Not So Trivia

Channel Nine’s Millionaire Hot Seat with host Eddie McGuire is a litmus test of changing times. At 4 pm, Monday to Friday, Eddie quizzes Australia on culture and history with snippets of maths and science. Both the host and the show are cultural icons. Eddie, because he’s done it for 25 years, and the show because its questions highlight a generational chasm in taken-for-granted cultural knowledge.

Eddie is 22 years younger than me and around 30 years older than his younger guests. While he shows no judgement, I am often astonished when a person under 30, descended from convicts, cannot answer a simple question about common Aussie sayings. People whose families of origin are elsewhere often do better.

I admire Eddie, whose calm and friendly demeanour never wavers, no matter who is in the hot seat. Further, he shows a genuine interest in contestants while introducing us to a wide range of people from different backgrounds. He brings out the best in everybody in 30 seconds each, most of whom are under a spotlight on TV for the first time. It’s a tough gig, but he does it with charm and good humour.

Change and Continuity

Millionaire Hot Seat is a window into our culture. It reveals a distinct shift away from my generation and even Eddie’s common sayings. The young appear to know more about American football and celebrity than Australian culture and history. Those up in years have little knowledge of popular music. You often hear the young claim: ‘I wasn’t even born then’, or, ‘That’s before my time’. It’s as though the world before them is irrelevant. It’s a puzzle.

However, I raise the idea of disparity between generations here to highlight the fact that some things remain the same. Many things have changed since my day, but two phrases will never hit the quiz circuit because we take them for granted in everyday life. I refer particularly to ‘You’ve got no sense of humour’ and ‘You’re so strong’.

Well known to women of my generation (I checked yesterday with an age mate), these remarks and others with similar intent are still not uncommon.

Growing up Girl

If I expressed an opinion my father disliked when I was little, he would say, ‘What would you know, you are only a little girl?’ Hmm. We all sometimes dismiss children, but those words stung. As I got older, when Dad disliked my mother’s or my response to a put-down, he would declare, ‘You’ve got no sense of humour’. That phrase trivialises and demeans.

I won’t dwell on it, but resisting mockery goes against unwritten rules about what it is to be feminine. In the company of others, ‘You’ve got no sense of humour’ always came up with a wink and a laugh or followed by, ‘I’m only joking’. The accompanying sideways glance suggested we, as women, were not quite bright enough to notice.

I’ll end this section with the following poem because, although I am speaking up (sic) against my father, I want also to honour him for the love he showed me. He was a kind man, yet, like us all, a product of his times. I am simply drawing attention to the fact that some things haven’t changed. We have not scrutinized the sort of jocular teasing women put up with, even though it makes a statement about how a woman should behave or become.

Women of Power and Influence

The phrases I draw attention to come with a smile but can be as manipulative and damaging as gaslighting and bullying. Mockery has the same structure as blaming girls for getting raped by dressing provocatively or walking alone at night; for being themselves.

Let me introduce two scholars I admire who paved the way for a better understanding of how stereotypes and implicit views affect women in our culture. 

            Anne Summers

I was sad to see online that Anne Summers AO has dropped off most current lists of prominent Australian Feminist writers. Born in 1945, she was a former First Assistant Secretary to the Office of the Status of Women in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Bob Hawke from 1983 to 1986.

Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975) broke new ground. Its title immediately captivated me. It encapsulated in a few words the way the male gaze casts women (read patriarchy) either as sluts or keepers of morals. (In my day, men often slept with any girl but preferred to marry a virgin.)  

Before publication in 2013, Summers gave public talks in 2012 about The Misogyny Factor, not long before Julia Gillard’s famous speech in parliament denouncing Tony Abbott for his misogyny. Summers argued Australia had a long way to go before accepting women in power and influence. Her work received acclaim and flak. The flak was not about her being strong per se, but she spoke up to power, loud and clear.

Jane M Usher

Like Summers’ two books, Jane M Usher’s 1992 Women’s Madness: Misogyny Or Mental Illness? systematically exposes structures of power at the highest level, so we might comprehend it when we see it in daily life.

I remember my delight when I read Jane Usher’s book. It will now be a little outdated, given changes (I avoid saying advances!) in our understanding of depression in women, but the title retains veracity. She raised questions about the relationship between a mental condition (women’s madness) and social pressure for women to conform (misogyny). This question is paramount even today in understanding how gendered concepts play out in daily life.

In Summary

In their landmark texts, these scholars both point to structures that are reinforced in everyday practices, like saying you’ve got no sense of humour and you’re so strong to women. They measure someone against an inchoate or unspoken ideal and give us tools to recognise gendered asymmetry at the local level.

As For Madness

When the husband of one of my aunts deserted, leaving her with three children to manage alone, she cried and became depressed. He was cruel during the marriage, yet nobody encouraged her to heal. Rather, the brutality of shock therapy diminished her for the rest of her life. (I am talking about half a century or more ago.)

Another aunt would put her head down and knit the minute her husband raised his voice. She’d smile, go silent and only later would say, ‘I don’t like fights’, too scared was she to defend herself or speak her mind. I’m not sure we are yet aware of how often fear of reprisal silences women whose minor transgressions, like speaking out of turn, can turn nasty.

A third aunt’s husband bullied and beat her black and blue because she defied him by working on a factory assembly line where she could express herself and laugh with other women. He disappeared, never to be seen again. When her only son subsequently died, she had no one to turn to. 

Mockery is a Power Tool

Mock threats towards women happen more often than you think, and they underpin domestic violence. Who remembers the poolside practice of a man picking up a girl or woman and threatening to throw her into the pool only to be put down before doing it? (I’ve seen this done to children too.) The message is, look how powerful I am, but I am saving you. This time!

I always loathed that ‘game’. The response to my angry demand to be put down was a collective, ‘You’ve got no sense of humour’. It’s not a big stretch to suggest that is another way of saying you’re too strong (for standing up for yourself). It blurs into the same trope after a while.

Such personal snippets exemplify patriarchy in everyday life. Patriarchy (dare I say the word?) is not some overarching cloud that glowers down from above like a judgmental god. Nor is it ‘all men’. Power disparities exist even in the little things, the small things that I’ve talked about. These phrases and their companion ideas delineate as they perpetuate that.

We can include bigger things, like domestic violence; it’s a matter of degree. But patriarchy exists in taken-for-granted power imbalances. Women also support it when we participate in our own oppression. An example would be a right winger who denies being a feminist.

Wrapping Up

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people tell me I’m ‘so strong’, either as a compliment or a putdown. Neither allows for vulnerability. I’ve even been told that my strength frightens people. Sure, I don’t suffer fools gladly, but am I really that scary? Especially now, as a social category, I am an old woman with failing health and no money. I have no power, no cultural capital, but were I to decry, I can hear the response now, ‘You’ve got no sense of humour’.

You may think I am harsh, yet I only consider everyday structures of behaviour that reinforce by repetition. Have you ever heard a man tell another that he has no sense of humour or is so strong? There would definitely be a power imbalance if so.

That said, I admit there can be ambiguity between the intention and effect of gendered comments. For example, my postgraduate supervisor once said he’d have to teach me how to write like a man. He said it kindly; he intended to be supportive, and I appreciated that, but it jarred because the phrase implies that writing like a woman has no value. Please think about that.

Happy Writing

Wattletales

On Celebration

It never occurred to me I’d still be here to write this post commemorating my 80^th birthday, yet here I am after recently renewing my passport with considerable but unjustified optimism. Last year I imagined all the different ways I might give myself a party for my coming of actual old age in 2023, but I chose instead to have a quiet one and had a memorable day with my daughter.

We banqueted at the Asian Flavour House on Glenelg’s Marina Pier. The food was superb, the service sublime and the weather and setting perfect on the deck. The restaurant served me a fried ice cream dessert with a sparkler on top. Other guests and the waiter then joined my daughter to sing Happy Birthday. It was very special indeed.

My TramsEnd poetry compatriots surprised me the following Saturday with a beautiful cake and glorious pot plant, cards and other gifts when we lunched at Elatte at The Bay after our regular meeting.

Restaurateur Rade added his magical smile to the day as he did at both of my book launches at Elatte last year. After lunch, he organised the cake onto a platter, nicely sliced and generously provided plates, cutlery and serviettes. He always makes me so welcome.

Inez organised the cake, and Valerie brought the pot plant, but the gifts were from TramsEnd Poets. I thank everyone for the kindness they showed me.

The 80 candles have a history, first used for David, then Valerie, and now for me. To accompany them, Valerie also wrote this delightful poem welcoming me to the octogenarian club. Who would have thought?

When I was a kid, I refused parties because I feared nobody would come, and I’ve remained pretty low-key about birthdays ever since. Turning 30 was my scariest; it signified that it was time to be an adult. When I turned 50, I celebrated quietly as for this one, but with my youngest son, Mark. We had lunch at home, and he gave me a single red rose, which I put on the table. My other two children were then living far away.

Childhood

I have spoken about my childhood several times on Wattletales, so I’m not going in-depth here except to say that my peripatetic life has gone from occupied Japan post-WWII to Oodnadatta in my late teens and early twenties. Just two of my two worlds, about as far apart as you can get, as these collages show.

Marunouchi Hotel, Tokyo Japan with BCOF

Transcontinental Hotel, Oodnadatta, SA

I continued to live and work in pubs at different times in different places over the years as a receptionist, cook, waitress, cleaner and barmaid. I worked in two well-known Glenelg venues in my early forties to save before going to Sri Lanka with my kids. Sometimes pub work was my mainstay, at others, a handy backup.

Change is the Only Constant in Life

As a teenager (a concept that entered the lexicon as I exited adolescence), I yearned to be 25. It seemed like the aspirational moment when I’d become an adult. I wasn’t a legal adult when I married a violent man at 17, a matter that required parental consent, which had no corresponding power to control my husband. At law, I could drive at 16 but not drink alcohol or sign documents until I reached the Age of Majority, at 21.

I once published a paper about the changing nature of Australia’s liquor laws,* exploring the age of consent for drinking alcohol. Since federation, the age limit has bounced up and down and was once 12. True.

When my three children and I lived in Sri Lanka during 18 months of field research in the mid-1980s, strings of young coconut leaves lined streets with houses where someone had died. This familiar sight inspired my kids to ask why so many people died in that country. The answer, of course, is that at home in Australia, we pretend nobody ever dies. As a culture, we mark death in enclosed cemeteries except for personal floral tributes at road accident sites which, like strings of young coconut leaves, wither in place. Death is a truth we tend to evade.

Soldiering On

I attempted unsuccessfully to survive marriage three times. I call my second marriage the real one because, from it, I had three wonderful children in 1971, 1972 and 1974. Their father left me when the youngest was still at kindy. I railed against my situation, playing the victim when I could. I assigned blame to mask a broken heart, although nobody thought I had one back then.

Yes, I was unhappy in the marriage and had been wish-dreaming that my husband would die because I lacked the initiative and courage to leave him. Dad encouraged me to do so while Mum, her best friend, and other older women advised the opposite, saying I shouldn’t do that to my children. I think the advice would be different today.

As a mother, I did what we must do. I put my head down to live and take care of my children. Solutions do not always exist, and life commands us to keep going, so I quashed dark thoughts. Deep down, I resolved to do nothing extreme that could hurt my children. Of course, there were other inadvertent ways of doing that. As it is, my children have their own stories, and all will differ from mine as they should.

My Salvation

After my marriage collapsed, I worked part-time managing a well-known Adelaide ballet school for my brother, Phillip Warrell and Rex Reid, both dancers. I caught a tram to the city every morning after eating a scrambled egg on toast till the monotony froze me in depression.

One day, a kind person (one of the well-heeled mothers) suggested I undertake tertiary study. ‘A clever girl like you’ is what she called me, who left school at 15. At her suggestion, I sat and succeeded in a university entrance exam that gave me a spot as a special entry student at the University of Adelaide.

On campus, I walked around feeling as though someone had stamped intelligence on my forehead. It was such a privilege. I loved university life, where I was finally free to devour books as I often did as a lonely child.

I made new and exciting friends and learned far more than the curriculum offered. Things I knew intuitively fell into place, and I revelled in a world rich in ideas and creativity. I even discovered feminism — for free because of Gough Whitlam.

Going Back

I was the first in my family to get a university education.

My father was born in Sydney’s Glebe slums in 1910 and walked barefoot three miles to and from school. If he got a pair of shoes for Christmas, he was thrilled. As a little boy, he became a bookie’s runner until he got his first ‘proper’ job labouring, earning ten shillings a week. Later, at 11, he joined the Navy and then the Army for WWII.

Mum worked in a woollen factory in Melbourne. She joked that she and her sisters had to pull fluff from their noses on the way home after work every day. When she died of lung disease, medical science said it was because she smoked. History ignored.

My first pay packet was six pounds from memory when I worked in a garage in Port Lincoln, pumping petrol aged 15-16. When we speak of inflation today, these figures tell us that our system is inflationary by definition, and one wonders where it might end.

The Simple Life

When I was a little girl in St Kilda, Melbourne, milk came on a horse-drawn cart. At the gate, the milky ladled fresh milk, which had a deep layer of cream, into domestic metal pails. When my children were little, the milky delivered milk in bottles to the front door, still creamy. There is no cream in the hundreds of milk brands now lining supermarket shelves. It is all about choice, they say, as competition helps profits to soar.

During my early teens in Mentone in Melbourne, before I left school, my parents and I sat around a little table, watching a wireless similar to the one pictured below to listen to serials. We had no television in Australia then and no mobile phones, not even cordless ones, and some of us didn’t have a phone at all.

Personal computers were unheard of, and you got your driving licence without a road test, as I did in Port Lincoln, South Australia. (Even after coming and going from SA, I still have the original licence number!) It was safe to go out at night. Men had punch-ups but didn’t end up in gaol, and nearly everybody smoked until the mid-1980s.

It wasn’t all good, but life was far simpler in my youth. Choices were fewer. If I go back to pre-adolescence, getting an icy treat meant choosing between a milk or water ice block in a square cone. They came in about three flavours. Milkshakes (my favourite was Blue Heaven) were a treat. Teenagers rarely had cars, and although I got my licence at 16 (before I could do any other adult things), I didn’t buy my first vehicle until I was 27.

Even when I had primary school children at home, people still played board games or cards at night or had singalongs, and families often did nothing more than watch little ones play. These activities brought generations together, whereas the push of technology and progress now separates us. Television did not then dominate as it does today, with multiplying streaming services and bewildering choices.

Progress

Where once a household had a single television set, it is now likely there’s one in every room. We don’t share computers; we have one each. This may be a generalisation, but I suspect capitalism’s impetus, like the technology it spawns, is to segregate and multiply the number of consumers it feeds in the name of profit that makes obscene levels of wealth disparity possible. Loss, in these terms, means less profit. Think about that.

Our economic system is a greedy monster that dehumanises as it grows, bringing isolation, loneliness, depression, and, for the young, a sense of disconnect, to which the only answer seems to be pills.

On a High Note

Of course, bad times and suffering exist at any age or stage, always interspersed with great satisfaction and happiness. As my dear Buddhist monk friend Bhante Ly would say, that is ‘the life’ (samsara).

My parents suffered extreme poverty during the great depression, and many of my friends experienced it as children here and elsewhere. As for World War II, we must never forget the suffering of the Jewish people or the devastation of frontier wars and war everywhere.

War separates and divides us as humans on an increasingly fragile planet. All we can do is live our best life with what we have for as long as we are lucky enough to be here. And I am indeed blessed to have come this far.

A beloved friend taught me we could overcome adverse circumstances, even severe illness and ageing, by maintaining curiosity. With this in mind, I try to treat each experience as new in the manner of dogs on walkies.

My advice now is to let small things fascinate you, the things that briefly flutter your heart or tickle your fancy. Take joy in a baby’s smile, a cat’s purr or a dog’s wagging tail and shiny, loving eyes. Relish sunshine after rain. See how leaves glisten. I love to luxuriate in freshly washed bed linen and take hot showers in cold weather. I have my down moments, but small things and my joy in writing remind me daily how fortunate I am to still be in this suffering world. 

Happy Writing

Wattletales

REFERENCES

* “Flirting with Morality in the Law: The Booze, The Bouncer and Adolescence Down Under’, in Anthropological Forum (1995) Vol.7 No. 7 pp.332-334

Love and Laughter

On 16 October 2022, with Nigel Ford as MC, Jude Aquilina set my little poetry book adrift in a room full of open hearts, wisdom and humour. The atmosphere was electric as friends, family and fellow poets received us and the book with love and laughter. Who could wish for more?

Jude has launched three of my five books with Nigel as MC. Individually or together, they each bring light into the darkness wherever they go with their profound generosity of spirit.

Jude writes splendid blurbs and introductions and reads closely, as evidenced by her insightful launch talks, and Nigel brings his jokes and expansive personality to keep people on their toes. He also shares his sound equipment, which is above and beyond. Click here to read more about Nigel‘s and Jude‘s poetry journeys.

Underpinning the joy of the day was Mr Rade’s delightful Greek-themed cafe and restaurant, Elatte. At all times, it brightens the Bay strip as it does my life. I take my friends there for the best coffee in Glenelg or a meal, and TramsEnd Poets meet there monthly for lunch. I love that Rade agreed to host not one but two launches for me this year, the first for my novel, The Publican’s Daughter, in April, and on this occasion, A Curious Mix in Free Verse.

Word Music

This mix of free verse is like the random jam of a jazz band, it makes you listen, smile and feel the rhythms of humanity. Jude Aquilina

As an early teen, all I had was Bill Hayley and the Comets until Elvis appeared. A few short years later, I was secretly horrified by the way girls screamed, swayed and swooned at a Bee Gees concert I went to with a cousin in Sydney, but when the group pulled up next to me on the street after the show waving and smiling and flirting from an open-topped car they got to me too! But my lingering love is for Elvis or, I now appreciate, the feelings his voice arouses even now.

In my late teens, country and jazz clamoured for dominance until, in Sydney’s underground bars on weekend afternoons, the pulse of the blues, piano, sax and scat in a fug of booze, smoke and men, jazz took the prize. How perceptive, therefore, of Jude to recognise jazz as the organising principle of A Curious Mix in Free Verse. Embodied truths come out in writing, whether we like it or not.

Rhythms of Life

Jude also spoke of the rhythms of life, which resonated with me. I am a solitary soul, yet, late in life, through poetry, I have come to know and count as friends many of the wonderful people who brightened the day. Two special people rose to the microphone to add their words of encouragement, Roger Rees and Kathryn Pentecost.

As many of you know, Roger is prominent in Goolwa’s Sand Writers and is a man of many talents. In poetry and prose, Roger applauds others whose courage or achievements he admires in what I see as a unique form of literary portraiture. His brilliant gaze similarly enlivens his recent publication, Venturing Out (Moonglow Publishing). I admire Roger more than he knows, and his praise of my work humbled me.

I first met Kathryn Pentecost of Delamere at one of her Yankalilla writing workshops. Since then, Kathryn has kindly let me share monthly Wattletales and occasional guest posts in her active South Coast Writers and Friends Facebook group. Kathryn also interviewed me about my novel for a review which was published in the Yankalilla Times. It also appears on Goodreads.

I thank Katherine for her encouragement, her kind words and especially for promoting my Wattletales website as she did. Kathryn has just published her husband, Geoff Bromilow’s biography, entitled Born at Sea (Moonglow Publishing).

My Invitation & Your Gift

It was risky, inviting so many people to a second launch in the space of six months, and I thank all those who came. With COVID restrictions lifted and travel back on the agenda, many friends were away, but I thank everyone who made time for me. Unfortunately, Avalanche, who was going to bring his saxophone as he did for The Publican’s Daughter launch, was held up at work, but his music was with us in spirit, and I thank him for that.

I thank Roger and Jude for writing enticing blurbs for the book. I also thank Inez Marrasso, who took charge of the door prize tickets, Helen Hutton for taking photos and Veronica Cookson and my daughter, Vanessa Warrell, for taking on book sales.

But to everyone, thank you for your gift of attendance. Through you as readers, my book now has a life, and I am genuinely grateful.

Holdfast Bay Libraries

I also need to acknowledge Holdfast Bay Libraries for all their support. As some of you know, Christine Kennedy attended the launch of The Publican’s Daughter, and Alice Mariano also of Holdfast Bay Libraries attended this one, both out of work hours.

The two books launched at Elatte are now in South Australia’s public library catalogue, both as paperbacks and ebooks. For someone like me who grew up with my head in books, lived in libraries and found many fictional friends in books all my life, having my work in libraries is a deep honour.

Recommendations

A friend who could not attend the launch for health reasons told me after she read A Curious Mix… that my strengths are in social commentary and humour, so I thought I’d end with two poems from it to represent her nominated themes.

Should you be interested, A Curious Mix in Free Verse is available in paperback from The Book Depository, Amazon, Booktopia, Barnes & Noble and, as an ebook on Kindle, Kobo and others.

Social Comment

Humour

Happy Writing

Wattletales

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Unless otherwise indicated, photos by Helen Hutton

The Prince and The Queen

Most of us shuck off our work or best clothes when we get home. Not so the Renaissance political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, who argued against the moral imperatives of his time by suggesting that violence and duplicity are the virtues of good rule. After the Medici sacked him in the 1500s, Machiavelli is reputed to have donned elaborate court finery at home to write his most famous work, The Prince. What is it with dressing up?

Machiavelli’s finery came to mind during the wall-to-wall television coverage of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II and associated ritual performances. Say what you will; it was a big show, a magnificent display of riches, jewels, finery, uniforms, military might, equine precision, and scrupulous detail, with the odd sentimental touch of flower mountains, corgis, and kids. Before long, splendid PhD theses will no doubt emerge on the power of symbolism to elicit the astonishing depth of reverence and emotion we saw in so many for so long across the planet.

Grief and Derision

Alongside grief, we also heard loud voices of derision for the pomp and pageantry from those for whom the same symbols stand for violence, oppression, and dispossession. Here in Australia, commentary erupted about it being time for us to become a republic which makes sense. After all, Australia’s ideal of us being a laid-back, secular, egalitarian culture, no matter how deceptive and misbegotten, hardly fits with the extravaganza we witnessed. We are much more football, meat pies, kangaroos and koalas.

It was fascinating to hear divergent voices of admiration and disdain, for, ironically, conflict is often vital in keeping ritual alive. Such dissonance between the two camps —those who cried and those who decried — is delightfully captured by the symbolic contrast between the late Queen’s genteel pastel taste in apparel, also reflected in her choice of coffin and flowers for her funeral and the mighty power of the 96-gunshot salute of Empire; discharged with military efficacy.

The Ever-present

Clothing has the power not only to express how we feel at a personal level or represent who we think we are socially but also silently inculcates in us moral things we need or ought to know as cultural beings, allowing us to intuitively read attire.

The Queen’s pastels and contrasting images with her in a bejewelled crown or military uniform were as familiar to me as my bedroom when I was a kid. Staff at the New Albury Hotel where we lived kept me awake at the age of 10 to listen to the young Queen’s coronation in the UK, crackling here on the wireless (as we then called the radio). Photos of her were everywhere and taken for granted for most of my early life, yet when we now see ubiquitous presidential images (think Saddam Hussein) in foreign lands, we consider it strange.

The Queen’s photos faded quietly from the scene but notice that bronze images of Captain Cook are seen to be in peril. Is it a gender thing?

In this country in my early years, there were more strategically placed representations of the Queen than statues of Captain Cook in public squares, she was ever-present. In my formative years, we sang God Save the Queen daily in school assemblies and stood to do the same at the cinema or any other public event. Her ubiquitously framed face smiled at us from corridor walls at school, in banks, shops and government offices and even in swimming pools, clubs and pubs. These are the ways we come to revere.

Today, TV and big screen representations dominate, and the young adore musicians, actors, and superheroes.

The First Royal Visit

I never asked why, but my mother, who shared her 21 April birth date with the Queen, despised royalty. She was disgusted that school children were ‘forced’ to travel by bus to line up for hours in the hot sun to see Her Majesty and Prince Phillip in 1954.

As one of those benighted children, I live to tell you that seeing the young Queen and her Prince Consort in Benalla NSW waving at us — at me — from an open-topped vehicle from not more than six feet away robbed me of breath in the few seconds it took for her to pass by. I was besotted. Unsurprisingly, therefore, while I would like to see Australia as a republic, I cried when the Queen died. That is the power of symbols in secular life, as in church. None of us grows up in a cultural vacuum.

Uniforms as Social Structure

I’m not fond of the glorification of war, yet also weep when I hear the Last Post because of cultural induction in childhood. At school in Melbourne, we were compelled to attend the Dawn Service in school uniform, often in freezing rain. It was common to hear people say that it rained on Anzac Day as though the ritual caused it to.

Since the mid-1980s, Anzac celebrations have become huge, yet my father, a Major in the Australian Army, refused to march to his dying day. He never said why but I gathered it was something to do with the Army not helping men who needed it. 

An Army cousin of mine fell in Vietnam the day before he was due to come home, and another served there in the Navy, as did the father of my children. We forget too soon that it took a fight for Vietnam veterans and, later, women to be included in the Anzac story, a conflict that in part helped revive Anzac Day celebrations.

While the Queen’s uniform-like adherence to pastels separated her from the rest of us and fashion trends, actual uniforms delineate and define groups such as the military. They, like the Queen, are special because they serve the rest of us in our regular clothes, even though we must look up to them. When the mighty are understood to serve the lowly like this, routine social distancing protocols are occasionally ritually reversed, reaffirming in contradiction the actual hierarchy.

As a slight aside, we upheld this tradition of reversal for a long time in the hotels where I grew up and seems still to be a feature of the hospitality industry if Masterchef is on the mark. At Christmas and other significant social moments, management always served the staff once the busy time was over. We didn’t, however, wear staff uniforms! Our subservience was implied by our actions.

Social Distancing

Nevertheless, in everyday life, being physically close to a person of great significance is a rare honour because we mere mortals are usually distanced from the powerful, not by a simple fence but by all sorts of protocols. It is the same in religion, where the sacred and profane are separated (think altar and pews). Both religious vestments and military garb do boundary duty. They are distinctive and highly structured garments for this reason.

The danger of that which should be kept apart mingling, either scared and profane or royalty and commoners, is considerable, which is why such happenings must be hedged around, fudged if you will. In esoteric rituals, this might be achieved by music, performance and sacred costuming (clothes!). In the case of the Queen’s funeral procession, the sleight of hand was in the magical concealment of high-level security.

Dressing Culture

Clothing across the planet, from the most ornate to loincloths and penis sheaths, always speaks of social hierarchy; apparel is a cultural artifact. The way things are worn defines boundaries. For example, how a sari or sarong is tied in South Asia speaks of culture and caste, while we think only of fashion or ethical shopping when it comes to that. Politics deviates a little but notice blue ties for LNP (blue is the colour of authority). While red is the ALP’s dominant colour Albanese has a flair with fashionable ties.

Closer to home, have you ever wondered why women must (or used to be compelled to) wear a hat in church, but men had to take theirs off? Is it because men are closer to God and may bare their heads, or are women thus defined as impure (must cover their heads in the presence of the divine) by contrast? The hat, in this case, is a boundary between sacred and profane. Dress codes always have something to say about social distinctions.

High Fashion’s Boldest Statement

Dressing up in lay life may have ethical options that avoid exploitation, but I am not sure this is fashion’s whole story. The Brownlow Medal red carpet ritual performance is a case in point, where footballers’ partners are announced as being ‘dressed by’ a named fashion designer, whether the garment is ethically procured or not.

The Brownlow event may just echo the Oscars, except that women at the latter gala are more often attending in their own right as possible contenders for a prize or as a presenter, suggesting that women in the movie business dress for themselves, their roles and prizes. So, why are partners of footballers forced to drape themselves glamorously on the arm of men vying to win best and fairest player on a field that women have barely got a toe in? It is a puzzle, isn’t it? Is there a Brownlow for women footballers yet?

What is a Dressing Down?

As for dressing down, we sometimes talk of stripping someone bare with our mind, imagining them naked if we fancy them, perhaps. In my mid-forties, I once got the giggles when my mind involuntarily conjured a pompous middle-aged lecturer in saggy, striped pyjamas. Imagining him like that, minus his suave, lecturer-relaxed-in-my-intellect style clothing, cracked me up. Thirty-odd years later, this poem spun from that episode. I should have called it dressing up, dressing down.

A Final Note

In part, I speak tongue-in-cheek in this post, but only in part. What fun it is to sit outside and pretend I’m not embroiled in the universal catastrophe of life like everyone else. But, remember this: dressing up our self-importance always means we are only ever a hair’s breadth away from being like Hans Christian Anderson’s emperor with his new clothes.

Happy Writing

Wattletales

In Retrospect

I went to university in my late 30s as a special entry student to prove wrong all those teachers and bosses who treated me like an ignorant underling. Even then, at university in the 1980s, my postgrad supervisor declared that he’d have to teach me to write like a man. It would seem my being a female was a problem. Who’d have guessed?

This dolly collage on my desk represents the little girl in me who had an early childhood in Japan and the old woman I am now, not quite the Venus of Willendorf, but nevertheless, a survivor. They sit together on my desk as a reminder of what life does to us, begging the question; do we stay the same as we change? What, in fact, makes us?

I left school at 15 with a Victorian Intermediate Certificate. I got zero for sewing but excelled at shorthand and typing. My mind is nothing if not quick. Mordialloc High School placed me in the commercial stream, saying I wasn’t bright enough to cope with the humanities. (I was new and from NSW). Never mind that I consistently topped the class in English Literature and Grammar, which were then both compulsory subjects, and, as history has it, I later got a PhD in the humanities.

Back then, feedback on a research funding application for a project on the National War Memorial and the ADF’s role in post-war Japan suggested I had a creative streak. In its rejection letter, the selection panel commended my submission, saying that it would make a great novel. It’s funny how life prods but you still head in the wrong direction. I had other things to prove!

School

I left school in 1958. Back then, we were brainwashed by reciting times tables by rote, every day, over and over until they became bodily memory. Very handy before calculators and computers. Amazing how, as waiters in pubs, we could compute the cost of drinks and meals for a crowd without so much as pen and paper.

We were orderly at school, where co-ed meant segregating boys and girls to opposite sides of the classroom and yard. We stood as one when the bell rang and filed out of class in gendered rows. We’d find ourselves banished to the head teacher’s door to be greeted by a wooden ruler across our knuckles for passing notes in class. There was no sly grog, no smokes, and no drugs in school back then although occasional whispers could be heard of early pregnancy when a girl disappeared without warning.

Systematic inferiority was inculcated in us by means of these chalky terror tactics. Today, I assume teachers use different means. After all, school is an arm of the state and future citizens must be shaped accordingly as anyone who has read Foucault will agree.

In this context, I thank David Malouf for his onomatopoeic valorisation of my humble beginnings as the fastest typist in the world in his poem and eponymous book, Typewriter Music. Not only does it brilliantly evoke the sound of a busy typewriter, but it also beats in my heart as a symbol of the art and craft of poetry itself. Well, what can I say, I’m a Malouf fan although my love of poetry was born in elocution lessons when I was a child. Do kids still have those? My parents wanted me to speak well in a British sort of way while today TV has taught us all to speak American.

My first profession was as a barmaid, housemaid, cleaner and rouseabout. Malouf had nothing to with that but these capabilities served me well, whenever money was tight. Throughout my tertiary years after entering university as a special entry student, I cooked breakfasts and cleaned in various hotels and motels and waitressed in others. A handy skill that helped me save a few extra dollars to take my kids with me to Sri Lanka when I did postgrad field research there.

The IQ test

At 26 years of age after my mother sent me to a psychiatrist because I wasn’t yet married, I took an IQ test hoping to find direction. In my day, being single at that age was an indicator that something was amiss. It was a thing for girls. The test report scored my IQ at 160 which is in the top 2% of the population, well past Mensa’s entry standard.

When I sat down for what was then a 1.5-hour exam the administering psychologist tried to reassure me that nobody ever finished it, so I shouldn’t worry. Patronising git. He nearly fell over when I completed the paper in under 60 minutes, yet his recommendation put me in my place, reminding me as it did that I was a mere girl by suggesting that I had the capability to become a nurse or a teacher. Higher aspiration was reserved for boys.

Mum really should not have worried. After all, I was briefly married when I was 17 to a violent man, a marriage that lasted only six months from which I was divorced at 21 (we had to wait three years). But, her concern by then was that nobody would want an ‘ageing’ divorcee, although I’ll never understand why she cared when she married at 19 and was miserable ever after.

I did marry again at 27 and rapidly produced three children, but I apparently married the wrong sort of man. He was Dutch and younger than me. Mum was never satisfied. I understand now that all she ever wanted was for me to fit in, but I never did.

Over time, I have come to attribute my lifelong inability to conform to gendered expectations to my IQ. A doctor recently told me that one’s Intelligence Quotient doesn’t change despite seniors’ moments which is heartening. But, now that I’m old I find myself being patronised even more than when I was young. Funny, isn’t it, how the world turns.

The Good Secretary

Nursing and teaching were not for me, and, IQ notwithstanding, I scored a highly-paid executive secretary job with my brilliant shorthand and typing skills. The role would nowadays be called office or business manager.

My new boss, the engineering son of a prominent eye specialist, said he decided I was suitable for the job the minute he saw me walking in the rain towards the entrance to his premises in Melbourne Street, North Adelaide, carrying an umbrella with books under my arm. My salary was equivalent to the then Prime Minister’s secretary.

I bought my first car, a little Nissan that I had to ask the dealer to drive home, but when my confidence grew to match my newly inflated ego, I traded the Nissan — wait for it — for a Holden Kingswood. To paraphrase Gough, well may you laugh.

Despite the confidence overlay, my educationally ingrained sense of inferiority still had me yearning for approval. This poem about that office tells the tale.

Moving On

In the end, I fought with my boss because I had no idea how to assert myself (nobody had heard of that word) and walked out, leaving him in the lurch as ill-educated, clever-dick upstarts are prone to do when jobs are to be had everywhere. I headed bush for a while and then to Darwin with a dollar in my pocket after I paid for the taxi from the airport. The driver took me to a boarding house where I found lodgings on the way and a government typing-pool job the next morning.

Before I caught the plane, Mum took me to Woollies to buy a new floral nylon dress with a fine-pleated skirt. She said nobody up there would guess where it came from (Darwin’s ‘frontier’ population was then 14,000). As soon as I could replace it with cotton, I did because nylon was full of static and stuck to my skin in the humidity. I notice today that manufactured fabrics proliferate, even in the sub-tropics. Attempts at subterfuge are now useless, shops are the same everywhere to the extent I sometimes wonder why people still travel.

About Cars

Getting a driver’s license when I was 16 was a breeze. I was living in Port Lincoln at the time, where Mum and Dad managed The Pier Hotel. My first job after school was pumping petrol at a local garage for six pounds a week (my father’s first salary was ten shillings a week). I then became Dad’s (sic) dining-room hostess and receptionist. I remember one day asking a customer wanting to book in for his name. When he said, ‘Robin Hood,’ I quipped with, ‘And, where’s Friar Tuck?’ I thought he was joking, he was not amused.

One day a local policeman whispered in my ear that it was about time I got my license. He’d seen me driving around in various young men’s cars. Just pop into the station, he said, and I did, to sit a test on the road rules, and that was it. Every time I return to South Australia, my original license number follows. No driving test then, although I believe they may force one on me when I turn 80 early next year.

I married my first husband when I was 17 and he was 33. He had a work vehicle and was away a lot, so bought me a black FJ Holden to get around Adelaide. It had convenient triangular widows that wound out so you could ash your cigarettes. Gear stick driving, of course, and little orange indicators that flicked up in the newer models, but I had to put my arm out of the window to turn, no matter the weather.

I remember my first husband well.

The Sky is Still There, But…

Who remembers the sweet sound of a washing machine agitator swishing and swirling back and forth in early morning silence, window dreaming, squeezing sodden clothes through a ringer to be hung on lines strung across the lawn, propped up by forked, grey timber poles you could lower to reach and heighten for the breeze (and occasionally fell flat on the ground, heavy from rain)? Rows of sheets, towels, white cloth nappies and neat rows of trousers, shirts, frocks, socks and undies soaked in the sun’s goodness. Even rain refreshed and a breeze shook away any residue after a fall.

Today, we can’t moon around while doing the washing. Instead, we must leave the little tiled cubicle most dwellings call a laundry at the behest of a pre-set washing machine cycle. No involvement, no control but lots of mechanical noise and, if a load gets out of balance, the washing machine beeps like a fridge door left open too long or your car when you put the key in the ignition before you close the door or forget your seat belt.

Daily irritations are the order of the day.

Machines determine how things should be done. If they break down, it is final. In this world of planned obsolescence, we are forced to replace them and pray the bloke who brings the new one will take the broken one away. Otherwise, we have to pay to dump things. Even middle Australia’s beloved icon, the Hills Hoist, is vanishing with the koala as we pile our laundry direct from washers into driers in tight spaces (think European laundries, hidden behind slats in corridors) for convenience’s sake. Talk about power bills. Who is making all that money I wonder.

The sky is still there and the air, but there’s no room for clotheslines in flats and high-rise residential dwellings. No matter how many settings there are on newfangled models that let you adjust times and temperatures for artificial fabrics, doing the laundry is not the same. Rain, fresh air and sun have been replaced by the claustrophobic tension of having to separate clothes and linen by fabric and colour according to their manufacturer’s specifications which are inconsistent with your washing machine’s options. Commerce rules.

Public Transport and a Public Private Life

Only those using public transport routinely feel the weather today. I remember well travelling from North Ryde in Sydney to the Haymarket and back every day for work, a long, high-heeled walk followed by bus, train, tram and another long walk. Both walks were downhill on the way into the city and uphill on the way home. Walking alone on a rainy night with footsteps behind was scary but standing under a streetlight with a brolly in the freezing dark was in its own way, thrilling.

I also sometimes miss those nippy mornings sitting over a two-bar radiant heater, shivering, clasping a cup of coffee for warmth until the orange glow was enough to defrost fingers and toes. We got by. At the other end of the spectrum, I worked in a Nissen Hut in Wet Season Darwin in the early years without air conditioning. We had fans at our feet, blowing paperwork and cigarette ash hither and yon in the oppressive heat.

We were allowed to go home if the temperature got over 100F, I think it was. But when an electrical storm broke through 98% humidity, we laughed and scampered out to dance like people in love in its heavenly tropical downpour.

At night in the Government hostel on Darwin’s Esplanade, we luxuriated in single rooms beneath the comforting whirr of rusty ceiling fans, the smell of mildew (on our clothes and walls) and the chirrupy sound of geckoes. At 21, newly divorced, I used to creep out at midnight to the common room to practice the piano. Becoming a pianist was something that all young Australian girls aspired to beyond lust for horseriding inspired by Mary Grant Bruce’s bush-for-girls stories. I’d given up in shame as a publican’s child, practising on the keyboard in front of guests and quit again in cowardice when the hostel mocked me as the phantom pianist.

Home

In Oodnadatta, I cooked in my parent’s pub on a fuel range in temperatures that regularly soared over 107F or 42C in summer. No airconditioning. Our only protection from the ambient inferno was flywire.

When I was a little girl of about seven or eight in Redan Street in St Kilda where my parents had a room in a guest house after WWII, I took comfort from the warmth of burning coal in a small hearth. Dirty, messy things they were. But, we had the fragrance of freshly baked bread wafting past on Clydesdale-drawn carts whose sweet, gold, steaming horse shit lined the streets. Bakers Delight offers neither aroma. Maybe my younger sense of smell was more acute.

Those heroic horses also clip-clopped down Redan street with ice (yes, for the icebox) and small vats of milk with inches of thick cream on top. All the smells, tastes and sounds of my childhood, so pungent, distinctive and thrilling have been replaced by traffic’s roar and the beep, beep of a refrigerated Coles delivery van that chills your bread to a temperature suitable for fresh food causing faster mould growth and dripping cans that soon rust in your dry food cupboard.

While I can’t say I miss grubs in apples and cabbages, it worries me that we are daily bombarded with unnatural but perfectly formed fresh produce poisoned by pesticides. Apples from the tree smell so sweet and there was always that fearful tremor of excitement that you might encounter a worm. Can you get a whiff of a Granny Smith on a Coles shelf? I don’t think worms could survive there, our fruit is in cold storage for too long.

On The Medical Side of Things

How many of you remember having a smoke with your doctor? Were you ever offered a cigarette from his packet (always his back then) as he pushed the ashtray towards you to share? We may not have been treated well for women’s problems, especially if you were single and wanted the pill, or had either thrush or unwanted pregnancy, all of which aroused opprobrium, but sharing a fag gave us a contradictory sense of equality.

I remember in my early thirties having major surgery in the Wakefield Street Private Hospital in Adelaide and two nurses beside my bed when I got back to my room, all three of us giggling and smoking while I was still groggy from anaesthetic, the ashtray on my tummy.

My three babies were born in smoke, the first two in Calvary Hospital in North Adelaide and one in Darwin where the matron and a couple of nurses would smoke with me, while I cradled my baby in my left arm, fag in the right hand, gesticulating. Nobody ever believed I’d quit which I did with the greatest of ease, albeit a bit late to save my kids. I tried once before my third child was born, but my husband, brother and parents piled it on, telling me I was too cranky to bear so I should go back to smoking. True.

What they didn’t realise was that I was actually speaking up for myself for the first time in my life and it made them uncomfortable but, I gave in under duress. My stagecoach to honest self expression was slow to start.

Some things were bad back then, but the good stuff was being able to cradle your newborn in your arms when it was time to drive home from the hospital. No back-facing baby pods on the back seat. Dislocation now starts early! I would have hated what has become the safety norm for young parents today, but everybody drives more and the traffic is insanely dangerous in our brave new world so I’d comply.

I cycled my first two infants to kindergarten as pre-school was once known, and walked them all as little ones to school until they could ride themselves. It was a different world.

Enough for Now

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s it from me for now. If anybody has a tale about how different their young world was to tell in a Wattletales guest post, it would be most welcome.

TIP

What you leave out of your writing speaks as loud as words on the page.

Wattletales

Happy Writing

Putting a Light on the Strangest Things

I’ve changed the furniture in my life, like others change clothes, but not for fashion or status. Always seeking comfort in furniture, I’ve found that interminable discomfort ensues. What suits one place is undesirable in the next and, because I have moved a lot, there has been a lot of furniture under my bridge. However, it is not only when I move that I change furniture, so let me throw this delightful light on my furniture fetish.

I’m not fond of yellow-glow lighting, but I adore my gold and crystal chandelier. When it was first hung, I often lay back on my pretend-sofa bed to gaze up at it. It still thrills me, reminding me as it does that I am a tart at heart. Not that anyone would guess now, but I once harboured lust for red patent leather high heels that would have made Julie Bishop blush, not to mention Hollywood’s Dorothy of the red slippers in The Wizard of Oz. Now, approaching 80, I have descended into the endless tedium of utility, except for domestic adornments and my eternal search for comfort.

Seriously though, when a piece of furniture stays with us, it learns who we are and then robs us of comfort. We think of furniture as inanimate, but I declare it has a mind of its own and is as fickle as we are. Do we not feel an urge to stand if we sit too long? And, doesn’t sitting beckon after we stand for a while? Life is in perpetual motion, as is my furniture.

When Things Stick

If we try to let go of an item we love, it clings. Sometimes, when hate is embedded in it, it will do the same thing out of spite. When an item is meant to move on, it will sell immediately on Marketplace; if not, you’ll have trouble giving it away.

A friend recently bought a new couch for the delivery of which she had to wait 18 weeks, as is the way in current climes where COVID and shipping delays rule. The delay meant she had months to sell her old sofa, but nobody on Facebook’s Marketplace wanted it despite price-lowering to the point of insanity. Her notice posted in our building attracted zilch interest, and Vinnies would not even come to look at it although it was a beautiful, new-looking cream leather piece of Italian design.

A volunteer organisation called Second Chances finally agreed to collect my friend’s old lounge but not until weeks after the new one was due to be delivered. She had to endure the squeeze of two sizeable sofas in a tiny space for a very uncomfortable while.

At the point when my friend decided in desperation to send her dear old lounge to the tip, it accidentally found an unusual home in a halfway house. Someone she knew who knew someone who worked in rehabilitation said they’d take it, and it now happily provides luxurious if temporary comfort for a rotation of unfortunate souls newly released from gaol. It once again basks in loving appreciation.

Katherine, Melbourne and Aldinga Beach

When I retired, I shipped my German-crafted microfibre aubergine two-seater, bought while I was in the chips in Katherine in the Northern Territory, to Melbourne where the boiler blew up in my second-storey flat and ruined it. It was my last sofa for a while. The end of an era.

I soon moved from that flat into a high-rise public housing studio for the elderly in Prahran, which has become the setting for my second novel, High Rise Society. There, I switched to a click-clack sofabed which soon came with me to Aldinga Beach in SA as a spare bed that my eldest son slept on in the outside studio until it gave up the ghost. A temporary sort of piece, it sturdily saw us both through tough times.

In Aldinga Beach, my first lounge suite was a locally manufactured three-piece suite in apple green, a good colour for healing which I suspect I needed then. Its settee was soon relegated to my outside studio and the two chairs to my bedroom because they were too lightweight for heavy-duty visitors. I replaced them with a pair of oversized Californian armchairs that were over $1000 each (on special) from now-defunct Le Cornus and I dare not tell how little they sold for at Unley Auctions three months later.

I finally found a two-tone brown and tan lounge at Nick Scali, just right for the dog and me, as they say in fairy tales. When I moved into a retirement unit, Nick Scali went with Clarrie to his new home.

Three Desks and Office Chairs

The Aldinga Beach house also saw three desks pass in and out of its doors. My first was a small glass thing until I bought a sociably round dining table which let me convert the old rectangular one into a desk with a lightweight rug cover, something I learned from my Dutch mother-in-law many years ago.

After a bit of a windfall when I went back to full-time work aged 69-71, I replaced the table with a white corner setting as though somehow, I was established. It was at this desk that I wrote The Publican’s Daughter.

The new Aldinga desk invited a posh office chair so I exchanged my comfortable Ikea with the expensively uncomfortable chartreuse job you see in the photo on the left, recently exchanged for white Temple & Webster’s comfort in Manson Towers, where my current desk is white glass. (The Aldinga Beach desk did not fit into my tiny unit. In fact, the removalists had to take it away to give away on moving-in day!)

It Gets Worse

Immediately after moving into Glenelg’s Manson Towers retirement village, I had to downsize. With arrogant disregard for ageing and flush with the proceeds of selling my house, I had bought in advance, a high fashion button-press sofabed from King Living Furniture. It was lovely to look at. Wonderful to sit on to read.

However, the name of the shop should have warned me; King Living furniture is clearly for kings, not old ladies like me. While the sofabed idea allowed me to use the bedroom here as a studio and it matched the uncomfortable chartreuse office chair, for daily life, it was a bugger of a thing.

Any fool knows that a sofabed must be made anew every night and stripped every morning but, as you can see, there are two long back cushions on this piece, too heavy for me to lift when I buzzed the bed to full size at night and I had nowhere suitable to store them or the bed linen in the morning. So, I once again sold high-dollar fashion for pennies and replaced it with a real bed which, with covers serves as a sofa during the day.

The Utter Discomfort of Furniture

As for armchairs, I bought a cream leather rocker to start village living. When it upset my arthritic hip before surgery, I swapped it for a lovely burnt coral velvet number for half the price from Harvey Norman and I loved that until I needed something I could sleep in overnight when unwell.

These two pieces quickly found the best of homes. A delightful, fresh-faced young tradie whose wife was expecting their first baby took the cream leather and a heavily pregnant about-to-be-first-time mum, the burn coral velvet, both to be used as feeding chairs. These two chairs literally ran away from me for a better life.

Now I have a ruby leather recliner from Wohlers and even it has become uncomfortable after I spent weeks sleeping on it with four crush fractures in my spine last winter. As the Buddha says, nothing stays the same, life is constantly arising and — dare I say it, in decay. Decay sounds better I think, than passing away — for now.

I wrote the poem Serious Nonsense a couple of years ago, long before I decided to expand the theme here.

Revealing Stuff

If we agree with the notion that one’s house is a symbol of the self, then my changing furniture is symbolic not only of my circumstances but also of my inner life as it has changed and changed and changed. Having moved so much, I can’t possibly talk about all the furniture I’ve left behind but I adored and mourn the jarrah table in the poem. I used to polish it lovingly with fragrant orange oil in Darwin at a time when I entertained a lot. Is it the table I miss, do you think?

I know that many spend changing lives in the same place, replacing some things, piling others on and filling garages with items they cannot bear to let go of. Some are probably borderline hoarders, others might feel that what they collect is their legacy. However, now that we live in a world that changes constantly and seems to go faster and faster every day, it is conceivable that I’m not as alone as a mover and furniture changer as I might once have been.

Cleaning out and moving on is my way. I pay speeding fines instantly to forget them and equally quickly dispose of anything that no longer has a function in my life. My wardrobe is regularly culled and I delete texts from my iPhone immediately after a conversation.

The same goes with cupboard and fridge contents and, sometimes, friends. I left my sex life behind when I shaved my head. I am a ‘clearer-outerer’, but not when it comes to memories. Those I cherish. Few know what a peripatetic and unusual life I’ve led, but I’ve loved every minute, as though I’ve wafted through it all, high on fragrant orange oil.

Tip

As writers, we need to render strange that which is normal or normalise the strange. Think about your furniture and see what you come up with. What does it say about you? How useful is knowing the complexity of these everyday things for your writing, settings and character development?

Happy Writing

Wattletales

Science and Creativity

I have had a fortunate academic and professional career, strands of which persist in my creative fascination with other people and their lives. In particular, I love to explore the power of creativity to heal.

For 30 years, I was both the designer and Director of South Australia’s Community Rehabilitation Program for People with Brain Injury and the Institute for the Study of Learning Difficulties. During that time, I adopted a positive approach to people suffering from brain injury and related neurological disorders, using language which nurtured whichever brain system was impaired.

As a pioneer in this method, I passed new skills to students and wrote and broadcasted twelve scripts for the ABC Radio Science Show. These include Sailability and Recovery from Stroke, Music and the Mind, about strategies that helped Gabriel Gifford recover after an assassin’s bullet destroyed her entire left temporal lobe. Humour as Medicine demonstrates the extent to which the brain’s emotional circuits are nourished by humour.

Also, there is the script called Oliver Sacks — Virtuoso, a collaboration with Sacks that explores the way music, dance, and poetry play a significant role in the rehabilitation process.

Motor Neurone Disease (MDN)

My time with people with MND again demonstrated the power of the arts to make a significant difference, something I shared with the scientist Peter Scott-Morgan, diagnosed with incurable MND in 2018. He defied this disease by pushing the boundaries of science to transform himself with robotics to extend his life.

After becoming a Cyborg, Peter responded most warmly to this poem. A significant factor about writing it is that it provides both my students and me with an understanding of the stage-related process of this illness. Poetry is to the fore in the diagnosis of MND.

Demob Suitcase

In ‘Demob Suitcase’, I write to my father about what it was like to see him maimed by war and endure a brave but slow recovery. As a child, this was my first clear indication of what constitutes the uniqueness of the human spirit and how it can best be nurtured. Here is an excerpt.

On a Far East 1943 Pacific morning, as dawn broke, explosions heralded another battle. An erupting torpedo shell wound its way, a direct hit. You held your hands and forearms to protect your face; your chest became bloodied and ripped. That day your world changed, the sky descended, acrid smoke and tribes of clouds passed overhead as your flesh tore.

You were carried below the battle deck to your bunk. There would be no more handshakes, no more holding children aloft, no more piano playing, no more doing up buttons or tying shoelaces. You could no longer reach out and touch your case as it told of home and upon its canvas floated your hope, its contents, your dreams. But it took more than a shell strike to bring about your ruin.

You can read, print or download the full article here.

Suffering and Beauty

With Adelaide poet Jude Aquilina I had the satisfaction of being involved in SA’s Mental Health Week, which entailed working with, and presentations for people with mental health difficulties: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorders, alcoholism and schizophrenia. This little poem commemorates that occasion and expresses my admiration for Jude’s wonderful work.

Lindy Warrell often comments that I write a lot in admiration of creative people and others who inspire me with their courage and fortitude, as I do in this poem about someone who suffered indescribable pain.

Whether in prose or a poem, I am often inspired to write about suffering, whether from mental incapacity, ill health, war or incarceration.

The human spirit in the face of adversity is, in the end, what constantly fascinates me, as I hope these two poems attest.

My Life Today

I continue to work and write in retirement with the sense that I’ve led a charmed life with Tricia, my beloved wife, friend and companion. Living in Goolwa close to the sea is soul-satisfying.

I welcome each day at the piano, playing Chopin’s nocturnes, waltzes and mazurkas. I enjoy sailing my 25ft yacht, Wind in the Willows, where I am Toad, who bosses his crew. And I am grateful to have the opportunity to appreciate the world around me.

More fortunate than many, I live daily with the joy of knowing how nurturing language can give people courage in difficult times.

AUTHOR BIO

My husband bought me lilies for Valentine’s Day. They are enormous; white blooms unashamedly ostentatious; their heady, exotic scent rising like a sacred offering, dispelling the odours of attempted toddler toilet training, cat litter, and musty fingerprints of God-knows-what on unwashed walls.

Five children bring love, laughter, chaos, and wonder to my world, but they also push romance into the abyss beneath the couch cushions, along with creativity, silence, and reflection. We’re just too busy.

Flowers are a rebellion.

We can’t afford them. We don’t need them. They bring no practical value to our household. And yet their scent… Why does their scent fill me with hope?

Flowers take me outside. Beyond the walls of school drop-offs, dinner preparation, appointments, and fear, fear, everywhere; beyond my own skin, pain, age, and memories that flicker like fading candlelight. They take my hand and lead me to a place where green grows deep and bright, where blooms reach and hang in clustered colour, where the air carries water from sea and river, and the earth remembers.

Flowers are words.

Both hold the wildness of chaos and harmony, symmetry and serendipity. Both sing of a rich and mysterious beauty that we long for, yet never fully reach. Both are formed from love – a love which we cannot comprehend, yet know we need if we are to be truly alive.

Even as a child, words were always more to me than symbols through which we communicate. Words – both read and written – held a kind of magic, a hint of something intangible and vital. I wrote, not for my words to be read, but simply to stay connected to that mystery.

Then I grew up. I left school, got a job, found a partner. Life was good. Words and their magic became the silly, remembered fantasies of childhood. I got married, had a child, then another, and another. For ten years of my life, I built a world for my family out of myself, stretching skin wide and thin around a frame of brittle bones, hollowing myself out to become a place where they could be safe from the monsters outside.

But the monster was me. Like a wild, trapped thing, I savaged my way out from the cage I had created. The world I had carefully built collapsed, and I was lost, buried in the wreckage.

And there, in the silence left behind, I heard a sound I’d long forgotten.

Words. Humming like vibrations through the air, through my fingers. Hidden in the undergrowth, in the infinite. I listened.

I enrolled to study Creative Writing at Tabor Adelaide. I crawled into my first class, waiting for someone to expose me as the fraud I felt I was. But the pointed finger never came and, instead, I found a doorway to a world of rich and vivid colour – a world I remembered. I had been to this place before. I knew these wild paths, these sensations of movement and texture and rhythm, and this feeling of limitless possibility.

I breathed deep the sweet air of freedom and stepped through the open door. I began to write again. The dam wall had burst, and I wrote like a mad thing, poems pouring out from me with a roar. Soon I had gathered enough for my first anthology, Then There Was You – but I needed a new name for this awakened self. To be honest, I sought to be slightly sheltered from the raw intensity that somewhat frightened me. And so I became Elizabeth Snow. Not child, nor mother, nor wife. Elizabeth Snow – the woman who writes.

I have had two more children since I began to write again, but I will never again believe that I must sacrifice my own inner world in order to nourish theirs. Here is where I come alive, where words hold truth and power, and where my children may see what hope looks like.

Hope is where flowers bloom. It is where I grow, verdant and rebellious. Hope is an act of great courage – to choose to remain close to the source, close to love, even when the world tells us we are selfish or proud, or unnecessary. For me, to hope is to write. And to write is to live.

To know that which gives us life is itself a gift, and though we may choose to share it, we must never let it be lost.

Hope shows us not just a flower, but closer – the intricate design, the swirl of ivory on emerald, the undulation of petal and leaf; the scent of honey and pine; the silk of milk and green… Then, closer still, we see beauty, possibility, love. We see ourselves mirrored there, perfect, imperfect, flawed and flawless. Loved.

We are flowers.

We are words.

And we must never lose hope.

AUTHOR BIO

We Met in Melbourne

My friend Margaret Luginbuhl passed away in France on 26 March 2022. She was 83. I wanted to do a post to honour her, and I thank her daughter, Albertine, for allowing me to do so. Albertine kindly contributed some delightful memory gems about her mother when they were younger, showing that Margaret then was as steadfast, loving and wise as the woman I got to know in later years.

I met Margaret in 2004 when I left my beloved Darwin for Melbourne, where two of my three children then lived. Almost as soon as I got there, I began to have crush fractures of the spine and, at 61, found myself on a Disability Pension. I signed up for public housing, which came through quickly, and I found myself in a small studio at No 25 King Street in Prahran, where Margaret was my next-door neighbour. Over time, we became close friends, walking and talking and sitting beneath shady trees in Princes Gardens or taking coffee on Chapel Street.

Margaret often came with me to Brighton Beach when I took my little dog Lolo for walkies. She sat on the sand in those high-rise days, but in readiness for the south of France on one of her routine biennial trips to see her children when she was around 80 years of age, my friend bought a bathing suit and had a bikini wax. She was full of surprises, slim as she had become.

An Old Soul

Margaret was a dignified person of unique intellect, warmth and unflagging curiosity about everything and everyone around her, an old soul. I was proud that she chose me as a friend. We were only physically together for a little over a year before I returned to South Australia to live, but our friendship strengthened through time.

With her partner, Graeme Wilson, Margaret stayed with me in Aldinga Beach once, and we had short annual catchups when I went to Melbourne to be with my daughter for Christmas, but we stayed in regular contact by phone for years. We called each other at least weekly or whenever we wanted to share.

Despite the geographical distance, Margaret’s death affected me deeply. Over the years, our friendship had become an affair of the heart. We admired each other, and I always felt better after talking to her. My friend was one of the few people apart from my other two children who met and loved my eldest son before he died. That gave me great comfort.

I learned from our friendship that intimacy grows despite separation, and love persists across distance. And, because love, as a matter of the heart, is a physical experience, grief doesn’t consider absence either. We all know that when someone is no longer with us on this earth, even after habits form around their absence, the flow of love never ceases, and grief can sometimes catch us unawares because those we love in life are always part of who we are.

A Place of One’s Own

While I struggled at first with a sense of failure for finding myself in public housing, Margaret relished it, and I learned from her. A place of her own represented independence, one of Margaret’s highest values. Like so many people in No. 25 and its sister building, No. 27, then dedicated to the elderly, residents felt secure, as did I with Margaret’s friendship. I have taken this remarkable fact as the premise of the novel I am now working on called, for the time being, High Rise Society which I’ll dedicate to Margaret, who thought it would make an excellent story.

The Romance

Margaret, a nurse, met engineer Graeme at ARAFMI (Association of Relatives and Friends of the Mentally Ill) when she returned from France to live at home in Australia.

When Graeme was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few years ago, Margaret finally relinquished her beloved unit to live with and care for him in his family home in Camberwell. While they tried to live together as a couple earlier in life, the fact that they were both bipolar meant they found it better to live apart. Yet, Margaret’s love was such that she wanted to be with Graeme when he needed her.

Albertine told me that in France, the year Graeme became ill, Margaret talked endlessly about illness, manic depression and death. She and her brother Simon and his son listened patiently for a few days until they reminded her that she was on holiday. They made up the 3M game — every time Margaret said maladie, manico depression or mort, she was deprived of one cigarette that day (not really, but just for the game). After a couple of days, Margaret allowed herself to relax into holiday mode. Knowing as I did how worried and sad Margaret was before she left, I was thrilled to hear this.

Margaret and Graeme’s romance lasted over 30 years. They delighted in the cinema, classical music, theatre and ballet; both were bookworms. They had so much in common. When Graeme’s condition deteriorated, he retired to a nursing home where Margaret visited him, tending daily to his needs until he passed away. Margaret’s grief was deep, but she found the energy and courage to find herself a flat in the private sector when Graeme’s children sold their father’s house and remained independent despite her declining health.

Then COVID came.

Margaret as Mum in Albertine’s Words

Albertine flew out from France earlier this year to take her mother home, where she could look after her. I am glad that Margaret spent her last few months with Albertine and her son, Simon, and grandchildren. Despite her raw grief, Albertine offered these vignettes from earlier times with her mother. The central piece is, As I Remember Mum.

Across Time and Space

Margaret stayed in close contact with Albertine and Simon and their children across the oceans, not only by phone and mail but during her visits to France. Margaret told me they treated her like royalty. Seeing her children and grandchildren filled Margaret with an abiding, life-sustaining joy.

In 2019, my brave friend travelled to France with a broken and badly infected toe. She was still on heavy pain meds to keep her going until she returned to have the toe amputated. On her previous trip, she nursed herself to recovery from a double mastectomy for breast cancer.

Albertine told me that, after Margaret had the little toe removed, she called her to say, ‘You know, I think they ought to have a window at the Alfred (Hospital),  with all the pieces they’ve removed from my body on display.’ What a wry sense of humour.

Curiosity is the Solution

Born in Australia on 9 August 1938, Margaret had three children, Albertine and Simon, who live in France, where Margaret lived until she returned to Australia after suffering severe mental illness. Her other daughter, Shauna, lives in Brisbane. Shauna’s daughter visited her nana in Melbourne in recent years, but Margaret did not meet her first great-granddaughter, four-year-old Tori, from Shauna’s eldest son. 

Margaret was an articulate and somewhat formal person, a stickler for etiquette and good manners. She once told me that mental illness was no excuse for unkindness or poor behaviour. Margaret’s erudition astounded me. Unlike me, she barely watched TV and read, always returning from the library with a wide range of books. Her favourite novelist was Isabel Allende, but she read non-fiction and biographies too. She was interested in everything.

Curiosity guided Margaret’s life. Even in illness, she once told me, the way to get through it was to be curious about whatever was going on. On her advice, I now bring curiosity to my ageing process. It has the uncanny effect of distancing you from yourself as you relinquish the fantasy of forever being young. Instead, you meet life with the question: what’s next?

The Storyteller

Margaret had an insatiable love of life and a remarkable capacity to tell stories. There was not even a smidgen of judgement in her bones. She’d sometimes ring to tell me about the suffering of a Middle Eastern taxi driver who had confided in her while she was his passenger. People on trams spoke to her of their woes. As Albertine says, Margaret attracted people — she had a distinct gravitas, but more than that, she listened with an open heart. No wonder people from all walks of life were drawn to her.

Margaret’s stories were up there with a good novel. She had an excellent memory for detail that comes from a genuine fascination with the lives of those she encountered daily. I miss her stories, her kindness, her steadfastness, and our laughs.

Margaret baked shortbread biscuits for her friends and anyone she respected or cared for every Christmas. She was a fine cook. For many years, Margaret taught English to migrants and was herself always learning. A few years ago, already fluent in English and French, she set out to refresh her Italian, and I met even more people in Margaret’s life through her stories.  

The Plan Stopper

Margaret had arranged to return to France to live after Graeme died, but COVID slammed Australia’s borders shut on her plans. Soon after, she had to move from the flat she had grown fond of to another less to her liking. It didn’t bother her initially because she saw it as a temporary thing as she’d already booked and paid for tickets to France. But ill-health and COVID conspired against her.

COVID 19 hit Melbourne especially hard. Mandatory lockdown, separation from friends, illness, and inability to go to the library or the Citizens Advice Bureau where she had volunteered for 25 years or attend her Italian lessons and other groups took their toll. She could not even go for coffee in Chapel Street, leaving Margaret bereft.

In a few short years, Margaret lost her partner, moved house twice, had breast cancer surgery, an amputation followed by a knee reconstruction while all along being at risk of blindness for which she had regular ocular injections. It was too much for her tiny frame, and her mental health began to suffer.

The Irony of COVID

One night, I took a call from France. Something in the back of my mind told me to answer it. Sure enough, it was Albertine. We had never spoken before, but for me, it was as though I knew her through Margaret. Albertine was concerned because Margaret had not been answering the phone.

When I told my daughter, Vanessa, of my concern and Albertine’s call, she suggested I contact the local police to do a welfare visit. Margaret was over 80, frail and alone, as I have described. The police were helpful and cheerily rang a few hours after I spoke to them to say that she reported herself as being alive and well. She told them that she would call me.

No call came that night, so I rang Margaret the following morning, but there was no answer. I was therefore relieved to get an email from Albertine saying that Margaret had been admitted to hospital. It confirmed my thoughts about the happy tone in the young constable’s voice — that Margaret had charmed him in her uniquely proud way.

Soon after that, Albertine arrived in Australia to take Margaret to France to live, where she had wanted to go two years earlier, before COVID. I spoke to my clever, unique and wonderful friend just once after she had settled into a comfortable care home in Paris. I could hear in her voice that she had started to gain strength, but COVID took Margaret’s frail body within three months.

Sadly, Margaret can no longer play the French Pastry delicacy contest with her children. Each day on her French holidays, she’d select a favourite local pastry, a croissant or pain au raisin and try one or the other from a different bakery. She used to vote for the best one, but each day they got better, so her verdict would always be, ‘l’ll have to come back next year and start all over again.’

I am pleased that my dear friend left this world in the bosom of her children’s embrace.

Keep Writing

Wattletales

Introduction

A few years ago, I thought that if I ever wrote my autobiography, it would be called Living Life Backwards. However, I have come to realise that my early life as a five-year-old English migrant child and the ensuing years shaped who I was and, together with my life adventures, who I am now. I wouldn’t choose that title anymore. But those thoughts are for a different time.

As ten-pound Poms (I was a free Pom!), Mum and Dad, both born in 1909, migrated to Australia from the north of England in 1953. Poorly educated and out of work, they grasped the opportunity of creating a better life in South Australia for my brother and me and, of course, for themselves. Education was not a priority for them, having left school at twelve years old and put to work in factories. What was most important to them was having a job and an income.

Given that my parents would have been considered low-working class, I must highlight that they were all class; honest, hard-working, and compassionate. My gorgeous brother, who is ten years older than me, was fifteen years old when we arrived in Australia by boat and soon after accepted an apprenticeship to help our family income. Effectively I was the only ‘child’ in our household. I got the occasional threepence, sometimes sixpence, to spend, more often from my brother. I usually bought a thick slice of Fritz or some lollies at the local deli. I was spoiled within severe financial constraints, but there were no limitations on love and support.

When I was young, I wasn’t aware that we were rather poor compared to some others, because I was happy. Neighbours were living in similar conditions to ours. The only thing I can remember thinking — this was when I was at high school when I was probably more attentive to what other people may have had compared to us — I remember thinking that if a classmate lived in a brick house, they must have been rich; we lived in a non-builder-dad-built wood and asbestos house which was quite normal in our street and surrounding suburbs of that era.

Mistake?

I jokingly tell people sometimes that my birth was a mistake, and technically it was! Mum and dad’s first baby, a girl they named Sheila, died at three and a half months. My mum told me once and never spoke of it again. Sheila was born with a hare lip, and cleft palate, so required surgery to repair the abnormality. During the operation, they overdosed her with ether, the common anaesthetic of the time, and she died on the operating table.

My brother was born later, and because mum had had two caesarean sections, she was advised it would be dangerous to have another child. Consequently, she had her tubes tied to prevent further pregnancies. So, I hear you ask, how did I get into the world?

Well, ten years later, I simply snuck through. Perhaps the knots on mum’s tubes had loosened, or the material used to tie them dissolved; who knows? Thankfully mum got through her third caesarean birth successfully, and here I am. Mum always said I was the daughter she was meant to have, so I know that although my seed self defied a medical procedure, I know that I was never really a mistake.

*Regular socials were held at the I.C.I. (factory where dad worked) Hall at Largs Bay. Families took supper, and there was dancing, and we kids just had fun.

Surgery at 79 Years Old

Writing of operations made me think of my mother having a major operation to remove her cancerous bladder in 1988 when she was 79 years old. Below is a poem I wrote after seeing her immediately after surgery when she was still groggy with several tubes attached to her nose, neck, and body. A confronting scene for me, and a traumatic event for an elderly woman who had lost her husband, my dad, nine years earlier from a stroke and massive heart attack.

A Young Woman

After leaving high school at sixteen, I married at nineteen, had two children at the age of twenty-two and twenty-four, completed a university degree as a mature-age student and became a secondary teacher. I became a widow at thirty-eight after an, at times, difficult marriage. In hindsight, I was too young and too naïve to get married, but we produced two beautiful children who have grown into fabulous people, so I do not regret those years of marriage. I grew up. I became stronger. I had two amazing teenagers to support.

Literature, Writing and Me

When I think back about when I started to write, it’s quite difficult to really pin it down to a specific time. I began to write seriously about three years ago but had dabbled infrequently, before that time. I was always a reader, something I picked up from my parents. I remember the Heidi and Lassie series, and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, for example. And I loved my Rupert the Bear Album. I spent a whole Christmas Day one year, curled up in an armchair, reading a Heidi book I’d received as a present.

An Incident from my first year of high school, year 8, sticks in my memory. I wrote a story for English but about what I can’t recall. What stands out in my memory is that my teacher praised me for using the word ‘retrieve’. I’d heard the word while watching an episode of Lloyd Bridges’ television series, Sea Hunt, a fictional show based on scuba diving with all the usual conflicts needed for a drama series. Ironically, in that same essay, my work was corrected because I had spelled the word ‘Darwin’ as ‘Darwen’. But I had my sweet revenge as it was the name of where I was born in England, and ‘Darwen’ was the correct spelling. Obviously, the teacher was thinking of the Northern Territory’s ‘Darwin’, but he did apologise.

At high school and university, although there were quite a few years of marriage, and the birth of two children in between, I loved studying literature. Shakespeare (Henry V in year 8 had me hooked), year 10 and Shelly’s poem Ozymandias. Moving on to Keats, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, Bruce Dawe, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and many other writers, classic and modern, who took me into their worlds.

Now, here I am. I don’t model myself on any writer; I write what is in my imagination or where my feelings about social issues take me. When I re-read my work, I often wonder where it all came from. The mind is a wonderful library to be plundered.

AUTHOR BIO

The Context

Journalism and media reportage in the lead-up to our forthcoming Federal election on 21 May is appalling. Whether in print, news media or related outlets and forums, we have a Fourth Estate riddled with bias, misrepresentation, tasteless jokes and nasty personal put-downs of politicians that any thinking person must find repugnant. It is cheap, rude and often bullying behaviour that patronises the population. I decided, therefore, that it is time to talk about writers who put their lives on the line to speak truth to power. The contrast, as you will see, is stark.

On 9 May,  Crikey.com also came out with a similar argument about the abysmal behaviour of journalists lately —

…while journalists are being imprisoned and intimidated in China, Hong Kong and Russia, and while Maria Ressa fights the raging spread of fake news in the Philippines and is arrested and charged for criticising President Rodrigo Duterte, some Nine bozo thinks that tripping up the opposition leader is Journalism At Its Best. Thus, we can see how far Australian journalism has disappeared up its own fundamental.                    David Hardaker

Such is the entitled idiocy prevailing in Australia in 2022 when hundreds of writers across the globe — sometimes over a thousand — continue to be harassed, silenced, exiled, disappeared, kidnapped, imprisoned, forced into hiding or detained annually without justice. Many live under the threat of death; some are summarily killed. Writers who speak out in countries where freedom of expression is considered the highest value are not exempt. We only have to think of the treatment of our fellow Australian, Julian Assange, which brings me to International PEN.

International PEN

International PEN (an acronym for Poets Essayists and Novelists) was founded in 1921 to promote literature. It was the first human rights organisation in the world. Today, it has 147 Centers in over 100 countries advocating for and supporting writers, readers, writing and freedom of speech.

PEN’s mission is to engage with and empower individuals, societies and communities across cultures and languages through reading and writing. It believes that writers can play a crucial role in changing and developing civil society by promoting literature, campaigning internationally on translation and freedom of expression, and improving access to literature worldwide at national and regional levels.

Membership is open to all published writers who subscribe to the PEN Charter regardless of nationality, language, race, colour or religion. International PEN is non-political and has special consultative status at UNESCO and the United Nations.

PEN centres operate on the ground through a committee structure: Writers in Prison, Writers for Peace, Writers in Exile, Translation and Linguistic Rights and Women Writers. International PEN monitors and advocates on behalf of writers in trouble worldwide and issues a Case List every six and twelve months. (You can download this .pdf to read now or save.)

Arbitrary enforcement of COVID-19 measures

Here is a taste of the latest case list readings — a point of comparison perhaps for those who grumble and groan in this country about lockdowns.

In the pretext of enforcing COVID-19 health measures repressive governments intensified attacks on freedom of expression and press freedom across the (African) continent. Human rights and freedom of expression organisations reported a sharp rise in attacks and restrictions on journalists, editors, reporters and digital content producers in Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Eswatini, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda, Comoros, Kenya, Ghana and Ethiopia for their reporting on the pandemic and its effect on their respective populations. Journalists were assaulted, shot, had their equipment seized or destroyed, were arrested and detained arbitrarily; they were also harassed through bogus trials and some were forced to flee their countries. Others were banned from practice and media outlets were shut down for reporting on the pandemic. In Kenya, the police unlawfully stopped peaceful protests calling for police accountability over excessive use of force and extrajudicial killings while enforcing lockdown measures. (my addition)

The Adelaide Chapter

I first joined PEN in Melbourne and, when I decided to head back to Adelaide to live in 2005, was keen to join here, but there was no centre. On the recommendation of Melbourne PEN, I got in touch with author Nicholas Jose, the then head of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and, with his guidance and support, founded what was called an Adelaide Chapter of PEN.

I had wanted to create a centre, but Jose advised against it. He was an active member of Sydney PEN, and I was more comfortable working with Melbourne, so a chapter seemed to be a good compromise. Australia is not big enough for three centres. While there was a bit of rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne PEN, as there is in most things between the two states, both supported our chapter.

Once the group formed, our energies focused on the Writers in Prison Committee’s activities involving the inauguration of an annual International PEN Day of the Imprisoned Writer on 15 November 2006.

The Day of the Imprisoned Writer — Adelaide 2006

Sam Oshodi, pictured in the introduction, welcomed onlookers and introduced the day with his marvellous African drums.

You will recognise some of the people in the audience, John Hill, then SA’s Health Minister, on the left and, next to him, author and poet Peter Goldsworthy. Mike Ladd, then of ABC Adelaide’s Poetica, is on the far right.

Jude Aquilina, another well-known Adelaide poet in the centre of the top photo, soon did a stint with masking tape over her mouth to represent the silencing of writers. Others took turns. in rotation. In PEN, an Empty Chair symbolises those who have died, disappeared or find themselves imprisoned for speaking out.

Australia’s National Human Rights Commissioner and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the time, Dr Tom Calma AO, was the keynote speaker. I once worked with Dr Calma’s family in Darwin so it was a thrill that he accepted our invitation. That is him holding papers in the photo below.

Click here to read Dr Calma’s speech, ‘Freedom of Expression, Censorship and Race Relations’.

At meetings, Adelaide PEN members also wrote regular letters to prisoners and sent greeting cards during the Xmas festive season. After two years, I stepped down as Chair, making way for others. Unfortunately, PEN is no longer active in Adelaide.

The Juxtaposition

I juxtapose the poems below with the inanities of today’s political media. The poignancy in each poem reveals a depth of suffering from poets who nevertheless have the courage to speak out against war and human rights abuses. We are fortunate that the first three poets live in Adelaide.

Apart from a brief introduction to each poet, I’ll let their poems do the talking.

Juan Garrido Salgado

Juan migrated to Australia from Chile in 1990, fleeing the regime that burned his poetry and imprisoned and tortured him for political activism. He has published eight poetry books, and his work has been widely translated. He has also translated into Spanish works by a number of leading Australian and five Aboriginal poets for the anthology Espejo de Tierra/ Earth Mirror (2008). With Steve Brock and Sergio Holas, Juan also translated the Trilingual Mapuche Poetry Anthology into English.

In 2019, Juan read poems from his book, When I was Clandestine as part of a poetical tour at the Granada International Poetry Festival in Nicaragua and at a series of literary events in Mexico and Cuba. His most recent collection is Hope Blossoming in their Ink. (Puncher & Wattmann 2020).

With Judith Nangala Crispin and Anthony Lawrence, Juan judged the 67th Blake Poetry Prize. At Adelaide Writers Week in 2022, he contributed to ‘a ruthless muse’, a poetry performance with some of the finest and most dedicated of our local poets.

Read more about Juan here.

Yahia Alsamawi

Yahia Alsamawy was born in Samaway in Iraq in 1949. He was a teacher, writer, poet, and part of a following to overthrow or challenge Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was successful for a while but failed in 1991. When Yahia heard about attempts to execute him, he fled alone to the Kuwait border and then to Saudi Arabia, from where he sent others to bring his family to join him. Then, after suffering years of threats and attempts to silence him, he brought his family to Australia.

Yahia has published many poetry collections and is considered a leading Arab poet who has won several prizes for his achievements.

I want to point out that, at Adelaide PEN’s inaugural Day of the Imprisoned Writer, Yahia read this poem in Arabic, followed by a reading in English by his translator, Eva Hornung. Just listening to the Arabic sent chills through me and brought tears. Yes, the language is poetic, but the anguish of Yahia’s reading touched me without understanding the words.

Read more about Yahia here.

Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen

Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen studied Economics and English Literature at Baghdad University and has a Diploma of Interpreting (Arabic-English) from the Adelaide Institute of TAFE in South Australia.

He has published 25 poetry collections and, in 1999, won the major prize of Iraqi poetry. His work has been translated into many languages and reviewed in Iraqi, Tunisian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Yemeni and Moroccan. He has written Arabic translations of short stories and poems from Australia, Japan, New Zealand, China and the United States.

Read more about Adeeb here in English and here in Arabic.

Ranjan Abayasekera

I discovered Ranjan Abayasekera’s poem ‘Have You Seen a Bushfire’ in Another Country, a Sydney PEN anthology edited by Rosie Scott and Thomas Keneally (1984). The writings are primarily from refugees held in the Baxter Detention Centre. The Introduction reads —

This ‘other country’ is a place that poets map, “...a nightmare country which lies in the heart of Australia...a place where innocents are locked up for years without charge, without trial, without hope where children live behind razor wire without trees or dreams. It is a country where people sew their lips together in acts of courage and despair, and the fostering of hopelessness is law, deceit, the language, the breaking of the human spirit official policy. ... This is a country where people are driven mad by despair, die by their own hand, or slowly, day by day as the years wear on. It is a country where mercy has no place and children die of grief.

Another Country describes Ranjan Abayasekera as an electrical engineer from Sri Lanka, then working in Whyalla. He was active at the Baxter Detention Centre and founded the Centre’s Newsletter. In this poem, he brings Australia and Sri Lanka together because he feels that tragedy allows people to recognise their shared humanity.

International PEN Women Writers Committee (IPWWC)

It is not always easy to find women’s political poetry, especially in countries where women’s writing, like their voices, is frequently marginalised. The IPWWC was created in 1991 to redress this imbalance within International PEN’s framework and now enjoys representation in over 70 PEN Centres.

Dr Judith Buckrich, Vice-President of the Melbourne Centre of PEN in Australia until 2017 and Chair of IPWWC between 2003 and 2009 introduced me to PEN and provided the following poem by Jocelyn Ortt-Saeed.

Jocelyn Ortt-Saeed

Jocelyn Ortt-Saeed is a Pakistani poet living in Brisbane. Born in Australia and educated in Germany, she spent a large part of her life in Pakistan, and her poetry draws on the Suffi tradition.

A Final Word

I started with journalists misbehaving and juxtaposed that contemporary unpleasantness with uplifting poems of grief and wisdom from talented people who write with hope as they share their pain. We all need to be mindful of how fortunate most of us are in this country — excluding those in detention, as we all know. Are we complicit?

I survived Cyclone Tracy in 1974 and lived in Japan post WWII as a child, where I can still remember as I write, seeing white ash scenes of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb from a train window. I had ringworm smothered with Gentian Violet! And I lived in Sri Lanka during curfews just before the great turmoil that Ranjan Abayasekera’s poem highlights.

While I heard stories of earlier pogroms, flaming tire necklaces and floating bodies, I cannot conceive what it must be like to live through or survive war and persecution like the poets who have generously shared their work here and writers, including journalists worldwide, who are often imprisoned or killed for speaking out to power.

Tip

Each time we pick up our pens, we have a responsibility to write with integrity and bring truth into the light.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

‘Sonnet’ by Juan Garrido-Salgado in Hope Blossoming. Puncher & Wattman 2020

‘Laughing’ and photo with permission, Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen

‘Leave My Country’ with permission, Yahia Alsamawi

Photos from Adelaide PEN’s 2006 Day of the Imprisoned Writer are from my collection.

Happy Writing

Wattletales

Stories about Stories

If you asked me, Lindy Warrell, to tell you what I prefer to read when it comes to the novel, I’d say I like quiet literary works centred on a protagonist’s journey. Such tales raise existential questions, embed philosophy and speak the truth about power. I also like books that excite, challenge and enlighten me. When it comes to books that open my heart and mind, like The Songs of Trees by the erudite yet lyrical David George Haskell, I am in awe.

However, when you’ve lived for nearly 80 years as I have, the number — and range — of books you’ve read is immense. Whittling them down for a blog post is no mean feat. Yet, my reading proclivities make it easy as I naturally gravitate to books I fell in love with, whether scholarly, poetic, literary or popular. As you’ll see, I am an eclectic reader who yearns to be transported and thrills to new insights offered by writers who take me on a journey into the unknown.

At university, I read tables of content and scanned indices as an aid to learning, but I am a free reader for the rest. Nobody could ever accuse me of being in thrall to fashion or rules. Whether anything I’ve read influences my writing remains moot, although everything I have read exemplifies or reveals my tastes and inclinations.

Books of Knowledge and Insight

Let me start with works by novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley and his father, Sir Julian Huxley, who was a humanist and, scarily, a eugenicist. I found both in the Darwin Library when, aged 21, I used to shelf browse on wet season, pre-TV weekends, hungry for knowledge. As a girl who left school at 15, I struggled to understand, but reading stuff beyond my reach then challenged and excited me. To this day, I retain the thrill of profound insight about this thing called society from Brave New World (1932) that may even have led me to anthropology half a lifetime later.

Curiosity has led me in heaps of different directions over the years. And who can go past accidental discoveries? Ania Walwicz was such for me not long before she died in 2020. While I critiqued her book Horses on Goodreads, I have to admit that I never completely understood her.

I read Horses much as I read Karl Marx at University and Salman Rushdie at times, rolling with the words and allowing meaning to arise by osmosis. One exception to this was her critique of Australia, popularly known as ‘You Big Ugly‘, the penetrating insight of which had me laughing out loud with recognition, and I wrote ‘The Shame’ in its wake.

A Book That Changed Me

In 1966 French anthropologist Louis Dumont published a ground-breaking work called Homo Hierarchicus which he called an essay on the Indian caste system. I first read HH in the 1980s in my undergraduate years. As a hitherto uneducated Australian, I fought with everything he said (after I finally understood what that was), so entrenched was my cultural egalitarianism.

His thesis was that an encompassing hierarchy of superior and inferior, pure and impure, is natural to humans and social order. In contrast, possessive individualism in the West has turned society upside-down like the nursery rhyme hand game, here’s the church and here’s the steeple [fingers locked facing down, then invert your hands] open the door and here’s all the people. In other words, he identifies the underpinnings of our disconnectedness by comparison with India.

My fight with Louis Dumont persisted into my postgraduate writing, but I eventually thanked him for what turned out to be the Indian seeds of his innovative analysis of possessive individualism elaborated a decade later in From Mandeville to Marx (1977). Of course, I learned these things in other ways, but Dumont was my introduction to a critique of the taken-for-granted in my world, a protracted but profound lesson in humility.

Books the Way I Think

Nobel Prize-winner J M Coetzee’s signature novel, Disgrace, which won the Booker Prize in 1999, blew me away. His seemingly simple narrative style spoke directly to me as it took me to dark places in everyday life as though that was the most natural thing to do. I’ve read nearly all of Coetzee’s books and admire him greatly. As an author, he is unafraid to confront stark truths, and he trusts his reader enough to shock. How clever is that?

I defy anyone to say that Disgrace does not linger. I can see the setting, the horror of the rape and the symbolic role of dogs as though I read it yesterday. In all of Coetzee’s books, the prose is sparse, concise and piercing in its honesty. Reading Coetzee leaves me with the sense that he writes as I think. Had I the skill, I would emulate him.

In Journey to the Stone Country (2002), Alex Miller is another author who speaks my language. For a girl who grew up reading stories set elsewhere, I love the way Miller naturalises Australia as a setting. My first experience of that was with Peter Goldsworthy’s marvellous short story collection, The List of All Answers (2006). When I read about driving up Magill Road, I had permission from Goldsworthy to write about home.

A Book that Gave Me Permission to be Myself

Although I was acquainted with the classics from school and elocution classes, I came to contemporary poetry late in life through Jude Aquilina, primarily through Women Speak (2009), which she co-authored with Louise Nicholas. Who knew that a mammogram could find its way into a published poem or that vulvas could speak.

What a charming, magical and hilarious collection this is. It taught me that women could speak out, that their concerns are significant enough to write about.

Books as Lifelong Loves

After I forgave it for not being Sri Lanka where I lived and loved, I was in thrall to India when I visited that country a few years before Vikram Seth’s 1400+ page classic, A Suitable Boy (1993), came out. As one of the longest novels in a single volume in English, it is ostensibly about a mother wanting to find a suitable husband for her independent daughter, but it delves into the anguish caused by the partition of India. I sat on my flamingo-pink velvet armchair (true) with this tome for a fortnight (at night), cross-legged; transported. The story is now beautifully portrayed in a 2020 Netflix series of the same name, which made me love it all over again.

Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz similarly drew me into Egypt’s history with his fascinating Cairo Trilogy*. The three books, Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street, tell the story of one family through generations in a society transforming. I could not put these books down, and I escaped into their pages.

Maybe I just like epics, but these writers write history and politics through family dramas full of people to love and hate, not unlike the popular TV series, The Crown. The scope and depth of these authors’ knowledge and research is astounding, their skill as storytellers unsurpassed. They are literary, not historical, novels that remain part of how I feel as a person.

* First published in 1952, and in English in 1990. As a collection at various times between 1966-2001.

Books We Must Not Be Ashamed Of

A writerly friend recommended Julia Cameron’s self-help book The Artist’s Way. Written for creatives, it came out in 1992 and is still in print and all good bookshops today. I bought it and tossed it aside with disdain for some time, but I learned so much when I finally got to reading it. I had dissipated my creative energy with what Cameron calls crazymakers, friends and family whose needs always seemed so much more important than mine. Such was my need to be needed earlier in life — a salutary lesson.

Learning to stand up for yourself comes late for some of us. I learned similar lessons through Buddhism and subsequently taught meditation for years. Here is a book I’d recommend to anyone who struggles to feel free, as it offers a way out.

Don’t Take Your Life Personally (2010) is a Buddhist-inspired text by the renowned American monk Ajahn Sumedho of the Theravadin tradition whose teacher was the beloved and enlightened Thai monk, Ajahn Chah. The title tells the tale.

A Quiet Book

Let me come back to the novel. I mentioned quiet stories in my introduction and recently read one that I loved, by the doctor and prizewinning Australian author Melanie Cheng, Room for a Stranger (2020). The story is about a relationship between an old Australian woman and a young Chinese student. She needs someone to help around the house; he needs cheaper accommodation.

Cheng transports us into a slightly run-down inner-suburban Melbourne cottage as she delicately explores issues of race, aging and the human need for comfort and a sense of belonging. This gentle and sensitive story of profound social and cultural significance exemplifies what I call a quiet book.

A Random Book To Complete This Collection

I want to sneak in a book called The Dialogic Imagination (M Holquist Ed 1981). It is a collection of four writings by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, who I love so much I’ve used his name for an old Russian character in my current novel, High Rise Society.

Bakhtin introduces several unique concepts for writers; he explores how the novel changed from the epics of old where a hero went through all sorts of strife but emerged heroically unscathed (classical epics). In the new novel, he argues, the whole point is that protagonists change in light of the challenges they come across.

Bakhtin introduced the idea that every time we make an utterance, we select from ‘a world aswarm with names’ to create anew. He made it explicit that each sector of society has its own language. We only have to think of the self-referential language of the mainstream media and political discourse, the medical lexicon of diseases, causes and cures, academic jargon, the dialect of betting, horse racing and football or the argot of the streets. All conditioned by context and each other.

Bakhtin’s take on languages and utterances aside, I actually introduced him here as a somewhat derivative way of sneaking in a poem to end this post, based on Rabelais* and his penchant for list-making, which I discovered through Bakhtin. Reading reaps rewards.

*Francois Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer, physician, humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He is primarily known as a writer of satire, of the grotesque, and of bawdy jokes and songs.

This eclectic collection of writings has shaped me. But, there are many more writers to whom I attribute the way I think and even feel about the world and what it all means. Do stories embed themselves in you, as they do with me?

Happy Reading and Writing

Wattletales