Geoffrey Dean's blog

Aphorisms

2011-01-29T00:37:00.002+11:00

APHORISMS, maxims or axioms:
I bought a new pair of glasses last week & I see so much better - the only trouble is when I look in the mirror they give me such a lousy complexion.
On Writing:
You can't be taught to write it's only something you can learn.
“I remember everything in the past– even if it didn’t happen.” (Mark Twain)
Look, you have to believe me, I tell lies – about everything - and that’s the truth. (Damian Runyan)
Awareness and imagination are the principal tools in any writers toolbox. (Flannery O’Connor)
Those who would like to write should be thoroughly discouraged, only those who have to write need encouragement. (TS Eliot)
A vivid imagination is the cheapest mode of travel.
A cliché is often a discarded truism.
I admit I only set out to describe not to understand the human psyche.
The Arts Industry: The ones who make a better living out of our art than we do.
ON PHILOSOPHY:
The desert submerges the trees. The trees fail to submerge the desert.
The greatest wisdom is to keep an open mind.
Those who are reluctant to govern make better rulers than those who are eager to govern. (Socrates)
It’s not God that’s the problem it’s those who believe absolutely.
The simple is as much complex as the complex is simple.
If you say something is impossible you are more likely to be wrong than if you say anything is possible. (Arthur C Clark)
The difference between a snob and a discriminator is that a snob relies on ignorance to judge whereas a discriminator discriminates.
Half full or half empty depends on whether you talking about petrol or a vintage wine.
OR: Who cares anyway?
I think therefore I am. (Decarte)
I am, therefore I think. (Decarte’s wife)
The meaning of life ... is the life you lead
To accomplish something of worth for its own sake creates the metaphoric soundlessness of one hand clapping.
The pessimist believes there is no point in action because all is lost, whereas the optimist believes no action is necessary because things always come out okay. It is only through the combination of a pessimistic outlook and an optimist act that change will come about.
Only through sacrifice comes redemption. (Source unknown)
GENERAL:
When there are two ways to proceed that are equally as bad as the other there is no choice, only the sufferance of the one thing or the other.
The Mobile phone culture: an often a meaningless mobile chatter that speaks mostly of either isolation or self-importance.
Reality is your reality, my reality, even unreality.
The only difference between a miracle and a mystery is that the former is considered solved whereas the latter is not.
I started off with nothing and I’ve still got most of it left. (Overheard in a Laundromat)
Talking without thought is like singing without a tune.
Advice to give to an extra-terrestrial: Go home the earth is full. (NET)
You are depriving some village of an idiot. (Overheard during a road rage incident)
The suburbs: A bevy of silver TV arrows pointing towards their godhead.
My greatest ambition is to sit on the moon one evening and watch the earth rise. (Nasser Astronaut.)
I’m not really short I just know a lot of very tall people. (Overheard, Salamanca)
You live a bit and you learn a bit but you don’t live long enough to know very much.
Too many people live in a forest and never see a tree and others see a tree and not the forest.
Death is the aphrodisiac for living (Philip Adams):
The Da Vinci Code :A little ancient clay pot with a paper inside that says: Wrong way idiot, go back.
If you haven’t found more in your mind than you thought there was, then you really haven’t tried.
When you’re wrong about something you have the chance to advance your knowledge.
ON PSYCHOLOGY:
While there is life there is hope and while there is hope there is life.
‘Naïve is a word that people who don’t care about things, use to describe people who do.’ (Ethan Black.)
Moderation in all things, even moderation in moderation. (Neil Hackett)
If ego is the head driver, it shouldn’t have a license.
Save yourself a trip to India: Be your own Guru., (‘GEE YOU ARE YOU’)
Ambivalent? Well, yes and no! (NET)
Without compromise all things remain static.
I’m sure of nothing and surprised by nothing, (Gerald Durral)
It is only the moral self that keeps the moral order.
ON OLD AGE:
The older you get the more like yourself you become. ( Zen?)
AND: The older you get the fewer things are worthy of discussion.
AND: A hot shower solves many problems.
AND: The most heated conversation one can expect after being house bound is with your TV.
AND: Just because you can’t find something, it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
AND: The time comes when testosterone fades that the exchange of bodily fluids loses its appeal.
ON MEMORY:
Oldies can’t remember names and nouns, There is a name for this condition but few oldies can remember what it is.
AND: If you remain calm when all else is panic, perhaps you haven’t got your hearing aid turned on.
AND: When you walk along the shopping centre you smile at all the oldies in case you know them, and they smile back in case they know you.
AND: Don’t worry that you forgot my name. I forgot yours too. (NET)
AND: I bought pills to help with my memory but I keep forgetting to take them. (Overheard in a chemist shop)
QUESTIONS:
POETS have no place in a perfect world.
Is there such a thing as un-natural talent?
Fundamental Islam: If there were 72 virgins in paradise awaiting the suicide bombers, how would you feel if you were 73rd?
Do we cry for others or do we cry for ourselves?
Who are you in your dream? Have you ever seen yourself in a dream? Or do you just imagine yourself in a dream? You are looking out but never in, you don’t see yourself, so who or what is it you are in your dream? Do you have a specific age? Or are you simply an ageless essence of all your time before and after your earthly birth? Perhaps it is your very soul you are glimpsing?
ON SEMANTICS;
Sentiment belongs to the past because it is mainly about the loss of something or the regret that we didn’t ever find the love we were seeking.
Romance belongs to the present - an idealistic act directed towards someone you love. If reciprocated we know happiness and if not reciprocated it also falls into the tearful arms of sentiment.

Or then again, perhaps it is all just a load of cods wallop.

Meeting the Great Artist

2010-08-11T01:55:00.002+10:00

Ubud, Bali 1991
I sat uncomfortably on the edge of the visitors' couch pinching the tiny china cup between thumb and forefinger. Senor and Senora Blanco sat opposite. Antonio the great Balinese artist collapsed deep into the plump luxurious cushions of his chair in what was obviously meant to be a simulated state of exhaustion. Perched on the very edge of the second chair his wife seemed hardly able to contain her impatience. Or was it disregard? I had no idea, for her expression was inscrutable. Antonio on the other hand, jittered. His hands and feet were forever on the move.
He was quite a small man with an aquiline profile and delicate hands that he used extensively with an amazing variety of flowing movements to conduct his words each time he spoke. Such an intricate patterning of the air, they seemed to contain their own special eloquence. He wore a blue pom-pom beret cockily tilted forward over one eye with the studied care of a showoff. His shoulders were surprisingly wide for a small thin man.
I thought they may have owed some of that width to padding in the decorous shirt he wore underneath his loosely hanging paint-spotted smock.
The great artist didn't seem to have drunk any of his tea and he certainly hadn't reached for any of the biscuits on the black glass coffee table. I would have liked to take his second biscuit but the thought of reaching out to get one suddenly seemed a very difficult thing to do.
I felt the three of us could have gone on like that forever, all in their own worlds. Me thinking of the best way to bring up the subject of his promised interview, the great artist's wife still staring into space as if none of it was any of her business, and Blanco himself struggling to feign some kind of interest in the proceedings when it was obvious that he was still considering color mixes, perspective, shape and form. In his mind's eye painting on, treating the beautiful young body before him as nothing more or less than a smooth brown landscape of shaded contours and configurations that had to be examined minutely, centimetre by centimetre, moment by moment...
"I enjoyed your book," Antonio Blanco said. "I read it through just two days ago. A requirement for my wife's Balinese Hindu religion is that our four children have a tooth filing ceremony when they come of age...we had four done altogether. We had thousands of guests yet I managed to slip away and read your book. I refuse to make comments on it...the fact is it kept me occupied in the face of tumult...that, I think, speaks of my review."
I wasn't at all sure whether it was a good review or a bad one. I nodded back at Antonio Blanco inanely and forced myself to smile. I was surprised to see that the artist was nodding also.
"You do write very well," he said.
I smiled. "But not as well as Chechov." I meant it to be a joke because Blanco had told me earlier that his namesake Antonio Chechov was his favourite author.
But Blanco took my remark seriously. "Chechov, your own Patrick White, yourself, myself - we are all artists. All different, so fortunately we do not have to race like horses. There is no first, second and third, surely?
I couldn't have agreed more but I felt a bit put out because the artist's correction implied I didn't. My ego was rearing its ugly head.
"It should be like that," I said a little truculently, "but I'm afraid it's not. Not in Australia anyway."
Blanco smiled. "Correct me if I am wrong but it seems you feel let down maybe? Your race has been a little futile perhaps?"
"Not futile," I assured him. "More frustrating I would say."
"Ah, yes," Antonio Blanco said, "I understand. But perhaps it is you and not your work that suffers...if you had a little more faith in yourself you could perhaps overcome anything."
I wasn't sure that it was my faith that was lacking so I shrugged for want of a better reply.
It was Blanco who persisted. "You can do anything you want. It is up to you. Take us sitting here. Why are we here?"
"I've come to do an interview," I reminded him succinctly. “For the Australian magazines.”
"No, no, dear. You are here because it was ordained we should share this moment. That dove last week getting into my studio and you helping catch it. You lending me your book to explain yourself, that was the moment. If we really explore what can be done with each moment we may find we can do anything. We can think what we wish. I can think what I want to think and you what you want to think. Or we can talk, as we are doing now. We can change the course of our lives moment by moment, if we so wish. I can make sense of a scared bird frightening my model and crapping on my paintings, if in fact the end result is we are joined in friendly conversation over a cup of tea. The moment was offered and we have taken up that offer and made much of it."
I wasn't at all sure that the artist was entirely serious. "Are you talking about serendipity Antonio?"
"Serendipity? What is that?"
"It's a kind of accidental discovery we make that turns out to be fortunate."
Antonio Blanco raised one of his thick devilish eyebrows and said with some exasperation, "My dear, it is not a matter of accident, every moment can be fortunate, but it is only fortunate if we accept it for what it is, find the best of it and act upon it. This is the way we enrich our lives, moment by moment."
I thought it all sounded a little too pat but of course wasn't going to say. I was going over in my mind my plan of interview.
"Yes dear soul," Antonio Blanco continued. "There is little that mankind can't do. You are perhaps a catholic and think that only Jesus can perform miracles? But remember dear, Jesus only walked on water, man has walked on the moon."
The artist's wife didn't seem too impressed with her husband's revelation. She half-turned and stared resentfully at him for a brief moment and then returned her gaze into her own comfortable middle distance.
"Okay," I said. "But what if that person we are talking of is a poor fisherman, or rice farmer with only a small plot of land, what can he do to improve his lot moment by moment?"
"Well, my dear, no one expects fisher folk and rice farmers to walk on the moon if that's what you mean, but the fisherman can always continue to learn his trade can he not? And the rice farmer to improve the fertility of his land and grow better rice."
"It's not a lot though is it? It's not a big step for a man."
Antonio Blanco, sighed suddenly. "Maybe not for you or me who have escaped the tediousness of life via our respective art but for some it may well be all there is my dear and who is to say one man's moment is any less or more valuable than another's. It is only how each of us value our own moments that is important."
I was still searching for a suspected flaw in Antonio Blanco's argument. It implied a whiff of elitism, but before I could respond the phone rang.
The artist excused himself and picked up the receiver. There was a rapid conversation in Indonesian and then he put the phone down with a look of regret. "My dear," he said, "that was my agent in Jakarta who tells me my paintings are being demanded by the Americans and I must return to work and not stop until I am finished painting for this dreadful exhibition."
He offered me a fleeting smile as he jumped up from his chair. "Not even if I catch on fire, he tells me. So my dear I must go."
The famous artist reached both his long elegant hands across the coffee table and took hold of my reluctant one.
"Don't look so glum," he said, "being at the rich man's beck and call is the price you have to pay. You should well remember that, when you long so for success. But you know as well as I that it is not the art they want my dear, it is market value they seek. Those who really need our art can never afford us. It is one of the great ironies of capitalism don't you think."
Antonio Blanco hurried off then towards the curtained door that led to his studio. He was waving further goodbyes over his shoulder as he went, but then at the door he stopped suddenly and turned fully around. "By the way," he called back across the large visitors' room. "My dear, did you not come here to interview me?"
"Yes," I answered, "I did."
"Just as well for me you didn't get your interview," Antonio Blanco called cheerily. "I think I am a rather pretentious, self-opinionated man and it may have shown. I wouldn't have wanted too many to know that."
I was sure I could see a mischievous sparkle in the man's eyes even from that distance.
I could think of nothing else to do but smile back and when I returned my attention back to Senora Blanco, even though her eyes still seemed occupied with something that was happening out in the garden, I was surprised to see her smiling also.

(An almost interview with Antonio Blanco, Ubud, Bali,1991)

A cat called Jasper

2010-06-07T00:08:00.002+10:00

Ron’s neighbour asked whether he would look after their old cat overnight so that he and his wife could go to Queenstown for the funeral of a close relative. Ron would have preferred to have a quiet night, because the day before he’d badly twisted his ankle when foolishly demonstrating to his six-year-old niece how to execute a cartwheel on a wet lawn.
‘We’d take him with us,’ his neighbour said, ‘but you know what Jasper’s like.’
Yeah, Ron knew the cat all right. Very depressing, it was. Old Jasper was about as ugly a cat you’d ever see. He was incontinent, almost bald and as far as Ron was concerned about five years past his use-by date.
The only thing that made him stand out from the crowd of decrepit felines was his tail, a glorification that had somehow dodged the hair-destroying pestilence. His tail was quite splendid actually; it reminded Ron of a black feather duster.
The subliminal message Ron got from his neighbour’s request was that it was better for the cat to crap in his house rather than in their car.
Against his better judgement, Ron finally acquiesced. Ron was the sort of bloke who acquiesced quite a bit. His ex-partner Jane left him because of that trait. She had put it down to a physiological condition that he had inherited from his parents, a backbone that was made of rubber. ‘All three of you would bend before a temperate breeze,’ she said on that last day as she slammed the door behind her.
And it was the same lack of fortitude in Ron’s essential being that he’d also said yes that morning to his dubious pal Jacko who rang him and offered to come around and stay the night. ‘I heard you’d busted your ankle,’ Jacko said, ‘I thought you might like a bit of company. I could bring around a few stubbies and a pack of cards and cheer you up.’
That particular scenario was as unwanted as looking after the cat. Jacko was well known to hit the grog more than somewhat and the last time he stayed he ruined Ron’s best pair of fitted sheets when he passed out while smoking a fag in the spare room bed.
That would have been the time to disassociate Jacko from his circle of friends and the same went with Jasper’s owners who often called on him to borrow this or that without any reciprocality. He chastised himself for not saying a very definite no in both cases. He should have, but he didn’t.
Ron admitted it to himself that Jane was probably right; it was a matter of his innate softness, as always it was easier for him to say yes than to say no. Saying it quite cheerily on the surface but deep down there was mostly a great deal of nervous apprehension.

Jasper and Jacko arrived about the same time. Jacko carrying his sleeping bag, a dozen stubbies of beer and a pack of cards, and the cat arriving in a wicker basket along with his four tins of special dietary food, his silver bowl, three bottles of coloured pills and a vet‘s chart on how to dispense them.
With final farewells that would have done justice to a favoured cherub rather than a scraggy, balding moggy well on its way to a heavenly cattery, his neighbours drove away still shouting orders out the window of their car on how to make dear old Jasper happy and comfortable.
Bloody hell, Ron told Jacko, ‘I’m going to be a day/night nurse for a bald-backed, incontinent cat.’
‘No mate, no worries,’ Jacko said. ‘I’ll put old Jasper in the laundry with the back door open a crack. I’ll leave enough for him to eat and drink and he’ll be able to stagger in and out at will, and then I’ll come back and cook you the beast meal you’ve had since Jane left you.’
It all sounded so fine and dandy, so why was it that deep down Ron felt that niggling sense of foreboding once again? But then, his demeanour was somewhat ameliorated later that evening when Jacko had stir-fried a reasonable meal and catered most dutifully to Jasper’s wants and needs. Ron was happy enough to drink a couple of stubbies and play poker till midnight when he gave in to his aching ankle and went to bed. But not before he had established a heartfelt promise from Jacko not to smoke inside the house and to check out the cat before he retired.
‘No worries,’ Jacko assured him, ‘I’ll clean out his crapping dish fasten the door and let him out first thing in the morning.’

Ron found it hard to go to sleep that night, what with his throbbing ankle and residual doubts, and when he did finally drift off in the early hours, not surprising his dreams were very erratic, at one time almost pleasant, and then slipping into a nightmare with crippled cats crawling and scratching around his bedroom floor, meowing plaintively.
Then it was Jacko’s turn to come charging into his dream. Drunk as the hooniest of hoons, car horn blaring, he was chasing decomposing, cat-like obscenities out on the road in his dilapidated jalopy - shouting hysterically as he mowed them down one after the other.
Ron woke abruptly, the sounds still echoing in his head. It was two in the morning and he could hear Jacko bumping around out the back and muttering to himself. Something was wrong. In rising panic Ron lumbered out of bed, slid into his slippers and hobbled into his living room where he found Jacko standing irresolutely by the laundry door with the very limp and bedraggled body of Jasper in his arms.
Jacko thrust the corpse forward and tried to explain what had happened. ‘I was a bit pissed mate, I must have not closed the door properly. I woke up when I heard a car horn blaring and tyres skidding. I rushed out into the road and there was this guy standing in front of his car staring down at Jasper in disbelief. It was like he’d just knocked down the devil incarnate. He told me he was heading home after a wild night out and came across this apparition that looked like a giant black maggot with a feather duster stuck up his bum crawling across the road. He said he thought it was one of his deliriums and tried to drive right through it. He was surprised when he felt the bump of a solid body.’
Ron stared at the ghastly, sagging corpse in Jacko’s arms; it seemed even in death that the cat emitted some kind of evil miasma. He felt completely drained of any caring for anyone or thing. He was acting like an automaton in his strident insistence that he and Jacko spend the next hour blundering around in the dark with a spade, looking for a soft patch of soil in the garden to bury the cat and be rid of it forever.
It was only when it was finally done that they both staggered back to bed. Jacko in the spare room fighting off a brain-destroying hangover and Ron, wide awake, constructing in his mind what he was going to say to his neighbours on their return. But not without some satisfaction that he had at least buried their obscenity for them.
He went off to sleep finally with his mind so shut down that no dream good or bad would have dared to enter his subconscious. When he woke at nine the following morning he was pleasantly surprised to find that through some unexplained miracle, his ankle had stopped its painful throbbing. He even convinced himself that the combination of events of the previous night had done something good for both that miserable old cat and for humanity in general.
As a matter of fact you could say he felt good – until that was his tranquil mood was shattered by Jacko’s terrible howl from the spare room. He hobbled in to see what was wrong. Jacko stood at the window staring out. He was pointing a trembling finger at something in the garden and gibbering incoherently.
Ron followed his gaze and there it was, the residual horror of the night before - the exposed tail of Jasper, upright and brushy, waving frantically back and forth.
‘Bloody hell,’ Jacko groaned, ‘we buried the poor bugger alive.’

Of course, Jasper couldn’t really have still been alive. How would it be possible? On closer inspection it turned out that the phenomenon was caused by a trick of the morning wind blowing old Jasper’s carelessly exposed tail back and forth. And, though only a temporarily confusion in two men’s minds who had suffered a very bad night, it should be said that such a spectre was so symbolically powerful, so extravagantly bizarre, it could well have turned a man’s mind – or two men’s minds if it came to that.
In Jacko’s case, having confronted the full consequences of the demon drink he decided there and then to give up the grog. No way did he ever want to chance such a mind-bending experience ever again.
And as for Ron, well, from that time on he refused all offers to give, to give in, or lend, or do, or help anyone, no matter who asked and how much supplication was applied, or urgently the proposition couched, he would definitely, absolutely, intractably refuse.
You could say, after that night, whereas Jacko turned into a bit of a wowser, Ron turned from being a real soft touch into a real hard bastard.

Saroyan take...

2010-03-01T23:26:00.003+11:00

Maskells Hill
Dear Michael de V, I always thought when learning to write that it was good idea to copy the style of other writers. That way one learns something about their style of telling. This story was a take on Saroyan and all in all it turned out to be a pretty good story in its own right, so I’ll pass it onto you and anyone else who visits this blog.

WHAT YOU KNOW

(Forgive me William Saroyan)

1962
A second cousin of mine called Joey, who thinks of himself as an up-and-coming writer of some substance, rings me up last week and suggests we go for a drink in this sleazy little bar where writers hang out on Fifty Second Street. The only time I ever hear from Joey is when he’s frustrated over something or other. I had a bit of time on my hands so I listen attentively to what he has to say and I guess I’m just thankful that it’s not going to be one of his personal visits to my room. Last time he visited he drank my week’s supply of Uncle Elbe’s moonshine whisky and puffed away my last packet of smokes.

“I’ve got writer’s block,” he tells me over the phone. “I’ve got this guy on a ledge ten floors up who’s threatening to end his empty life. I got this Irish cop trying to talk him down. You know the kind, cousin Bill? One of those sentimental Irish cops who still hears the sounds of Irish jigs in his head twenty years after he left Donegal.”

My second cousin is getting very upset because his character the cop, though well rounded, is not doing very well in the savior business. Joey can’t find the right words for the cop to say to talk the guy down from the ledge. To overcome the situation cousin Joey tells me that he calls in a new character. This time it’s the potential jumper’s ex-girl friend. He reads out over the phone what he has the cop tell the girl.

‘I’ve been workin’ at it for two whole hours ‘an ’nuttin’ I say gets troo. He jes don’t wanta listen. Ain’t nobody listens at-tall in th’ Big City, not even a jumper. But then who knows, goils being goils wit’ their tender hearts an’ lovely smiles, might jus’ talk him down. But den I ain’t holdin’ me breath goil, cos this guy is empty of hope, he’s lost his dreaming in a city that takes no notice of lost dreams. He’s got to woirk it out hisself. Nobody’s goin’ to woirk it out for him, they’re not. But, if you tink yer can do it goil, then the best of Irish luck to yer.”

Not bad hey, Joey says. I like those Irish accents. They make good reading. But this girl I bring is of a different mould. She got what it takes. I call her Charlotte. She comes from North Dakota where her old man is a potato farmer who’s lived out feast and famine and blizzards all his life and he’s passed the iron in his blood on to his daughter. Charlotte’s hot to talk him down. She remembers her boy friend’s soft side – his passionate words and hard body when they make love on his narrow iron bedstead in his sleazy little flat with the peeling wallpaper and where the gas-ring’s never worked properly and the cold water tap runs as much rust as it does water.

Joey is getting a bit hoarse in his telling. He’s beginning to sound a bit desperate. “I mean it’s good stuff up to then isn’t it? So, where do I go now? You’re the writer, you should know about these things. How does the girl talk him down?”

“Know thyself, know others,” I tell him.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he says, “C’mon, be a good guy, they say you can find a plot in a used bus ticket. Be a Pal, where do I take this one?”

“You’re got to look in before you look out,” I tell him.

“You got to explain that to me personally,” he says over the phone.

So, because he is the youngest son of my second cousin once removed, Abraham, I go into the city and meet him at this writer’s joint on fifty second.

When Joey arrives he looks like he hasn’t slept a lot.His voice is edging on desperation,“How the Hell does this girl friend convince the guy’s life is worth living?”

I buy him a scotch on the rocks hoping it might help him and wait for him to drink it.
“Know thyself,” I tell him.

“F’Chrissake,” he says, “Where you going with that one? It’s the girl’s point of view I’m looking for. Gazing at my own navel’s not going to get me anywhere. I’ll tell you I’m desperate. I’ve got to get out of this one. This writing business is dragging me down.”

“Know thy navel and know other’s navels,” I tell him.

But he doesn’t take me seriously. He’s really on edge and lays his troubles on me for the following two hours, and because I’m a willful parasite I let him go.“It’s the issues I want to write about,” he confesses. “I want to write about suicides and crooked cops and wars and pestilence and poverty. I want to tell those rich sons of bitches that pay us peanuts for our labors what the real world’s about. I want to shake ‘em out of their apathy.”

I listen conscientiously and it’s skewed somewhere because his father is a successful scrap metal merchant who’s put his youngest son through college and is always grizzling about how his youngest son drinks too much and won’t join the firm. Joey lives in the loft above his parents’ garage and sponges off anyone who’ll give him a free lunch.

Joey’s still ranting when I leave him two hours later. He hasn’t been able to get any sympathy out of me so he’s switched his attention to an overweight cutlery salesman from Cincinnati and his spiky-haired New York girl friend that are as drunk as he is. When I get up to leave he doesn’t notice. He’s still trying to peddle his fantasies.
“I’m a writer,” I hear him say to his new found drinking friends. “I got this guy hanging fire over a two hundred foot drop an’ nobody’s come up with a way to talk him down. It’s a tough business, this story telling, but I’ll beat it you see if I don’t.”

At home - if you can call one room with lice infected wall paper, a single gas ring that doesn’t always work, a cold water tap that runs more rust than water and a hall-shared bathroom, home - I’m pretty well fired up. I sit down at my table, take the cover off my second-hand Remington and begin my next story. It’s called, Ten Storeys up and Writers’ Block.

It goes quite well for a while but the ending eludes me so I sit there staring at the peeling wallpaper for an hour or two until the phone rings. It’s the Captain from the Seventh Precinct. He tells me my would-be writer second cousin is dead. He tells me he jumped out of a hotel window down town. I tell him how shocked I am and I go back to my typewriter and finish the story.

Two weeks later I go to his graveside and whisper my story to him. “It’s about this guy, I say, who never got to know who he was and died because of it.”

INTRO TO BIRD THIEF

2010-01-17T01:23:00.001+11:00

By popular request – well four readers anyway – insist that I add the following memoir to my blog. This I am happy to do because I consider this work one of my best and most sincerely accomplished. I wrote it in 2004 and offered it to two literary journals but both weren’t interested. Both had, I might add, academic backgrounds and what would an academic editor know about honest to god story telling. Then I sent it off to Ralf Wessman at Famous Reporter, Ralf being in my mind one of the few editors who is attuned to what readers like, published it immediately. His common touch, reminds me of that wonderful editor Bruce Pascoe who edited Australian Short Stories through the nineteen eighties and nineties. Sadly now defunct. And I should like to add here with thumb firmly on end of nose and fingers extended like a cock’s comb that I have correspondence in my files from Amanda Lohrey and Nicholas Shakespeare who also thought it a humdinger

Intro

2010-01-17T00:56:00.002+11:00

EGG THIEF

What I know about birds I mostly gained from my father as we tramped the hills and gullies of Tasmania. An ardent Field Naturalist member and a keen amateur ornithologist he said that birds were put on this earth to amaze us with their beauty and their song. I was thirteen years old; he was fifty-five. At that age I wasn’t much interested in bird watching myself. Birds were birds as far as I was concerned. Some were big and some were small, some whistled and some squawked, and some - if you were unlucky - shat on you from a great height. No, I wasn’t there by choice, I accompanied my father on those jaunts for quite a specific purpose; I was his guardian - commissioned by my mother to make sure that he didn’t forget where, or even who, he was.

My father was a TPI war pensioner. He was shot through the neck during a bayonet charge in the final weeks of World War One. He lay on the battlefield all day and through the night, conscious but completely paralyzed. The following day the medics loaded him on to the truck with the rest of the dead. It was only through the alertness of one of the soldiers at the burial site that he was saved from the horrendous ordeal of being buried alive. The soldier felt that the body he lifted down from the truck still had warmth. He held a mirror to my father’s mouth and the trace of steam on the glass showed that he was still breathing.

It took four years for him to recover from his ordeal. According to my mother, a voluntary auxiliary nurse, who was a one of those who nursed him through his rehabilitation, his main motivation was to get fit enough so he could tramp through the wild areas of his island home checking out the wildlife. Though his right arm was paralysed and he had bouts of memory loss, his heart, legs and lungs were fine. In fact he could out distance me even in the hardest going. One of his well-remember sayings was: If you’re only tired we’ll keep on, if you’re exhausted we’ll take a rest.

Most Sundays during the springtime my father and I set out very early in the morning carrying our packed lunch, a long light rope, binoculars, a tomahawk, a small calico bag full of six steel spikes, a medical kit, a torch, a magnifying glass, a ball of string and a few small cardboard boxes packed with cotton wool. It wasn’t just the birds we were after; we were searching out their nests and stealing their eggs. And I was there with him, the most agile, and possibly the most suggestible of his four sons, his apprentice egg thief and tree climber.

We didn’t steal every egg we came across, just those remaining sets my father needed to add to his collection. The collection numbered over one hundred and seventy different species. It was reputed to be the most comprehensive collection that was ever assembled in Tasmania. He had been collecting the eggs since he was eight years old. The gem in the collection was the egg of a Tasmanian Emu, a species that had been extinct since the middle eighteen hundreds. He told me his own father had found the egg when he was young man. That it was a Tasmanian Emu’s egg is disputed in some quarters, but the egg was definitely smaller and a slightly different colour than the mainland variety. My father was an honorable man and I can’t imagine he would have concocted such a story even if his own memory was somewhat unpredictable.

Such was his drive I sometimes considered that his main ambition was to collect a set of eggs from every single Tasmanian bird species and that his jobs as an itinerant fruit picker and cane cutter and later a teacher, a bank teller, and a Company Sergeant in the Great War were mere impediments to that paramount ambition. Even at the age of thirteen I thought this rather an obsessive and forlorn hope.

My father and I covered a fair bit of territory in those days, sometimes not far from our home on the outskirts of Hobart and at other times to further destinations by car. Any place where there were heath lands, river grasslands, open bush, damp gullies, and the tall trees of the ancient forests whose height took your breath away. I often fantasized we were trekking through the Congo, the Amazonian Basin, the wilds of Patagonia and I don’t ever remember losing our direction, even though he never carried a compass or a watch. The sun, or failing light were good enough indicators of the time, and re-following those landmarks he’d mapped out in his head was good enough to guide us to our safe return. The fact that I was there to watch over him was becoming quite farcical.

There seemed that no place was without birds and if you stayed long enough and still enough they would emerge and invariably disclose to the patient watcher where their nests were. Many nests were high up and by planting spikes into the trunk of a tree and a rope tossed over a bough higher up; smaller trees were quite climbable. My father would sit at the base of the tree with his bird and egg-identifying book and I would call down the type of material the nest was made from and a description of the eggs. Usually he could work out what kind of bird it belonged to.

If that failed I would take one egg, put into one of the cardboard boxes and lower it to the ground on a piece of string. If it was a bird whose eggs weren’t in his collection, he would then decide whether they were freshly laid or too close to hatching to preserve the shell. This was simply done. By holding up the egg to the sun the level of development of the chick inside could be readily seen. If there was no sun, then shining a torch was almost as good. If the eggs were freshly laid they could be “blown” by boring a hole with a needle at both ends of the egg and giving a few hearty blows at one end. If too close to hatching we would replace them and leave the vicinity as soon as possible to avoid unduly disturbing the birds.

Though, as far as I remember, we only took a dozen or so batches of eggs that he didn’t already have in his collection. Three, I remember well. A Red-capped Plover clutch we found at the back of the beach at Marion Bay, another two eggs which he thought were the eggs of a Forty Spotted Pardalote (though they could have been the more common Spotted Pardalote) we found in a hollow on Bruny Island and a Bassian Thrush’s clutch we found in a rotting stump near the magnificent tall trees of a rain forest near the Arve River. On his insistence we always took the complete clutch because he told me that with all their eggs gone the birds would lay again.

And it was, I recall, this latter area around the Arve that I think my father revered the most. I remember him once sitting on a moss-encrusted log in the ancient forest shushing me to silence.

“Listen,” he said.

“But it’s so quiet,” I complained.

“Shush,” he said. “Listen, deeper.”

I cupped my hands over my ears, listening again. This time I heard in the distance the faint warbling of a thrush that floated on a wind you couldn’t even feel at ground level. The sound lent immensity to our surroundings.

“I nodded as if I fully understood because I knew that was what he wanted.

“It is the reason I survived those terrible years. All those days I spent in bed. All this,” he said, waving his one good arm about, “Is my church.”

Although, in spite of the attraction of such cathedral-like aspects as the rain forests with its giant trees; or those lesser trees that I could scale with ease and display my agility; my favourite sites were the river grasslands where there was an abundance of water birds and especially the habitat of the intricate weavers of dry grasses.

“How do they do it,” I had asked in awe at seeing my first Grassbird’s nest - so exact, so delicate in its structure, strung between a half dozen stalks of reeds, it swayed ever so slightly in the breeze. It was an intricate work of art.

“Ah”, my father said, “that is the question. I once saw two Wedge-tailed Eagles teaching their fledging to fly but I never saw a Grassbird chick getting a lesson in weaving.”

It was a question I haven’t found an exact answer to yet. Though in my father’s case it simply didn’t matter. He just accepted the marvels of nature as they were revealed...

It was only after his death in 1981 that I really understood how deeply he must felt about the wilderness. During a walk in the Florentine Valley with a friend some years after my father’s death, and remembering that I had walked the same track with him years before, we stopped when we heard a distant piping whistle from somewhere above. We looked up and there framed in the canopy of branches; high up in the cloudless sky was a white Goshawk circling the sun. It was a wondrous sight and with the sunlight filtering through its wings it was almost translucent. There seemed a mystical quality. We were enthralled and stood there completely immobile for several minutes until we heard a distant sound – not the warble of a thrush this time, it was the cough and splutter of a distant chainsaw starting up. Being once again reminded of the present day reality my heart sank. I felt I was losing something special and something personal. What would my father have thought of the present day method of clear felling in such an area? I wouldn’t have been too surprised if he’d taken up his .22 rabbit gun and gone to defend his “church” against the forces of ignorance.

As with everything else in my life; from what I do and what I see and what I hear and what I read, stories emerge; and so it was with my experience as an egg thief; some of these incidents were bordering on the mystical, some humorous and some frightening. One such story involved a disagreement between my father and the Tasmanian Museum in the nineteen thirties after he’d reported sighting a pair of Dollarbirds in the far northeast of Tasmania. He told the museum curator that the birds seemed to be in nesting mode. His observation was summarily dismissed. The record showed that there had only been two verified sightings of the Dollarbird in Tasmania since white settlement. My father was a stubborn man who would not back off. He had seen them and that was that. The following year he returned to the same area with one of his brothers and camped there for two weeks, but the birds hadn’t returned.

Knowing at the time he didn’t have a sophisticated camera I’d asked him once what he would have done if he’d seen them again?

“Maybe I would have shot one just to prove a point,” he said gloomily. Though I knew from experience it was an empty threat due more to his frustration that his word wasn’t accepted. He considered his word and his experience were irrefutable proof. The museum needed concrete evidence and he didn’t have any.

The second installment of the Dollarbird arose when my family and I were farming on the east coast and my father was visiting. My youngest daughter came home one afternoon and asked him about a bird she’d seen on her friend’s farm. It was a bird she’d never seen before. A bird as big as a starling, she told him, skewing along the windrows after insects like it was drunk.

“A cranky fan?” my father said.

“No,” she said, “It was bigger and noisier – a kind of bluish-grey with a red beak and white spots under its wings.”

We didn’t see much of him for the next three days as he went looking for his Dollarbird, unfortunately for him, again without luck.

But in some strange way he did get his point over to the Tasmanian Museum years after he was dead. In the time I lived in Cygnet during the nineteen nineties I had stepped out the back door on my way to the shops early one winter’s morning when right in the middle of the path lay the body of a dead bird. I had only seen such a bird as that in cages in Indonesia. I assumed it was some kind of escaped pet killed by the cold weather. But that bird wouldn’t leave my mind. I fretted about it for two days until I was driven by curiosity to find out what it was. I rang the museum and described the bird over the phone. I was asked to freeze it and bring it to the museum. It was eventually identified as a Dollarbird.

I must admit the following day I looked up at the sky with my sceptical eyes and wondered about all the amazing coincidences that had happened to me throughout my life. Was there some unstated law that threw up such unbelievable odds to make us reconsider our prejudices? Was Carl Jung right when he suggested there was no such thing as a coincidence, that it was a matter of syncronicity – an acausal connecting principle that would give meaning to a series of coincidences not explicable through notions of simple causality? Who knows? Of all the places that the Dollarbird could fall, it fell from out of a blue sky right at my feet. No doubt other birds could have lost their way and fallen somewhere in the mountains or in the deep forests, undiscovered, but even then that Dollarbird episode goes to the top of my list of unexplained phenomenon. And, as my father often said rather dismissively: “If it works, then it works, knowing why makes little difference.”

The humorous story that emerged still resonates today and continues to gives me enjoyment. My father and I had been searching the tussocks in a small valley close to Hobart for the nest of a Bassian Thrush when up flew a flock of small birds with yellow backs. I asked my father what they were and it was one of those occasions when the name escaped him. He told me that he would think of it later.

Later turned out to be the following Sunday, one of those dreadful days when I and my three brothers were warned to be on our best behavior because our grandmother was coming to share our Sunday’s roast. To us kids grandmother was the granny from Hell. My mother’s mother was a Methodist to her very core. Her attitude towards life was denial, where laughter, dancing and singing were inventions of the Devil. She wore veils and dark filmy dresses that gave her body no shape, no character, other than that of a formidable battleship presence that should to be avoided at all costs, especially if you were young. On the threat of no lollies or pocket money, or any largesse for the duration of our childhoods, we four boys sat silent and immobile, chomping away at our dinner. Half way through the fruit salad with icecream our father sat up straight with a sudden grunt. He looked across at me, his blue eyes alight with a sudden realisation and almost shouted it out: “Tits, that’s what they were!”

In the deathly silence that followed I could hear the mantelpiece clock ticking out the seconds. Our grandmother’s face had turned a sickly yellow. She looked like she was well on her way to a heart attack. The rest of my family was giving a fair impersonation of being catatonic. Nobody wanted to comment. And when one of my brothers dropped his spoon on the wooden floor it could have been a bomb going off. It shook me into action. I was the only one who knew what my father meant. I looked at him across the table and tried to keep the tremble out of my voice. “Those birds up at Ridgeway last week,” I said.

“Yes,” my father said, “Yellow-rumped Tits.”

It was all too much for my brothers who began an uncontrollable giggling. They were banished to the back yard where the giggles became a kind of suppressed whooping. Our grandmother didn’t finish her meal that day, she left soon after. My father drove her home still wondering what all the fuss was about. When she was gone my mother gave us all a generous heaping of icecream in the backyard. “We don’t want Mum’s helping going to waste, do we?” she said.

The frightening side to egg stealing came the following year when recklessly showing off my ability to climb, a branch snapped under my feet and I fell twenty feet to the hard ground below and was knocked unconscious. I was rushed to the hospital by ambulance and spent three days there, my head wrapped in bandages, bruised and aching. Fortunately there were no bones broken and no lasting effects other than an acquired fear of heights - or at least a cautionary attitude when it came to climbing trees. I hadn’t realized before that such a thing could happen. I began avoiding those weekend jaunts with my father. I made up excuses. I became unusually keen to play football for my school, or do my homework.

But pressure, or conscience, got through to me eventually. So one day in the following spring I set out again with my father on a nest hunt. Only this time, he emphasized, we were merely observing rather than stealing eggs. “Just a short jaunt,” he said, as we set off up towards the Hobart Waterworks. He told me that he’d seen two nesting birds there and they could have been Leaden Flycatchers. He told me he had a set of the Satin Flycatcher’s, which were more common, but the other Flycatcher had eluded him. He had seen several pairs but he’d never found their nest.

“I just wanted you to help me check it out,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get a set of eggs. Not that I’m asking you to climb after your accident last year.”

“I’ll climb the tree if it’s easy,” I said rather recklessly.

It wasn’t. It was in a Eucalypt tree in a dense gully at the back of the reservoir. The first branches began several metres up the clean bole of the tree - too large for me to be able to put my arm around it for support. The only hopeful feature was that another smaller tree was growing close alongside. Small enough, I surmised, for me to hang on with one arm as I straddled the trunk and if I could use the spikes as steps to a height where I could toss the rope over a branch above the nest I thought I might be able to do it. I had climbed more difficult trees, though not since my accidental fall.

Though I didn’t tell him that. If he thought I couldn’t climb the tree I wouldn’t have to tell him of my fear. For at least an hour we sat very still on the ground each one of us taking turns to view the two birds as they came and went. “See that! He’s got cobwebs in his beak,” my father said. “They’re putting the finishing touches to the nest now. Can you see its back? Is it dark grey or more to dark iridescent blue?” There was no way to tell, we were directly below and there was little light in the dense surrounding trees. “It’s no good,” my father said. “We can’t tell what it is. It’s not worth the risk of the climb – not knowing.” I readily agreed.

The following week I couldn’t concentrate on anything. My schoolwork, which had always been mediocre, was plummeting. I even tried to do a bit of homework to get that nest out of my mind. At night my dreams were to do with trying to fly and falling - and dragging my feet through ankle-deep mud in a dismal, endless swamp. I had to do something. So the following Saturday I arose before sunrise and set off towards the reservoir reserve carrying a rope, a bag of spikes and a hammer.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but I had to take another look. In the early morning light with no pressure to do or not to do, I stood at he bottom of the tree and felt optimistic. At first there was no sign of the birds, Leaden or Satin, but after a few minutes one of the birds came arrowing in. I saw its tail flick as it changed places with its mate, who then set off to catch its own morning insects. I made up my mind – it was now or never. Without thinking I hammered the first spike into the tree.

I had no memory of how I climbed the tree. The same way, I suppose, I had climbed trees before, one step, one hand, always keeping three grips at any one time and thinking of nothing else than the next move upwards. Even the monkey jump from one tree to the other I took with ease. And there was the nest in front of me with three eggs in it. I settled the eggs into the cotton-wool lined boxes I had in my pockets. “Thanks birds,” I said a little flippantly in my triumph. I’d seen in a movie once when the Native American Indian shot down his prey with an arrow and I copied him. But up there, in the cool morning air, even at that young age, I realized that the notion of thanking the beast he had slain for food and bird that I had robbed of its eggs was a human construct after all - to salve our conscience.

The next lesson I learned that morning was never to forget the salutary rule in climbing – it was much easier to go up than come down. I was turned backwards to the tree that I had to descend by. To turn around I had to stand with only a few gum leaves to hang onto, then take two steps along the branch and jump back to the other tree. That was when the fear really gripped me. That was when all my dreams of falling pierced me right in the heart. So I sat indecisive - perspiring. How long could I sit there? How long would it be before I lost my balance and fell? Who would ever find me? I sat and I sweated and I worried, for a very long time.

But then I remembered one of the few things my father told me about the war and his near mortal wounding. The fact that he had been shot down that day in 1918 didn’t surprise him. He knew his time was up because his mother had warned him in a dream during the night that he would be shot. In his dream he saw her standing on the parapet before him. She raised her finger in a manner he knew so well and waggled it before his eyes. He believed the message but he had no alternative: he had to go. He was the senior Sergeant and the highest ranked soldier still alive in his depleted Company. If he hadn’t have given the order and gone over the top with the rest of his mates he couldn’t have lived with himself.

Remembering all that gave me the strength I needed. If he could then I could. I stood up, balancing with my arms outspread, and I turned, took two steps and leapt across the gap, and, unlike my father, I was saved by the sturdy bough that I fell into.

I got home late for breakfast that morning. I didn’t care when my mother chastised me. And I wasn’t too surprised later when my father sadly affirmed that the eggs were the wrong kind of Flycatcher after all. I cared for his disappointment but not for mine. For hadn’t I had proved something that morning as my father had proved before me. Though what exactly that was I was never quite sure. But what I was sure of, that experience was a kind of catalyst, for even though my father and I still roamed the bush on and off for years after, we never cheated any bird out of its prime purpose in life - to go forth into the world and multiply…

ALLIE’S FAREWELL SLIDE

2009-12-29T00:35:00.003+11:00

The death of a family pet is always a trauma. However, sometimes that inevitable trauma is relieved by a most unlikely circumstance that somehow ameliorates the sadness of the occasion.

The family pet was a much-loved, tail thumping, sooky old Labrador named Allie, whose only two sins in his behavior patterns during his life was to bark at people wearing large hats and sometimes embarrassing his family by his inbred desire to rescue bathers from the sea.

He contracted arthritis in his back legs at the age of fifteen years and went downhill rapidly until he was almost completely immobile. Groaning became his chief occupation. Drugs did nothing for him, so driven by concern for his well being, our family assembled one day and, unlike our nervous politicians, we unanimously passed the Euthanasia Bill in my backyard. We thought it for the best and the vet thought it for the best and we presumed that poor old Allie would agree.

The following day after a lot of pampering and soothing words we took him to the vet who injected him with a lethal drug. Within a few seconds his groaning stopped and I’ll swear to this day that his last breath was a sigh of gratitude.

I had prepared a grave for him and bought a pencil pine to plant on top but our family couldn’t assemble until the following Saturday. The vet told us that he put Allie’s body in the cooler until then. What he didn’t tell us was that his cooler was set very low for when we picked up his body two days later poor old Allie was quite frozen inside a stiff plastic orange bag.

It’s what we use for such occasions, the vet told us. People find it less confrontational.

We carefully settled Allie in the back of my daughter’s wagon and off we went to the burial site in my back garden relating ‘remember how’ stories of the dog’s life on the way.

At the time I lived in Warwick Street just above Argyle and anyone who knows the area will realize it is quite steep. I’m not quite sure what happened when we lifted Allie out of the boot. Perhaps we were distressed at the occasion and not quite concentrating. Whatever, his body suddenly slid out of the plastic bag and took off down the street at a rate of knots that he’d never acquired during his life.

We watched in awe as his frozen body slid into the traffic in Argyle Street - running a red light I might add. I could hear brakes squealing, horns tooting and shouts of disapproval and disbelief issuing from inside the cars that were banking up behind each other.

The iced up carcass of Allie finished up in the gutter twenty metres beyond the intersection. Two young girls hanging over a picket fence added to the mayhem with a duo of high-pitched screaming as they bolded indoors when they realized the thing sliding their way was a frozen dog.

Several cars were jammed together because their drivers had climbed out to see what it was that had run out in front of them. Others, further back, began tooting impatiently. Road rage was pending.

When the cops turned up a few minutes later one took to sorting out the traffic and the other walked down to where my daughter and I were trying to slide the dog back into his bag.

He stood in front of us with arms folded, trying to take in what was going on. An older cop he was who thought he’d seen it all, but hadn’t. He cleared his throat and asked me to explain.

Well, I said. It was like this…

Due to the solemness of the occasion he did his best not to smile but I imagined that it wasn’t far away. I also imagined how the bizarre event would be described and relayed around the police station on their return. I mean what could we book him for? There’s no law about keeping a dead dog on a lead, is there? Right, but the dog didn’t have a licence to slide on the Queen’s Highway and it did run a red light! Yeah, sure, but imagine explaining that to a magistrate?

It would make their day.

Back in the real world the older cop who was still holding back his smile said finally: Well no real damage done, though you better bury him quick and try not to do it again, hey!

Yes officer, my daughter said, trying to beat him at his own game. And if we do we’ll be sure the traffic light is on green.

And that made the bugger smile.

Teaching Creative Writing. Fact or Fallacy?

2009-11-29T02:11:00.000+11:00

Dear Michael de V, I agree with you that far too many people (students?) are flooding the writers’ marketplace with their “thinly disguised biographies to the detriment of literature.” I have commented on this myself. In fact I wrote an article about it back in 2001. Except for a page excerpt that was published as a letter in Island 87, no one else wanted to give it an airing. Was it because it was a poor argument? Or is it because there is too much money involved in continuing this myth that anyone can learn to write creative fiction? Below is the article the letter was taken from and I challenge anyone who disagrees to come forward…

Teaching Creative writing:

What are these strange convolutions taking place in the literary world? Publishing houses, for example, reneging on their traditional role as the literary nurturers of emerging talent? How convenient for them to be able to drop all that tedious time-consuming work, sack a few editors and get on with the simple task of making money.

How propitious it is for the institutes of higher learning that our present day literary policy - presumably promoted by the Literature Board in conjunction with the Federal Ministers for the arts - have managed to sell to the gullible youth of this nation, the foolish (and I consider destructive) notion that anyone, if given the right tuition, can write literary fiction. And are we to assume from this outlandish supposition that it also means that anyone can learn to become a concert pianist, compose a credible orchestral symphony or become a first class portrait painter, if given the required tuition?

Rather than querying this very shaky assumption as one would expect, educational institutions have cashed in on it by offering painless, do-it-yourself, soft-option degrees for the multitudes of aspiring young (would-be) writers for a mere $15000. It seems to me that the most popular and ever growing literary activity in this country from the late nineteen eighties on, revolves around its learning rather than its doing.

Ah, but some might say, it pays the writers a decent wage for teaching creative writing. Well yes, but that’s not the point is it? Do we continue on with a fallacy just so writers can earn money? Wouldn’t it be better to simply pay promising writers some kind of remuneration to continue to write and stop the fudging of the facts?

I had the privilege in Adelaide once of sharing a coffee break with two women writers I admire, the late Thea Astley and Elizabeth Jolly. I remember clearly Elizabeth lamenting that her time to actually write was beginning to take second place to her teaching writing and talking about it at various festivals around the country.

These days, she said, much of her writing was done on an aeroplane heading across country for the next engagement. And, although it was probably a throw away comment, there is an underlying truth that such a process could have a deleterious effect on both the quantity and possibly the quality of literature.

It is a fact that most people involved in any branch of the arts should also have a day job to fall back on. However, I would suggest that hiding oneself behind the castles walls of academe is hardly the kind of social interaction that a creative person needs to stimulate his or her imagination. I painted other people’s houses for my day job where at least I was engaged in the hum of ordinary life.

But I repeat the central point; can creative writing be taught? I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that he could tell a class of students how to write all afternoon and he would just as likely to be wrong as he would be right. I agree entirely. In those few times I have attempted to explain how I write stories I found it impossible to come up with any kind of concise formula that could be followed. All I could say was that when the idea came I found the right voice(s) and began. How the story evolved was as much a mystery to me as it was to anyone else.

I agree that it is beneficial to show someone how to improve his or her sentence and story structure, but can a teacher tell someone else how to construct a personal contrivance that not only engages readers but also offers them up an individual’s unique view of the world? One might be able to teach the craft of writing but to my mind the creative process that brings a fine story into being, is indefinable.

And if anyone continues to believe that creative writing classes have any real literary value, look around at the results from nearly thirty years of its practice. Where is that multitude of storywriters that the system promised? Where is the wealth of writing from the thousands of students who have been taught to write? Where are the up-and-coming honest to God storytellers like Carey and Winton? Where are the replacements for the world-class women writers like Olga Masters, Amy Witting, and Beverley Farmer? And if I need to go further, where are the hundred or so storywriters that were represented in the Penguin Century of Australian Stories and the Harper Collin’s Personal Best volumes published in the late 1990s?

And, I ask, how did these writers learn to write? The same way, I would suggest, that all writers in the past learnt – by the simple method of reading and writing and reading and writing and by trial and error and making minimal use of advice from those writers they trust and all the time believing implicitly in their ability that they have something worthwhile to say.

Certainly there are writers emerging today like they always have, but I would suggest that those few with the necessary talent to grow into first class writers might be hard to find in the piles of the untalented, misguided wannabees cluttering up the editorial desks around this nation.

What a waste of the valuable time of the young and the bright who should have been concentrating on some other more profitable life’s endeavour that they might be naturally good at.

Reply to Peter K

2009-10-21T15:11:00.004+11:00

Peter K, you ask how I weave between dialogue and narration (or monologue). The fact is I learnt the style mainly from five writers – all American and all quite some time ago. 1920 -1940 I think. Damon Runyon, William Saroyan, O'Henry (for his surprise endings) Mark Twain (who said I remember everything from the past even if it didn’t happen) and somewhat later, Hemingway.

At an early age I found in those five writers the ingredients for story telling that I should follow. Simplicity, awareness, passion, drama, sensitivity, consideration of their subjects and easy telling. I added poetry and flow to all that and they took precedence over being strictly correct. Other bits and pieces I got from a myriad of sources, but the framework was laid down by those writers. I re-read Saroyan’s Best Stories and Runyan’s More than Somewhat at least once a year. Thank for your encouraging comments. I was going to do some gardening today but it’s raining again. Regards.

Re story ending

2009-10-19T23:37:00.003+11:00

Dear Peter B, this story taken from my book The Literary Lunch has the kind of ending that I was telling you about on the phone – like it could have ended with the words…sorting out the state of the art.’ But, with the ending I did give it, I was trying to add a further dimension to the clown’s character – a man who can overcome adversity rather than being just a poor put down clown. And it also throws up a greater intrigue - was the gun real or wasn’t it? Let the readers work it out. And because I didn’t network along with the rest that day I got the story did I not? And by the way, the other 17 stories in TLL are just as good.

Clown/Juggler/Magician

and the Literary Barbecue

I first see him on the brow of the hill looking down on us. Even at that distance it is possible to recognise that it is a male figure and that by his attitude he is contemplating possibilities. But of what, I have no idea.

But then my attention is taken by a nice line from the woman sitting on the collapsible canvas stool right in front of me. ‘It was so hot today even the flies seemed stunned,’ she says.

She is leaning back against the rough bark of a Jelly Palm and addressing her friend who sits on a carry-rug at her feet but the voice is loud enough to encompass others in the vicinity who may be interested in her brief revelation. She is holding a transparent plastic cup in one hand and a sausage in the other. Both she and her friend are dressed in smart pant-suits of earthy toning reminiscent of Bali. Having made her point she lowers the sausage and frowns in the general direction of the setting sun. ‘Ah, Adelaide,’ she drawls, and there seems both awe and regret in her following sigh.

Her friend nods acknowledgment as she beats at the hot, still air with her Writers’ Week program, and they both lapse into a contemplative silence. Beyond the tops of their nicely tinted hair (perfect yet, in spite of the heat), I see the distant, dark figure moving down the springy bank of grey buffalo grass towards us; although at this point there is some doubt in my mind that the crowd gathered around the barbecue is his eventual goal, for there appear to be several shifts in his intention. A moving first to the left of the crowd then a cutting back to skirt to the right.

He has a loping sort of a walk, and a leaning, as if he may be favouring an old injury, and when once again he changes direction — this time heading into the very centre of the crowd — he is caught briefly in full silhouette against the setting sun. A bent stick of a man with a dome-shaped head. It seems now that rather than moving towards us he is simply growing — looming upwards out of the blaze of evening light.

It isn’t until he is quite close that I realise the shape of his head is due to the fact he is wearing a bowler hat with an unusually narrow rim. Underneath this curious object his painted paste-white face is covered in red and green spots. Black brows ride ridiculously high over each eye and curl around to fade eventually into the spotted hollows of his cheeks. The general effect is an unyielding expression of sickly surprise, which will undoubtedly surmount all other expressions. No joke, no matter how hilarious, or pain excruciating, could possibly crack through that fixed intention.

As he swings out of the sun’s glare other details emerge. His top half owes quite a deal to the tradition of the cockney ‘Pearly King’. Buttons of many shapes and hues decorate his frilled dress shirt in a series of Vs and scrolls that could have mystical symbolism, and his bottom half is clad in a black leotard, which sports random jagged holes through which rising welts of pinkness lend what is possibly an unintentional provocation of skin and flesh.

I see he is carrying a silken brocade bag with leather straps slung over one shoulder. He bends slightly with its weight and I realise this accounts for his strange, lopsided walk. He stops, finally, directly in front of the two women in the pant-suits, lowers the bag onto the grass and immediately begins taking several items from it. But his concentration is elsewhere, for as his hand dips in and out of the bag he continues to peer about with little shifts of his head. He reminds me of someone unpacking a bag of groceries while they are watching television and I realise then that underneath the facade of painted surprise there are rapid calculations taking place. This man is a professional — a performer preparing to engage in his legitimate trade and he expects a just financial reward like everyone else.

With his paraphernalia finally settled he stands upright and, like a swimmer on the blocks, his hands, arms, shoulders, droop and flick. His neck stretches and retracts. His eyes fall eventually on the two women under the Jelly Palm. He catches the eye of the one sitting on the stool and despite his surprised eyebrows he affects an expression that is at once cheeky, sad and appealing. ‘Ullo Maa-dum,’ he says, and the two simple words border on hilarity — restrained hysteria lurks in the quivering of his lips. He bends suddenly and whips a hideous light-green spotted handkerchief out of thin air. The spots look like dried snot randomly scattered across the handkerchiefs surface. He sweeps it up to his nose and blows noisily and then with the same spectacular flourish passes it on to the woman.

Her instinctive response is to take it, but she suddenly realises what she is doing and withdraws her hand hurriedly as she laughingly shrieks her disapproval. The rejected handkerchief disappears as mysteriously as it had appeared. The clown leans closer to her. ‘I am sorry, Maa-dum, I could have sworn it was yours because you have one just like it tucked into the collar of your exquisite little outfit.’

The handkerchief re-appears and flutters under her nose and she again rocks backwards with little screams of protest. She tries to hide her embarrassment by covering her face with pale, delicate hands. The clown immediately flicks his attention to the second woman, whose tentative smile displays uncertainty. She is not sure whether she should implicate herself or not. But she hasn’t the choice, for he lunges forward, the obscene rag out-thrust. In unison both women sway away from it with further cries of protest.

The noisy hilarity has had the effect the clown intends. With a quick, backward step and a swinging glance he includes several more curious onlookers with his cheeky expression of surprise. His hand dives into his bag of tricks and comes out holding a cardboard carton of eggs. He grabs up a handful and holds them up for the scrutiny of the growing number of uncertain participants.

‘Are they real?’ he asks. He waves a hand into the air and an egg drops. He catches it neatly on his shoe. ‘Ooh!’ someone cries and as more people glance towards the agonised sound he repositions himself to a spot that takes advantage of their interest. ‘Are they real?’ he calls again. Conversations are cut as more heads turn. There is an increasing sense of anticipation as he begins to juggle several of the eggs. Again one slips and falls to perch precariously on his outstretched toe. He is now juggling and hopping in circles. There is a settling taking place in the crowd’s attention and an increasing hush as more eggs flip through the golden evening light. Higher and wider, spinning up and arcing down. His hands flash, to the right, to the left, above his head, between his legs. He projects the wayward egg back into the concentric swirl of flying objects. He is dancing, backwards and forwards, his body swaying, twisting, contorting into quite amazing shapes.

‘Are they real?’ he shouts breathlessly. A hand flashes out, just in time to save a breakage on the shirtfront of a mesmerised watcher. No one yet dares to answer. Eggs are flying perilously close to heads, to arms, to bare shoulders. A woman in a white dress cringes with a moan of protest and several men in the forefront grin bravely, holding their ground, books and clip folders raised to protect light-toned safari suits.

Juggler/clown/magician, he does a quick pirouette, rips the narrow-rimmed bowler from his head and lets the eggs fall one by one into it. The crowd groans, envisaging disaster as he bends with a swirling flourish to finish. Is it a momentary lapse of concentration due to his flush of triumph or a further deliberate act of perversity in the name of entertainment that he replaces the bowler on his head? The crowd waits breathlessly for a result. Will the smashed eggs dribble through the rim and down his face and neck?

He waits. Stretching expectation to its very limit. Then casually he removes the bowler and slowly turns it upside-down. Nothing happens. He shakes it vigorously and eventually holds it out for general scrutiny. It is undeniably empty. He looks surprised and so do they. There are several sporadic bouts of appreciative clapping, especially from the two women whose attention he had first attracted. They seem to expect some proprietary right to share in his modest success. They step forward to congratulate him personally.

But as yet our clown has not been paid for his undeniable expertise. Admiration is not enough. He places the hat on the grass and whips out a water pistol from under his decorated shirt. His voice mocks aggression. ‘Okay you lot,’ he snarls, ‘put your money and your valuables into the hat or yer get a jet of filthy Torrens water fair between the eyes.’

Polite (albeit nervous) laughter ripples through the crowd. Half a dozen coins flick into the hat. Juggler/magician/clown! highwayman; he is not impressed. ‘Pathetic,’ he snarls. He sweeps the gun around again. Heads and bodies sway away to avoid the meagre jets. ‘Give, give.’ A few more coins flutter towards the hat. There seems genuine surprise expressed in his hand-on-hip stance as he gazes down into the hat. Then with an exaggerated shrug he suddenly bends, dives his hand back into his bag and comes up holding another handful of eggs which he promptly begins passing out to those nearest him. With the pistol waving again, he indicates the eggs should be held high. ‘Up, up, swines.’

I see some of the more mistrustful participants pass the eggs on to anyone who will take them. He continues to move quickly around the circle, taking hold of hands, re-adjusting heights. I recognise several well-known writers holding up eggs for other well-known writers and their friends to see. Editors and literary agents pass tolerant smiles between each other as they wait impatiently.

The water pistol squirts aimlessly in their general direction as he again tries to extract the required answer from them. ‘Are they genuine farm-fresh eggs? Sirs, Madams?’

Beyond his imploring, perambulating frame, I see two small boys move in to explore the discarded bowler lying in the grass. The clown’s voice rises to a crescendo. ‘ARE THEY REAL?’

‘No,’ shout the kids. They have found the eggs in the hat’s lining and are banging them together. One boy holds an egg above is head. ‘Ya, they’re made of rubber.’

Our clown swings around and drives the boys off with his water pistol. They scuttle away to safety, still jeering. With one quick notion he whisks the bowler into his brocade bag. His pistol is left on the ground. One of the boys returns, swoops it up and aims it at the clown. Two quick squirts hit him in the face. The crowd applauds. The boy who has got the laughs for being so clever continues to squirt and gets more laughs and claps.

Our clown acknowledges the kid’s smartness by offering him an exaggerated clap too, but I am close enough to hear his urgent plea. ‘C’mon kid, fair go. I need the gun for the next trick.’

The boy backs off, still squirting.

Clown/magician/juggler/desperado; he glances quickly around the crowd. Concentration is eroding rapidly. Arms are beginning to falter above heads. Desperate measures are called for; he grabs an egg from the nearest hand and tosses it into the air. It arcs and falls. He heads it neatly. Orange and silver slime dribbles own his surprised face. A few people laugh. Someone even manages a lone clapping. I suspect from its direction it’s one of the two women in pantsuits; remaining true.

There is an increasing sense of frustration as the clown begins to stalk the boy through the crowd. ‘C’mon kid, quick, I need the gun.’ He holds out his hand, pleading. The boy is not impressed. His role as tormentor has already been condoned by most. He slips deeper into the forest of legs, reappearing occasionally to deliver the odd shot in the direction of the pursuing clown. The crowd, deprived of further entertainment, returns to its own pursuits. A prize-winning author, cheekier than the rest, cracks her egg onto the barbie hotplate. So inspired, two lesser-known writers follow suit. Three eggs (they are real after all) sizzle alongside the next batch of sausages.

At the crowd’s edge I see the clown returning with his bowler tucked under his arm. There is no sign of the water pistol. Despite my earlier opinion that the fixed painted surprise could override all other expressions, there is a distinct scowling.

He stands for a few seconds in his old position, looking around. The small, huddled groups seem even more impenetrable than when he first arrived. This time his hand-on-hip stance seems to express genuine antagonism as he spies the eggs sizzling on the barbecue. With great deliberation he tips the few coins out of his hat onto the dry, dusty lawn. No one notices the gesture. He grabs up the remaining eggs, real or otherwise, stuffs them into his bag, spits at nothing or no one in particular and lopes off in the direction he had first come from.

I glance around. Hot sausages dripping sauce (looking like blood) are squeezed into open mouths. A fairly well known writer is waving his sandwiched sausage under the nose of a little known editor of a small magazine. The editor counter-gesticulates and looks perplexed when he finds he is clasping a forgotten egg in his hand. One of the boys who uncovered the magician’s trickery is on his knees on the lawn scrabbling after the discarded coins. The other boy is showing off his new water pistol to his admiring parents. I decide I am not hungry enough to burrow my way into the tight throng around the Barbie so I leave them to it — sorting out the state of the art

Later that evening I pass another crowd assembled on the concrete at the back of the Festival Centre. I see the clown/juggler/magician holding a handful of eggs for all to see. ‘Are they real?’ he shouts.

There are many tourists present. An entire clan of Aborigines sits astride a concrete wall. There are off-shift bus drivers and office workers and ordinary families taking in the hot night air. There are kids galore, of all colours, shapes and sizes. ‘Yes,’ they chant in unison. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

Our clown, despite his benign, fixed expression of surprise, seems more confident, more aggressive. He holds the eggs high with his left hand and in his other hand I see he is holding a new gun—black this time and shiny. He is waving it under the noses of those kids who come too close. Forcing them off his patch.

The gun, like the eggs, looks surprisingly real...

2009-10-06T23:12:00.001+11:00

The real Mr Eddy

My dad was a disabled veteran from the war with a wife and four sons to keep on an inadequate pension. Because of his circumstances the spin off was he got a few perks from the kindly citizens of our small city. One of those perks was a free haircut for him and his four boys down at Eddy’s. Eddy, or Mr Eddy to us boys, had a two-room barber’s shop down town. There was an opaque glass wall and a door dividing the two rooms. When you stepped in from the street there was a counter to one side with all kinds of tobacco, chocolates, combs, brushes, hair oils, dandruff eliminators and all things to do with men’s toiletry.

To the very front of the counter there was an array of chewing gums set out somewhat enticingly in their boxes and I, probably along with other boys, used to nick a packet of that chewy on the way out when Eddie was out the back engaged with someone’s hair. I kidded myself that Eddie was well off enough not to miss just one small packet each month. Chewing gum was a luxury my family couldn’t afford. Though I must admit I did it with some guilt. I mean he was cutting my hair for nix, but that fresh hot tangy hit of peppermint was something I just couldn’t resist.

Mr Eddie cut our hair mostly on Mondays after school because it was his slackest time. He called it his belated service to all those brave men who went off to the war to fight for their country. Those brave, brave men, he’d say and shake his head. I began to think Mr Eddie had a really soft side. On Mondays, for instance, he always had his radio on a music station - orchestral music mostly. He told me he loved all kinds of music. I remember one evening when there a whole lot of stringed instruments playing ever so sweetly in the background he suddenly stopped cutting my hair and said with some feeling: If music be the food of love, play on.

Shakespeare said that, he told me. Do you learn about Shakespeare? I shook my head. You will, he said, you should. That bard said almost everything there was to say about life. Then he went back to snipping and humming away with the music in the background. I thought I’d ask my teacher about Shakespeare. He sounded pretty grand.

Mr Eddie also had a fondness for quoting poetry by Banjo Patterson or Henry Lawson, or some such. He sometimes spouted a few lines from their poems when he was snipping away at my hair. Music and the poetry, he told me once, made his life worth living.

But it was only on Monday evenings he said those sorts of things. My dad was surprised when I told him. Funny thing that, he said, Eddie was all sport Saturdays. My dad told me that what Eddie didn’t know about sport wasn’t worth knowing. Damn it, my dad said, that bloke could predict winners better than the local paper’s sports journalist yet he never went to see a game in his life. He’s a bit of a genius when it comes to sport, my dad reckoned.

So I worked out that there were two sides to Mr Eddie. He liked poetry and music but he also wanted to be one of the boys. Just about all his men customers worked at the canning factories, or the shoe factories, or the Zinc Works and shopping emporiums and hardware stores. Those men, my dad said, who through the week sweated their lives away for the captains of industry. They congregated in Eddy’s shop and sipped a beer or two out of sight, chewing over the sporting fat before either going to the game or home to their family responsibilities. According to my dad the excuse Mr Eddie gave for not going to the footy was that his customers kept him too busy cutting their hair. It’s the beer you blokes drink, Eddie quipped, it irrigates your scalps. How can I take Saturdays off?

Well, that was he said on Saturdays, but I knew there was a different reason. Mr Eddy didn’t go to any sport, be it athletics, or cricket, or any place where able-bodied men hit or kicked a ball about because of one simple fact - he hated all sporting activities because of his own affliction. He had one leg shorter than the other. The different lengths of his legs was well known, you could see the built up heel. You could hear it thump on the floor. Everyone took it for granted, but Mr Eddie didn’t. It’s all right to talk sport in theory, he told me, but being there, watching and thinking what could have been, was too much.

He told me all about this when there was only me and him in the shop. Me, a boy of twelve, and him a grown man; it was a somewhat unusual friendship and a friendship that came about in an unusual way. I once showed him a story that I’d written at school about the war and how my dad got shot. He sat in the vacant seat next to me and read it from start to finish. When he read it I was surprised to see his eyes water up. Then he got up and went across to a cupboard and opened it. I heard him blowing his nose. When he came back he was carrying a new packet of paper towels as if that’s what he went for.

He asked me if I got a good mark? I told him yes. I told him that I was the best at writing stories in the class. My teacher Mrs Peach often lent me books to read. She expected me to become a writer. He nodded his approval and from that day on he used to talk to me about himself and how he felt about things. He said I would understand because I had the sensitivity of someone a lot older.

He told me once that he cut the hair of all the returned soldiers and their sons and learnt all about sport because he felt so guilty that he had to stay home cutting hair when all his able-bodied friends went off to the war. Some came back and some didn’t, he told me. It was all so terribly sad. He said that he would have cut the hair of all the soldier’s daughters too but that he was a single man and it wasn’t a good idea. Someone would see something bad in that. There are some people who see bad in everything, he said. I think it’s because they are unhappy with their lives. I’m unhappy with my life but I don’t think bad thoughts about others.

He also confessed to me once that he would have liked to marry but who would want a man with one leg shorter than the other. But the war I said…like my father, he was shot up and he got married. There are lots of men without legs, without arms, in wheel chairs even and a lot of good women around who would marry them - widows and things, lots of them.

Ah, he said, but they are men who went to war. I’m just an old stay at home cripple who does his best by cutting the hair of the wounded and the widow’s children. I do my best but it’s not enough.

I was getting quite heated. He just didn’t know how good he was. But you cut hair and you entertain with your knowledge about sports and things, I insisted. Men come here to listen to you. You’re a…I couldn’t think of the word I was searching for but I knew there was one.

He wasn’t convinced. He shook his head and finished cutting my hair. He took off my white cape and shook it out on the floor. He stared down at it on the polished linoleum, pushing it around with the toe of his boot as if he was trying to figure something out. Then he gave a big sigh picked up his brush and set to work whisking the hair from my shoulders with an unusual vigour. Ah, he said finally when he put the brush away, if you only knew just how much I hate sport.

I left him that night sweeping up the hair on the floor. He seemed to have forgotten I was there. I put on my jacket and quietly left. In the outer shop the display of the neatly packaged chewing gums on the counter seemed less enticing than before. To hell with tangy peppermint, I thought. I walked on by and through the door and out into the sun-setting street.

Mombai Calling

2009-09-30T23:44:00.002+10:00

We’ve all had them - those calls from a distant place, trying to sell you an update of this or that – you know something brand-spanking new that will change your life from one of mediocrity to one of instant heart-stopping excitement with this new get up and go … whatever…

When I first got these phone calls my early responses were like: Sorry, not interested and I put the phone down. But, as you all know, being polite doesn’t get them off your back. They don’t cross your name off the list just because you’re polite and the calls go on.

The next set of my responses were a little more creative: Like no, Mr Dean is not here, he’s gone to Queensland - or the Bahamas, or wherever else for the winter. No go, I’m afraid, it does not deter the professional. And what about you, the caller says, are you interested in this blah…blah…blah…

Others things I’ve tried are like: Sorry, I’m just the real estate agent doing a check. I’m afraid Mr Dean has flown the coup for destinations unknown owing a considerable amount of rent.

Or even better I found that pretending compliancy and saying hang on a tick and I’ll go and get him and then going to the shops instead does have some appeal. I mean it’s a way of getting your own back by letting them waste their time.

Some people tell me that they use invective to get rid of the calls, but I always understood that as a cop out and demeaning to both parties. And it doesn’t work anyway because there is always someone else to take up the challenge. Anyway, I didn’t just want to blast off haphazardly; I wanted a quid pro quo for my harassment.

So, because the rings went on regardless I upped the ante. I became more creative. I tried things like: Sorry, I’m ill and can’t be bothered with anything. Or, more potently: Are you the doctor? I’m waiting for his call. Please get off the line. I’m very ill. (All said in a very weak voice).

Well, they did get off the line but like insistent mossies in late summer they disregarded my pathetic swipes and came back the following week for another feed of my psychological blood. I had to lift my game once again.

So to be ready for the next inevitable assault I began studying up on exaggerated narrative. It went something like this: No, Mr Dean is not here but I am the neighbourhood burglar and I’m telling you Mr Dean’s house, which I am now ransacking, is bereft of any worthwhile goods and it appeared to me as an experienced burglar, that he is poorer than a Delhi street beggar. It is my belief that he can’t afford food, let only a new mobile phone. I’m telling you the guy’s not worth your attention.

Well, as creative as that might be, I’m afraid to say it still didn’t work. It was like the caller wasn’t listening to the words. No doubt part of the caller’s training was to completely ignore incidentals. Okay, I thought, I’ll make them listen. I’ll try a touch of pathos. I’ll twig their conscience - I’ll make them shed a tear or two. So next call I said; Mr Dean is not here. He has had a very serious accident and is in hospital and probably will not survive. You are invading his privacy at the moments before his demise. Please have mercy on his soul.

Failure again. Calls went on. It was like these anonymous callers were tuned into a different life. Perhaps I thought they aren’t real. In this world of advanced technology perhaps they are running a program with automatons. So I responded in a similar manner. I got I held a cup to my mouth and in the kind of non-human voice that your computer sometimes addresses you when it denies responsibility for an error, I said: This is Mr dean’s answering service. We are sorry to report that Mr Dean has been murdered by a drug-crazed Veterinary surgeon who wanted to cut out his body parts and sell them off to the Russian Mafia.

I must admit I enjoyed all those later answers I began to see it as a kind of exercise in creative writing. I thought up all kinds of responses in the next few weeks and the phone kept ringing and I kept upping the anti.

The climax came after a visit I had from an old friend that I hadn’t seen for a few years and who remembered that I liked vodka. He brought a bottle with him and even though I hadn’t drunk vodka for many moons I had several nips that afternoon. By the time he left I’ve have to admit I was thoroughly inebriated and my head was swimming with nonsensical thought patterns.

Ten minutes after he left, the phone rang, and judging by the foreign accent it was a call from afar – a female voice who asked if I was Mr Dean. And hyped up by vodka and creative thought patterns I let her have the full broadside. As far as I can remember the following conversation was a reasonable interpretation of the events that afternoon.

I say, no madam, I’m not Mr Dean, I am a policeman. Are you a friend of his?

Oh no, she says, I want to speak to Mr Dean because I have a very magnificent offer for him.

This offer, I say, is it anything to do with drugs?

Oh no, no, she says. I only want to talk to him.

Ah huh, I say, and what’s your name then? She tells me her name was Andira.

Well, Andira, I say, my name is Detective Sergeant Morgan from the Australian Federal Police and we are also after Mr Dean for an infringement of the class A drug laws and I have it here also he owes a considerable amount of rent at this address.

Mr Dean, I tell her in a very serious voice, is in a lot of trouble. Are you sure you’re not a friend of his?

Oh no, she says. I only want to talk to him about his Internet Provider.

Well, I say, why don’t you send him an email?

I’d better call my supervisor, she says.

After some seconds delay a man’s comes over the phone. Hullo, the male voice says, this is Chandra speaking. I am the supervisor of this call centre. To whom am I talking?

Australian Federal Police here Mr Chandra, I say. Detective Sergeant Morgan speaking. I hear you are looking for Mr Dean. Are you the one who is Mr Dean’s friend?

Oh no, he says, this is only a call centre.

And where is this call centre based, I ask?

Mombai, India, he tells me.

(Here I hold the phone away and ask question of my fictitious superior.)

Hey chief, I say, there’s a guy here from India who wants to talk to Mr Dean. Wasn’t the word from the CIA and the Interpol that he was sighted in Afghanistan heading for the golden triangle? Do you reckon he might have dodged back through India to put us off the scent?

(Indistinct mumbling in reply?)

Okay boss, I’ll tell him that. Mr Chandra, I say, Mr Dean has skipped Australia on a phoney passport. We have a big operation on to bring him to justice. You’re said you don’t know Mr Dean – is that right?

Oh no, I am just a supervisor in a Call Centre, he said.

But, I said, if you say you don’t know Mr Dean how come you are calling him?

His number is on our list, he tells me.

List, ay? What kind of list is this, I ask?

Our phoning list sir. We are supplied with a list from our Company.

We could check up on that you know?

Certainly sir, he says. You can check sir, but I assure you we are a legitimate call centre sales company.

Okay, I say, we’ll let you off the hook this time Mr Chandra, but if Mr Dean contacts you at any time you’ll let us know, won’t you? The contact address is Australian Federal Police, Canberra, Australia. You can get hold of us by phoning 1800 666666. Okay?

Oh, yes sir, I will certainly let you know sir – I certainly will. 1800 666666 you said. Is that right, is that right sir?

That’s right I say.

Oh thank you sir, he says, and hangs up.

I didn’t get a call for nearly a month after that and rightly or wrongly I kidded myself that there was one list, in one particular call centre in Mombai India, that has a big black mark through my name. A small step, but a step nevertheless…

Dear Michael re the story The Last Page

2009-09-22T15:24:00.005+10:00

Melbourne,October ‘08

Dear Michael, herewith the story I told you about. The first story I ever won a prize with and had published – in the Mercury Newspaper 1956, I think. I polished it a little but in the main it remains the same. The prize helped when I got back from Canada flat broke. There it was waiting for me all alone in my depleted bank account.

In retro, I do declare the story is not too bad at all. I note that even back then I took a stab at writing about things I didn’t really know. And in this case the main thing I tidied up in the story was the hospital experience – the morphine bit particularly. I know about it now, I only guessed then. I haven’t been shot of course, but with cops and robbers and cowboys and all that stuff it’s easy to imagine. Besides, not many people have been shot in the stomach twice and lived to tell the tale, so there are but few to correct me.

Which brings me to one of the problems I see with today’s stories. The number of times I’ve given up reading a story because it didn’t engage me – well, who wants to know about someone dad, mum, granny who made her own soap, or school, or I or me and my love affairs and disappointments, blah, blah, blah. Self-centered, first person mediocrity in a short story; even when written in the third person I can still see the writer behind the story. As far as I’m concerned these are the subject matter for the novel where they can be explored fully in a more emotional context. As far as the short story goes it seems like everyone has misinterpreted the meaning of ‘write about what you know.’ I mean it was OK for Hemingway but most of us have dull lives and what we know is dull, unless we bring our imaginations to bear and ask ourselves: What if?

Consider the Bronte sisters. Most of their work was dragged out of their vivid imaginations. Remember that story I wrote about the grandfather who stole a train so his grandson could experience what he experienced in his own youth. Well, I was writing about what I know but I interpret the meaning of that advice quite differently than seems the general consensus. I know what it’s like being a boy. I know what it’s like getting old and feeling a bit useless. I know what it’s like to fish in a river like old Gramp did. I know about frustration and being a bit pissed. I know that some rivers are getting polluted. I know what a country pub’s like. I know how to drive a car and also a train because of my experience with the C.P.R. in Canada. I know how a train’s whistle sounds in the distance, especially in the night. So very atmospheric, a sadness and longing and sometimes loneliness – many things, but for the boy, so exciting. That’s what I know. The rest, the storyline, was dragged out of my imagination. It didn’t exist until I made it so and what authenticated the story was my experience. What more can I say? Hope you enjoy it.

PS there is another story about that time I’ll send you. Seeing I was so fond of William Saroyan I couldn’t help spoofing him. I had heard, and I’m sure it’s true, that copying the style of an author you admire is a very good way of learning how a writer solves the problems of the trade, as it is with any trade. Anyway, I’ll send it on later when I’ve polished it a little. I think it had promise.

THE LAST PAGE

The impact was simultaneous with the shattering roar - the bullet thumping into his chest, and then another flash, another roar and a thump lower down and an orange fireball swept down from the ceiling and exploded in his eyes. His knees buckled under him and someone hit him in the face with a floral carpet. The last thing he heard was a muffled scream in the air above him and the dark rushed in…

Slowly, as if it wasn’t sure of its intention, a light flickered and flickered again – a white light, first blinding then subsiding and finally separating into two white masks peering down at him. The masks told him to lie still and not to move. One mask told him her name was Veronica and the other mask was called Jim. He told them he had a bellyache and began to swear. Jim said just relax we’re going to operate. Veronica told him to count to twenty. He began counting and after ten he forgot what came next…

He lay on his back feeling the starchiness of the white sheets under and over him. Two blank walls looked sideways at him. The wall in front had two windows in the middle. It could have been a huge bespectacled old man watching him.

“How do we feel,” a voice asked. It was the ward nurse. Her dress was blue. He felt irritated; it should have been white. She was heavily built; she had a square face and a thin mouth.

“I don’t know how you feel,” he said. “But I feel fuckin’ awful.”

Her tight mouth became even tighter. “No need for that, she said. She pointed out the small device attached to his arm. “That is your morphine pain regulator, press the button on the end if the pain becomes unbearable. There’s water there too, but sip, don’t take it too quickly. Now, is there anything else you want?”

More of a groan than a statement, he said, “I want to go back to the day before yesterday.”

“Seriously, I mean.”

“Pull back the curtains,” he said. “I’d like that.”

“There’s nothing out there. It’s after ten o’clock. It’s pitch dark.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “There’s always something to look at.”

The nurse went to the window and pulled back the curtains and then she turned and stared at him with disapproval. “See,” she said, “Dark, like I said.” She came back and sat on a plastic chair by his bed and opened up a book.

It was still raining. He could see a few lights through the wet glass. Streetlights? Or lonely stars in a black sky? Yes, he thought, there’s always something to see or imagine. He turned back to the nurse, “What’s the book about?”

The nurse looked embarrassed. “It’s about an Australian girl on a working holiday in Italy.”

“Who meets a boy, no doubt.”

“A man - yes.”

“A cliché plot, you mean?”

“You shouldn’t be talking. You should save your strength. You’re very ill.”

“D’you reckon the book’s got a happy ending?” He was dragging the words out. He hated silence. Too many unwanted thoughts crept into silence.

“How do I know how it’s going to end?”

“Probably a happy ending. Isn’t that what they’re all about - a happy ending? A girl a boy and love? The few I read were full of that kind of bullshit. They made me spew. The world’s a sick oyster.”

The nurse didn’t say anything.

“Come on,” he said. “This one might be different. Do me a favour; read the end.”

She looked across at him with suspicion. “That’s silly.”

“Come on,” he said, “Just the last page.”

The nurse turned the pages over slowly until she reached the final page. She moved her lips - silently reading it through.

“Read it aloud,” he said softly. “Read it for me.”

She began to read in a flat nasal monotone. He watched her lips as she read but didn’t hear the words.

Why was she so plain? Why not a pretty nurse like they had on the soapies? Someone he could fall in love with. A nurse who would sponge his brow – sponge him all over - be kind and not judge him with frowns and narrow looks. Not like this one with her mean-looking lips. Suddenly he began to dislike her for being so unrelentingly plain. Then he began to hate himself for being shot up and feeling ill and useless; lying in bed on a wet night so far from all the things he’d hoped for. Where was the sun? The laughter? Where was his best girl?

Whistling a tuneless tune, walking down the street with a bunch of bright yellow flowers - daffs or marigolds? Whistling Genevieve.

Where had the summer, his youth, his friends all gone? What happened to yesterday?

The nurse closed the book. “Did you like it?” she said.

“It was beautiful, truly beautiful.”

“I thought you’d like it,” she said. “Now, if there’s nothing more that you want, I’ll go back to the beginning.”

“What’s the point,” he said, “You know the ending, that’s all you need to read. Every writer is at his or her best in the last page. Everything neat, all tidied up – happy! What more do you want?”

“Well, if you don’t mind I’ll try and stagger through it. I have to sit here for another three hours and I have to find something to do.”

He gave her a half-hearted wink and forced out a grin. “There’s always something that boy and girl could do.”

She looked at him, her eyes half closed. “Now I don’t want any funny stuff from you Mr Smart Aleck. I know all about you.”

He smiled wistfully, “Ah, yes, my reputation is tarnished I have to admit, but there was a time long ago when I believed it was a perfect world. I was in love, you see, just like in your book.

The nurse watched him warily with narrow, unblinking eyes. He closed his own eyes, frowning as if recalling and the huskiness in his throat adding authenticity to the tone of his telling. “Ah, she was so beautiful, her eyes shining acorns, her hair golden, full of soft curls it was. I adored her and when she looked at me my heart melted. Yes, I guess I was hopelessly in love.”

He paused and screwed his face and closed his eyes against the sharp pain in his lower stomach. He pressed the button on the top of the drug regulator. Only when the pain subsided did he open his eyes again. She was staring at him and her large square face was full of expectancy. Her thin unpainted lips drawn tight. Damn her, he thought, why is she so plain?

Then he said: “She was killed in an accident. A truck hit her and she was killed.”

The nurse blinked twice. He was pleased to see a look of anguish creeping over her foolish-looking face. “How utterly ghastly,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“So am I,” he said, “She was the best little bitch I ever had.”

She didn’t react like he thought. She was staring at the white wall. Her flat, white face giving nothing away.

“She was a terrier,” the man said and started to laugh softly. Then deep down in his guts he felt the pain beginning to burn again. A slight stirrings in his intestines. Then he felt as if some part of him had turned over. An acid taste was trickling down his throat and he began to cough with hard retching movements of his chest.

He pressed the button on the device again and closed his eyes until the warm surge swept away the pain. He could get used to morphine - such a pleasant feeling – like lying on a bed of feathers. A peacefulness he’d never really felt before. How ironic, he’d sold drugs but had never really indulged himself. It was easy money and there was always a steady cliental. A rather weak-willed lot, his clientele, he always thought. But now, perhaps like him, they were alleviating their pain - seeking their own peace. Maybe he was wrong about that? Wrong about a lot of things.

All he could see of the city where he’d spent most of his life were a few distant lights twinkling mistily on a far hill. He wanted to be there. He needed to stand on that hill and the fact he couldn’t filled him with an almost unbearable loneliness. He began to realize how much his life meant to him. How the city was part of him and how he part of it.

Down, down, down, and the flames rose higher…

The door opened and two men came in. One was overweight and the other over tall. For a moment they stood at the door looking at him. They both looked uncomfortable in the clean whiteness of the room. A small semi-circle of water dripped soundlessly from the bottoms of their shiny wet mackintoshes.

“Hullo Sommers,” said the tall one. “We’re police officers. We’d like to talk to you.” They showed their badges that were too far away from him to see.

“You surprise me,” the man in the bed grunted.” I thought you were giant golliwogs.”

The nurse rose to go.

“Sit down,” the man in the bed said. “I might take another turn for the worse.”

She looked at the policemen. The tall one nodded towards her chair so she sat down again.

“We want you to give us a statement, Sommers.”

“Sure, why not.”

The fat policeman took out a notebook and a fountain pen.

The man in the bed gazed reflectively out of the darkened window. “It was a burglar,” he said,

He saw their faces harden and felt their dislike for him fill the room.

“Look,” said the fat cop, “We know all about you and your phony deals. We know how most of your so-called clients end up. We know about the lives you’re ruined with your sordid little rackets. You must have lots of enemies. Was it someone trying to get even? Why not tell us? It can’t hurt you now.”

“Now that I’m terminal you mean?”

“I don’t mean that,” The fat cop said flatly. The two policemen shifted restlessly and looked at each other. The fat one shrugged his shoulders drew in his breath and for a moment it looked like he might spit at the floor.

God damn them, he thought, why can’t they leave him alone. He began to feel sorry for himself. He realized the cops were right, he had no friends - only enemies. He thought that maybe he should tell them the truth. But then he remembered the girl - her trembling hand – her despair. So young – so off the rails ...

Sweet eighteen, red hair in the porch-light, receiving a bunch of red carnations ... a piano playing on a warm summer’s night ... a ride on a bicycle along a country lane ... skinny-dipping the river. Sweet Genevieve, long, long ago… sweet, sweet, murder …

“Do you want a statement, or don’t you?”

“Shoot,” said the tall policeman said and looked around for a laugh.

The nurse frowned and looked out the darkened window. The fat policeman was gazing noncommittally at the white ceiling.

The man in bed took a deep breath. “Monday night - it was raining. I just got back from dinner. I was alone. I took out my door key when I saw it was already unlatched, so I crept in. At first I couldn’t see or hear anything, then I noticed a torch light flicker in the room I use as an office. I threw open the door and there was this guy going through my desk. I asked him what the hell he was doing and he threw his torch at me, so I hit him and he went down. The next minute he was back on his feet and waving this gun under my nose. I made a grab for it and he fired – twice. That’s all - you know the rest.”

“We don’t know anything, except that you’re a liar,” the fat cop said.

“You cops are too cynical.”

“Who in their right mind would rob you at that time?”

Pain coming again. He was forcing the words through bloodless lips, “Yeah, you’re right … it was strange.”

“How was this burglar dressed,” asked the tall policeman. “What did he look like?”

“I don’t know, bugger it. He had a stocking over his head. He was about average height. I didn’t notice much, I was too busy bleeding.”

“The man cleaning the lobby said he only saw one stranger - a woman. Quite young – she had red hair.”

“It must be a lonely job he’s got.”

“He said the girl was acting strangely,” the fat policemen said.

“They all do, believe me.” The man in bed tried to smile in a way that he knew annoyed them. But it didn’t come off. It came out more of a grimace. He pressed the button on the self-administrating painkiller. But the pressure wasn’t there. It was all that he was allowed. Any more and it might kill him the doctor had told him earlier. Well, how was that for irony? What a Goddamn farce!

Pain building again. Bugger it, he thought, he just wanted to get it over with. I want it all to stop. Everything.

The nurse who had been a spectator during the whole interview suddenly stood up. She faced the two policemen. “He said he didn’t know. Just give him a break. I’m going to call the doctor if you don’t leave him alone.”

The tall policeman shrugged his shoulders. He stared at the nurse for a moment. “You know.” he said, “I can’t make up my mind whether he’s a hypocrite or not. What d’you reckon nurse.”

The nurse looked at him blankly. “It’s not for me to say, is it?”

The cop smiled. “No, me either. Though I wish I was religious sometimes. I wish I believed in Heaven and Hell and all that sort of thing. Some blokes need to get their comeuppance somewhere.”

The man in the bed gave the nurse a wry grin. “We wouldn’t want to go down below would we nurse, there’re too many crooked cops down there.”

The overweight cop ripped the sheet out of his pad. “Your statement,” he said. He screwed it into a ball and tossed it into the stainless steel rubbish container. “More hospital waste,” he said.

When the two policemen had left the nurse sat down again. “Was it true what you told them?”

“My, you are a curious one. Of course it wasn’t. I was shot up by a midget Indian Rajah with horn-rimmed specs - I stole one of his concubines once and he never forgave me.”

The nurse said, “Oh, you’re impossible. I don’t know how you can be so flippant?”

“Why not?”

“You know – you’re ill.”

The man in the bed felt the pain coming again. He felt like someone was ratcheting up a red-hot band around his lower back. He couldn’t help groaning aloud. “I’m not ill – I’m dying and my morph has run dry. How about some more?”

“You know what the doctor said.”

He groaned. “Fuckin’ doctors and their hypocritical oath. I wonder what he’ll do when his time comes?”

“That’s enough of that,” the nurse said. “All those things you used to do. I read about it in the papers. You should be ashamed of yourself and all you can do is swear and carry on.”

He snorted. “Sure, I got away with a lot and I got blamed for a lot I didn’t do. Some call it procuring but I prefer protection. It’s the way of the world. Some men can be worst bastards than me and their expertise is in shifting the blame. Take my old man for instance - he blamed me for everything…me and my mum…just for living mostly. He’ll be happy now.”

The nurse’s expression softened. “Do you want me to ask the doctor for more morphine?”

He found it hard to even shake his head now, and even the pain seemed somehow justified. The nurse was gazing down on him. She had such a look of concern on her face he was shamed. How very strange, she thought him a creep, she’d made that plain, but now – it was almost as if she cared for him. He thought that he could even see her blinking back tears.

He said, “I’m sorry, truly sorry.” And the more he thought about it the more sorry he became. “I’m sorry for me and I’m sorry for my mother, who I should have looked after those years ago when I was too busy looking after myself. I’m sorry for those strangers who offered me a smile and I didn’t respond. I’m sorry for the friends I pissed off and for all those girls… and for you. Mostly for you nurse who’s stuck here on a rainy night when you could be somewhere else. You’re quite beautiful … I hadn’t noticed … you remind me of someone … someone long ago.”

And then he was further surprised to see her actually smiling down at him. A smile, empty of malice, or anticipation, or greed, or calculation - just a smile as smiles should always be. He tried to lift his hand in salutation but all his strength had dissipated and this time the pain came in searing rushes, driving everything before it, every thought, every feeling being swept away. There was a bell buzzing, buzz buzz buzz. Jarring! Then, inexplicably, it faded and he felt an amazing lightness and relief, like he had escaped from something. The sound of soft music filled the room and he listened with wonder. Genevieve. Someone was singing about her. Genevieve. Ah Genevieve, the girl he never met, the town he never saw, the house he never lived in … how it might have been?

Now he was walking from his bed across the mirrored floor, his image foot to foot through the wall and into the wide world. He was floating through space. Below him the streets were black, the building shapeless. He was drifting in the lightness of peace…hovering. He felt the air cool on his face and he smelt the fragrance of spring – of roses and jasmine – and he rose up, swirling, becoming unattached, until, like cigarette smoke in the breeze, he was gone…

Me speaking this time: When I get better I’m going to buy a van and go ferae naturae on a tropical beach.

The story of Dog Lately

2009-09-09T23:26:00.001+10:00

Dear Dorit V.C.

Thank you for your letter and photo. Is your lovely little dog Bandit a Tibetan terrier? I had one just like it but sadly he died at the remarkable old age of eighteen years four years ago, his name was Dog Lately. Like have you seen the dog lately? He was a wild dog in many ways and somewhat savage towards other dogs. He never discriminated size-wise. Any dog would do. With half a chance he’d just tear into them, be they Alsatians or Pomeranians. More than once we had to take him to the vet and get him stitched up.

His original owner was a local millionaire of some note in the white goods business. He bought the dog as a pup from a dog breeder in Melbourne for a very high price. The pup was a Tibetan Terrier, the breed that in ancient times were used to guard the temples. That little pup more pedigree than the Queen and I suspect that Mrs Millionaire wanted to show him at the Hobart and Launceston Shows and lift her profile in the doggy world.

Unfortunately his original owner wasn’t observant enough to note that dear little Dog Lately only had one testicle and a slightly overshot jaw. He was definitely not a show prospect. The millionaire who bought him, it seems, had been gazumped by a canine breeder and it was suggested through the local gossip that he was somewhat pissed off with the deal and took out his spite on the growing pup by not giving him a lot of love and affection. And Dog Lately who, like most dogs, had an insatiable desire for the same ran away from his new home and spent the next eighteen months living off the land. He became expert at hunting down and catching the local and plentiful Tasmanian native hens.

He also learnt the art of grafting in between times. He turned up in the yard of a friend of mine one rainy winter’s morning and sat beneath a camellia bush looking somewhat wet and miserable and fixed his doggy eyes on my friend the moment he stepped out his door. Well, you know what doggy eyes can do in the pleading game? Within the hour the dog through the largesse of my friend’s wife had a quantity of breakfast left overs, including some first class home-cured bacon rinds and crusty bread to fatten him up. Naturally enough, being a dog of some wisdom, he found that grafting was a good deal less strenuous than chasing wild birds so he turned up the following morning and got more of the same.

And so it went on for several weeks and Dog Lately was putting on weight. He looked like he was settling in. He began to stay around longer and longer. Sometimes, right through until almost dark, when he would mysteriously disappear. By that time my friends had found out the hard cold facts about Dog Lately’s recent history. They reasonable assumed that having satisfied his doggy needs for the day he had either returned to his original owners or to some secret doggy den somewhere.

Both assumptions that were proved wrong when my friend met one of his neighbours some time later and the neighbour told him how this stray muddy dog turned up on his doorstep just before dark each night and cadged the family’s evening meal leftovers. He told how the dog would gulp down his meal, slurp up some water and collapse on to their verandah to sleep. In the morning there was no sign of him. When I finally met the wayward dog I was also smitten by those eyes of his. I offered to take him home with me and make such a fuss of him that he would never stray again. Everybody agreed that it was a great idea, including, it seemed the dog who had already decided the carpet in the back of my Kombi was a good place to snatch a bit of shut-eye after a hard day’s grafting.

So off I went with him in the back of my van - an excitement for both of us. Me, with plans of walking the dog on the beach, playing ball with him in the parks and having high expectations of having a dog to guard our temple when we were away. The dog’s excitement was more direct. The moment I started the van he suddenly changed from a happy soft-eyed, tail-wagging doggy into a monster. Every car we passed got his message with his snarling and barking that he wasn’t a dog to be fooled with. And I’ll swear to this day, that when we so coincidently passed a carry van with the name of his late master emblazoned on its side, the dog’s barking rose to a crescendo that would have put the hounds of Baskerville to shame. He literally hurled himself at the windows of my van. Leaving, I might add, smears and scratches that I could never quite rub off.

Unfortunately, my envisaged doggy games with him never eventuated. Dog Lately never brought back a ball I threw. He preferred rather to eat them. Neither did he ever stay home and house watch. He insisted on going everywhere we went, whether it was to a party, a funeral or a wedding. He sat in the driver’s seat with eyes half closed looking like a bored taxi driver waiting for us to return. That Kombi belonged to him and woe to any stranger trying to touch it. Our warm house was of very little interest him. He preferred to sleep outside in his kennel or in the Kombi. He was an outside dog. Indoors was alien to him.

That showed on the first night I brought him home. I had to pick him up and carry his struggling body inside where hopefully he would get to know his new home. He spent most of that night trying to eat his way through the back door. Too scared to let him out we fed him up in the closed porch until he was busting and only let him out on a lead to recycle his meaty-bites in the garden. I had to practically drag him back into the porch when he was finished where he howled and yapped half the night and spent the other half working on the door.

Two days later when he’d quietened down somewhat we decided give him a run. We walked him up the road towards the farmlands and that was when he showed us some of his acquired show-dog characteristics, he was out in front, pulling at his lead like a sled dog, his plumed tail up and wagging, fit for any show. When we were in the open paddocks we let him off his lead and held our breaths. He was Ok for two minutes sniffing around, but then when he hit the trail of native hen he was off with a speed that would have shamed a racing greyhound.

For hours we trekked around the paddocks and the nearby dams, calling and whistling, but there was neither sight nor sound of Dog Lately. We imagined him racing the forty kilometres back to our friend’s place on the outskirts of the city to get his leftovers. Or worse, getting himself squashed on the roads in the attempt.

We decided we’d better go home and ring around. But that dog continued to surprise. When he got back home in the early afternoon there he was sitting up expectantly on our doorstep, with the kind of eloquent, tongue-hanging expression that seemed to enquire where had we been all day. We were further surprised to see that lying between his paws was a somewhat mangled and very dead, native hen. We presumed the bird he was offering was not so much of a gift as it was his token of his acceptance of us as his new slaves…

The day I nearly met Patrick White

2009-09-07T17:58:00.001+10:00

When I read Patrick White’s book The Tree of Man I was fascinated by his style of writing and his storytelling ability. He became my favourite Australian author. When I published my first book, Strangers Country in 1977, I readily admit, that, in parts, its style and phraseology owed something to Patrick White.

After its publication my friend, the late James McQueen, suggested I send Patrick White a copy of my book. There was some discussion about how many other aspiring writers would do the same, and how Patrick White might think that it was a sneaky way of using any comment he might make as promotion material. I didn’t want him to think that, so I expressly wrote inside the cover that my book was just a small gesture in appreciation for all his writing and that I wasn’t seeking a response.

On the strength of my book having positive reviews in The Age Newspaper, The Australian and the ABC book program, I was invited to attend the Adelaide Writers Festival where I mixed with many literary luminaries such as Elizabeth Jolly, Ann Summers and Thea Astley.

On the third day after I had read (rather nervously) one of my stories, a man I’d never seen before emerged from the crowd, sat down beside me and introduced himself. I was somewhat surprised by the event and I regret that I didn’t get his name. I think he said he was a publisher.

He told me that he had a message from Patrick. He told me that Patrick said thanks for the gift of my book and that he’d read it and enjoyed it, that I had an individualistic style and that I should never be persuaded to sway from it. I thought it a rather cryptic message at the time, but who cared, the man at the very top of my literary tree liked my stories! I was, to say the least, elated.

In 1982 I was accepted to attend the Film School in Sydney to learn film script writing. I rented a room from a friend of mine in Randwick and drove to the school in North Ryde each weekday. At the weekends I used to walk for miles in all directions, exploring the Eastern Suburbs and working potential scripts over in my mind.

During one of my walks around Centennial Park, quite by accident, I suddenly realized that I was in the street where Patrick White lived. Martin Road, Centennial Park. Number 20. I remembered it well. It was the address to which I’d posted my book.

Would I walk right in and knock on his door? Hello Mr White, I’d say, my name is Geoffrey Dean… remember my book? Would he invite me in? Would he offer me a cup of tea or coffee? And why did I want to say hello? Perhaps I needed the story of my visit to carry around me in my name-dropping bag to impress my friends at the dinner table? I had no real idea what my motive really was.

And just say that he had invited me in - what then? I wasn’t really a literary person at all. I’d never so much got a sniff at getting a degree in literature. I disliked disseminating writing for its own sake. I was a storywriter. I wrote stories intuitively by watching and seeing and listening; teasing stories out from the remembered past and the present ethos; waiting for them to emerge and reveal their shape and purpose. How could I have talked about that with a great writer who had won the Nobel Prize?

But then Hell, I could talk about something else, couldn’t I? Like, where I lived under the mountain in Hobart and how my day job was painting other people’s houses - or about farming - just general repartee - the kind of conversation I was reasonably good at.

So, drawing in my breath and imagining that my backbone was lashed to a shining steel rod, I opened the gate and let myself into his garden. A garden, I thought, that owed as much to Southern Europe as it did to Australia.

I either rang or banged at the door. (A detail that escapes my memory.) Silence from within - the kind of dull silence that belonged to a house bereft of any living being. There was hardly any need for the neighbour’s voice calling to me from over the fence that Patrick and Manoly were away.

I never did try again during that year I was living in Sydney. I had stumbled on his street by accident, knocked at his door and he wasn’t home. I put the event down to Fate giving me a message. At that age and experience draining my feeble literary courage once, was enough…

Some years later I met Vivian Smith the expatriate Tasmanian poet at Salamanca Market who now lived in Sydney. I knew Vivian when he lived in Hobart and I had heard through the literary grapevine that he was Patrick White’s friend. I told him about my foray into Patrick White’s territory. Ah, yes, he said, I actually had a conversation about you with Patrick when I saw your book in his bookcase.

And, I asked? Well nothing much really he said. He asked me how old you were and when I told him you were about my age he seemed rather surprised. Was it because he thought my writing had the promise of the young, I asked? No, nothing to do with that, Vivian said. It was more to do with whether your stories would be acceptable in Australia because of their...

That’s when the phone rang Vivian told me and Patrick went off to answer it. When he came back, Vivian said he was fuming about something that had gone wrong with the publishing of his next book. Unfortunately we never got back to you, Vivian said rather regretfully. I wonder what it was he was going to say?

Yeah, and me too. A pity he wasn’t home that day I called.

A goldfish called Serberton

2009-08-24T21:38:00.001+10:00

My neighbour Alice has this pet goldfish that is breaking all records for longevity in the fish world - or so she thinks. But there are certain things Alice doesn’t know, and it’s better for both of us she remain ignorant.

It all began last month with Alice and me sitting in her kitchen drinking tea and watching her goldfish swimming in its miniature aquarium on the top of her walnut veneer sideboard. Well, the fish is not exactly swimming; it's more of a kind of languishing. It floats in a patch of lettuce-green waterweed. The only sign that it is alive is the occasional rippling of its diaphanous dorsal fin and a bubble or two that escapes from its mouth.

I didn’t know you had a goldfish Alice, I tell her. Ah yes, she says, my little Cerberton. She explains to me that she bought the goldfish to keep her company years ago when her husband was on the road selling vacuum cleaners. She and her husband Herb had lived in a small flat where no pets were permitted. She hadn't been sure whether the landlord's edict had also run to goldfish, so just to be sure she'd sneaked the fish in one day when the landlord wasn't looking.

I called him Cerberton, Alice tells me. You know, like the suburb in London where I was born. That little fish has been great company to me, especially these last few years since poor Herb passed on. We never had any children you know.

She sighs a regretful sigh and pours me a second cup of tea as she continues to fill in the picture. Of course Cerberton was only a bit of a tiddler then. Thirty-five years ago last month, it was.

I have no reason to mistrust Alice’s veracity but I am amazed that a goldfish could live so long. I know cockatoos can live to a ripe old age and turtles too, but such longevity in a goldfish stretches my credulity to its limit. Perhaps Alice is mistaken? She is at the age when many begin to become somewhat vague.

We finish our cups of tea and I go back to shoring up the posts and hammering another generation of galvanized nails into the palings of our territorial fence. That fence has blown down in the wind for the third time in as many years. I have suggested to Alice several times that we renew it but she resists and every time we have a really nasty gale I am back to shoring it up again.

But it's not the cost of her half share to build a new fence that worries Alice; it’s the notion of change. I've got so used to that old fence, she tells me, I'd be unhappy if it were gone. It's such a lovely smoky grey, isn’t it? And then there’s the lichen - it’s taken years to grow that. It was like she was pleading for a favored work of art or an artifact of some significant and I, like always, give in.

Later that month Alice is in a bit of a quandary. She tells me over the fence that her sister who lives in Launceston is sick. She laments that she can't go to stay with her for a few days because there's nobody to look after her Cerberton.

I know what she’s getting at, so to save time I tell that it would be an honor for me to look after the little feller. Surely, I tell her, all he needs is a bit of grub each day? I could put his glass tank on my kitchen bench where I could keep a close eye on him.

Alice is ever so grateful for my offer but not entirely convinced that it is as simple as I make out. But he'll be lonely without me, she says. He’ll miss me. I talk to him all the time. Well, I’ll talk to him, I assure her. I'll go in and talk to him every time I make myself a cup of coffee and I drink lots of coffee. She still looks a little doubtful, but with a few more words of assurance I manage to convince her that I am an experienced goldfish-sitter who will treat her goldfish as though he were my very own.

Ah, if only life could be so simple! Three days after Alice's departure I come home and find Cerberton acting like a miniature shipwreck. He is floating upside down on the surface of his glass tank and no matter how many times I right him with my finger he rolls right back over. I decide eventually that there is no getting away from it, Cerberton is no more, he has, as the Goon said, shuffled off this mortal coil.

My God! What have I done wrong? What am I to do now? Here is a fish that has survived thirty-five years in my neighbour's loving care and I have killed it in the course of three days. In my mind I go over all the things that I have done or not done, to try and find a reason for Cerberton's demise. But there seems to be no reason. Have I been so unlucky to be his keeper on the very day that he has been designated by fate to depart to that big fish-tank in the sky?

Surely not, I tell myself. The chance of that happening is about the same odds as me winning the lottery. So, perhaps it is something not quite so coincidental? Perhaps I hadn't been talking to the little feller enough? Perhaps my casual good mornings and how are you today chats, weren't enough to sustain his tenuous grip on life?

Although, I did remember one quite long conversation I'd had with him on the second morning about the consequence of my literary dry up. And I'll swear that morning he'd responded to my words with an extra bubble or two. Was he upset by my confession? Did it affect him? I have no idea. The only thing I do know is something has to be done about it. I don't think I'm up to facing Alice’s tears on her return.

It is the man in the pet shop who eventually solves the dilemma for me. When I show him poor Cerberton's body, he immediately identifies it as a carpis manifico. Quite a common species, he assures me, replacement will not be too difficult. Do I go along with the minor conspiracy? Or do I subject myself to self condemnation and Alice to sorrow and tears? I toss it up in my mind. Conspiracy wins hands down.

The shop owner and I wander from glass tank to glass tank in his pet shop, peering amongst the weeds and exotic paraphernalia that litter the bottoms of the tanks for a replacement of the extinct and rapidly decomposing Cerberton. And he is right, they are many variations on a theme and it isn't too long before we find the absolute replica of the late Cerberton hiding in the fluorescent hull of a miniature Titanic. That's him, I tell the pet shop owner. That’s the one I want. This carpis manifico looks as old and languid as Cerberton ever looked.

Back home I very carefully follow the pet shop owner's instructions on feeding little Cerberton 2 a tiny pinch of the flaky fish food, any more and it will be too much. Which, considering the spoonfuls I fed his predecessor, at least solves the mystery of his untimely death. Though, as I watch the little fish rise slowly in a very Cerberton-like manner to take the food, I wonder about the other unsolved mystery of his predecessor’s unlikely age. The pet shop owner has assured me that goldfish rarely live beyond fifteen years - eighteen at the most.

I lean closer to the tank and eyeball the tiny fish through the watery glass and ask the question. What do you think Cerberton 2? Do you reckon there was another goldfish-sitter all those years ago that pulled the same scam on the original model? You might be the third in line? The fishy stare and string of bubbles I get in reply tells me nothing.

When Alice gets back at the end of the week she is delighted when she sees the goldfish languishing peacefully in his glass tank. She leans forward and warbles her greetings to him. Cerberton 2 rises to the surface like he always does around feeding time. See, Alice cries, he knows my voice. Sure I tell her, why not. There are times when the truth is not the best policy.

Cradle Mountain

2009-08-20T14:42:00.001+10:00

Dear S.K. There’s a picture of Cradle Mountain on the television. Cradle makes me feel a bit sentimental. You are right; Cradle Mountain does call you back. Remember how I had commented how different it was when I walked around Dove Lake and climbed the Cradle forty years before with my family and friends. We only met about half a dozen people that day and this time there was almost a constant line of walkers from one end to the other. Ah, me, progress!

But back at Waldheim I remember when I stood on the verge of the tree line looking out across the valley, waiting for you to finish your shower, just how isolated it could be. The tourists had all gone back to their comfy hotels and motels - the Overland Track hikers all gone - heading south towards Lake St Claire. It seemed like we were the only ones left in the world. Certainly, we were the only ones left in Waldheim.

Remember how there had been a brief storm before you went off to those so inadequate shower rooms. The storm left a kind of rosy light behind. It infused everything, the huts and the trees behind me; the valley in front, it all glowed as if lit by unseen lanterns. It looked like it was millions of years old. I could have imagined giant marsupials down there in that valley, reining supreme. Sure, the single weather-greyed wooden walkway was there, but so integral was it with its surrounds it was - or could have just been, part of the general configuration.

Then there was a movement in front and I saw this fat old orange-tinged wombat coming out of the ferns to grab a quick snack before dark. I walked right up to it and it just lifted its head, blinked and went back to chewing. Okay, I said, don’t talk, you’re a midget compared with what I have just imagined. You wouldn’t think that a fat old wombat could be so stuck up, would you? The wombat still ignored me and went on chomping.

It was then I saw on the side of the distant mountain, a slow moving patch of red in the losing light coming down the slope. Curiously enough such a sight didn’t impose on the vast emptiness all around. It was like the present also needed to be recognised and in its own strange way it added, rather than subtracted, from the emptiness. And curiously enough in retrospect, that touch of alien colour reminded me of some of those white figure drawings you do on a black background. The ones where you had given a touch of alien colour to the faces of the otherwise blank fingers. There was a similarity. Something to do with minimalism, I suspect.

And by the way, I ran into Bob Brown at his photo exhibition in the Salamanca Gallery some time back and commented to him that one of the photos he took must have been taken at almost the same spot that I just described. I told him how I felt about that lone returning hiker. How alien in such emptiness. He told me that he remembered taking the photo well, because just after he‘d taken the shot he heard in the distance the sound of a dog baying in hunting mode.How strange! Who what or how?

I looked back at his photo and it suddenly seemed a little flatter than it had been a few seconds before. I sometimes think in my more fanciful moments that photos need more than just an unmoving description of the past, they are too flat; they need audio or movement to bring them to full life. But then, they wouldn’t be photos would they. They’d be something else. They’d be being there!

The washing machine story

2009-08-12T23:19:00.003+10:00

I met Bill in the local grocery store. He had a heap of groceries in his basket and I was only buying a loaf of bread and a carton of milk. I stepped aside to let him go in before me. There were still three people in front and it was one of those times when each one of them paid by bankcard. By the time they had slipped their cards through the machine, being accepted and signed the slip, it took quite a while.

The man who I had let in before me half turned around and winked at me. Weren’t cards meant to make shopping quicker and simpler?

Yeah, I said, for the bank and the store but not for us.

We who only stand and wait, he said. He changed his full basket from one hand to the other and groaned. Thanks for letting me in front.

When I reached the counter I paid by cash, the same way as he did and I was out of there in no time. I caught up to him in the car park where his vehicle was parked next to mine. It was a yellow campervan. He was stuffing his groceries through the middle door into a kind of large wicker basket.

It looks like you might be going away, I said.

He closed the door and shook his head rather sadly. The wife and I were going. You know, retired now, kids all grown up. Spending our inheritance we joked, but unfortunately my wife got sick. You know how it goes; life chucks you a bit of a wobbly now and again. I’ve had to go back to work for a while to pay off the medical bills.

I told him how sorry I was and asked him what kind of work he did?

White goods mechanic, he said.

Bad luck for him and his wife, good luck for me. Like maybe you fix washing machines? I asked.

I explained to him that my washing machine had broken down a couple of weeks ago and I had been using my daughter’s machine until I could get someone to take it in for repairs.

Sure, he said, I’ll fix it. Half the price of the downtown guys too.

I gave him my address and he turned up the following day and within an hour the machine was going like a new top. An hour’s work, fifty bucks, good all round.

It was a nice sunny day that day and neither of us had much to do so I offered him a cup of coffee and we sat on my bench in the sun and talked.

I asked him how his wife was. He shook his head sadly. She used to be great - a naturally happy person, looking forward to our trip away and all that, then suddenly, without any warning, Bonbon died.

Bonbon? Somebody close was it?

Not somebody exactly, something. My wife’s Pomeranian. Well ours actually, but mostly my wife’s. She took him everywhere. Poor little Bonbon, she found him in his basket one morning just before last Xmas. All cold and stiff. She’s never got over it. I took her to the doctor but that didn’t do much good, he just gave her drugs and it made her more depressed. A psychologist tried to talk her around and that didn’t do any good either. She finished up in a clinic and that cost a heap. He smiled then, wistfully. Nothing seemed to help. Goodbye trip I say.

Look, perhaps it takes more time, I told him at my gate. I thought of my own situation in the past. Sometimes time is the only healer?

I hope so, he said, without a great deal of conviction. I’ve been thinking lately that I might put the van on the market and pay off the debt.

Give it time, I shouted after him as he drove off.

For weeks after, every time I saw a campervan passing in the street I checked it out. But no, I didn’t see Bill or his wife that I never met riding by. I could only hope that it did come out well for both of them.

Some time later I was sitting down reading the ads in the paper. I was looking for someone selling sheep manure for the garden and as my eye slid down the columns, another ad under livestock caught my eye. Someone was advertising for a home for a half grown Pomeranian puppy. A sweet little companion for a lady the ad said. I went to my kitchen drawer to get the scissors and cut the ad out. I picked up Bill’s address from the phone book and sent the ad to him. I signed it from a Well-wisher.

Would my little hint work? As it turned out I didn’t have all that long to wonder what happened to Bill and his wife. Early in autumn I saw a woman sitting in a loaded up yellow campervan outside the same grocer shop where I’d first met Bill. She was sitting up, smiling happily. There was a little, flat-nosed, golden-haired dog with a red ribbon round its neck standing on her lap, yapping out at the world in general. I never did particularly like Pomeranians much but this one seemed to be a little beauty.

I was in a hurry that day and I didn’t stop to verify my assumption that it was Bill’s missus. I reckon it was a pretty sure bet that it was, though.

Welcome to Geoff's blog!

2009-08-01T15:48:00.007+10:00

These are random posts about various phases of my life, in no particular order, just as they come to mind.

Most will be uplifting some with a touch of humour and some with a touch of sadness - like life really.

I hope you will enjoy them.

Let me know!