They are not little tuffs of hair, grouped together, like some kind of hair apartheid, but lonely single lines, assimilated with the rest of the population, to my eye standing out like second place getters at long lost school carnivals. Really, they only look confident as they are exact opposite of the darkish extremes of the rest of the bunch. One day, a single one caught the eye in the mirror, and no, five more didn’t come to the funeral of that silver thread of hair. That’s when the ritual started, a monthly search of the hair for the grey ones. It did turn, quickly, with a strain of paranoia, into a weekly event. I avoided mirrors, easily confused of course, as I soon found more as I shaved the spines of hair from my face. I once confessed that I wouldn’t mind going grey, as long as the pimples stopped. I didn’t mind ageing, but I would burst out in pimples, more like a teen than a 20 something.
The first time I remember travelling north, the road was single laned, with a cigarette paper thin imaginary line between south bound and north bound. I remember the trees being close enough to touch from the car, in those days of windows down, pre-air con clammy trips. We’d start in the early afternoon; sleep in the car, a cocooned oven, heated by late teenager farts, pizza breath and fizzy drinks mixed with Jim Beam. Someone- other than me- would be in charge of mixed tapes to play along the way. We’d get to each stretch of country charm coastal towns and villages and turn the music down low as the sleepy truck drivers and Sydney to Brisbane buses stopped to pause. We’d be out of touch with the daily grind. A tent, sometimes, a onsite caravan, with electricity $2 per day.
For some reason, the last time I paced the car along the same road- with a different name and concrete barriers and dividers and multinational service stations with no service and the ipod on shuffle and the air con drying my lips, windows hugged tight and the external thermostat on the dash reading 37 degrees- I don’t remember the trees or the towns now conveniently by-passed.
And now we stay in a hotel with a lobby with wireless.
The first time Maree told me she loved me I was half asleep and half awake. That late night phone call was when she was drunk, laying next to a man she had loved earlier and as she whispered so he wouldn’t hear she told me she could hear a man she had loved, loving someone else.
Maree had only just got the telephone connected at the bookshop when she first confessed her love to me. What does one do if someone pleads guilty to love? How should I have reacted? It is the ancient dilemma of the male half of our race. What is the answer? What is the right response? Give everything, profess enduring love, declare the deepest desires, make sure you don’t confuse lust with love, like a Shakespearean tragic, and be overwhelmed with guilt and greed and guile? I hadn’t learnt anything from Romeo, or Hamlet or Othello or Macbeth. Their pursuit of the love of women led to only one conclusion.
One day you will have someone tell you they love you and you will not know what to say or do. That is a good thing. That is normal. Males have been caught like that- a stunned rabbit in the headlights of a car- for centuries. Really, you will be continuing a tradition.
Maree whispered down the line that she had just done something she already regretted and that she hoped that her next words would be something she wouldn’t regret. Seconds after she told be that she loved me and that she couldn’t help that, I rolled over and held another woman around the waist; I slept and woke next to someone else. Maree slept and woke next to someone else.
I wouldn’t mind my daughter being like you. I often vacuum in front of her, mockingly telling her All Men Vacuum, Don’t Forget That. I cut my steak into small pieces and wrap it in lettuce. I chew on carrots and drink from the carton only when she isn’t looking. After all, she is a little sponge. I set up the Scrabble board and make her moves for her. I finally found someone I can beat, she just happens to have a vocab of a four month old. I let my dogs lick her feet, just so she giggles. I have a small piano accordion, but I make noise that makes her cry. I hide the ipod from her, but I let her see the ancient and new records, LP’s that rattle and hum. The teevee isn’t a babysitter; black and white films come across lucid. I like it when we both read on Saturday mornings, staying in our PJ’s, while the world travels. I try to trace her finger across maps, places I’ve been, places she’ll go one day, but she never follows the path I want. Which is good, isn’t it?
I usually write fiction. Or a better description might be, I usually write about things that have happened, just not exactly how they happened. Does that make sense?
I was recently asked the question:
What can we do to change how things are with Aboriginal people?
It was within a wider discussion of Australia, Australians, education and my role as Indigenous Education Coordinator at a large coastal school.
It is a good question. I am puzzled, do we have a single answer to this question? The school I am currently working with has a wonderful reputation, wonderful standardised testing results, high retention, positive learning occuring in most areas. Yet we have never had a student who identitfies as Aboriginal or Torres Strait complete the HSC. Sure, the students may have moved into TAFE or employment or other further educational fields, and been successful. But no students with Indigenous heritage have completed the HSC.
Of course, education is a key element of any answer to that question. But what else?
Money? Attitudes? Students or teachers or community, if so, which ones first? Change teachers and student attitudes might come, alter community and you may influence students and teachers. Change students and you might have a flow on effect into teachers and community.
I have a simple idea: What is good for Indigenous students is good for all students. I would like Indigenous education to be for all students, staff and community at our school. That instead of one off art or cultural days, or NAIDOC week celebrations that look more like Australiana days (http://leparcaustralien.free.fr/), that Indigenous ideas, perspectives and community are welcomed, actively sort out and embraced to help our students learn about ancient and contemporary Australia. I would like Indigenous education to become normal. Just another thing we do well.
So my answer to the question:
What can we do to change how things are with Aboriginal people?
Of course, came in a question:
What can you do to change how things are with Aboriginal people?
“His once strong and loyal hands were the first to go. He would hold them in his lap, curled up like balls of socks, trying to bring them to life. After a close shave at work he didn’t feel the top of his thump come free, holding on by a thread. The blood alerted him to the pain he should have felt. Worse, while watching the nurse pierce his leather jacket skin, he didn’t feel a thing. With each twist and turn of the needle his body only shuddered at the thought of not feeling what he was entitled to. Of not feeling warm sand between his fingers. Of not feeling the bitter frost on his car door handle. Of not holding his fishing rod with a forefinger on the line as if it was a vein holding a pulse. He would feel again, he would feel the numbness of knowing what was lost.
He seems to be ageing.”
See you around Pop…05/09
She has been awake for hours. Next door, a toilet flushing, beside her, the man rolls mumbling, pulling the single sheet- light blue, freshly washed- around himself, as if to cocoon himself from the night. It wasn’t the routine flush of the toilet, or the slap of screen door or the laughter from next door that woke her. Instead, as her feet touch the cooling floor boards next to her bed, she thinks only of her youngest. The man turns his back on her, her side of the bed, empty. Her gentle steps echo as she tries to avoid the lonely wooden plank that always creaks. One hand guides her along the wall, the other is busy rolling the ring she has chained around her neck. The smallish (of course, it was made for her) ring is white gold, thin around the underside yet thickish, plain and simple. When her fingers aren’t playing with the ring it rests over her sternum. Sometimes as she types or talks on the phone or writes in her journal she finds herself playing with the ring, sometimes when she fucks it flies up, hitting her in the chin. At these times, all else can be forgotten and the damn ring is just there. If someone were to see her tonight, a black singlet top and bland Bonds undies, they would see she has the beginnings of laughter wrinkles. Of course, she is happy.
Her youngest is in the smallest room. The fan above the wood stained cot is blowing warm air around the room and her only daughter murmurs along with it, a melody of a summer flu and a ceiling fan. Her little legs are kicking against the fever, the water soaked face washer discarded. All blankets are at her feet, yet she still sweats, her petite body anxious for relief. More twisting of the chain and ring around her neck, absentmindedly slipping it onto her pinkie and off again, never has she felt powerless, like now, a child sick. Her mother has told her about these nights. Those stories of waking every few hours to check for life, signs of breathing, seemed lifeless as a teenager, now her mother only nods knowingly at the semi-permanent bags under her daughter’s eyes.
Backing away, tired finally, she leaves the room without a sound, returning, passing the two boys rooms, the teenager’s door with a thin lip of dull light spilling into the hallway. She returns, with drained legs, to her own bed, of course, her side is still empty.
You are not meant to like me, hell, I don’t like myself and at no time shall I ask for sympathy, if I do, stop reading, you have permission to go and do something else. As a rule, I don’t like stories with flashbacks. Instead, for you, I have a flash forward, something you need to see before I write anymore.
The court room is empty. There isn’t going to be empathy from the muttering Judge, or from the single file of half asleep garden gnome officers. No one will stand and provide a passionate plea for my freedom, no one will gasp when the city magistrate hands down society’s revenge. No one will try to make a painful pun of the verdict in some newspaper. There are no journalists or sub-editors to write, no court artist to sketch my last day wearing a suit and the last time I would be cleanly shaven. No one will notice the day I am sent away, the last day of freshish air. As truly fresh air, the kind of my 7th birthday, doesn’t exist, instead, this is the day I start to breathe stale air.
The war had ended as wars sometimes do, unexpectedly. Everything’s fucking beautiful!
When they write my obituary. How would you have me write about it?
My name is Herbert Babgery. It was love at first sight. The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one. Every nine and a half years I see Amanda. In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives. Henri found himself looking at the sky again- a clear, black crystal dome overhead. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reasons; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply later in life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue.
‘So of course,’ wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, ‘there was nothing for it but to leave’. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. Will you look at us by the river!
Simeone De Beauvoir – The Mandarins
Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
Peter Carey – The Illywhacker
Richard Flanagan – The unknown terrorist
Steve Toltz – A fraction of the whole
Kate Jennings – Moral Hazard
Richard Flanagan – Wanting
Luke Davies – Candy
Tim Winton – Cloudstreet
Joseph Heller – Catch-22
Virginia Woolfe – Jacob’s Room
Helen Garner- Monkey Grip
Nicole Krauss – The History Of Love
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms
Elliot Pearlman – Three Dollars
