Your world turned upside down: motoring in Gippsland.

GIPPSLAND TRIP

WE climbed into the car and headed south-east, the four of us just last week. I drove, frustrated at times on the journey to one of our favourite haunts, Gippsland. Frustrated because I was outvoted and had to listen to the strident voice of Adele for much of the way. She’s bitter, it seems, over broken relationships.

Still, it didn’t take as long as I expected. Wilson’s Promontory- specifically, Squeaky Beach. M has always wanted to go there, often asking if it really squeaks. We snacked at Fish Creek (Alison Lester, author, has a bookshop there). The weather was ripe for our swim. We followed some German travellers to the shoreline. They spoke of crocodiles. I told them the story of the bright red fingernails found in a crocodile’s belly several years ago in the NT.

We stripped off. Children straight in. Me, holding back like I seem to do more and more these days. Is it my sight? Some newly formed trepidation. The water, up to my thighs, was incredible though. S wanted to go deeper and deeper. She watched the ‘boogie boards’. Her mind ticked over. M was in shallower water. They both sat down at times, making the waves rise to impact their body, and make the waves feel bigger than they were.

I looked over my shoulder and took in the lovely, large boulders and distant mountains. It occurred to me that this must be one of the world’s great beaches. Perfect crystalline white sand. Translucent, sheer, silken water. Tiny dark fishes. Sans seaweed and sharp shells.

I walked over to the marble-like rocks and stood between some, in the deep little watery gullies that they formed. I met a boy that told me there were giant crabs underneath. A man with an impressive-looking camera was taking portraits of his girls adjacent to the rocks. In some shots the thin horizon was behind them, and then he turned them around, and had the mountains as a backdrop, in the opposite direction.

I focused on the smooth, rocky ground and the magnificent boulders. Marvelling at the colours, I called M over, and to my delight she also found them fascinating. The rocky bed beneath our feet was predominately gold. The sides of some of the rocks were a reddish rust-brown in colour. M and I talked about where we had seen that colour before.  We couldn’t, however, remember. Was it on a horse?

S came over to see what the fuss was about and posed for pictures. We began to leave, reluctantly. I thought about other great sea adventures of my own. Cornwall, UK, 1987. After a long journey by train from London, I arrived in the late afternoon at Bodmin Station. There was barely anybody there. It was a Sunday and a camp leader allowed me to return with him to a nearby camp consisting of young adults. The alternative was to be stuck at the station until the morning, and sleep there. I shared a lovely evening with them, and then the same man drove me to Wadebridge in the morning so I could connect with a bus heading west to see my friends who had organized a little yellow cottage called ‘Wave’s End’ at Port Isaac.

I arrived, at around dusk, in an exalted mood, buoyed by my camp experience and fellow kindness, and the sheer beauty and expectation of being in Cornwall. A short distance from our cottage was the bay and shoreline of Port Isaac. A heavy anchor lies beside the water. You can see it in the original series of Poldark, and apparently in the current show called Doc Martin.

This must be what paradise is like.

One night- it must have been the first night- or hang on, I think it was the second- it was by moonlight, just after the period we call dusk. We were there in winter, January 1987. It was pretty cold, especially by Australian standards, which is of course what I was used to. The adrenaline flowed as I stepped outside the door, and I ran the 400 or so metres down to the inlet madly and exalted. I stared out at the calm, black water, and the dark green mountains surrounding I, and felt the crashing winds.  I thought of my childhood dreams which were all centred around Cornwall. Books, mythology, adventure, smuggling. I could scarce believe where I was standing. The old, ancient and rusted anchor on my left, I thought about the centuries lived in that very spot. The majesty of the scene made me blink back tears. Not long afterwards, I wrote a postcard to my English aunt in Melbourne, and told her, with absolute sincerity, that Port Isaac was the most magical and beautiful place I had ever visited.

I thought about all this as I looked at the mountains and smooth rocks of Squeaky Beach, Victoria. The crystal clear water, yellow pristine sand. Beware of the power of moods. It was the night time and coldness and wildness and ruggedness that made me love Cornwall. But in a different mood, and at a different time, I could see that Squeaky beach could be the most magnificent place on Earth as well.

We left, reluctantly, all four of us, and headed off to east Leongatha- our home for the next two nights- Walnut Farm Cottage. Lovely gardens filled with avocado trees, five gaggling geese, and a run down but adequate tennis court.

Next day, the dawn was a brilliant fiery red.

Somewhere in Gippsland there lives a man who ‘owns’ about 60-70 dogs. He sells them not too long after they are born, sometimes for several thousand dollars. They are housed in concrete runs and bark excitedly when you put your fingers through the metal grate. He has one small pup with an unusual blue tinge in its fur. He says there is something rare about it, and that he might get a bit more for it.

The dogs are all associated with poodles. The letters ‘…oodle’ are all in their breed. A man with 60-70 dogs, the number increasing by the day. A man with about 60-70 dogs. All ‘oodles’. You could say there are ‘oodles’ of them. He has 60-70 dogs. He sells them when they have grown up a bit. They are being born every day. The poodle influence is everywhere. He has 60-70 dogs, which he regularly sells as new ones are born. You can see the poodle influence in them. And the cavalier… dogs everywhere held up for inspection for potential buyers. He has at any one time 60-70 dogs, and this number might grow. The dogs have soft fur and kind clear eyes. There are a good number of them. For sale.

At the pub near Foster. A young girl is dressed up as the main character from the film ‘Frozen’. Families are inside sitting at tables waiting for meals. They are mostly over 65, 70, probably retired. I don’t like this pub much. There are more people outside. They look like they haven’t a care in the world. A much younger crowd, drinking and smoking, and swearing. For someone from Melbourne’s suburbs it’s a different experience. They are probably nice people. There is just something about their casualness and indifference to everything which is slightly repugnant. Difficult to put your finger on. I’m thinking of farms and cattle and utes with kelpies in the back. I don’t know if I am ready for this lifestyle, but at the same time I don’t like the city much. I am in no man’s land. Everything seems wrong, somehow.

The meal comes. It is supposed to be pork medallions. It might be pork, ugly and hard and burnt as it is. And flavourless. But it certainly ain’t medallions. They are supposed to be round. The waitress comes, and I am alert and expectant. But she doesn’t ask the customary ‘how was your meal?’ She must think better of it.

Inverloch is nice, on a barely bearable hot day. How lucky we are to find that park. How skilful we are at getting in our bathers either inside or beside the car. The waves are inviting and cool. But I had that scare years ago. I don’t go far in. Still, it’s beautiful. S and I stay in for eternity. Magnetised. The sky and the horizon are worlds away. We are just little dots in an expansive ocean, boogie boards flying harmlessly around us. Will we ever feel ready to get out of the water. I have had this feeling on other trips, wanting time to stand still. Bobbing and drifting like we are self-contained little boats.

Cars fly by in the traffic on the way home. In the heat of the car, our bathers slowly dry. It’s my turn for music and I listen to live Van Morrison. He is covering an old song by Sam Cooke and the charm of the words make me smile:

‘Eyes turned away, I know
And music soft and slow
With someone you love so
That's where it's at.

Your world turned upside down
You're making not a sound
No one else around
That's where it's at.

Yeah, let me tell you
Your heart beatin' fast
You're knowin' that time will pass
But hopin' that it lasts
That's where it's at.’ 

Georgia Blain's final book: unflinching, despairing

GEORGIA Blain’s first novel was set in Adelaide and was called ‘Closed For Winter.’ Quite a haunting novel, it was an accomplished debut, about a young girl who struggles with the fact that her slightly older sister has gone missing, perhaps due to foul play. Her mother also struggles to cope, neurotically cutting out newspaper articles about crimes, from memory. The protagonist’s voice, in first person, was steady, unblinking and plainly adorned, and was very effective as a symbol of uncertainty and suffering. I remember the great Australian reviewer, James Bradley, enjoyed the book, calling it ‘Beachside Gothic’ in his ABR review.

Well, Georgia Blain’s dead now. She died at the age of not much more than 50, and her mother died just a few days later, back in December last year. So she had a fairly brief writing life, although generous if you want to compare her with people like Emily Bronte or John Keats.

Her final book, ‘Between A  Wolf And A Dog’, has its moments, but it isn’t, in my opinion, one of her best books. There is a mother, filmmaker, who is dying of brain cancer and cannot tell her two daughters. Her husband, an accomplished artist, has already died. She finishes herself off with a large dose of heroin. Of her two daughters, one is at a loose end but used to be a pretty good songwriter. She is estranged from her sister because she had sex with her sister’s husband. Naturally, her sister is estranged from her husband as a result. She is a family therapist, so we are introduced to the miserable lives of her ‘patients’, some of them crying because of failed relationship, another desperately sad and neurotic because she has never had sex. The sister, therefore, does not communicate with ex-husband or sister, and is beginning to conduct a new relationship which, admittedly, holds some hope.

This sister has two young daughters who are pretty obnoxious and play the parents off against each other, sometimes feigning illness to get out of school. One day she sees her father kissing her mother’s sister (it seems the taboo relationship might start up again), and won’t talk to her father as a result.

The father is pretty hopeless. By the end of the novel he is crying in synch with the rain being splashed on the car windscreen. He is some sort of pollster who is lazy and unethical, and he gets dismissed from his job and finds he has nowhere to go and nothing to do. The damaging sex he had with his sister-in-law was reckless and occurred because both were bored. He takes drugs and is a well-known womaniser, devilishly handsome, but best steered away from. He is only redeeming experience is at the end of the book, when he is surprisingly able to keep his mother-in-law’s suicide a secret.

The other thing about this book. On top of all these awful people, and the difficulty I had in finding pathos and empathy, it is constantly raining. Georgia Blain must have found at least 20 or 30 ways to describe torrential rainfall. It adds to the depressing, claustrophobic, despairing nature of the novel. Just like some dystopian Blade Runner-like atmosphere, this unrelenting rain. It seeps into the soul of the characters and weighs them down helplessly, just like some of Ray Bradbury’s characters.

I wished I had liked ‘Between A Wolf And A Dog’ more. The best thing I can say about it is that there is a certain boldness and truthfulness, as always, in Georgia Blain’s writing. An appealing lack of sentimentality, perhaps. But I wish she allowed the sun to creep in a little bit more. Sure, in the end, the characters do strive for equilibrium or redemption in some ways, but is all seems so submerged by their depressing worries and poor life choices.

I also wish I could find a truly great novel. It has been at least 7 or 8 books since I read something I really like. Alex Miller’s ‘Coal Creek’. He leaves most contemporary authors for dead.

The Regatta

HALF MOON BAY, 2017

WE arrived at Half Moon Bay at about 1:00 PM. The sun was at its peak then, the hottest part of the day. We were lucky to find a park, if you recall. There were those long, elongated car spots on our right. A number of them empty, I believe. I nearly took one, so desperate we were. Then we realised it was set aside for the cars towing the yachts. A regatta was going to begin later in the day. It would have been the height of rudeness to book it. An awful start to our little swimming in the bay adventure. Luckily, somebody was leaving behind a regular spot. We just had to be patient and zoom in when it became vacant.

We all walked down, then, to the little curved bay, the bay in a kind of half-moon shape, all four of us walking slowly, carrying things, beneath a weird, intense and vast blue, blue sky, and before the still waters and the soft yellowish sand. We placed all our things down in a little spot that had space around it, not far past the beginning of the swimming spots, only a hundred yards from the fish’n’chips stall, and fifty yards from the coloured bathing boxes.

You and M quickly abandoned all sense of family responsibility and wanted to wade into the inviting water. But we still had the tent to put up, the towels to lay out, the chair to position and the crucial sun- screen to apply. Ouch, how hot it was getting already. We had most of the tent organised. Next it was time to cup our hands and place sand alongside the pockets so the tent wouldn’t blow away. Not that there was much of a breeze. It just wasn’t my sort of day. The fact that it was windless, and hot, and the mucking about with the tent, and the crowds of people- all this conspired against me. But none of this was impacting you or your sister. Or your mother, for that matter. You all anticipated cool water and hot, hot, hot sun!

Nothing I could do could get me comfortable. You and M went out quite far and were really enjoying yourselves. I tried not to feel anxious. I could see the submarine wreck out past you, somebody climbing on it. I tried to get comfortable. My sore limbs wouldn’t allow it. Sitting up hurt my back, and lying down meant my long legs would stick out into the dangerously hot sun. I tried to read, and did a bit more of the crossword puzzle. I could only think about how comfortable it would be, to be at home on my cool bed and my soft, soft pillows. I knew I was being a ‘beach wimp’, but I couldn’t help it. By 1:30 I was ready to go. But you were having too much fun in the water with your sister, and then your mother was venturing in, too. I hated it, but conversely I enjoyed the fact that you didn’t.

Many years ago, the 1920’s, in the world of fiction, two people talked about love on these very shores, overlooking the same wreck out in the water. The author Alex Miller explores the theme of growing love between a French engineer, Georges Elder, and a young Melbourne woman, Emily Stanton. They look out over the water, and, more meaningfully, into each other’s eyes, and upon each other’s skin. Her parents are also present, and the attraction is not lost upon them. These parents are probably thinking about their courting days. It is here that Emily has probably decided she will marry Georges, and go back to Paris with him, and begin, unbeknown to her, a dissatisfying life in the French capital.

I thought about these matters quietly, and then I began to have a good look around me. Most noticeable was the young woman in front of me right in my vision, about half way between me and the beginning of the water. She had a red bikini top with big, green bikini bottoms. The white tag was sticking out at the bottom of her back. Her hair was up and she wore sun glasses. She looked about 22 and under her glasses I could see she had wide, European eyes and a large, attractive mouth. Next to her on the adjacent towel was her little boy, no more than about three, wearing nappies under his little bathers. She had him mostly covered up by another towel, but his left arm and some of his naked chest was exposed. It reminded me of cooking a little lamb on the spit. Every now and then she applied a bit more sun screen to his body, so in places he was a slippery, milky white. He seemed to be asleep. She was dozing. Soaking up the hot rays and getting her copper-coloured body all bronzed. She had the phone in her hand at times, texting. Then taking a photo of her tired, little boy, shrivelling away in the sun like a prawn. I imagined her messages were then relayed to her husband, working somewhere like the Docklands, sweltering in the sun with a naked torso on top of some tall building adjacent to a crane.

I couldn’t get the woman and her little roasted boy out of my mind, and wondered if she knew what I was thinking. I wanted to share my fears with you, but you were still frolicking in the water, oblivious. I nearly said something to her. ‘Are you planning to cook him and eat him all up when you get home?’ Just then, an equally concerned person, a wiser, older mother, offered her an umbrella for shade, and the neglectful mother gladly took it. There was all ‘round relief.

Finally, all three of you came out, glistening, from the water. You and your sister played in the sand, thousands of little grains clinging to your still damp bodies. Your mother came back into the tent. I felt restless, and M, your sister, agreed to come for a walk along the water. We ventured as far as we could to the right, until we reached impenetrable rocks on the shore. We passed hundreds of people either in the water or laying at the mercy from the hot rays of the sun. Families, and lot of groups of friends, often all males or groups of four or five females. Different ages and different accents. It was difficult not to notice all that exposed skin. Some people wore the barest threads of clothing. It was like some sort of designer beach. You half expected a camera to be set up somewhere for photo shoots for Vogue or Cosmopolitan magazine.

M and I returned to find you quietly sitting beside your mother and letting sand sift through your cupped little fingers. I thought about the passing of life and had a visual update of the poor boy burning. Behind our tent a new group had gathered. Four of five young women lying on their stomachs, phones in hand, texting. I started wondering if there were any places where phones would be inappropriate, or probably more accurately, inconvenient or unsuitable. Perhaps the women wouldn’t take their phones into the water. I turned to ask you your thoughts, but you and M had already gone back into the water, just when I was going to make the suggestion that we might think about packing up and leaving.

The heat of the day became stronger. The population of sun worshippers began to grow larger. Another body appeared. Another woman. A blue one-piece bathing suit with white frills at the tops of the legs and around the neck. Broad, black sunglasses and black, glossy hair. She lay quickly, on her back, as the golden sun began to pour all over her warm body.

Many years ago, the 1920’s, in the world of fiction, Juliet lay, like this woman, feeling the soft air of the sea and feeling the sun penetrate into her bones and her thoughts, in Sicily, in the imagination of D H Lawrence. I thought about Juliet, and this woman, and wondered if she, like Juliet, was leading a dissatisfied life with a dull husband at home, dissolving unhappy thoughts through the rays of the blue, pulsing sun.

I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, share any of these thought with you as you still dripped with water,  twenty or thirty metres into the bay. You and M were both beginning to practise handstands. You did not want to come in any time soon. Still, I had had enough and told your mother I wanted to go. I had have enough of the wearying heat hours ago. There was something ugly and alien about the water to me and I refused to yield to it by getting uncomfortably wet, with millions of grains of sand sticking to my toes. The people all around me bothered me. The silly couple that emerged to my right that giggled and reminded me of Georges and Emily. Juliet next door whose large eyes were closed under her wide black sunglasses. The four women begin the tent still texting away and marvelling at images on their phone. The cruel woman in front of us in the red bikini top who lay adjacent to her scorched, immobile son. All the petty people along the shoreline where M and I had walked almost an hour ago, shifting their positions and lifting their legs and their thighs to become ever closer to the harsh, all empowering sun.

Finally, finally, you and your sister clambered onshore, and with the promise of a take away meal, agreed to help in the exhausting process of packing up. The tent was awful to put away. It just wouldn’t collapse on itself and fold the way it was meant to do. There was so much luggage to take back to the car. Our accessories seem to have grown. Your mother and I picked up most of the things. You managed your own personal possessions, your thongs trailing out of your right hand. You told me you were refreshed. I said I was hot, uncomfortable, and tired.

All four of us walked back towards the car park, past the bathing boxes and the fish ‘n’ shop. My eyes were mostly averted, downcast, the pavement hot under my bare feet. Then when I heard some shouts I looked up. The regatta was returning. About a hundred lovely boats with their little white sails being hauled up onto the land. Lots of bronzed men and women pulling ropes and lifting equipment. It was a lovely colourful thing to see. I looked over my shoulder to tell you about it, to see if you could see. The bay looked beautifully curved, more beautiful than I could remember. There were people milling around everyone, from all walks of life, eating chips, standing at the shore, resting their tired limbs on towels. Those lovely, lovely white boats with their beautiful fresh-looking little sails. A hive of activity, a real community, a busy path. What a glorious picture it would have been. A photograph as a snapshot of the Melbourne bay at the beginning of the year 2017. People, adults, families. Lovely kids, all engaging in peace and goodwill, the best of modern summer life.

We reached our vehicle, stored everything in the boot, and pulled away. I turned to look at your face and could see the beginnings of a soft, slow redness already.

'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.