Stationary

 

The surprise closure this year of the Apollo Bay Newsagency left pretty vacant the shop floor of its aisles of magazines, postcard racks, Scandinavian noir, and biros. Gamblers must seek elsewhere for their latest credit dock. A solitary sign on the windows of the empty premises requests, ‘Do not lean bicycles against the glass.’ Glass that reflects the ocean across the way. Enterprisingly, the clothes shop down the main street, specialising in Akubra hats ® and Ugg Boots ® has converted into that classic mainstay of old-fashioned country towns, the General Store. Daily newspapers now compete for space with racks of Great Ocean Road tee-shirts and surfie baggies. Necessity is the mother of reinvention. Some of the new stock, however, is noticeably slow-moving. Item: Ranks of next year’s diary rest against last year’s diary, waiting for events that time has forgot. They await the efflorescence of the well-coifed ancient hippie resident in her beatified beach bungalow, the catch-of-the-day records of the tanned angler and particularly his catch-of-the-night straight from the Strait, the personal planner procession of the frazzled councillor and minute secretary, decisions, revisions, divisions. Perhaps everyone uses laptops these days, though who’s to know? If true, it’s one simple delete that time alas will forget. Item: Blocks of A4 will not budge that could all too readily convert into the new Apollonian novel, there to augment Isobelle Carmody and Gregory Day and Bruce Pascoe. The fiery reflection of a burning warship in a window, for example, opens the sole witness account of the 1941 invasion of the Otways, under suppression by the Australian government though not the author’s imagination. Or there’s the John Clarke-like history of the region told in laconic one-liners by a grey power surfer in dialogue with a Gadubanud elder, some of it chronological. Then there’s the new wave story from the echidna’s point of view, the chapters are called waves, living cheap under the millionaire’s sea view acquisition, watching the Antarctic come to the doorstep in instalments. Item: Boxes of map pins await their purpose on quiet ledges. Item: Derwents remain encased, that in future could redraw the crags of the Cumberland, wind patterns of sand middens, and the blue of the wren. Item: Unmoved compasses that once imagined the world’s corners yearn for a turning circle. Perhaps the whole world has come to a standstill watched from screens at the edge of the fingertips’ halfmoons. Or maybe it’s just a slow day in the middle of the week in December, again.  Just me and my dog.

Train

 

Zigzag and speckle and prism are the new scrapers’ windows, passing by the ‘quiet carriage’ windows out of Southern Cross, one by one catch the sun. Miles of bluestone chips hem the rails they embank and support, perfectly poured by sleeper-fitters through clunk hours of work crush; same bedrock bluestone the ancient memory engendering Melbourne Black. Peppercorn and pampas spears and yellow fennel meet grandiose amongst other random flora on rail islands no gardener can reach; bristle as our windows rush past. White flour mills and set-square warehouses and glintiest apartments rise overseen by the Goddess of Footscray high and happy and calm as multiculturalism amidst her billabong of curly pavilions. Underpasses and freeway barriers and buckled old-wave fences spread transformed by the night prowlers’ calligraphic spray cans; brighten the morning with colours of many hands. Thousands of thistles full-grown full extent seed any crevice on offer, their land grab impregnable as barb-wire railyards. Cars in driveways of houses with their clotheslines and satellite dishes and sheds stay squared by palings from here to eternity; new suburbs adjacent still but a name on a noticeboard in a field. The way the tin barn is patchwork of old brown rained-through corrugated sheets overlapping grey sheets and two or three bright new silver sheets, weed-lined, the same way every time. New classy glassy rail station inside the concrete-sprayed trench takes everyone alighted by sensible lift and diagonal ramp up, up to the grassland view again. You Yangs mirror the low soft-sloping roofs of slate-grey tile across the paddock estates, treed overseeing the treeless, with many a free-floating cloud for good measure. Tower in a fence in a field transmits who knows what cornucopia of civilization through high-up boxes on windless days, silently. Next season’s greetings Christmas trees jet up green diamond rows behind gnarled windbreaks, furry green not yet ready for sale, quiet earners all. Someone’s couch finally finds its way to the side of a farm road, a $2 shop for bird’s nests, sniffing stop for foxes, sight to see as we hurtle towards Lara; sun and rain and wind will end its days. Palaces of stacked pallets line the forecourts of mighty warehouses, the forbidding cities of reinforced steel, storing the future with grains and machinery and ‘units’; such overnight sensations as add yet more concentric rings to outer Geelong.

Bird

 

In Wye River before Christmas, I sit at the picture windows re-reading ‘The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon’. My eye revisits Entry no. 28: Birds. Looking up on Saturday I watch from the same windows the flight of a sulphur-crested cockatoo over the river, backdrop the sea. Its plumage is pure white as the wave crests. In the evening, kookaburras chortle from the park. They will ‘laugh’ at unexpected times, not just at daybreak: heartening surprise. Next day blue fairy wrens dart onto the decking. Their waltzing is like fidgeting, then they skedaddle. At sunset, a small flock of currawongs fly across the ridge towards night home. One has food in its beak,  but what is it? Monday, a magpie lands and stands on a nearby roof. Its head strikes the classical heroic pose renowned of magpies, counterpoint to the neighbour’s abstract off-centre antenna. Garden birds, unidentifiable, swim through dusk air catching midges in the fading heat. On Tuesday Bridie sees a large bird on a low branch above the river. Binoculars improve things, but we cannot agree if it’s an egret or heron, or petrel even. The beak is orange, neck is too short, it’s more black than white. Answers hang in the air, but when we magnify the lenses again, the bird has flown. Next day discussion continues about petrels, their likeness to shearwaters, their relative size. We watch petrels from the safety of the car, as we drive into Apollo Bay for lunch. Out from the clifftops they ride on the thermals, backdrop the sea, magnificent and defiant. Wednesday is the first occasion this week we sight king parrots. Their glossy green plumage and orange heads are most familiar up at the house. Perhaps weeks of rain have kept them inland. Crimson rosellas inspect a woodheap: charming. Later they inspect our decking for seeds and crumbs. A flock flying through the trees at full speed is an event. BoM said it would rain on Thursday and here it is, raining on Thursday. Later in the morning rain clears and I continue reading Sei Shōnagon above the gully, its expansive view of inlet and sea, outside at the back of the house. Rosellas. Thrushes. Wattlebirds. Cockatoos. They come and go in their own ways. At tea time we observe birds flying down to eat seed scattered on the decking table. Bridie and I agree that rosellas are polite eaters, while cockatoos are garrulous. I notice on the last day of our stay how conspicuous by their absence are satin bowerbirds. Perhaps scrub clearances have forced them over to Separation Creek. Is that likely? Also, firetails, I haven’t seen any firetails for a while, wishing the finches hopping on a distant branch were such. We laugh at the friendly whistle of the rosella pecking at its breakfast. Cute, we call the whistle, but what does cute mean? It seems a synonym for lovely, or companionable. Sweet, as the Italians say, and Fitzroy baristas.

Park

 

Image: Fitzroy Gardens, a photograph taken by my great uncle John Henry Harvey (1855-1938), probably in the 1890s.

One of the great urban revivals in Melbourne was the planning and setting out of green belts and green corridors into the centre of the metropolis during the 1970s. Silver firs were no longer the suburbanite’s statement of status, as silver wattles weaved again through old gullies, rediscovered meadows, and along riverbanks; the Western Australian ‘silver princess’ eucalypt became today’s favourite ornamental. Landscapes were reclaimed from Edwardian Europeanisation, native birdlife returned in abundance and proper ecosystems developed. The exceedingly cheerful sound of lorikeets and galahs all across town is a result of this change of mind about our use of space and flora. Though more like a wake-up call than a change of mind, as Melburnians grew to understand their interconnectedness with the local natural environment. It is hard to imagine the city ever going back to the pre-raucous caucus days of street-by-street exoticism, even as we order in our well-shaped pine tree for Christmas at home. It is very hard, though, to believe the same city now permits sprawling new suburbs with vast square houses that take up each block, no gardens to speak of, let alone parks. Developments edge down to gullies that overlook creeks, where greenery is left to the imagination of the new home buyer. These jigsaw miles of brick and tile scarcely allow a sprout to show between the joins. They are Templestowe temples converted into Sicilian compounds, fully reliant on cooling systems for survival; the future could entail one hell of a summer. And curiously, each residence still gets to be separated by that quintessential Melbourne feature, the paling fence. The sheer waste of timber resources expended on this unnecessary add-on is itself a scandal. Parks and garden aerate the mind, stretch the limbs, deliver relief. Getting-out-of-the-house-a-bit is not just an impulse, it’s a prerequisite for both dog and human. It’s why gardens, parks, green corners were mapped in such number and size by the makers of Melbourne. The temporary escape from rooms and grids are the green swathes, spacious and shaded wherever the eye explores. For Marvellous Melburnians, ‘green shades’ are necessary for ‘green thoughts’, and especially those who have adopted the apartment for their existence. European apartment living has gone from eccentricity to solitude solution to fad to style choice to force for change in just a few years. And as any European knows, a nearby park or garden held in common is about community, refreshment, and sane living. An hour, or half a day, may be spent there. Quite simply, each new apartment estate on the landscape should plan equal space for a park, within easy walking distance. Legislation should be put in place this third term in the interests of all of us, those with a home and those without, dogs, lorikeets, the list goes on.

Transformation

 

Reflection for the Third Sunday in Advent (Gaudete), the 11^th of December 2022, in the pew notes at St Peter’s, Eastern Hill, Melbourne.  Written by Philip Harvey. 

Jesus answers questions with return questions. He gets you to think about what you’re asking. Other times he answers questions with wise circumlocutions. Asked if he’s the Messiah, he replies with a stack of events that must add up to Yes, you’d think, but leaves you then to make up your own mind. ‘The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.’ 

These happenings contradict all the empirical norms, yet no one disputes that they are happening. Inasmuch as he is riffing the prophet Isaiah, if that’s what he’s doing, Jesus is making clear that the moment has arrived. 

What is happening is personal transformation. Those who encounter Jesus, his words and actions, are spoken to. They are healed according to their need, given new life in ways not previously conceivable. His reply to the question are you the Messiah is not a brag sheet of attributes and achievements. He is showing what happens when we encounter the transformative love of God. There are none so insightful as those whose sight has been restored. To overcome the powers of death is to see and live existence anew. To be on side with those who have nothing is to begin to offer hope in a state of pure necessity. Such transformation is available to anyone at all, everyone in fact. 

As both Jesus and his cousin John the Baptist say, transformation comes first with repentance. It’s personal. It starts with us. He confirms John’s ministry in the process. 

Jesus’s astonishing circumlocution comes with an unusual blessing. ‘And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.’ Is this a form of advance forgiveness? The blessing comes from a knowledge of contradiction, that not everyone is going to adopt his way immediately. There are those who will give up on his teaching, who find it doesn’t meet their expectations whether high or low, doesn’t suit their lifestyle, or is just too hard to handle. Yet for all that, his way remains open at any time. Transformation is available. 

Isaiah 35: 1-6, 10. Psalm 146: 6-10. James 5: 7-10. Matthew 11: 2-11.

 

Twentieth

 

Horseless and hungry, the twentieth century automobile rolls from production line, its shining plate reads COURAGE, a kind of tiger that burns bright in the forest cities of night, Arabian gazillions in its tank. Heroic is its on-the-road journey to a future no satnav can imagine. Obsolescence enflames its fearful symmetry, a trust in rust its makers do not declare. Sunrisen and sunset, the twentieth century empires fight back, that all-red self-destructed; change their names, that burnished their crowns. Empires umpire treaties they live to regret, sell up nations they once boasted with titles and boulevards, devise management strategies from new formed departments of ANGER, their futures sunroasted, sunbesetted. Pineapple-shirted and tropical blue, the twentieth century tourist travels with a mental AVERSION list, paying for the sights and leaving a deposit, a holy smoke destination where yesterday’s pollution can take care of itself. Physical and chemical, the twentieth century proof of energy plays with fire, children with a Little Boy toy they throw in the ring. This is the ring and this is the split, this is the drop and this is the fire, they cannot resist. It comes in a black box, a game box labelled FEAR, a throw of the dice and atoms divide, the only rule: mutually assured destruction. Plummeted and pulleying, the twentieth century elevator is going up, avoiding unnecessary steps, pushing the right buttons, fun at so many levels. Where might it end if not on the whitest of moons, taking childish steps across a sea of tranquillity, collecting lunacies to store in good ship MIRTH, watching earthrise again, a unique opportunity. Motioning and pictured, the twentieth century arcade makes the case for AMAZEMENT in corridors of showcases. Feathered archdukes motion flickeringly into the oblivion of trenches. Flying Scotsmen break land speed records in brief seconds of film. Crystal clear Fabs and Top Ten girls shimmer golden up the scale, singing their youngest words to digitised eternity. Machine-driven and revolving, the twentieth century turntable says over and over again Nobody Told Me, needling listeners with forgotten truths and unfamiliar longings green from long ago. The box-set LOVE warbles birdlike through rooms, whispers pillow-talk over rooftops the central message of postcard and pulpit, now this very minute. Heating and powering, the twentieth century fossils breathe smokestack lightning, beating blue sky thinking to airy nothing, a greyer shade of pale. Gaze turns to glaze upon that which seems normal, personal satisfactions consuming product at all-time highs go gangbusters all four quarters. Vapour trails read SORROW, what’s done cannot be undone.

 

Empath

 

Are you a narcissist or an empath? To play this social media quiz question you click three colours and hope you don’t come up trump. How this divides statistically is hard to gauge. Are there more empaths per capita in the city or the regional and rural areas? Which political party has the most narcissists? Hard to gauge while the determining judge is artificial intelligence, one that is trained up to colour matching but not emotional range. It is hard to take the word ‘empath’ seriously. It originates in science fiction, a person with the paranormal ability to perceive the mental or emotional state of an individual. This has to be an improvement on seeing through said individual using X-ray vision, though it’s a question what it says about the emotional range of science fiction itself. Somehow in very recent times ‘empath’ has spread into common currency, meaning someone who identifies with another’s feelings and experience. However, ‘empath’ sounds like a type, raising the potential dilemma of infinite variables. There could be the active empath, by contrast with the passive empath. Can someone be a part-time empath? I imagine it happens all the time. Maybe one could work towards a doctorate. Or become the world’s leading empath. Though how would you know? Some variables have, in fact, already been identified, only one of them being emotional empath: physical empath, intuitive empath, dream empath, plant empath, Earth empath, animal empath. Can an empath love? we are asked, only to be told yes, with anyone but it is better if it’s with someone who expresses emotion, possibly because empaths are described as “emotional sponges”. Marrying an empath is preferable to marrying a narcissist, needless to say, though are the words antonyms? We are even told of the presence of toxic empaths, who over-identify with others’ problems and adopt them as their own. (Why this is toxic and how ‘toxic’ is today’s omnipresent negative adjective, is another story.) About the best-known empathy story in our culture is the Good Samaritan, a man who according to the Greek has a gut reaction to finding this man beaten up in the middle of nowhere. I have yet to hear a sermon in which he is called an empath, but is it only a matter of time? The implication is that those who passed by on the other side of the road knew about empathy, were even taught to be empathic, but one thing or another stopped them. It was the wrong person who did the right thing, in fact a person so outside proper society that it never occurred to the listeners (then or now) to extend empathy to them. Figures are not in for those who chose the colours of the narcissist, but we may assume that the figures for empath are pretty high, of whatever scale of empathy. Only how can we tell?

Image:  Wood engraving of the Good Samaritan, copied from the work of the German painter Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872). published in Paris in 1860

Planet

 

Ascending the curving staircase inside his mind, the staircase that puts him that much closer to the heavens, he peers through the telescope of his imagination at Mercury.  It is quite the blackest thing he’s ever seen, if almost imperceptible, before the full face of the sun. Fear is the astronomer’s first instinct. Can anything survive such heat extremes? Will the great blast absorb this morsel at an unknown hour? How does it keep on going year after year? It appears to contain all the finality of a full-stop. Yet continues, like an ellipsis. Turning the lens towards Venus, he is surprised to find it’s saffron. This is not how the planet is pictured in books. He double-checks the telescope’s satnav. Sure, Venus. Who knows, it takes courage to be up at work first thing in the morning. Still up and at it as night falls. Courage to be taken for granted, courage to be misunderstood. Most of what can be said about Venus still hasn’t been written down. Saffron. Tilting the instrument by accident he finds everything’s gone green. All manner of green. Green leaves, green eyes … O! it’s Earth. Growth reproduces growth in such profusion his language proliferates to breaking point. Clouds pure to sight are born to rainbow and to green upon continents where love is spoken of every day. Home. Reascending the whorls of stairs to stare at worlds, the astronomer is reassured by the anger of Mars. His books see red in this regard with tireless consistency. Who is he to argue? It must get exhausting being angry all the time in permanent cycles and for what reason? He wishes Mars would get over its cliché behaviour, but who will stop it? Who wants to go there? Better to turn to the wonder of Jupiter, that keeps red to one corner midst unending bursts and resolutions, firsts and revolutions of yellow. The odd thing about wonders is how words have their limits. What to say? And what to say of mirth-inspiring Saturn, a planet that could float in a bath, leaving a ring? Dazzling white in its dark night of eternal delight, that will never occur. Its humour lies in never standing still. What’s not to like? He pays attention to Saturn’s effortless ability to please. He brightens to its unique distinction. The astronomer however wishes he could avoid Uranus, grey and alone at the edge of the party. Sorrow will try its best to keep up appearances that all the time is an appearance of sorrow. Can anything be done? While Neptune elicits aversion, its bluest blue sunk with stories words deny, music cannot delve, psychology banishes to the end of the ward. Out where the known stares at the unknown for hours, long since empty of questions that could make any sense. Only its tenuous orbit gives some purpose to its baffling solitude. Time to close the telescope and reconnect with green. Or dream anon, when stars come out at night.

Keaton

 

Buster is equally capable of expressing complacent contentment. A realm of continual improvisation. Unexpected leaps. A realm of continual education. Fantastic structures and machines have the stark authenticity of the handmade. Rigour and purposefulness. Buster is equally capable of expressing inhibited longing. Imaginative agility. He turns every action into the most elegant possible ideogram. Whether by means of intricately conceived machinery or the barest of gestures. No matter how impossible the attempt. Shades of awe and amazement reliably awaken. Buster is equally capable of expressing controlled panic. This comedy of catastrophe. He undergoes catastrophes and dodges extreme risks by a hair with a grace positively angelic. As if he had done nothing at all. His trajectory and vicissitudes. That risk of harm – of annihilation – continues to play out. Buster is equally capable of expressing dawning awareness. The clear-eyed genius of a very serious child. Inventing new and undreamt of uses for common objects. He worked things out in his head. Buster sits up, jumps on the chair he is sitting in and onto the table, from which he vaults over his adversary’s head and flies through a narrow open transom over the locked door. Heroic physical feats accomplished without bravado. Not with bravado but with a demeanour that could pass for self-effacement. He is actually in great peril. Missing death by inches. Buster is equally capable of expressing unspoken sorrow. Incarnated a superior but detached intelligence. All that information alleviates somewhat the sense of pain attached to loss of independence. He plays all the parts and all the members of the audience. Neither frozen nor funereal. Nor blank nor immobile nor masklike. The most quintessentially silent. At times almost otherworldly beauty. Buster is equally capable of expressing resigned acceptance. He learnt how not to get hurt, or how not to make too much of it if he did. When it’s done, it’s done. Buster is equally capable of expressing the supremely focused attention of the scientist on the brink of a discovery. Geometric abstraction. Not only plausible but inevitable. He dives forward into a small valise held open by his assistant and is instantly and inexplicably swallowed up. 

Note to readers: Found poem using words from a review ‘Keep Your Eye on the Kid’ by Geoffrey O’Brien of two new books about Buster Keaton, published in The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2022, pages 49-51.

 

Election

 

Our local candidate for the Angry Party was working up to something in his online propaganda spiel, before claiming he has for 30 years been proudly servicing our region. Doubtless he means serving our region. How to point out this solecism to an Angry Party person is not easy. How might he respond? With a serve? English is a tricky business. Reducing stress and listening to the policies would help. Angry were less forthcoming on that score. Observers and participants are saying this is the ugliest campaign in living memory, which is why anyone under 25 notices the absurdities rather than the ugliness. The Opposition has waited until the week of the vote to declare it has policies. This is a change from the plans it has announced so far, each one of which has been bested by some plan from the Government, but sheer fantasy land if you are the Opposition. Apparently the policies are in a 93-page document, just released, and the electorate is assured that they are very good, sound, safe policies. The substance of the policies is slower coming to light, leaving voters with the sense that all they need to do is download the policy document and discuss it over breakfast, picking up on the finer points. That could be more than one breakfast and there are only a couple more breakfasts until Saturday. All parties are agreed on one thing, the main issue is the Premier. I am referring to the person who saved thousands of lives in the past three years because he acted on the best medical advice. This is unsatisfactory for many thousands of voters, who are still alive and kicking and want to express their anger. Their anger seems to be about being made to stay in their dream home on their quarter acre block for weeks on end with clean running water and more pizzas deliveries than common sense. Contrarily, other voters seem exceedingly happy still to be alive and with a quarter acre block thrown in, not least the many voters who have just come to live in the electorate from overseas. The illusion that this is a level playing field is whipped into action by some city newspapers. Apparently it is a neck-and-neck race, while other newspapers don’t even bother with the predictions. Level playing fields are not level crossings, a Government campaign in plain sight extending its two terms of office. If emotions colour voting then there should be a Miserable Party, a Horrified Party, a Confused Party too. After all, weeks of torrential rain and floods should leave voters with the awareness that the main issue is climate. As it is, parties sell themselves as the Happiness Party, the Excitement Party, the Satisfaction Party also.

DeSanctimonious

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident: it is the right of every citizen to be DeSanctimonious. To be or not to be DeSanctimonious, that is the question. Sign up now for the 12-step DeSanctimonious program. If you are feeling tired, listless, sanctimonious, then perhaps it’s time to take up a free DeSanctimonious course. Do yourself a favour: download the new Taylor Swift album ‘DeSanctimonious Like You’ while stocks last. DeSanctimonious is as DeSanctimonious does. And lo! The DeSanctimonious shall inhabit the earth and there will be a season of rampant name-calling. They say he is one hell of a DeSanctimonious sonofabitch. That woman gives new meaning to the word DeSanctimonious, I mean really. The nicest thing I can say about them is they are, and I’m trying hard here, DeSanctimonious. Lexicographers, however, are divided over DeSanctimonious: isn’t it one of those Janus words, a contronym? Popular DeSanctimonious dummies manuals seem designed to overcome or reduce the condition amongst those accused, rightly or wrongly, of being DeSanctimonious. Are they or aren’t they? It cuts deep. They need to know. Something. This should not be a cause for sleepless nights. While other evidence suggests the word also means its opposite in general usage. Common sanctimoniousness isn’t enough. There is a desire to accelerate their DeSanctimonious credentials in all directions, gear up or even turbocharge the DeSanctimonious via DeSanctimonious weekend retreats and refresher courses, the ultimate objective being able to say and in all truth, even with a touch of arrogance, they are more DeSanctimonious than thou. This contronym contrariety can do your head in. You will wish you had never heard the word DeSanctimonious. It is recommended to play ‘Round Midnight’ by DeSanctimonious Monk on permanent loop until you are chill. Or imagine what it would be like, no direction home, if Bob Dylan had kept to the first draft: “Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”  Polysyllabic DeSanctimonious didn’t scan for Bob. Then again, if top secret documents can eventually be declassified, can someone become l-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y DeSanctimonious? Can they become less and less holy until there’s nothing holy left, only a hole? Or less and less sanctimonious until they are to all intents and purposes very holy and possibly even sacrosanct? It is a veritable paradox, a conundrum that defies mere grammar. Perhaps Dean Martin was right, everybody’s DeSanctimonious sometimes. Even, or especially, if they don’t know what the word means. This column is open for comments. 

Shan-shui

 

Rain falls. Fast parallels vast falling white walls. Footpaths become creekbeds. Ripples over old brickwork and concrete hairlines. Leaves catch wet and drop the droplets, weighing on their edges. Windows fleck and slither. Skylights fan with more fanning water. More and more. Rooftops take a beating. Beatings gush and slosh down inclines. Rise in gutters. Rain hides the hill. Rain visits rooftops and walls with the clouds of its making. Houses reside inside clouds. Hard corners and patterned extras. Thunder moderates to patter. Lines of falling light. Arcs of overflow. Clouds drift and hang. Clouds lift. Pools settle. Surfaces resume composure, assume spots that circle outward. Irregularity turns from brook into puddles. Sun shows itself. Very dark against very white cloud glows alive. Cat rounds the corner. Sharpens claws. Walks by. Shadows diminish in sunlight. Light greens the leaves. Leaves green the light and gleam. Branches lift. Flowers sway. Water splays. Bees topple and hover. Curves clamber over verticals. Ground rises up with tall grass. Grass rises up with the ground. Foliage resumes its shapes. Birds find footing. Little birds tip and dart. This hill of houses shines awhile its glass. Mercury barely budges. Streets return to normal. Thinking and breathing, breathing and writing. I start writing. Permanent nouns with surprise verbs. Please. Breathing out again. My head of ten thousand words tips towards you. Lifetime of words discovered and forgotten and rediscovered. Reaching for the one word that reading will see. For the seventh time I cross out the words. Words that raced with excitement. Words that later sounded pompous. Words that tried too hard sounding grandiose. Words that only played to the audience. Words that scurried. Words that held back. Words that were interesting and untrue. Today there is nothing to say. The big blank of absence. Your absence. Your retreat. Somewhere outside the rain. Possibly somewhere inside rain. This time I turn to a new page. The page proves nothing. Shan-shui started out this way. Which came first, the landscape or the words? Raindrops falling on the page. Let me colour them in. Let me make a word. Let me describe the hill with one hundred words. Turn a raindrop into a letter. Repeat those words here and there like drops of rain. A page covered in words. A page that talks after rain has cleared. If you were here we would talk about everything. Ten thousand things, more or less. Everything under the sun. Everything rain feeds. Talk about everything. Or let go of words a while. Simply share the silence.

Ninety

 

At the Sunday party at church for my mother’s birthday, the vicar said in his speech that in his previous parish (St John’s, Finch Street) he cared for the oldest living Australian, at 112 years old. This meant, he said to my mother (Dawn Harvey), that you only have 22 years to go. ‘Don’t speak too soon,” muttered a few observers amidst the general laughter. It was one of the more sensitive ways of declaring her great age without actually stating the number. Mother in reply, “I have just a few words”, said that being here (St John’s Camberwell) was the longest time she had ever been in one parish: thirty years. Covid has not yet shrunk my brain to the extent that I could still calculate, that is a third of her life. Such milestones prompt us to measure our own span against that of others. It is a simple fact, for example, that I will always be 22 and a half years younger than her, though nowadays it’s not her who seems old but me. This age development is reinforced by my teenage daughter, whose irritating talent for realism confirms that I am old, repeated at any time when she thinks it necessary to remind me, in case I’ve forgotten. When I was her age anyone over 30 was old, an English word meaning ‘old’; this is a perception that seems to pass down through the generations. Our laughter at the idea of aiming for 112 is the laughter of knowing, after years and years, a moment arrives when that’s not so important any more. Take King Charles, as we must, a person who shares his birthday with my mother. His mother’s obstinate determination to get on with it and break reign records, her refusal to buck the practice and abdicate in favour of him, sets brains expanding with thoughts about wisdom coming with experience and the merits of patience. That Mother might eventually receive a letter from Charles is about the least of her concerns. We imagine her receiving the letter with “well that’s all very interesting.” When she says “I have just a few words”, this is taken as a most unlikely prospect if you are anyone of her family and friends. Our weekend of birthday celebrations was volubility itself, in much the same way as hour-long phone calls with her frequently operate according to their own Pareto Principle of ratio 80:20 input. During such conversations you are likely to hear about every member of the family in order of news, achievements, travels, crises, &c. Memories, from as long ago as her own growing up in Ivanhoe and Mentone, then Blackburn and Ringwood, come into the present in a moment. Names from every decade, with stories attached, innumerable, rise bidden or unbidden, conversations where time frames collapse and age distinctions vanish. Sometimes we listen amazed at some extraordinary story from the decades, one we’ve never heard before, related by her as though it were common knowledge and happened only last weekend.

End

 

Reflection by Philip Harvey for the Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, the 13^th of November 2022, at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

The End of the World is ever before us. In fact, it has been before us for centuries, which is one way of appreciating Christ’s words that we are not to know the time or the hour. His message is to be vigilant. 

Like so much of the scriptural language of End Times, Luke speaks from a centre of great calm. This God-centeredness can take getting used to, given that calmness is very far from the content of much of the messaging. Plague, wars, famine, mass destruction and death - it’s like reading the newspapers. Or watching the movies. Only here the words are steadying, they speak of things that will come to pass, of things it’s necessary for us to keep in mind. At the same time there is the message, recurrent throughout scripture, whether stated directly or by implication or tone: Do not be afraid. Fear not.       

Indeed, scripture sounds almost matter-of-fact as to what needs to be done. The words are realistic about the impossible scale of apocalypse and anyone’s ability to avoid or control it, yet practical about how to respond, abide and endure. Malachi says “But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” Psalms declare that the Lord “will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.” Words of calm keep breaking through. And Paul says to the Thessalonians to “go on doing the things that we command,” namely in that context praying, sharing, and avoiding bone idleness. 

Jesus’ dramatic warnings in Luke about the destruction of the Temple are likewise calm, realistic and practical. If the Temple is the dwelling place of God, what to do when “not one stone will be left upon another”? He appears to be saying, such a day will come, a day in which all our illusions will be taken away from us. 

Sooner rather than later, we become aware that we are talking of things it is necessary to know, to be ready for, but spoken as a mystery. It is the mystery of how to speak of the future and ourselves on this one Earth in that future. Amongst the many signs and portents of End Times named in scripture are the words of scripture itself. What to make of them? There is time to take time. We are told though that it is about our relationship with God and with one another. Cataclysms, false prophets, persecutions, all these warnings in the world do not appear to be as important as the message to be watchful, do what is right, love God and one another, and live in daily gratitude. 

Malachi 4: 1-2; Psalm 98: 5-9; 2 Thessalonians 3: 7-12; Luke 21: 5-19.

Grandfather

 

My maternal grandfather, Charles Hulme, went to the Great War. The silver teaspoons from Beaulieu and Ypres gleam in the family cabinet.  He was a machine-gunner, and I was often told as a child that most machine-gunners survived the War for the simple reason they were protected by the gun shield. He’d say he was only wounded once, when he cut himself in the mess with a tin-opener. This story is family folklore. One can only imagine the things he must have seen with his own eyes. Charlie hated war and never talked about what he really saw. He rarely mentioned the brother who was killed in 1917; the loss was important to his silence. The War was not a point of conversation at family occasions, even if he wanted to talk about it. He also detested the jingoistic patriotism that came later. He never attended parades. He avoided marches, probably because the men would all reminisce and drink. It was all about getting drunk and two-up later, as far as he could see. Charlie was abstemious, but not a wowser. Self-indulgence was not an option for that generation. Charlie founded Blackburn Rover Scouts and laid wreathes at the Shrine of Remembrance on behalf of the Scout Movement. He would have done that out of honour and to demonstrate to the boys how to show true respect. For Charlie the whole experience of the War was about survival. Young men, thrown together, quickly came to depend on one another. Themselves a mixed-up lot, they worked together in the trenches simply in order to get through it. Sticking together made tolerable a situation that was hostile, vicious, and ludicrous. You could die at any moment. They would watch their brothers and friends being shot to pieces right before their eyes. It was in these baffling and desperate circumstances that the men worked together. Later the term ‘mateship’ was used of this behaviour, which is why the term today has changed. Mateship was about dealing every day with meaningless terror. Once arrived on the Front it quickly became obvious to these teenagers that the officers didn’t know what they were doing. An acre of mud could be won then lost again within days. Consequent disrespect for the officers informed Charlie’s disapproval too of making the chaplains officers, because they became distant from the soldiers. It tended to make it difficult for the chaplains to minister effectively to the men. Charlie married Evelyn McKeown in 1921. She never talked about the War either, but when I visited her at Cabrini Hospital in the 1980s she was on powerful painkillers and not her usual composed self. Staring out over the rooftops of Malvern her mind was fraught by the past. I might have said something about her youth because she suddenly burst into uncontrollable crying and yelled out, “Oh the waste! All those boys! The waste! The waste!” I was silenced by the sight of her distress. I still think about that visit when I hear our glib modern throwaways like “Haven’t you got over it yet?” I know that trauma can never go away, it stays inside and changes how people relate to the world, how they understand everything, sometimes. Sixty years later my grandmother still mourned the young men she had loved and lost to the War. The War affected everyone’s lives, got into every family. Armistice Day (now Remembrance Day) was more significant than Anzac Day for my grandparent’s generation, because it commemorated the end of a traumatic experience in their own lives. There was an ending. Those who came later ponder the distance between our way of remembering the War and theirs.

Theatre

 

It is illegal to produce a drama about Queen Elizabeth. This state rule was also a creative limitation rule if you were William Shakespeare, or his contemporary dramatist friends. Any depiction of the reigning Queen on stage, or in any medium, might lead to social conflict and instability. Subjects could get the wrong idea. Staging a play called ‘The Crown’ with Elizabeth and other state actors (as we say today) in lead roles would have put Shakespeare outside the purple circle, inside a gaol. This was never his goal. If major figures had words and actions attributed to them falsely, it was a threat to the monarchy, seditious and even treasonable. Shakespeare’s solution to making contemporary political theatre was to retell stories based on monarchs who were safely out of the way. Hence ‘Richard the Third’ is a propaganda exercise about lineage aimed at the Tudors’ archrivals, the Plantagenets. Queen Elizabeth could sleep soundly at night, especially while she and her successor King James VI and I had Shakespeare on their side. ‘Macbeth’ is famously a screen for the chaos in London after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Setting it somewhere remote, like Scotland, adds to the romance. This week’s call from the retro outfit the Australian Monarchist League reminds us of the wisdom of this quaint law. The law being, royals had to be well dead before writers dipped the poison pen that finished them off. Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, was the last monarch dealt with by Shakespeare, though she and James are everywhere in his plays, once you know where to look. Really, the League is beleaguered that calls for bans, boycotts, and disclaimers on ‘The Crown’ that depicts Charles influencing John Major to force Elizabeth to abdicate in the heir’s favour. It’s not like that in the real world. Dame Judi Dench’s appeals for historical accuracy raise eyebrows amongst those who have watched her perform the inaccuracies of Shakespeare over a lifetime. Richard the Third wasn’t all bad. The real Macbeth was a nice person. King Charles is a work-in-progress (exclamation mark), which is another way of saying he is still alive. To plot against his mother is the stuff of Jacobean drama, very bad propaganda for the House of Windsor, and of a certainty untrue. But, it’s great theatre! Pity that our present day Shakespeares cannot contrive a dramatic trigger that not only is right but feels right. Amongst numerous other reasons why royals (and many of their subjects) must long for a return of the ‘well dead’ rule are those trashy royal magazines designed to take the sparkle out of Markle; the magazines where Kate and Camilla hurl crockery at one another on a daily basis and it all ends up in tears. It’s a wonder there is any Spode left.       

Language

 

Look-it-up language, how do you spell that? Lookitup, Look It Up, like a birdcall. Look-it-up’s become a language of our minds, who travel online for hours of the week. When permacrisis is declared Word of the Year by a famous dictionary, we have never heard of permacrisis, we have to Look-it-up. It’s an open question if Look-it-up is symptomatic of permacrisis, or vice versa, but it pays to know. Apparently. Online we may bounce from one permacrisis to another, or reel, only to meet more fresh language that is simply safest, sincerest Look-it-up. It has its own poetry, by which is meant Look-it-up is new sensory experience, intellect update, blurry around the edges. However, it’s not as simple as phonemes, or your first language. TikTok missiles and shock jock whistles and schlock rock samples are itemised minutely, hourly. Screens – long, regular, short – reference communications requiring cinematic recall, translation radios, tune encyclopedias. Scarcely can Look-it-up be labelled artificial intelligence, as it’s our palpable minds must process this plethora of peopled expression. Still, discernment has its limits, to the screen flicking nearness newness in our eyes and ears at maximum rates. Look-it-up language tests mind’s auxiliary motors, texts its febrile manifestations, tempting a tipping point. New vocabulary pushes us to rest, to leave the screen awhile playing self-Scrabble with its millions of players. Our attention shifts towards origins that are not English and not non-English, not itunes or iframes or iabstracts. Our attention finds, for example, green. Trees are green, their manifold variations of foliage, variegated and non-variegated, viridian and verdant, offering us their exactly earthly beauty free of the novel sensations of Look-it-up. Grass in its endless possibilities sways and glows, a consistent healing of the ground that gives grass life, sending out seeds. Patterns of green river over us, beneath us, constellate and rush, shooting out more green than words in dictionaries, mysteriously indifferent to permacrisis, whatever that is; or so we hope. More green, and then our attention yearns towards original languages, the language of origin, that which makes our English sound like any other birdsong, the trees patterns upon patterns, and green simply the majesty of light and water. Such that our attention becomes speechless and clear before the languages our minds cannot keep up with. Sensory languages that all in glory extend simply and surely due to their very existence the invitation to Look-it-up. As though already, permacrisis left in the too hard basket long ago, it were all one omniscient Word of the Year, not requiring a definition. Beyond definition.

Horse

 

Morning coffee on Melbourne Cup Day at home prompted mock American nasal singing of the line “I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee…” but conversation turned not on who was so vain, Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, David Bowie, David Cassidy, or Cat Stevens, any one of whom (logically) must be vain to be a candidate, but on the question, can a horse naturally win? As you recall, the target of the song “went up to Saratoga,” location of a prestigious racetrack in New York State, “where your horse naturally won”. Being first past the post is important when you’re so vain, we conclude, but can the horse naturally win? Equine behaviourists are generally in agreement that horses are not aware they are in a race, nor that they are in the business of either winning or losing. They do not behave any differently after the race, either, whether they came at the front, middle or rear of the field. When young, horses jump and cavort. There can be some charging about, friskiness as they say, but while this may be called racing around, if this is racing in any conscious sense remains fairly open to doubt. Galloping is essential in adulthood for escaping from threat of different kinds. Also, bachelor stallions race each other, but especially the harem stallion, for attention of mares in the season; English jargon calls this horsey behaviour, or horsing around. Why would bachelors wish to do this in the pouring rain at the prestigious Flemington racetrack in front of thousands of humans in sopping suits and dripping fascinators and occasionally a “scarf it was apricot”? It is not a main concern of the race caller, obviously, or the bookkeepers. All of this leads to the ethics of the spectacle and the universal knowledge that jockeys can pull a race, any race, even the Melbourne Cup. Whether a horse can ‘naturally win’ is superfluous once it is understood that humans pull the strings, strings in this case being reins, whips, heels, raised voice and anything else jockeys use to manage the outcome. The horse’s health and physique is one thing, but the manoeuvrability of the rider is critical. Possibly the question revolves around whether horseracing itself is natural. It would seem at least to be an outcome of ancient domestication, leaving us to ask what purpose racing serves beyond vicarious and ephemeral pleasure, for the humans. One of my draws in the home sweep was Young Werther, a person Carly Simon could never deride with “you’re so vain”, given he is the epitome of Sturm und Drang, “the wife of a close friend” being the issue. You have to ask what kind of owner would name a horse Young Werther in the first place. Have they read the book? Over morning coffee, Young Werther did not look like much of chance on a wet track in a field of 24. Two scratchings.

Bathroom

 

Go there in a hurry, red coming out, a burn a blister, an event breaking the surface of skin, to stop the hurry, the tearing hurry of pink squares and protective film, to hold the fear in place, a few seconds of stop, going on non-stop, that was a burst of fear fear no more. Or worse, go there for the jar of rattling antidotes, to fend off the gush of nausea, the swell of headache, the flesh prompts for disgust, something unpronounceable and no time to say, there to vomit the facts, meet the shivering need for water, or whatever it takes, held tight alone by awareness of certain walls. More normally, invariably virtually, is entry for the comb that streams the comedy file of fine lines in curves and waves, curls and dreams as preparation for out again, out into the commentary of weather, the mirth of your head tingling appreciation whatever anyone says of the current style, hilarious that human weather of commentary, the comedy stand-up of your very self brushing at the mirror, all concentration on your part, and the comb. Likewise, the satisfactions of the toothbrush. And there’s soap, milky or translucent, oaten or jasmine, readying you in fresh scent for flesh to embrace its future that today may be simply the weather again, self-respect enough, or who knows but suddenly and particularly the pleasures of love named, enough for encounter, enough to feel pretty okay really, thanks. Thence beneath the human-wrought cloud perforations of the showerhead, such wonder washing your face, eyes closed, your limbs their litheness and limits, every part of you refreshed under the solid sprinkle, the one genuine trickle-down effect, as if just for a brief while this warm heaven went on forever. Go there to manage the inexplicable fact of existing, again, like the last time was again, where expectations are you will be cleaned and tidied and scented and brushed and cured and dressed and prettified and from in there will summon some little fresh courage for out there, from somewhere. Contemplative it is in there, where you attend to your needs, that place of acoustic perfection bel canto excess in the shower recess, a well-lit cleanly place that rarely knows anger, unless another raps demand at the door, interrupts peace with their own special hurry, their hedge-backwards uncombed hair, spoiling your care. Only, on occasion, thinking about such elegies in elegy mood, do you pick at the scab of mortality, reach frustrated for the crumpling blister pack, consider a minute the sorrow of the body, your wondrous and yet mysterious friend, who is everyone’s sorrow timing down to switch out the light and go.

 

 

 

Lightbulb

 

The herald arrived at our door mid-afternoon. She had a Sinhalese name meaning Practical. Her name dangled on a lanyard. I didn’t catch the surname. She came to foreshadow the gift of lights. To be more specific, lightbulbs. If we were so inclined, she heralded, two men will appear within the hour and replace all of our current bulbs with new bulbs. That which was old technology will be upgraded to new. Her name may well have meant Graciousness, or Inspiration. The lights in question were light emitting diode lights. This was, explained Practical, a government initiative. We pay our taxes and behold there is light. We expressed a preference for warm rather than bright bulbs, having given it some thought. Kindly light passed unexpressed through our minds. Thanking Practical for her offer, we thought it a happy day when light is offered for free. In fact, individual lights to replace each existing bulb in house and environs. One hour later the men of light arrived, as promised. They carried ladders and cameras. They started photographing each bulb that was to be replaced, whilst yet in its fitting. This is where business meets state bureaucracy, explained one of the men of light. His name was the same as a central character in Jane Austen. Upon me saying that will be a lot of pictures of lightbulbs for someone to look at, the other man responded: someone in India. His name sounded Sinhalese, but I couldn’t catch the name, nor pronounce it. They must message our bulbs to the subcontinent, I thought to myself in wonder. Cheerfully they went about the house replacing mercury-laden bulbs in chandeliers and standard lamps with cheaper longer-lasting energy-efficient LEDs. Vanilla whip bulbs out, luminous nose bulbs in. More pictures were taken of the grand array. The men of light noticed how every room had walls of shelves of books. They remarked on the sheer number of books. I explained that I run libraries, my wife bookshops, and then we come home. What is your favourite reading?, asked the Sinhalese. Poetry, I replied, wondering in my mind what favourite reading means. My favourite is Patterson, said the man from Jane Austen. Banjo!, I exclaimed, I love Banjo and started reciting “There was movement at the station …” at which he joined in and we finished the verse. Incandescent halogens were unscrewed, accumulating for the recordkeepers of India. In return, energy efficient lumens found their place. Soon the men of light had balanced old with new, hoisted their ladders through the front door and were onto their next mission. First though, they photographed all the extracted bulbs and I signed off with my fingernail on the Sinhalese’s business screen. As evening fell in late October, our house glowed with a new inner glow, warmly, in preference to brightly, efficiently in preference to costly.     

BoM

 

Isometric is a good name. Until abbreviated to Iso, likely to cause confusion after two years of lockdowns. Cloud? Everything is in the Cloud these days. For example, the Cloud says it will be sunny all day. The Cloud predicts thunderstorms over the nearby hills. No, too vague, it will never work. Too much information. We wonder what was on the long list of new names for BoM. Atmosphere. Southerly Buster. Weatherperson. Rain Gauge. Go Troppo. Windsock. Frosty Reception. Sleet Sheet. Looking Good. Vane? My brother once worked in human resources at the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). I asked him, what is weather anyway? He replied, weather may be defined as rain. He meant, there are two states with certainty: raining and not raining. Obviously, there is much more to the job than saying whether it rains or not. Daily decisions hinge on having some idea of temperature, wind velocity, gutter levels, and will there be four seasons in one day. Record floods have a cause. BoM by any other name is more than a rain gauge. We wonder what was on that list of alternative names the consultancy company The C Word Communications Agency Pty Ltd had to finalise in its prescribed four months. Cloud Cover. Choice Chances. Climate Change. Colourful Charts. Cumulus Concerns. Close Calls. Current Conditions. Carbon Copies. Chattering Classes. Climate Change. Oh sorry, did I mention Climate Change again? C Word in the end recommended the word Bureau for general public usage and all future communications, begging the question, had C Word trialled Bureau for potential conflict of messaging? The Escritoire expects a slight chance of a shower in the afternoon and evening. The Bureau of Statistics has issued a sheep weather alert for the eastern part of the state from tonight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation expects overcast conditions for the next month. Had C Word tabled plans for BoM to be rebranded honouring names of beloved weather reporters? Rosemary Margan’s Bargain (RMB). Edwin Maher’s Pointer (EMP). Rob Gell’s Well-Well-Well (RGW). We still wonder what was on the long, or even short, list of alternative names for BoM, now that BoM has been reinstated by the new Government, given everyone says BoM anyway, not Bureau, and no one had a problem with BoM in the first place. BoM says it will be sunny all day. Seems fairly cut and dried. We’re ready for it, a sunny day. Everyone likes BoM, but herewith I forward other names for your consideration, waiving the usual $70,000 contract fee I would normally expect for this kind of job. I mean, it’s not as though I’m raising a sweat over a sonnet or anything heavy duty. Red Sky at Night (RSaN). Hail to Thee Blithe Spirits (HtTBS). Chiffonier-in-Chief (CiC). Rain on My Parade (RoMP). Wet the Finger (WtF). Send Her down Huey (SHdH). Winds Light and Variable (WLaV). Dry as a Dead Dingo’s Donger (DaaDDD). Deluge Desk (DD). Postscript Climate Change (PSCC).

Halloween

 

It is the season again of faux cobwebs over front fences, rubber skeletons dangling from porches, and plastic pumpkins with handles for collecting sweets. It’s weird, in a familiar weird way. Pumpkins themselves flourish in autumn or, as they say in North America, fall, which is a fairly major clue to this festival being a late import to Australia. “Mists and mellow fruitfulness” for a Queensland Blue arrive other times of year. Ritualists appreciate Australian Halloween as a springtime festival, first and foremost because it’s when children in bands invade the streets in costumes. Not just the usual spooky costumes like witches and draculas, but almost any costume: superheroes and ballerinas and gladiators. Every conceivable springtime colour, every imaginable excuse to dress to excess, every possible future. They run the odd side, the even side, more interested in treats than tricks. The neighbours oblige. Interestingly, it is the only festival when children meet large numbers of neighbours (known and unknown) on an equal basis, each year, and get to look inside their houses at close range. Halloween breaks down invisible barriers, invites discovery rather than fear. Not deathly, but lively. Knowledgeable adult pranksters argue for the season’s “pagan roots”, as they busy the children with Ziggy Stardust makeup and K-Mart capes, choosing to ignore that Halloween is self-descriptive of the night before All Saints’ Day, and the day that follows, All Souls’. It’s a bit like Mardi Gras. To really understand the festival itself you cannot have Mardi Gras without the day that follows, Ash Wednesday – because that’s the reason for Mardi Gras. I don’t see many trick-or-treaters going next day to pray to the saints, or the following day commemorating the dead. If I were to mention this to them, they’d probably think I was weird, in a weird way. Discussion is better kept safe and consumerist with the No Religion crowd. They are capable of believing anything, even that consumption is eternal. Can those who have everything go begging for something just slightly more than nothing, from the people next door? Yet for all that, it is the season of holy possibilities, the season of giving thanks and remembering those who have departed. Any time is a good time to share that reality. And Halloween is a start, it may be argued, children getting together in an organised fashion to meet strangers at the doorstep, in their very own street. They even sing a prepared song to extract free food. Plenty of time to learn whose love is unconditional, even their own. Time to learn how little time there ever was for anyone. Safely home they study their bonbons, enjoy the evening meal together, fold up their costumes (some throw them on chairs for someone else to figure out), and retire to bed with a book of ghost stories. Tomorrow is another day, as ritualists are wont to observe.  

Trumble

 

In September 2010, Angus Trumble shared some of his early school reports, with related background dramas social and emotional, real and imaginary, on his online blog ‘The Tumbrel Diaries’. He transcribed the words of the excellent Miss Cameron, his teacher at Grimwade House at the age of six: “Angus brings many books for us to read. He is most responsive to the rhythm of words and can join in the saying of many poems. He writes down many stories for our enjoyment. His drawings and paintings are especially interesting, being both colourful and imaginative. He has some excellent ideas for creative work and he gets much pleasure from the things he makes.” Miss Cameron was one of his most perceptive teachers. It could be a review of ‘The Tumbrel Diaries’, that splendid set of essays on all manner of interests in Angus’ life, all of it free, that now serves as a highly original, if forever incomplete, autobiography. Since news of his death was broadcast after the second weekend of October, I have been browsing these Diaries again, in order to deal with the loss and grief. Although I am friends with certain members of the Trumble family, my relationship with Angus was tangential, perhaps half a dozen passing conversations at most in the old days, before I stumbled (the only verb that suffices) across the Diaries during one of my daily surfs. I will miss our online banter and his exemplary generosity of spirit. He described, celebrated is a better word, wondered at, a world that I, like so many, connected with immediately: the world of Melbourne and beyond, the arts, art history, history in general, and in particularity. His particularity, one that spoke with wit, good humour, deepening knowledge, original insight, and all things considered, a disarming humility. He spoke entertainingly and informatively on whatever took his fancy, a very wide subject matter indeed. But it was how he spoke as much as what he spoke of, that clutched the attention. Where did that brilliant prose style come from? The Diaries index sprawls with family names, royal names, artists’ names, yet is thin on literary names. This leads me to believe that Angus’ prose style developed very early, urbane and readily accessible; a style he simply further perfected over time. I marvel with all the delight of a fan at his enthusiasm, and how he engenders that enthusiasm in others. Then also, his love of “the rhythm of words” resulted in poetry. One of my favourites are his haiku sequences written during Hurricane Irene in August 2011 (“No power, no gas./ Water’s off. With my flashlight/ Though, I read Miss Pym.”) proof that natural disasters do concentrate the mind. These little poems demonstrate why art is more accurate, more real, than the news: it puts you there and makes you feel it, albeit using the same black humour that informs the anagrammatic title of ‘The Tumbrel Diaries’ themselves. And typical Angus is to drop a name in without explanation, in this case a very literary one, Barbara Pym. He kept scattering clues.

Moscow

 

One of the funniest, most charming books you will ever read is ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ by the American Amor Towles (2016). Every page contains lines, moments, meanings, characters designed to amuse and amaze. Friends had recommended the novel, so when a paperback copy arrived in the Library in donation I thought, okay then. It is an account of a Count, Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who by chance wrote a poem before the October Revolution that Bolsheviks in 1922 deemed revolutionary enough to spare him his life. They directed that Rostov vacate his customary Suite 317 of the Metropol Hotel, to live in an attic room; a form of house arrest. This is the sumptuous hotel near the Kremlin, opposite the Bolshoi Theatre, that remained sumptuous throughout the Soviet 70 years and beyond. What happened next I recommend you find out for yourself, however reading the book during the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given me pause at the social meaning of many things in the novel. For example, on page 289 Rostov and his friend Mishka discuss the age-old question of the burning of Moscow. This is 1946, after the city had just escaped the latest such threat. Mishka hypothesises on Napoleon’s facial expression if, the day after capturing Moscow, he awoke to find the citizens had burnt the city to the ground. Although unsettled, the Count agrees that this is “the form of an event. One example plucked from a history of thousands. For as a people, we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created.” Similar thoughts have crossed mine and other minds since February, as we watch from afar at how Russians, directed by people in the Kremlin, wilfully destroy that which they claim is actually Russia. Would you not want to protect and uphold that which you regard as your valued inheritance? Who would destroy it? After gloomy disquisitions on famous paintings about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, Mishka continues, “How can we understand this, Sasha? What is it about a nation that would foster a willingness in its people to destroy their own artworks, ravage their own cities, and kill their own progeny without compulsion?” Towles inserts these harsh interludes to remind the reader of the brutal reality of the Russian world, views that seem belied by the rosy stoicism of the Count’s existence, as related with great humour and humanity the rest of the time. After retelling a dream of meeting the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky involving self-murder by revolver, Mishka concludes that unlike the British, French or Italians, Russians “are prepared to destroy that which we have created because we believe more than any of them in the power of the picture, the poem, the prayer, or the person. Mark my words, my friend. We have not burned Moscow to the ground for the last time.” Such is the morbid intensity of Mishka’s speeches, the Count is temporarily at a loss for words, a state that readers find hard to believe, myself included, given the detailed evidence to the contrary on the other 461 pages of the novel.     

Rochester

 

One of my earliest memories is peeping into the back lobby of the old Rectory at Rochester. River water had surged through to a height of one or two feet. Cold and clean, the water looked quite at home regardless of its recent arrival in our residence. Nature is like that. Its intrusion into our domestic arrangements was due to flood, the bush garden of the Rectory sloping slowly as it would down into the Campaspe River. Whether this memory draws on tiny black-and-white photographs of the same scene, I’m not sure, but the images are strong in my mind and include colour and sound. These memories are further coloured in by events of which I have only later reports: the arrival of my brother Michael into the world, so this was August 1958. Because the town was under water, the road between the Rectory and Rochester and District Hospital, in other words the Northern Highway, was blocked by river and rainwater. A long circuitous drive around back blocks was out of the question. The expectant mother chose to stay at home, against doctor’s orders, walking to the hospital being not wise in her condition. The ultimate decision was the child’s, who obliged by waiting until the flood had receded. This story is told to this day as though it were the norm. It was due to this particular flood that the vestry was propelled to build a new Rectory in the centre of town beside Holy Trinity Church itself, a home built with the fashionable white cream brick of the period. Flood was a regular hazard of life in Rochester in those days. Breaking its banks was what locals called ‘coming out’, i.e. the river would come out and go down again overnight; except when it didn’t. Walking from my new home a few doors to the main street, during the season I could witness that street completely covered in swirly floodwater that had ‘come out’; I was instructed not to go past the hotel on the corner. All the shops were shut for days as water slowly receded down drains and back into the Campaspe from whence it had risen. August, and Spring in general, was always a good time for a flood. At the age of six we left Rochester for Melbourne and more new homes, though in Melbourne they were called the Vicarage. This clear demarcation date tells me why all my early childhood memories of Rochester must have occurred before Melbourne Cup Day in 1961, the day of the shift. The thoroughbred Lord Fury led all the way to win the Cup that year. It was also the year they started work damming Lake Eppalock. Eppalock was a magical word of childhood, as adults extolled the happy resolution to the flooding history of the Campaspe River. Happy if you believe in regulated farm irrigation and safe, dry towns, doubtless, though presumably if Eppalock is full to the brim then floods will 'come out' again, as they have in recent years and spectacularly in 2022 when Rochester experienced the once-every-100-years event of being national frontpage news, the entire town being issued with an evacuation order.

 

Photograph: Silo art in Rochester, picture taken by my brother Seb during a visit to the town in August this year. He was born in Rochester in May 1961.