| OUR
BOOKS > MINI–MAGS > WHO? |
|
|
|
| Download
this book: |
 |
|
|
| To
read some extracts from this memoir click here: |
|
The start
Dale and Gwyn
Dale?
Gwyn – but why? |
|
| To
read about the writing of this memoir click
here. |
|
The
start
I have a feeling that this story may irritate you,
and writers don’t
want that to happen. From Shakespeare down, our aim’s to please.
But sometimes we can’t even please ourselves …
… because we’re puzzled by what’s
happened. It refuses to make sense. The only thing we can do is share
it, which means giving the problem to others to see if their working
out is better than ours.
To begin, we have to go back many years. My
story has two main characters, apart from myself, so I’ll start
when they first married. Dale and Gwyn. She used to say, ‘I
don’t know why it’s
spelt that way. There’s nobody Welsh in my family. Maybe they
made a mistake. More likely they just didn’t care. It’d
be typical of my family to do something and not know why.’ Since
I only met her after she was married, in a town where Dale was working,
far from her family, I couldn’t comment. Her family? Well, we
can’t avoid having them, can we, even if we don’t think
much of our inheritance.
Gwyn was sweet, and the opposite of forceful,
except that sometimes people who use no force can exert themselves
in ways that other people don’t know how to counter. Persistence
is a strength that tougher people underestimate, and Gwyn was nothing
if not persistent, as I was to find in later years …
I’d
known Dale for some time when he turned up teaching in a town not
so far from where I was at the time. He got a school residence because
he was married; that was news to me. I drove down to see him, and
met Gwyn. She referred to me as ‘one of Dale’s old
friends’, and busied herself about the stove. Biscuits and tea.
Dale and I talked boisterously and Gwyn learned what I could see she’d
never heard before, that Dale and I had met when we had to do military
training at Puckapunyal, to provide Australia with soldiers ready
for to fight The Communists – the terrors of an earlier age.
We laughed loudly about the stupidities of army life, and in particular
a man called Charlie Shaw. Charlie was in the regular army (we were ‘nashos’,
meaning national servicemen), he was a sergeant (three stripes), he
wasn’t very bright, and he was one of the regulars in charge
of a company full of university students. Charlie’s six year
contract was running out and he told us, often and vehemently, that
he wouldn’t sign for another term. ‘Another six years
doing this? Y’d need fuckin rocks in ya fuckin head!’ ‘When
do you have to decide, Charlie?’ we’d ask, and he’d
tell us the date: it was just before we’d be allowed back to
university, our training finished. As the time – our time – approached,
we became chirpier, and Charlie grew quieter. He got drunk once or
twice and we had a feeling there was something he wasn’t telling
us. He became subdued. He stopped grumbling about the army, polished
his boots and went for us if we didn’t look smart on parade.
It dawned on us one day that Charlie’s sign-on date had passed,
and he was still with us. He should have dropped in, wearing civilian
clothes, to shake hands and wish us well. But he hadn’t. We
knew what that meant. He’d signed on for another six years.
We felt sorry for him, and didn’t know what to say. Eventually
someone asked about it, and he said, ‘Ya gotta stick with the
things ya know and this is the only thing I know. You think about
that when you get back to school.’ He managed to sound contemptuous
of us – mere children, in his estimation – but we were
heading along the paths we’d chosen, and Charlie was going to
be in the army till he died, or they tossed him out …
Dale and
I laughed about Charlie, and felt sorry for him too. We had so many
things we wanted to do.
> back to TOP |
|
Dale and Gwyn
The next day we made another trip and this time Gwyn came along.
We travelled to a patch of mountain ash trees, the species which had
dominated the South Gippsland hills. Settlers had cleared them, cut
them down and burned them, felling the trees at the top of the slopes
so that they’d crash onto trees lower down which had been cut
through in order to weaken them so that they too fell when trees higher
up crashed down. I sometimes suspect myself of caring more about this
holocaust of trees than I do about humans slaughtering each other,
which is a practice we cannot, it seems, prevent. Dale was something
of an expert on insects, and he set off into the forest. I came back
after a few minutes to the car. Gwyn had never left it. I sat in the
front seat and she in the back, and I could tell that she was sad.
I asked her why, and she told me. She’d been pregnant for a
little while, she said, and she’d lost the child. She’d
been a nurse, and she told me about the bleeding. I listened respectfully.
I’d not heard a woman talk about losing a child before, and
it seemed to me that there could be no consolation except to have
another.
Gwyn did have another, and another after that, but I never saw these
children, nor did I ever see Gwyn again because by the time the first
of them was born she and Dale had left Foster, and soon after I’d
moved back to the city too. We lost contact, and when I ran into Dale,
years later, it was at a concert, he told me he was living … somewhere
I’ve forgotten, and he made no mention of Gwyn. Players were
coming on stage for the second half of the program, he went to his
seat, and I never saw him again.
There was an occasion, not so long ago, when I thought I did, but
more of that anon.
I’ve also told you that I never saw Gwyn again. This is true,
but misleading. Let me add to what I’ve told you.
> back to TOP |
|
Dale?
I stood at the door, surrounded by Chinese newspapers, plates, teapots
and casseroles made in China or Taiwan, vegetables, and top-opening
fridges full of frozen things to lick. A man came in, with a woman,
and I looked at him in surprise. It was Dale, or was it? The couple
moved past the cash register and into the shelves, with me looking
after them, filled with curiosity and doubt. Dale? I hadn’t
seen him since I’d run into him at the concert, and that must
have been thirty years before. Thirty years? I considered. Yes, thirty
seemed about right. Good heavens! I looked at the shelves, but the
two people were out of sight. I watched, waiting for them to come
back. Minutes passed, this time. Eventually the couple came to the
checkout and had their purchases stuffed into the plastic bags for
which Chinese people feel no shame. They were in no hurry to leave;
they stood near me, talking about something, then she, the woman,
started to inspect the ceramics on show. He, the man – Dale? – waited,
while I examined his face. He showed no awareness of me. Eventually
she lost interest in the pottery and they moved to pass through the
plastic strips. When he was looking into the light coming through
the plastic, away from me, I said quietly, ‘Dale?’
And again, ‘Dale?’
He must have heard, but went straight ahead. It hadn’t been
Dale after all. But how alike! The resemblance! I want to say, ‘I
could have sworn …’ but it wouldn’t be true. I
hadn’t been sure, but I’d felt surrounded by a feeling
of connection with something from my past. However, I’d been
wrong. The man hadn’t answered to ‘Dale’ and he
must have heard the word, even if his thoughts were somewhere else.
You can’t ignore your own name, unless you’re in a spy-drama
and your identity’s got to be kept hidden ...
Let’s not get into that!
I dropped my son at his place and I drove home. Into the lounge,
glance at the phone, red light flashing.
Message. I pushed the button.
> back to TOP |
|
Gwyn – but
why?
Message. I pushed the button.
It was Gwyn. She was sorry she’d missed me. She’d hoped
she might find me at home. As usual, she left no number to ring,
no address, no contact. She was, as always, a voice floating in from
somewhere far behind, out of sight, untraceable, wanting to reach
me but leaving no means to cause it to happen. ‘Goodbye,’ the
answering machine said, and it, Gwyn, addressed me by name. I sat
there, feeling sad. Then I realised that I’d missed something.
I pressed the button and went through the sadness again. When Gwyn
stopped, the machine gave me the time she’d rung. About forty
minutes earlier. I thought. I started to work out how long it had
taken to get from the restaurant to the shop, from the shop to the
car, then to my son’s house. How long had it taken my son to
unload? How long had we talked before he went inside? It was soon
very clear. Gwyn had rung me at much the same time that I was staring
at a man who made me think he was her former husband, Dale, a man
who turned out not to be Dale because he didn’t respond when
I said the name that was pressing firmly in the front of my mind …
… but what had been going on at the back? Gwyn was ringing
me and I was ‘seeing’ Dale. The man wasn’t Dale
but the connection was as absolute as if he had been. Some awareness
of Gwyn, causing the phone to ring in my house in another suburb,
had caused me to liken a stranger to the father of her children,
whom I hadn’t seen for thirty years. Very puzzling, I said
to myself, very puzzling, I say to you, dear reader, and that’s
why I began this piece with an apology because, knowing that I couldn’t
satisfy myself I knew I wouldn’t be able to satisfy you. Your
pardon is begged and as for me, I shall go on puzzling.
> back to TOP |
|
| The
writing of this memoir: |
|
A few words about
the writing of the memoirs ‘So
bitter was my heart’, ‘Keep
going!’, ‘Who?’,
and ‘At Baldy’s feet’.
These four short pieces, now being issued
as mini-mags, take my writing back to the territory of my first
book, Hail and Farewell! An
Evocation of Gippsland, 1971 (reissued as House
of Trees, 1986). I
began and finished the first part of this book, headed ‘The
Men from Snowy River’, at the end of 1967, during my last weeks
in Gippsland. In 1968, and by then established in Melbourne,
I began to think about the rest of the book, and I went through a
period of uncertainty. Put simply, there was a conflict in me:
was Gippsland my subject, or was I going to write about my own development
during those Gippsland years? They had been very influential,
taking me from an immature young man to someone who had some idea
of how the world worked. After a few weeks of indecision, I
decided that I was unready for autobiographical writing, and should
make the evocation of Gippsland my task. This I did. I
scrapped the short sketches I’d written thus far, and started
again, under the heading ‘Landscape and people’: I would,
if I could, keep myself out!
Thirty-eight years later, I found my thoughts
returning to things which had affected me in those years. I realised that there
must have been many turning points, important steps taken, or opportunities
accepted or rejected, which I had regarded as part of the ebb and
flow of life, without examining them for their long-term effects. The
Gippsland book I’d published had dealt with things I was prepared
to acknowledge, but I was also aware, especially after the passage
of a few more decades, that I’d chosen to keep quite a lot out
of sight.
This was partly a matter of reticence, natural
enough, partly a matter of not realising the importance of various
moments in my development, and it came about also because I was
still, all these years later, acting in the shadow of decency’s double standard. There
were things I knew about but wasn’t prepared to say. I
think many, perhaps most, writers face this problem, and it’s
a case of what I shall call the duplicity of honesty. I can
be frank, perhaps even brutally honest about someone else, but can
I be as frank, as honest, about myself? I think that like many
other writers my answer would have to be a rather pathetic ‘Occasionally
yes, but mostly, no.’
The passage of years does bring about changes,
however, and the memoir ‘So
bitter was my heart’ brings much into the open that I hadn’t
been able to deal with before. The key to the writing of this
piece is in the division of the writer’s voice – an old
man, a young man. The young man is scornful of much that goes
on around him, and lustful in a way that his teaching position requires
him to conceal. The old man, no longer hemmed in by these aspects
of life in a small town, is both curious and forgiving. What
did happen, way back then? The honesty, the release, and the
discovery bring the old man great rewards. The older man, in
denying the denial, is able to find humour, a great range and variety
of character, and the fascination of a powerful sexual experience.
And there is music, too, in this memoir, such
wonderful music, being discovered, examined and explored by a mind,
a soul, that doesn’t
know its limits – its own limits nor the music’s limits – yet. Yet. That
word almost turns time around, or at least it divides the river of
time into before and after. This is a valuable tool in searching
out one’s origins and/or stages of development. What was
I like before? And after? What had happened, in between? When
I reconsider my Gippsland years, I remember an afternoon, late in
the twelve-year period, when I was following a newly created track
alongside a stream somewhere in the Dargo area. I was not long
married and my wife was with me. We came upon a group of people – road
workers, I think - and I stopped to talk to them. I suppose
I asked how much further the track went, and I must suppose that their
answer was not far at all, because we turned around and went back. The
moment lasts, lingers in my mind as a turning point of sorts, as if,
in that decision to turn the car around, I was turning my back, forever,
on the years of exploration which were my life in Gippsland.
Was this really so? Or a construct of the writing mind that
developed later, a mind ageing and moving away from what it had been? I
cannot say, but that is the sort of question that bubbles to the surface
when one goes in search of what was once there, but not allowed to
surface when it might, and perhaps should.
‘Keep going!’ was the next of these four pieces to be
written. It took me by surprise. I had decided to write
about the young woman I call Simone, because the moment when her boyfriend’s – ex-boyfriend’s – car
passed us on the highway had returned to my thinking, and it seemed
an oddly dramatic dismissal of him. A dismissal without any
words exchanged. I set out to write it, and realised, somewhere
along the way, that I had done something much worse myself. Looking
back on my behaviour, I thought it had been shameful, yet there was
nothing I could do about it now, and, as I tried my hardest to remember
things said, thought and done all those years ago, the fact was that
there was only a limited amount that I could recall. There were
gaps all over the place. This caused me to think about the way
humans ‘forget’; forgetting, I think, is a controlled
process, carried on somewhere just out of sight of the controlling
mind – if it is controlling; perhaps it is merely signing the
papers prepared for it by subservient but clever underlings, if I
may speak of the human mind divided in that way.
So I had to write about myself, as well as
Simone. And Richard,
and Don. Looking back, I realised that I had very little idea
of what had been going on in the minds and feelings of any of us. What
are we doing, in our youth? In our struggles toward maturity? How
do we know we aren’t making the most terrible mistakes?
I don’t think we do know. I think we’re operating
on impulse, and this is a devil-take-the-hindmost way of conducting
a life. There is a saying that youth is wasted on the young,
but perhaps it can be twisted to say that youth is something richly
deserved by those who are ignorant enough to be going through it.
I suppose this sort of thought could be extended
but I want to leave it now. Looking back, and reconsidering all the ingredients
of ‘Keep going!’, I find myself quite shaken. People
are pursuing each other, and pursuing their own unrevealed destinies,
occasionally forced by forces half, or perhaps entirely hidden from
themselves, and making decisions they didn’t know were forming
in their minds until they brought themselves into the open. ‘Keep
going!’ Simone said, and I was worse, in staying silent. One
likes to think, as one grows older, that one is ‘managing’ life,
but the experience of writing ‘Keep going!’ leaves me
quite unsure.
And now ‘Who?’ It’s a simple story, in that
the facts that can be shared with the reader require no special skill
to put on the page. The real question in the writer’s
mind is, what is going on in my mind? The narrator, at the end
of the story, hearing what’s on his answering machine, and connecting
it with the happenings in a shop not long before, doesn’t know
what’s going on. This puts him in an anti-narrative position,
in that we normally expect narrators to know and narratives to tell
us. This, this time, is beyond the narrator because he’s
puzzled and wishes to share his puzzlement with the reader. It
could be said that this story is an invitation, by me to any readers
at all, to consider the limits of the human mind. Why? Because
we can be sure that there are things going on outside those limits
and that these forces are affecting us, whether we know about them
or not. We can also be sure that the operational limits of the
human mind, and its inbuilt weaknesses are affecting, every day of
our lives, the conclusions we are drawing about the way the world
is working around us. It’s like getting into a 2008 model
jet and discovering that everything in the cockpit, the pilot’s
controls, are circa-1920 in design and effectiveness. We still
have to fly, but we’d better know our limitations before we
take off!
‘At Baldy’s feet’ is very much an aftermath to
my earlier writing. Mount Baldhead is one of the points by which
the ‘Landscape and People’ section of my Gippsland book
had located itself (the other was Castle Hill). Castle Hill
was for me the mystical mountain and Baldhead the locus of my attempts
to create a unified meaning: a sort of home-made replacement for religion,
I now think. Both places, of course, were peaks. High. It
occurred to me that I had a number of memories located in the great
basin that sits before Mount Baldhead, and I decided to try to bring
these ‘lower’ experiences together. They don’t
have the reach, the resonance, of things that came to me on or near
the peaks – try Wainwrights’ Mountain – but I wanted
to say them, and here they are.
> back
to TOP > back
to WRITING BOOKS |
|
| Download
this book: |
|
|
|
| OUR
BOOKS > MINI–MAGS > WHO? |
|
