These Climes, This Shore

Stuffed full

Of white privilege;

Brained by the Big Easy

And gorged on an ocean view

The great Aussie lifestyle

Humidifies, rotisseries ‘til your

Dermis is pork-crackling

Innards, a secret stew.

Pumped up

With insulation

To buffer the heat and spill

Of a bigger world.

Buoyant, you

Jog that petite arse off

On a freeway of

Earplugged mime artists.

This is everyday.

Your feet on the path

Where you left them,

Your mind set loose on a wave.

But the same remains;

The same abyss-mal fact always

Remains.

Off a flat earth country

Of wide insouciant days

You will fall.

By choice and fate

You were shored up

And will be

Dumped by the sure.

Life Long Malaise or a Passing Phase?

        Hello and welcome. Come in and take a seat. No one's sitting on that island sized pudding shaped, pillow topped lounge. Throw yourself down. It's set to an almost imperceptible vibration, exuding an obscure aromatherapeutic sea scent subtly suffused with sandalwood. It won't bite. Nor will I.
        What's brought you here tonight? Bad TV? Family tension? An addiction to trolling, a compulsion about an allure of the thing that will ignite you.
I have nothing like it to offer, besides a simply waxed lyric about my ordinary life.
        Yesterday I had lunch with a human who is wise and whose brain I like to pick over like a bower bird. Let's call her Barbara. We discussed others who've lead exciting lives, have degrees of fame and stories worthy of at least three kilos of limes under a decent spot light, unlike we lady luncheonettes, at least as yet.
        This segue, having no other purpose but transition, leads to this blog's central theme, story telling.
What is a story's life well led? What comes first the person or the situation?
Dear blog reader, you are reading something that isn't a story at all. You might have desisted after the first paragraphs and yet I still address you. This reflecting the import and nature of stories. Am I toying with you or myself?
        What constitutes a story worth reading? Certainly not a chain of exciting, adventurous events, if there is no moral or heroic attainment. Surely a message explicitly rendered or inwardly launched by the reader. Maybe a toyed with desire activated by the protagonist desperate but constantly thwarted, terribly beguiling efforts, promised, lost, reignited, foiled and finally redeemed. But what about stories infused with erroneous social discourses that draw us up and away, like an alien abduction that we'd rather resist if it wasn't happening in our dreams, but yet it did.
        Today I attended a 'telling your story' forum for people who have an experience of mental illness. Dunno if you've noticed, but most stories about people with this type of illness are characters who are necessarily equipped with axes, have substituted words for screaming, laughter, gibberish, who smell like urine and are drenched by their own drool. My daughter noticed once, when we were travelling to Sydney that I had dribbled on the pillow propped against the window. I guess that explains everything.    
I have a diagnosis of Major Depression and Anxiety. I couldn't be violent to stand up for myself. Some of my work colleagues have diagnoses for illnesses that sometimes cause psychosis, and they wouldn't know an axe handle from a broom stick.
        Today's workshop was about telling stories, our stories, so that people hear a new perspective. Here's one:
"After two months of treatment in an acute psychiatric ward, I was a last well enough to have my small children visit. I'd missed them terribly and was very excited. The nurse thoughtfully organised a comfortable and neatly furnished room. She asked if I would like soft toys, paper and crayons so that my kids would feel welcome. It was a wonderful visit; the kids were obviously relieved to know that I was getting better. I was so buoyed up and hopeful that I'd be going home soon.  After this I kept getting better, and my kids visited often. .............NOW. I will tell you what really happened. ........ After two months of treatment for bipolar disorder in an acute psychiatric ward, I was at last well enough to have my small children visit. I had missed them so terribly much, and was very excited. The psyche nurse came to see me, an hour before their visit and told me that my mood was 'heightened'. Of course it is, I said, I'm in a great mood because I'm seeing my kids today. The nurse insisted that my heightened mood was dangerous and that I should take a sedative. I knew that sedation would render me incapable of being present with my kids and that this odd state would be confusing and upsetting for them. I said no. I refused to take the sedative. My refusal was seen as non-compliance. The visit was called off. I was put in isolation and forcibly given a sedative. I was kept there for seven days and during this time my mood plummeted into a dreadful life obscuring depression. The progress I'd made in recent weeks was undone. I spent another awful month in the psychiatric ward, worrying about my children whether life could ever improve."

Here's another one. "Once upon a time, there was a girl who suffered for twenty-five years with the most awful bouts of depression and social anxiety. Those who noticed ignored her, assuming she that was annoyingly aloof. When she asked doctors for help, they told her she should try harder, even though she was striving every day just to stay alive. They were happy to prescribe antibiotics for her brother, an asthma treatment for her sister, and a plaster cast for her friend's broken arm. And yet nobody responded to obvious signs as she hung on through critically unwell, life threatening periods. Until one day, by fluke, a clever doctor showed an interest in the girl's humanity and simply inquired about what she was experiencing. This doctor bestowed a diagnosis and a tablet. That little tablet provided a perfect synthetic substitute for the chemical her brain neglected to produce. At long last, the girl could express herself socially, pursue a career and discover that life was worth living. She is living mostly happily ever after.
THE END

Homelands

Guilt rightly stirs under the surface, in tension with the spiritual connection I have to the land I grew from. It never was mine, nor my ancestors' land. People lurking in my past stole it, and the fate of its owners has been tragically obscured by a whitewashed history. But part of me is firmly rooted in Muckatah and the region where, after famine and centuries of dispossession in Ireland my family set their sights on hope for a future. It's dug deep inside me.
    In dreams I try to climb Murray River Pines, I pick around in the dead animal pit, searching for real 'jacks' that I'll paint and show off at school, I scoop out a handful of frogspawn from a lichen topped swamp. Mostly in my dreams I'm visiting Grandma in her little house, and climbing onto her bench so I can reach the biscuit tin.
    Last weekend I was invited to what I imaged was a hokey, daggy literary awards' presentation in Shepparton, a small city where as kids, Mum would twice yearly take us to buy our seasonal garments (from Target and Venture). I was shortlisted for the short story category and Rob encouraged me to attend - so I split my indifference by suggesting that we make a weekend of it, visiting my parents in Cobram, only 40 minutes north of Shepp'.
    My yearning for the homelands resounded in doppler as we drove past our old farm, Pinedale, on the road to Cobram.  In 2000 - after the farm being handed from father to son for 125 years -  Mum and Dad sold up and retired to town. I've never been back.
 
    On Saturday it just so happened that my dear deceased Grandma's brother, Great Uncle Peter Lawless, was celebrating his 90th birthday. So Rob and I went along with Mum and Dad. The party was held at the farm first settled by my grandmother's mother's parents - Kennedys - whose many decedents still dwell close by. The Lawless farm is only 20 kilometres from Pinedale but I'd never been there. Dad said he hadn't been there since he was five years old.
   The landscaped changed as we drove. The lush irrigated pastures vanished, and enormous tracts of wheat crops extended out to the horizon. Tumble weeds and old abandoned buildings set the scene of a bygone era, and then an enormous bank of silos appeared, and behind them football sized sheds full of cropping machinery and vehicles came into view.
    Crossing verdant buffalo grass lawns and a lavish rose-garden we followed the chimera of voices, finding the afternoon party in a converted garage, next to a cheaply built modern house.
    We sipped bubbles and beer and chatted with blue-eyed obviously Lawless cousins, proffering anachronistic updates. Uncle Peter, like his sister, shared snared me with his perverse sense of humour.  Unlike her, being a non-smoker, and still alive, he's fit enough to play three rounds of golf every week.
    In the loo out the back, a Murphy's Law poster hung in pride of place. I thought about the odd twists and turns of fortune and circumstance; and the wee refrain my own luck and misadventures was drowned out by a cacophony of history swelling up from the very soil.
    I imagined my grandma, frolicking through the crops with pigtails flying, on the first weekend of summer.

   On Sunday morning we headed south again, to Shepparton. This time Mum and Dad tagged along, with expectant pride. My Shepp' based aunt and uncle also joined us for literary feastings.  Low and behold, I was bestowed with First Prize for my story 'To The Light', (my first win since Grade 2 at the Cobram show). Surprise and an awkward speech betrayed my subplot of confused guilt.
   The annual award has been funded for almost 20 years by the good old Furphy family foundry, another family with a history and passion for farming, engineering and writing, bringing resolve to a wonky but near perfect weekend narrative highlighting the constancy and curiosity of Irish settlers in country Victoria. Such is life.

Karma poos

Summoned mythical figures conspire

M

O

N

E

Y

auspiciously offered can pay the cat's vet bill

At home proud

Lovingly patting feeding and coquetting

the cat my foot finds

poo

vomit

on my best rug

Numbers so divinely

            +

 are absurdly

            -

Information Age Driftwood

The world wide web has me snared, funnelled, sucked me in
And all I can do is skim, ride this bodyboard,
And rise on the nano moment.
For I have shelved my brain next to Britannica. Britannia.
Another grounded ship, sails folded
Wings bent but fairy dust is in this twilight.

I can't remember, need not recall,
It's all on my hard drive,
That time when
That place so soft
I had a sensation of a pen in hand and a
Notebook that carved hieroglyph in me.

Old school beta-vid,Sunday non-committal church.
I'm a relic of the paper age.

In sleep I float on algae calm waters
On a pod without an I
Land on a shore without a fire,
See a hill that halts my view and I am longing
For that memory stick of morning dew, a sunset pew,
A concept of latte freshly brewed.

And I am bereft, where I left it all before,
On that shelf without a shore
My memory of you.
(Britannica. Britannia.)

There's no laptop on this desolate isle.
The corner store is a cave full of orangutans
And I am alone, alone and in shock.
Aching and burning for that simple
Sense of self,the whole me
Plumped with next door Brady Bunch comfort.

It's too late,
I'm adrift on a wireless tide
Remote and flailing footloose webbing.
And it's a fact that
When a vessel circles upon itself
There is no wake to ride.

To The Light

At the foot of a lighthouse, one finds darkness – Spanish Proverb


Having exchanged the life of an inner city skateboarding punk for a man and a fetus she finds herself astride a Malibu surfboard, paddling across a channel of water where sharks have been sighted. She’s wondering about the choice she’s made. Some might call it a sea change, while others think that she’s lost her mind.
This is a long way from the terrace house in Melbourne – from op- shopping expeditions and sessions at the pub. Her belly is four and a half months swollen; the hardness against fibreglass reminds her of what’s there. She hasn’t thought about it much.
The man behind her paddles furiously. He carries a backpack with two weeks’ supply of groceries wrapped in plastic bags. Waves rock the board and sideswipe them, and sea spray prickles her skin.
She’s excited, anxious, wavering somewhere between faith and apprehension as her guy restates his knowledge about the ocean and its ways. What would she know, having grown up on an inland farm? Her only experience of the sea being a childhood holiday at Rosebud, where tentative tongue waves lapped the shore and seaweed octopuses threatened to snare. Here the currents are tea-cozy warm and the expansive ocean beckons like a siren.
The sand on the island’s back beach is fine and squeaky under foot. He drops the backpack and they lug the surfboard to the far corner of the beach, setting it among native grasses. Once it’s wrapped in an old tarp they turn to the next leg of the journey: the sand-hill. He carries the pack and she navigates herself – a tired baby carriage. They traipse along the rough bush path towards the lighthouse cottage.

He’s inside, strumming his guitar. He’ll remain the same for hours until she initiates a conversation or stirs an argument. Sitting on the sandstone veranda she has no choice but to hold strong, and at least there’s an outlook.
Thirty metres or so off the Point a bombora stirs from beneath, receiving the crash of white water with nonchalance, as it has cargo ships and simple sailing boats. She’s been told that dozens of vessels have gone down on this rock in the past hundred and fifty years. This makes her shudder. Even recently boats have run aground here, regardless of the light.
Alertness to all she can see casts a shadow of oblivion. She walks the length of the veranda to find another angle. Daily, she sights spouts, followed by full-bodied eruptions as humpback whales migrate south. She’s constantly searching and straining her vision for the passing traffic. Last week, during the ritual of the heated outdoor bath they saw one heave itself from the water, only fifty metres away, and in falling slap the water like a kid’s belly-wacker.
“Ouch,” they said in unison; “that would have hurt”.
Today there are only coal ships passing, on their way to Singapore or Valparaiso.
She’s nineteen years old and the horizon is infinite. A crisp, perfect afternoon is imprinted on her mind forever.

Imprisoned by her otherness in the company of a boy-man who’s no more than a stranger, she as vacant as a seashell. Is she running from something or towards something? Her heart hurts when she thinks of her sisters, brothers, and parents worrying. They join her in futile dreams. Australia Post is reliable even at this distance, carrying regular missives from both ends. But nothing is said. She does her best to fight the undertow. I am an off-cast, an outcast. I am cast away.
She wants to express this feeling somehow, by skywriting or shrieking, psychic resonance or tragic journalling, but her feelings can’t form words. Seeing beauty is not conducive of happiness – she’s reminded of Coleridge’s lament and makes a cup of tea, wondering what to do with herself. There’s a constant clawing din in her head. I do nothing, I am nothing. I don’t belong. What is my nature?
The sandstone cools her body from toes to earlobes. Even on a mild day she’s on the boil. An incubator, she’s in charge of its growth. She asks of inner space, what is your nature? Who will you be? Her belly quivers; the little fish is swimming laps. They commune in tones resonating with heartbeats, organ- gurgle and breath, and she is nurtured.
Resting on the lumpy old mattress she yields but cannot sleep. Though the floor is made of stone, sounds of padding feet and vibrations rising up through the bedframe hold her attention. A storm out at sea gathers force and lightening snaps her into full awareness. Rampant rain pelts the baubled convex window, inventing mesmerising kaleidoscopic swirls as wind batters the building. Throughout the years wind and rain have infused the porous wall fashioning an ugly mosaic of bee-hives and pockmarks. How does this place endure? She coils into herself, wishing that the sun would set on this very long day.

Before they moved to the lighthouse, his father told her the history of the place. In 1824 convicts blasted, dug and cut the enormous bricks from perfect sandstone hills surrounding the Hawkesbury River valley. With the aid of bullocks, and the enigma of human endurance, the stone was loaded onto ships as ballast, and transported more than 150 miles to this island. The ships were reloaded with cedar from the Myall Lakes district and returned south. The newly landed Sydney gentry required the premium timber to build their stately homes, and the ships bearing the precious cargo could not be risked. By way of inverse logic the lighthouse and its cottage were built with stone ballast, and the fancy Sydney homes were built by forces against nature.
The local landowners, a clan of the Worimi nation, live along the coastline and further inland on the lakes. The island had been in their care for thousands of years. They brought their dead here. It was a sacred place for souls to journey undisturbed.
The Governor’s men negotiated the island’s purchase, proffering tea and flour and instructing the ‘natives’ how to make damper. When they realised that the owners would never abandon their vigil, the colonials offered flour laced with arsenic.
The cottage was built as a symbolic ship. Three families lived in adjoining quarters. The seven-room section was inhabited by the Commander or ‘Head Keeper’, the middle four rooms were allocated to the Engineer, and the last two rooms were reserved for servants.

The lighthouse was automated in the 1970s. Humans were no longer required for operations, so the Department of Transport ordered that the disused cottages be shovelled into the sea. His father, being a local businessman with some sway, intervened and signed a ‘peppercorn lease’ for the cottage, and took responsibility for its care.
In the Head Keeper’s bedroom she senses ghosts circling close then uncoiling away. She stirs herself and goes to her designated post to prepare their evening meal.
The next day he rouses her with his ambition to clear the island’s orchard. In the middle of the island and off this century’s well-beaten path, they cut their way through overgrown weeds. Among the entangled catastrophe of introduced species they glimpse the sparse limbs of old fruit and nut trees reaching outward. The orchard has been strangled by lantana, a South American import that in the subtropical environment has become a rampant triffid. She remembers it from the farm in Victoria – contained by pots and tamed by a different climate it was admired for its petite flowering clusters. With ancient, blunt secateurs she hacks into the tough vines and is rewarded by the foul stench of its sap. The plant bites back with barbed tendrils. Within days these tiny nicks bruise, swell and erupt into pustulant tropical boils.
He’s been digging with an old mattock, making rows and planting native shrubs that he sprouted from seed. He trips on his tool, injuring his foot; and they limp arm in arm, back to the cottage.

Most nights she wakes to the weak refrain of a woman crying.

The surfboard mysterious disappears, so his father finds them a tin rowboat. They catch the usual bus to the Port, and this time they purchase a month’s supply of groceries. He forks out money for a taxi back to the boat.
On the girth of the bay, feeling the pull of a heavy load he tries a different tack. If they paddle to the north of the island, to Shark Bay, they’ll have an easier walk to the lighthouse. She knows it. It’s near the orchard, and a bit north of the beach where they found a speared dolphin and gave it a grave. With no counter-argument she acquiesces. He’s four years older, has travelled, studied at university, and been so much more in the world than she.
On the way, she demands her turn at rowing the boat. As they both expect, she can’t get past popping an oar from its rollick, churning the boat in circles and showering them both with brine.
She calms herself after a giggle fit, relaxes under the sun, and enjoys the visage of him leveraging the boat across the swell.
Shark Island comes into view. He explains the geology and topography of this side of the island – something about rock formations, pre-historic earthquakes and the prevailing wind. She tunes into the word shark...Shark Island, Shark Bay... Her eyes sweep the waters, scouring from left to right, right to left for a fin. She imagines a pod of them circling, charging the boat and capsizing it. In a soup of shiraz infused froth, severed limbs rise to the surface.
He cries out, “Holy shit!”
Her heart leaps in its cage. There’s a narrow tract of water between the two shark places, through which they intend to pass. Waves are lunging through and breaking from the island through to the bay point. He looks at her and for a moment she sees a small boy lost in a shopping mall.

“Do something!” She shrieks and clutches her belly. “Turn the boat around!”
“I can’t,” he replies, “the tide’s against us. It’ll throw us back onto the rocks.” He points to a spot where waves are breaking less often, and says that if he times it right, they’ll get through. If they’re unlucky a wave will spill into the boat and capsize them.
“Right. So where’s my life jacket?” she spits.
“Too late for that now,” he yells, pragmatic in the absence of options.
He manipulates the oars to hold the boat steady, watches and times the wave-sets to gauge the ocean’s intent. She curls her fingers around the gunwale, leans back and rolls her eyes to the gods.
Fairy floss clouds scud past, the sort that charade as earthly objects then morph into other shapes. She catches the cloud slipstream and soars up. Seizing a view outside of herself, she feels futures leap in her womb. Time trickles and the ocean refracts light like a mirror ball. She recognises two people in a toy boat near the edge of a continent, and feels with certainty that there’s so much more of life to come.
He sees his opportunity and takes aim, paddling like billy-oh towards the foe. The wave will peak and spill but it must first give them a chance. They mount the brewing rise as foam forms underneath; the wave preparing to follow its pact with the moon. She holds her breath.
They ride through, the wave breaking a split second later, and together they squeal with relief. He turns the boat towards the bay, so suddenly swarthy and confident. She, recalling the adage; never turn your back on the ocean, turns and takes a look. A bold, briny wave slaps her in the face, engorges the boat, and drags them under. 

Flotsam at the shore-dump’s mercy, grazed and disoriented they haul themselves onto a pebbled beach and slump, weak as rag dolls. Her hair is seaweed salad, his smirk an unsavoury assault on her good nature. She throws a handful of stones at his head.
Under the dark sky their squabble is snatched aloft by a squall. The ghosts chuckle, then plan their next move.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Stephens_Light

Write Something, Right Something

Invent a new word and scrawl it on the footpath

Create a peace banner and hang it on your chest

write 'left' on one foot and 'go' on the other

- get a job and wait patiently for the aftermath

Spend your only life as an artisan scratching

scrimshaw into bones of frames for scaffolds,

for masterpieces. Pray for patent protection, or an afterlife,

and wait for the plan's inevitable hatching

Sledge stone, incise, align. With ten thousand other

slaves you join this chorus with the sky. Climb past breath

until with battle spit, collapse you are revolting

with the very stench of hope