Minnie Pwerle

On the walls at my sister's house - Minnie Pwerle's intriguing paintings. Minnie belongs to the Alyawarr group near Alice Springs.
Minnie's paintings reflect the design used for body painting in women's ceremony - Awelye. I particularly love the rings. My eyes bounce over the surface, become caught in a colour trail, follow lines of perspective into and out of the grounding. My sister bought these in Melbourne after we attended my graduation at Monash Uni last year. We went back several times before settling on these.

Mt Canoblas

Mt Canoblas near Orange NSW as the storm comes in this Anzac weekend

Pomegranates

My sister has always been the artistic one. These are pomegranates she arranged on her dining table. Beautiful despite their flaws and shown to perfection against the white platter and red tablecloth.

Sisters

My mother and her sisters in the 1930s

My grandmother and her sister in the 1890s - mischief!

Dear Diary...

I guess that I have always been a life writer. Who gave me that first red leather diary at age 10, I wonder? In it are recorded my friends, my meals, my dogs and some of my doings. Only 4 lines are allowed for each day so it is very concise. The blue-black cloth cover of the first diary I wrote at boarding school is ragged. The lines of writing in it are overrun by doodles and graffiti applied during prep as I struggled to stifle yawns of boredom.
As I pass through the years of adolescence the diaries get larger and are filled not only with the passions and disappointments of teenagehood but with cuttings, tickets and cards. My life is documented in detail. There is a gap while I am at uni - no time for introspection or documentation there. A brief and tantalising glimpse of my first marriage break-up is noted in a loose leaf folder from the time. Then I am obsessive about recording my babies births and milestones.
As the children grow more independent I write more in my journals - yes, journals rather than diaries, at this stage, I think. They are where I work out my ideas and values and chew through decisions and situations I don't fully comprehend. Somehow writing puts it all in order, makes it actual and understandable.
My current journal is all these things plus a creative space. I write haiku, tanka and poetry. I sketch ideas for stories and for this blog. Photographs and montages grace its pages. I record and savour journeys, dreams and conversations.
But now this blog takes a lot of my journalling time. Blogging is different to journalling. The audience is obviously different. What I write in my journal is for my eyes and heart only, what I write on here must not tread on any toes or reveal too much self in public. I am careful of the self I construct here. In my journal I am like the old house at "Myall Park" which just grew higgledy piggledy. In here I am more like the well-thought out and carefully planned home of your dreams squeezed onto a Gungahlin block.

Jazz in the afternoon

Just back from the third in the ABC Classic FM concerts at Lewellyn Hall. This time it was the Mike Price Trio, a jazz group from the School of Music. The drummer was a feat of coordination: the left leg steadily beating the cymbals, the right an irregular bass drum, the left arm caressing the tympany while the right stretched to all the cymbals and back to the tympany in a cycle of fluid movements. The bass player nestled the bass against him and slid and plucked up and down the strings, his eyes closed completely lost in the music. Mike Price was the guitarist and composer of a lot of the pieces. His busy fingers seemed independent of him as he leaned back on the sound.
Much to the disdain of my neighbour I bopped and swayed in my seat. It sounds trite to say the music plucked at my heart strings but I guess it's almost the physiological and physical truth: my innards vibrating in sympathy with the bass, drums and guitar.
I was mesmerised by the musicians and their music right to the end.

Word Power - a taste of Dennis Wild's poetry

This poem has no belly button
no passport
no bill of ownership
It arrived just hours ago
in a crate marked 'Inflammable',
your name
stamped on the outside.

This poem has ambitions
it's going places
your address is tattooed
just below where
its umbilicus should be.
How do you feel about that?

If you catch sight of this poem
shuffling down your street
carrying a flickering lantern
towards your matchwood hideaway
don't call the riot squad
don't dive down the cellar stairs
avoidance is such a shabby response.

This poem wants to mess you around
to gift your tidy life
with rollicking absurdity
with gut-busting hilarity
with tears of cleansing adversity.

Put it this way

It's quite simple

Your hour has come.

Dennis Wild. Just North of Bewilderment. Published by Picaro Press, PO Box 853, Warners Bay, NSW 2282, Australia. www.picaropress.com

Where words take us

Words took me to Jamison for an evening of Dennis Wild's rich storytelling on Friday night. Stories from around the world challenged and entertained us: a loon helping a blind Inuit recover his sight, a Japanese storyteller uncovering a voice deep within. The end of each story was only the beginning of a process of learning and expansion as we thought about and unravelled the fabric of the tale, and postulated possible futures.

Melbourne poet Peter Bakowski launched Dennis's first collection of poetry Just North of Bewilderment and urged him to read some for us. They were amusing but powerful poems, which made the audience laugh - after a pause to relish a twist or insight.

Peter also read some of his own poetry. Peter defamiliarises the domestic and everyday and suprises us with fresh visions of daily life.

The loon in Dennis' story urged the Inuit to go and do what must be done. I too must do what must be done.......read, study, write, look deeply into each day.

It's a dog's life!

The dogs had a ball in the puddles and bounding across the paddocks. We tagged along and enjoyed the green and the promise of more rain. In a week or so sowing will be in full swing. Oats is already out of the ground and the canola and wheat will be in by the end of the month.
Here in Canberra architecture and engineering separate us from the soil and the weather and shield us from the reality of our dependence on them. Everywhere we went over the weekend people spoke of rain and the possibilities it opened up for growing crops and livestock. Their livelihoods and lives depend so immediately on it.

Easter home coming

We spent a day over Easter with my brother on the property we grew up on. Without inhabitants the old house is becoming derelict. Roly poly weed is piled in the corners of the rooms and mice scuttle across the ceiling. My childhood bedroom was at the end of the back verandah. Where I lay on my bed and dreamed of being a grown-up my grandmother's hats and suitcases spill over the peeling lino. My mother's weaving loom is still strung with the greasey wool she was spinning and weaving on the day of her heart attack 34 years ago.
The pencil pine that Mum planted has grown so that only the trunk and a few split branches are now visible through the window. It grew so slowly that for years I angled my bookcase across the space to shade the room from the summer glare. Compared to my children I had few books but each was read and re-read. My imagination was populated with hedgehogs, rolling green dales and boarding school antics. Few of my books matched the heat and the dust of my reality. When I visited England I expected to feel more at home than I did. While the domesticated, well-watered landscape matched my images of it, it was fenced in and claustrophobic compared to the wide horizons teeming with wild life that I'd grown up in.

Four Letters of Love

I've had a feast of reading over Easter!! I finished Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams minutes before we all piled back into the car for the trek home this morning. It reminded me of South American magic realism but touched with Irish angels and rapt in the natural wild world of the emerald isle and its Antlantic islands. Last night I dreamt of wild seas, stormy skies and close knit Irish island communities presided over by angels and flights of birds.
Isabel, a beautiful island girl, walks out with a hopeless clod of a shopkeeper because she chances to meet him as she is looking for a way to escape her school and the island. He becomes a habit. She marries him to punish herself for her brother's disability and because she can see no other future for herself.
The stories of Isabel and Nicholas Coughlan, a city boy orphaned by his father's obsession with painting, run in parallel until they intersect near the end of the novel. Miracles and tragedies abound. The disappointments of youth and love are redeemed by the coming together of the two protagonists in the end - perhaps. In the final pages the author intervenes with a deliberate and postmodern dig at his sighing readers - did the lovers separated by a marriage, a pregnancy and Irish fidelity to one's spouse until life's end really end up together? "It was in the air at that moment ... the plots of God and Love came together."

Orpheus Lost

Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost blurs the boundaries between dream, fantasy, wish and reality. She reflects our experience of consciousness: the lightning subconscious responses to events and people around us and the twister that is our understanding of them. This is an intriguing tale written with a deft and technically sure hand. The beautiful language entranced me even as the story terrified me.

Like Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist an innocent is drawn into a web of inescapable bonds and condemned by a string of circumstantial events and meetings. False logic sucks him into a vortex of half-truths and short circuited connections.

The three main characters and their backgrounds are drawn with a sensitive pen. Despite the seeming madness of their families - don't all families have some nugget of madness, save yours and mine.....? - they emerge to triumph in their chosen fields but fail at a critical point, when the madness of terrorism and the response to it overwhelms them.

Mishka's desire to find his father and unwind the mystery of his own identity draws him into the underworld of the Middle East and terrorism. He is the Orpheus who looks back at his Eurydice and gives himself away, damning all to uncertainty and violence.

This lyrical but powerful novel will capture and disturb you.

Easter home town trip

My two daughters and I had an uneventful Good Friday trip home. It ended with coffee and homemade choc chip cookies around the table with my Dad and stepmother. Before our salmon and vegetables we had caught up on all the news - well all the news that Dad had heard. He's pretty busy in his retirement - manning the Rural Museum, Meals on Wheels, the Visitors' Centre, serving as Probus secretary and on the Cooee Lodge retirement centre and hospital management boards, among other things - and hears about the over sixties.
Down the main street today we heard the whispers from the rest of the demographic. All the news in a single sentence when I know that behind each sentence lies weeks and months of shifting and changing. Dominic diagnosed with cancer, the treatment, his reponse to the treatment, the support of their friends and family, the changes in his ability to keep up at the pub and the golf course and finally, the sentence that I heard in the bakery, his death in the palliative care unit. Moving away meant I missed all the subtleties and dailiness of his illness and the multiple impacts on his family, friends and the town.
This is what I most miss about small town life: the interconnectedness and the multiple intersections of relationships. I knew Dom's children through my children at the school. Mary his wife was in a reading group with me but also owned the corner gift shop and had been on the preschool committee with my husband. His brothers owned the pub and the butcher's shop. His father and step mother were much valued clients of my business. In the city I know people in one situation only. They are clients or they are musicians or they are writers. I don't know them from different angles or through different members of their family. I only know what they present to me in that single situation. In a small town a person is multidimensional; in the city I usually can know only a single dimension.

But Enough About Me

The boundary between autobiographical and critical writing is intriguingly blurred in Nancy K Miller's But Enough About Me:Why we read other people's lives. I learn about her past but also about her ongoing ideas and theories about that past and the present, not to mention the future.

It is not until well after a period that language - via writers, especially life writers, thinkers and talkers - attaches a meaning to it. Nancy Miller didn't realise that she was in the wave of feminism in the 1960s until she was swept up in the rhetoric and landed in an academic role where she was forced to make sense of it. In this book she is able to give that time and her small part in it meaning because she has the language and discursive tools to do it.

Nancy Miller discusses other people's memoirs that overlap geographically and chronologically with her own. She believes that the bond between writer and reader depends on the reader's identification or disidentification with the writer's experiences. The memoir prompts the construction of personal memories around the shared cultural memory. It places personal reminiscence in a cultural context and gives it a shape.

Nancy K Miller grew up in America a decade ahead of me but I can identify with some of her experiences growing up in that time and breaking into the academy as a woman. Her life script was to gain an education and a husband in one breath and live happily ever after surrounded by adoring family. Although she couldn't articulate it at the time she just wanted to get out and live her own life. Despite the built in discouragements and barriers to a woman making it professionally she stumbled through the thickets.

I had only a vague idea of the women's movement when I was at the scientific end of the uni. My professors patted the girls on the head and encouraged them to treat the physically undemanding small animals so that they could work part time when they had children. I believed that small animal practice was my future until I actually found myself in a job which demanded I treat horses, cattle, sheep or whatever came through the door. Miller was in the thick of it in consciousness raising groups, demonstrating, arguing and rethinking the literary canon from a feminist viewpoint. Still she took as long as I did to crystallise what was happening and how society was shifting.

Chilli swoon

Nothing like padding out onto the deck and picking a fresh hot chilli straight from the bush. Deck produce always tastes better and is better for our ailing earth, too. Despite the chill in the air my parsley, oregano, basil, Thai basil, sage and thyme are still growing strong, too.

The muse

My composer friend says she hears the music inside her head. She used to think that everyone did and wondered why only she had the urge to play and write it down. The Romantics believed in inspiration, the touch of God on the genius creator. This afternoon at the ABC Classic FM Sunday Live Concert at Llewellyn Hall I discovered Anne Boyd’s Bali Moods I and could only agree with Wordsworth’s musings. Canberra flautist Teresa Rabe and pianist Phillipa Candy evoked the beauty and mystery of Bali with skill and sensitivity.
We can hardly ignore twentieth century thinking on creativity though. Anne Boyd not only spent years steeped in the theory and technologies of music composition, she was influenced by Peter Sculthorpe and Asian music early in her career. Working in different countries around the world and then the academy has kept her in touch with the many discourses on music and art permeating our culture. The artist is but a catalyst for a play of forces and discourses. At their intersection Boyd employs her skills and knowledge to construct a product recognisable to a similarly acculturated audience.
My friend left a well paid professional career to follow her muse through the School of Music. A combination of inspiration, knowledge and hard work may mean that we will soon hear her compositions at Sunday Live Concerts, too. We can’t ignore the fact that some people have it – creative genius in a certain field – and most of us don’t, however much we wish for it!

Autumn thoughts

Neighbourhood violence

As I read Kevin Brophy’s Calibre Prize winning essay in the Australian Book Review this afternoon I could only nod my head in silent agreement – I too have never been good at violence. For a long year I lived opposite a woman whose backyard stretched along our street. Behind the looping wire fence lived a feral pig, several querulous cockatoos, a joey, some lambs, a calf and six dogs. For the sake of neighbourhood peace and unity I mostly ignored their sonic and physical intrusions into my garden. I even managed to contain my fear of the pit bull terrier whenever it bulldozed through her fence, across the road and over my usually impregnable boundary. My daughter and I would slip a noose over its head, haul it back to its chain around the mulberry tree and run home again, trembling as it lunged for our heels. While ever it did no actual harm we were anxious to maintain harmony and not involve the dog authorities.

Imagine my shock and disbelief when I received a notice that my dog, a lolloping Labrador, had been declared a nuisance by the authorities. My neighbour had urged a pedestrian frightened by his fence-side barking to report him. He was usually kept at the back of the house out of sight of the animals across the road and passers by.

This was in contrast to the constant and much more dangerous threat from the pit bull terrier. My neighbour's reply to my tolerance was to involve the authorities without any consulting me and with a vindictiveness that I found alarming. I felt that the compass for my dealings with others had spun off the dial.

Kevin Brophy struggles to trace the source of and fuel for the escalating violence of his neighbours. He despairs at the disappearance of his “universal ethic of equality and brotherhood”. Up against the limit of his liberal tolerance he cannot imagine them as flesh and blood humans. Disbelief at their nonsensical responses to any attempt at appeasement mounts. Chaos reigns. He examines his attitudes to violence in the light of Zizek’s essay but is only able to come to terms with their seemingly irrational behaviour and his fear by continuing to live as if his pragmatic position in the situation worked. The only solution in the end was to find new neighbours. He bought the neighbours’ house. I moved to another town where my dog and I live incognito, our violent pasts hidden from the neighbours by high picket fences.

Moral Hazard

I don't know what eerie impulse caused me to reach Kate Jennings' novel, Moral Hazard down from the shelf last week. I had remembered from the publication interviews back in 2002 that it was about nursing a husband through Alzheimer's Disease but had missed its connections to Wall St. Moral Hazard forecasts the current shattering financial system with grim accuracy.

Cath enters the financial world to earn enough money to care for Bailey, her deteriorating husband. She learns that the market is free and supreme, hedges protect against outliers but are only perfect in Japanese gardens, bankers are in it for the short term gain and are as greedy and short-sighted as any Las Vegas gambler. Without regualtion a big-time melt down was inevitable.

Are we surprised that the house of cards we call the the financial system is collapsing? Global breath holding and nervous repair around the edges is only a temporary stay. The cards will be swept away in a gale of despair and disillusionment. Those who knew it was all a chimera sustained by collective delusion, testosterone and wilful ignorance of its shakey structure will probably live to build another way but what about the rest of us? Bailey's delusions were probably more valuable tools in dealing with the world than a non-regulated system of finance and development driven by greed and self-interest.

At rest

All are at rest now after a harrowing 48 hours. Harriet has been sick and the pets have taken it in turns to comfort her. Cleo stands the troops down and searches for her own recuperative niche.

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness,

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out “Stay awhile.”

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,

“and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.”

Mary Oliver

deep night

deep night
buzzing with silence
until at last
a single magpie
calls in the new day