Blog - Sian Prior: Writer, Broadcaster, Singer, MC and Teacher

Walking the Blues Away in the Snowy Mountains

2012-01-18T09:41:26Z

No wonder so many Samoans were grumpy when they skipped a day in 2011 to jump over the international dateline. They also lost their status as the last spot in the world where you could watch the sunset; a major attraction for visiting honeymooners. Love and travel have always gone together like a judge and gavel, and the tourism industry has been the biggest winner.

When love unravels, though, most of us want to journey no further than under the doona. Grief feels like a backpack of boulders that even the most laissez-faire airline would ban from the luggage hold, for fear they might bring down the plane.

After my heart was trampled on recently, a wise woman advised me to get out from under the doona and look at the horizon. So when I was invited to go walking in the Snowy Mountains I decided to take her advice and see if some of the most spectacular horizons in Australia could help lighten my load.

On Boxing Day I packed a small suitcase and was driven by my friends Caroline and Charlie all the way from Melbourne to the southern NSW lakeside town of Jindabyne. Just west of the town along the Alpine Way we checked into an eccentric guest house called Bimblegumbie in the foothills of Mount Crackenback (‘great location for a chiropractic conference’, suggested Charlie, trying to raise a smile from his quietest passenger)

Established by owner Pru Parker in the late 1970’s, Bimblegumbie (meaning ‘whistling spear’ in one of the local indigenous languages) began life as a small house on a tree-covered hillside. It has since grown to a rambling collection of one and two-storey cottages dotted around the much-extended main lodge.

Canine pets are welcome here. Dogs can potter around the landscaped gardens dotted with sculptures – everything from a tower of rusted hanging chains to a tree covered with exotic masks. There’s even a piano sitting in an open shed complete with stool for anyone wanting to play a few tunes for the wildlife. The dogs don’t seem to deter the wallabies from grazing on the garden’s lush summer grass.

Up the hill behind the main house Pru’s companion Craig has carefully positioned a wicker chair overlooking the green valley below. He’s also stashed a couple of sets of binoculars in a nearby tree for better viewing; just one of many small, thoughtful touches at Bimblegumbie.

I stayed in the Rose Room of the main house (deep red and green walls) and my friends were in a small studio in the garden. Each day Caroline consulted the maps and planned a different walk for us while Charlie packed the lunches.

Day One we drove back through Jindabyne, past the ski resort of Perisher and up into the Mt Kosciuszko National Park. Parking at Charlotte’s Pass (named after Charlotte Adams, the first woman to reach the summit of Mt Kosciuszko), we added an extra layer of clothing against the cool alpine wind and set off for the Blue Lake.

A paved path led down the steep hill towards the Snowy River. In spite of the summer sun there were still some luminescent puddles of snow on the distant mountain peaks. Purple, white and yellow wildflowers were strewn beside the path as if from a giant’s basket. Crossing the wobbly rocks over the river, we began the steep ascent towards Carruthers Peak.

My grief-clogged lungs were soon protesting but I ignored them. This was exactly the treatment they needed. When you’re struggling for every breath, there is simply no energy left for rumination and regret. We stopped to watch some children sliding down a patch of remnant snow beside the track before we descended to the Blue Lake.

With clouds piling up overhead, the lake was more slate grey than azure. A couple of giant granite boulders provided a windbreak as we ate our packed lunches and listened to the water rushing out of the lake towards the Snowy River. Then we followed the river until we reached another body of water, Hedley Tarn, where patient birds dived for trout. When Charlie suggested we cut across country to re-join the return track above the Blue Lake, I was initially nervous – what if the clouds descend even further? After carefully checking the map, though, we decided to embrace the challenge.

I tried to think about fearless Charlotte Adams as we picked our way carefully across lichen-stained boulders, marveling at the infinite variety of cushiony grasses and the reflective pools of melted snow all around us. My anxiety melted too and I could even summon a smile when Charlie pointed out a rock shaped like an American Indian’s face, complete with feathered headdress. By the time we reached the return path my lungs felt expansive enough to try a spot of alpine yodeling.

Day Two we drove to the busy holiday village of Thredbo and caught the Kosciuszko Express Chairlift to the top of the mountain. Our destination was Dead Horse Gap, a largely downhill walk of about ten kilometers. On the way up I ventured the yodelling chorus from ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ and a man standing beneath our chairlift responded by opening his arms wide and hollering ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music’.

Above the tree line at Ram’s Head Range the three of us turned in slow Sufi-like circles, taking in the 360 degree views of the Snowy Mountains banked up against the skyline. The wise woman was right about the curative effect of those horizons. I’m surprised she didn’t mention the benefits of yodeling too.

Then down we went along the gently winding track through silvery stands of dead gums. Fierce bushfires in 2003 have left these trees looking like bleached coral stranded thousands of metres above sea level. At Dead Horse Gap we found a warm flat rock for our picnic lunch, then walked back to the village along the Thredbo River path. Pairs of brown trout chased each other in circles just under the surface, inspiring us to take a gasping dip in the shallow icy river.

Day Three involved a trip back to Victoria and a much-needed rest for our legs. Tom Groggin, west of Dead Horse Gap and close to the Murray River, is a popular camping spot. Four-wheel drivers can ford the shallow river there but as our car only had two-wheel drive we put on our bathers, hoisted our rucksacks and waded across the stony riverbed into our home state.

On the edge of the Alpine National Park the three of us lay under a shady tree and read books all afternoon. In between chapters we watched a kingfisher defending its territory against wattlebird incursions. On the drive back we stopped at dusk and walked down into a grassy valley where a dozen wild brumbies stared at us in panic before taking off into the forest.

Day Four was another tough climb. From the Guthega Dam (on the confluence of the Munyang and Snowy Rivers) we clambered northwards up a narrow overgrown path, looking for the trig point of the ridge. Grief had snuck back into my rucksack overnight and with every step it seemed to be getting heavier. Just as my legs and lungs were about to go on strike we reached the summit. There were those breath-taking horizons again, and not another human in sight. Yodelling was beyond me but smiling became possible again.

On the final day of our holiday we drove into town and found a shady park beside the Jindabyne Lake. The weather was steamy and the water almost warm compared to the body-shock of Thredbo River. I struck out towards the middle of the lake and trod water there for a while, looking back at the sun-bleached fields surrounding Jindabyne town.

Treading water: that’s how you deal with grief. Not waving, not drowning, just waiting till you catch your breath and you’re ready to head back to shore.

2011 - A Year of Reading for Pleasure

2011-12-11T14:25:21Z

Reading, reading, reading, so much reading to do, newspapers and blogs and street signs and advertising billboards and recipes and fine print and magazines and journals and emails and tweets and birthday cards and subtitles and surtitles and love letters and lawyer’s letters and texts, sub-texts and textbooks and – most importantly – BOOKS FOR PLEASURE.

Here’s my list of the twenty best books-for-pleasure I read in 2011 and why I think you should consider reading them too:

‘The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet’ – David Mitchell

I loved Mitchell’s novel ‘Cloud Atlas’ so I was primed to love his latest. It’s an extraordinary re-imagining of the clash between two trading cultures on the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries; the Japanese and the Dutch. But in case that makes it sound too much like a worthy historical text, in fact it’s a gripping love story between a truly good man and the daughter of a Japanese samurai. It’s also a page-turner that gives you a unique insight into a lost world you might never otherwise encounter.

‘Let the Great World Spin’ – Colum McCann

McCann takes an event from recent history – Frenchman Phillipe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers – and uses it as the fulcrum of a series of fictional character portraits of New Yorkers in 1974. From prostitutes to priests, judges to grieving mothers, these people get under your skin as their lives intersect in unexpected ways. Grief is ever-present but the stories are, in the end, life-affirming. Beautiful, beautiful prose and a clever (but not ‘clever-clever’) jigsaw-puzzle structure.

‘Piano Lessons’ – Anna Goldsworthy

If you’ve read Peter Goldsworthy’s ‘Maestro’ you will probably recognize the real characters upon whom Anna Goldsworthy’s father based his fictional story. Anna G’s memoir describes in painful detail the internal life of a prodigiously talented young student and musician, and her relationship with the mentor (her piano teacher) who taught her about so much more than pianistic technique.

‘The Inner Voice’ – Renee Fleming

Another musician’s memoir, this time from one of the best singers currently performing on the opera stage. American soprano Fleming outs herself as a shy girl who has battled her fears and emerged triumphant. A fascinating insight into the training and the daily life (and grind) of an international star. Plenty of useful vocal tips for singers here, too. Listen to her recordings of Strauss opera heroines while you read it, and try not to melt.

‘The Year of the Flood’ – Margaret Atwood

In a year in which humans were beset by natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones and floods, and in which local politics were dominated by the carbon tax debate. Atwood’s dystopian fictional vision of our future seemed disturbingly prescient. This is the prequel to ‘Oryx and Crake’, a novel which haunts me still, and I reckon both books should be compulsory reading for all climate change doubters.

‘The Help’ – Kathryn Stockett

The trailer for the recent film adaptation of Stockett’s novel looked so bad I didn’t bother (Wendell Pierce, African-American star of the US TV series ‘Treme’, sent several tweets confirming that verdict) but the novel is well worth reading. It’s a suspenseful depiction of the lives of African-American domestic workers in the deep South of the USA in the 1960’s. As the civil rights movement gains pace, these women are offered the chance to tell their stories of oppression, but the risks they take in the process are huge.

‘The Amateur Science of Love’ – Craig Sherborne

Don’t read this book if you’ve been unlucky in love lately. If you’re feeling okay, then read it and laugh (and cry) about the ill-fated couple in this Australian novel who suffer from ‘the sickness’ of love, and who try to keep love alive in the face of real sickness. Dark, funny, sad, original, fresh writing.

‘Hand Me Down World’ – Lloyd Jones

I have a special affection for Lloyd Jones and not just because he shares the same name as my beloved late grandfather. The novels of this New Zealand writer are always imbued with empathy, compassion and psychological insight. This time he imagines the life of an African refugee who makes her way from her homeland to Europe in search of her lost child. The structure ensures we read everyone else’s version of the woman’s life before we read her own, and we’re never quite sure which of these narrators are reliable. A disturbing and beautiful novel that should be compulsory reading for all those who want to ‘turn the boats back’.

‘As The Earth Turns Silver’ – Alison Wong

Wong, another New Zealander, is also a published poet, and it shows in her first novel, a story about a Wellington woman’s attraction to a newly-arrived Chinese greengrocer. Wong depicts New Zealand society at the beginning of the 20th century as unselfconsciously racist and chauvinist. But there’s a dreamlike quality to the writing which somehow protects the reader from the full impact of the tragedies that unfold.

‘A Kindness Cup’ – Thea Astley

Astley’s novel is also about racism and I re-read this one for the Meanjin magazine’s inaugural Tournament of Books. Scroll down this page to my blogpost of September 2011 and you will find my full review. It’s out of print now I believe, but you should find a copy in good libraries, and it’s worth checking second-hand bookshops to acquire your own copy. (If you find one in good condition, I’ll buy it! Read my review to see why… )

‘The Secret River’ – Kate Grenville

I also re-read this novel for Meanjin, so scroll down again for a full review. (I would read Kate Grenville’s shopping list, so impressed am I by her courage and insight as a novelist. ‘Dark Places’, her 1994 sequel to ‘Lilian’s Story’, took my breath away. I’m just sitting around, waiting for her to write another one, really.)

‘The Lieutenant’ – Kate Grenville

In the meantime I caught up with Grenville’s more recent re-imagining of the first contact between the First Fleet and the first peoples of Australia. Lieutenant Daniel Rooke finds himself caught between the conquering culture of his fellow Europeans and his growing loyalty to Sydney’s indigenous inhabitants whose language he is learning. Simply brilliant.

‘Five Bells’ – Gail Jones

I loved Gail Jones’ novel ‘Sorry’ and looked forward to reading her latest, named after Kenneth Slessor’s 1939 ‘Five Bells’. Like Slessor’s poem, the geographical setting of this tale is Sydney Harbour, and Jones’ work sits somewhere between a novel and a long prose-poem. The action takes place during one long day and though the paths of the four main characters do cross that day, only a couple of them know each other well. Jones teases us with the possibility of a redemptive happy ending but, you know, life just isn’t like that, and neither (usually) is good literature.

‘Melbourne’ – Sophie Cunningham

Hard to be objective about this non fiction book about my home town, written by a friend, in which I’m mentioned a couple of times. There, I’ve made my declarations. But if you want to get a sense of how the sediment of individual lives lived in inner Melbourne gradually accretes over the centuries and decades to make up a vibrant culture, this is the book to read. Cunningham has been involved with many of the city’s most progressive and influential arts institutions, and it has given her a unique insight into how Melbourne became (arguably) the cultural capital of the nation. Personal AND political, it’s also a jolly good read.

‘Stripped’ – Caroline Lee

Declaration number two – Caroline’s a friend of mine. But she’s probably also known to many of you as an award-winning Melbourne theatre actor. ‘Stripped’ tells the story of two feuding sisters who are re-united when one of them becomes seriously ill. The ending is told at the very beginning of this short novel, so I give nothing away when I tell you this is a story about coming to terms with death. Moving, poetic and illuminating.

‘The Discomfort Zone’ – Johnathan Franzen

Like Grenville, Franzen is a writer whose every word I am happy to devour. This one is a memoir whose title promises revelations about the author’s ‘discomfort’ in the world. But he is a tease. It’s more like a loose collection of sometimes-related autobiographical essays. There are digressions into topics such as the cultural importance of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy cartoons and the joys (and sorrows) of bird-watching. Beautifully written, funny, sad, but in the end I’m not sure I got to know Mr Franzen as well as I thought I would.

‘The Blindfold’ – Siri Hustvedt

I’d loved Hustvedt’s later novel ‘What I Loved’ (excuse the pun) so I went back to an earlier one to see where that complex, courageous, writerly mind began its work. ‘The Blindfold’ is almost like a series of novellas with the same main character; disturbing stories about people on the edge of madness. My favourite section is where the main (female) character becomes a cross-dresser by night, going to bars with a short haircut and a man’s suit and name. Thought I might try it out myself some time. Though in this instance it doesn’t end so well.

‘The Secret History of Costaguana’ – Juan Gabriel Vazquez

I shared a cab with this Barcelona-based Colombian writer at the Ubud Writers Festival in October, and though we didn’t really strike up a conversation, it made me curious about his writing. This novel covers the history of the separation of Panama from Colombia, and the political and propaganda wars surrounding the building of the Panama Canal. The narrator is a hollow man, an observer of others lives, a man who blames himself for his unwillingness to intervene in history’s great events. Reading it was a great way to learn about Colombian history but there was just a bit too much Aspergian detail (names, dates, makes of guns, ever-shifting political allegiances and divisions) for this reader.

‘Stasiland’ – Anna Funder

When I heard Anna Funder had a novel coming out I decided to re-read her wonderful non fiction book about the Stasi secret police in Communist East Germany. Or more accurately, about the devastating impact of the Stasi’s system of state surveillance on the people who lived through those terrifying years. Funder’s role is the ‘innocent abroad’ as she leads us through Stasiland, where madness was normalised and normal people were driven mad, all in the name of the great Communist utopian vision. We humans just love to police each other, don’t we? Should be compulsory reading for – well, for everyone, really. (Hmmm, speaking of policing each other, there’s a lot of ‘compulsory reading’ in my list, isn’t there?)

‘All That I Am’ – Anna Funder

Sometimes you read a book at just the right time. This is a novel about Nazism and the brave souls who tried to prevent it. About cruelty on a national scale and about the cruelties we perpetrate against the people we care for, in the name of art or politics or love. About selfishness and selflessness and about growing old and never getting the chance to grow old. A perfect way to end a year of pleasurable reading.

Feel free to email me via the Contact page with your suggestions about books for my reading pleasure in 2012.

Hospital Story

2011-11-02T20:15:35Z

i wrote this exactly ten years ago. A useful tale to remind yourself that, no matter how bad things seem, there’s always someone else who needs sympathy more than you do:

……………………………………………………………………………………………………….

You’ve been asleep for ten hours, but you wake up and it’s actually only been one and a half hours, and what woke you up was the sound of the woman in the next bed whimpering with pain. Her whimpers turn to sobs which turn to groans, as her head threatens to explode from pain. Where the hell does it come from? The doctors can’t say, it looked like an aneurism but all the tests in the world, the MRI tube of pain, the dye of pain, the lumbar puncture of pain, can’t confirm or deny their vague diagnosis.

So she’s crying out for the nurse, who gives her Panadeine Forte, but that takes a good twenty minutes to work, so in the meantime her arms and legs start tingling and pretty soon she can’t feel her hands, and who is there to comfort her? The nurse has gone away to page a doctor, and the woman is calling out, ‘Come back… don’t leave me… I’m scared… somebody?’ You’re lying two feet away from her, in your bedouin tent, earplugs out, wide awake, wondering if you should ease yourself painfully out of bed and go to the side of this woman you don’t know and hold her hand and tell her someone cares. But you don’t move.

You should have, and you know you will regret it for a long time, but you lie there and half of you is resenting your broken sleep and wishing she’d shut up and the other half knows exactly how she feels, how unspeakably awful this pain is, how you think you’re going to die and you half wish you would. But you know she has three kids and a good reason to live, because she told you through the tent walls earlier in the evening after you’d been laughing superciliously with your visiting friend about the funny names people call their kids, like Taylah Jayde and Kylie Breeane, and waddaya know, they’re a lot like her daughters' names. So maybe you’re just too damned embarrassed still to help her out.

Eventually the pills kick in and she sleeps. But you don’t, not for a long time.

In the morning you offer your sympathy, too little too late, and she apologises for waking you in the night. You feel a bit sick with shame. But somehow the night’s dramas have opened everybody up and pretty soon the other two women are telling their stories too. There’s M who has five kids from three different fathers, but her new boyfriend is different, she’s sure of it. She was having a holiday, the first hour of a week-long holiday from her job cleaning in a nursing home where she really loves the old folk. She says they have great senses of humour. One woman, Gladys, said about a new resident, ‘who’s that bastard?’ and when M said ‘I beg your pardon’, Gladys said ‘whose is that basket?’ and smiled a sly smile.

So M’s on holiday and kissing her boyfriend and suddenly a plane does a suicide plummet into her temples and she can’t stand up for the pain. Her boyfriend calls the hospital and she has to be airlifted from her country town to Melbourne because they haven’t got the technology to sort her out up there. The trouble is, they don’t seem to have it here either. She’s been through the technologies of pain too, and they can’t figure her out. She’s also had a drip inserted into the wrong part of her body all night so instead of reaching her veins it’s gone into her soft muscle tissue and her arms have swollen up. When the offending doctor comes around in the morning to sort it out, she’s apologising to him for causing trouble.

And then there’s B, whose son-in-law has promised to buy her a Frankenstein mask because that’s what the new scar on her temple reminds him of, and she thinks it’s a hoot. She’s quite disinhibited, often talks to herself, and you’ve learnt not to feel like you have to respond. She got sacked from her job on Friday, by letter, because her boss couldn’t wait the three months it will take her to recover (if she’s lucky). So she’s asking the nurse if there are any jobs for her at the hospital, and offering to go to a job interview in her nightie.

She asks you if you’re married, or have any children, and when the answer is no, she (they all) lose interest in you. You’re half disappointed and half glad, because you could tell them some stories, but none of yours could compete with their lives of struggle.

So even when you close your eyes, you can’t block out their pain and their after-midnight groans and their sad, worried children and their uncertain futures. You ache with shame and sympathy and with the knowledge that soon you’ll be out of here, but they’ll still be propped up on their pillows, hair awry, mouths dry, waiting for the next round of pills and the next visit from the be-suited young doctors who hold all the answers – except maybe they don’t.

Tournament of Books

2011-09-23T10:56:06Z

In the wake of the recent debate about the paucity of prize-winning female Australian authors, and the mooted establishment of a new literary award (The Stella Prize) specifically for women, Meanjin literary magazine is running a Tournament of Books to promote great books by Australian women.

I was invited to review two books from a shortlist of fifteen chosen by the Meanjin panel and ‘rank’ them:

‘A Kindness Cup’ by Thea Astley Vs ‘The Secret River’ by Kate Grenville

In the acknowledgements to Thea Astley’s novel ‘A Kindness Cup’ she mentions an ‘incident’ at The Leap near Mackay in Queensland which provided the ‘impetus’ for her book. Impetus is far too polite a word to describe the inferno of rage that appears to have inspired this novel. And for ’incident’, read Aboriginal massacre.

The novel was first published in 1974, just a couple of years after Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam established the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights and a year before he handed back some Gurindji land in the Northern Territory to its traditional owners. Gurindji, like many other indigenous groups, had been dispossessed, massacred then exploited as free labour over the previous decades. At last these stories were beginning to be spoken and written about by European Australians.

My copy of ‘A Kindness Cup’ is now thirty-five years old and it fell apart, one page at a time, as I re-read it for Meanjin. This literal disintegration became a metaphor for the story printed on the yellowing pages. The main character, Dorahy, is invited back to the (fictional) QLD town of The Taws where several decades earlier he witnessed the results of an act of white male mob violence. There is to be a twenty-year town reunion and Dorahy, a former schoolteacher in The Taws, can’t keep away. He is still seeking justice and the quest is sending him mad.

Dorahy hovers around the partying townsfolk like a blowfly circling a pack of dogs, goading the perpetrators and trying to enlist support for his cause. But in this seaside town the leaders of the pack have since been knighted. One dismisses the massacre as the town’s ‘growing pains’. The present blurs with the past as Dorahy’s mind obsessively rehearses the events leading up to the crime. One of the victims, Lunt, whose sympathy for his Aboriginal neighbours nearly cost him his life, is now a recluse. As Dorahy wages his righteous campaign, Lunt’s accommodation with the past and Dorahy’s inability to let it go are distilled down to a New Testament versus Old Testament view of humanity.

Astley’s prose is rich with poetry, especially when she’s describing the alienating Australian landscape where ‘the sea still burns its blue acid’ and ‘the terrible brown and green distances eat away at the compass outside.’ Occasionally she over-reaches and the images jar: ‘Gracie lies there and in a conglomerate of memories she inspects husbands one and two’.

There is a cast of fully fleshed-out white characters: Boyd the kindly newspaper editor who is sucked into the wake of Dorahy’s fury; Gracie the returning opera diva who sweats in the tropical heat and yearns for her younger, Sylph-like self. Most of the Aboriginal characters, though, are shadow puppets flitting wordlessly around the edges of the white man’s sub-conscious.

Embodied in the character of Dorahy, the author’s rage carries the reader along with immense energy. It’s the kind of anger that so frightened critics of the ‘black armband view of history’ three decades later, they refused to utter the word sorry. Astley demands our empathy; in the end, though, she rewards us with despair.

Thirty years after the publication of ‘A Kindness Cup’, Kate Grenville traversed similar territory in ‘The Secret River’. Like Astley she drew on some historical facts in creating the story of William Thornhill, an English convict transported to Sydney Cove in 1806 where he makes a new life with his growing family on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. Thornhill falls in love with the Australian landscape and, more importantly, with the seductive pleasures of land ownership. But when his ambitions are challenged by the indigenous owners of the land he calls Thornhill’s Point, tragedy becomes inevitable.

Grenville’s canvas is wider than Astley’s. She takes us all the way from Thornhill’s childhood in London, a life of constant hunger with ‘the gnawing feeling in his belly, the flat taste in his mouth, the rage that there was never enough’, to his old age as a wealthy colonialist whose ‘children wore boots and (who) was never without a chest of the best Darjeeling in the house.’ Her cast includes some of the same ‘types’ found in Astley’s novel: Thornhill’s neighbour Blackwood who is sympathetic to the local indigenous tribes; the bullies Saggity and Smasher who see the ‘savages’ as less than human. But the Aboriginal characters are also given distinct personalities, and thereby dignity.

As in ‘A Kindness Cup’, the fulcrum of Grenville’s narrative is an Aboriginal massacre described in horrific, moment-by-moment detail. Re-reading it five years after I first encountered ‘The Secret River’, the sheer horror of this scene once again left me weeping with rage and sorrow.

Describing a novel as having a ‘project’ is a risky business, but it seems to me both these authors wanted their readers to confront and vicariously experience the shameful history of the colonisers’ dealings with indigenous Australians. Both are critical of the brutal patriarchal worldview that defined land as territory to be conquered, just as you might conquer a woman (‘Ah you bitch country’, says one of Astley’s characters, sucking a pinch of dust from his fingers, ‘I love you’) and Aborigines as vermin to be eradicated.

In ‘A Kindness Cup’, Dorahy’s rage against this worldview is disabling and, in the end, futile. Thea Astley’s own worldview, it seems, is a dystopian one.

‘The Secret River’, though, ends with the image of William Thornhill scanning the cliff tops through his eye glass, searching the forest for ‘a man as dark as the scorched trunk of a stringybark’. Thornhill has been changed by the cruelty he has both witnessed and perpetrated – he is sorry – and in his regret there is the promise of redemption.

Kate Grenville gets my vote this time but PLEASE read them both.

Rescue Mission

2011-08-03T16:17:55Z

In the back room of the Innisfail Historical Museum, past the antique egg cups, the yellowing christening gowns and the old war rifles, is a collection of black-and-white photographs labelled “Cyclone, March 10th, 1918”. The images show wooden buildings littering the main street like spilled matchsticks. Men in braces and hats stand beside the piles of wood, hands on hips.

There’s something familiar about the cheerful look on their faces. It’s the same expression I’ve been seeing all week on the faces of Mission Beach residents – like the woman in the supermarket who told me ‘I’d rather have a cyclone than a flood or bushfire any day!’

On February 3 2011, Cyclone Yasi hit tropical north Queensland, destroying property and crops along the length of what’s known as the Cassowary Coast. The category-five storm caused massive damage to the resort infrastructure at Dunk and Bedarra islands and they won’t be taking bookings until at least April 2012.

At Mission Beach, two hours south of Cairns, the waterfront facilities (including the Clump Point Jetty and boat ramp) were ripped to pieces. Most buildings suffered some kind of structural or water damage. The irrepressible residents, however, have picked themselves up, repaired their buildings and resumed the coastal tourist trade. According to Angi Matveyeff, the manager of Mission Beach Tourism, two-thirds of the town’s cafes and restaurants are operating and almost all accommodation has reopened.

We’re staying at the beachside Castaways Resort and Spa, where the gym remains closed due to water damage. Otherwise, Castaways is fully operational and many rooms have recently been refurbished. Accommodation bookings are steady and the resort’s Bibesia restaurant is popular with locals on their night off.

Walking south along the beach towards Wongaling Beach we marvel at the resilience of Mission Beach’s picturesque coconut palms. The tidal surge that followed Yasi gouged the sand from under these trees, leaving their spaghetti-like root systems exposed. Most clung on, though, and have survived.

Occasionally we come across a rusting fridge half buried in the sand. It’s hard to know whether this is detritus left by Yasi or if it’s been here since Cyclone Larry swept through in March 2006. Two decades before Larry, Cyclone Winifred damaged 190 buildings in and around Innisfail (On the road between Mission Beach and neighbouring El Arish, one wag has left a hand-painted sign: “Hi Winifred, I’m in ELarrysh, got my Yasi kicked by every cyclone.”)

Cyclones aside, this part of north Queensland is one of the wettest regions in the country. The nearby town of Tully receives an annual average of 4000 millimetres of rain, symbolised by its giant Golden Gumboot monument. The week we visit the Cassowary Coast (spanning from Babinda in the north to Cardwell in the south), there are showers almost every day. There’s a strong wind, too, which is bad news for our planned island-hopping day trip with Coral Kayaking.

It’s good news, however, for the people hiring out BloKarts from the Adventure Centre (rebuilt on wheels after Yasi, for a quick getaway). I watch these go-carts with sails hurtle up and down the hard sand while I brave the choppy surf of Mission Beach.

We make the most of the sunny breaks, dropping in at the visitor information centre and the C4 Environment Centre next door to find out how the endangered cassowaries have survived Yasi.

These flightless blue-necked birds have inspired their own monument at South Mission Beach. Bus drivers like to advise backpackers that the ten-foot tall concrete and steel “man-eating” cassowary is “life-size”. (Fortunately most don’t buy it).

“Their habitat has been damaged, so the cassowaries are confused and hungry,” we’re told. “They’re wandering into places they don’t usually go, like car parks, looking for food.” Fortunately the birds can usually find a meal at one of a hundred rainforest feeding stations established on the Cassowary Coast, where rangers leave fruit for them each week.

The rainforest damage is starkly visible on the Licuala Fan Palm Walk in the Tam O’Shanter National Park. A decade ago I wandered here under a dappled canopy of native palms, keeping an eye out for wallabies and cassowaries. Now we marvel at the trunks of immense eucalypts, their roots bared, lying fallen beside the path. The little signs alerting visitors to different plant species have become advertisements for ghost trees. (The wallabies seem to have migrated to South Mission Beach where they’re feasting happily on lush front lawns.)

Five kilometres north of Mission Beach we tackle the walk up Bicton Hill in the Clump Mountain National Park. Some glades and gullies of rainforest remain unscathed. At the top of the hill the cyclone has stripped away foliage, creating a stunning new 360-degree view of the Cassowary Coast.

Intrigued by descriptions of Innisfail as the “art deco capital of Australia”, we head north up the Bruce Highway through canefields, stopping to pick up a heritage walk brochure at the Innisfail Tourist Centre. The roof here is still covered with a giant tarp but otherwise it’s business as usual.

Innisfail is architectural proof that good things can come from bad. The cyclone that ripped the town to pieces in 1918 prompted an art-deco building boom in the 1920s and ‘30s. Wooden constructions were replaced with more sturdy concrete and brick buildings, with the decorative curved and hand-tiled facades, porthole windows and geometric leadlight designs of the era. Starting at the Johnstone River, we follow the heritage walk around town, pausing to admire the freshly painted deco-style banks, arcades and cafes lining the streets.

The Innisfail Historical Museum is housed inside the blue-and-white deco glory of the Memorial School of Arts, where we stare at old photos of the cyclone-ravaged town. Finally we head up the hill to where Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church presides over the town. It’s a grand confection of cream and gold turrets, fully refurbished after Cyclone Larry in 2006. Like the rest of the town, it seems to have survived Yasi’s fury with minimal damage.

We drive back along the winding Old Bruce Highway, known as Canecutter Way, through a long valley of canefields flanked by cloud-topped mountains. As we pass the silver towers of the Bundaberg Sugar Mill in South Johnstone the sickly-sweet smell of processed sugar follows us down the road.

At Mena Creek we pull into a crowded car park and follow the signs to the entrance of Paronella Park. We can hear rushing water as our tour guide leads us down a steep path towards a patch of remnant rainforest. Suddenly, looming up from under the tall trees, there’s a ruined castle with turrets and balustrades, and right beside it, a gushing waterfall drops into a hidden valley.

Our tour guide explains that a Spanish immigrant named Jose Paronella made his fortune in the 1930s buying and selling Queensland cane farms. He bought five hectares of rainforest, built a small cottage for his family to live in and employed local labourers to construct this astonishing Spanish-style castle right beside the Mena Creek. He hired out the glamorous ballroom for weddings and dances and invited courting couples to wander along the landscaped paths he created in the rainforest. Visitors played on his tennis courts, swam in the creek at the bottom of the falls and bought ice-creams made by his wife, Margerita.

Paronella was an innovator, installing Australia’s first privately owned hydro-electric power plant under the waterfall. After his death the property changed hands several times and a fire in the ballroom caused extensive damage. Floods and cyclones have also taken their toll, and these days the castle is a series of picturesque moss-covered ruins. But someone has always rescued the heritage-listed Paronella Park from natural disaster and these days it’s one of the most popular tourist attractions in the state.

On the way back to Mission Beach we detour via Silkwood to visit the Murdering Point Winery. Here the Berryman family produces award-winning wines with tropical fruits including mango, passionfruit and Davidson plum. We buy a bottle of sweet lychee wine and that evening we raise a toast to the never-say-die spirit of tropical north Queenslanders.

(A version of this blogpost appeared as a travel article in the Fairfax Traveller in August 2011.)

Beware the 'S' word, Prime Minister

2011-07-15T13:13:32Z

‘Shy’: such a small word, and it begins with an instruction to keep quiet: shhhh. It’s used to describe the timid, unconfident people in our midst, those who prefer to remain silent as a way of avoiding attention. At least, that’s one common stereotype we attach to this particular temperament trait. And unfortunately it’s a description that simply doesn’t fit the public perception of our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

Yesterday the PM admitted to being shy at a Press Club Luncheon; a gathering of perhaps Australia’s most cynical political journalists. Today’s headlines are entirely predictable: ‘Gillard’s ‘Shy Girl’ Plea For Understanding’, ‘Gillard Confesses She’s A Shy Girl’, ‘Shy PM Fights Back Tears’. Whether it was a strategic move aimed at gaining sympathy and thereby political advantage, or a simple statement of fact (or both), it was a mistake.

Our perceptions of shyness are a veritable Rubik’s Cube of contradictory behaviours. On the positive side, we associate it with empathy, sensitivity, loyalty and with being a good listener. We often assume that behind the blushing façade, shy people are sweet-natured and harmless.

Few of these stereotypes fit our image of the current Prime Minister. Her perceived lack of loyalty to, or empathy for, her predecessor Kevin Rudd still hounds her, and those opposing a carbon tax claim Julia Gillard is not listening to their concerns.

On the negative side, shyness is linked with self-consciousness, hypersensitivity, self-pity, emotional withdrawal, social awkwardness, ‘goody-goody-ness’ and a lack of assertiveness. Shy people are often thought to be simply unwilling (too lazy, perhaps) to make an effort in social situations or to be ‘team players’ at work. Shyness is perceived as a form of weakness, a character flaw that should be erased with the help of assertiveness training, psychological counseling or even pharmaceuticals.

Publicly ascribing these qualities to one’s own personality, albeit tacitly, is clearly not the best way to win friends or influence people. Indeed, confessing to shyness more often provokes bullying than sympathy. Even our use of the word ‘confession’ implies that there is something shameful about being shy. And after all, who wants to vote for a weak leader?

Many, though, would find it hard to believe that someone who has climbed the political ladder to become the first female Prime Minister is timid. The Prime Minister usually presents herself in the media as calm, confident, assertive and in control; in her own words, a woman of ‘steely determination’.

So by ascribing any of these stereotypical shy attributes to herself, positive or negative, she risks being perceived as ‘Ju-liar’ once again, only this time we’ll assume she’s lying about her own personality. Television reporters have already begun joking about ‘the REAL real Julia Gillard’, and one Age Online commentator described her as ‘looking like a woman trying to get out of a speeding fine.’ If she’s not directly lying, then at best she appears to be trying to make excuses for her own perceived failings.

But what if we were to take her at her word?

Psychologists I have interviewed about shyness claim the essence of this temperament trait is ‘fear of negative evaluation’. We all experience this fear at times, but for shy people the anxiety about how others perceive us is much more extreme, persistent, and at times disabling.

As Prime Minister, Julia Gillard has frequently been criticised for not sticking to policy positions and promises, for doing political ‘backflips’ and for being overly concerned with opinion polls. Admitting to being shy is like admitting those criticisms are valid; she’s so worried about negative evaluation by Australian voters, she can’t stick to her guns.

Perhaps the biggest problem for the Prime Minister in admitting to shyness is her gender. Many of the stereotypical attributes of shyness are traditionally associated with ‘typical’ female behaviours. Men are assertive, women are timid. Men are the speakers, women are the listeners. Men stick to their guns, women are easily swayed by their emotions. Most female political leaders are forced to try to counter these stereotypes throughout their careers or risk being dismissed as unfit to lead. (I suspect Malcolm Fraser is deeply shy but his emotional reserve was deemed acceptable because he was a man.) With one small word, Julia Gillard has confirmed the prejudices of those voters who were already suspicious of her simply by virtue of her gender.

Many of these myths and stereotypes about shyness (and gender) are just plain wrong. Shy people find strategies to overcome the anxieties accompanying this particular temperament trait. I’ve interviewed self-describing shy people who have become highly successful actors, musicians, teachers, broadcasters, corporate leaders and politicians, often adopting alternative ‘personae’ that enable them to lead their professional lives in public while they protect their private lives from scrutiny.

Perhaps that’s part of the problem here. With Bob Hawke, what you saw was what you got – an extrovert with no need for a self-protective professional persona – and much of his popularity was based on our sense that he was ‘the real deal’. Perhaps our obsession with the ‘real’ Julia Gillard reflects our prurient desire to strip away the political persona and see the vulnerable person underneath. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, women rarely gain sympathy by stripping.

In admitting to shyness the Prime Minister sought our understanding, perhaps even our pity. I fear she is more likely to have lost our respect.

(A version of this article was published in the Sunday Age on July 17th, 2011.)

The Disappearing Woman

2011-07-10T14:56:50Z

If you haven’t heard of Ned Kelly, indeed if you haven’t developed a passionate view on the question of whether he was a murdering criminal deserving of capital punishment or a folk hero martyred by the criminal murdering Victorian justice system, you probably don’t deserve to be called an Orstrayan.

Ned Kelly has made it into our cinematic canon, been fictionalised by some of our best novelists, eulogised by some of our best songwriters, and taught on the school syllabus. Ned has inspired local tourism ventures all over country Victoria, and every year a bunch of eminent lawyers get together to re-enact his criminal trial.

But what of his sister Kate?

It’s a cliché to say that history often ignores women, but clichés usually become clichés because they are true. These days, few Australians have any knowledge about what happened to the pretty teenager whose resistance to police sexual harassment fuelled some of the ensuing conflict between her bushranging brother and the local constabulary.

While the process of festishising dead Ned’s body parts and armoury was getting underway, Kate Kelly was getting on with her life. According to novelist and scholar Merrill Findlay, after Ned’s death Kate briefly became a teenage celebrity:

‘(She was) as famous, perhaps infamous, as many of today’s celebs. People queued to meet her and to watch her ride. They bought postcards of her in her mourning outfit, a fashionable black silk riding habit. And then she disappeared. She fled her fame, her family, her friends, the north-eastern Victorian hill country she had grown up in; she changed her name several times; and then re-emerged, in the mid-1880s, on the flat inland plains of central western NSW.’ (riverartsfestival.org.au)

The story of Kate’s life once she reached NSW has become an all-consuming interest for Merrill Findlay. Her research into Kate’s life and tragic death in the NSW town of Forbes inspired her to write a series of poems about ‘Mrs Catherine Foster’, as Kate was known during this time. Merrill then commissioned award-winning New Zealand composer Ross Carey to set her five poems to music, and together they have produced the Kate Kelly Song Cycle.

But wait, there’s more.

Merrill wanted to share this story with the local community in Forbes, where she herself now lives, and for the past year she has been working to create an arts festival during which the Kate Kelly Song Cycle will be premiered in early September 2011. She has enlisted the support of a range of community organizations and creative artists to help produce this ever-growing community festival:

‘The inaugural Kalari-Lachlan River Arts Festival will be held beside the Forbes Lagoon, central western New South Wales, on 3-4 September 2011, as the opening event for the NSW Landcare & Catchment Management Forum. It will be directed by Stefo Nantsou, resident director with Sydney Theatre Company, and feature the premiere of The Kate Kelly Song Cycle … plus live musical performances from Classical to Country, a Lantern Parade, an Arts & Crafts Village, a Writers & Readers Tent, a Farmers & Landcarers’ Tent, a Healing Arts Alley, art exhibitions, ‘slow food’ stalls, wine tastings in the Festival Lounge, markets, sports and much much more.’

When Merrill Findlay’s novel, ‘The Republic of Women’ (pub. UQP) was launched in Melbourne in 1999, she invited me to sing an aria from Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’, an opera about a woman haunted by her past, desperate to create a new life for herself, but who comes to a tragic end.

A decade later Merrill invited me to sing the inaugural performance of the Kate Kelly Song Cycle, a chamber opera about another woman haunted by her past, desperate to reinvent herself, but whose life ends in a mysterious tragedy:

‘The premiere takes place beside the very lagoon in which the body of Ned Kelly’s sister Kate was found in October 1898. This legendary woman’s story is told from diverse perspectives in this new work, including that of her abusive husband Bricky Foster, and Quong Lee, the grocer at whose corner store she would have shopped.’

The Festival is only the latest in a long list of Kate Kelly projects inspired by Merrill Findlay. She has also been largely responsible for initiating:

The Kate Kelly Walking Trail and occasional Kate Kelly Heritage Tours in Forbes
A campaign to stop the demolition of the historic Quong Lee’s Store next to where Kate’s inlaws the Foster family lived from the 1860s and where Kate herself would have shopped
A leaflet about Kate’s life in Forbes which is now distributed through tourist outlets
Signage and landscaping near where Kate’s body was found, including a walking trail

Other ongoing benefits from the growing interest in Kate Kelly include:

Restoration and revegetation of the lagoon foreshore where Kate’s body was recovered
Rehabilitation of remnan native grasslands near the lagoon
An increased awareness of the richness of the region’s indigenous and non-indigenous cultural heritage and histories
Several new ‘tourist destinations’
A heightened sense of place within the local community

So if you’re anywhere near Forbes during the first weekend of September, I invite you to come and celebrate the life of Kate Kelly with us, and meet the people who’ve worked so hard to create a place for this ‘disappearing woman’ in Australian history.

(See ABC radio website for a review of the Kate Kelly Song Cycle premiere) (Addendum: In 1982 English-born Australian writer Jean Bedford wrote a controversial novel based on the life of Kate Kelly entitled ‘Sister Kate’, but is no longer in print. And Frank Hatherley wrote a comic play called ‘Ned Kelly’s Sister’s Travelling Circus’, last performed in 1980)

Go Back To Where You Came From

2011-06-09T15:00:18Z

About eight years ago I paid a visit to Baxter Detention Centre in South Australia. It was an eye-opener. Tall barbed-wire fences, security gates, bored blank-eyed guards, and a community of alternately hopeful and hopeless detainees from all over the world, stuck in limbo. Statistics became living breathing people for me during the few hours i spent inside those fences.

I was reminded of that visit when i watched some previews this week of a new SBS television series called ‘Go Back To Where You Came From’, due to be screened on June 21 – 23, during Refugee Week. The producers have embraced our ‘reality hunger’ (as American writer David Shields calls it) and created a three-part documentary in which a group of six Australians literally go back to where many of our asylum-seekers have come from. Most of these Australians don’t approve of the re-settlement of asylum-seekers in our community and believe they should be sent straight back home.

The six Australians meet refugees in their new homes in Sydney and Wollongong, then board a leaky boat and travel to Malaysia where they meet some of the people waiting to come here. Then they fly to the countries in whose refugee camps these frightened asylum-seekers have spent time waiting to be offered a safe haven. They put faces to statistics, embrace real live weeping human beings, and have their preconceptions challenged in ways few us are willing to allow.

It is riveting television and my only regret is that it will be screened on SBS to an audience who are most likely already ‘converted’ to the cause of refugees. In an ideal world it would be screened on all the commercial TV channels in prime time, and reach an audience who may have little knowledge of the traumas suffered by people desperate to leave all that is familiar, board these leaky boats and seek safety.

You can listen an interview with the presenter of the new SBS series, Dr David Corlett, on The Conversation Hour on 774 ABC Melbourne, which i co-hosted today with Jon Faine.

After my trip to Baxter i wrote a series of columns for The Age about some of the people I had met there. These stories inspired the most correspondence of any of the columns i wrote over three years. I have posted them below for your interest:

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‘Cream Cake’ said the label in big black letters. It looked fresh and delicious, but I hesitated for a moment at the cash register. Maybe cream cake was culturally inappropriate. Maybe they had already tried Australian cream cake and found it too sweet, or not sweet enough. Maybe there was something else that I should be taking with me. But what?

Distracted on my arrival by the two tall rows of barbed-wire fencing and the no-man’s-land of white pebbles in between them, I forgot about the cake. It wasn’t until after pressing the red button and waiting for the giant steel door to open, walking along a mesh-enclosed corridor to the next steel door, entering the reception area which was buzzing with flies, handing over my three different types of photo identification, filling out five separate forms, emptying my pockets of personal items, putting them in a locker and walking through a metal detector, that I remembered the gift.

So back I went for the cream cake, through the metal detector and the steel doors, and when I returned one of the guards held out his hands. “I’ll take that.” “Why?” “Because that’s the rule.” “Can’t I take it to the people I’m visiting?” “No.” “But what will you do with it?” “It has to go to Property.” “What will Property do with it?” “They might take it through tomorrow, if they have time.” “Why not today?” “Because that’s the rule.” “So my friends won’t be able to eat the cake today?” “No.” “So if they get the cake at all, it will be stale?” The guard just smiled at me. Stale, mate.

Inside the waiting room the Coke machine hummed loudly, and I wondered why Coke was okay but cake was forbidden. A door opened and a slight young woman was let into the room. She kissed me on both cheeks, holding my hands tightly, and thanked me for coming. She’d been here at Baxter for three weeks, after two years at Curtin, after many days at sea, after five months in Indonesia, after her husband had had ‘big problems’ in Iran and they had fled for their lives.

She was teaching herself English, but a dictionary couldn’t relieve the dead weight of boredom that hung over every long day. A cat called Rosie had adopted her, and kept her company when she lay awake in her compound in the small hours of the morning. I wondered about her husband, locked in a separate compound with no cat and no wife to keep him company. “I brought a cake, but they wouldn’t let me bring it in”, I explained. She smiled again and shrugged. She was used to people saying ‘no’ for no good reason.

Two more detainees were allowed in through the security door. One wore a white chef’s coat which smelt of fried chicken. He was working eight hours a day in the hot kitchen, earning one point an hour, one dollar a point, to buy phone cards. He was another recent arrival from Curtin, where there was nothing to eat from five pm until breakfast time, and the detainees were often hungry. Here at Baxter, where there was plenty of food, he had lost his appetite. Perhaps it was because he had exhausted every possible appeal option, and after three years behind barbed wire, he could soon be forced to return to Iran. When I mentioned the cake he simply held up his hands and shook his head sadly.

The other man carried a white stick and said little. Twenty-eight days on a hunger strike in Curtin had robbed him of his sight, and possibly of his mind. The others led him gently into the court-yard so he could sit with us in the afternoon sun. They talked and talked, as if they’d been starved of communication, until it was time for me to leave.

And as I walked out through the steel doors, savouring my freedom, I knew that even though the cream cake would be stale by the morning, our conversation would be fresh in their minds for days to come.

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Tried ringing M’s lawyer again last week. No one there. Left another message. Wonder if M has been able to get out of bed today. Wonder if she knows that yesterday was World Refugee Day. Wonder if she’d think it was some kind of sick joke.

Most days M doesn’t get out of bed until lunch time. Some days she goes back to bed around mid afternoon. Sometimes I ring late in the afternoon, and after I’ve scrabbled around, trying to find the scrap of paper on which I’ve written her detainee number and have been put through to the right compound, I wait on the end of the line for a long time until the loudspeakers have woken her up and she’s stumbled out of bed to the public phone. M’s always glad to hear from me, and always sounds surprised that I’ve bothered to ring again. She rarely complains, but I can tell she’s struggling.

Three years in limbo would take its toll. Three years of trying to hang onto hope, while those around you are sinking deeper and deeper into hopelessness. Escaping from her home country probably saved her life, but it has already cost M her marriage. How do you keep a relationship together when you have nothing to do all day, nothing new to talk about, no children to care for, no home to renovate, no garden to tend, and neither of you know what your future will be? You’re both fenced inside the same small enclosure, but the emotional gap between you grows wider and wider, until eventually it is unbreachable.

Most of the time M stays in bed because she’s run out of reasons to get up in the morning. Recently, though, illness kept her there. She had shooting pains in her guts, and was worried that it might be her appendix. M’s mother and both her brothers had to have theirs removed, so perhaps it runs in the family. She tried to explain this to the detention centre guards, but she’s not sure whether they understood her, because M’s English still falls apart when she’s under stress. After about a week of severe pain, a nurse came to see her and gave her a couple of Panadol. She hasn’t seen a doctor yet, and doesn’t expect they’ll organise one for her. I’m outraged, but she’s used to it.

A few months ago, M rang me herself. It was early in the morning, so I knew something good must have happened to get her out of bed. She’d just found out that she was to be given a temporary protection visa. Soon she would be free, at least for a while. She sounded so happy, it was as if I was speaking with a different person. I sent her some postcards of Melbourne landmarks, and promised to show them to her when she was released from detention.

Even though she had been granted a visa, she’d been told there would still be a wait of ‘a couple of weeks’ while the Australian Federal Police ran a ‘character check’ on her. I could tell them a few things about her character, I thought to myself. I could tell them about the first I met M, in a sterile waiting room in a remote detention centre, where she offered me a cup of tea and half a precious chocolate bar which she had saved for her visitor. I could tell them about how even the stony-faced guards smiled when M spoke to them. I could them about how she’d given the cake that I’d brought for her to another woman in the same compound, because it was her birthday. I could tell them about M’s love of Hollywood romances, which has had me scouring my local video stores for films with guaranteed happy endings to mail to her. But I don’t suppose the police would be interested in that kind of information.

It’s been almost three months since that early morning phone call, and M is still in detention. I rang her case officer from the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs about six weeks ago, but he didn’t know when M would be released. I rang again a couple of weeks ago, and he suggested I try calling M’s lawyer to check that the original request for a character check had actually gone through to the Federal Police. I rang the lawyer’s number but there was only an answering machine, and no one returned my call. So I rang again last week; still no response. The case officer reckons M will have to send in another request to the police, but he doesn’t know how long she’ll have to wait after that.

Tried to ring M yesterday afternoon but she was asleep and even the loudspeakers didn’t wake her. Happy World Refugee Day, my friend.

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When the mobile phone rings I recognise the interstate number on the little screen, and hesitate before answering. Please let this be a good day. A day marked by the kindness of a stranger or the promise of work. A day with dignity.

I take the call and it seems that, today at least, things are okay. Hello, M sings into my ear. How are you, my friend? How is your family? We talk about the events of the past week, and she can even laugh about the afternoon she got completely lost in the big city, caught the wrong train and ended up way out west with no idea how to find her way home. It all took several hours, by which time she’d missed her weekly English lesson.

I can tell M feels ambivalent about this. She is trying hard to learn our unwieldy language, and her spoken English is getting better by the day, but the classes are frustrating. They are full of refugees just like her, people from every corner of the globe, but most of the time she can’t understand what they are saying because their accents are even stronger than hers. She persists, though, because she still finds herself falling through the gaps in her English several times a day. I speak carefully to her over the phone, slow enough to be clear but hopefully not so slow that I sound patronising. I know how it feels to be spoken to as if you are deaf, or stupid, rather than just foreign.

M is happy today because she has finally met the lawyer who argued her case for a Temporary Protection Visa, and ended her long years in limbo. She shared a meal with him and his wife, and they invited her to visit them in Melbourne. That makes two more people in this country who know she exists. Which probably makes it easier for her to believe she exists, when she’s having a really bad day.

I wanted her to come to Melbourne when they let her out of the remote detention centre. But M had made a friend in there, so she went to the town which her friend had moved to after his visa came through. On the first day they spent together outside the high wire fences, he had taken M for a long bushwalk. After three years in confinement, the sudden sense of space made her feel dizzy. They walked for hours until her legs couldn’t go any further. She had expected that, once she was free, the constant tiredness which had been afflicting her in the detention centre would lift. But freedom was tiring, too.

It was tiring, dealing with something new every second of the day. New language, new customs, new rules. Street signs, road maps, train schedules, government bureaucracies, they were all bewildering. A woman had stared at her for a long time at a bus stop. Finally the woman approached and said she wanted to take a photo of M’s beautiful face and put it in a magazine. The woman gave her a phone number, but M isn’t sure if she should ring. Is it a nice magazine or something sleazy for men? Will she be able to tell the readers of this magazine why she had to leave her home and family and spend three years behind bars, and how it feels to know that she might be sent back again when her three year visa is up – or will they want her to take her clothes off?

The next day she rings me again. It’s not a good day. The man at Centrelink has just told her that they are stopping her unemployment benefits. They’re the rules, he says. She has no work and no income, and the generous stranger with whom she has been living for the past three months needs her spare room back. The church is trying to find M somewhere else to live, but they’ve had no luck so far.

I am helpless. We both are. M wants to come and visit me soon, but until she knows how she will get through tomorrow, she can’t plan any further ahead than today.

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Missing out on the end of a story can be intensely frustrating. Like hearing a couple on a tram discussing whether they’re about to break up, and then watching them get off the tram before the question is resolved. Like watching a couple of enticing episodes of ‘Carnivale’ on ABC television and then missing the rest because you’re out every Sunday night for a month. Or like reading several ‘This Life’ columns about an Iranian refugee in a remote detention centre, and not finding out what happened to her once she’d been released.

I’ve been contributing regularly to The Age for three years now. Of the one hundred and fifty columns I’ve written during that time, the stories I’ve told about my friend M and her slow journey through the Australian immigration system have elicited the biggest response of all. ‘Whatever happened to that woman’, people ask me, ‘the one in the detention centre? Is she okay?’ So in the interests of ‘narrative closure’, as the film buffs call it, and to satisfy those readers who wrote to me expressing their concern about this anonymous young woman, here are the facts.

M spent three long years in detention, waiting for her status as a genuine asylum-seeker to be formally recognised. I first met her one hot afternoon in a sterile visitor’s room at Baxter, where she held my hands tightly and talked about the two young brothers who she hadn’t seen for years, and about the cat that she had adopted in the detention centre and how it was helping to keep her sane. We stayed in touch and I sent M postcards of Melbourne’s green parks, promising to show them to her when she was released.

M was finally granted a Temporary Protection Visa in 2003, and made her way to Sydney with her adopted cat. M’s partner had been living there since he was released from detention, a year before M’s visa came through. Freedom was hard for M. She had been ground down by years of boredom, uncertainty and anxiety. She found it difficult to commit to anything, like her regular English lessons or the waitressing job she finally found after months of searching for work. She missed her family back in Iran and worried about their safety. M loved Sydney’s big air-conditioned shopping centres, but her partner couldn’t persuade her to go to Bondi Beach with him. All that bare flesh was too much for a modest Iranian girl.

But M stuck with her studies and focussed on the idea of becoming a nurse. She liked caring for people, and had heard that there was a shortage of nurses in her new country. M’s English gradually improved, and early in the New Year she was interviewed for a place in a nursing course. M was so nervous before the interview, she thought she was going to be sick. But she passed the language test and was accepted into university.

Two weeks ago M phoned me. She was in Melbourne for a brief holiday before her studies began, so we arranged to meet for a picnic. I gathered together some friends, and we met M and her partner in the St Kilda Botanical Gardens on a Sunday evening. She looked a little different to when I had last seen her in Sydney. There were blonde streaks in her dark hair, and her smile came more easily. We sat on a rug eating cold chicken and toasting her new nursing career with glasses of bubbly. After dinner we all played boules on the soft, summer grass and the young Iranian couple won every game. They apologised but I could tell they were delighted with their beginner’s luck. When the sun disappeared we packed up the picnic and said our goodbyes. She’s going to be okay, I thought to myself.

I’m sorry, readers. You’ve been misled. I’m afraid I can’t finish this story. When M’s Temporary Protection Visa runs out, it’ll be up to the Federal Government to decide whether she stays in Australia or is forcibly returned to Iran. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed.

Why be Welcomed to Country?

2011-05-19T18:13:08Z

On the day the conservative Victorian Coalition Government decided to make Welcome to Country ‘optional’ for state politicians, I thought it was timely to post a column I first wrote for The Age several years ago exploring my own reaction to this important Australian tradition…

I’m standing on a barge in the middle of the Maribyrnong River, feeling confused. There’s a tall, elegant woman standing beside me, holding aloft a sprig of gum leaves, and she’s inviting me to take a leaf and pass the rest on. Our amplified voices are booming out across the crowd of locals who’ve gathered on the riverbank to enjoy a community festival. I take a leaf, but I don’t know what to do with it. I’m meant to be hosting this event, but before the first act has even begun, I’m feeling at a loss.

The elegant woman beside me is a Wurundjeri elder, and she has just performed a Welcome to Country ceremony. She has spoken simply and graciously about her ancestors, about their spiritual beliefs, and their links to the history of this place. She speaks as if they are standing right here beside us, and she explains what they expect of us as visitors to their land. I understand, and yet I don’t. My ancestors are dead, I hold no spiritual beliefs, and although I feel at home here, I know little about the history of this quiet, winding river. The ceremony ends with some words spoken in a language I cannot comprehend, and as I hand over the sprig of gum leaves to a woman sitting on a picnic rug, the look of confusion on her face mirrors my own.

Over the following few weeks I find myself at half a dozen events where official proceedings begin with a Welcome to Country. At community meetings, concerts and award nights, in local halls, public parks and conference rooms, I listen as indigenous elders from different tribes of the Kulin Nation tell stories about their totems, such as Bunjil the eagle and Waang the crow. I see audience members shuffling uncomfortably, and I find myself wondering whether any of us understand the significance of this new welcoming ritual, or whether it’s simply tokenism.

How am I meant to feel when I’m welcomed to country? What exactly is being asked of me? And what should I take away from these brief moments of symbolism in the busy business of life? It is disturbing and slightly embarrassing to be welcomed like a stranger to a place which feels utterly familiar. It’s as if I’ve left my home for a while and when I’ve returned, someone else has made it their own, and I have to knock politely on the front door to gain entrance.

Maybe this is the simple heart of the matter. For two whole centuries it was assumed (and enshrined in law) that Australia had been ‘terra nullius’ when Europeans arrived. In other words, no one home, so make the place your own. And we did. It wasn’t until Eddie Mabo dug in his heels, and refused to accept that his home belonged to someone else, that we finally had to relinquish the idea of Australia as an empty land just waiting to be colonised.

When Wurundjeri or Boonwerwrung elders welcome me to their traditional lands, it forces me to look at my local park or town hall with new eyes. It asks me to imagine how this country might have looked when their great-grandparents felt just as ‘at home’ here as I now do. It reminds me that, less than a couple of centuries ago, these places must have felt utterly alien to my immigrant forbears. And it helps me to understand the ongoing relationship that indigenous communities have with this country. When those elders ask us to ‘respect their land, their beliefs and their people’, it is a gentle reminder that for a long time, few white Australians did. No wonder I feel uncomfortable.

I don’t really mind this kind of discomfort, though. It encourages me to imagine what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes. It’s the kind of imaginative leap that will be invaluable in our slow but sure progress towards reconciliation.

New Zealand Mon Amour

2011-05-08T21:20:03Z

‘Magical thinking is causal reasoning that looks for correlation between acts or utterances and certain events. In clinical psychology, magical thinking is a condition that causes the patient to experience irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because they assume a correlation with their acts and threatening calamities’. (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Perhaps I shouldn’t return to New Zealand. Ever.

I visited Christchurch for their Winter Arts Festival and some time later they had a terrible earthquake there. In March this year I went to Auckland for their annual Arts Festival and last week they had a freakish typhoon there. Magical thinking leads me to wonder if there’s a causal relationship. I hope not, because I’m having a little love affair with New Zealand.

It’s not your usual Kiwi-Aussie love affair, inspired by blinding white snowfields, bubbling mud pools and bungee jumps into bottomless canyons. Dare-devilry and odiferous ponds hold little appeal for me. But after my recent trip to Auckland I’m nursing a quiet passion for New Zealand popular culture.

Gazing across the vast expanse of KareKare beach, west of Auckland, I suddenly understood why I couldn’t quite recall whether Jane Campion’s movie ‘The Piano’ was filmed in colour or black-and-white. On a cloudy autumn day, this coastal landscape where Campion set her gothic love story was rendered in metallic sheens of silver, grey and ash. The sea was much calmer than when actor Holly Hunter was carried from the surf onto the shore. Still, I was faintly disappointed not to see a grand piano perched in the black sand with a child cart-wheeling around its mud-caked legs.

KareKare beach was the last stop on my brief popular cultural pilgrimage on the north island. My fella and I had been invited to perform for four nights in the Auckland Arts Festival, a three week program of local and international music, dance, theatre and visual arts. Most nights after the show we would head to Aotea Square, a grassy space between the Auckland Town Hall and the Aotea Centre theatre complex. The square had been transformed into a Festival hub, complete with a Spiegeltent and an open-air bar for artists and audience members. Here we met up with some of the country’s most prolific songwriters and screenwriters, and I began formulating a little plan to get a first-hand look at the places made famous in New Zealand songs, films and TV shows.

Crowded House frontman Neil Finn made a guest appearance at the Festival with us one night. As the rain began falling on Aotea Square after the show, I was reminded that the lyrics of his song ‘Four Seasons In One Day’ refer not to Melbourne (as many like to think) but to Neil’s home town. So when our gigs had all finished and we had a couple of free days in Auckland, I set off with my fella to see ‘the sun shine on the black clouds hanging over the Domain’.

The Auckland Domain is a seventy-five hectare park in the central suburb of Grafton. It was created in the mid 1840’s around the cone of the long extinct Pukekawa volcano. As we puffed up the hill, past duck ponds fed by underground springs, the sun was in hiding and a warm drizzle was falling on the manicured sporting fields spread across the floor of the crater.

At the peak of the cone, beyond the century-old wooden cricket pavilion and the elegant greenhouses in the Domain’s Wintergarden, you can get practically a 360-degree view of Auckland city. Neil Finn had told us that he tries to go cycling around the Domain at least once a week, but there was no sign of him or his bicycle on this wet morning. We opened our umbrella and wandered towards the Auckland War Memorial Museum, a grand building that sits proudly at the top the Domain like a giant square crown. Opened in 1929, the museum houses much more than war memorabilia. When we got to the entrance I did a double-take at the sight of the wide stone stairs covered with leopard-print.

It turns out the Museum was hosting an ‘Outrageous Fortune’ exhibition, celebrating the local television series which transfixed New Zealand audiences over four years during the ‘noughties’. Set in the working-class suburbs of west Auckland, the comedy–drama follows the fortunes of a crime family matriarch with a fondness for animal prints, Cheryl West, who tries valiantly to get the family to go straight. (Turns out the young woman who’d collected us from Auckland Airport was a New Zealand actor who’d had an occasional role in the series for several years, playing an Auckland ‘slapper’ with a fondness for oral sex, Draska Doslic.)

We’d met the show’s avuncular co-creator James Griffin at the bar in Aotea Square a couple of nights before. Outrageously successful as a screenwriter, Griffin and his co-writer Rachel Lang had originally named the show after Hamlet’s famous ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ speech, and then decided to keep the gag running. The title of each episode was taken from Shakespeare’s play about the rotten old state of Denmark (‘Contagious Blastments’, ‘Tis So Concluded’, ‘Think Yourself a Baby’, etc.) and somehow they managed to find titles for six series’ worth.

So after we’d finished checking out the Domain we headed to Auckland’s most famous record shop, Real Groovy (these days also selling CDs, movies, vintage clothes, video games and books) in Queen St, to buy up the first two series of ‘Outrageous Fortune’ on DVD. (We’re currently half-way through the second series and COMPLETELY HOOKED.)

I also bought a second copy of one of my favourite CDs of the last couple of years; ‘Marvellous Year’ by New Zealand singer-songwriter Don McGlashan. In the decades since he made the move from being an orchestral French horn player to playing with outfits including Blam Blam Blam, The Front Lawn and The Mutton Birds, Don McGlashan has become a household name in NZ. He has written music for theatre, television, film (he composed the music for Jane Campion’s feature film ‘An Angel At My Table’), dance and sporting events, as well as producing several award-winning solo albums. Since ‘Marvellous Year’ came out in 2009 it had been getting quite a thrashing in my car stereo system, and I thought my sis might like it too. (She does, and when Don comes out to do some gigs in Melbourne in late July, we’ll be there with bells on).

It was courtesy of Don McGlashan that we got a chance to visit KareKare beach. He’d done a couple of guest spots with us during the Festival, playing the euphonium and singing his haunting song ‘White Valiant’ from the Mutton Birds album ‘Flock’. We’d asked his advice about good places to go walking (or tramping, as they say in NZ) not far from Auckland, and he’d offered to come with us to the west coast.

On our last day in New Zealand Don picked us up from our hotel and drove us through the undulating western ‘burbs of Auckland (no sign of Cheryl West or Draska Doslic, more’s the pity) all the way to the sea. Our first stop was a carpark behind Piha Beach, where we met up with Don’s friend Geoff Chapple.

Geoff is a journalist, playwright, screenwriter, musician and activist (he played a major role in the New Zealand anti-apartheid campaign against the 1981 Springbok rugby tour, and later wrote a book about it called ‘The Tour’). He wrote the screenplay for the Vincent Ward movie ‘The Navigator’ and Geoff’s also the person responsible for kick-starting a successful campaign to establish a walking track from the tip of New Zealand’s north island to the bottom of the south island. (To prove it could be done, Geoff walked the trail himself, bush-bashing half the time, and later wrote a book about it called ‘Te Araroa – The New Zealand Trail’)

So who better to lead us around the stunning cliff-tops of the west coast? This was my second visit to Piha Beach, but the first time I’d seen those wild little bays that stretch north of the surfing village where Neil Finn has his holiday house. We tramped down the hill and along the wide black sand beach, wishing we had more time so we could take a dip in the waves. But we wanted to get to KareKare before sunset, so we jumped back in the cars and headed further south.

When did you last watch ‘The Piano’? It’s worth getting it out on DVD for another look. The landscape is entirely breathtaking and so are the performances by Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill and Anna Paquin (only three Academy Awards? – I reckon the team should have taken home a dozen). The chiaroscuro beaches at KareKare stretch for an eternity and even with dozens of holiday homes dotted along the hillsides, you can still feel how strange and Other this place must have been for those first generations of whitefellas, chopping down the ancient forests on the muddy hillsides.

A week after we left Auckland Don McGlashan copped a car-door in the ribs when he was cycling home one day. He was laid up for weeks.

Dangerous times in New Zealand Mon Amour.

(A version of this article appeared in The Big Issue magazine in September 2011.)

My Spectacular Life

2011-04-13T20:22:15Z

It all began with the semiquavers. Bashing through a Bach prelude, I noticed that the dots on the page seemed to be dancing in time with the music. That might work okay in a scene from the 1940 Disney animation Fantasia, but when you’re out of practice, you need the notes to keep still. So I stopped practising.

The next clue was my creeping reluctance to read the papers. Once an avid consumer of news, I’d become incapable of reading an article from start to finish. Short attention span, I thought. Just another victim of the collective Attention Deficit Disorder afflicting us in the information age. (Strange, though, that I could still listen to a two-hour radio documentary without a problem.) So I cancelled my newspaper subscription.

Next there was the Light Deficit Disorder. My bedside lamp had served me well for decades, but now it was too dim, so a second lamp was installed above my head. Late at night, though, and even with two lamps glaring, I still found it hard to get through more than a few pages of a novel before having to close my eyes. I reluctantly considered resigning from my book club.

By now, any sensible person would have figured out what was wrong, but when you’ve experienced a miracle your senses sometimes desert you.

Fifteen years ago, I couldn’t see clearly past the end of the bed. Trying to find my way back to my beach towel after an ocean swim was like a Burke and Wills expedition. I needed a guide to help me find my way onstage for the opera productions I was involved in. Without glasses, I couldn’t navigate my way to my front door, let alone to the other side of town. Then, at the turn of the millennium, I paid a man with more than a decade’s worth of specialist medical training an awful lot of money to sedate me, prop open my eyelids and slice off a tiny section of each eyeball. When I awoke, I could see everything.

Trees that used to look like plates of mashed peas when I took off my glasses suddenly had individual leaves on their individual branches. Blackboard menus in restaurants were legible, and actors on distant theatre stages were recognisably male or female. My spectacles were donated to the local op shop and I invested in my very first pair of non-prescription sunnies. Through the miracle of modern ophthalmological medicine I now had 20-20 vision, and I felt super-human.

So you would understand my reluctance to admit that those halcyon days had come to an end. Laser eye surgery might have cured my short-sightedness, but as far as I’m aware no one has found a cure for old age. Like practically every other forty-something on the planet, I was succumbing to the sad inevitability of age-related long-sightedness. Driving from one place to another might still have been a doddle without glasses, but as soon as I strayed from my usual routes and needed to look up the street directory, I was stuffed. Printed street names that used to look like logical sequences of letters from the Roman alphabet now looked like trails of squashed ants.

The good news was that I didn’t have to give up piano practice, newspapers or my book club; the bad news was that I had to rejoin the human race. The first time the optometrist led me to one of those back-lit racks of spectacles and asked me to choose a new pair, I panicked and fled the store.

I felt like shouting: I AM NOT READY TO HAVE A DISABILITY AGAIN. I don’t want to fish around endlessly in the bottom of my bag for glasses, leave them behind at cafes, accidentally swap them with my partner’s, forget that they’re perched on top of my head, or sit on them when I leave them on the beach towel. And I don’t want to have to attach them to one of those little plastic chains that cartoon grannies wear around their necks.

But resistance was futile. Returning to the optometrist, I ordered the cheapest frames they had and, when the new glasses arrived, I put them on, bought a newspaper and read it from cover to cover. Then I finished the novel my book club mates had raved about six months ago. And I loved it. Then I went to the piano, opened up Bach’s 24 Preludes and Fugues and began to play. The notes stood still and the accidentals stuck to the notes. As I began to enjoy the sound of the music again, I remembered that my hearing is still superhuman. For now, anyway.

(This column was first published in The Big Issue, No 378, 12th April 2011)

How to watch 'The Killing' AND earn a Ph.D

2011-04-02T17:26:32Z

If you haven’t caught up with the Danish crime series ‘The Killing' yet, you’ve probably had less sleepless nights than the rest of us.

The series was broadcast on SBS television in Australia in 2010, but I’ve only recently watched it (all twenty gripping episodes) on DVD.

‘The Killing’ (or ‘Forbrydelsen’ as it’s originally titled in Danish) is being broadcast on TV in the UK right now, hence the recent spate of newspaper articles focussing on Sara Lund (the lead female character) and her woolen jumper collection.

In honour of this growing popular cultural obsession, we’ve been workshopping a few thesis titles, in case any Lund fans would like to turn their obsession into a post-graduate qualification.

Feel free to pinch one of these, and we’d also welcome your own contributions to the list (send them in via the Contact page on this website):

1) ‘Knit One Purl One: potency and subversion in Lund’s performative persona’

2) ‘Tightly Wound: the repression of Scandinavian sexuality in a post-Feminist state with particular reference to the the post-patriarchal performative discourse of Sara Lund’s jumper in Forbrydelsen’

3) ‘Passionless Post-Fashion Praxis: the captioned capture of post-feminist cache’

4) ‘Hand Wash With Care: re-imagining the Scandinavian screen-based sweater-crime sub-genre’

5) ‘Lund, Lanolin and Liminality: the agrarian fashion aesthetics of Danish TV crime’

6) ‘The Missing Body: emptiness and absence in the embodiment of empathy as expressed by Sara Lund’

Smiling in Christchurch

2011-03-01T14:18:11Z

I know we love to sentimentalise victims. When bad stuff happens to people, we assume they’re saints. Journalists are the worst offenders. Even tax-dodging, cartel-concocting captains of industry become national heroes when they get ill or die, according to the newspapers. But I refuse to let my embarrassment about the worst narrative clichés of my profession prevent me from stating what I believe to be true: the residents of Christchurch are the nicest people I ever met.

Two years ago I spent a week in this geographically-displaced English regional town, performing in the Christchurch Arts Festival. The niceness began even before I arrived. Boarding the plane from Melbourne, I observed a couple of young New Zealanders helping a hunched elderly lady to put her hand luggage in the compartment above her head. A couple of moments earlier I’d overheard one of them saying quietly to the other ‘Gosh it’s a bit funky round here, isn’t it?’ Perhaps they didn’t realize that the faint smell of faeces was coming from the old woman they were about to help. Perhaps they did, and it didn’t matter. Either way, they smiled benignly at her and made sure the door of the compartment was firmly shut on her scuffed bag.

Smiling was quite a thing in Christchurch. Strangers walking past you in the street all seemed to nod and smile, and many of them said hello. Each hello felt like a personal welcome, as if they were surprised and delighted that you actually chose to visit their town. It was mid-winter and most days the temperature didn’t go above single digits, so I bought some possum socks and felt at one with the other possum-sock, possum-hat and possum-scarf-wearing pedestrians as I walked to the Festival venue each day from my hotel.

The hotel was across the road from Hagley Park, a vast clean green space bounded by a shallow stream optimistically called the Avon River. The park was swarming with ducks, all busy with their complicated social lives. Handsome emerald-necked drakes bullied each other out of the way of Plain Jane ducks, oblivious to the joggers and dog-walkers and hand-holding lovers who criss-crossed the park all day long. I got lost in the Botanical Gardens that adjoin Hagley Park one day and had to be talked out of there by a friend on a mobile phone. There are worse places to get lost.

The Avon River is fed by an underground spring, a taxi driver proudly informed me. It hasn’t flooded in 150 years. Children learn to fish in it, and every five years it’s re-stocked with salmon and trout, just so that every child has a good chance of catching something. Best not to drink from it, he advised me, but it’s pretty damn clear, isn’t it!

Coming from the dry flatlands of bayside Melbourne, it was extraordinary for me to walk out of the hotel each day to the sight of the snow-covered mountains that line both sides of the Canterbury Valley, like luscious slices of lemon meringue pie. One day we caught a bus to the foot of the Port Hills and hiked up to Evans Pass where we stood sucking in that clean cold air and taking photos of each other in front of faraway Lyttelton Harbour. Seasoned trampers passed us on the trail with their nobbly sticks and their nobbly knees and their ever-smiling wind-chapped faces.

By the time we made it to the bottom of the hill our legs were shaking, but we found a café in London Street, Lyttelton with old typewriters and children’s bicycles hanging from the walls beside pictures of Che Guevara and a vinyl-spinning DJ playing hits of the 80’s. The coffee was so good I had to have three cups. Then we ordered fish and chips across the road and ate them sitting on the window ledge of a pub down by the port, enjoying the afternoon sun and licking our salty fingers clean.

Back in Christchurch the Festival people looked after us as if we were their long lost cousins. There was friendly Wendy on the lights, and M the muscley sound guy who’d spent four years living in Melbourne, hoping to make it big as a musician. He and his band mates had been ‘kingpins’ in Christchurch, he said, but they wanted to find a bigger pond, and the word on the street was that Melbourne was the ‘coolest city in the southern hemisphere’ for rock’n’roll.

But the big pond wasn’t so welcoming and he ended up working in JB Hifi selling guitar strings and missing his family. Eventually he came back home to Christchurch and found a doe-eyed girlfriend who was an equestrian star. ‘She doesn’t know much about music but she knows a shitload more about horses than I ever will’, he said.

‘What was it I was trying to get the horse to do? The one after a trot?’ he asked her one night when we were having after-show drinks in the bar. ‘That’d be a canter’ she replied with a patient smile.

When our shows were all finished I didn’t want to go home. I fantasized about coming back in summer and bringing a big lilo and floating all the way down the Avon River to the sea (is that where it goes?) one warm day, lying on my back watching the sun trickling through the fronds of the weeping willows, salmon nibbling at my fingers.

I’d never even heard of the word ‘liquefaction’ back then.

I’ve been watching the TV news this week and I haven’t seen anyone in Christchurch smiling.

Music in Melbourne - Celebration and Survival

2011-02-11T16:54:11Z

Having survived the infamous Clarinet-gate episode of January 2011 (I left my instrument in the Qantas Club Lounge at Melbourne Airport and flew to Sydney to play in the opening gig of PK’s four night ‘A to Z’ Sydney Festival shows at the City Recital Hall – doh! the clarinet was found safe and sound, by the way) I returned home to Melbourne to contemplate (with some relief) a week of listening to other people perform.

On Monday night this week I went to the Melbourne Town Hall to hear the Australian Chamber Orchestra present the first of their 2011 National Concert Season programs with guest baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes. The program was an eclectic mix of old and new, original and re-arranged works. There is always that moment when the ACO first begin playing when you remember just how exquisite their attention to detail is, and how they always perform as if they are one single organism with multiple arms. You know you are in safe hands.

Mahler’s Adagietto (from the 5th Symphony) began so softly, there was almost something sinister in the promise of the ‘forte’ passages to come. It’s a work that provokes (perhaps embodies) intense nostalgia and vulnerability – the perfect emotional state for an audience at the beginning of a program of widely contrasting musical moods.

Artistic Director and lead violinist Richard Tognetti played a cycle of Five Melodies by Prokofiev, pieces that were originally composed as wordless songs. Tognetti stood bent-kneed, as if staggering under the weight of a gold-plated violin (in fact it’s a ‘priceless’ 1743 Guarneri del Gesu) but played with such lightness of touch, the instrument could have been made of balsa wood.

Here’s a question for musical train-spotters: in the first of the five Profofiev pieces, the main melodic motif seems to be exactly the same as the ‘Could you coo, could you care…’ phrase in Gershwin’s ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’ – did George borrow from Sergei??

After a short orchestral work by Robert Saxton, Teddy Tahu Rhodes was up next (‘up’ being the operative word – he was literally twice the height of some ACO members) and was very charming, particularly in his delivery of Richard Rodney Bennett’s ‘Songs Before Sleep’. They were written less than a decade ago but there is something very olde-fashioned – and appealing – about RRB’s setting of these gothic nursery rhymes.

I wasn’t as enamoured with Tognetti’s chamber orchestra arrangements of ‘An die ferne Geliebte’ (To the distant beloved), a collection of songs by Beethoven that is credited with being The First Ever Song Cycle. I kept wondering WHY you would think that an arrangement of this work for orchestra was a good idea. Art song is so much it’s OWN thing, and that ‘thing’ is so much about intimacy and the duet between the piano and voice, but that intimacy was lost when an orchestra was substituted for a piano. Plus Teddy Tahu Rhodes somehow lacked the gravitas that this kind of art song requires; he kept mugging and flirting with the audience in a very musical-theatre kind of way.

I had similar qualms about Tognetti’s orchestral arrangement of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 3 in D Major. The work lost the sense of an intimate conversation between a few instruments that you get with a quartet. Sure, it was very pleasant to listen to but not nearly as moving as the original. (Maybe Tognetti has too much time on his hands? Hard to believe)

Here’s another question for you: is the fact that Melbourne audience members rarely seem to clap at ‘inappropriate moments’ (ie. between movements) these days a good thing or a bad thing? Is it a sign that only the most dedicated and knowledgeable music fans, those with significant cultural capital, come to classical concerts any more? Or is it a sign that we have ALL now been educated in the etiquette of listening to classical music?

And did anyone else in the audience notice that the clock on the Melbourne Town Hall organ was stuck on 3:47 for the whole concert? Perhaps it’s a deliberate ploy to make us believe that when we’re listening to fine music, we enter another realm, beyond the reach of time. (Or maybe someone’s forgotten to notify the blokes in the Maintenance Depot)

On Tuesday night I attended the joint birthday party for the Melbourne Recital Centre (turning 2) and its benefactor Dame Elizabeth Murdoch (turning 102). They’re both looking in remarkably good shape. After welcome drinks in the (insert car brandname here) foyer, we were seated in the Elizabeth Murdoch Hall for speeches and performances of some of Dame E’s favourite works. (Still feels like entering a United Nations meeting room, with excellent acoustics)

The VIPs lined up on the stage throughout the celebratory concert occasionally looked uncomfortable, and when they got up to speak they had to turn their backs to the audience to acknowledge each other’s esteemed presence, but the speeches were mostly mercifully short and relatively informal. Premier (and Arts Minister) Ted Baillieu even referred somewhat enigmatically to ‘the girls bringing in the chairs’ as being ‘like Jacques Tati’, before describing Dame E as ‘one of my mum’s best mates’. (Simon Crean made the same boast, in a message read out later on the night)

The Murdoch tradition of arts philanthropy will be continued with the addition of a new Elizabeth Murdoch Creative Development Fund to ‘support the Melbourne Recital Centre’s programs’ and ‘nurture talent’. It will include a ‘Great Romantics Prize’, supported by Dame E’s grand-daughter Julie Kantor, and a program to allow more Victorians from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend MRC concerts.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard sent a special message to Dame E, referring to her ‘humility of character’, her ‘deep sense of public duty’ and describing her as ‘a gift and a treasure for our nation.’

And in between speeches we heard a movement of a Mozart Piano Sonata by Caroline Almonte, the slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet played pianissississimo by Ensemble Liaison and friends, an improvisation by the Mannins Gould Jones Trio (happy to listen to David Jones and Tony Gould any time, but the cello as jazz instrument just doesn’t do it for me) and a strangely conservative gospel number from the Soweto Gospel Choir (a musical boomerang, from Africa to America and back to Africa again).

Then it was out into the (insert car brandname here) foyer again for more celebratory drinks, after farewelling the birthday girl who (according to her daughter Anne Kantor) said recently ‘It’s so very tiring to be so old but i DO love living’.

Last night it was a very different crowd who turned up at the Forum Theatre for the premiere screening of ‘Murundak: Songs of Freedom’, the new documentary film about the Black Arm Band. I was commissioned to write the program essay for the very first Black Arm Band performance at the Melbourne Festival in October 2006 (I will paste in that essay at the end of this blog) so it was a pleasure to join in the celebrations for this wonderful record of the ensemble’s early work.

Film-makers Rhys Graham and Natasha Gadd and producers Sarah Bond and Phillipa Campey travelled with the indigenous musicians off and on for four years as they toured capital cities and indigenous communities in Australia and then flew to London, filming backstage and on stage as the musicians performed some of the best known indigenous pop/folk/protest songs: ‘Treaty’, ‘Took the Children Away’, ‘Down City Streets’, ‘We Have Survived’, ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, ‘Yil Lull’ and Goanna’s ‘Solid Rock’.

‘Murundak’ means ‘alive’ in Woiwurrung language, and the film is intensely moving, showing the emotional cost to the singers of re-telling their stories of suffering and survival in song. Bart Willoughby tells the film-makers, ‘Some of us old fellas have this kind of Vietnam syndrome, and we’ve never even been to war’. And most audience members at the Forum screening were quietly weeping, watching footage of the late Ruby Hunter hugging her husband and soul-mate Archie Roach after he performs ‘Took The Children Away’ on the day former PM Kevin Rudd delivered The Apology to the Stolen Generations.

Archie describes the advantages of singing his pain in songs: ‘You walk away stronger, you’re not bleeding, and you haven’t hurt anyone else’. In London, Kutcha Edwards marvels at the experience of ‘singing to the mob who put us in the predicament we’re in’.

BAB founder Steven Richardson, Melbourne Festival Director Brett Sheehy and Black Arm Band members including Emma Donovan, Kutcha Edwards, Dan Sultan, Shellie Morris, Lou Bennett, Bart Willoughby, Rachel Maza, Stephen Pigram and Archie Roach watched the film, then the musicians delivered a high-energy set of BAB songs for the rest of the audience members downstairs in the big Forum auditorium.

Tonight, Friday February 11th, the St Kilda Festival will showcase the film in a free outdoor screening in the O'Donnell gardens, St Kilda, Melbourne from 8.30pm, and it will be shown on SBS Television later this year, followed by a Madmen DVD release. Congratulations to everyone involved – this is an important piece of Australian cultural history, recorded now for posterity.

Black Arm Band – Murundak program essay – Sian Prior – June 2006

During the past decade, there’s been no escaping the phrase ‘the black armband view of history’. First used by Australian historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey in his 1993 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture, it has since become a handy rhetorical shield thrown up by those wishing to dispute the history of injustices perpetrated by white Australia against its indigenous inhabitants.

The meaning of the phrase has expanded over the years, as it has penetrated deeper within the public discourse. Originally used to describe the attitude of particular historians, this insidious metaphor now conjures up images of a race of people interred in the past, immobilised by self-pity and (with the active support of their whitefella friends) obsessed with ‘shaming and blaming’.

But as a description of how current generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (and their whitefella friends) have responded to centuries of injustice, it is simply inaccurate, and for evidence of this we need look no further than the outpouring of indigenous popular music over the past four decades.

From the driving country-pop of Vic Simms’ ‘Stranger in My Land’ (1973) to Yothu Yindi‘s international dance hit, ‘Treaty’ (1991), from the bitter-sweet female harmonies of Tiddas’ ‘Anthem’ (1996) to the urban hip-hop of Local Knowledge’s ‘Blackfellas’ (2005), songs have been vehicles for the expression of both anger and pride, for political protest and profound optimism. Many of these songs have been the result of respectful collaborations between black and white artists, authentic examples of reconciliation in action.

As Gunditjmara singer/songwriter Richard Frankland has said, ‘Our songs tell stories of real things, real people and real situations’(1). The subject matter of these songs has been as varied as the individual experiences of their creators, but certain themes have recurred over the years.

There have been songs celebrating indigenous resistance to oppression, such as Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ (1991), about the struggle of the Gurindji people for their traditional lands at Wattie Creek. The same story was originally told in Ted Egan’s ‘Gurindji Blues’, recorded back in 1971 by a young member of the Gumatj clan of the Yolngu people, Galarrwuy Yunupingu (later to be named Indigenous Australian of the Year).

Murri singer-songwriter Joe Geia’s 1988 song ‘Kwanji’ celebrates ‘a hard-fighting man… forces can’t seem to put (Kwanji) down’. Paul Kelly’s ‘Pigeon/Jundamurra’ tells the story of an Aboriginal resistance leader whose name is ‘spreading all across the valleys… like a burning flame’ (1989), and in ‘Cannot Buy My Soul’, Kev Carmody reminds us that when it comes to freedom fighters of any race or creed, ‘you may take our life and liberty, but you can never buy our soul.’ (1991)

There have been many songs written that reaffirm indigenous Australians’ connections to place. Some are overtly political, mirroring contemporary struggles for indigenous land rights. In 1989, Alice Springs band Amunda recorded a song called ‘1788’ which poses the question, ‘When will he get back his lands from the white man’s hands?’ The Sunrize Band from Arnhem Land spelt it out loud and clear in their song ‘Land Rights’; ‘So let’s stand up for our land rights ‘cause it’s part of the dreamtime’. (rec. 1990)

Several songs written during the late 70’s, including ‘Bran Nue Dae’ by Broome musician Jimmy Chi, became strongly associated with the dispute over land rights on the Noonkanbah Station in the south Kimberley, between the traditional owners and an oil-mining corporation. (2) That song later became the title of Chi’s first nationally acclaimed musical, and along with his second major work, ‘Corrugation Road’ , is considered a major artistic landmark in contemporary Aboriginal arts.

Other songs have had a gentler message, celebrating the power and the beauty of the land. In ‘Uncle Willie’ (rec. 1988), Joe Geia eulogises the ‘mountains and streams’ that are ‘part of our dreams’. Two years later Bart Willoughby’s band Mixed Relations recorded a song called ‘Our Mother’ which describes how the land ‘cared for us with love and affection, she made us strong’.

Blekbela Mujik’s ‘Kakadu’ describes how the world-famous escarpment ‘stands up like a beauty in the blazing sunlit sky’ and in ‘Nitmiluk’ (the Jawoyn language place name for Katherine Gorge) the band celebrated the return of that place to its traditional owners; ‘You’re the father of this land, break the chains and help to set me free.’ (rec.1990)

Yothu Yindi is just one of a number of Aboriginal bands who celebrated the ground-breaking 1992 Mabo decision by the High Court of Australia (overturning the doctrine of terra nullius) in song; ‘Terra nullius is dead and gone, We were right, that we were here, They were wrong, that we weren’t here.’ (‘Mabo’, 1994) A decade later, Ngarrindjeri singer/songwriter Ruby Hunter performed her songs in a concert called ‘Kura Tungar’ (Songs from the River) with the Australian Art Orchestra, reaffirming her ongoing connection to her traditional lands along the Murray River.

Alongside these artists there have been a number of significant non-indigenous songwriters whose work has responded to the Aboriginal politics of land. In 1982, Shane Howard’s band Goanna released a song called ‘Solid Rock’ which became a hugely successful mainstream rock anthem. The song re-tells the story of European invasion and its impact on traditional indigenous culture;’ They were standin' on the shore one day, Saw the white sails in the sun, Wasn’t long before they felt the sting, white man, white law, white gun, Don’t tell me that it’s justified, ‘cause somewhere, someone lied… genocide.’ In addition to his prolific song writing output, Shane Howard has also worked as a producer, recording many albums by indigenous artists over the past two decades.

One of the founders of the Warumpi Band, Neil Murray, is another non-indigenous musician who has written prolifically about Aboriginal relationships with the land. In an interview for Rhythms magazine in 2000, Murray said, ‘My entire creative output has been a quest for meaning in this country… people always say that something in my sound… evokes a sense of place.’ (3) His most famous song, ‘My Island Home’, became a hit for Torres Strait Island singer Christine Anu, and an unofficial anthem of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

In the introduction to their book ‘Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places,’ (2004) authors Peter Dunbar-Hall and Chris Gibson write that ‘music is used to sing the past into the present and the future’. (4) This is nowhere more evident than in the use of traditional languages, both in the names of indigenous bands, and in the lyrics of their songs.

Until the 1980’s very few Aboriginal pop musicians had sung in language. Country singer Isaac Yama was a pioneer, performing his original songs in Pitjantjatjara in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s (5). When jailed singer/songwriter Vic Simms recorded his song ‘Stranger in my Land’ in Long Bay, back in 1973, he sang ‘The black Australian has his pride, his culture and his dreamtime’. But the fact that this song, and all the other songs on his debut album ‘The Loner’, were written entirely in English, could be seen as evidence of the stifling of that culture.

Ten years later, things were beginning to change. Languages that had been forbidden in many missions and schools in the first half of the twentieth century would find new expression, and new audiences, in the songs of artists like Joe Geia, and bands such as Blekbela Mujik, Tiddas, Yothu Yindi and Warumpi Band.

According to Neil Murray, the Warumpi Band’s debut single, ‘Jailangaru Pakarnu’ (Out from Jail, 1983) was the first rock song to be released entirely in an Aboriginal language. ‘Warumpi’ is another version of ‘Papunya’, the name of the central Australian Aboriginal community from which the band emerged in the early 1980’s, and is sung in Luritja. (6)

Back in the late 1970’s, however, Jimmy Chi was writing and recording songs with his band Kuckles (featuring Stephen Pigram) which employed Aboriginal language lyrics, including the mini-album ‘Milliya Rumurra’ (1979). Their song ‘Nyul Nyul Girl’ was one of the first to substantially employ Aboriginal lyrics, and one of the first contemporary love songs in Aboriginal language.

‘Yothu Yindi’ means ‘mother and child’, and according to lead singer Manduwuy Yunupingu, the band used the traditional music, instruments and languages of the Gumatj and Rirratjingu clans of North Eastern Arnhem land specifically to ‘create impact for our culture’. (7) Yothu Yindi, Blekbela Mujik, Joe Geia, No Fixed Address, Mixed Relations, Kev Carmody, Coloured Stone and Sunrize Band have all incorporated didjeridu into their song arrangements in recent decades, and many indigenous bands have also used clap sticks. When a re-mix of Yothu Yindi’s song ‘Treaty’ became a world-wide dance hit in 1992, it ensured that the music, the instruments, the language and the political aspirations of the band members reached an international audience.

More recently, urban indigenous rapper Munki Mark has been using his grandmother’s language, Jarwwadjali, the language of the Grampians in western Victoria, and Arrernte, spoken in Alice Springs. (8) The title track on indigenous hip hop band Local Knowledge’s 2005 EP ‘Blackfellas’ also includes some rapping in language.

If indigenous popular music can be seen as an antidote to the image of pathos and paralysis evoked by the phrase ‘the black arm band view of history’, that is not to suggest that all indigenous songwriters have ‘eliminated the negative’ in order to ‘accentuate the positive’.

Archie Roach’s 1990 song ‘Took the Children Away’ is a poetic but unflinching account of the Australian government’s policy of forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their families. Twenty-five years earlier, Bob Randall had written a haunting song on the same subject called ‘Brown Skin Baby’, described by music writer Clinton Walker as ‘the flower in a corner of the dustbin of history’ (9).

The first album of indigenous musician and activist Bobby McLeod, ‘Culture Up Front’, wasn’t released until 1988, but over a decade before he’d been ‘telling it like it was’ for many Aboriginal Australians, in live performances of his song, ‘Sick of Being Treated Like a Low Down Mangy Dog’. (10)

Many of the songs of Murri musician Kev Carmody are inflected by a deep and righteous anger at social injustice. At the same time, they are informed by a sophisticated critical understanding of Australian political relations. In ‘Strange People’, he sings ‘Technology enslaves, the media blinds, our money in the bank supports environmental crimes, strange, strange people inhabit this earth’ (rec. 1995)

But alongside the anger there is an equally deep well of optimism in the lyrical output of Kev Carmody, nowhere more evident than in the song he co-wrote with Paul Kelly, ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’; ‘This is the story of something much more, how power and privilege cannot move a people, who know where they stand, and they stand in their law’.

Perhaps it is in the words of Joe Geia’s bicentennial lament ‘Yil Lull’ (1988) that we can find the quintessential mix of grief and hope, acknowledgement of the past and optimism for the future, that has characterised indigenous popular music in recent decades; ‘I sing for the red and the blood that was shed… and I’m singing for the gold and the new year, young and old… now I’m singing just for you…’

The texts listed below will amply reward anyone interested in further exploring the work of those artists – and institutions – who have been the ‘spear tips’ of this contemporary music movement. Places like CASM, for instance, the Adelaide-based Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music, which was a potent incubator for a number of influential Aboriginal artists during the late 1970s and early 1980s, or CAAMA, the Alice Springs-based Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association which first recorded and broadcast many significant indigenous musicians. Artists like Bart Willoughby of No Fixed Address and Buna Lawrie of Coloured Stone (creators of the enduringly popular song ‘Black Boy’), whose bands toured the country exhaustively in the early 1980’s ‘on the smell of an oily rag’. They have not yet achieved the mainstream recognition they deserve, but they remain two of the most loved and respected indigenous musicians amongst Aboriginal communities.

In October this year, as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, some of these indigenous musicians will come together to form the ‘Black Arm Band’, for a series of two concerts called ‘Murundak’ (meaning “alive” in woiwurrung language) at the Hamer Hall. The Black Arm Band will include Christine Anu, Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter, Bart Willoughby, Stephen Pigram, Kutcha Edwards, Kev Carmody, Mark Atkins, Lou Bennett, Joe Geia and Dave Arden, joined by Paul Kelly, Neil Murray and Shane Howard.

The concerts are billed as a ‘celebration of music as an instrument of identity, resistance and resilience,’ and are meant as a tribute to the lasting musical legacy of these ground-breaking artists. But they will have another important function; to begin the reclamation (or perhaps subversion) of a highly divisive little phrase, re-defining it as The Black Arm Band’s view of history.

References

p. 24, Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places.
p 236. ibid
pp. 180 – 181, Singing Australia
p. 17, Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places.
p. 232, Buried Country.
http://www.neilmurray.com.au/wb_history)
p. 179, Popular Music and Local Identity
p. 217, Buried Country
p. 22, Blak Times, Meanjin Vol 65 No 1
p. 156, Buried Country

Bibliography:

‘Meanjin’, Blak Times, Vol 65, No 1 (2005)
‘Singing Australian: A History of Folk and Country Music’, Graeme Smith (2005)
‘Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places’, Peter Dunbar-Hall and Chris Gibson (2004)
‘Buried Country’, Clinton Walker (2000)
‘The Didjeridu: From Arnhem Land to Internet’, Karl Neuenfeldt (1997)
‘Popular Music and Local Identity’, Tony Mitchell (1996)

Alone at last: the hours dissolve in Amed

2011-01-12T16:31:10Z

Travel blog: Away from digital distractions, I discovered a different kind of meditation amongst the outriggers of Aas Beach…

Once you start noticing the piles, they’re everywhere you look, in all shapes and sizes. Driving from the crowded Balinese capital of Denpasar towards the north east coast, I start to count all the different types of objects heaped up by humans on the side of the road.

There are piles of bricks and cement bags, sawdust and tiles, timber and kindling and peanuts and rice and stone carvings and religious offerings of rainbow-hued flower petals. And on the heads of women, balanced magically in reed baskets, there are teetering towers of palm fronds and fresh fish, fruits and vegetables. So many piles of stuff that is being made into other stuff, or that no one has figured out what to do with yet, or to be offered up as appeasements to the Heavenly Rulers of All Stuff.

We Australians often worry about the amount of stuff we create and consume, but we are not alone in these habits of heaping and hoarding. Many of these piles are destined for the building sites that, in spite of the terrorist bombings, are still springing up all around Bali. New hotels, shopping centres, schools and houses are chewing up former rice paddies and tropical jungles to accommodate the ever-swelling population of this island of six million people.

It’s my first trip to Bali in twenty years and I’m determined to avoid the heaving tourist centres in the south. Kuta is a hazy memory of Australians behaving badly, and a friend has instructed me to head straight to Amed where, he assures me, the Balinese still live traditional lives in spite of the influx of foreigners.

My driver, a hotel manager called Agus, speaks wistfully of how the island was two decades ago. ‘We used to share things, be collective, but now we are all individuals and everyone wants to go to McDonalds.’ Agus has worked in Seminyak for ten years but is planning to return to his rural village when he is old. ‘There, if you have no food, your neighbour will feed you.’

As we pass through the coastal villages north of Denpasar I stop counting the piles and begin noticing how the jungle creeps back in, trying to re-colonise the space being taken over by building sites; great flowering vines of greenery stretching up and over and through everything, in a race to re-claim the land.

Agus points out a distant mountain that he climbed with his wife when they were newly-weds. They were making a pilgrimage to a temple near the mountaintop, and after their prayers the young couple camped overnight behind the temple. They awoke to find the mountain ringed by dark clouds and the rain falling heavily – but only below them – while the peak remained clear and cloudless at dawn.

The journey to Amed takes three hours and as we turn south-east along the winding coast road I look for signs for Meditasi Bungalows. Meditasi is Indonesian for ‘meditation’, and I hope the name doesn’t imply an expectation that guests will be rising at dawn to contemplate the nature of existence. Having never been into meditation (too impatient), I’m not planning to start now.

The steep coastal landscape is reminiscent of Italy’s Amalfi coast, but where every hairpin bend on the Sorrentine Peninsula reveals a whitewashed town dissected by cobbled streets, Amed’s villages of thatched huts hide demurely under coconut palms. Meditasi is the last ‘resort’ on the road that winds through the village of Aas Beach, and the entrance is hidden down the end of a steep driveway. The manager, Prapta, greets me with a relaxed smile and shows me to my palm-thatched bungalow, one of only four in this small complex. The bungalows have been cannily designed for maximum exposure to nature and minimum exposure to other people. We enter through a private stone-walled garden littered with fragrant frangipani flowers (which doubles as the outdoor bathroom) and climb some winding stone steps to the back door.

The hut is a single spacious room with a double bed and a large balcony overlooking the shimmering sea. Surrounded by pink bougainvillea, the balcony has a second bed for relaxing on during the daytime. Perfect.

Or not. ‘Of course you probably know that we have no internet connection or mobile phone reception here’, says Prapta, and my heart skips a couple of beats. Five days alone in a bamboo hut with no means of communication with the outside world. Suddenly the hours seem to pile up in front of me, empty and aimless. No gossip from friends and family, no online news outlets to keep me in the loop, and no vehicle to drive myself back along the coast to find a phone signal. How will I get through the long humid days?

I’m still in a state of mild panic as I head down to the black sandy beach with my snorkel and goggles. Meditasi is perched on a half-moon bay about 500 metres long and bounded by rocky outcrops. There are dozens of white outriggers pulled up above the tide-line and I clamber around them to find a patch of clear sand. A couple of fishermen are mending nets in the shade but the beach is otherwise deserted. Timing is everything when you enter the water here, dodging between small but powerful waves and watching out for submerged rocks.

I launch out into the deeper water and suddenly, right there below me, is the alternative universe of a coral reef. Clouds of brilliant aquamarine fish swerve away at my approach, and a couple of clownfish rush for refuge to an anemone. The coral shows signs of wear and tear from the outrigger traffic but the variety of different fish promises days of entertainment.

Back on the beach, I am joined by a small gang of local Balinese children aged between six and sixteen. We chat in phrases of two or three words (‘beach good yes’) and then they gather a pile of smooth grey stones and place them in front of me. Under instruction from the eldest boy, they make a series of ‘hotels’ by placing the stones in neat lines in the sand and decorating them with small shells from the shoreline.

The children belong to the families who own the one hundred fishing boats on Aas Beach that go out to sea around 4:30 every morning. Over the next few days it becomes my habit to wake just after dawn to watch the fishermen return to shore, the flotilla of outriggers gliding landwards like waterborne spiders crouched on the surface of the stippled sea.

The beach is narrow and one day I ask a young local called Wayan if he worries about the prospect of rising sea levels. ‘Of course’, he says, ‘because there will be nowhere to put the boats, and without the boats, no fishing and no food’. There are a thousand fishing boats on the Amed coast and their owners also worry about tsunamis. Wayan tells me he feels safe, though, because he lives between two important Hindu temples and prays to the gods every day to make sure the sea is not angry.

I spend the daytime hours reading novels on my sunny balcony, snorkeling on the reef, eating small mountains of nasi goreng at the Meditasi restaurant and having massages. Late afternoons, when the heat recedes, I walk north or south along the coastal road, peering at the carved temples in the villages and nodding to the women who salt baskets of fresh fish and hang them under the thatched eaves of their huts. One afternoon I see a huge pile of straw propped high up between the forks of a dead tree, an ingenious feedlot system for the agile goats who bleat from the side of the road.

And somehow, in the absence of the usual digital distractions, those mountains of empty hours dissolve and flow past in a smooth stream of pleasure. Solitude produces its own meditative trance, and I revel in the opportunity to do just one thing at a time, giving it my full attention. On the fifth day, as I take my last stroll along the beach front, I’m reassured to see that those little rock ‘hotels’ piled up neatly in the sand are still standing, safe and sound above the tide-line.

Long Live The Book

2011-01-02T12:30:27Z

As we shuck off the old year and steel ourselves for the new (2011 – good lord! 1991 still feels recent to me) it’s worth cranking up the memory machine and noting some highlights of the cultural calendar. I’ll start with books (theatre, opera and film to come later):

‘The Boat’ by Nam Le – this book could be called ‘A Stretch of the Imagination’ (if that title hadn’t already been taken), given the astonishing authenticity with which Nam Le inhabits the minds and worlds of his fictional (and sometimes not so fictional) characters. I heard him being interviewed by Jo Case at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in October where Le told us that ‘as writers we need to go to the painful places’. A timely reminder. Read ‘The Boat’ and fall in love with the short story again.

‘Small Island’ by Andrea Levy – I finally caught up with this novel that most book-loving folk read years ago. Suddenly so much about the London i first encountered as a school-girl in 1979 (eg. steel drums bands at school assembly) made sense to me. A great companion to some of Zadie Smith’s best writing.

‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ by Jeff Kinney (parts 1,2,3 and 4) – thanks to Reuben Cumming (aged 11) for putting me onto this stuff. Hilarious. Not just for kids (or maybe for small kids and big kids)

‘Exposure’ by Joel Magarey – a funny/sad tale of a young man circumnavigating the world, trying to negotiate a peace treaty with his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Works beautifully as a rare insight into the fear-filled life of an OCD sufferer, as a travel book, and as a romance.

‘Solar’ by Ian McEwan – I hated most of the main characters, loathed the version of human nature that McEwan offers us, but loved this book about climate change politics. Clearly we’re all rooned – but you gotta laugh or you’ll just curl up inside a dark cupboard and wait for The End.

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee – it had been about thirty years since I last read this masterpiece and fortunately i’d forgotten most of the plot so i could enjoy it all over again – in bed, in the bath, on the tram, couldn’t put it down. I’ve already pencilled in the next-re-read for 2041.

‘Six Impossible Things’ by Fiona Wood – funny funny funny young adult novel that works as a page-turner for not-so-young adults too. Local, universal, pop cultural, and with a good old-fashioned happy ending.

‘Freedom’ by Jonathan Franzen – finished this one in tears. What an opus of righteous anger. I feel like I’ve met America now – the neighbour who’s gonna take over your street and corrupt your children and fill the drains with sump oil, but bring you delicious fresh-baked cookies after church. As good as ‘The Corrections’, I reckon.

‘Great House’ by Nicole Krauss – poetic, elegaic novel with an ingenious Rubik’s Cube structure, all based on one big wooden desk that has had many owners. I wanted to keep writing down quotes from this novel for later perusal. Another one that had me in tears quite often (but that’s a good thing).

Forget Wikileaks: what about the Labor-leaks?

2010-12-14T09:27:20Z

While the Australian media pack salivates over the scandalous morsels being dished up by Wikileaks, it may be missing an equally delicious manoeuvre going on right under our noses. Although The Greens weren’t able to outwit the major parties in the recent Victorian State election, the party seems to have learnt some lessons from the cunning preference deals which kept them out of the lower house. And I have to applaud their chutzpah. Blackmailing a member of the NSW right of the Labor Party into advocating a new debate over the party’s anti-nuclear power policy was a stroke of genius.

You doubt my conspiracy theory? If not the result of a blackmail attempt, how else can we rationally explain the timing of NSW Senator Steve Hutchins recent demand that a change in Labor’s nuclear policy be on the agenda at the next ALP conference? Surely no one in their right minds would want to alienate once and for all the remaining green-left rump of this formerly progressive party?

The ALP has been steadily leaking first preference votes to the Greens for over a decade. Not only that, it has been leaking membership, too. When I was working as an environment activist twenty years ago, many of my fellow campaigners were also active members of the ALP, attending local branch meetings, initiating and supporting the passage of green policies through the labyrinthine policy processes of their party. They saw value in working simultaneously with independent interest groups and within a mainstream political party.

Over time, though, most of those people (and the younger campaigners who’ve followed in their footsteps) have migrated to the Greens. Disappointed by ALP policy reversals on key environmental issues like uranium mining and, more recently, by the parliamentary Labor Party’s spectacular failure to tackle the threats posed by climate change and our unsustainable use of natural resources, green-left activists and voters opted to support a party which puts those concerns at the centre of its policy platform.

According to Labor historian Rodney Cavalier, author of Power Crisis, ALP membership in Senator Hutchins’ state of NSW dropped from 19,609 in 2002 to 15,385 in 2009, representing a decline of over twenty percent. In contrast, the Greens national membership climbed from 4889 in 2002 to 10,429 in 2009, representing an increase of over one hundred percent.

The ALP is not alone in facing this leakage problem. Speaking on ABC Radio National last week, Berlin-based politics professor Wolfgang Merkel claimed that in Germany, the membership of traditional social democratic parties has effectively halved over the past decade. In many European and Scandinavian nations, young people who are interested in politics join ‘either NGOs or environmental parties such as the Greens’, leaving labour parties to become ‘elite cartel parties losing their link to the population.’

If the ALP wants to reverse this trend and re-energise its membership base, the last thing it should be doing is trashing its remaining environmental credentials by adopting a pro-nuclear policy. Not only might it be the last straw for many ALP members who are considering abandoning the party, but it makes no economic or environmental sense.

Judging by the US experience, a nuclear power industry would require huge government subsidies to produce energy at an affordable cost for consumers. According to physicist and President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Professor Ian Lowe, direct subsidies to the US nuclear industry totalled $115 billion between 1947 and 1999. Decommissioning nuclear power plants is expensive and dangerous, and no one has yet found an economically or environmentally sensible (or indeed a politically acceptable) solution to the problem of radioactive waste.

Furthermore, building new nuclear power stations would lead to a short term increase in our carbon emissions, at a time when we need to be quickly and efficiently reducing emissions to slow the pace of dangerous climate change. And even if we were willing to cop that increase, maintaining a reliable, long term supply of uranium ore to fuel those stations would also require increasingly carbon-intensive extraction and processing.

I challenge any Labor Government to persuade the residents of a major Australian city that a nuclear power station is safe enough to be built in their backyard. Our memory banks may be shrinking as digital technologies take over the work of our brain cells, but few Australians over the age of forty won’t shudder at the mention of the word Chernobyl. And which insurance companies would agree to insure an Australian nuclear industry without iron-clad government guarantees to underwrite the risks?

Given the astounding success of Team Wikileaks in sniffing out any dirty political underwear left lying around, surely it’s only a matter of time before this ingenious blackmail strategy is revealed to the world and Senator Hutchins is forced to back down from his patently ridiculous attempt to send more Labor members and voters into the waiting arms of the Greens. Watch this space.

Words and Music

2010-11-23T13:05:43Z

On Friday 19th November I had an opinion piece published in the Age (available online in The National Times) about the taboo surrounding the declaration of voting intentions.

On Friday November 26th I’ll be singing some French and German art songs and some original works by local composer Natalya Vagner at a bar called The City Tiler at 115 Bay St, Port Melbourne – 8:30 pm – come along (it’s free).

And i’ve finally dragged myself into the 21st century and got on board with Twitter: you can follow me on @sianprior

Radio, Print and some Gigs

2010-10-27T13:55:22Z

I co-hosted The Conversation Hour today with Jon Faine on 774 ABC Melbourne: guests were novelist and fashion columnist Maggie Alderson and presenter of ABC TV’s ‘art + soul’ series Hettie Perkins. We had a lively discussion about the past and future of Aboriginal art and women’s fashion.

The Victorian Writers Centre have invited me to run a year-long series of workshops on non fiction writing in 2011. The program will be out a little later this year, but you can check their website for news of when 2011 enrollments begin.

My article on ‘10 Things You Should Know About Reporting The Arts’ is in the October edition of The Walkley magazine. Check out the online edition here.

I’ll be performing with Paul Kelly in some of his forthcoming A to Z concerts in 2011: Sydney 20th to 23rd January (SOLD OUT), Melbourne 2nd to 5th March.

Ubud and Beyond

2010-09-06T14:35:54Z

Plans are firming for my appearances at the forthcoming Ubud Writers And Readers Festival in Bali (October 6th – 10th), courtesy of Meanjin literary magazine. I’ll be appearing on a panel called ‘Writers Speak Out’ with Meanjin editor Sophie Cunningham, author Christos Tsiolkas, poet and rapper Omar Musa and non fiction writer Antony Loewenstein on Friday October 8th. I’ll also be interviewing Tony Maniaty, author of the memoir ‘Shooting Balibo’, taking part in a panel discussion on the future of criticism, and running a workshop on reviewing the arts. (A review of my Reviewing Workshop can be found here!) And on the evening of October 7th i’ll be singing a couple of songs on a lunar theme at the Jazz Night at Casa Luna.

Keep an eye out for my forthcoming profile of debut author Maris Morton (winner of the 2009 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript) with a focus on her forthcoming novel ‘A Darker Music’ (pub. by Scribe). It will appear as part of the Readings New Australian Writing series.

And you can hear me playing clarinet on Paul Kelly: A to Z, the forthcoming set of 8 CDs to be released in late September, along with PK’s mongrel memoir, ‘How To Make Gravy’ (pub. by Penguin).