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I started writing this piece a couple of years ago, but never finished it, because I think it felt like a hopeless enterprise, given the way things are in Australia. Maybe it still is, but here goes.

When the Adam Goodes thing was happening, I was sickened and horrified, not just by the booing, but by the seeming inability of the average punter to see this as racist intimidation. I remember reading a thread on our local Facebook Community noticeboard at the time, where someone I know and like had branded Goodes a “sook and a dobber”. This bloke, like so many other people, was unable to see that calling an Aboriginal man an ape, and then bullying him for objecting to it was racism, pure and simple. Even though I understood that neither the 13 year old girl at that game, nor the average person has an awareness of the historical significance of calling a black man an ape, it wasn’t this ignorance that caused me so much despair during this period. What really distressed me was the fact that, as a white Australian, raised in Australia, I knew exactly why the crowds had turned on Goodes.

Around the time that this was happening, I met a bloke from New Zealand who had just taken over as CEO of a big Australian company, with lots of staff. We chatted for a while about the concerns of managing a big team in a new country, and then I asked him: “how are you coping with all the racism?” He was a bit reluctant to say anything uncomplimentary about Australia, but finally admitted “I’ve never come across anything like it.” He was surprised that, as an Australian I was aware of it, but what he didn’t realise was that, just like a “magic eye” picture, my own endemic racism had slowly revealed itself to me over a number of years. This elemental and sinister thread  snakes its way into the hearts and infects the minds of young Australians from a tender age. One of my earliest memories was hearing my beloved kindy teacher in Kalgoorlie advising us solemnly not to drink out of Paddy Hannan’s fountain, “in case an Aborigine has drunk out of it before you.” Comments like this have an impact on children. You don’t actually have to sit a child down and tell them things about the world for them to get the tip, and the tip I got was, Aboriginal people are not your mates, they’re not people you hang around with, essentially, they’re not really real people.

This unconscious belief finally bubbled up into my awareness when I had my first baby. I was 26, and up until then had been oblivious to the fact that I lived in a country whose original inhabitants were now invisible at almost every level of society. I happened to be alone for a night while my husband drove the vegie truck to Perth, and was watching a program about the Stolen Generations.    I remember thinking afterwards, “God, imagine living in a country where someone could just walk in the door, and take your baby from you.” Then I realised I did live in that country. This was my country, and this happened to people here. The force of this realisation hit me so intensely, that I actually grabbed my baby and frantically began looking through the dark windows to the outside, closing the curtains, locking the door and thinking about places to hide. It was at that moment that I realised I had never once, ever considered how the mothers of those snatched children must have felt.  If I had ever given it any thought at all, I might have told myself that maybe it was “for the best”, unaware of the shameful belief supporting this: that these mothers “didn’t feel the same way as us.”

It’s very hard to explain how otherwise, kind, well-meaning people can collude with the wholesale cultural erasing of an entire group of people. Maybe it’s “because of our convict streak,” to quote the inimitable Dave Warner, but facing your own racism is an incredibly painful and shaming feeling, and I completely understand why it’s so hard to do. Nobody likes to reflect on their own cruelty or indifference, or even their ignorance. One of the reasons that Australians struggle to understand other cultures, is because they don’t recognise their own. If you think culture is something that only belongs to people who wear “funny “clothes or worship in strange places,  try skiting about how much money you make, or arriving at a barbecue without a bottle of wine and with an empty plate as so many hapless newcomers have done when asked to “bring a plate.” Just as accepted cultural standards are invisible, so too are cultural taboos until you try and break one, and the biggest cultural taboo we have as white Australians is accepting what has been done to black Australians.

Despite the AFL’s recent apology to Adam Goodes, it’s clear that they still don’t really get what the problem was. Their ham-fisted implementation of the “booing police” simply underscores that they think that booing and bad sportsmanship was the reason for Goodes’ distress. Adam Goodes believed that in the 21^st century, given the history of the eugenics movement and the origins of the Holocaust, no black man should be called an ape or a monkey. His faith that this was a reasonable expectation in a fair and just society was tragically misplaced. Instead of giving Adam Goodes the immediate backup this incident deserved, he was left to stand alone and fight alone, until he couldn’t fight any more. The minute that this targeted booing started , the AFL should have instructed every player in every team to sit down on the pitch until it stopped, in every game.

This did not happen because we expected Goodes to do what we demand of Aboriginal people every year on January 26^th: suck it up princess, we won, you lost, it’s time to parrrtayy!!!

Australians pride themselves on being fair-minded, kind and warm-hearted, which just makes this level of callous insensitivity so hard to reconcile with our national character. Sadly, I think we still have a long way to go.

 

 

                                                           

My Dad is a giant character, an institution in himself and the archetypal family patriarch. Dad has always been there, with his back turned to cave entrance, guarding, guiding and protecting his children, even as we enter our late middle age, a seemingly indestructible presence. Although we don’t always appreciate his persistent supervision, each one of us were knocked way off balance when he was recently hospitalised with severe pneumonia. You’d think that, at 93 years of age, we would all have had some inkling that Dad may not be with us forever, but his never-say-die (literally) attitude kind of keeps us believing in his immortality.
Anyway, true to form, he pulled through and is living to fight another day, pottering around the garden, driving(!) and scrolling through Facebook…
During his illness though, I found myself reflecting on what I valued most about the many things he had taught me. Besides his financial advice : “if you’re always generous, you’ll never have to worry about money” (sorry Bill!); the most important thing that Dad has given to me, and to all of my siblings is a love of poetry. Dad has an incredible feel for poetry and the gift of truly appreciating its depth and beauty. I have seen Dad moved to tears by poems, and am lucky enough to share his reactions, getting goosebumps from certain poems no matter how many times I read them. It was not surprising then, that when I workshopped Dad’s illness with my younger sister, I found that, like me, she had used poetry as a way of coping. Both of us had been mentally reciting a poem every day, over and over to soothe ourselves and to help make sense of life’s inevitable changes. We had chosen different poems, but both were helpful to us and I thought you might enjoy reading them!
Pip chose:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

I chose:

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

                                               

ANMJ_August book_LR 22

If there’s one thing I really love, it’s the way that the words and deeds of dead people get handed on through the generations, even when people no longer remember who said what.  I find it so amusing that my kids will say things like: ”I must congratulate you-much as I hate to, I must.”  They don’t know that these were words that my Mum and her siblings unfairly attributed to their maternal grandmother who was apparently a bit grudging in her praise. My kids have naturally never met their great-great grandmother, but it’s amazing that this joke has survived for so many years beyond her life.

Grandparents can be incredibly influential people, often more than they realise. My Dad’s mother was an amazing person, mother of 9 boys and 2 girls, ferocious rather than feisty and hilarious to boot. She was raised very hard by a strong and brave mother that she idolised, and a feckless, selfish father of convict descent, whom she despised. She and her sister Mary wrote a poem about him when they were children, which finished with the charming  line:

“And when gets down into hell,

there’ll be some lovely burnings.”

Such gruesome horrors were certainly not a feature of my sheltered childhood, so Granny’s  gleeful harshness held a particular fascination for us. We vied for her attention and longed for her to think of us little cream puffs as tough, strong and capable, which rarely happened. The only one of us who consistently got her approval was my older sister Sue who was referred to as “The pick of the bunch.” There was no room in Granny’s world for worrying about impartiality, or giving every child a prize to prop up their self-esteem.

I guess that’s why a couple of small incidents stand out for me, in looking back at this crucial relationship. Until the nursing home she was sent to in the last few weeks of her life cut off her hair into a “manageable bob”, Granny wore her long white hair plaited and pinned to the top of her head, using old-fashioned hairpins. I remember one Christmas or birthday when we presented her with the usual talc-and-nightie, I had for some reason also chosen a packet of hairpins. It so happened that she had just run out of these useful items, so when she opened the present and exclaimed: “hairpins! That’s exactly what I wanted!” , I glowed with pride and pleasure at being the chosen one, for that moment at least.

The other incident has had a longer lasting and surprisingly far-reaching impact. Granny was a famous cook, but in her last 10 years of life, was very restricted by bad hips, which meant that she always walked with a stick, and later a walking frame. I have seen her limp painfully and awkwardly carrying an entire roasting tray laden with meat and potatoes to the table using one hand and her zimmer frame at her old house in Spearwood. She was also renowned as a scone maker, which in a big, hungry family was a bonus, particularly for my late and great  Uncle John who claimed to be able to “swallow a scone whole without biting it!” I have no idea how I happened to be the lucky recipient of this knowledge, but serendipitously I was at Spearwood when Granny was making scones and in the mood to share her recipe, which I have never forgotten. It is so easy, so economical and so satisfying!

4 (tea) cups of SR flour (super cheap)

2 oz butter (a tiny amount of the most expensive ingredient!)

Water to mix  (hello-anyone can get hold of this!)

Preheat oven to HOT, rub butter into flour with your fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs, mix in water until it’s sticky but not too wet (sorry, no exact amounts were given). Turn out immediately onto a floured board (DO NOT OVER-HANDLE). Pat lightly to a height of about 1 ½ inches, cut out with a glass if you don’t have a cutter, put on tray, sling into hot oven and cook until brown (approximately 10-15 minutes). That’s it!

This recipe has impressed one and all, from the firefighters hosing down yet another fire at my place, to my little Canadian friends who call me “Anty Gay” and who have helped me make numerous rounds of scones.  I even have a photo of the results of this recipe from a kitchen in Glasgow, where my nephew and his wife knocked out a terrific batch, with added fruit for zing.

So Grannies one and all, your legacy is lasting, your influence is far-reaching and you will never be forgotten, as long as your words and your skills are still being used by anyone, even those you never met.

 

 

 

 

In the work and task-driven life I have chosen, it’s been so easy to forget the importance of creativity and self-expression, so it was great having my creatively determined sister come down recently and spend the long weekend with me, with the express purpose of going to the Margaret River Readers’ and Writers’ Festival.  I have been to this event a few times, but in the past couple of years had always found something more important to do, like mowing the lawn, getting wood, cleaning the house, cooking for the week ahead; in short, doing things that probably won’t feel very important on my deathbed, instead of taking some precious time to be inspired and refreshed.

We went to a poetry session, and listened to Dennis Haskell reading heart-wrenching poems he had written as his wife was dying from ovarian cancer. It was such a moving session, with the poet and much of the audience in tears throughout as Dennis read and spoke about his experiences.

I left the session so uplifted, and in such a different frame of mind, that it really got me thinking about those people who seek the creative path, whatever the cost. I had recently watched the movie “Still Alice”, which dealt with the tragedy of a woman diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease at 50 years of age. She had three children: a son who was a doctor, a daughter who was a lawyer and a younger daughter who was a struggling actress. Before her illness, Alice had spent a lot of time fretting about this daughter’s lack of a “real job”,  but as Alice’s memory deteriorated, it was the flaky daughter who was able to communicate most directly and fruitfully with her, really “meeting her where she was.”  As a person who has spent the majority of my adult life endorsing, pursuing and attaining mainstream, conservative achievements, I was similarly bewildered by my son’s refusal to become a fine upstanding teacher;  instead choosing to pursue a degree in art and  illustration.

This is the sort of choice I would never dream of making, but that poetry session really made me reflect on what we lose when we spend no time at all on creativity. It worries me that we are sending children to school younger and younger, reducing the time spent on imaginative play and pushing 5 year olds into formal learning in the name of productivity.

In the spirit of creativity, I would like to share one of my poems that I wrote many years ago, and  had completely forgotten about until  I went to that writer’s session- I hope you enjoy it

 

Last Year at Home

Big brown eyes

Stands at the door

Looking out from safety

At his world.

Days stretch on and on

When will it all end for him?

And the world begin

To take away his open face

Open eyes

Open mouth

Flying limbs?

 

 

Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime

(William Shakespeare: Sonnet 3)

 

The passage of time: how commonplace, how relentless and, unless you die young, how totally unavoidable. There’s something about the transformative nature of time that I have always found so compelling, and sad/happy. Perhaps it’s just my Western cultural denial of death and decay, but I have always found the pace of change in myself and the people around me a bit disconcerting.

I was grabbing some after-work groceries a couple of evenings ago; it was cold outside, getting dark and the supermarket was busy and  bit hassled as it always is at that time of day. I noticed a young couple near the vegie stands looking  slightly harassed and getting tetchy with one another, and glanced again as they both looked a bit familiar. It wasn’t until they had passed me that I realised  they had the grown-up versions of the faces of children that I knew. Living in a small town, you get to know which of your children’s schoolmates are dating whom, and for the first year or two after they all leave school, it all seems quite sweet and of course you expect them all to move to the city and meet other strangers and that’s that. There was something though about the body language between these two that told me that they were a totally established, long term, probably-thinking-about-getting-married couple, just like I had been, you know, a few years ago, but surely not so long ago that these primary school-aged children could have moved somehow into that spot …I mean, I realise that I’m not doing school lunches anymore, and maybe a couple of the “cool girls” from my year at school are now GRANDMOTHERS but, like, what’s happened here??!

I remember feeling the same way a couple of  years ago when I first got onto Facebook and was able to connect with old school friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen since Year 12.  I distinctly recall how strange it was seeing a picture of one of the guys with his son, who not only looked just like him, but was exactly the same age that my schoolmate had been the last time I saw him. It was such a peculiar Rip Van Winkel feeling, to be looking at the face of a familiar boy, knowing that the young fella I remembered was in fact the greying, middle-aged man standing next to him. What had happened to the boy I knew?

Living in a small town means that you get to see people born, learn to walk, have playdates with your own children, sing at assemblies, finish school, have their own babies and eventually become middle aged.  You get to watch powerful community leaders and fearsome matriarchs weaken, lose their power and disappear from the committees and meetings and boards in which they played so vital a part, and which, at the time may have seemed impossible to run without them. You get to see, first hand, that nobody is indispensable, even if they feel irreplaceable, and you marvel that the  PhD expert you now need to consult was someone you first met as he was pulled from his mother’s womb.

Having the opportunity to watch the effects of time within a small community is both disturbing and grounding. To see the waters close over other figures and to know that one day it will softly close over you as the life of the town flows on is healthy and humbling.  The challenge is to try and live as George Bernard Shaw tells us:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

 

So I was riding my bike home from town the other day, along a quiet country backroad lined with huge karri trees, and I started to daydream, as I often do. Well, to be honest, not so much daydream, but fall into the type of imaginings I had as a child, when I used to love playing various daring roles with my sisters.

I was lucky enough to be raised in a very large family of (mostly) girls, with one long-suffering brother, and the best thing about this was that you never had to scratch around for someone to play with, or for something to do.  We were all very avid readers as well, and having had both parents in the armed forces in WWII, quite a few of our games involved complicated escaping-the-Nazis-French-Resistance storylines, with ourselves cast in heroic roles-always the good guys.  These adventures were always spiced up whenever we could convince our brother (generally as the bad guy) to join us,  because he had awesome “cap guns”, you know, the ones that made a sharp cracking sound and puffed out a little bit of smoke when you pulled the trigger. You can probably still get them in Bali I imagine…

One of my favourite books that I read and re-read (even as an adult) was a Dutch novel called “The Winged Watchman” by Hilda Van Stockum. The story is told through the eyes of Joris Verhagen, a  10 year old boy who lives in a windmill with his parents, older brother Dirk Jan and baby sister Trixie, and it deals with their lives under Nazi occupation. In one scene, a young girl, Reina, who is working for the Dutch resistance, is cycling along with a satchel full of forbidden newspapers, when she is accosted by a Nazi collaborator, who demands that she get off her bike, then throws her onto the side of the road. Bicycles, at that time, were no longer available to ordinary people, and the thug is outraged when he sees Reina coolly ignoring the interdiction and deals with her accordingly. Although Reina lives to tell the tale, the frightening incident sets a super-suspenseful mood for the novel.

So, occasionally, when I am riding along freely, breathing sweet country air, listening to the sound of the birds and occasionally waving to an acquaintance, I get a scary thought about what it would be like to be in a situation like Reina. To be listening out for the sound of drones, or gunfire, or to be looking over my shoulder, and I feel, for the millionth time, how incredibly lucky I am to live in such a peaceful and safe place, and feel so sad for those many millions of faceless and nameless people who don’t.

They’re not all faceless though. I am in touch with a young Rohingya chap on Manus Island, who’s been there in a mouldy tent for nearly three years. For those of you who don’t know, the Rohingya are possibly the most persecuted group in the world.  An ethnic minority in Burma for generations, the Rohingya are unable to be citizens of Burma. Ever.  Even the peace-loving  Buddhist monks there won’t have a bar of them, and the much celebrated freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi has turned her back on them, needing the support of the military establishment there to shore up her fragile fledgling democracy. And I guess I kind of get that, I mean, maybe the end does justify the means and God knows I have never had to be in the position to make huge decisions like that, and maybe it’s easy to criticise when I will never have those responsibilities. But I don’t know.

I do know that it makes me sad to reflect that it’s a lot harder these days,  for me to think of Australia, this land that I love so much, as one of the good guys.

A poem I often think of when I am corresponding with a few of the young fellas on Manus and Nauru is John Donne’s No Man is an Island, but I think this short passage from the Winged Watchman sums it up pretty well.  After liberation, Joris’ mother is speaking to a Jewish woman who was the sole surviving member of her family and says to her: “how you must hate the Germans!”

But Mrs Groen shook her head. “Oh no” she said. “I’m sorry for them. To suffer yourself, that is nothing. God will wipe all tears from our eyes. But to hear God ask: ‘Where is your brother?’-that must be dreadful. The hardest to bear are the wrongs we do others.”

 Wishing all of our politicians the strength and courage to remember for whom the bell tolls.                                                                                                                                                               .

I’m not sure when this poem started running around in my head, but given the week I’m having, the lure of stillness and silence feels very compelling…

It was written by the English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, in addition to being a Jesuit priest , (don’t let that put you off) wrote some of the most beautiful, exquisitely crafted poetry you will ever read.

Hopkins’ style was unique in that he used non-traditional rhythms, making his poetry fresh and sparkling. He often created words, as though the English language was not big enough to express what he saw and experienced.

The title of this poem “The Habit of Perfection” is a play on the double meaning of a “habit” as a  daily practice as well as the donning of the habit of religion.  I particularly love his description of the silence he has chosen, or “elected” beating “upon (his) whorled ear”, just one of the many acute observations of nature’s replications in the shell-like “whorls” in the human ear.

Having just spent some time in India, I was fascinated by the dozens of religious traditions there, and although the motifs and symbols in this poem come from the Christian tradition, the ideas of seclusion, silence, fasting and the inward journey are common to all traditions. I hope you enjoy it!

The Habit of Perfection

Elected Silence, sing to me

And beat upon my whorlèd ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:

It is the shut, the curfew sent

From there where all surrenders come

Which only makes you eloquent.

Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark

And find the uncreated light:

This ruck and reel which you remark

Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,

Desire not to be rinsed with wine:

The can must be so sweet, the crust

So fresh that come in fasts divine!

Nostrils, your careless breath that spend

Upon the stir and keep of pride,

What relish shall the censers send

Along the sanctuary side!

O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet

That want the yield of plushy sward,

But you shall walk the golden street

And you unhouse and house the Lord.

And, Poverty, be thou the bride

And now the marriage feast begun,

And lily-coloured clothes provide

Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.