'We Are Not Such Things'- Truth and Forgiveness in South Africa

                                                               

THERE HAVE BEEN myriad references to Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’. ‘We Are Not Such Things’ has been extensively researched. Four years to write. So many interviews and lots of travelling in the car. 

Compelling observations, mostly about poor, impoverished lives, at least by our standards. Many of us have flowing incomes. We worry about proper clothes, nutrition, a good amount of sleep, gadgets and devices, books, travel, our health. Here in poor black townships it seems to be about camaraderie no place for much of the above. So it offers plenty of interesting social observations.

Then there is the relating of the story itself. Amy Biehl. Young, rich, white. Social conscience. Works for the ANC. Believer, deep believer in human rights. Abhors apartheid and is prepared to work hard for its end, and hopefully help the transition. Prepared to bleed for it? Perhaps not. The old cliché. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

Amy Biehl. Forging an interesting path for herself. Bright. Future looks bright. Rich, white American. Wants to do something great. Could be at home in America with mother and father and friends. Plenty of people love and admire her. Surely has friends from Stanford University. Plenty of opportunities for skiing or mall shopping. Maybe reading books.

‘Momma and Betsy say

Find yourself a charity.

Help the needy or the crippled

Or put some time into ecology.

There’s a wide, wide range of noble causes

And lovely landscapes to discover

Yet all I want to do right now is find another lover’.

(Joni Mitchell ‘Song for Sharon’)

Amy Biehl is not looking for a lover. She has her cause. Something back home is stirred in her. It is 1993. Nelson Mandela will soon be released from 27 years at Robben Island. To become President of South Africa, no less. F W de Klerk will become his Deputy. How is that for Reconciliation?

                                   

               

Amy Biehl is in Gugulethu. August 25, 1993. The last place you would want to be if you are white and blonde on this particular day, fifteen kilometres from Cape Town. The air is arid, thick. There is a strong menace in the air. Black people are restless and hungry for the transition that is supposed to be taking place soon. Anticipation, hunger, tension, expectation. It is their right. This should have happened a long time ago. South Africa is about to catch up, at least a little bit, with the rest of the world. But we aren’t there yet.

Amy Biehl is rich, white, American. She is driving through the township of Gugulethu on a hot day that is filled with anticipation and expectation. Many men and women have stones and sticks, some have knives. Lethal restlessness. Lots of toyi-toying. Who is this passing through on the NY1 road in her orangey yellow-coloured Mazda. It is Amy Biehl and she is driving three black colleagues in her car. Stop the toyi-toying. ‘One settler, one bullet’. Someone hurls a brick through Amy Biehl’s windscreen. Possibly another. One hits her in the face, probably her forehead. Somehow she emerges from the car and runs towards the Caltex service station. There are no police, as yet. Yet, there have been incidents on the NY1 road earlier in the day. A car overturned, set on fire. And worse…

Amy Biehl stops, bleeding, exhausted. Facing her killers, sitting down in the gravel. She is inches from death and knows it. She reportedly apologizes. ‘Sorry. What did I do?’ One of the angry mob inserts a knife blade, towards her heart…

There are people nearby who have a different view. Who see her as ‘comrade’, even though she is white. They transport her to the police station, where she dies.

Out of all this tragedy, and mess, hope. The Truth and Reconciliation Committee is meeting. Somehow four killers were found and sentenced to long term imprisonment. They are about to be pardoned. Amy Biehl’s parents insist on it. It is all part of a process of rebuilding. Those who have committed crimes of a political nature in the now former apartheid South Africa may find themselves being pardoned for their crimes and released. It is healing. But their crime must have had a political bent by nature. Amy Biehl’s parents believe their daughter died for a cause, not just a rambling blood-thirstiness. Perhaps it is easier to accept. A death not quite senseless, but mixed up in disadvantage and despair.

                                   

Most of Justine Van Der Leun’s book deals with the aftermath of the commission’s findings. The years after the building of the Amy Biehl Foundation. How two of the ‘killers’ are offered jobs in the Foundation. They become good friends with Amy’s forgiving parents. It is important to the parents. It is what Amy would have wanted. One who understood helplessness and despair.

In a peripheral sense, Justine Van Der Leun gets to know the Biehl parents, but later (well after the father has died), becomes estranged with the mother. This is partly because the book follows new paths. There are interesting little seeds planted. Her book is long for a reason. She becomes a detective tracking down new information which comes to light. It excites her. And it excites her reader. She spends many an hour with the two men who work for the Foundation, and their families. It involves a lot of time in Gugulethu and getting to know the community. It is much changed, fortunately, in the post-apartheid era.

But there is more. Were the right people found, and tried, and sent to jail, and subsequently pardoned? Did the Biehl’s give a job to somebody who wasn’t even present when Amy was killed? Should it have been, instead, his look-alike brother? And therefore, why was he sheltered from everything? Furthermore, was there another attempted lynching in Gugulethu on the same day? Why didn’t this man ever receive justice? What has been the long-term physical and psychological effects of this trauma?

The author travels far and wide around Cape Town and other parts of South Africa in her pursuit of the truth. It is a fascinating story and it has stayed with me for days, even over a week now. She is an excellent reporter/ researcher who has taken copious notes and has asked many questions and has been brave on many occasions. There are many occasions when the reader is transported to various locations. As she talks to the people of the community in their own little homes you feel like you are sitting on the floor or the couch with them. Her detailed descriptions are such that you get a strong sense of who these people are. Their history, their struggles, their poverty, the way they have forged meaning in their lives, their needs (sometimes they ask for food). The way the author edges her way into their history and subtly nudges their conscience and their consciousness to extract as much truth from them as she can. Sometimes recollections clash. She unearths the reasons for these clashes of memory, and sometimes the reasons are fascinating. Not just fading memories, but protectiveness, of other people’s lives.

This is a story that appears to have been written as events have unfolded. The events become complicated and intriguing, therefore the book takes longer to finish and the pages multiply.

It leaves me thinking about Amy Biehl travelling along the NY1, heading innocently towards a maelstrom of grief and misunderstanding, her black companions seated beside her, her mind full of ambition and hope for the changes that are about to take place in South African society.

I also think about the amazing ability to forgive. The generosity of the Biehl parents. The mindset you can forge in order to make sense of turbulent events. To ease the pain. To think and feel that your very own daughter died for a cause, not, because, as one judge perceived, ‘it was wanton brutality, like a pack of sharks smelling blood’.

And finally, I think about other people’s lives, where the place you are born and raised can determine the kind of life you lead. Where there are communities that are so generous and so tight with each other because they have to be. That the best books are those that teach us something important about life. Where we feel so much richer for reading them. That we want to share them with others after sumptuous Christmas meals in safe houses, accompanied by nice wines.

                              

Mavis again- the current state of Australia

MAVIS Clarke was first interviewed on February 22, 2014. She is a British woman who lives in Glenroy with her husband Laurie. She was originally a ‘ten pound pom’ and has an increasingly negative view of the immigration problems she sees mounting in Australia.

                                     

‘Lovely to see you again. I know why you have come back. It’s because the world is turning, isn’t it? You might have guessed, I’ve had a smile on my dial for several months now. Things were pretty bleak there for a while, while Sco Mo was doing his job as Immigration Minister. Don’t get me wrong. With the help of Tony Abbott he did stop the boats. And they’ve still stopped. It’s just that Sco Mo was nothing compared to the real Iron Man, Peter Dutton. He tells it like it is. No fear. The other day he was bang on the money when her said we’ve dragged too many Lebo’s into the country. Someone had to say it. It’s needed to be said for years. And here we are, making the same mistakes. Blacks. Kids from South Sudan who run wild and think they’re in the jungle out here, like it’s some sort of African Apocalypse Now. Except we know who invited them. I’m pretty sure it was Julia Gillard, and if it wasn’t, then it was Kevin 07. You can bet Peter Dutton won’t be bringing any more out. I’ve got a feeling the next lot of ‘refugees’ will be Christian’s like me. Maybe even from England or the British Isles. See, the penny is dropping. Australia is waking up to itself at last.

No, I’m not saying things are perfect. There’s still issues since you interviewed me last, back in Feb, 2014. Take the media. It’s about time we had some equality in reporting as a lot of Australians are sick to death of the Lefty/Marxist/Socialist agenda being shoved at us from every angle. That’s still happening. The Age hasn’t quite gone out of business yet, although it’s closer. Laurie still buys it, but did you see how thin it was today? Yet it’s still $2.80. Waleed Aly’s mouth is getting bigger and bigger, ever since he won that Logie. I had to laugh. Waleed Aly asking Lucy Honan who organised the ‘Teachers for Refugees’ movement whether it’s a teacher’s role to push a political agenda. And he managed to ask while keeping a straight face. Last Monday teachers in some Victorian schools wore slogan T-shirts and had discussions with students about Australia’s supposedly poor treatment of refugees. They should have been sacked immediately. Peter Dutton will get onto this, mark my words.

Am I happy with the new PM? No, not quite. Wrong man. Nothing will replace Tony. Malcolm Turnbull saying none of these Manus Island hobos will ever get to Australia, even if they become government officials of another country one day. Well, that’s a pretty safe bet that won’t happen. And you might say ‘good on him, he is getting away from the Marxist’s at last’, but what does he go and do? He plans to make a swap with America, you take these jokesters who tried to illegally sneak onto Australian waters, and we’ll take some of your illegals- black ones at that- who tried to illegally get into your country. So, in other words, a terrorists’ swap. Worse, we get the black ones.

My sister, back in Bristol, thinks it’s hilarious. She knows how these bastards have stuffed up her country, and she wants the same thing to happen here. ‘Well listen here’, I told her on my Christmas card the other day, ‘it is happening’. I sent her some clippings from the Herald Sun about the Apex gang running wild in the streets and breaking into people’s houses. ‘Come to Glenroy’, I say. ‘Laurie will shoot your heads off with his hidden Adler.’

Donald Trump? Thought you’d ask me about him. But- and this is a big but- two saviours have been born, just before Christmas, ironically enough. Donald Trump out in the US is making America great again (If things don’t improve here me and Laurie are going over).  And the other one is here, the beautiful redhead, God Bless her. Pauline. One Nation is thriving, and why wouldn’t it be? She says it how it is, she knows what the average man on the street thinks, and that is no blacks, no Muslims, no Sharia law, no burqas or hee-jabs, no polygamists ripping off Centrelink, no Apex (deport them all), close temples and mosques, leave if you don’t like our way of life, and let’s get back to the real Australia. Lamb or pig, doesn’t matter, BBQ’s, sunscreen Christmas carols, Christian man, woman, dog sitting on their porches or under the sprinkler with barely nothing on, or going down to the RSL for dinner knowing it’s safe and knowing there’ll be no black Sudanese kid or some Muslim kid standing in your lounge when you get home looking for your video or DVD player.

Anyone who pays on a boat and comes to another country is as far as I’m concerned is illegal. Where is this so-called multiculturalism? We’re losing our culture here. They’re imposing their values on us. These poor women in their godawful shrouds- all this clobber- it should be banned- b-a-n-n-e-d. We don’t do that in Australia. So much for Christmas. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays! How many times have you heard that lately? No councils putting up Christmas decorations anymore. Why are we so hell-bent on changing to fit all these people from other countries?

The wheel is turning my friend. But pretty slowly. My grandkids will reap the benefits. By the time they’re teenagers Glenroy will go back to all its former glory. See how optimistic I am. We are slowly waking up that there’s a nightmare on our doorstep. Aleppo, Germany, Italy, Afghanistan. Let the rest of the world go mad. I’m sitting with Laurie in the kitchen, he’s boiling the tea. My little Christmas tree is twinkling away in the corner. There’s Lauries’s Bassett licorice on the table and some shortbread and biscuits from my sister, Pauline Hanson’s smiling away there on the telly. And I don’t give a rats about anything anymore. 

                            

Tim Winton- New Collection of Essays

                                                   

A TEACHER of secondary students that I know recently read Tim Winton’s ‘The Turning’, found it impressive, and threw it up as a possible text for the next year’s curriculum. He was, apparently, met with horrified glances, even snorts of derision. ‘Tim Winton? You are kidding!” There we have it, the ‘cultural cringe’ lurking in the corridors of a Victorian secondary school, banished from even the remotest corners of a curriculum filled no doubt with golden oldies like Shakespeare from the UK, and acceptable American masters like Arthur Miller and F Scott Fitzgerald, all who apparently have more relevance to young Australian lives than Tim Winton.

I was riveted to last year’s ‘Island Home’ and finding his new book of essays, ‘The Boy Behind The Curtain’ in Readings recently, was an exciting surprise. Winton’s non-fiction essay writing is filled with just as many thought provoking ideas and lovely prose as his fiction.

The new collection begins provocatively with an essay about boyhood which starts with ‘When I was a kid I liked to stand at the window with a rifle and aim it at people’. Readers of Winton’s short stories will recognize the idea in his story ‘A Long Clear View’. It is about the odd things we do in the safety of our family homes when we are children, particularly when our parents are not at home. The essay provides a lovely reminder that often the best art and inspiration comes from real life experiences. Winton has always been a hunter, fisherman and shooter. He might be a bit like Hemingway in this regard- (which reminds me of another cultural cringe hangover people have about him- yes, his prose is unashamedly muscular, and masculine)- here he is, a young teenager, basking in the glow of being home alone, bringing out the .22 Lithgow and holding passers’ by in the street in the weapon’s sight. For months on end. There was no bullet in the breech. But it did give the young Winton a thrill- it placed him in ‘a febrile mood that was almost erotic’. Here he uses the most militaristic of language- ‘I’d stalk into the front room’, ‘survey the street’, ‘when I took up my sentry post’, ‘I’d draw a bead on them’, ‘a person seemed smaller, easier to apprehend’, and so on. Winton’s reflections on dangerous childhood games morphs into a discussion about gun violence in general, and inevitably on to Martin Bryant, murderer of 35 people in Tasmania in 1996. The link between the young and lost Winton, and the equally lost Bryant is chillingly made. Winton, it seems, found words, but words never came easy to Martin Bryant. As for my own childhood misadventures, for me it was blindly hurling pebbles in people’s backyards, waiting for those enthralling seconds to pass before you could discern what the pebble actually hit. A tin roof, perhaps, or a woody tree, or even a sheet of glass. Once I stood on top of a fence and saw how close my pebble was to striking a frightened woman standing on her back yard porch four or five houses away. The thought that the pebble might have felled her was too chilling to think about, and this sudden recognition was what made me stop. Hardly a match for Winton’s gun, yet in its own way far more dangerous and potentially deadly.

What follows is Winton’s recollection of a great cinematic experience. Seeing ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ at the tender age of eight absolutely baffled him but at the same time had a profound impact. He sees it as not just an ‘introduction to the possibilities of cinema’, but also ‘a wormhole into the life of the imagination…’. Much of what I see film-wise these days is on the small screen I am looking at now as I type this 7:47 at night. When these kinds of smaller scale laptops came onto the market back whenever it was, I saw a film being played in an electronics store. Previously it had been in VHS mode on a television. Then I saw it- a Tom Cruise film I think- being played on a laptop in the store, and the intimacy with the screen fascinated me. How easy to pause on images, to choose another chapter, to watch at your leisure with a cup of coffee in bed. I couldn’t wait to buy a DVD I could shove into the drive at the side of the computer. It probably takes away some of the spectacle, but it’s how I studied the Dekalog films by Kieslowski, most of Ingmar Bergman’s catalogue and of recent times, loads of Charlie Chaplin films on youtube. For certain other films, I would always prefer the big screen spectacle, as in the case of A Clockwork Orange or 2001, and definitely for the colour and sound and sheer delight of a film like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that bursts at the sides of the big screen.

Winton likes recalling extreme family moments or other moments of searing intensity that stay with you forever. His father sounded like an interesting chap. That’s him on the police motor bike on the front of the book. His son details his father’s biggest road accident, and it is horrific. Winton uses these incidents in his fiction, as all good writers do. Stay at home and do nothing and you won’t have much to say. Unless, perhaps, you are Emily, Anne or Charlotte at home in Haworth or traversing the moors. In Winton’s case, his father had a horrendous motorbike accident which cries out to in his fiction somewhere.

His chest, shoulder and hip were crushed after being slammed into a brick wall by a driver who had run a stop sign. His painfully long, subsequent recovery caused a ‘fog of dread’ in the house. Sometimes the fog of death can be caused by a single horrific accident. Sometimes it can be caused by a terrible illness. I am thinking of Georgia Blain who died the other day at the age of 52, just a few day’s shy of her birthday. Her mother, Ann Deveson, died on her birthday.

Accidents abound in Winton’s fiction. I’m pretty sure I remember a drowning in Cloudstreet, or at least a near miss. There’s a scene similar to a scene in the film Gattaca in a short story from The Turning when one man saves his brother from drowning. For five years Winton lived with his wife ‘in the very literal shadow’ of Fremantle Hospital. He describes the ‘electricity in the air’ of a place that ‘provided a startling amount of free entertainment’. This is where TW is interesting as he combines truth with imagination- patients ‘beat at the windows…crawled bleeding and intoxicated through the hedges… (a car) ramming the doors of a mental health unit… the puddles of blood and the shitty nappies and the needles and broken glass and the pools of piss…’. It makes you wonder, as a reader, if the writer lives in a different universe.

                       

Besides observer of pain and darkness, and chronicler of memories and films, Winton is also a modern day eco warrior. His chapter about the part he played in the ‘Save Ningaloo Reef’ campaign is perhaps the best essay in the book. There was a proposal for a marina and a resort to be built close to the Ningaloo Reef, 12oo kms from Perth. Wikipedia tells me that the Ningaloo Coast is a World Heritage Site. The reading might be entirely different had there not been a campaign to save the reef from developers. Winton explains in some depth the conservation angle- the beauty of the reef, its ‘terrestrial wilderness’, the threat to various whales, turtles, sharks and dugongs. But he goes further and offers fascinating insight into the politics of the day and the toing and froing, the developers’ point of view, the strength of the Gallup government, and so on. There is the tension at the meetings, the transformation of towns caught in the midst of things, like Coral Bay and Exmouth, and shrewd insights into the crucial part that the media plays. 1500 people turned up at one public meeting at the town hall in Fremantle. There are fundraisers, auctions, banners, MP’s, websites. Then there were the celebrities. Winton himself, and Toni Collette offering a hand, and before that Luc Longley, and Eddie Vedder chiming in when Pearl Jam came to visit. Being a prolific novelist, you would think, might be all-consuming. Winton’s love of the land and the sea, and in particular all things WA, contribute to making him quite a charismatic figure.

Winton’s affinity with sea creatures well and truly encompasses sharks. He remembers, at 13, witnessing men ‘blasting holes’ into sharks from close range in Albany in 1973. The sharks are there because of the mass of blood in the water from dead sperm whales. Thankfully the blasé attitude has long gone and he has become a vocal defender of the shark just as much as he has been a defender of eco systems. In his book he bemoans the fact that the ‘barbaric trade in shark fin’ prospers. That people in Sydney and Melbourne enjoy eating flake, even ‘as the numbers decline.’ That people everywhere have their ‘shark prejudices’, that millions of people swim in the water every year, yet there are very few shark attacks, yet almost ‘a hundred million’ sharks are killed every year.

Besides a touching, affectionate piece reminiscing his time under the tutelage of Elizabeth Jolley at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT), and further eco system stuff, and a short piece about visiting what was once a cultural Mecca for the Winton family (Melbourne), TW finishes with a debate about something that he sees is ‘festering in the heart of our community’: the refugee debate. He remembers the old days of welcoming strangers after the Vietnam War years, and writes about the way in which we have become ‘afraid of strangers’. That ‘our leaders’ have taught us ‘we need to harden our hearts’. That a policy has developed where mainstream parties ‘pursue asylum-seeker policies based on cruelty and secrecy’. That ‘pity is no longer a virtue but a form of weakness’. That our policies ‘ruin the lives of children’ and it ‘shames us and it poisons the future’. This essay of Winton’s would be a good one to refer back to in, say, twenty or thirty years. Place it in an envelope and bury it in a time capsule. Open it around the time of the inevitable Royal Commission, and wonder at how it could ever have happened. It’s all there, as another reminder of why it’s worth reading Tim Winton.

                          

               

November meanderings

WHEN I am tired or full of doubts, or unwinding, or just want to relax, I go back in time and place to all those things that have given me nourishment over the years. Then I feel renewed and more cheerful and soothed, and I am thankful I have these things to sustain me, these things that I marvel at, these pure and beautiful sounds and precious, comforting thoughts, things that make you feel special and unique, like you have uncovered some kind of corner or something hidden, where there is inspiration and goodness and silence and wonder and shining gratitude where you feel like a knight that shimmers in his armour, or can imagine all the colours of autumn leaves brightly standing out.

I am thinking of… lots of things… as I let my mind drift back in memory lane to events in the past. It is a film and the image goes wobbly and out of focus, and suddenly there it is in colour.

I am standing in this secure web of playing cricket with the other kids in the neighbourhood. We are playing for hours in the late afternoon sunshine. It all happens on a corner. The wickets stand in the middle of the road at one end, and at the entrance to a neighbour’s nature strip at the other (as time goes on they will build a garden on their nature strip to make it more difficult to play cricket). As a car intrudes we scoop the wicket up with one hand to allow the car to pass, and get back to the cricket. Sometimes Sam or Sotto are umpires and they have less idea about what to do than the rest of us. Wayne appeals for LBW, manipulatively and vituperatively, and they nervously raise their finger. The fear of going against his appeal! I like this shot which is like a cover drive (the bowling is slow enough for me to be able to do this), whilst Anthony at the other end smacks the ball over several houses. 

There is the time Wayne smashes the bat against a telegraph pole and creates a sudden end to our glorious games… but that’s another story. It’s all pretty innocent. Sometimes we just stand outside the Arbuckle’s house and chat- for hours and hours about anything. The talking and the listening and the speculating and the mystery of life, it’s all quite fascinating. We are like children in a William Blake poem from ‘Songs Of Innocence’, except we are surrounded by bitumen roads rather than being in the heart of the country:

‘When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.

‘Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.’

‘No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly,
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep.’

‘Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,
And then go home to bed.’
The little ones leapèd, and shoutèd, and laugh'd
And all the hills echoed.’  

 (William Blake, ‘Nurse’s Song’).

Then there are other images, unravelling. I am still in this secure web. I think it is about the same time. I am still eleven or twelve, or maybe thirteen. I have grown up on a diet of Enid Blyton books. I have devoured them, especially the ‘Five Find-Outers’ series and the wonderful adventure series, like the ‘Valley of Adventure’ and the ‘River’ or ‘Mountain of Adventure.’ I read these books in one or two goes until they are finished. The older siblings, or the adults, are probably watching television. I am oblivious to the other noises in the house. It is all making me go blind. I am on the bottom bunk, without a lamp. But then, at that time, it doesn’t matter. These are the halcyon days of reading. 

Later, quite a bit later, as an adult, I will sit in a lounge room chair with Colm Toibin’s second novel, ‘The Heather Blazing’, and I will revisit those wondrous days of reading with a sense of wonder, enthralled by the writing and the characters, feeling as though I am reading something somehow intrinsically significant, moved by the power of words and moods and staying absolutely still until it is over, like you have finished a sumptuous meal.

Music. Memories of music come flooding in. When I was young if I wasn’t up the corner like Blake’s children, or devouring sets of books by Enid Blyton or Agatha Christie, I was in the lounge listening to the Marantz stereo, possibly with headphones, music making me deaf just as reading made me blind. The price you have to pay.

The cousins in Bundoora had some Beatles. It was the first time I ever had ‘Sergeant Pepper’ placed in my hand. I studied the numerous faces on the cover with absolute fascination. If I couldn’t quite get moved by ‘For The Benefit of Mr Kite’ or ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’, I was floored by ‘Lovely Rita’ with its delirious panting, astonished by the domestic violence in ‘Getting Better’ and put into a wondrous dream by ‘A Day in the Life’, the dreamy bit on the bus sung by McCartney my favourite bit. Then of course I would buy them all. Still very deep in my memory is going to Northland and taking ‘Abbey Road’ to the Marantz, staying up late when all were in bed, fascinated by the street scenes on the front and back covers, wondering what was next to the 'N' partially by the girl in the blue dress, Lennon’s screams in ‘I Want You’, his groans in ‘Come Together’, the nonsense of ‘Sun King’ and the majesty of the last twenty minutes of the vinyl’s ‘Side 2’:

‘One sweet dream
Pick up the bags and get in the limousine
Soon we'll be away from here
Step on the gas and wipe that tear away
One sweet dream came true today
Came true today
Came true today (Yes it did)’

(Paul McCartney, ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’)

Naturally, my musical journey took other paths. I became even more involved in ‘The Doors’, and by Year 12 it was an obsession.

 I wore a Jim Morrison badge every day. People said I looked like him. Perhaps I thought in a way I was him. I even, somewhat cautiously it must be said, even tried to mimic a bit of his alleged lifestyle. I loved the rockier songs, like ‘Peace Frog’ and ‘LA Woman’, but it was probably the more adventurous or experimental ones I liked, as well as some ballads. ‘The Soft Parade’ and ‘The End’ have always held a fascination, and I can’t remember how many times I’ve crooned along to ‘I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind’, ‘The Crystal Ship’, ‘Blue Sunday’, ‘Indian Summer’, ‘Wishful Sinful.’ Never really the boppy hits for me. Jim’s face has always fascinated me. To this day I often look at pictures, and sometimes find new ones. Young and beautiful, and then equally as handsome, and more poetic and dignified looking, around 69’/ 70’ with that magnificent beard. A towering charisma, for all his faults and his reckless lifestyle.

Then, entering adulthood, and the space is all colour now and fresher and more recent and long lasting. The eldest brother had a Joni Mitchell- ‘The World of Joni Mitchell’- a compilation. It was enough. It wetted my appetite. I was spellbound, and still am, by the wondrous beauty of the words, and the shimmering melodies, unusual instruments like the Appalachian dulcimer- and Joni’s flowing hair and angular features and soprano voice, all creating seductive little hooks. The first songs (from this album) were really ‘That Song About The Midway’ and ‘Song To A Seagull’, the latter with its mesmerizing lyrics centred on place, the alienating city:

‘I came to the city
And lived like old Crusoe
On an island of noise
In a cobblestone sea
And the beaches were concrete
And the stars paid a light bill
And the blossoms hung false
On their store window trees
My dreams with the seagulls fly
Out of reach out of cry.’

Events from the past whirr about me. These are gloriously hungry times, of searching Joni’s oeuvre, internet-less and probably penniless. The album ‘Blue’ came quickly after, and we already had ‘Court and Spark’ (screeching in the lounge room to ‘Help Me’, and emotionally moved, without really understanding ‘The Same Situation”), and other Joni albums, some as they came out, brave efforts like ‘Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter’ (brother’s help again), but then the ultimate floored experience, trance-like, in another world of blissful devastation- the discovery of ‘Hejira’, with no less than ‘Amelia’, ‘Song For Sharon’, and the majestic title track, the groove, the Jaco Pastorius bass, and the sheer love of poetry:

‘I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones

I know, no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone

Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tribute to finality, to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality

In the church they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears
There's the hope and the hopelessness
I've witnessed thirty years

We're only particles of change I know, I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone…’

There’s a lot here because it is really difficult to know where to stop. It’s Joni at her best- an outsider with feelings of melancholia and confusion, a fresh break-up in the incessant quest for love, or safety, or security. And wandering, wandering. Just like another artist… which leads on to…

Van Morrison. A simultaneous discovery, and just as profound, when my mind was teeming with new ideas and experiences and questions and reading and thinking. Absolutely ripe for ‘Astral Weeks’. In some ways a similar journey about travel and a the old 70’s search for answers. John Densmore, in his book, tells the story of how he witnessed Van writing the lyrics to the song ‘Astral Weeks’ when they were sitting on a couch at a party together. Near the end of the song there is this heavenly experience:

‘Ain't nothing but a stranger in this world
I'm nothing but a stranger in this world
I got a home on high
In another land
So far away
So far away
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
In another time
In another place
In another time
In another place
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
In another time
In another place
In another time
In another place
In another face.’

The first thing you will notice is how evocative and expressive and other- wordly or mystical it is. Then how repetitive it is. And that’s Van Morrison. Another realm. His words don’t win him a Nobel Prize for Literature. But they are electric and earth shattering when they combine with the music and the unique phrasing. One of the ‘way up in the heaven’ lines goes for about ten seconds. ‘Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy up in the heaven…’ Sometimes when I read something really good, like some gorgeous prose from someone who knows just exactly how to write- like Fitzgerald describing Gatsby’s world just before he gets shot- I imagine them up in their study on the top floor, putting the pen down, drawing a breath and looking out of the curtains and thinking ‘wow, where did that come from?’ That’s how it is with the whole of the ‘Astral Weeks’ album. Van pens it, gets it down in the studio with Jay Berliner and others, and then walks out with a light heart and a smirk of self-satisfaction on his face (you literally get to see it with Paul Simon during the earliest recordings of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’).

I am having trouble remembering the first time I ever heard the album. By 1984 I was buying each new Van album when it was released. Fortunately, he had the type of 80’s that very few of his contemporaries had. So I listened to this and others throughout the 80’s and I remember living in Adelaide for a while during 1986, and I think this was the time it meant the most to me. The evocative walking up Cyprus Avenue, the ballerina stepping lightly but not like Degas, the sheer joy of having someone you love sitting beside you, walking with abandonment drinking cherry wine, the euphoria of driving down the street in a chariot, the smell of sweet perfume, and then the abrupt, tragic death, ‘I know you’re dying and I know you know it too.’

These thoughts sustain and carry me. They are what make you an individual. They are what nobody else understands. We all have them. You can only hope to feel things, keenly. You don’t want robotic anything. You want a heart and a pulse. No empty spaces. And then one day, when you’re seventy…

Hope and optimism in extreme adversity

BABA SCHWARTZ- 'The May Beetles'.

THE first memoir about the Jewish Holocaust I encountered was Elie Wiesel’s book ‘Night’. Although it was often gripping and shocking, and reasonably lyrical or poetic, I found it too overwhelming and cloying. By the end the experiences that he and his father encountered were exhausting to read, although I did appreciate the incredible strength and fortitude the pair shared in surviving, together, for so long. Of course it feels almost shameful to say that reading these experiences of the terrible and degrading encounters at Auschwitz were ‘exhausting’ in some way. Victims might retaliate with ‘well, you should have tried to live it.’ But somewhere in the deepest corners or avenues of my mind there was something that repelled me in my experience of reading ‘Night’. Perhaps I reacted to the didactic, heavy-handed, moralising style. It may have become connected in some way in my mind with the subsequent publicity about Elie Wiesel’s life, and his return journey to his horrors and his association with the mawkish Oprah Winfrey.

The next book I read, also set at Auschwitz, was written from a woman’s perspective. Elli L Friedmann (Livia Bitton Jackson) was 13 years old when she was taken to Auschwitz with members of her family. I still remember the incredible detail of when she arrived on the cattle train. Sometimes kids her age would be sent to the gas chambers, however, she apparently survived because Mengele was curious about her long blond braids, incredulous about the perceived disconnect between her blondness and Jewish background. Elli was such a brave kid who told her story without too many melodramatic flourishes. I wish I remembered more about it.

Just this past week I finished my third memoir, this time by a survivor of Auschwitz from the easternmost province of Hungary, a small nondescript town then of 12,000, called Nyirbator. It was compelling reading from the get go, and a week after I read it, it still weighs heavily on my mind. It is a lovely Black Inc publication with beautiful photographs from long ago.

Baba Schwartz’s book ‘The May Beetles- My First Twenty Years’ offers just what its title suggests. Its lovely first hundred pages or so are without conflict and detail the ordinary life of growing up within a close family in a small eastern Hungarian town. Baba is the middle girl of three, born in December, 1927. Her memoir details the romantic background of her parents’ shy introduction and their romantic beginnings. Baba’s attraction to her future husband was, apparently, ‘the grace of her walk’ and ‘the pleasing shape of her legs.’ By the time Baba is born the reader is already intrigued by their history and all their Jewish customs.

Then we come across many marvellous details about Baba and her sisters growing up in the thirties. All innocence. Tragedies await but they are oblivious to it all. Like many Jews, the Hungarian ones do not know what awaits them. Or, if they do- and sometimes there were warning signs of abuse and conflict in the big cities- they can scarcely believe it and don’t take any action.

Growing up, Baba is receptive to nature and all the wonderful things going on around her, like sunsets, or the flight of birds, or the ‘heavy, sweet fragrance’ of acacia trees. Baba is sensitive as a child, and very intelligent. For her ‘the world (was) an inexhaustible source of the strange, the wonderful and the downright puzzling.’ A beautiful anecdote is her memory of suddenly realising she was bright. It occurred when she was just a year into school. She had a book of poems and was reciting poetry to her younger sister- except she was making up the verse as she went along, producing an extemporaneous language that was still somehow filled with ‘fluency, meaning, rhyme and rhythm.’ Tears fall down her cheek as she is ‘overwhelmed’ by her talent. This linguistic talent and imagination is shown in bucket loads in this book.

Baba recounts her lovely Jewish family traditions and the idiosyncrasies of life in Nyirbator and Its people. The thirties were a lovely time for the family of five and the Keimovitz family (Baba’s maiden name) played with Jews and non-Jews alike. The only sour and mildly troubling note from this decade comes in the form of the phrase ‘Stinking Jews’, spoken by a boy from the neighbourhood. This occurs in 1938.

Baba recalls the ‘warm winds’, and the ‘fragrance of blossoms’, and ‘flirting with boys with intense delight’ in the summer of ’42.  She has turned fifteen. There is a beautiful photograph of her at this age, her right hand resting under her chin, the top row of white teeth gleaming, her right shoulder dipped and her dreamy, powerful eyes fixed on some object to her right. Her hair is soft and long and she looks radiant and mature.

Finally, by early 1944, word comes that the Germans have entered Hungary, and all their lives change. She is called a ‘Stinking Jewess’ by a ticket conductor on a tram. There is malicious gossip about her Jewish origins on a train. And then not long after her sixteenth birthday, all Jews are suddenly handing over their radios and jewellery. The yellow star. Baba’s father is weeping, and her own heart aches. Families are burying precious goods in their backyards, and there is the first journey- to a local synagogue, afterwards a ghetto.

A number of journeys take place after this, until the dreaded Auschwitz looms. Baba recalls the train journey and that ‘on each face one could see a recognition that our lives meant nothing to those who had brought us here.’ There is inhuman cramping of bodies, and buckets for toileting, the problem of privacy and the initial shielding with coats, until ‘modesty’ is eventually ‘dispensed with’. Baba calls the entry to Auschwitz ‘the gates of hell.’

Much of what occurs here- the selection, the shaving of heads, the nakedness and ill-fitting clothes, has all been documented countless times. Baba and her family- and all of them, besides their father, somehow survive. It is another amazing story of courage and perseverance and the will to live. What makes this memoir different, it seems to me, is the incredible optimism. Baba does not spend much time reflecting on the brutality of the SS or the outrageous unfairness of this new barbaric world they have entered. Even well before the Russians arrive there is much that is uplifting or life-affirming. It is indicative of her generous and beautiful nature. And her humanity.

And that of her mother. A Lithuanian girl dies during the night when Baba is in a hospital post-Auschwitz in a place called Fridendorf. It is the middle of winter and the ground is frozen. Baba’s mother thaws the hard ground with buckets of hot water. She gives the poor girl a decent burial, in a brutal world where decency barely exists. The girl weighed ‘no more than a cat.’ This is the world that Baba lives in now, at the age of seventeen.

By the beginning of 1945 the Russians are advancing and there is a constant movement and marching. Many people are perishing, often executed by the SS because they are lame or are stumbling. It is Baba’s mother who is again the strength of the family. It is her ingenious plan that enables their escape, hiding in a cellar, somehow avoiding the early morning march that would probably have killed her sister, barely able to walk.

Although liberation is drawing nearer, there are still many trials ahead, both with German and Russian soldiers, and constant subterfuge. A few months later and the war is over, and the world for Baba and her family changes colour and becomes warmer and filled with hope again. There is even enough time in her memoir to deal with a return home, and at the start of 1947, marriage to the man of her dreams. It is a memoir that filled me with enormous interest and pleasure. It is not what you might expect from a memoir about Auschwitz and WW2. But this is a story about much more than that. The grace and the optimism and the courage and the love of life all miraculously outweigh the deadening horrors of Josef Mengele and his concentration camp.