Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

The dream is to find yourself, to re-invent the more confident, indestructible you.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Eighteen months is forever to a dragonfly. Ask that dead one on the deck that the cat hasn’t had the decency to eat. She eats everything else. Especially possum face, but that’s another story.

Eighteen months is a long time and no time at all.

My sister, Libby, died eighteen months ago. She was forty-two. She died at about eight o’clock at night, on her couch, of a heart attack. We think. Most of the time it doesn’t matter how she went, she’s gone and that’s the important bit, but mixed drug toxicity is doubtful. Still, I reckon she didn’t commit suicide because in her home, on her couch, with her partner making dinner, is a far cry from her down at the park beside Safeway. Her regular picnic table, razor blades, panic, Panadol with rum and coke to wash them down. Packets and packets of the stuff, she had.

Eighteen months and I’m still shocked.

Eighteen months and I’d give anything, anything, for another two minutes. To hold her hand, hear a joke – fuck, she was funny – to hear her breathy hello one last time. But she’s gone and the days roll on by.

So, I’m living this life of two halves.

Forty-three years of being Libby’s elder sister and this new life without her. I’m living Since Time. Since the cops came to may house early one morning and I climbed the stairs to hear that my sister had died. I think I said how did she do it? I know I shouted no, no, no, and crumpled like they do in Hollywood.

The tears you cry this far down the road are different from the tears of the first day, or first month, and they’re different from the tears of the first year anniversary. There is less spring, they don’t leap out of your face and onto strangers like they used to. That’s good. And they don’t clag up your voice and wet your sleeve quite as much as they did before.

It’s not because the tears aren’t there.

There are a million things I’ve learnt in this the second half of my life, everybody has a dead someone, Madonna must be listened to with tissues, and Libby was many things to many people. She is remembered. And tear management, ya gotta do your tear management. I try not to put myself in situations where I might cry, or, I put myself in places where I’ll cry and be done with it.

So it’s a sad and knowing second half, this life, but it’s a great second half, too. I’ve learned it’s okay to cry, to miss my little sister like fucken, excruciating Hell. I’ve discovered there’s happiness in that missing. Smile and cry, smile and cry.

Loss hasn’t made me a better person. I still get things wrong, I forget to sign permission slips and if I had a dollar for every time I’ve said, shit, was that today?! I’d be able to hire myself a secretary and never say those words again. But loss has made me humble, has let me see. It’s a looking second half.

I Googled and dragonflies don’t really live for only one day, their life cycle is about six months. That dead dragonfly on the deck, its wings like wire, its body a shining green fuselage, here for a day, six months, whatever, it was here. That’s the point. I’ve remembered it. Libby was here for forty-two years, they weren’t all splendid, but some of them were damn remarkable. Eighteen months into my second half, this new life, I’m remembering.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

So she’s sitting on the chaise lounge on the balcony, overlooking Pall Mall. The drunkards and patrons downstairs are stumbling towards the tram stop. Like an angry mosquito, the tram driver rings his bell signalling for the drunken thugs to move off the tram lines so he can get to the next stop.

She can hear the honky tonk piano playing, and the boozy punters and working girls chorusing in any key they choose. She can’t see them but she knows Maisy, Dot, Pearl and Colleen are dancing for their dinners. She’d heard there had been a lucky strike at Golden Square and the Mayor had warned her to expect hungry, and thirsty punters. Well she knew that hunger comes in many forms. She put to work some of her newest, youngest, prettiest and healthiest girls. There had been problems in Ballarat and the Mayor believed (and possibly she would have too, should she care to think beyond her business) that if you kept the diggers fed, boozed and bedded, there would be no talk of rebellion in Roslyn Park, no disputing the authorities while basic needs were met.

Josephine, also known more infamously around Bendigo as Madam Bellefleur, had money to make, girls to keep honestly working, plying their custom to pleasure politicians, police and panners. The warm, smoke-filled air of the saloon below mingled with the cooling summer dusk, and filtered up to the balcony. The young, wizened woman felt a renewed sense of purpose. She had never imagined herself enjoying her current position. She had more money at her disposal than she had ever dreamt of. She had come by it in ways which made her hard and worldly for her age. But that was a fate much better than starving back in Ireland or accepting the low place reserved for women of her birth and race. And she was proud she now looked after other girls, steered them right, and away from the problems she had met earlier on. After all, there were many men here, hoping to find their fortune, who needed comfort at the end of their day’s toil. Her girls were clean mostly, and knew how to pleasure the high and low, the rich, the poor, the English, American, French, and Italians. The Chinese knew not to bother here, and the constabulary took their share of both pleasure and profits in exchange for protection.

She turned to her friend, whose figure was silhouetted in the doorway from the balcony to the front Rosette room, and guarded herself.

“Do they know you are here?” , she tried not to look directly at him.

In the folds of her full layered skirt, in a concealed pocket, she could feel the nugget brushing against her thigh.

He scratched his beard, and looked towards the fading sunset beyond the wrought iron balcony.

“Now, Jo, how would they know I’m here? I stowed away on the coal coach and came up the laneway.” He paused when there was no reply, and looked more intently at her. “What are you so worried about? That I might tarnish your good name?” He snickered, then laughed unreservedly.

Jo saw in him something she most detested in men, in anyone for that matter; arrogance. “He thinks he’s safe”, she thought. “Thinks he has less to lose than I do, thinks he’s better, more rights to a good life than I do….he thinks he’s on top.”

“It has been a long time since a man has been on top of me, Brendan Murphy. And you are certainly no match for the last one I had.”

He looked at her with a mixture of fury and injury, unsure whether to scold her and treat her like the child she was behaving like, or remind her of her place as the gold town’s purveyor of female flesh, or appeal to her better nature. Either way, he refused to be belittled by her. He strode up to her couch, tipped his beared face close to her ear and whispered “You have no idea of the delights you would be missing, Jo.”

She wheezed as she drew breath and laughed like a pipe clearing itself. One of the drunk customers below looked up and saw her talking to what looked like no one, shook his head and threw up into the street’s open drain.

He looked even more hurt than before, then laughed with her. When their laughter died down, he asked “So, Jo, when will you leave this and be with me?”

The smile drained from her face as she realised he was serious.

“You know I…well, I can’t and you wouldn’t really want me caged like that, would you?” She looked around waiting for his reaction, then continued speaking into the silence between them, while the honky tonk piano played in the salon below.

“You wouldn’t have a family life with me, Brendan. No children….and I’m not the right sort for you. Besides, what would happen to the girls? They need taking care of. I see no reason to change my life, Brendan. Or is it my money you are after?” She thought, from his silence, his suggestion had been genuine. “You like my freedom, my wild ways. That disappears with a wedding ring.”

He turned silently, and disappeared. She wouldn’t see him again, and felt the cold nugget graze her thigh again.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

I’ve got 60 minutes to write this. I’ve just returned home from Catherine Deveny’s writing master class “The Gunnas” and I’ve got to go out again in one hour.

I think one of the most important things when you take a creative enema as Catherine called it, is to get cracking. Don’t leave too much time between the enema and the motion. And I didn’t pay good money to have it wear off. “Just write something” and “aim low”, setting the bar too high only puts you off. I’m quite a literal person, so here I go.

I used to know a person who is one of only two people I have ever called a cunt. He went from being my childhood neighbor and incompetent father of his own five children to becoming my step father. He was given carte blanche by my well meaning but misguided mother to parent her three children as he deemed fit.

He was a mean, misogynistic, alcoholic cunt who frequented the pub after work every day for a drink or six and returned home to regularly put me and my two brothers down. Though not physically violent, he was extremely verbally abusive. He did this in ways that my mother seemed not to notice. Mostly when she was out of the house he’d get stuck into us, usually one on one. Accusing us of trying to deceive him or take advantage of him. Comments like being ugly, stupid, untrustworthy, unloveable, or worst of all, being like our good for nothing father were commonly spat at us. If we complained to our mother, all was denied by this bastard and we were then made to apologise to him for making a fuss over nothing.

He made up ridiculous rules such as no touching each other at the table, no eye contact with him when he wasn’t talking to you and earnest, interested eye contact when he was. You couldn’t laugh or get upset when he told you off and you could never, ever disagree with him. If he said jump, you replied how high.

He was also clever at deceiving friends and colleagues and was seen as an upstanding member of the local community. He helped coach the local junior football club, had a few friendly beers with many of the other great blokes and helped out at local fundraisers, fetes and such like.

Me and my two brothers have been affected by his abuse to some degree, as was my mother, who has said that back in the 70’s there was no option to be a single mother, it just wasn’t done. She earnestly believed a woman could not bring kids up without a man. A man was necessary to help discipline and straighten out those kids who were six, nine and 12, and always looking for a way to take advantage of any situation they could get away with.

He kicked me out of home at the age of 16, and my brother was kicked out at 18 for daring to want to go to university. None of his kids had ever gone to university, so he wasn’t going to support some other bastard’s kid at university.

Eventually he left my mother, and ran off with a younger woman. I don’t know whatever happened to him, I think he’s dead. I reckon once a cunt, always a cunt and I sincerely hope he had a shit life.

I have a reasonable relationship with my mother and have never discussed this with her as my brother has tried and it gets heated, my mother feels like she’s being abused and victimised and denies ever having been aware of such verbal abuse. It’s kind of funny now to think how something could happen right under her nose and she not believe it was happening.

I have forgiven my mother for this “invisible” abuse as it allows me to move forward. She had a terrible and cruel childhood herself, much worse than mine, so it’s no good blaming and shaming at this late stage. However, what having a cunt for a stepfather has given me is an ability to never, ever accept shit from anybody, although I will admit to a strange haunting how and again. I have a good life and a loving family whom I highly value. I have a kind partner and have taught my boys to be bloody respectful to their own partners.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Stories. Where do they start? I sit amongst a pile of my parents’ photographs, pouring through their life – images of tan lines, lipstick smiles, Dad in a French beret with a painted on moustache bent over double in a fit of laughter, foreign landscapes, poses, each one snatches of a second – what am I supposed to do with these boxes of memorial trophies? What do I keep? What do I dismiss and sentence to become landfill, to dissolve into particles of dust and dirt?

I Begin.

So many photos.

So many photos.

So… many… photos

I pick up one and toss it to the floor.

It flips and flutters landing with a light ‘Thwick’ on the carpet and so the pile of  ‘Not to be kept’ begins.

It begins and grows.

The pile is scooped up and fuelled with guilt, these Kodak moments are tumbled into the wheelie bin. How callous and cruel am I chucking out their memories with the other refuse. My hand hovers, jerks goes to retrieve a photo, stops, plunges, stops, slams shut the lid!

I scoot inside, my eyes like sniffer dogs scan the room resting on objects. The scotch glass in the cabinet has a thumbprint…was that my dad’s? The dishes, the cups and saucers, the pots and pans, their DNA reside in every crack and crevice of this entire house. I turn to the chair, his favourite chair and want to see him nodding off after a family lunchtime feast. I want to see him do that stupid trick with his fingers where he extends his middle finger and the other digits fashion themselves into legs and they gallop across the table with him whinnying like a horse. I want to see my mum becoming so distracted with talk and laughter she curdles the bloody cream…I want…

Stop.>

Breathe.

Back to the photos.  I smile a little smile as whispers of their life trickles back.

A grand hotel. A woman in a blue coat. Her breath, a dragon’s puff in the cold air. “C’mon Ken hurry up, it’s freezing out here. Christine don’t roll down the hill the grass is wet. Where’s Peter Where the hell ‘s Peter?”

A twig thin boy standing on stage. His mouth open like a hungry bird leaning towards the microphone.

“Christ almighty Adrienne did you know he was going to do this?”

“No Ken”

The dining room falls silent.

A mother’s breath stops.

A pure note fills the room with angelic feather-like brightness.

A mother’s breath resumes.  A father’s heart beats plumply in his chest. 

Tanned limbs, zinc creamed nose, a semi twisted smile in front of pristine waters.

“Okay, so this is a nudist beach is it Ken?”

“Um yes..I guess it is. So I’ll only take this photo of you now and when I finish we’d better take our bathers off so we don’t look like perverts.”

“ Oh for crying out loud”

Helmet clad, oar in hand, rapids tumbling in the background.

“ I feel like an idiot. The helmet’s coming off!”

“What if you come out of the canoe, hit your head on a rock, suffer brain damage and can’t wipe your arse?”

“ Rrrright…”

The helmet stays on. The man survives.

Wedding dress bundled in arms shy of the dew heavy grass. Father and daughter walk like brolgas towards the groom

“ You look beautiful Christine. Goofy, but beautiful”

Look at this. a babe in arms, screaming and squirming in red-faced defiance. His grandfather smiling fit to burst – fuelled and plumped up with love.

So many photos.

So many photos.

So…many…photos.

These survivors of the cull are littered across the bed. Most likely they won’t survive the next generational cull, but for now they are precious.