welcome to country

Friday evening dusk stroll along the lake with two companions. We are early for  the opening ceremony/welcome to country  of ‘Floating Land’ at Boreen Point. In this peaceful place, we three are suddenly peaceful, after our day full of busy motion, and chatting, and driving up the Highway. The lake laps gently. The water is a silvery emptiness. Silence hangs in the trees. The sky blurs dreamily from blue to pink to starlight infinity.

We follow the strains of distant music and find someone playing piano by the side of the sleepy little dead-end road, just a few metres from the lake.  A small crowd is gathering at the cooroboree spot. Everyone is rugged up in jackets and beanies. We sit on the grass. Some speeches are made, referring to Art In Nature, installations, the history of Floating Land, international and local artists, workshops. The Water Theme.

Then the Gubbi Gubbi dancers wander out from behind the paperbark trees. Some words of welcome are spoken in  language, by Lyndon, a young man who is a local traditional owner whose ancestors have always lived in these parts.  We in the audience repeat his foreign word for welcome. We repeat it  softly, shyly. Like a talisman, an  offering from The Time Before. Lyndon speaks of his family, his great grandmother, and tells us where Gubbi Gubbi country is  - south down to Pine River, east to The Connondales.

While Lyndon plays the didgeridoo, the other three men make fire in the traditional ceremonial way, by twirling a grasstree stem  in the small hole in a branch lieing on the ground, until the friction ignites  a handful of dry grass and a wisp of smoke spirals up. Once the fire is lit, the dancing begins.

The dances tell of hunting and fishing, of following the dolphin to find mullet, following a certain bird to find wild honey. Always sharing honey with the bird. Never killing the big fish who are about to reproduce, ensuring future food supplies. The men dance sea eagles and black cockatoos. Their naked, painted  thighs quiver with energy;  their stamping feet kick up puffs of dust  in the flickering firelight.

I have seen all this many times - the fire ceremony, the dances. It is always entrancing, always creates a sort of  meditative bubble in time and space. 

Later these pale brown men will put on their jeans and t-shirts and drive back to town in their car, but for this moment, their longing to keep their culture alive offers me a tiny fragment of  Dreamtime reality, when the people of this land hunted and held their ceremonies and lived in rhythms attuned with the cycles of nature. 

After the dancing, there is an art show opening in the sailing club over the road. But it looks crowded, so we meander down the road instead. There are no shops, not even street lights,  nobody. Just the lapping of the water and the tinking sounds of night  insects. A huge cabbage tree palm, monochrome in the starlight looks like a giant creature. J wants to paint or draw it. How do you paint stars? she asks, so hard. Maybe its good that there are some things you just can’t ever reproduce, you have to be there. It is a little crystal of a moment. ‘I want to remember this’, she says. Me too.

Effie

Effie lives next door to us, in a little cabin. Her daughter, son-in-law and two teenaged granddaughters live in the main house. We don’t see her all that often, although we hear her sweet, wavery singing voice wafting through the bamboo fence - she used to be an opera singer. 

Effie was born in 1926, the same year as The Queen Of England. Also the same year as my mother, who has been dead nearly twenty years now. It’s hard to imagine that Mum, had she lived, would look as old as Effie does now. Effie’s daughter says she can’t really get used to the idea that her mother is ‘old’ either.

Effie ( short for the Greek name Ephigenia) has a tinkling laugh and a wicked sparkle in her eye. A while back I was sitting next to her  at a  big party when the hosts’ teenaged girls came home  with a couple of  handsome young French boys they’d picked up somewhere.

‘Oh, aren’t they gorgeous-looking fellows!’ said Effie, which was what we were all thinking.  ‘See,  you can say that kind of thing when you reach my age!’.

Last December Effie  hobbled over with her walking stick to our place, with a Christmas gift : Greek biscuits she’d baked herself, with the help of her two granddaughters. There were two sorts of biscuits,  golden-coloured honey-biscuits,  and  crescent moon-shaped shortbreads dusted with icing sugar, with a clove planted in the centre. The biscuits were wrapped in cellophane and arranged in a little basket with a red ribbon and a pink geranium from Effie’s garden. 

Of course we invited her in for a cup of tea. After I’d made the tea, I wished I hadn’t used teabags, because I’d heard that Effie reads tea-leaves. She said the biscuits were made ‘by hand, with love and no machinery’

The next time she came over, I made sure we had loose tea, and she gave me a tea leaf reading. I can’t remember now what she said. I think she saw an eagle, and maybe a fish. 

In her 50’s, Effie travelled to India and Nepal. She studied Tibetan Buddhism and did meditation retreats. I can imagine her as an intrepid traveller. She still likes to get out and about, and seems to have a flock of willing young ( well, much younger than she is) friends who pick her up and drive her to social events.

It was her 85th birthday last week and we were  invited next door for a celebration with some other friends, and  Effie’s son and daughter in law. We gathered in the living room and there were pots of warm soup. These first  cosy Winter nights are  still a delicious novelty. Effie’s son turned out to be a magical pianist who somehow had us all singing and clapping and dancing. Guitar, ukulele,  the two teenage girls singing; and  F on the clarinet  in ‘Stand by Me’. Effie in the percussion section clinking along with a little temple bell, with a beautific expression on her face. 

I even played a song on my ukulele, a clumsy beginner version of You Are My Sunshine. My first ever public performance. Everyone clapped afterwards. More singing, more dancing, a sweet moment.  

soccer on the sabbath

soccer on the sabbath

Initially I said No, because I reckon one day of sport per weekend is enough for a 12 year old with  a week of school ahead. I believe in a Day Of Rest. In theory, at least.

This week there has been a soccer catch-up match on tuesday after school, regular soccer practise Wednesday after school, the game on Saturday, and then another catch-up match ( due to recent rain cancellations) today, Sunday, out at West Woop Woop, an hour’s drive away. Groan.

The importance of Not Letting The Team Down is mentioned, but ultimately  I decree  that it’s neccessary to get some chill-out time, before the next action-packed school week begins. 

Then after the match yesterday, F and his team mate E present their case. Such adorable boys they can be when they want to. The team really needs him. He’s not the tiniest bit tired, swear to God. Then E’s father, one of the coaches, says in a tone of deep seriousness,  “Can I have a word with you?”  And tells me  they’ll have to cancel if F pulls out, they’ve barely got a side, they really need him as a sweeper. He’s a key player. He can get a lift there. 

After a brief conference with D, we say okay. 

Sunday morning dawns, grey and damp with “Stay in bed and read a book” written all over it. Even F  looks a bit sorry to have to drag himself out from under the doona. We have to be at the Post Office, at 8.30 a.m for the car pool. Come on, you have to eat something before you go. Have you got your shin pads? Hurry up, put that comic book away, we’re late, concentrate! Etc. ie pretty much like a regular school day.

There they all are at the P.O. Faithful parents, all rugged up, skinny-legged boys milling about  on the steps in their blue soccer shorts. Then someone gets a text : The game is cancelled. Disappointment, relief, shrugs, re-arrangements. We go home and get stuck into today’s planned task: cleaning out the cupboard in F’s room.

getting through the impasse

About 80% of his clothes don’t fit him anymore. I help him sort. Here’s the crocodile t-shirt I bought back from Cairns, and the New Zealand one from Dad , and Ollies stylish much loved shirts, and all the fantastic opshop finds from J, and a whole swag of colourful tropical shirts , size 8, 10, 12, all too small. The old rainbow tie-dyes, he wouldn’t be seen dead in nowadays. But he clings to a couple of faves - Tin Tin In Vietnam, and Felix The Cat. An old Santa hat from the depths of the wardrobe  goes onto his head.

He plays rap music ( Zombie Love Song, Orphan Tears, The Sea Is Rising), while we sort. I actually enjoy most of it. Good beat, interesting words. Though could do with out the indiscriminate sprinkling of the F-word through almost every song.  

Remember this shirt, that you wore to church in Samoa, remember  when these stripey thermals fitted you, you looked like a little bumble bee...

Remember, remember...When we moved here, less than two years ago his room was still full of  cars and dinosaurs and soft toys. Now it’s Simpsons mags and books, books, books. Nothing like parenthood to keep you in touch with constant change.

Actually, we haven’t finished his room yet. Just having a break.The cupboard is miraculously tidy, shirts are on hangers, there is a big op shop box. But we’ve hit that awful place - the impasse, which seems to occur during any sort of serious clean up ( literal, psychological...)  -  when you’ve got a pile of uncatergorizable junk sitting on the bedroom floor and can feel momentum trickling away. Though you’re actually almost there. No way forward but though. Better get back to it. 

twos

twos

I saw two snakes yesterday, mating or possibly fighting. Entwined in the grass  by the driveway, in a sunny spot. I was walking down to collect dry grass clippings for the compost. The snakes were blueish olive-y green with a coppery patch behind their heads. One slid away, the other stayed. Male? Female? 

There have also been two willy wagtails in their neat little tuxedoes, flitting about near the vegie garden making their chattery rattley sound. I always think of  a kids story about Aborigines in which the willy wagtails were messengers. 

And  two white headed pigeons seem to have nested in under the bougainvillaea, just a few metres from our front door. D says he saw a baby in there, though surely it’s the wrong season...

nothing left to imagine

Ursula Le Guin on fantasy

‘For all our delight in the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness...People turn to the realms of  fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitudes. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitised, made cute, made safe. The passionately concieved ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys moulded in bright-coloured plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable’. 

( from the Foreword, Tales From Earthsea)

Spot on, I reckon. Even the seductively beautiful, magical 3D of world of Avatar, when I examined it afterwards seemed hollow, despite it’s seemingly ‘green’ /pro-environment/ anti-capitalist politics etc.  And of course it’s  still the white American Male hero  who saves the day, gets the girl etc

I also wonder if  the pumped-up, served-up  ‘perfection’ of computer-generated fantasy worlds doesn’t makes the less glossy but far more profound beauty of Real Nature harder  to see.

 I have moaned and wailed many times about the lack of  good children’s films. Though there are usually  at least a few really good  adults movies every year. 

So it’s been a mostly futile quest to find anything I’ve  wanted my child to see. There seem to be hardly any  kids’ movies with real substance, originality, or anything to nourish the spirit. Like a  satisfying story, for example. 

I often feel like I must be an old killjoy. Everyone else has seemed perfectly happy with Finding Nemo and Harry Potter and Ice Age etc. And it’s 'only entertainment', they say.  And so dazzlingly clever technically. But what a shame the content is so banal, so cliched, so empty. Like junk food pumped with msg. 

And then there is the awful Disney-fication of  delightful old English classics like Winnie The Pooh etc. Should be a law against it. 

Visiting Disneyland last year with my son was, I have to admit, lots of fun. But the ‘appropriation’ thing really struck me. They’d grabbed everything from Alice In Wonderland, to Mark Twain, to Jules Verne, to Robinson Crusoe, and turned it  all into some tacky ride or experience, leaving nothing to the imagination. Some of them - like the ‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea submarine were done with incredible attention to detail. Others  - like Alice In Wonderland, just felt like a heap of plastic crap... but I’d better stop. I’m in rant-mode. 

Please don’t tell me Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar looked like this plastic toy

Onboard the MarkTwain Paddle Steamer

the lay of the land

After dropping F at yet another 13th birthday party on a Saturday afternoon I went exploring. Not far from home, but driving down a road I haven’t been on before. I wanted to get to the other side of the river mouth. The wild-looking side. We’ve often  looked across from Bruns and wondered how to reach the foreign land of over there

I tried once before, by plunging down a dirt track through the forest. The track ended abruptly at a sort of overgrown carpark, with scruffy bush, a derelict building, a lot of  rusting machinery and lobster pots and car tyres; and murky mangrove-y water with rows of  oyster farming. 

Back home, D and I looked at a map and figured out that where the road ended was at one of the creeks  that feed into the river. You have to go right around, over the bridge... 

This time I got there. To the end of another rutted puddled dirt road, where I found the walking track, which led through the forest  and out to the river mouth. It wasn’t far. I walked along the breakwater  and saw a rainbow, and some silent, serious fishermen and imagined for a moment that  I was in Scotland. Or somewhere. I looked across to the familiar ( and somehow more cheerful) side. Then walked as far as I could - only a few hundred metres - along the little beach.  There were a few people pottering in boats around the mangroves, or sitting on the damp low-tide sand of the beach.   

 This fisherman’s vehicle in the car park at the end of the road reminded me it’s not all peace love and sustainability around here.

liquidambers

A mad rush to get out of the house this morning, for choir at school at 8 a.m.  F  eating his cereal in the car, and yelling at D to slow down so as not to spill the milk We picked up  K & T on the way, and all felt  for a moment like we could be heading off on a road trip, into the fog and rain, like we did in this faithful 4WD a few years back.

Then we  arrived at school early and sat  on the stairs outside the hall, chatting. D and F kicked a soccer ball on the grass. Finally we made  a call and found out  choir wasn’t on. But it didn’t matter. It was a little holiday, being at the almost deserted school, sitting around. On the way back home I asked D to stop the car so I could photograph this unexpected  glimpse of  European autumn in the subtropics.

all you need is love

My parents gave me this poster for Christmas in 1967. God, it was the most fantastic thing. It was fab! It was groovy! My  father  managed to knock together  a frame for it, and Flower Power went up on the wall over my bed. 

I was twelve, and  the pink and mauve floral wallpaper chosen by my mother a few years earlier had been all but obliterated with pin-ups of The Beatles and The Stones, and Go-Set posters of  local boy pop stars with neat fringes across their eyebrows, and names like Normie and Ronnie and Johnny.  

Crimson And Clover/it’s All so Beautiful/Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds/Good Vibrations/The Rain, the Park... Are you going to San Francisco...Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair....

Sadly, unfairly I wasn’t going to SanFrancisco, or Woodstock, or any of those mythical yearned-for places. I was going down to Ringwood station to catch the train to boring old school. I was going to Eastland shopping centre with Mum. I was stuck in the suburbs, doing my homework on Sunday afternoon while Dad mowed the lawn. Going over to my girlfriends’ place to giggle and write fan letters and read Dolly magazines.

My friends and I heard about the Summer Of Love. A year or so later, in 1968 or 1969, my father went to San Francisco for a ‘business trip’ How unjust! San Francisco - wasted on my square of a  father. He asked what I’d like him to bring back. I asked for some hippy beads from Haight Ashbury. 

Dad came back from the States, bead-less, and announced with some satisfaction that the whole ‘Haight Ashbury thing was all completely washed up and passe.

But something extraordinary really was happening in America, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just that I was a teenager at the time. There really was a celebratory throwing off of the shackles of repressive middle class values.  Ripples of  revolution reached us through the music . Righteous rage and rebellion, flowers and colours and sex and drugs and flowing hair and Dancin’ In The Street. And also in amongst it, the deep longing for peace and love and an end to racial discrimination and  war...Love, Love, Love, said the young ones.

Make Love Not War:  My parents said Darling, you shouldn’t wear that badge, it could make boys think you were,  you know....

Last night I watched a DVD doco about The Doors, which is what has prompted all this reminiscence. 

Light My Fire, People Are Strange, Hello I love you, won’t you tell me your name..

That broody spooky  sexy druggy excitement - how irresistible it all was to me and my friends back then. Though our  rock heroes - Jimi, Janis and Jim were all dead before  we finished school.

Forty years on, I’m snuggled on the sofa in my pyjamas on Saturday night. Nostalgic about my distant youth.  My own son is out,  having a sleep over at his friend’s place after soccer. No doubt they’re on Youtube, or iTunes,  getting their generation’s version ... 

Seems Jim Morrison’s parents had no understanding of their precocious brat  of a son. His father was a naval officer. He was serving in  Vietnam while his drug-addled offspring gyrated in front of thousands of hysterical girls, while ranting about love and peace and threatening to undo his pants. It looked like he would have done it too, if police and the other band members hadn’t hauled him off stage in the nick of time. 

Jim said that America was “ in love with violence”.  Watching those images from the 1960's, you could only agree with him. The assassination of JFK, then the assassination of Martin Luther King. The shocking killing by state police  of four protesting  students on campus at Kent State University. The awful blow of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. And all of this against the background of  race riots in the U.S, and America’s war in  Vietnam. 

the fragile web

For the last 24 hours I’ve been unable to upload to Blogger. I’m writing this in faith that the problem of the endless spinning circle will be soon fixed by Google - Who or whatever ‘Google’ really is. I picture an anonymous team of bespectacled genius nerds who never see daylight, floating in a cyberspaceship, out there somewhere in Doctor Who-land.

On the ‘help’ page, I discover one anguished blogger after another. Suffering ‘massive inconvenience’, unable to meet deadlines, ‘been trying to upload for eight hours’ ‘It’s KILLING me’ etc...

Yesterday arvo I went into town as usual to meet the school bus. I went 20 minutes early, so I could do a bit of shopping for dinner and mail  some letters. The Post Office door was locked and it was dark inside. 

Someone said there’s a blackout. I strolled down to the IGA supermarket. Same thing, doors closed. And a group of people hovering outside, waiting for power to return, for things to return to ‘normal’

Over the road, in the gloom of the un-lit health food store they were still struggling along with old-fashioned cash and calculators. 

Made me think about all the places in recent months where natural disasters have knocked out power supplies, and plenty of things way worse.

Made me think about how frighteningly dependant we’ve all become on electricity, on internet access, on plastic cards. How fast it’s all happened. When did cash registers stop being big solid machines, manual machines - and become, like just about everything else in the world ( from cameras to cars) - computers? And  completely useless without electricity, even though most of what we do to generate electricity is driving the planet to ruin etc

I  sometimes imagine the whole miraculous magical fragile invisible web could just disintegrate, like a spiders web in a hail storm. In fact I expect it to, sooner or later...

Fortunately - or perhaps unfortunately - the power came back on  before this train of thought was able  to go too far. The supermarket doors re-opened, We surged inside, I got my free range chicken, and made it to the school bus stop only a few minutes late. 

mothers day too

Mother’s day morning was sweet. F said ‘Don’t look Mum’, so I stayed in the office reading in my pyjamas until summoned. He and D had set out breakfast on the verandah - buckwheat pancakes, stewed apples, maple syrup, cream etc. A special drawing from F. and a little gift of handmade soap from D. 

When I was a kid we never celebrated Mothers Day. My father decreed that it was all a meaningless commercial beat-up, to be ignored by intelligent people like us. 

When actually, it is nice to be honoured as a mother, and to honour our own mothers. I feel sad that we didn’t do anything for my mum back then. Was there breakfast in bed? I don’t think so. But memory is an unreliable thing.

Yesterday was an almost computer-free day. A few pleasantly mindless chores - weed vegie garden etc. I even enjoyed scrubbing the bird pooh off the verandah. It smelt of camphor from the seeds they eat ( and spread around the countryside) Plenty of lazy time flicking through the Weekend Magazine while sipping green tea.  Plunking on the ukulele. I’ve almost mastered going from B flat to F 7.

Late arvo, D said Lets watch sunset at the beach, so we dashed down to Brunswick and walked along the breakwater and took photos of eachother in the luminous autumn light as the sun set. There were quite a few other families there, also taking photos of eachother. 

(posted on tuesday on account of above mentioned technical prob)

mothers' day

Mothers' Day Proclamation

Julia Ward Howe, Boston, 1870

Mother's Day was originally started after the Civil War, as a protest to the carnage of that war, by women who had lost their sons. Here is the original Mother's Day Proclamation from 1870,

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts,

whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by

irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking

with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be

taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach

them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another

country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From

the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.

It says "Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance

of justice."

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons

of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a

great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women,

to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the

means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each

bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,

but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that 

a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be

appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and 

at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the

alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of 

international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Julia Ward Howe

Boston 

autumn homesickness

Autumn is here. As crisp as a new season apple. Summer’s endless sweaty humidity has evapourated into bright skies. “What a cracker of a day!” says D, stepping out beneath the pink cascade of the  flowering vine over the front door. Laundry flutters and dries on the line. My body slips cosily into clothes, into jumpers and socks.

The other day I walked up the hill with my dear friend J, who was visiting from the Gold Coast. She was waxing lyrical about the rural feeling here and the  lovely lonely late afternoon autumn light filtering through the eucalypts. Said it reminded her of her childhood in South Africa. She said that remembered landscape was always somehow ‘home’ for her, even though she would never live there again. 

I told her how I’d missed the European Autumn of Melbourne when I first moved up here to the subtropics seventeen years ago. I almost burst into tears once,  when I saw a solitary Liquidamber blazing crimson against the rainforest green near Maleny.

J said she experienced the same thing in reverse when first settling in Australia, in  Melbourne. Scuffling crispy brown leaves on footpaths, then the long bleak season of naked branches, elms and plane trees, grey skies, it all made her feel homesick.

happiness attack

This morning the Bruns market was on, it being the first Saturday of the month. Over our coffees and Thai coconut cakes, I said to D, ‘I’m so glad we live here’ 

The high tide river was glittering green. We bought vegetable and flowers and had little chats with stall holders and acquaintances. A gaggle of adolescent girls from F’s class were running about giggling, one of them with a goldfish in a plastic bag full of water. 

And then the moment when I heard the music. They are a local duo who turn up around the place - sound a bit like the Gypsy Kings. It’s music that goes straight to my soul. I suddenly wanted to dance. 

This guy sings in Spanish, so passionately you feel he might rip his heart right out of his chest any minute, or fall down sobbing.  All the women waiting at the coffee stall were saying, I wanna marry him! His partner  who plays fabulous flamenco guitar is the perfect contrast : deadpan-soulful, with a toothpick sticking out of the corner of his mouth. I bought their CD.

F  spent the arvo at E’s place, after soccer. E was here last night too. They are like a pair of puppy dogs, all legs and arms. Wrestling with eachother, kicking a balls, plunking a guitar, flopping about, consuming mountains of rice bubbles and pasta. Making a mess.

A peaceful domestic afternoon getting the laundry done and the house in order. I even spent 15 minutes lazing in a deck chair in the mild autumn sunshine doing nothing. Later D showed me a couple of You Tubes of early Dusty Springfield. Dressed like Doris Day, and sounding like Aretha Franklin. Later, looking like a sort of wonderful drag queen. God, the woman could sing! I knew every single lyric. And was right back there with the emotional intensity of my adolescence.

I went and picked F up at dinnertime. As we drove home a delicate crescent moon hung in the dusk sky over the silhouette of our little pointy mountain. We were listening to Jack Johnson on the car stereo. I said ‘I’m having a happiness attack’

Next challenge: work out how to link You Tube to blog. If you wanna hear Dusty, try this & see if it works..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5LS---oX7Y&feature=related

lost friends - the Russian Princess

I always thought of Ludmilla as  the Russian Princess, although she probably thought of herself  more as a humble  gardener. We met in Tennant Creek in 1988, in a shade house where we were propagating vegetable seedlings. We were volunteers with a local Aboriginal organisation that helped people return to their  traditional homelands.

Ludi and I and the rest of the our raggle taggle crew went out to remote Aboriginal communities with  our seedlings and set up vegetable gardens. Under the guidance of our intrepid leader. We planted windbreaks and mango trees and installed watering systems. We banged star pickets into the ground, struggled with fencing wire  and hauled things around in the midday sun. Like mad dogs and Englishmen.

The Central Australian sun in a dry and cloudless sky, a dark blue sky,  a dark red earth. I was surprised to learn that the desert sand is fertile, full of minerals. Just needs water. I also discovered out there in that  dreamy empty heat-shimmering land that planting trees feels like one of the few really good, pure  acts. 

Much cleaner than the school-teaching I did in the N.T, which was always an uncomfortable job, trying  to impose a whitefella  template over someone elses culture. 

A big difference was that we had been invited by the communities to come out and do the land management work. As it was called. When you thought about how long Aboriginal people had lived as nomads, it was not surprising that they needed some clues from us on how to live the ‘settled’ existence now imposed on them. 

So we - Ludmilla and I and a couple of German WOOFAs, a French guy, and assorted hippy types from Northern NSW sweated happily in the midday sun. Slept in swags around campfires - nights were cold. We star-gazed and drank billie tea and smoked rollies.

Back in town we cooked up big meals in the wok, and sat around and got stoned. Tennant Creek was a hard, gritty town. The telegraph poles were all metal  because there were no big trees for miles around. And if there had been, the termites would have reduced them to dust. I never cried a single tear in Tennant - it would have felt like wasting water. 

Ludmilla had been growing things for a long time. Her home was in the rainforest in Northern NSW. Her hands held the plants tenderly, firmly . She said a little blessing while patting down the earth around newly planted baby trees.

A year or so later, when we had both left the Territory I visited her in her  secret place of rainforest and waterfalls and clear pools, nestled under a misty  blue escarpment. I was on the run from...oh it’s a long story, but anyway, I found refuge in the forest with Ludmilla for a few weeks.

She and a former partner had been seventies refugees from the city.  They bought their big piece of  land for a song, with a group of friends.  Then hacked away acres of  lantana, gathered recycled timber, old windows, bathtubs, and doorknobs, and cobbled together an airy homemade tree-house and a simple life close to nature. They smoked dope, raised a child, and regenerated the rainforest felled by earlier generations of farmers.

Ludmilla spoke softly, trod lightly, sat reading by candlelight inside a mosquito net. There was no electricity. When I returned to Melbourne after this I was struck by just how huge my ( what we now call) carbon footprint was. So much energy used, keeping warm, staying up late, sloshing around hot water. 

Ludi was in her garden paradise every day and I was her willing apprentice, planting pawpaws, weeding the vegies. She’d been an early convert to permaculture and was old mates with Bill Mollison, who lived nearby. She knew all the gossip, but was discreet.

She  had a teenaged or early twenties son, who I met once or twice. He came and went and seemed a bit lost. She never spoke of his father except to say that he was “no longer in this world” 

Later, she lived in Melbourne for a while, studying ceramics, and earning some money. She worked at a residential facility for people with mental illness, a tough job. I drove from the other side of town to see her. Ludmilla  looked lacklustre and vulnerable in the city, away from her natural habitat. 

We went for a holiday together, to Tasmania, hitchhiking and bushwalking. Cradle Mountain, Lake StClair, camping on freezing cold earth. Warm climate girls, marvelling at the strange Tasmanian plants. She dreamed of one day returning to find her ancestors in Russia. I could picture her in  a tinkling sleigh, in snow. She was a nature - spirit with  the face of a Russian aristocrat.

When did we lose touch? Must be fifteen years ago  or more now. She went back to her Garden of Eden. I continued  my inner city life in Melbourne. I still have a ceramic bowl she gave me, with her name - Ludi - signed on the base

shooting the breeze

I met the Cloudcatchers this morning down in the park by the creek, for the Autumn Gingko. It felt more like winter. About twelve of us, in our raincoats, with our notebooks stood around in the picnic shelter. Mild-mannered, mostly middle-aged and older folk. 

Introductions, friendliness...Relaxing, to be with older people sometimes: everyone’s long ago given up trying to be cool... Rain was plick-placking intermittently on the corrugated iron roof after a recent  downpour. 

A woman made a brief formal acknowledgement of traditional indigenous owners of the land. Then chief Cloudcatcher ( & award-winning haiku writer) Quendryth explained, for the benefit of us newies, what we do on a gingko. Which is: spend a while mooching around in the vicinity, taking note of images  & other sensory data. In silence. (Q is about four feet tall, a retired school teacher, in a bright red jacket. I bet her students loved her.)

After collecting our data, we gather back to the picnic shelter table, spend a little more time cobbling together  rough drafts of  haiku. Then we share our new-born half-formed poems, reading in turns  around the 

table

waiting for haiku

raindrops fall

on my words

pen poised 

i stand

before the tree 

tyre on rope 

hangs empty

over winter river

dead tree roots

cling to air

where creek bank used to be

old man

pauses by

empty playground

creek reflections

- raindrops ripple circles

in clouds

suburban creek

murmurs  memory

of wildness

Afterwards we adjourn to the terrace of the Bangalow Hotel for lunch, some glasses of wine, and gentle conversations about art and nature and literature. The two blokes sitting opposite me have the look of old survivors. One has a marked limp and walks with a stick; the other is pallid and quite elderly - but someone tells him he's looking better than he was. Two old poets, it seems.

The woman sitting next to me is a poet too, from Nimbin. She and the man across the table are passing a paper  napkin back and forth between them, writing alternating couplets of a nonsense verse. 

The elderly poet - I’m trying to imagine what he looked like younger, has bright, kind eyes - says he has some cause for optimism. Nature writing is on the rise, he says. He writes the name of a  nature writing blog on a piece of lined paper, in a spidery script, and presses it into my hand as we leave an hour later.  

He says his father started the Salvation Army citadel in Mullum. The other poet’s father jumped off a slow-moving freight train in Casino to start a new life, or escape from an old one. Or was it Newcastle? These people have space in their lives for yarns and musings and poetry. How sweet, how calming to my frenzied mind to drop into the world of the Cloudcatchers for a moment.

arrows of desire

The Royal Wedding, I know, it’s already so last week. We hadn’t intended to watch, but...what a great show it turned out to be.

All those funny hats the women wore. Like see-through dinner plates on the side of their heads. And Princess Beatrice’s wacko antlers. And the way the royal chappies in their military garb took their hats and white gloves off on entering the cathedral. All that ritualistic British class stuff, all that saluting and  waving.

I’m in the middle of reading ‘Wolf Hall’, a gruelling Booker prize-winning novel set in the court of Henry VIII. The stuffy Westminster Abbey cardinals in their gold and scarlet robes looked straight out of the sixteenth century.

And some of the dreary words they said sounded that way too. Marriage being like the marriage between Christ and The Church. Our Father, Our Lord, I had vaguely  imagined that the church might have updated itself by now.

F, aged 12, was gasping in horror and disgust at every patriarchal utterance Our Father, Our Lord  

The really strange thing is we, his parents told him to hush, because we wanted to hear. Especially the gorgeous choirs. D and I even sang along with‘Jerusalem’ Having been educated at Anglican schools we both knew every one of William Blake’s stirring words. Arrows of desire, chariots of fire...

F looked incredulous, but was about to be even more appalled when his cynical/ pagan /Buddhisty (not to mention republican)  parents started to  drone along with The Lord’s Prayer.

As a kid I thought it was ‘hello’d be thy name and forgive us our trespassers, and none of it made the slightest bit of sense and no-one bothered to explain any of it , and we said it every day in school assembly.

Long-forgotten, yet so familiar and comfortable. And probably the closest we ever came to some sort of spiritual connection.

Well I’ve clearly been successful in my  parental campaign to counter all the patriarchal  Male God crap F used to hear  from his  old  teacher. But I also feel a sense of loss, that he doesn’t know Jerusalem, or the Lord’s Prayer. Like most of his contemporaries he has little sense of the Christian foundations that underpin our culture, for better or (more often) worse.

Of course some righteous people damned the whole wedding circus as a ridiculous waste of money, shameful when so many in the world are suffering. Yes, I can easily go there, the perpetual guilt. Then again, if we waited till everyone was happy before we ever allowed ourselves to celebrate...

And I actually agreed with one of the church guys - the Archbisop of London, I think - who spoke about marrige as a symbol of hope, of new beginning. There are times when we need to celebrate collectively, not just in our little seperate nuclear units - Birth, death, marriage, the things that connect us all. The archbishop also seemed realistic about the challenges of marriage. And spoke of a ‘generous’, rather than a ‘punishing’ God.

( For decades I couldn’t even bring myself to use the word God - so overlaid with Big Bossy Bloke In The Sky connotations. It was Goddess, Great Spirit, All That Is...)

The slowness of the whole thing was sort of restful - the great unedited chunks of nothing much happening, cars approaching, cameras fixed on the empty balcony waiting for the royals to appear. Almost meditative it was, in this era of everything too thick and fast. 

And at the centre of the elaborate theatrical pageant - a young couple who looked as if they actually do like eachother a lot, and seem to know what they’re doing.