THE EARTHRISE DIARY (JULY 2013)

THE EARTHRISE DIARY (July 2013)

                                                                                                             Don Diespecker

© Text 2013, Don Diespecker

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns--the ones we don't know we don't know.

     Donald Rumsfeld (February 12 2002 Department of Defense news briefing).

The days of man are but as grass: for he flourisheth as a flower of the field.

For as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

                                              Psalm 58. The Book of Common Prayer

The two quotations above might provide a philosophical hint to some of what follows below (code for the Earthrise incumbent very much taking refuge inside his head, at least for a few thoughtful pars). A third quote, below, is from a compelling novel by James Salter: the story’s unidentified narrator is travelling in a train in France and experiencing what he sees: the story that follows is a fiction ‘imagined’ by the traveller/narrator. This month whilst being in the middle of everything (like editing a second collection of my essays intended as another eBook, “Here and There. Essays from Home and Away”), I’m also flitting between chores, some of the new notions arising while editing recent essays about times past, pondering other places of long ago, fantasising the plot of another novel, brainstorming how we store and access memory, dreamily reflecting on present perceptions, and documenting for want of a better word, a little of what wanders through my mind from day to day especially while I sit seeing what can be seen in my riverside garden. None of what follows is at all complex; I’m simply be sharing some of my experience with you.

Of these tasks and reflections the experience of sitting in my sunny winter garden and not doing anything more strenuous than staying awake and aware, is pleasantly exciting. Falling asleep in the riverside garden is never safe or wise because of the many branches (including weighty deadwood) that will kill one with ease merely by breaking and falling 40- or 50-m. Gravity in this garden may be an unexpectedly lethal weapon and the flooded gum, eucalyptus grandis, is also known as the widow-maker. As magnificent as they are, some gum trees shed leaves, barks and branches when it suits them to. The reflective garden sitter is wise to look around before sitting and to decide on where to run should he or she hear the gunshot CRACK of a breaking branch high above the ground: there is always a chance that the pensive sitter will be sufficiently speedy to outrun the down-coming missile. Alas, such a chance is always going to be very slim. Breaking branches, especially deadwood branches, habitually fall when least expected: it is as if branches will themselves to break and fall in otherwise idle moments, those moments when the thinker or meditating sitter is between thoughts, near-blank moments that beg to be utilised. I have been puzzling about the availability of such hypothetical between spaces: how empty or blank is such a space and how does one know when blankness occurs? If you are a story-teller then no matter how hard you try to keep gaps and spaces filled with narrative so that the teller and the reader or listener are simultaneously at the same point and on the same page, there are moments when the images in the two minds will be very different and perhaps have little or nothing whatever to do with the story. Such wayward moments seem likely to be filled to bursting: both minds will have to be flying on the story autopilot whilst each mind simultaneously is stunt-flying along two other trajectories. See what I mean? My cousin Jill has sent me a copy of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and I’ve been reading the last section first: it’s about that writer as passenger flying with a stunt-flier. Not only is her prose very good writing but the text implies consciousness being crowded for each of the two people in the plane and despite the ‘sharing’ of the flying experience, that content, I suspect, will be markedly different for each person (at least it seems so to me).

Inspired by the structure and form of Salter’s novel (A Sport And A Pastime) I recently borrowed the notion of the unnamed narrator being not a passenger in a moving train, but being the pilot in a moving aircraft: writing those parts was sheer pleasure (see my recent novel, an eBook, The Overview). The writer need not be, also, a pilot; having flown either as pilot or as passenger will be sufficient for the reader to experience memories of flying in a plane. –Now I’m remembering having been a frequent passenger on DC3 flights, the old Douglas Dakotas that flew domestic routes in Iran before the Revolution: some of the more hair-raising of those flights were descents through mountainous gaps with sheep grazing at either wingtip: whatever the pilot was experiencing in those in-between moments, I’m sure it was very different to what I was feeling as a passenger (to have arrived safely and in one piece on the ground at Isfahan, for example, was then like arriving in paradise).    

My suggestion for busy readers is to skim lightly through the text and stop to read more closely only if there is something that attracts your attention. If you speed-read at a good pace, this little exercise will last scarcely five minutes (perhaps less if you’re really speedy). And bear in mind too, please, that blogging, whatever else it might be, is a healthy exercise for the blogger to provide text for ambitious speed-readers to become Masters of reading speedily. Bloggers offer scope for fast readers to become accomplished, if not omniscient: the speed-reader will for example acquire a necessary credential for reading detailed engineering drawings, for studying historical data and probably for espionage moments when reading documents extremely speedily is essential for survival or for success.

Green, bourgeoise France. We are going at tremendous speed. We cross bridges, the sound short and drumming. The country is opening up. We are on our way to towns where no one goes. There are long, wheat-coloured stretches and then green, level land, recumbent and rich. The farms are built of stone. The wisdom of generations knows that land is the only real wealth, a knowledge that need not question itself, need not change. Open country flat as playing fields. Stands of trees.

                                                                      James Salter, A Sport And A Pastime.

Between

                                                                                                                            DD

I’m one of those people who sleep less than the average. There are times when I wish that I slept more but I’m learning late that most of what interests me is more or less available when I’m awake. To sleep altogether for about a third of one’s life seems absurd: much time would be wasted as time lost, time squandered that could have been used creatively, more productively. I write every day: writing is what I enjoy doing, often for long hours. That does not mean that I write incessantly when I might be doing something either different or more desirable. There are useful gaps, spaces, pauses between bouts of writing and washing the dishes or raking leaves or driving the car or shopping. It’s currently the spaces between activities that I ponder and the physical spaces between brain technologies, if I may call them that, such as remembering or planning. Neither remembering nor planning is a steadily continuous enterprise until completed: there are surely spaces between thoughts, however minute. Are these spaces fuzzy or big or small and where might they reside in the brain and how do we experience these in between phenomena in consciousness? Consider how in between some car driving seems: the driver drives ‘automatically’ remembering nothing, sometimes, of having travelled from one place to another? How do we manage that and where was the mind during that time? If these available spaces are ‘empty’ are we able to visualise them? And so on.

Sleeping is a huge space that is probably anything but empty. What enables the sleeper’s mind to tick on in neutral or partly shut down during sleep? How does that work? The ‘sleeping’ brain contrives cooperation with the rest of one’s self when dreaming: the Gestalt Approach to dreams and to dreaming is that the dream and every part thereof is the dreamer. The dreamer writes the script, provides all of the required ‘material’ to enable a ‘screening’ in the mind. There are opportunities in the off-duty brain for maintenance and improved planning; might there be also opportunities for up-dating systems, for storing memories and for improving memory storage? Could ‘being off duty’ all too easily become ‘being out to lunch)? Or should I give the attended brain and its enabled mind a break and leave it to these remarkable facilities to do what they do best without too much interceding or interference from me, the inquisitive chairperson?

I know that sleep is a valuable process that not only will reduce wear and tear: it contributes bountifully to that state of general good health that I usually enjoy. I have therefore to broker an agreement with myself most nights when the matter of sleep features itself. The agreement goes something like this: I won’t lie awake worrying unduly about mistakes made this day or take more than a few seconds to run through my list of enemies, particularly those hopelessly deranged or intent on murder. In those several seconds I will reflect on what can best be learned from mistakes and also allow the brief resurgence of a few dark yet positive thoughts regarding enemies. ‘Enemies,’ whatever that might mean in this day and age, invariably are a nuisance. Enemies and generally negative persons whose images intrude at sleep time in my mind are imaginatively invited to wrench open a fantasised trapdoor in a dark recess of my mind that enables instant disposal: all the bad guys fall gracelessly through the trap and as they vanish from view in the general direction of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (particularly toward the very dark part of the triptych appearing most hellish), I dust off my managerial hands and turn to something more creative: ideas and images more positive and rewarding. I may then, for example, dwell on ‘my’ characters in a current fiction that I’m crafting by cheerfully inventing their next moves, their next lines and speeches, or I imagine my own wingless soaring and flying along the serpentine Bellinger River at an enlightening altitude or brushing in midair the canopies of great forest giants. Sometimes I don’t get very far in these epic encounters and flights and without any further ado I shunt from wake into sleep with minimal fuss. To my surprise I generally am able to remember these inspirational and sometimes spiritual jaunts when I awake and am ready to write again. These remembered images and thoughts as words gleaned are new possibilities that will inform my writings or further my experience in the world: experiment with this next, and then do that…  I don’t recommend this for anybody other than for myself (but try it if it holds possibility for you). It seems often to be effective for me and is certainly more interesting than not. And there are times too when I become aware in the semi conscious state, that I would like to understand more about how the sleeping mind goes about its business. At such times I ponder memory, how it works, where it resides, how easily it makes available to me in images places and people and events as ideas, thoughts, or imagined words that often seem accompanied by a soundtrack. On reflection, unexpectedly strange characteristics and qualities of people and of fictive characters seem to come directly to me either from the distant past or from the contemporary imagination. So far, my imagination seems forever teeming. Our imaginations are the most potent forces in the world. What could be more important than the imagination? To be deprived of my imagination would be devastating: how could anybody live without imagination?

Mental processes are so intriguing! When awake I always carry a small notebook and a pen: if I’m away from the house and in the garden or walking along the road and an idea arrives, I can jot it down and I do so frequently. 

I often remember (when fully awake, as I currently feel myself to be) I recall yet again, with startling awareness that we remember, for instance, a time when we last saw a particular person or a time when we last went swimming or a time when this or that person did this or said that and in each of these possibilities I can also see in this almost immediate show of imagery myself as if seen by another. I have become used to this odd phenomenon but I was amazed when I first realized the truth of this habituated experience: it was when I read Julian Jaynes’s surprising book, The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind. If you, dear reader, now will kindly remember the last time you went swimming (for example), you are most likely to see yourself in the imagery, swimming. As Jaynes reminds us, seeing yourself (as if by another or as if in a photograph) is an experience we cannot in fact have or actually experience except when remembering. Our minds know how to imagine that. Is that not awesome?

I frequently take a break during the day, usually at lunchtime, to sit in the garden, often sitting and reading, sitting and writing or making notes, and sometimes just sitting seeing. Most of my computer time these days is devoted to long hours of editing writings that I intend to self publish and I’m not reading enough when I allow myself time to read. Rather, I’ve been sitting and seeing where I am. Passers by who see me thus, idly sitting (and possibly also seeing what there is to be seen) will probably assume I am idling. Not that there’s anything wrong with idling for relaxation, but sitting and seeing sometimes inspires discoveries one might not otherwise easily have enjoyed. Seeing is also a great power. Vision is so remarkable that it seems almost impossible to convey that wonder in words. The experienced idler (myself sitting seeing in the garden), will see amazing things as I have recently done, at almost any time of the day between dawn and dusk. Also, everything that can be seen from one position will change profoundly with only slight movements of one’s head.

I was sitting and looking at the old clumps of white begonias next to the considerably old white cedar on the belvedere. The sun was low at 12:30, this being mid-winter, and because it was declining toward the forested slopes and a shortened afternoon, it was shining across and through the plants at the foot of the cedar tree and the light was perfectly illuminating the old white begonia plants as well as many strands of very fine silk and small webs. But for the strong sunlight and had I been restless or hasty I might never have dwelt on the myriad small webs that drew my attention. I got up and went to examine them more closely: the hunting lines were well strung between the begonia stems, like vines in a forest, and the tiny webs well located and sheltered and the spiders responsible were so miniscule I had to kneel to see them. None of this would have been perceptible but for the brilliant light of the sun illuminating the small scene as if it were a BIG Hollywood epic. Surprised at the abundance of fine silk made by almost microscopic spiders I walked around the tree to approximately its north side, a couple of meters away, and studied the white begonia clump there: no silk, no webs, no spiders: not one.

All of the spider/silk action is on the south side of the old tree. Last February, only five months ago, the begonias close to my chair were covered by more than 3-m of the flooding river (the begonias have never been displaced in almost 30 years: they collect without any great difficulty, impressive amounts of flotsam and loam whilst the flood falls).   

I can still see the silky relatively new images that arise when I want to remember them from wherever they are usually archived (a notion that implies elaborate brain technologies for storing Old Stuff and considerable storage space in which to keep it all). We have very, very sophisticated equipment between the ears and until someone demonstrates that our mental capacity and our cognitive abilities are inferior to something higher or deeper or whatever, we may be accommodating the smartest brains or the best neural apparatus ever and not only here on the Blue Planet, perhaps in the cosmos. That seems immensely awesome when I think about it. 

But that’s not what I’m presently struggling with because validation of our brain’s capabilities beyond the planet is presently not possible; rather, it is this: when I become aware of having accessed an idea and I then dwell on that idea it is as if it occupies a very tiny space or even a speck in an infinite space.

Lost

                                                                                                        DD

Earlier this year, on the day now known as Black Saturday, when the worst wildfires in modern Australian history incinerated more than a million acres of the state of Victoria and killed 173 people, Bruce Ackerman left his house in Marysville to meet up with his regular Saturday lunch group. Marysville, a small town some 60 miles northeast of Melbourne, sprang up in the 1860s as a stopover for miners on their way to the gold-rush towns farther north. Situated in a cool valley of the Great Dividing Range, the mountainous spine that dominates eastern Australia, the town is a popular tourist destination. Ackerman, a bluff fifty-year-old, is proud of being a fourth-generation inhabitant, and told me that his work as a plumber had taken him inside every house there except one. Over the years, he had served on the water board, the cemetery trust, the school council, the ambulance service, and the volunteer fire brigade.

Christine Kenneally, “The Inferno,” in The Best Australian Essays, 2010.

The old photos recently reviewed left behind afterglow notions that made me think again of that 1935 camp scene in the woods somewhere on Vancouver Island, near Englishman’s River, perhaps and Grace standing relaxed her hands behind her back calmly regarding the photographer and I think myself as well sitting in front of her by the campfire, the old tent in the background and the woods all around, also the upright form rectangular or box-like almost of our old motor car a Paige—and whatever became of it, that car? And what became of the forest and the river: can they still be there? And there was an earlier car, older, a Model T Ford I think it was? Was that the family car with a hand-levered throttle mounted next to the steering wheel? Whatever happened to that car and how easily did running boards disappear from motorcars; the Paige had them I’m sure? Some 1920s and 1930s cars with running boards had also an added secured box or container for the family dog. And in those far-off times we weren’t able to see ahead this far and into this century unless we read Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comics.  I remember too that my sister Deirdre when I was a toddler would sometimes take me to the stone beach not far from our house in Oxford Street and she’d show me the tidal pools in the bedrock filled with vey small creatures in and under the water: anemones and crab, seaweed that seemed to wave; bright pebbles. She used to search for amber close to the waves; she had two small pieces that glowed like jewellery. What became of our cameras? What became of items in that old house: a Venetian glass scent bottle on my mother’s dressing table, the decorative small concave bowls like delicate ashtrays with butterfly wings glassed in? And the cardboard box filled with glass baubles and fragile glass balls and shimmering decorations that were the Christmas tree decorations, and my tricycle and the four-wheeled wooden wagon and my two cap pistols? Are any of those in museums now?

Found

                                                                                                                DD

The g’s slammed me into my seat like thugs and pinned me while my heart pounded and the plane turned over slowly and compacted each organ in turn. My eyeballs were newly spherical and full of heartbeats. I seemed to hear a crescendo; the wing rolled shuddering down the last ninety degrees and settled on the flat. There were the islands, admirably below us, and the clouds, admirably above. When I could breathe, I asked if we could do it again, and we did. He rolled the other way. The brilliant line of the sea slid up the side window bearing its heavy islands. Through the shriek of my blood and the plane’s shakes I glimpsed the line of the sea over the windshield, thin as a spear.

                                                                             Annie Dillard: The Writing Life.

At Earthrise the sun would keep moving with its brilliance on the bright winter day. Shadowgraphs of nearby foliage, cast on the pale cream of flooded-gum trunks, would move too, orchestrated. The pictures would change continually, slowly, and you would have to adjust to that change, that slow movement because the shadows moved imperceptibly yet changed the images so hugely: imaged fuzzy leaves, imaged blurred branches, all projected as if in a theatre on a high narrow screen. Like an exquisitely slow exposition settling you for an afternoon’s viewing in the galleried forest. Nobody else would arrive privately for such a public show changed to a private showing. The viewer would be privileged and there was a second chair available. Shadowgraphs on the flooded-gums trunks are both old and new and may always be seen whilst forever changing. Different flooded-gums screen different pictures. One tree looms over the shadowed house we built 30 years ago, the house show 40- to 50-m high over the lawn. And after sunset darkness would arrive and there would be no further shadowgraphs until the moon’s rising and then the viewer could see shows more velvety, softer on the night-time trunks.

In this part of the garden butterflies were frequent, even in winter and they put on air shows of their own. The garden views were seldom silent or empty: the air when looked at from behind a shading hand encouraged the sun to reveal squadrons of winged insects flying, possibly sometimes for pleasure. Tiny insects airborne were white and bright in strong sunlight; they hung forcefully in any breeze that tried to disrupt and move them around. Some butterflies navigated bobbing and bouncing at speed, often upward at acute angles and through foliage without accidents.

And gallery-goers could find nearby sunny patterns of the river’s surface projected through the running river’s shallows and those images free for all as enlarged pictures at an exhibition of minute ripples and swirls and froth. And these would be underwater shows screened on the surfaces of stones or the river’s sandy bottom. Movement of sunlight and shadows made fine art.

In 1991 when I stood on the small stone beach and looked back across the Cowichan at the footbridge and the steps down the crumbling far ban and the rails on one side to assist going down and up ant the woods looming over the cabin, I was astonished to find it all so apparently unchanged since the 1930s. It was eerie. Does the river there not flood? And similarly in downtown Victoria the city library in the Provincial Capital had unchanged steps outside the building, steps that seemed huge when I was a small boy and in 1991 seemed toy-like. The same steps were perceived in two different eras and seemed so changed in the 1990s.

In the 1930s Mom used to cook plain boiled white rice and a mutton stew that we’d take in two pots to the car and drive down Cook Street to the stone beach on summer eves and eating that simple food on the beach in those far-off Depression days was a splendid experience for the family and I remember those times so well that they seem more like four years ago rather than 84 years ago. Everything changes: and you have to keep your eye on everything that moves.

About my eBooks: For those readers who browse for eBooks, here again are the first of those that I’ve begun self-publishing:

1. Finding Drina is a light-hearted sequel to my two print novels (not available as eBooks) published in one volume as The Agreement and it’s sequel, Lourenço Marques. Finding Drina is written in three parts and in three different styles that also are intended homage pieces (to GG Marquez, Ernest Hemingway and Lawrence Durrell); thus this little book is also meta-fiction (novella, about 30-k words). 

2. The Earthrise Visits is an Australian long story set at Earthrise (about 20-k words): an old psychologist meets a young literary ghost from the 1920s (his girlfriend meets her too) before a second old literary ghost, unaware of his spectral state, arrives unexpectedly.

3.  Farewelling Luis Silva is an Australian dystopian long story partly set in Australia, Portugal and France (about 23-k words). A sniper meets an Australian Prime Minister, an old lover and a celebrity journalist; three of them meet a terrorist in Lisbon where there is a bloody assassination.

4. The Selati Line is an early 20^th century Transvaal train story, road story, flying story, a caper and love story sequel to The Agreement and Lourenço Marques, lightly written and with some magical realism. A scene-stealing child prodigy keeps the characters in order (novel, about 150-k words).

5.  The Summer River is a dystopian novel (about 70-k words) set at Earthrise. A General, the déjà vu sniper, the Australian Prime Minister and the celebrity journalist witness the murder of a guerrilla who had also been an Australian university student; they discuss how best to write an appropriate book about ‘foreign invasions’ (novel, about 70-k words).

6.  The Annotated “Elizabeth.” I examine and offer likely explanations as to why my uncle published a mixed prose and verse novel in which his mother is the principal protagonist and I suggest why the book Elizabeth (published by Dick Diespecker in 1950) is a novel and not a biography, memoir or history (non-fiction, about 24-k words).

7.  The Overview is an Australian novella set at Earthrise (about 32-k words) and is also a sequel to The Summer River. 

8.  Scribbles from Earthrise is a selection of essays and caprice written at Earthrise (about 32-k words). Topics are: family and friends, history of the Earthrise house, the river, the forest, stream of consciousness writing and the Earthrise dogs.

9.  Here and There is a selection of Home and Away essays.

           

Pease see Russell Atkinson’s blog at: www.theoldestako.wordpress.com

With best wishes from Don.  

The Earthrise Diary (June 2013)

The Earthrise Diary (June 2013)

                                                                                                  Don Diespecker

        © Text Don Diespecker 2013; guest writers retain their ©

On my way to the deck to shake out the rinsed coffee pot I notice a silky strand float past the window and I stop to see the glimpsed view of the river behind the strand of silk against the rising sun and dried flotsam still in riverside branches, and then I hear the sound of the rapids louder as I open the door. It’s Saturday. I shake the coffee pot watching the drops fly, thinking waterfalls, waterfalls in the mind.

                                                                                DD June 22 2013

Vale. Cameron John Lee, a friend and writer colleague, has died, aged 84, at Coffs Harbour. John was born June 13 1929 in Wanganui, New Zealand. His relatives and friends attended his funeral on Friday, June 21. John’s farewell included tributes that also were endearing narratives from his family and his host of friends. Images of John and his family and many others who knew him well were shown on wall screens during the funeral service. Some of his friends knew him as John, or as Jack. A collection of his poems, Searching for the Edges, has just been published. Many of the poems are evocations of place, of places that he loved.

My neighbour, Doug Spiller, was one who spoke to the congregation and Doug also remembers his friend in a memoir included in this Diary.

June 22 2013. Saturday. Re my quoted words above: those drops of water from the coffee pot remind me of a wet Sunday in the mountains near Pilgrim’s Rest (Transvaal), my father and I sheltering beneath a rock overhang and small spontaneous waterfalls flying past us in the rain. ‘Fly’ and then ‘flying’ come up, perhaps spontaneously, because I’ve been writing about aircraft and about flying and it would be difficult to keep either of those words separate from what I am writing now. I’m remembering how rare it was to see any kind of aircraft in the mountains when I was a youngster in the 1930s and 1940s: a plane would appear as if by magic and be seen at a distance, scarcely heard, then fly on, dwindle and disappear forever. Pilgrim’s Rest is a small mining village and now is very much a National Monument that will always be remembered as the centre of the oldest continuously mined (gold mining) area in South Africa. My grandfather, Rudolph (1858-1920), had been a first era prospector in the district in the 1870s; my father, Durbyn (1896-1977) met my mother, Grace (1898-1974) there; and my sister, Deirdre (1921-1994), was born there.

The first wartime aircraft I had ever seen was a captured Caproni bomber at a so-called ‘Air Commando’ in Lydenburg, 37-miles from Pilgrim’s. More recently I was moved when seeing on television a film titled Spitfire Women: it included images that I remember first seeing in wartime newsreels. That astonishing footage is of young women (some of them still alive) who, as members of the Air Transport Auxiliary, flew replacement aircraft from UK factories to frontline RAF squadrons during the Blitz and the Battle of Britain. Remarkably, these young fliers came from many countries including, I understand, from Australia and they had the ability to fly anything and everything they were required to transport, sometimes several different types of aircraft in one day, including Spitfires and 4-engine bombers! To the best of my knowledge those new aircraft were not armed when flown by ATA pilots.

It’s not every day that I italicize my own Diary text (as if quoting A N Other); I do this today because it’s been a roller coaster week in more ways than one. Correction: the week doesn’t feel complete because week isn’t quite the word for that phrase; maybe ‘roller coaster time’ best marks these recent days. At this moment the morning is still pristine, the sun bright and drops fall from the riverside casuarinas following an overnight shower and some of the remnant other drops are from the night’s river mist. An East Coast Low hasn’t quite reached here yet although flood warnings are current for rivers on the Lower Mid Coast that are further south. All of the radio news is decidedly bad: floods in India, floods in Canada that look remarkably like our recent floods in Australia, and now there’s the increasing probability of flooding closer to home.

Today, June 22, I realize that the winter solstice yesterday slipped past without my having noticed it at all. In the now miserable winter the days are already beginning to grow longer. The full moon will be bigger, brighter and closer to us than usual: a super moon!

Minutes after my Saturday indulgence of coffee (Old Guys think almost simultaneously of caffeine and blood pressure) and during breakfast I hear radio music that presses buttons for me: Debussy’s Claire de Lune, songs from Franz Lehar’s Land of Smiles and The Merry Widow, Kalman’s Countess Mariza. Some of this music is not only ‘old’ for me: it was old for my father (who would occasionally startle the family by singing some of the remembered songs in English). And I suspect he had learned those songs long ago because his father was fond of the same music. Grandfather Rudolph had a lifelong love affair with South Africa and when Durbyn joined his father to help operate the Diespecker Gold Mining Company at Ross Hill in the Transvaal, they both had opportunities to learn about each other’s musical interests and to discuss family history. My father Durbyn and my grandfather Rudolph surely enjoyed music as much as we all do, but in 2013 we all have access to much more of it than they did: consider what was available to reproduce the sounds of music in, say, 1914: probably not very much at all. The point? Although we keep our nearest and dearest departed by holding them in our hearts the personal and individual memories of our families fade and may be forever lost unless they are recorded or somehow preserved. Now I’m remembering that there are sound recordings (courtesy of my late cousin John Bier, who was a radio program producer with the South African Broadcasting Corporation) made by my now late parents many years ago. How remarkable to still be able to hear their voices! When we record music and voices we may remember more clearly and experience our feelings more sharply.

As I leave the house for an early walk down the road I hear crows calling and then hear also the happier sounds of a trilling honeyeater interrupting the crows. It’s a cold morning; the sky is achingly blue and at this early time of the day there are no clouds at all: the clouds will come later because of the flood warnings current for rivers south of here. I meet my neighbor along the way and we chat before I continue and walk to Richardson’s Bridge where I’m pleased to see again the swallows doing acrobatics over and under the bridge, while they feed on the wing. The river is low and I study the new and different patterns on the stones beneath the surface made by the light of the rising sun. 

I recently read a very impressive novel A Sport and a Pastime (by James Salter) in which the author employs the device of an unnamed ‘narrator’ who imagines the novel that follows the beginning of the narrator’s story. Those two narratives become one story. After reading Salter’s book and remembering the Spitfire Women film I experimentally re-wrote the beginning of a draft novella by including a ‘device’ similar to that used by Salter (above). Perhaps because I’m always touched or moved by images of flying that I see or read descriptions of (those who have read some of my fiction may recall this) I was moved by my own writing (!) while writing and re-reading drafted text (my own) that represents ‘the inner life’ of a flier observing the Bellinger riverscape and creatively thinking while flying. Much of this kind of prose is so-called stream of consciousness writing (principally interior monologue and the free indirect style). A few days ago I published the novella via the Kindle Direct Publishing template, as The Overview. All of that kind of writing has been an emotional experience. I’ve also twice climbed the forested hillside behind the house hoping to take a photo of the Bellinger River seen from above because such an image will make a good cover for the little book set here. Although there is too much new growth now obscuring river views from up there, I’ll keep searching because I remember such views 20 years ago and will keep climbing until I can re-discover one of them.

Similarly, I’ve reminded myself of movies that feature images of aircraft flying (e.g., The English Patient) but haven’t quite got past the video pictures (via Google) enabling both images and the stunning soundtrack from the 1985 movie, Out of Africa. The static image of a biplane in the sky is not overwhelming when seen, particularly in black and white; and color helps.

I’m thinking now of the old b/w photo of the so-called Antoinette Racer chosen to inspire an imaginative account of such an aircraft flown by a young pilot accompanied by an eleven years old girl, the photographer in one of my fictions (The Selati Line) set in the Transvaal Lowveld way back in 1910 or thereabouts (the Lowveld is where the Kruger National Park is now). Some of the characters in this novel are based on family and friends: Rudolph Diespecker and his brother, Jules, were Selati Railway sub-contractors in 1890 and Jules later became Manager of the Selati Railway. My grandmother, Elizabeth, having just given birth to her and Rudolph’s first child, unwisely braved lions, primitive accommodations, malaria and other dangerous diseases to live in or near the Selati Railway construction camps.

The combination of moving pictures in near natural color and with the appropriate sounds to accompany such footage will remind most of us (perhaps, ‘almost all of us’) of our romantic, emotional and chosen involvement in such forms of story-telling. Being an incurable romantic, a storyteller with an almost lifelong excitement about planes and flying, and having spent most of my childhood in Africa encourages my wholehearted involvement when seeing, hearing and experiencing related feelings associated with such works. For those who now are reading these words, please try this experiment: Google Out of Africa, select sites that present aspects of the film version of the book and watch some of the relatively short videos compiled from the movie footage. Discover your own ‘emotional involvement’ in what you are seeing and hearing and your feelings as you watch the images, hear the music and the words of the actors. (‘When did you learn to fly?’ ‘Yesterday.’ Or, when the male protagonist refers euphemistically to our mortality: ‘We’re just passing through…’). Why and how do so many of us love the movies as thoroughly as we do? And isn’t it interesting that we choose to so involve ourselves in fantasies?

Many of the trees and shrubs here still have clumps and bouquets of light flotsam, mostly grasses, festooning their lower branches. Because writing is presently the priority I’m leaving most of this material that’s just out of reach and I want also to see how the living trees manage these cloying tangles of burden: most trees are ignoring that and growing right through the tangles because the long Indian Summer decreed a lot of late growth. The high and dry flotsam makes a good starter, as kindling, in the slow combustion heater and I’ve been drying some of it in the sun close to where I’ve been sitting outside and because all the heavier burnable wood that I was too idle to gather and shelter is so wet. (I may have included this passage in the May Diary but I’m cheerfully using it (again, possibly) because the unruly garden remains characteristic of this area.

Re the butterflies: their behaviours are hard to explain—I ought to research this more and find out but I haven't got around to it yet. There were quite a few of these critters in late summer and early autumn and so I've been surprised to see any of them at all in winter but almost every time I turn up on the lawn near the belvedere at least one butterfly manifests. This surprises me. It’s almost as if the same single flier arrives to greet me (but that's surely all in my mind, rather than in a butterfly’s consciousness). If I get as far as researching this I'll be searching for the butterfly writings of the late Vladimir Nabokov who was famous both for his novels and for his studies of butterflies—I recall that one or more butterflies were named in his honour (not bad for a scribbler who wasn't a proper scientist!).

June 23 2013. Last night there were possums barging over the cathedral roof above my bed; they seemed as loud as a herd of cattle. This morning a tap dancing (by the sound of it) Fred Astaire rattles and bangs above where I sit at the keyboard and so I tiptoe upstairs to have a peek through the window and see that it’s probably only a ground thrush small enough to sit in my hand, scalloped, using his beak to hunt spiders between the weatherboards and the roof over this lower part of the house and when it calls loudly it sounds like the shrike thrush, a bigger bird with a strong voice and a compelling song. (Or possibly there’s a shrike thrush nearby, watching and singing: the ground thrush isn’t a bird I’m at all familiar with and this one wasn’t even on the ground…).

The writing that follows is both memoir and tribute to the late John Lee written by his friend, Doug Spiller:

An Ill-conceived But Pleasurable Journey—

A Folly Of Sorts

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Doug Spiller

 About six years ago astronomers made adjustments to the Hubble satellite telescope and tested it by aiming at a very small section of the sky that appeared to be empty. When the results came in they revealed that in that area alone there was more matter than in the previously known universe.   

John Lee and I spread the topographical map out on his floor about 60 years ago and planned a 10-day walk. We caught a morning train from Central to Mount Victoria and on arriving set out up the hill to the pub for a beer, a bit of a yarn to the locals, and advice of  “Just go up the road, down the Victoria Pass and turn left at Hartley; it’s a bit of a step, mate.”

We were young, had planned for 7 or 8 days, no commitments as casual cab drivers for Jack Donohue and each with about 5-quid in our pockets. Well shod and with a spring in our step. In those days the highway traffic was light so going down the Pass and along the highway of the Hartley Valley was easy, safe, pleasant and for the most part quiet.

The country was new to us as we went down through the road cut by the convicts 130 years before, down through the Narrabeen strata of shale and sandstone with the occasional glimpse of Kanimbla valley cliffs and valley floor below.

“This must be a bit like the Paddington Gully was before they put in factories like Hardie Rubber,” muttered John.

“I suppose so—why do you say that though?”

“Oh, the junk everywhere, the oil and grease, the idiot painted signs on the rock face. And that’s got nothing to the madness inside the factory. But I think it’s a bigger crime what they did to the gully and the cliffs,” he murmured.

By now we’d hit the last bend of the Pass and dashed (lumbered with big packs) across to the other side of the road, because the last cutting came right to the road edge. Then it was open road down past Rosedale Inn and along to the old Hartley remnant of a 1800s village that never grew up around the solid sandstone courthouse, as planned by the Colonial Government. We agreed that it’s good to see a few government plans fail so completely—particularly if it meant shoving blokes in gaol and sometimes hanging them.

“Still, some of the rich were OK you know.”

“At least they built some nice buildings.”

“I’d sooner have lived in that old cottage.’

“Yeah.”

“Here’s the Jenolan Road—less traffic.” 

“That must be the Lett River down there.”

And so the journey through to the Jenolan Caves started. John sang some songs about Reedy River to the rhythm of our tramping feet. It was not a time for talk and we could see up ahead the road coming down and around a bend to the Cox’s River Bridge. Then another old building turned into a remote, rundown shop with an ice cream sign—Peters Ice Cream—Yum. We didn’t give it a second look—John’s song, the rhythm of the tramp and our minds were far from houses and the impedimenta of the people that lived in them—at the time.

 The road across the bridge and beyond, past the old coaching Bathurst road that cut across and wound over through paddocks to the west, up the hill beside the remnant, cut off bends from a time when cars were fewer and slower. A journey of smattered, undirected conversation that was picked up and dropped at our leisure and meant little at the time but was somehow unforgettable, nonetheless. 

And so up to Lowther and on to Hampton, our first night out and it’s starting to rain.

In the gloom as we went out of the 5-something house settlement we found a one-teacher school building with a verandah down one side. The mist and rain obscured it from the road. Two blokes, it’s raining, shelter; we take all of 10 seconds to start planning. The packs are off, the bread and cheese is out the sleeping bags unrolled. But the ever thinking John had an idea. He saw an old sheet of roofing iron under the verandah. If we have a very small fire on the iron, on the verandah out of the rain, then the bread and cheese becomes all the better with a billy of tea!

 A good night’s sleep and we’re on the road before any locals are abroad. And what a road to tramp! It winds through the forest hugging a big drop down into the Kanimbla. Mist, no wind, smell of eucalypt and pine, a full belly and the company’s acceptable. By the time we pass the Oberon turnoff the sun is up, the rain is easing and I’m telling John about the night The Brow became known as The Uninvited. It goes like this—The Brow (I never knew what his parents named him) was well under the weather by the time the pub closed at 6 o’clock, so he bought a few bottles of Royal Purple Para Sweet Sherry to drink over at Gabardine’s (I never knew his name either). Gabardine later told us that The Brow left about 12 o’clock and seemed Ok at the time. The Brow told us that he didn’t remember that but woke up in a very plush lounge chair in one of the big houses up on the hill near Wirth’s old place. Standing in front of him was an old lady in a dressing gown and beside her was a policeman. The lady was saying over and over, “He was uninvited, he’s not a guest. – He’s uninvited!”

And that was how it was reported the next day in the Daily Telegraph no less.

So it was too good an opportunity for Bobby Hanlon, who devised most of Coogee’s nicknames. That I know, there are now some people who don’t even know that The Uninvited used to be The Brow!

John’s main comment was that that is probably the most useful and accurate news item to ever appear in the Daily Telegraph. And then talking as we were about newspapers he told me that Frank Norton of shonky newspaper fame used to live in Torrington Road just about 100 yards down from Tilly Devine (that was just down the road from John’s place). Funny how there are clusters of notoriety isn’t it? Or is it just that we make very personal constructs of ‘notoriety’?

We talked and walked, talked and walked, we sang a bit—made up songs of absolutely no musical merit and put together scraps of conversation that were forgotten about as fast as they were discarded—but my god we had a good time of it!

After a second night in the rain (in John’s japara tent) we walked into and through the beautiful faux alpine Jenolan Caves settlement at about noon. With a bit of luck we had been given a lift for the 2-miles down the big hill by a coal miner and his family from Newcastle.

“Get in mate we can’t leave you out in this rain—move over kids—chuck your packs in the back—I’m Bill, this is Janice, that’s the kids—my god isn’t this great country!” Pok,pok,pok goes the windscreen wiper and we hold our breath as he drives slowly down the steep, winding  Jenolan Caves hill that drops about 2,000 feet in 5-miles...

It fitted our mood very well indeed. The rain was nothing to us that day.

With our heads down against the rain and leaning into the weight of our packs intent in part on the small discomforts of the load and weather, our minds were released from the social burden of communication conventions of ‘eye contact,’ sentence construction, voice modulation etc. In this situation John expressed a very personal construction on his two seasons as a kangaroo shooter out on the Darling River plains. It is interesting, he thought, how an animal who has been here for thousands of years can become a pest—more, he thought, an ‘inconvenience’ and so ‘pest’ as a convenient way in which we can allow a debasement of them, through brutality—shooting, skinning, leave the carcass the indignity of being ‘discarded’ to rot. Ironically it was the advanced technology of the telescopic sight that brought the animal closer and thus more comprehensively seen as to make it of more value to John by his not pulling the trigger. John spent hours observing the interaction within the family groups of kangaroo. He became the observer and his compassion came into play. He started to doubt his right to decide life or death. He was then aged 24. As the years wore on the life/death process tantalized him. It was never lightly considered—a personal consideration as an atheist who puts the decision firmly at the feet of the individual and not to be conveniently passed on to a deity.

 That night we had a wet camp. The talk rolled on. In later years there were some who queried whether John’s conversation was just ‘unstructured’ and he talked just to fill in an empty space. It’s crossed my mind and I think it was sometimes a possibility. But then I would have to admit also that out of the mass of words he uttered there did emerge a pattern of profound insights. I now think that his mind was ‘abuzz’ and if he had a fault it was one of tending to say what he thought, when some of us screen and censor the thought before speaking.

But...on the track, with the personal distraction of rain and discomfort John was a joy. And he was a good listener. He was no egotistic, garrulous bore.

The dirt road out the other side of Jenolan Caves to Kanangra Walls undulates across a plateau through shallow valleys and dry swamps. We made it to Kanangra in time for John’s left knee to let us know that there was no way that it was at all willing to go beyond Kanangra or beyond to the Colong Caves. In fact, it was quite definite in expressing the view that it was not keen to go from the plateau into the Kowmung river valley and then up Lannigan’s Creek to Colong. John passed the message on to me and we had to admit that the original plan, drafted as it was in the comfort of a flat in Coogee, was ill conceived. John’s knee made a rather crude comment. I can’t help wondering whether John too readily ignored its (the knee’s) discontent with too much equanimity over the years. After all it is a lesson only really acknowledged by the old, that consistent discomfort, for a young person may progress to serious pain in later years—but more of that later.

Forty years before we arrived at Kanangra Walls some of the local girls and lads constructed a dance platform in a large overhang. The platform was about 20 feet (I concede 6-metres to those who must have it so) by 20-feet square. The foundation pillars were about 4-feet high with heavy 10-inch by 2-inch rough sawn plank flooring bolted in place. You could have driven John’s 2-ton truck on it if you had a ramp. When we arrived, about two thirds of the planking was intact and all of the pillars were sound. Not long before I had seen a troupe of Spanish dancers and we cavorted in Spanish style across the platform. The acoustic reverberation in the big composite rock overhang was tremendous. The locals who traveled there in previous years must have had an amazing time. You would have to imagine accordions, guitars, banjos, tin whistles and drums. John even forgot his knee!

 In the back of the overhang was a section of a big concrete pipe set in the rock into which a permanent spring dripped water.

It was our observation that while urban comforts may be accepted as admirable they are not a universal necessity. That Kanangra Walls overhang was the Ritz for us at that time.

My grandparents lived in Bayswater Road, Sydney in the 1940s just one block from Kings Cross. They had a basement flat. Their 15-feet square ‘backyard’ was a shaft in the Hawkesbury sandstone, probably part of an old quarry for the early Sydney buildings. There was one large room on two levels with the footpath grate directly above the far corner of the room. John, his mother and older sister were only a small step in comfort beyond that in mid 1950s.

The notions of necessity, comfort and luxury were part of our conversation that day. Over the years I always saw John as living in comfort but never with luxury. He never sought nor desired it. I find it odd how easy it is to say that of some, but not of others. I really have to watch that I don’t judge too harshly on this one. I find that I can.

Stories had it that cattle was driven up onto the Kanangra Walls Plateau. I can’t quite imagine why. Some droughts must have been harsh in the 1800s. The heath and hard grasses of the plateau could not have been nutritious for introduced, European cattle. However, that is only a rather idiosyncratic selection of the history of that place. I suppose that wherever you stand on the earth’s surface you are standing on a complicated trace of past processes. That is very easily seen at Kanangra Walls. The massive strata of conglomerate and sandstone are obvious because the edge of the plateau is in the process of fairly active weathering. We spent the second night over the edge of Brennan’s Wall, on the far side from the dancing platform overhang. We were following the minute flow out of a small plateau swamp, scrambled through a weathering joint in the sandstone block and worked our way back to the waterline that was by now above where we were.

Bingo, we had our haven for the night. We had found a coal seam that was weathering much faster than the underlying and overlying sandstone strata. The overhang was about 10-15 feet deep and about 50-feet long, with a good floor for the likes of us!

A billy placed under the slow flow from the swamp above and it was full in about 10 minutes –Teas up! The damper made from the previous night’s campfire was finished off as we looked around.

We were in an ‘eagle’s nest’ site, with a sheer drop of about 300-feet to the scree below and an unimpaired view for about 100-miles over the ridges to the south. It was quiet but yet not quiet. The hush and whisper of the vast valley and ridges below, away in the distance was soft, constant. Conversation became muted and infrequent, by mutual, unspoken assent. This was not a time to trivialize our interests in the presence of the grand Kanangra Walls and its magnificent tribe.

This certainly was the destination that could only have been attained by being unsought.

                                                                                     DS. June 24 2013.

This is one of Cameron John Lee’s poems:

Daily Thoughts

Like David Attenborough

I can't help thinking every day

Death stalks me like a shadow.

There won't be a choir or eulogy,

Church service, but maybe a wake

As my mind shuts down for once

Letting me make room for another.

A handful of mates to blow the bugle

With a few schooners at the pub

Watching my ashes fly the coop

And that pile of worldly goods,

While I ride the wild winds

Further than an albatross

Lightly dusting Mother Earth.

                                          Jack Lee. (December 2011).

Doug Spiller was a friend of John Lee for over half a century. He now lives on the Upper Bellinger River. 

douglas.spiller@bigpond.com

June 25 2013. Tuesday. My cousin Jill and her husband, Brian, sent me this link to a Vancouver newspaper:

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Footloose+with+fishing/8564815/story.html

The link opens a Vancouver Sun story about the Cowichan River on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The Cowichan is the primary river of my life and has also been iconic for members of our family for more than 100 years. When last I visited BC in 1991, parts of the Cowichan that I’ve remembered like dreams of the 1930s astonished me because they were so familiar and seemed so little changed.

As with my family and the contemporary related and associated families, the Cowichan River continues to be an important place for many other families, too. The current newspaper story is about Tony Travers and his young grandson Ned and about Tony returning to the river of his past. Tony and Ned traveled from Sydney, Australia to British Columbia to fish the Cowichan River. Tony Travers’ book, Fishing The River Of Time describes his “return to a landscape that has had a profound effect on his life and his way of thinking, and to share this place with his grandson.” The book is “an elegant meditation on nature, life, and family, written with warmth and wisdom. It inspires self-reflection and an appreciation of the natural world and the fundamentals of our human experience. It is destined to become a classic work of simple living in the mold of Henry David Thoreau's Walden."

Diary readers may also be interested to visit the site below that also was sent me by my cousin, Jill. The video is of a person eloquently describing her experience of a stroke and of her recovery (the person who suffered the stroke also works professionally in the area of brain research: the presentation is made to her professional colleagues).

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

 Please see, also, Russell Atkinson’s blog at:

www.theoldestako.wordpress.com 

June 26 2013. Wednesday. Another month is winding down and this one has been moving helter-skelter for me. The reader will be pleased to know that when the computer baulked at helter-skelter being spelled without its hyphen, I checked and discovered that this adjective, adverb and also noun describes a tower-shaped structure in funfairs with an external spiral track down which a person may slide on a mat and that skelte, from Middle English, means to hasten and I see too, that the prior phrase, winding down, though I’d unconsciously selected it, also was surprisingly apt. Sometimes, it’s as if the mind manages to find the word for me without my laborious intervention, as if the mind makes the necessary connections through elaborate pathways (and billions more connections) without me trying to supervise. Funny too, how we sometimes may feel compelled to hasten to meet a deadline, often self-imposed, or for some of us, to travel at hastened speed without realizing that hasty is not always normal in 21^st century societies and having now checked back to the start of this paragraph I’m tickled to see that when winding down swam into my ken it was neatly chosen. Was that perhaps intuition? I feel lightness returning and because of that I’m going to change style from Diary or informal journalese to personal essay of a kind. I recommend this kind of writing as salve that will sooth anxiety and fatigue.

Wednesday

Monday was an opportunity to race down to the garden chair and the river’s downstream views because the sun shone briefly and I was glad when I did because I saw something not previously seen from my chair. The river is broad here at the bend: it’s probably one of the widest bends of the upper Bellinger and I enjoy seeing it even during hair-raising floods. There were four or five swallows flying over the river at speed, to and fro, navigating at speed, presumably hunting. I realized that butterflies fly and navigate even more jerkily but otherwise similarly and unerringly and probably for a different reason: to avoid predators like swallows hunting just above the river’s surface. Certain butterflies are unerring because they easily fly fast, angled while climbing and adroitly navigating through foliage. If you have ever seen this while idly watching it’s easy to miss the point: the butterfly can move deftly upwards through endless obstructions of leaves and branches without collision, always gaining altitude and heading for a specific target at a predetermined height and the jerking twists and turns that the little creature makes at speed are truly remarkable to watch. These turns tightly made climbing at speed would likely tear apart the airframe of a fast-moving jet aircraft, but a tiny animal flier with fragile-looking big wings can do all of that without stressing anything.

The handful of swallows flying sorties at low altitude were spectacular to see and then I saw distantly that there was a second squadron of swallows downstream another 100- to 200-m beyond the ones here at the bend. They seemed separate, the two groups and that was something I’d not previously seen here, not knowingly or certainly not remembered seeing. Was there a no-fly zone between the two squadrons? Would the downstream fliers edge closer to the upstream ones? How territorial might low-level swallows be when feeding in air filled with tiny flying insects?

The two groups began to merge without mishap and soon became one armada of flying hunters. There were no collisions. Whether the two groups were related or unrelated I’ll never know but they flew and dined together. And that was more than my first surprise: it all seemed so apolitical, as cheery as a circus, and that was something to see on Monday and on Wednesday, close to frazzled, I remembered back to a few days before when similarly I’d sat in the same place and seen no swallows at all and was thinking vaguely that it now was too cold and the midwinter weather too damp for butterflies either white or brown with yellow markings when to my great surprise one of the brown ones flew up out of Big Lawn like a mini fighter aircraft wobbling up to gain altitude following take-off. Startled I moved my head back to avoid the little flier but it came determinedly on to make an eagle-like pouncing landing on my shirt, on my chest, directly over my heart.

What was that? Was it by chance? Was it reckless flying, harum-scarum navigation, or was it a friendly greeting? I’ll never know, will I?

If that or almost all of it might now be integrated I now more calmly return to Wednesday where parts of me have seemed still to be driving from home to Moonee Beach following an early start to visit Kerry and Susan and then with further finessing tuition self-publish a non-fiction collection of essays.

It’s a cloudy and damp day at home and it’s bright and sunny on the Coast. Drivers come up behind me, swing out and pass. I’m doing a polite 100-km/hr and they’re invariably pushing at and over the 110 limit. How do we so differently interpret advisory signs? Do some drivers believe they’re all supposed to drive at 110, at the max? Have I become a renegade slowpoke the others will want to see much less obviously on their Pacific Highway? I’m aware of my residue of intolerance; it’s like a burr and I’ll have to work on it as soon as I return to the river and my garden chair.

I complete some chores in Bellingen and get home in one piece. The draft Diary needs more work. There’s elation because the essays some of them capricious are now suddenly published although there’s also my Grommet-like furrowing of the brow because of Breaking News on the radio: the hung Parliament is likely changing the leader and ousting the Prime Minister and there are rumbling uncertainties so palpable that many more of us will be furrowing and blinking by dark. Can hung Parliaments unravel and why are they not called hanged Parliaments? And so there’s all of that, the elation mixing with the puzzlement. And there’s the tiredness of the long day jostling now with the experience of damp and cold and approaching showers likely and the need to hydrate and refuel and somehow switch off those urgent departments in the brain clamoring despite tiredness to show me what they can still do while about to rev down yet asserting they’re still standing by to rev right back up again. How many of these parts were observing Other Driver Behaviour on the Highway? The brain comes up with some curly questions, repeats of those screened earlier in the theatre of the mind. Will it be OK for me to be too tired to make a fire and instead to warmly wrap up and lie abed with one eye wanly on the mind-altering TV and the other eye winking toward sleep? What the heck is going on in Parliament House, what really, I mean? And of course the Snooze Department takes over because it’s presently more powerful than Bleating Central and I’m out like a light until woken by a playful snore that I hadn’t planned at all and I see a senior Minister explaining his next move in the Parliamentary Game will likely bring down one PM and raise up the other who once a PM himself has been. I blink away at brainy cobwebs thirty mere minutes by the bedside radio clock and half an hour being not quite enough for complete cognitive enterprising even though four hours or thereabouts is all I enable most nights. Sleeping a third of my life seems absurd so I’m programmed not to for most of my time. Tiredness is another matter. And I suddenly find serendipitously a solution to drama in the head: I thoughtfully make an agreement, a deal as the politically inclined might say and I make brief visits to the TV channels available to me and settle on three for monitoring. The ABC, the National Broadcaster, has unhesitatingly it seems allowed itself to be led away from its regular programs into an abyss of Breaking News (from Parliament House of course) whilst Chanel Nine remains unswervingly fixated (together with thousands of maroon-clad Queenslander lively fans at a Brisbane football stadium and a few million Queensland and NSW other viewers at home) all of these fans enraptured by the second in the series of State of Origin rugby league games and I visit quickly the more genteel version of excitement free of biffo and unruly bloodied blokes being sent off offered by Chanel Seven which is at Wimbledon more kindly watching the tennis and possibly a spectator or two sipping aperitifs like Pimm’s No. 1 and certainly eating strawberries and cream and later I’ll sample also SBS1 (the Special Broadcasting Service) that will screen Borgen the Danish language political thriller that is simultaneously politics Big Time, political thriller and fascinating entertainment that allows all of us to brush up our Danish whilst reading English subtext. This works for me because the alternative is to remain fixated on only one of the channels if TV is at all acceptable and the single channel would soon trigger my insanity because I’d be wondering constantly about the unfolding, the actions and the outcomes of the other unviewed and unseen broadcasters.

TV is a soothing prophylactic: you just have to know how to use it sensibly… Thus I stick around sanely till midnight and beyond watching Wednesday slip to Thursday and as warm as toast with Thinking Central easing to Stand By I slide silkily away to my night-shift sleep. 

DD June 27 2013

January 15, 1955

Jill Alexander

The date is January 15. She is 16 years old and in labour. She has been in labour for many hours. Suddenly the time comes to bear down and she is terribly frightened. She thinks something had gone wrong. She cries out and then hears the doctor’s voice saying, “Put her under.” Then there is darkness.

When she awakes there is no one else there. Everything is clean and quiet. She wonders if she has had the baby yet. She slips her hands under the blanket and feels her stomach.  It seems flatter and feels much softer.  A nurse appears and says she is going to wheel her to her room. It’s a private room. There is no baby to hold and no one to talk to.

The next morning she summons the courage to ask if she had a boy or a girl.  A boy, she is told.  She tries to imagine what he looks like.  She is not allowed to see him.

A week later she leaves the hospital for the foster home where she had been living.  Then, four lonely months later, she returns to her family home and resumes her previous life.

A year passes. January 15 arrives. He is one today. She wonders what he looks like.  Another year passes: January 15 again.  He is two today. Does he have blonde hair?  Is he having a party? 

Every year on January 15 she wonders about her son and tries to picture him another year older. 

Years later they find each other.  It is a very happy reunion. His adoptive mother and father are curious and invite her for a cup of tea. His mother takes her through the house and shows her the photos of him on every wall.  “This is when he was a baby,” she says.  This is when he was two, three, four…” They were all there—the pictures she had tried so hard to see.  Now they are all here before her.

When they finish their tea, the two of them walk to the door. The adoptive mother says to her, “I never thought of my son as being adopted, except on his birthday. And then I always thought of you.”

 She leaves with those words repeating over and over in her mind.

Now on January 15, she has the party.

Jill Diespecker Alexander is a retired nurse and business owner and is presently writing her life story.

 jillalexander@shaw.ca

About my eBooks: For those readers who browse for eBooks, here are some that I’ve been self-publishing:

1. Finding Drina is a light-hearted sequel to my two print novels (not available as eBooks) published in one volume as The Agreement and it’s sequel, Lourenço Marques. Finding Drina is written in three parts and in three different styles that also are intended homage pieces (to GG Marquez, Ernest Hemingway and Lawrence Durrell); thus this little book is also meta-fiction (novella, about 30-k words). 

2. The Earthrise Visits is an Australian long story set at Earthrise (about 20-k words): an old psychologist meets a young literary ghost from the 1920s (his girlfriend meets her too) before a second old literary ghost, unaware of his spectral state, arrives unexpectedly.

3.  Farewelling Luis Silva is an Australian dystopian long story partly set in Australia, Portugal and France (about 23-k words). A sniper meets an Australian Prime Minister, an old lover and a celebrity journalist; three of them meet a terrorist in Lisbon where there is a bloody assassination.

4. The Selati Line is an early 20^th century Transvaal train story, road story, flying story, a caper and love story sequel to The Agreement and Lourenço Marques, lightly written and with some magical realism. A scene-stealing child prodigy keeps the characters in order (novel, about 150-k words).

5.  The Summer River is a dystopian novel (about 70-k words) set at Earthrise. A General, the déjà vu sniper, the Australian Prime Minister and the celebrity journalist witness the murder of a guerrilla who had also been an Australian university student; they discuss how best to write an appropriate book about ‘foreign invasions’ (novel, about 70-k words).

6.  The Annotated “Elizabeth.” I examine and offer likely explanations as to why my uncle published a mixed prose and verse novel in which his mother is the principal protagonist and I suggest why the book Elizabeth (published by Dick Diespecker in 1950) is a novel rather than a biography, memoir or history (non-fiction, about 24-k words).

7.  The Overview is an Australian novella set at Earthrise (about 32-k words) and is also a sequel to The Summer River. 

8.  Scribbles from Earthrise is a selection of essays and caprice written at Earthrise (about 32-k words). Topics are: family and friends, history of the Earthrise house, the river, the forest, stream of consciousness writing and the Earthrise dogs.

June 30 2013. Friday. It is twenty-nine years since Jannelle and I arrived here to build the house by the river and I am also almost a Local having lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere in the world.

If it’s possible I’ll insert below an old photo of Elizabeth and Rudolph’s five sons (no daughters): a picture taken in the summer of 1932 on the Cowichan River (from L to R: Jean, Durbyn, Dick, Louis, Denny). Thanks to Rik Diespecker for sharing the photo. 

Thank you to my guest writers. Best wishes to all my readers from Don.