Category: On Life

Ancestral Origins

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.

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.

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 Street New Poets 19. Maria’s poems are also in the Canberra Times, Victorian Writer and SCUM Magazine, Poetica Christie, Friendly Street and Ochre Coast Anthologies.

Read more about Maria and her love of dogs here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Dogolalia’, The Victorian Writer Autumn 2021

‘Fire’, Canberra Times Panorama Literary Supplement, 2019

‘The Body Mother Made Me‘, Grieve Anthology 2017, Hunter Valley Writer’s Centre, Friendly Street New Poets 19, and In Daily.

‘Sonnet to Mother’s Eyes’ and ‘Gesthemane Kiss’, Friendly Street Poets, NewPoets 19, 2018

Anywhere but Here

In times of distress, I yearn to be anywhere but here. When I am unwell, confused, depressed or feeling old, my mind takes leave of my body to travel in memory. This is a powerful yearning for people, places and times when I felt love or contentment, more so than daydreaming. Daydreams tend to venture to places full of joy and promise; they speak of a future where trees whisper, gardens are hidden, and a world of humid forests, open plains, wild oceans, and mystical lights awaits. Memory travel is painful in its beauty.

My dreams and yearning often turn into poems. As a child, I dreamed magical waking dreams, but now, my yearning reaches into the past as in this poem about Darwin, one of my three favourite places, including Sri Lanka and the Australian bush. I’ll come back to them all. While yearning can romanticise, as this poem shows, I always seem to find an underside, a twist.

Childhood Exile

As a child, I oscillated between daydreaming and showing off. School to me was a prison that denied the sky, fresh air, sunshine and rain. I spent many hours in a corridor outside my class or at the Principal’s door waiting for a ruler over my knuckles.

At the same time, I was locked out of suburban social life because my parents were hotelkeepers. Few friends were allowed to play at my place. Urban mothers saw hotels as dens of iniquity that enticed husbands from the nest in the days before women were allowed into front bars. (If you remember that!)

I once managed to convince a couple of ‘cool kids’ to join me after school with a promise to sneak them onto the roof of the New Albury Hotel where I lived. I was 10. We climbed the fire escape at the back of the building, and then I climbed over the roof’s parapet and let myself down onto the sixth storey ledge in a dizzying moment of what I hoped would be popularity. Heads peeped over at me, then disappeared, leaving me to climb ingloriously back onto the roof alone.

That experience taught me I was pretty much on my own in this world. Most of us eventually come to understand this, one way or another. For me, at 10, I chose to daydream or, as I saw it, to appreciate the life of the mind. I decided to become a writer, a choice already half made by my being a bookworm but one which took me most of my life to fulfil.

The Benefits and Limitations of Old Age

Apart from losing the need to impress others, one good thing about being old is that you have a whole life to run away to. Lots of past to yearn for. It makes sense, really, that the elderly tend to dwell on times when they were fit, in love, happy or meaningfully involved in the lives of others.

As I age, I sometimes cry for my mother, lost son, father and brother, all of whom I loved deeply. I then ask myself what age I was at the remembered moment I’m visiting, only to realise that what I really yearn for is the person I was — the way I felt — when those people were around. With them, I was a viable member of a complete, multi-generational family. I learned that my retrospective tearful yearning is not for them; it is for me. When I’m out of sorts, I miss the vibrant younger person I once was.

Yearning for places is the same. It, too, is a judgement of the present in many ways because the message to self is — I don’t want to be here or thus, in this present moment. I don’t want to be who I now am, but who I used to be. I’d say there’s a lot of that around.

Bear in mind that this yearning overtakes me only when I’m feeling low, which doesn’t happen when I count my many blessings, wonderful children, friends, poetry, writing, and a lovely place to live. And, my wandering into the past brings a renewed sense of what a fortunate life I’ve had.

The Bush

As for places, let me start with the Australian bush. My love for Australia began with the koala my nana gave me, which survived a loss of hair, Snuggle Pot and Cuddle Pie and childhood reading about the outback. I daydreamed about the outback at school. Then it all became real. I travelled to Oodnadatta in the far north of South Australia after my parents bought the lease of the Transcontinental Hotel there. My novel, On Gidgee Plains, draws on that experience.

Later I was privileged to work as an anthropologist in several states across outback Australia for many years with First Nations People, documenting sites and recording stories. What those people so generously showed me, taught me, and shared brought the landscape alive. I learned of things that, in my day at school, were completely ignored — about the cruel history of this nation. Here is a poem that offers my experience of the bush; a bit of romance and a touch of history tempered with politics.

The bush, the desert, the tropical north all attract my yearning to this day. When I hear crows caw, I see gibber plains under blue skies. I see as if it is still part of me, not in the Aboriginal way — I wouldn’t presume — but in my own way. In memory of who I have been lucky enough to be.

The Tropics

My adolescent daydreams often took me to the tropics. This could have started with The Nun’s Story (1959), starring Peter Finch and Audrey Hepburn and set in what was once the Belgian Congo, a love story where heat, drenching rain and romantic yearning still tug at these old heart-strings today. Or, my love of the tropics may have been inculcated earlier by how my mother spoke of Zamboanga — listen to the romance in that name — in the Philippines on our travels to and from Japan during WWII Occupation.

Darwin

There are so many ways to view ‘the tropics’ and, here, I’ll stick to the Top End. To Darwin, mostly. I went there when my mother gently hinted that it was time I fled the family nest. She took me to Woolworths in Rundle Mall in Adelaide to fit me out in a ghastly green print nylon dress with pleats for job interviews. I arrived in Darwin with ten shillings in my pocket and asked a cabbie to show me a place to live.

I took a room in a boarding house on Cavenagh Street, walked to the government offices the next morning, and landed a job in a typing pool. To my credit, I soon moved from that role to senior secretarial work for the Deputy and sometimes the Director of what was once called The Welfare Department (Aboriginal Branch). There, I learned in the official documents I was asked to type that Aboriginal people were ‘ineducable’ past the age of twelve. Ponder that if you please, it is part of this nation’s history.

I nearly got sacked once for not returning to work after lunch because I had too much fun at The Vic on Mitchell Street (where the mall now is). My Darwin was water skiing. We often skied across the Harbour to Mandorah and back after a few drinks. I learned to ski in Doctor’s Gully when the marvellous Karl Atkinson lived there, an older man who loved to entertain young ladies with champagne on the verandah when the fish came in at sunset. I later helped teach water-skiing on McMinn’s Lagoon with his side-kick.

The Top End

We also skied on Yellow Waters in Kakadu National Park in the days before the idea of a national park gained prominence with the National Parks and Wildlife Legislation Act 1975. Few knew about Aboriginal rights in the area back then, despite the long-running Wave Hill Station walk-off in 1966. Not to speak of the longest-running land claim in Australia by Darwin’s Larrakia people, which became official in 1979 but had been running since 1789.

Many years later, I worked in the tropical far north of Queensland, and this poem is a record of donga life in the far north field. (You all know what a donga is, right?) Not so romantic, but true.

The Jewel in My Wanderlust Crown

Sri Lanka. A childhood daydream of hidden gardens and delights fills my heart even now, nearly 40 years on. It brought together my romance with the tropics, late love, my career as an anthropologist and the trials of being a mother of three pre-adolescent children in the field for 18 months. This was not the sub-tropics. This tiny island lashed by two cyclone seasons a year, one from the southwest and the other from the northeast, was the real tropics.

I played tourist the first time I went to Sri Lanka, but it was home to me for the duration of my fieldwork. I loved every moment of that experience. What tore me in two was having to leave when my research came to an end.

Falling in love beneath torrential tropical rain (like Peter Finch and Audrey Hepburn) remains an unsurpassed joy in my life. I was seduced by the Island, its people and Elaris, my Sri Lankan husband, now also deceased. I frequently visit Sri Lanka in my memory when times get tough. A Sri Lankan friend I have kept in touch with recently told me that a poem I wrote last year about the famous elephant processions known as Perahara was anachronistic. That Lanka, he said, in longer exists.

Back Home

My children were equally discombobulated when we got home. Kids teased them at school for speaking in a ‘posh’ (Sri Lankan English) accent as much as Sri Lanka teased us for being Australian-unintelligible. I took a while to settle back in myself. But, we have the beach. A different beach but just as beautiful.

And Glenelg, where I live, has its attractions. It is from here that I escape back to Sri Lanka, the Top End and the bush. And to many other elsewheres, and elsewhens —too many for one little story,

For Those Who Write About Life

Pay attention to your feelings, your moods and sadness. In Tragedy and Despair in Fiction and Poetry, I argued that they are keys to the truth of life. Instead of clutching onto the past as a thing to recover from, try to see what your yearning is telling you.

Question why you remember particular things at particular times. Are there patterns? My bet is you will find them and, when you do, open a page in a notebook or on the computer and start writing. Tell the page what is going on. Or record it on your phone at first.

Once you have written the story, you have something concrete to work with. Like it or not, misery takes us to interesting places. It takes us to original truths, ripe and rich with fine detail that is almost impossible to conjure from imagination alone.

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED: ‘A Bush Suite’ in Soft Toys for Grown-Ups, Ginninderra Press, Adelaide. 2018

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.: Photo of the New Albury Hotel by Foto Supplies (1963). New Albury Hotel August 1963 (Trove).

A Short Long Story

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

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

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

The Alice

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

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

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

A Constant Companion

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

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

A Different Horizon

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

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

On Country

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

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

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

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

From Outback to Urban Life

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

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

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

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

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

And, Now

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

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

And so, finally —

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

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

AUTHOR BIO

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

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

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

My First Love

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

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

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

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

An Aside

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

Books that Grew Me Up

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

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

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

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

Stories are Living Things

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

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

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

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

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

Youthful Attractions

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

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

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

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

Once an Anthropologist…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Novels

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

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

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

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

The Pull of Poetry

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

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

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

How Books Make Me

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

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

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

Writing Tip

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

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

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

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

Following Smoke

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

Who’s a Quitter Then?

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

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

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

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

Did you know that smoking had gendered rules?

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

Doctors and Nurses

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

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

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

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

The Winds Changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Got Away With Heaps

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Past is Another Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Came COVID-19

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

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

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

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

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

Try This

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

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

These questions are merely a guide.

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

Then —

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

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

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

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

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