Sydney, a life

Visiting Sydney is like a school reunion: the thrill of shared memories, the rediscovery of familiar places and the space to recall my young self – and the relief of returning home to my settled life in the bush capital.

Gulls fought over the scraps from tourists’ lunches, towers competed for sky while the bridge brooded over the sparkling harbour. The queues for Writers' Festival sessions stretched along the Walsh Bay wharves and people argued over the contentions pouring from the overhead speakers as they waited. The performance poets - or were they stand-up poets? – entertained us with comedy and psalmody. I listened hard to Kate Grenville, Amanda Curtin and Nava Semel as they discussed their fictive takes on history and people.

Nava Semel’s innovative blend of genres in her book And the Rat Laughed intrigued me. Narrative, blog, poetry, diary, testimony and legend are woven into a compelling account of a child’s holocaust survival story. Although it is a pseudo-autobiography/biography it confirmed that the genre of life narrative can stretch to accommodate a plethora of forms and points of view.

a swarm of birds

a swarm of birds
snake across the wind
life with you
often labour
sometimes effortless

Letters home

I’m beginning to think that writing a blog is more like writing a letter than writing a dairy. When snail mail was our only option I was a champion letter writer. Sunday afternoons at boarding school were spent with 30 other girls in the prep room writing letters home. I wrote volumes to my parents and another library to my grandmother. My days with their hassles, angst and hopes were poured onto paper. I was working out my adolescent self in a more public arena than my diary. Because the letters were directed to others I was more conscious of how I revealed myself and chose my subject matter carefully.

The act of writing a blog entry feels similar to writing a personal letter because I know that it will be read by others. The experience of confession and creative expression in blogging is similar to that in diary writing but because it is a self conscious performance it feels like letter writing too. I am writing myself into existence for others’ eyes and responses.

However, a blog is more than a diary and more than a letter. It is a new genre altogether based on a radically different technology. A blog invites interactivity and builds a community of readers. Readers unknown to the blog creator are attracted by tags that label the subject matter in a post. Friends and colleagues can be invited to keep up with the latest activities and as a team can cooperate in building a blog.

My children, now adult and living in other cities, communicate with me daily not weekly. Pleas for help, money and understanding come by email, SMS and mobile phone. My response is (almost) immediate and their use of these means is nowhere near as confessional or reflective as the product of my hours in the prep room.

Old moon

old moon
reclining on Red Hill
reminiscing
on people and parties
that once mattered

A year from home

After the Love Letters concert on Tuesday night of works and letters written by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn I thought again about how the culture we live in determines the development and expression of our talents and skills.

Fanny Mendelssohn lived and worked in her younger brother’s shadow. Fanny was as talented and well-trained musically as Felix but as soon as she married she was expected to give up her music and composing. Her father wrote to Fanny when she was fifteen years old “perhaps for him (Felix) music will become a profession, while for you it will always be an ornament and can and should never become the ground bass of your being and doing.”

Fanny’s husband and brother privately supported her and Felix often asked her advice and seems to have published some of her music under his name. However echoing their father Felix refused to help her publish in her own name. He wrote that publishing her music “would only disturb her in” her “primary duties” of managing her home.

With her artist husband’s full support she established a musical salon in her family home and she composed most of her music for these weekly performances. However, her home duties, organising the salon and opposition to publishing by her brother gradually sapped her enthusiasm and strength for composing. It is only away from home on a trip through Italy with her husband and son that she is able to gather inspiration and energy write a longer work.

Away from the strictures of Berlin society she interacted with composers, musicians and other artists in Rome who appreciated her as a pianist and composer and examined her talent and self from the outside. She comments in her diary “that it is so difficult to lift oneself up from one’s time, one’s family, one’s own self” but nourished by the new milieu writes a sustained work, Das Jahr, a kind of musical diary of her year away, and sketch many other works.

Home again, and with her husband’s support, Fanny decides to publish and only after writes to Felix:

"I'm beginning to publish...and if I've done it of my own free will and cannot blame anyone in my family if aggravation results from it...then I can console myself with the knowledge that in no way did I seek or induce the kind of musical reputation that might have brought me such offers. I hope I shall not disgrace you all, for I am no femme libre...If it [my publication] succeeds, that is, if people like the pieces and I receive further offers, I know it will be a great stimulus to me, which I have always needed in order to create. If not, I shall be at the same point where I have always been."

I can only imagine the strength of will Fanny summoned to publish and afterward write to her brother. All her upbringing had engrained a sense of restraint and feminine submission to father and brother into her. The temporary standing outside of societal and familial strictures and expectations allowed her to see them as constructed for a certain time and place and to gain the courage to flout them to her own ends.

After her death Felix composed a tormented string quartet, reproaching himself musically for not supporting publication of her work. Tuesday evening finished with an arrangement of this Quartet no. 6 in F minor arranged for a string orchestra. He clearly came to believe that life is too short to waste talent such as hers – his anger with himself and regret for his censoring of her musicality were clearly apparent in the work.

Midlife career change?

This has been a busy week with the music festival and with no day off to sit and puddle about. On my day off I attended a science editing workshop ostensibly to improve my editing skills for our Surgery newsletter and handouts but also to try on a new career. My fellow students were from the CSIRO and various government departments focussed on communicating with the public and other lay people on scientific topics. The younger ones had degrees in media and communications, the older ones had slipped into the editing role sideways, finding that their role as gatekeeper of sensitive information meant wordsmithing and editing.
Our trainer from Biotext, Hilary Cadman, kept our attention for the full day with short grabs of information then exercises in groups or alone. She refreshed my knowledge of the basics of editing and I picked up on the continuing controversies in the editing world that I didn’t cotton onto when doing editing by distance education. There is nothing like personal interaction for understanding the nuances and subtleties of a subject.
So would I leave vetting to become an editor, even a veterinary editor? It would mean the loss of my veterinary identity, the kind, caring, animal-lover me and the authoritative, credible me. I would be starting out again as a junior, learning the jargon, habits and attitudes of a new professional, a new persona. I am past worrying about the adequacy of my qualifications and experience and I know what is permissible, what is possible as a veterinarian in this place and time. If I made a fresh start all those insecurities would dog me as I made new contacts and built up relationships around my new work.
Changing careers is more than a change of job it is an overhaul of self and identity. When I left my job as a government vet to marry Chris and live on a farm the mat was pulled from under me. I had spent five years training and five years learning the ropes of vetting in private practice and then in the Department of Agriculture and suddenly I was “just” a farmer’s wife. I did not know who I was if I was not a vet. Although I had looked forward to time to write and reflect I devised endless household and farm chores to fill time and myself as I tried to find myself in the new situation. No one in the town knew of my past life or was even interested in it. Women there gained brownie points for being good wives and mothers -working mothers were the source of society’s evils. I learnt to keep quiet about my profession especially after my first baby. I was tangled in a morass of conflicting identities and expectations until I took some locum positions and started to regain my foothold on myself.
It is not only experience that forms the self it is the whole glove of identity that a person pulls on when they call themselves, or are called, a certain type of professional. As soon as I call myself a vet, I am expected to know a certain set of skills and knowledge and to operate within my field with judgement, authority and a high degree of ethical behaviour. If I changed my career I would change my reputation as well as the expectations others have of me.
So although a change is tempting, I will probably stick to vetting with small excursions into writing and editing scientific material. A working day spent sitting in front of a flickering screen would probably send me bananas in a week, anyway.

National Photographic Portrait Prize 2009

Harriet and I spent Mother's Day afternoon inspecting the best entries in the National Photographic Portrait Prize for 2009 at the National Portrait Gallery. You can have a peek too - click on the thumbnails see the full photo and go through the screens by clicking on next in the top left. My favourites: Assorted Toppings,Betty Churcher,Antonio Tisano,Larry Stiski surrounded by music,Little Joys and Ruby.... but lots of others well composed and lit and capturing the essence of the subject.

http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/NPPP2009_9.php

Making the Stars

The fifteenth Canberra International Music Festival is in full swing. The first concert in the National Portrait Gallery foyer was a tribute to Peter Sculthorpe on his 80th birthday. His How the Stars were Made opened the programme. William Barton’s didjeridu was the base for an evocation in percussion of the Aboriginal story about the creation of the heavens. For the space of the piece we were out in the desert watching the stars spearing into the sky. Bells, cymbals, drums, half-formed melodies, sticks, triangles and gongs cascaded over each other, then the didjeridu remained, a haunting ongoing reminder of the past in the present.
I sat with William Barton’s mother, Delmae, before the concert. She told me that she had recently sung a song of lament and hope for reconciliation at St Mary’s church in Brisbane as the congregation left the church for a new home at a Trades Hall. The community appears to be one of inclusiveness, welcoming people from all walks of life without judgement. Pity the Roman Catholic Church, who proclaim themselves to be the living body of the man who came to earth to reconcile all with God, can’t at least tolerate and at most enfold them all in its bosom. (Perhaps the lack of bosom in the hierarchy is the problem?)
The concert continued with the Tinalley Quartet. With their hands and bows they infused the music with their own vitality and passion. At their own concert last night we swooned to their Schubert Quartettsatz and Ravel quartet.
I was pleasantly surprised by the accessibility of Sculthorpe’s songs. Mina Kanaridis’ pure, strong but not resonant soprano, certainly enhanced my appreciation of them.
Sculthorpe, who sat immediately in front of me during the concert, says that after his first music lesson at age 7 or so, he rushed straight home and started writing music. His teacher scolded him for misinterpreting the reason for piano lessons and he composed by torchlight under the blankets for a year or so afterward. I thought this a charming story until I remembered that the reason I nagged my mother for piano lessons was that I wanted to learn how to make music in the fullest sense. I spent many hours as a child experimenting with sound on the old honky tonk piano stored on the back verandah. The only composition I remember was a cascade of notes I called The Bells. When did the dream of creation degenerate into the dirge of scales and fingerings?

Eyes on me

A friend of mine is conducting a research project investigating drivers’ actions, responses and distractions. He has published in a similar vein on pilots. Last night he brought two movie cameras over and mounted them in my car, one on the dash and one on the back seat. At first I was very conscious of these ‘eyes’ on me. I didn’t primp my hair in the mirror, make mobile calls or let myself be distracted by the scenery... but eventually I relaxed into the situation and drove nearly normally.

The funny thing was that as I picked through the vegetables at Choku Bai Jo I still had the sensation of being on camera. I thought about how an onlooker might interpret my movements and facial expressions. Shades of The Truman Show? I often imagine what the people around me are thinking about. Perhaps they are pretty much the same as me. My mind is often pretty blank or worrying about what I am to do next rather than in the moment. I doubt my facial expressions have more than a fleeting connection to what is actually happening to or around me.

The feeling I have when the camera is on is akin to the one I feel writing this blog. I feel like a character on the blog. Not only my writing is crafted but so is my self. In fact the very crafting of the writing forces me to condense this self. The elements that are the self in this particular situation or recollection are gathered into words inadequate to the task. So many complexities and layers of self lie between my brain, my fingers and the paltry words that spill onto the screen. Still words are the only way I have of communicating with you. Heaven knows how your brain receives anything half like what my brain sent out!

My Working Self

Somehow I've managed to keep my working self and my writing/academic self wide apart. None of my poems or stories mention animals and there has been no reason to mention my profession to my uni tutor/supervisor. Animals, especially pets, often give writing a sentimental undertone so I guess I have avoided them, except in practice newsletters and brochures. I thought I'd better put the record straight and prove that I am devoted to my patients and enjoy the company of my co-workers - after all I spend the greater part of my waking life with them!
Although I have a special interest in the medicine of cats I see far more dogs in a day than cats. I have no pics of them though as I haven't had to present a dog in an assignment lately! I also see a fair number of rabbits, some guinea pigs and birds, an alpaca and the odd cow. Although I used to own a farm animal practice where I saw and treated any species in a day, including ostriches, emus, koalas, goats, sheep, cattle, horses, camels, and tigers (I've treated two!), I now concentrate on animals that can be carried/led into the practice.
Our clients all come to us by word of mouth. We are off the highway in a quiet part of Canberra which has very little passing traffic and new clients often miss our sign. So our clients are generally self-selected: they treat their pets as part of the family, give their pets' health financial priority and take our advice seriously. Such a change from the bush where I saw a wide cross-section of society and animal owners every day. Stock owners valued my work according to the value of the beast, pet owners varied from those who treated their pets as disposable to those who were emotionally dependant on them.
When we are having a bad day (translation: every consult is a euthanasia/ an old canine friend is given a bad diagnosis/ we can't get an answer on why a cat is rapidly deteriorating/ a patient dies under anaesthesia) we make a fuss of a puppy and have a cuddle with a kitten or have a good communal sob!
Isn't it interesting that this post has quite a different tone to the others? Posts about my daily life are a little philosophical and tend to sound like a story. This is more colloquial, at least for me, and mimics my work self. The work self that is upbeat and busy but professional and kind.