The Voyage
Journeys in creative writing
New writing from the Universities of Monash and Warwick
edited by
Chandani Lokuge and David Morley
A Silkworms Ink Anthology
Published by Silkworms Ink
Find more Silkworms Ink titles here
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Chandani Lokuge and David Morley
-
First published 2011
by Silkworms Ink
Highlands, Whatlington, Battle, East Sussex, TN33 0NL
Selection and Editorial Matter Copyright Chandani Lokuge and David Morley
Individual Contributions Copyright the Contributors
The right of Chandani Lokuge and David Morley to be identified as Editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN: 978-1-908-64400-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Silkworms Ink and Smashwords, Inc.
Highlands
Whatlington
Battle
East Sussex
TN33 0NL
Chandani Lokuge & David Morley
Peter Blegvad
Cinematic Mash-up: The Sublime Genre of the Internet
Lauren Bliss
Elleke Boehmer
Halina Boniszewska
Janine Burke
Ed Byrne
Peter Carpenter
Maryrose Casey
Philip Caveney
Jane Commane
Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario
Will Eaves
Elin-Maria Evangelista
Peter Forbes
Maureen Freely
Elsa Halling
John Hawke
Angie Hobbs
Gruffydd Jones
Sue Kossew
Raj Lal
Nick Lawrence
Anna Lea
Chandani Lokuge
Anna MacDonald
Elizabeth Manuel
Adrian Martin
Michael McKimm
David Morley
Catherine Noske
A fifteen minute delay at a provincial Italian train station
Leila Rasheed
A Gallipoli Story: Imagining History
Bruce Scates
Ian Stewart
Driving to Saturday’s Rally for Refugees
Jenny Strauss
‘My Journey from Kumasi’ by Matthew Tipple, Class 4TF, Oatlands Junior School, Harrogate, UK, July 1982
Nicholas Tipple
Dragan Todorovic
George Ttoouli
Ndaeyo Uko
Robert JC Young
Welcome to The Voyage, an innovative new anthology of writing by staff and postgraduates from both Monash in Australia and Warwick in England. We believe all writing, at its best, is creative writing. To that end we have drawn our distinguished contributors not only from English and Creative Writing but also from other departments in Humanities, from our Faculties of Science and Social Science, and from our Administration. What's more, we invited writers and scholars who have some practical connection with Warwick and Monash from both within and outside the academy.
We were open to all forms and genres: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction including scholarship and biography, drama and most other forms of creativity you might imagine. We were happy for our contributors to write on any theme but we think that the core of the book is what it means to journey. These might be imagined or remembered journeys, physical or metaphorical journeys, or journeys into knowledge or across time.
There are over ten thousand miles between the universities of Monash and Warwick. Our writers live and work on the opposite side of the planet to each other. This book has been a voyage in space and time zones. It is part of a larger project between our universities. We are developing creative and practical research and teaching links for the benefit of staff and students. We have carried out workshops in Australia and England and our postgraduates have developed a superb anthology of student writing, Verge 2011: The Unknowable, which will be launched at Melbourne Writers Festival.
We thank all our contributors and colleagues at Warwick and Monash Universities, our innovative publishers Silkworms Ink for their inventiveness and attention, and Melbourne Writers Festival for their support. We also thank the Monash-Warwick Strategic Funding Initiative for Joint Research and Education Programmes for financial support. We apologise for any errors or omissions that have occurred during the editing process: these are entirely our responsibility. The copyright of all the pieces in this book remain with the authors.
Chandani Lokuge, Monash University
David Morley, Warwick University
Peter Blegvad
Ullage is “the amount a vessel lacks of being full” as my old dictionary defines it. The amount of absence or emptiness in it. Oppressed by the glut of surplus objects, people are beginning to value ullage more than the vessel itself. As a concerned citizen, feeling I should do my bit, I joined a destruction-crew in a field heaped with bottles, cups, mugs, jugs, beakers, demi-johns and other such. A tap or two of the hammer and they burst with a crack, pop or tinkle, their ullage freed to supplement the gasses enveloping the planet.
Our team had been working since dawn with an hour’s break for lunch, and now the sun was setting. In the course of the day I’d smashed hundreds of vessels of various kinds with equal indifference, so why was I moved to spare this one? There was just something about it. A little terra-cotta cup. I looked around. The others were focused on their work, their hammers rising and falling, liberating ullage. Though it was against the rules, I put the cup in my pocket. Just as the whistle blew. The workday was over. We weren’t searched. I took the cup home undetected, hoping the absence it contained would not be missed.
A happy marriage of form and function, but that wasn’t it. It was the cup’s modesty, its humility which moved me. Somehow I identified with it, part of me did — that part which wanted to be small again, to be ‘bounded in a nutshell’, contained.
Erich Neumann, in his study of the feminine archetype, “The Great Mother” (1955), draws a diagram of the Goddess as a vast pot or beaker, vectors connecting her anatomy with a constellation of other objects — beings, substances and things. In a straight line ascending from her right breast we find bowl, cup, and at the top, grail. The grail I pictured was gaudy, bejewelled, ostentatious, vulgar. While the terra-cotta cup seemed to embody Christ’s injunction to “become as little children.”
Strange how anything, the humblest object, can be the agent of a person’s conversion.
In the days that followed, notices appeared. The cup had been missed after all. A reward was offered for its return. It was described as a disposable cup for water, found in India. Where in India? My enquiries had to be discrete, but I managed to discover the specific provenance of the cup: a workshop in rural Gujarat. I resolved to return it to its place of origin.
If we imagine the line from the Great Mother’s breast continuing upward beyond the grail it would eventually reach the ultimate in gaudy vessels: the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, built at a cost of billions. Inside the LHC protons stream at near light-speed around a ring 27 kilometres in circumference before being directed by super-cooled magnets to smash into each other in a spectacular approximation of the conditions which obtained immediately subsequent to the Big Bang.
Inside the cup particles streamed at a more leisurely pace and collided or not, according to chance. After days of travel, the cup and I arrived at a village near Morbi in Rajkot district, Gujarat. In the abandoned workshop the kilns were cold. Nearby the earth had been excavated to a depth of 3 metres. At the bottom it was clay, red with iron oxide. Moist and still warm from the setting sun.
What can we hope to learn from the collision of particles inside the LHC? It may give us direct evidence of the Higgs Boson, a new matter which would push the boundaries of high-energy physics.
What could I learn from the ullage the cup contained? I curled myself around it at the bottom of the pit and waited for night to fall.
Detail from diagram in “The Great Mother” by Erich Neumann
Cinematic Mash-up: The Sublime Genre of the Internet
Lauren Bliss
All Your Base are Belong to Us
What a strange, intoxicating place the Internet has become. Where the early film theorist Jean Epstein spoke of the pleasures of being embroiled in the cinema, I find myself equally immersed in the screen of my computer. I confess, I am a cinema purist; I despise the practice of watching films outside the intensity and veracity of the cinema auditorium – but I am able to become, through the small size of my computer screen, absorbed in the erotic power of the Internet. There is something about the Internet’s infinite possibilities that is comparable to the sublime propensity of the cinema.
Jean-François Lyotard wrote in his famous 1973 article “Acinema” that avant-garde films can offer the sublime where there is a dispersal of sterile energy; sterile meaning pleasure for the sake of pleasure, discharge without need of invention or reproduction. The Internet, in its purest sense, is the absolute definition of this sublime experience. But what an unusual phenomenon it is: the usually discrete terms of audience and practitioner are now fluid, shaky, mobile. The Internet rips mainstream cinema open and queers its form – but now with the spectator in charge. With its proliferation of sharing technology, a new genre of video art has formed; one that is both fluid in its dialogue with cinema proper and distinct in its exchange with modern technological conventions.
This conversation between the Internet and cinema is enabled by the free exchange of films and the proliferation of artistic communities that, through websites like YouTube, share their work freely and directly with a global audience. The Internet breeds a language of its own but, rather than in the exclusive cliques and societies of art movements past, it occurs in a youthful culture paradoxically bound by anonymity and disconnection. As with experimental cinema, one must know where to look in order to find liberated and unchallenged movements; but unlike experimental cinema, subjects of the Internet are not so hard to find, as artists filter into largely indiscriminate searching platforms like Google – the only trick being in the words and phrases used to seek out all forms of bizarre, unadulterated pleasure (a talent possessed by a limited few people).
The early French impressionists (like Epstein) cherished the moving image camera’s ability to defamiliarise ordinary objects – those hundreds of films concerned only with the movements of cars, aeroplanes and merry-go-rounds – a practice still not lost on contemporary video artists, such as the Philadelphia-based Ryan Trecartin (user name WianTreetin) or Australian Wendy Vainity (who has been described as the Jackson Pollock of the Internet). These artists utilise the effects of unreliable technology to invoke delight out of frustration. Wendy’s video, kitty litter physics animation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Aw9OdyZ6s) is a revelation for the senses. Wendy provokes the repetitive, awkward slowness of technology; irritation is transformed into jouissance, what Lyotard would call a simulacrum. The video features footage of a poorly animated cat as it shifts clumsily around a fairly abstract looking litter box. The soundtrack is marked by stereotypical sound effects common to editing software, which is placed into a repetitive loop by Wendy; the video offers a gesture toward the shallow thrill for rupturing the limits of technology.
The Internet operates as a Utopian platform for all forms of moving-image art. The popularity of both downloading software and websites for critical discussions of film allows almost anyone with a computer to access almost anything. And then, in an act of sublime nihilism, the user destroys itself. In its purest form, this exists as the virus (a condition relatively unknown to users of Macintosh operating systems, but they will get their fill soon enough). Then we see this destruction through the act of hacking, where the socially inept invert the power of technology to watch the rapid destruction of all forms of structure. Why? For the lulz! But, when the cinema bleeds into the Internet we see this destruction in the form of the mash-up. Here, video practitioners mutate cinematic genres and adapt solid genre to the fluidity of the Internet.
Mash-ups have given rise to fabulous, sometimes humorous concoctions that violently deconstruct the productive power of mainstream cinema. One brilliant example of this is from user tomthenomad whose YouTube video, shawkwsank r4edemptions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAFq5QKgLRg&feature) mutates the sentimentality of the original feature The Shawshank Redemption in much the same way as Austrian artist Martin Arnold did to a 1940s Hollywood movie in Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy. Tomthenomad’s clip takes footage intended to be dramatic and affecting (including the moment when the protagonist Andy/Tim Robbins learns that he has been sentenced to prison for the rest of his life, or the warm exchange on the prison roof between ‘Red’/Morgan Freeman and Andy) and brutally mutilates it. Pixellated images of a pair of sunglasses dot the faces of both protagonists; clips are shortened to prevent the sequence releasing its dramatic climax; and a MIDI music file is transplanted onto the soundtrack. In 40 seconds, tomthenomad pulverises the excessive sentimentality of The Shawshank Redemption and intuitively illustrates Lyotard’s notion of the commodification of cinematic practice.
More complexly, in his Youtube video I-BE AREA (Pasta and Wendy M-PEGgy) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR4sHDR-1XE), Ryan Trecartin combines computer technology and avant-garde practice to exploit both the sentimentality of the mainstream and the superficiality of computer graphics technology. Trecartin’s films are purposefully reduced so that we can only watch his work on our computer screens; cinema-scale projection blurs the image and the sound file is too weak for any enhanced system. Pasta and Wendy performs as if Trecartin has given his camera a strong dose of LSD – the schizophrenia of his videotext violently smashes together the genres of horror, daytime television, teen-film, documentary and home-shopping programs. A strange concoction that challenges audience expectations of what a teenage slumber party should look like. His work is a prescription for sterile pleasure – something I can experience for free, anywhere in the world through my computer.
For the Lulz
The Internet ruptures the economics of movement. How else would I be able to indulge in the experimental erotic film Carmilla from French writer and filmmaker Stéphane du Mesnildot, whilst enjoying music videos from the great 1980s Mexican pop group Flans, while witnessing the underground movements of hackers serving DDOS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) to reckless corporations? Perhaps the freshest realisation of the Internet in the cinema can be found in one of the most well-regarded avant-garde filmmakers of all time: Jean-Luc Godard, whose recent work Film Socialisme takes memes and viral videos in order to unpack not only the politics of class, but also the sterility of the Internet – its freedom from productivity and capability for complete indulgence. His use of the well-known video The Two Talking Cats (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3U0udLH974) best expresses the universality of the Internet, how it can potentially exceed cultural barriers and perform pleasure at its most enchanting and sublime.
There is a dark side to the Internet: its unlimited accessibility. It is, in this sense, the ultimate machine-human cyborg, complete with an unconscious that provokes and unsettles. To think that one can have access to the entire world. This is the reason why so many supposedly democratic governments have mobilised to try to restrict access to content. Just look at the case of Egypt or the Wikileaks phenomenon – where revolutions have spawned from its power! The Internet makes sure that no film will be censored, nothing left inaccessible. The problem is that this makes the Internet’s power seem like a infant let loose in a candy store – a technology that can give us whatever we want has made governments react like stern parents trying to control their rebellious children.
Fortunately, the power of the Internet is precisely that it cannot be controlled – there is always a way around censorship and tyranny. The Internet transforms the very notion of genre into something more fluid, less rigid; it opens up new ways of seeing and seizes its power by its mutated vocation for pleasure.
Copyright Lauren Bliss July 2011
(Work in Progress from ‘The Girl is Also Well’)
Elleke Boehmer
The girl runs into the kitchen from the glittering outdoors and finds paper. She is wearing her big white cotton knickers and a cotton vest, her kit for humid summer days. The exercise book she uses for drawing lies open on the red gingham table-cloth on the kitchen table. But there is also scrap paper in a pile on the father’s desk, and more drawing paper in her bedroom, if she wants it.
The girl likes all paper, blank or printed. When she was small, smaller than she is now, she liked it so much she ate it, any paper lying about but especially the pages of the telephone directory. The telephone directory had a special sweetish taste, sharpened by the peppery flavour of the ink. When well mixed with spit, the paper went slick and pasty and could be squished through the gaps in her teeth, a feeling she very much liked.
To eat the telephone directory she first softened a page by sucking on a corner, then tore away tiny bits with her front teeth, savouring the taste, till the day she nibbled off a number the father needed and he stored the directory on a high shelf from then on, out of reach.
The girl grabs the exercise book off the table and the pencil lying beside it. She crouches down on the cool green tiles of the kitchen floor, the tiles that will later be covered by the father with the sticky orange linoleum the mother will say attracts every grain of passing dirt. Her head is slightly under the table, protected within its shadow, as if in a cave. Her forearms lie flush against the green tiles to soak in their coolness. Her fat sweaty knees make two fuzzy circles of condensation on the tiles. She spreads her left hand on the opened blank pages of the exercise book to steady it, as she has been taught at her Dutch kindergarten, and holds the pencil neat and tight in the hook of her right. She begins to write down her words.
The words came to her just then as she was skipping outside in the kitchen yard beside the windy-drier that looks like a daisy with its single green-painted stem. Wait for it; how did they go? Feet feet. No, that wasn’t it. Silver, silver, ah sold ah sold.
She has a head full of noises. Just-about-words, almost-words, nonsense sounds, they buzz in her ears all the time. A-ta-tuh-tuh, a-ta-tuh-tuh, as her legs skip the rope. Drah again drah again drah again, walking home from school, a sound that beats through her friend Linda’s chatter. Ffffff-fee as she and her Dad and her Mam drive down the long hill into town. Ffffff-ffeeee. And overriding the low humming almost-words are the big keynotes, ah no no no no ah no ah whrrreee, high pitched, shrieking, the noise that is everywhere when she lies in bed at night waiting for sleep; ah whrrreee and whaa-woe, whaa-woe, its undertone, that goes in time with her heartbeat.
These tones and pulses, she knows, come from inside her ears, but at the same time they encircle the everyday noises she can hear from her bed, sounds that come from her white-haired father who sits out there on the veranda, smoking and slapping at mosquitoes, now and again saying something to himself, gruff, like a swear word.
Godverdomme, Godverdomme.
But today the words that buzzed as she skipped gathered themselves for the first time into a shape. Step by step the words make a wobbly square, a column of rhymes, a stalagmite. Here, she has it now, she is writing it down.
My feet are made of silver
My hands are made of gold
My arms are made of crystal
And now I’m sold.
Just as it came to her.
She sits back on her heels and softly chants the shape through. Just right, yes, she has it, and each word spelt just so, even crystal. The y in crystal makes a sharp point, sharp like the shards of crystal you get when the cut-glass champagne flutes brought over to South Africa from Holland break during washing up, as they seem to do whenever they are used. She thinks of the fleck of glass in the eye of Hans, the boy bewitched by the Snow Queen, whose heart turned cold. His shard was like the y of crystal.
She chants the rhyme through again, louder than before but still softly. She doesn’t want to attract notice. There are Sunday visitors on the veranda with her parents, the visitors who occasionally come, as grey and wrinkled as her Dad, to relive the good days back in the Far East, wherever that is. It sounds like a place not on earth. Skipping, she can hear their ragged bursts of conversation and makes sure not to slap the rope too hard on the ground. It is not a good idea to attract the guests’ attention. If ever her presence is detected, the mother dispatches the guests to say hello. They come upon her crouched with her book and break out in exclamation.
What funny girl! What interesting talents ! Wat een wonder!
And their cries rouse the mother once again to drive her outside. Now Go and Play, Ella. Play some Outside Games, Go and Play Outside. What Weather in Africa, Go and Enjoy it, Go and Play.
She tears the page out of the exercise book and stores it in her bedroom under the mat beside her bed. Now she would like to lie flat on her stomach on the cool kitchen tiles and read something but she knows this is asking for trouble. So she goes outside again and finds the skipping rope coiled on the ground. It is in the shape of small letter a: a is a pretty, loosely knotted letter. She begins again to skip, the wooden handles whistling in her hands, the rope whirring, a white blur, zzzzzzzzzzz, and this time she has a whole rhyme to skip to, a wistful, mysterious rhyme, all her own.
Arms made of crystal, Arms made of crystal,
Sold, sold, now I’m sold.
Silver, gold, now, now, sold.
The rhyme sticks in her head all day, like songs do, Lo-co-mo-tion on the radio, Al-le-menschen on Mam’s Philips radiogram. The rhyme bounces in amongst the other things she hears, snatches of the visitors’ talk, the father beating his knee, telling his stories, till she’s sick of it, till she nearly ruins everything and hums it out loud, which is as good as saying, Look what I did! and quenching it for good.
In bed that night the rhyme’s still there, thumping lightly, arms, gold, now sold, now sold. She’s happy she kept it to herself because saying it over begins to sound like a secret lullaby. The words as they come pull her thoughts out thin and straight like hair through a comb. They drown out the sounds filtering in from outside, the whining of the veranda light, Dad’s talk, shouts, also the patter of the heavy roses against her window, tossed by the breeze, the low drumming that drifts most weekends from the township when the wind is in the right direction, the sound that arches over all the others, the thin ah whrrreee whaa-woe that must be the sound of the universe, the light of the stars boring through the darkness.
The words and numbers she swallowed when eating the telephone directory, she thinks, must have seeped into her blood and from there into her brain, so heavy is her head with sounds and letters, like a sponge with water.
So she turns on to her stomach, her face pressed into the pillow, away from the window where the yellow veranda light leaks in, the heads of the roses dance like the savage Indians in Mam’s Winnatoo stories, and she says her rhyme:
My feet are made of silver
My hands are made of gold
My arms, my arms, my arms are made of crystal
And now … and now ... and now
Godverdomme.
Drumming, whining. Godverdomme. Ah whrrreee. The darkness shrieking.
Halina Boniszewska
‘Look, Mum!’ -- Oskar squealed. -- ‘Look at the tiny houses!’
‘Whaaa..?’
Anna strained to see through the grease and dirt of the Superbus window; but the light was harsh, so she closed her eyes to a swirling of stars.
If possible, make a U-turn! If possible, make a U-turn!
She half-remembered a heart-rending story – some poor country bumpkin on his first trip to England, the lunatic ravings of his brand-new ‘sat nav’, his dutiful reaction and the tragic consequence. She drove away the memory and changed position.
The air hung heavy and smelled of petrol. She licked her lips and wriggled about in a bid to escape the static charge of the Superbus seat. Beads of sweat trickled down her forehead, dripped off her brow and mixed with mascara. She dabbed at her eyes and dislodged a contact lens.
‘Mummy – look!’
Oskar dug his fingers into her weary shoulder, his breath stale, warm on her cheek. ‘Look at the English houses! They’re all squashed together, all pushed together…’ – He moved his bony hands to a ghostly accordion. -- ‘…such tiny, little houses, and…Mummeeee…euh…’ – His voice broke in despair. – ‘They don’t have any gardens…’
Anna tried to sit up, but a sharp ray of sunlight stabbed at her eyeballs.
‘The houses, Mummy…will ours be like that..?’ – His face puckered up – ‘…with no garden… Mummy..?’ He was digging in harder.
‘N...,’ she croaked. She wanted to tell him that their house would be lovely – neat and tidy, with a pretty, little garden, like Uncle Adam’s and Auntie Julia’s, like the one in the photos that his cousin, Radek, had e-mailed from England; but the sunlight confused her.
‘Look!’ Oskar shrieked. ‘Mummy, look at the black man!’
‘Shush! Oskar, you can’t say that in England!’
‘There’s another one, look!’ – Oskar’s mouth was an ‘O’. – ‘Mum, look at that lady…’
He jabbed his finger at the dirt-smeared window. She followed his gaze to a grey-haired woman in a purple sari, embroidered with crystals that were flashing out tiny rainbows of light.
‘Ugh… Mum, look how fat that man is!’
Anna roused herself and began to explain that in this country there were all sorts of people – all colours and races, all religions, all shapes and sizes.
‘But why are people in England so fat? Mum, if Daddy came to England, would Daddy get fat?’
Anna made herself focus.
‘Darling,’ she sighed. She touched his arm, but he pulled away. ‘Daddy…’ she said, and she winced at the word. ‘Daddy’s thin because of his illness, but he will get better, now that Grandma’s looking after him.’
But she doubted her husband would ever get better. He had suffered from his affliction for as long as she could remember.
She tried to explain: ‘Mummy’s going to get a job, and then we’ll all have some money. We’ll get rich and fat…’ – She steered his hand. – ‘…like that man over there!’
Oskar giggled and wriggled, then turned to face her.
‘Are Uncle Adam and Auntie Julia fat now?’
Anna spluttered at the thought.
‘Who knows..?’ She laughed.
‘Will Radek be fat?’
‘Radek won’t be fat. He likes his parkour.’
‘Can I do parkour, now that we’re in England – can I? Can I?’
‘When you’re older, Oskar, when you’re older…’
‘No…’ he wailed. ‘I want to do it now..; Mum, can I do it now..?’
‘Soon, Darling, soon…’
His parkour obsession showed no sign of waning. In his grandmother’s garden, back in Poland, he’d practised his own version of the various moves, his silhouette grown stick-like through repeated training and a hard-core diet. He no longer ate meat, not since the day he had witnessed his grandmother wringing the neck of her favourite chicken. (How could she; how could she?) He had vomited on the spot, and now poked at his food, cross-questioning his mother on the exact ingredients of every meal.
Irritated as she was by his ‘inconvenient’ vegetarianism, Anna was fiercely proud of her son. At least he had a mind of his own, which was more than she could say for herself. She had married the wrong brother: that much was clear. It should have been Adam…
Anna sighed.
Yet here was Adam, right beside her – ‘Uncle’ Adam in her son’s curiosity, ‘Uncle’ Adam in his questioning streak, ‘Uncle’ Adam in the independent mind, with the quirkiness too of her nephew, Radek:
School’s a doddle. Teachers are soft. There are LOADS of jobs. Mum and Dad earn THREE times as much as they did in Poland! It’s warehouse work, but it’s just a start, while they brush up on their English. The warehouses here are full of Poles – mostly professionals: teachers, doctors…
No sooner had she read Radek’s e-mail, then she knew just exactly what she had to do. Within the hour she had driven her husband round to his mother’s.
‘There!’ she said, as she pushed his comatose form out the car. ‘You can feed her chickens!’
Then she sold the Skoda and bought the tickets.
And here they were, a week later – one suitcase, one rucksack and one bag of hope – driving through England to a whole new life.
But she was haunted by phrases, dogged by images; she could not get Radek’s e-mails out of her mind:
The Poles are the ones cycling round in packs – men with shaved heads, no helmets, no lights. Sometimes – no kidding – at closing time, you can see them cycling back from the pubs – on the right-hand-side of the road – PLONKERS! They think they’re going down these little, country lanes; they go round a corner and…bam!
Anna shuddered. She tried to shake it off, but the image clung to her. Radek was 15, his bravado distasteful:
You’ll find us in Primark, Home Bargains, The Pound Shop... Oh yes! Let it be said: we Poles know how to shop. We know how to work. We know how to pray. Of a Sunday you’ll see us all flocking to mass. Bravo for the Poles! We have resurrected the Catholic Church…
Pah! Anna had long given up on that sort of nonsense -- another reason, she suspected, for Julia’s coldness towards her – perfect Julia who never missed mass, led the singing in church, helped at Polish school and had energy to spare for saving Anna’s soul – a pointless task; Anna’s soul was beyond redemption. All the same, twice a year, at Christmas and Easter, she still went to mass. She needed her fix of smoky incense, a soaring organ and flickering candles, of the sunlight dancing through stained-glass windows, the Easter basket offered up for its blessing: painted eggs, emerald green, fuchsia pink and golden brown, with their sheen of olive oil, nestling in a napkin, all crisp and white, with the white sugar lamb and its baby-blue bow. She could smell the smoked sausage, could taste the salt and pepper...
‘Mummy – what’s wrong?’
Oskar was on her lap, smearing her cheek with his dirty fingers.
‘It’s nothing, Darling – I just need the toilet…’
But the Superbus toilet was out of order, so she forced herself to think of Christmas – of midnight mass, the snow-laden fields, the star-filled heavens, the church bells ringing throughout the valleys…
Oskar tightened his grip. ‘And I need the toilet! And I need to do parkour.’
His bottom jaw – so like Adam’s – was jutting out with resolve and defiance. There was no getting away from this parkour fixation; within the week, he’d be running with Radek – role model, outlier, parkour-obsessive –while she toiled in the warehouse with Adam and Julia. She winced at the thought of working with Julia, whose animosity only increased as the years went by. (Did she know? Had she worked it out?)
‘Mummy – what’s the third world?’
Anna blinked at Oskar.
‘The third world, Oskar? Why do you ask?’
She screwed up her eyes. How to explain…
‘Mummy – Radek said England’s a third-world country.’
‘Oh, no!’ she laughed. ‘That was a joke, Darling – the mixer taps joke! It’s just funny to think that we’ve waited all these years to join the European Union, and here we are, in a place with no mixer taps, with paper-thin walls, toy-town houses and…’ – She pulled a face. – ‘…zero dress sense… Ugh, Oskar -- just look at that!’
But Oskar had no interest in sartorial design.
‘Mummy -- can we live in Toy Town? Do Radek and Auntie Julia and Uncle Adam live in Toy Town?’
‘Don’t be silly!’ she snapped, shifting position. The wriggling in her intestines had given way to a persistent throbbing.
‘Awh,’ he sighed and clung to her neck.
‘But you’ll like it here, Darling. The people are friendly, and they know how to queue, and when you walk down the street – Uncle Adam says – everyone smiles at you…’
‘What else does Uncle Adam say?’
‘Well, he says that people are polite when they serve you in shops; they don’t just throw the change at you like they do in Poland…’
‘What does Auntie Julia think?’
‘What? Well… What do you mean, Oskar?’
But Oskar lost interest. He sank back in his seat and closed his eyes.
‘Mummy..?’ he said – he was starting to slur – ‘If we don’t like it in England, can we go back to Poland? I want…’ – He gave a big yawn. – ‘I want to see Daddy…’
Anna thought for a while; then she thought some more, and then she replied:
‘Darling…Oskar…we’re going to see Daddy.’
But Oskar had already fallen asleep.
Janine Burke
Utopia is about 250 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs. It's the traditional country of Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Her huge, lush, abstract paintings have been compared to Monet and Jackson Pollock, yet Emily knew nothing of Western art, had not attended art school and was illiterate in the English language. As enigmatic as either Monet or Pollock, she rarely discussed her painting, except to say that she painted 'whole lot, that's whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming).' But, unlike them, she was the land's sacred caretaker and myth-keeper. In a sense, Emily created herself as an artist, though her perception, most likely, was that the land created her.
Emily, as she signed her paintings, was born around 1910. The date is inexact because Aboriginal births were not recorded until the 1960s. Much of her life is a mystery, though it is inextricably tied to the occupation of Aboriginal land by European colonisers. In 1976, Aboriginal land rights were made law in the Northern Territory. Three years later, Emily's people gained the freehold title of Utopia and once more the land was truly theirs. At the same time, Emily began making bold, brilliantly coloured batik prints. In 1988, when she started painting, she won immediate critical acclaim and, over the next eight years, produced over 3000 artworks, a feat worthy of Picasso.
I travelled to Utopia with Tim Jennings, a big, energetic, talkative fellow, a former policeman who became fascinated with Aboriginal art and opened a gallery in Alice Springs. I was accompanying Tim on a regular trip where he purchases art directly from Aboriginal people.
Emily's country is not a tourist destination. There's only one way in and that is by road, even if you catch a plane part of the way. There are no towns, one shop and no service stations. Sometimes there are no roads either. I visited several remote communities, places where Emily spent much of her life and where her relatives continue to live including Mulga Bore (Akaya), Rocket Range Camp (Arnkawenyerr) and Arlparra. Utopia was formerly a vast cattle station belonging to Sonny and Trott Kunoth, young Germans who settled there in 1927. So delighted with the abundance of rabbits they could catch by hand, the Kunoths named it after Thomas More's imaginary island paradise. Utopia, the byword for an ideal community, means, in Greek, no [ou] place [topos]. Emily lived, travelled and painted throughout Utopia and regarded all of it as her land.
Because it is illegal to visit the communities without a permit, Tim obtained one for me from the local land council. It's worth noting permits are rarely denied, and most are issued without charge. Alcohol is forbidden in the communities, an ordinance decreed by the people themselves, and the restrictions are designed to stop the flow of grog. After seeing Aboriginal people weaving drunkenly through the streets of Alice Springs or boozing from morning till night in the dry bed of the Todd River, it seems a wise plan.
Ours was a one-day trip: we set off from Alice Springs in the pre-dawn darkness in Tim's blissfully air-conditioned, four-wheel drive, and returned fifteen hours later. I left knowing one Australia and returned, in a state of utter bewilderment, having encountered another. Utopia provided me with a series of schismatic visions, of a tribal people who choose to live in the harshest circumstances and who produce subtle and sophisticated art for a non-Aboriginal audience, who appear to have scant regard for the environment yet who have trenchantly fought 'whitefella' law for decades to reclaim their land, who often look unhealthy and listless yet are the land's proud, spiritual custodians, and whose aesthetic sense, from their crude, makeshift lifestyle, seems opposed to beauty, order and harmony, yet whose artworks offer compelling examples of exactly that.
Heading up the unsealed Sandover Highway provides a leisurely introduction to the Central Desert. The earth is a deep, burning, sensual red like the flesh of a great, soft, warm body that stretches out in magnificent display towards the infinity of the horizon. I want to plunge my hands into it. The sky is electric blue, massive and cloudless like New Mexico: it's the same pristine atmosphere, the same feeling that, on such an ancient earth, the sky's relentless clarity offers perpetual and magical renewal. The eye is constantly drawn upward, away from the ground and into the air. The boundary between earth and sky, between red and blue, is dramatic on the land's flat plane, and visual contrasts are piercingly immediate. There's no perspective, no object on which to fix the gaze and assign three-dimensionality; there's only distance that shimmers and quivers and vanishes. The land is like a reckless and flamboyant gesture. Lavish, potent and open, it dares you to paint it, and survive it.
Expecting 'desert', I'm surprised at the amount of vegetation: the country is scattered with spinifex and low, scrubby trees but, during winter at least, the colours are muted: the grasses are dull green and the trees, eking out a meagre existence from the soil, are subdued in tone. Water governs the country which flourishes only because of an underground water supply. The communities gather around the soakages, turned into artesian bores during the era of the cattle stations to prevent animals contaminating them.
A few hours later, we drive off the highway towards Mulga Bore. I'm expectant, excited. Like many white, urban Australians, I've had little contact with indigenous people. The Aboriginal people I know are of Aboriginal-European descent; members of the art world, they're either curators or artists. My overwhelming sense of guilt usually disables frank discussion, leaving me either speechless or behaving in a manner that seems, to me at least, both patronising and obsequious. Quite literally, I don't know what to say.
Driving into Mulga Bore is like arriving in a documentary about 'Aboriginal poverty' and 'Third World squalor', the awful, popular narrative, the negative imagery with which the media mostly represents Aboriginal Australia. Before visiting Emily's country, I'd considered such reports extravagant, embellished or prejudiced. Now I see they're sometimes accurate. One of the chief consolations of Aboriginal art's massive, international success is to provide a good news story in the mire of bad.
Mulga Bore is a settlement of about half a dozen houses, some tin, some concrete, some surrounded by wire fencing, and all at a distance from one another. How do people bear the heat in a tin house? The walls of the concrete houses are stained a dusty ochre. Rubbish is scattered everywhere, cans, plastic shopping bags, empty milk and soft-drink bottles. Wrecked car bodies form rusting metal sculptures. There are also piles of discarded clothes, a bizarre sight in the desert, as if the people wearing them simply took them off and walked away. In the distance, I can see a basket-ball court where children are playing. Next to it is the school house that caters for around 45 pupils.
As I slide out of the car, a brindled dog with the smart, friendly eyes of a dingo cruises up, sniffing the stranger's scent. Instinctively, I hold out my hand to stroke it. 'Don't touch the dogs', Tim commands. I peer at the dog, and the others clustering around the car. They're underfed and filthy, their skins are pocked with sores, and they scratch constantly. The bitches have long, withered, swinging teats. I have my camera in my hand but I don't know what to photograph. I stare at the ground and take a picture.
We're parked outside the house of Lindsay Bird Mpetyane. From inside comes wailing, a high, shrill keening that spirals into the still air and hovers like smoke. Lindsay, impressive and self-contained, is the community's elder, a former stockman and a well-known artist. He's related to Emily, and Tim has told me I can interview him. At around sixty, Lindsay cuts a dapper, youthful figure wearing a cowboy-style hat, white striped shirt and black jeans. In a soft, rhythmic voice, he explains that 'sorry business', or communal ritual mourning, is taking place. Yesterday, a man from the community went into Alice Springs where he was shot and killed. Later, we hear from other people that the man wasn't shot: he fell asleep in the middle of the road, dead drunk, and was run over. Apparently, an all too frequent event.
Lindsay was the only man from Utopia making silk batik prints in the 1980s, around the same time Emily did. When Tim encourages me to interview him, I don't which of us is more shy. I am the white lady with the notebook and the camera, the clumsy intruder from the First World. As I reach for my biro, I notice how pale my skin looks, freckled and fragile, under the desert sun. Though Emily married twice, she had no children of her own, so she was appointed Lindsay's chief carer, his 'mother'. Lindsay tells me, '[She] grown me up. Look after [her] son. Not when big, when little. Good person.' Emily was 'always painting...everywhere she paints.' I've heard Emily was a real character, with a wicked sense of humour and a penchant for whacky hats. What was she like? Long pause. 'Shout me', he says reflectively. Then Lindsay steers the talk to the 'good prices' that he and Emily have earned for their paintings. When Lindsay makes the point he didn't ask Emily for money, he's referring to the obligation that Aboriginal people are under to distribute whatever they have among family and community. As Emily's fame escalated, together with her prices, she was under pressure to produce, not only from a hungry art market but from her needy relatives and her community - which meant she was supporting around 80 people. It was such a burden that she wanted to give up painting: it made her 'sick with worry'.
As Lindsay and I talk, other members of the community slowly arrive, carrying paintings they've produced since Tim's last visit. The women wear loose t-shirts and long skirts, some of the older men are in overcoats and beanies. It's chilly and most people wear shoes. The children arrive from the school, curious to find out what's happening. Graceful and quick, they skim the ground like swallows. With huge, dark eyes, honey-coloured skin and tawny hair, their beauty and joie de vivre is dazzling to behold. As Tim introduces me, everyone smiles courteously, distantly. I'm the art historian who's writing about Emily. I wonder how that strikes them. After all, Emily is the most renowned Aboriginal artist, and she's from their neck of the woods. But their reticence and self-possession make probing impossible. There's also the language barrier. Most people speak only a smattering of English. Conversations with newcomers, as I learn from interviewing Lindsay, can be excruciating.
Then it's down to business and I have my job, too. Because of the numerous fakes on the market, agents and dealers photograph the artists with their work as proof for the buyer. Lindsay has produced an impressive pile of small, elegant, paintings. As he holds up each one, I'm meant to photograph him and the painting. As I find out later from Tim, I've completely botched it: the photographs are either of Lindsay's face, or the painting, but not both. Tim will have to do them all over again. It comes as no surprise; I feel like I can't see straight.
Along the road, Tim pulls up and hails a family, artists whom he'd hoped to meet at another community, a couple who are heading for Arlparra with their three children. While Tim chats to the adults, I try communicating with the kids. We stumble with English words but end up exchanging smiles. Suddenly, the children whirl off like the wind into the grasses, and return with their palms outstretched. They're offering me a handful of small, orange-brown berries. I pop some into my mouth: they're juicy and, curiously, taste like curry. Tim's jaw drops. 'Do you realise some of those varieties are poisonous?' he asks. I feel rather foolish. Tim is responsible for me out here. 'I'll be fine', I say flippantly. But as we get into the car, I wonder how long it takes for poison to hit the system. What comes first? Pain? Nausea? Bush Tucker Kills Writer, Coroner Reports. I implicitly trusted the children: they know which foods are safe, and acted from courtesy and friendliness. It was a gift. The traveller's motto - trust your instincts - pays off and, by the time we get to Arlparra, all I need is a cold drink.
Arlparra is the hub of the district, the neighbourhood drop-in centre. It's where the Urapuntja Council, Utopia's governing body, and the community-controlled health service are based. A recent report shows that Utopia is one of the healthiest areas in the Northern Territory for Aboriginal people. We're heading for the store, the only one in the district, and it's busy. A mural graces the front wall, a colourful, realistically rendered, dot-painted landscape. Inside, it looks like any well-stocked, mixed business with take-away food, shelves of groceries, a fridge filled with milk, juice and soft drinks, and some trays of fruit and vegetables. The truck bringing fresh produce comes only once a fortnight. I buy a bucket of chips and a mineral water. At the check-out, the most popular items are soft drinks and vacuum-sealed, ready to cook, kangaroo legs, complete with fur and claws. Tim sees another artist, and introduces me. I crank up a smile. The heat, the drive, the confrontation with this new Australia, have overwhelmed me and I'm starting to tire.
Rocket Range Camp is named for the shape of the local water-tower. Dozens of junked, rusting car bodies surround the camp. The ground is strewn with broken glass, empty cans, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles and stained mattresses. We pull up beneath a tree, where several elderly women are sitting. With them is a naked child whose mucous-stained face crawls with flies. Near where we park, a make-shift home has been constructed around the remains of a brick chimney: its walls are tree boughs and corrugated iron sheets, draped with clothes and blankets. The government-built houses are empty, stripped. Tim gets on with business, unloading wads of rolled up canvases and bags crammed with acrylic paints. A young woman approaches, smiling shyly. She's barefoot and skinny, her stiff, unwashed hair radiates from her head like an aureole. In her hands, as tenderly as a baby, she carries a small, beautifully rendered, abstract painting.
I guess I'm slow but it suddenly hits me it was in a place like this Emily produced great art, where she sat cross-legged on the earth, brush in hand, painting with absorption and determination, surrounded by her family, her friends and her dogs. Any one of these old ladies could be Emily. I try to wipe the shock from my face. The little boy catches my eye. He grabs a puppy by the legs, and slams it on the ground as hard as he can. The dog screams in pain. Whack. He does it again, and laughs. The women sitting next to him - his mother? His aunties? - continue to talk among themselves and pay him no attention. He can see I'm furious. He shrieks with laughter. Whack. 'If he does that again, I'll kill him', I mutter to Tim. I turn away and face a tall, white wooden cross, supported by beams, opposite the camp. There must have been a church here once, built by the Lutheran missionaries. Of course, I despise the missionaries who tried to convince Aboriginal people to conform to their rules. Now I'm not so sure of my opinions, an ideology built in my safe suburban world, surrounded by people who agree with me. I want to snatch the puppy from the boy and explain it's wrong to hurt animals. I want to clean his face and wash his hands. Give him rules, my rules. Standing alone, the cross resembles the ruin of a previous civilisation.
The shimmering web of the Dreaming that Emily illustrates shows no rupture, no crude or ugly passages, no marks of sadness or mourning, no lack. In her abstract paintings, the Dreaming is represented as a perfect, luminous entirety, shining with health and optimism, stretching out forever. A key reason for the appeal of Emily's work is the frank and lucid spirituality it conveys, a rarity in the cool world of contemporary art. Her paintings beat like a heart with conviction. But, equally, they offer no place for a clash of cultures, for our seemingly insoluble, intertwined problems. Emily's political statement is her Dreaming: transcendence, unity, eternity, an ideal community. Utopia.
Tim veers off the road, then veers off that road, and we're heading down a bumpy track.
When we pull up, I encounter the most extraordinary sight in an extraordinary day. Surrounded by native grasses and graceful ghost gums is a black marble grave with an imposing headstone. There's nothing else in sight; no houses, no people, no fences. The headstone reads: Emily. Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Died September 2 1996. A Great Australian Artist. It's a well-meaning though incongruous tribute representing the differing expectations, the contradictory results, the unpredictable and often startling intersections of our black/white, non/indigenous relations.
Under the night sky, we head back to Alice Springs, and I'm dumb with fatigue. Although I've been looking at Aboriginal art for years, I didn't understand the context, the conditions under which it was made. The documentation of Aboriginal art largely ignores the issue, either unconsciously, or from respect, or political correctness. It is difficult to write about the communities without feeling you're offending someone, or you're 'making things worse'.
In some modern cultures, art can exist separately from its environment. In traditional Aboriginal art, there is no 'separate'; there is only 'environment'. Emily asks us to consider it.
Ed Byrne
In seeming control
of a small world
that often seems
quite large
and even important
in a day to day way
balance can be
elusive fragile
bound to tarmac
engineer alchemist
looking for explanations
for a red light
that holds the plane
fast to the earth
through regulation
connection missed
in a foreign city
itinerary in shreds
an unexpected chance
for perspective
and a reminder
that in all that really matters
control is an illusion
sustained only
by the foolish
and morally deplete
Peter Carpenter
‘radiant with bovine life’ (E.M. Forster)
‘It’s raining but I don’t believe it’s raining’ (G.E. Moore)
i
Docks, nettles, self-sown
sycamores, willows
thunderstruck by their own
brilliance, sap-boiled,
boughs gone scissor-handed.
The cow is there, now.
Do not move suddenly
or she’ll scare.
Scrutinise the lining
of flies. First thistles
then she tongues down a slip
of overhanging willow.
She is there.
~
A woman sleeps rough
by the chained punts, money-spiders
criss-crossing her back.
~
Attempting steps down
from Fellows’ Court,
the poet, grand old man,
white-haired with stick.
~
The living image of my mother
whispers to her companion:
‘I like walking full stop.’
High summer’s over.
The great elms motionless,
yellow blotches on their leaves.
I’m there – in the meadow –
I have proved it to myself.
ii
I’m not down some
grey-muzzled road
off the old Kite
nor chalked up
with REFRESHMENTS
and ICES beneath
a pyramid
of canned peas
there since rationing
nor standing any week-day
dusk by a temporary
bus stop on Pound Hill
nor head-down
over the drop handlebars
of some five-gear
Gentleman’s Racer
sporting tweeds
and cycle-clips
nor behind a crack-pot
hollyhock by spiked black
railings past the U.L.
but simply blistering off
in globules
that have collected
according to the laws
of surface tension
on the bonnet
of a permit-holder’s Polo
under paving-stone-
cracking sycamores
down Grange Road
contemplating that turn
up to the Maltings
iii
What rough beast…
Jon Tipple in ‘The Granta’
all randy laughter, Eraserhead hair,
fingering shrapnel from the till,
collaring a chilled draught Guinness.
Love’s bitter mystery…
The trace of down
on an arm can do it. T-bone, fillet, rump.
‘Green leaf or mixed, dressing for the salad, sir ?’
Grant me an old man’s frenzy.
What else have I to spur me into song ?
Ah, there, across
the mill pond towards the new Pizzeria,
those punters with the pole playing silly buggers
right next to that swan.
iv
Ground Floor between Fiction and Poetry.
The second time in as many days. It comes at me.
The smell from where she sits between Travel
and Crime is enough make browsers wrinkle
features in ‘what is that ?’disgust. She stinks.
Because clothes for sleeping rough, layer upon
layer, are being walked in, underneath the visible
leather-sheen great-coat and cap. Auschwitz ?
That liberation shot at the wire ? No, here, beneath
the 3 For 2 CD offers in the Borders Summer Sale.
The truth is, she impregnates every last page of verse:
the entire Carcanet list, the brand new Armitage,
the Collected Muldoon, the Selected O’Hara, the new
Billy Childish, 101 Poems That Will Change Your Life --
you name it. We all track on by, join a queue
to pay by plastic. She exits into Market Square, freeing
up from under the cap her long streak-grey hair,
making her way beyond us. I keep finding her
days later, unremitting, unbearable still, in page
after page of Paul Celan or Miklós Radnóti.
v
I’d made it-- broken the back
of ‘Anna Karenina’ on a three day week
of eight hour shifts, barely conscious
of the world out there: the lines at Grunwick,
the National Front, the exiled Shah. All done
in top floor digs on the Lensfield Road, a room
with a view over a carpark and a criminal
Edwardian fire escape. Oliver’s army was here
to stay. Talk over the chicken chow mein
was of ‘narodnost’, commitment to the cause.
Then to the place of labour: working flat out
on bed or floor, a production line of borstal specials
and Maxwell House brews from the communal tin.
Snow drifted through
the second night;
an easterly wind jittering the string
of the primitive extractor fan. History
was one vast steppe. By dawn, water
at Hobson’s Choice was laminated in ice.
My classic set in Linotype Pilgrim fell apart
at the death– individual leaves came away
in my hands from the creased black spine.
The only thing to stick was an image of Kitty
and Levin under the Milky Way before the run
of blank sheets you get at the very end.
vi
a place to graze the eye
note the levels
here a shimmer
of springtime buds
downstream
the glaze of mist
you point out to me
carved in stone
a bird stilled
for centuries
its crest
on a college wall
but quiet now
from a lilac bush
badly in need
of cutting back
a robin
ups and leaves
for Coe Fen
Lammas
on to the place
where rivers join
Paradise
is it
vii
A stone wyvern –
weighed a ton.
Midnight prank there come dawn.
Snow dusted the college lawn.
We knelt, shaking.
Then it was done.
Note:
The first epigraph comes from E.M. Forster’s ‘The Longest Journey’ and an undergraduate discussion (based on the ideas on G.E. Moore, whose ‘paradox’ is the second epigraph) about the existence of objects, in this case, cows. Moore’s ‘paradox’ is the second epigraph. These inform the sequence, especially the first section. It is a series of epiphanies (what Virginia Woolf called ‘exceptional moments’) and its centre is Cambridge with all its illusions, mirages and time-warps. It is narrated by a series of revenants (dossers, has-beens, tourists, bright young things); the narratives trace internalised quest myths, often dead ends, but with their own (often compelling) logic. There are speculative excursions into edgelands (Coe Fen, in vi), text itself (Tolstoy, Yeats, for example), and the journey ends with a ritualised rite of passage, a wedding. Many of these are generated by what Lowell termed the ‘mania to return’.
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