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.
June 25 2013. Tuesday. My cousin Jill and her husband, Brian, sent
me this link to a Vancouver newspaper:
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).
Please see, also, Russell Atkinson’s
blog at:
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 21st
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.
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 20th
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.
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