writing creatively. I thought I could try that. In my first effort, I sat down and wrote a concise story, a bit over seven hundred words, about a crazy Irish guy I had known in the Navy.
I started writing poems when I learned that poetry didn’t have to be flowery and rhyming but could be a conduit to tell a tale. The floodgates opened, and in just one year, I wrote over two hundred poems.
In addition to my health, I’ve written about life events. For example, a poem entitled, ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong’, emerged from the time when my wife and I were swept out to sea with friends in our kayaks. We had to be rescued by sea rescue and ended up in the news.
“Sorry To Say” is the title of a poem written about a friend we took in and cared for in his last eighteen months of life before he died from bowel cancer. Last year a different friend died from a stroke in her fifties, way too young. I wrote this little poem.
Poems and Art are My Life
‘Love Me Forever is the title of a poem I wrote for my wife based on when she agreed to marry me sitting next to a campfire on the bank of a creek in the Flinders Ranges where we had witnessed a flash-flood a few hours earlier.
After pumping out poems, I first posted them to Facebook then set up my first Instagram account, where my digital art took off. I used the art as a background for poems and ended up with an Instagram following. The poetry didn’t take off, but the art certainly did.
Earlier this year learned of a weekly veterans’ art group. As I served in the Royal Australian Navy for over 11 years, I was eligible, and the group encouraged me to exhibit my art. I’m also learning about other art forms like flow painting and mosaic’s which I enjoy even with ten thumbs. I wrote ‘Bloom’ to honour this group.
I haven’t found it easy to write about myself. But, writing about it in poetry feels like I’m writing outside of myself, freeing me up to release the words. So maybe as I continue, I’ll be able to explore the more challenging parts of my life poetically.
AUTHOR BIO
Andrew Ballard lives in Adelaide. He was a Petty Officer Medical in the Royal Australian Navy for 11 years. He worked for medical companies selling devices and instruments, then as a support worker in mental health and first aid and aged care trainer. Diagnosed with Systemic Macrocytosis, he took early retirement. In 2020, with activities curtailed, Andrew turned to writing and digital art. He has published In quick succession, in the US in the inaugural edition of the New Jersey Mignolo Arts Group’s journal, the New York poetry journal ‘Open Skies’, The Beckindale Poetry Journal and InDaily, Poets Corner.
My mate Mick drove Morse and me out to Parkeston in that FE Holden I’d only sold to him the day before. Still, it was sad for me to have to part with my faithful car. It had never missed a beat while I’d drove it all the way from South Australia right across the Nullarbor to where we finished in Kalgoorlie. I knew I couldn’t have driven the Holden to where Morse and I’d soon be going, out in the middle of nowhere to this railway siding at Loongana on the Nullarbor Plains.
Me
and Morse
The next evening, Mick again drove Morse and me in the Holden to Parkeston, a suburb in Kal, to board the train to Loongana. He wanted to see us off. I’d been expecting the girl Morse had visited there at the Hay Street Brothel to have been on the platform too, to wave him off. Many others stood on the platform that evening, waiting to board the train; some of them being married couples with their children, those willing to brave very harsh conditions.
When they signed up for the job, many of these families hadn’t expected the Nullarbor to be so tough. Some families I’d spoken to had plans to save up enough money so that when the time came for them to leave the Commonwealth Railway, they’d have enough put by to buy a house in whatever town it was they’d come from.
A lot of single blokes also travelled on that train: Morse and I soon learned that a few of them were running from the law for various crimes, with most wanting to avoid paying maintenance to their wives. What these blokes hadn’t realized at the time of signing on with the railways was that the cops already knew their whereabouts and that they’d sooner or later get sick of working out along the line in the middle of nowhere. Their longed-for return to the good life there in the big smoke would soon become their downfall.
With there being only two ways to travel for these blokes, either back to Parkeston in WA or to Port Augusta in SA, the cops would be waiting on either of the platforms to meet them, ready to handcuff them as they stepped off the train. Never had there been much hope at all for those working out along the line for the Commonwealth Railways wanting to escape the long arm of the law.
Sitting up on the train that night for me and Morse wasn’t very enjoyable at all. We had to put up with those who were pissed, yelling and wanting to fight each other and then wanting to have a go at those blokes who were sober. Then we had these couple of idiot drunks, who tried to get on with a couple of the married women there on the train.
Still, there had been quite a few of these blokes I’d heard about, tried doing the same thing wanting to get involved with the married women. Yet, for those stupid bastards, I’d been told, they never got to leave the train without looking somewhat different than how they were when they boarded! It has always been the same rule for single men while working out there along the line, for them not to go fucking around with other blokes’ wives or their girlfriends.
The Trans-Australia train heading west circa 1938
To read more about what are now ghost railway sidings on the Nullarbor, including Loongana, click here. For a summarising map, see here. The line was completed in 1917.
Loongana Siding at the 1292 km peg
It was close at 11 pm on the 2 July 1965 by the time the train rolled into Loongana. Me and Morse were both well and truly stuffed as we stepped down off the train that night, most likely because we’d been trying to stop these couple of arse holes from causing trouble. Barry Pall met us. He was the Ganger in Charge of the fettler gang stationed here at Loongana.
We met him once before when I was with Heavy Plant down at Port Augusta and had always found him to have been a good, decent bloke to those working under him. Barry’d been working for the Commonwealth Railways ever since he had left school, so there wasn’t much he didn’t know about this job, Morse and I’d been sent out here to do.
‘Hi fellers, how’d the trip out here go? Were you blokes able to get much sleep on the train?’ He asked. I replied, ‘No, Barry, we had no hope of getting much sleep at all, with all the yelling and screaming going on between a couple of those hot heads on the train’.
‘I bet them drunken idiots, tried making out with those married girls, hey Rocky?’ Barry turned to Morse, who replied, ‘Still, one thing’s for sure, those bloody idiots are going to have sore bloody heads, by whatever time it is they get off the train.’
‘Anyway, fellas, come on, I’ll show you where you’ll be camping, then once you’ve had yourselves a decent sleep, I’ll catch you both up in the morning at breakfast.
The Camp
We found this to be a really good camp. Every one of the rail huts had a single bed with an innerspring mattress. Morse and I decided before we hit the sack, we’d go and have a shower first. After a good night’s sleep, I woke up the next morning feeling fitter than ever, being able to breathe in all that nice fresh Nullarbor air. Morse and I then headed over to the washhouse, had ourselves a good splash and a piss then headed over to the mess for breakfast.
Barry was there in the mess, waiting, ready to introduce Morse and me to the rest of the gang, already sitting at their tables waiting for breakfast. Soon as Barry headed off, Morse and me then went and sat at this table with Colon and Hughie and ordered a good feed of bacon and eggs on toast, with a mug of black tea to finish it off.
While sitting there at the table, I noticed most of the blokes in the mess with us seemed to have had done a lot of hard work in their day. Even though he knew, it never worried Barry one bit that some of the blokes in his gang were running from the law. Just as long as the blokes were able to get done what they were paid to do and never caused any trouble, he’d just leave them alone.
Getting to Work
After we’d all finished breakfast, Barry then got Morse and me aside and explained to us the job we’d be doing — ripping out all the old sleepers along the line before replacing those with new sleepers. Our start time was 7.30 am every morning, from Monday right through to Saturday. Our first job was to grab hold of whatever gear we needed to take out along the line. That then had to be loaded onto a couple of flattops, and when loaded, we’d hook both flattops up to the section car. With that done, we then climbed up on the section car to be taken out along the line, ready to begin a hard day’s work.
Barry got those working with the claw bars to start ripping the dog spikes out first on our arrival at the destination. Then, he had some of the other blokes going on behind dragging out the old sleepers from under the line soon as the dogs were removed and stacked up in piles. It was then Morse, me and the rest of the gang who went and picked up the new sleepers and carried them over and trussed them under the line where the old sleepers had once been.
Those boys who’d dragged them old sleepers out, they now had to grab hold of the jiggers and begin drilling eight holes in each and every one of those new sleepers we’d just finished laying under the line. Once there had been a dozen or so of those sleepers drilled out and the fishplates placed on top, Morse, Hughie, Col, me and a couple of other blokes, we’d then grab hold of a twenty-four-pound sledgehammer each and begin hammering those dogs home.
This had been hard going for a start, us trying to hammer those dogs down, and it’d taken many a blow of that sledge to do so. But, after about a week of doing this, we were then able to hammer them doggies down into those sleepers, taking only three strikes of the sledgehammer to do it.
Hell, it used to get bloody hot out there at times, with most days always up around the 100º F mark. Yet, at night it could get very cold out there at times. Even the water bag we’d have hanging up under the shade was at times close to boiling point, especially on those scorching summer days. No matter how hot the water was, it still came in mighty handy for quenching the thirst for those of us swinging those twenty-four-pounders.
The Best Parts
It felt really great being way out there on the Nullarbor, breathing in all that fresh air and with nothing to see for miles around — except for saltbush, crows, and those beautiful wedge-tailed eagles with their wings spread wide out gliding around up there in that wide-open blue sky.
Wedge-tailed Eagle
We had a spare couple of rail huts at Loongana, so we set a couple of old tables and chairs inside for those wanting play cards. Morse also put a dartboard up for anyone wanting to play in their spare time. This hut was soon known as the Loongana police station.
Another Bloke Morse and I knew there at Loongana, was Curly Turner. Curly was the ganger in charge of the married men, those who had brought their wives and kids out along the line with them. The houses supplied to these families by the Commonwealth railways back in the 60s were pretty well built, with three bedrooms and kerosine fridges.
AUTHOR BIO
On 24 May 1948, my mother dumped my brother Graham and me at W R Black Home for Girls in Chelmer QLD. Our lives changed forever. It burdened Graham until his early death in 1974 aged 28 and affects me to this day. I later found myself in the Presbyterian Blackheath Boys Home, the Salvation Army’s Riverview and for no reason Mt Penang Juvenile Justice Centre in Queensland. There was no schooling in those places.
I started writing about my life much later. My books include A Tormented Life, and Brutalized: Institutional Abuse in Australia.
