Uncle Mal was drunk when he told me. It was Christmas night and we were sitting in the courtyard of the house mum and I rented in Fitzroy. Only Mal and I were out there as mum took a nap on the couch in the lounge room. Over the previous few hours the two of them had drunken everything in the house, including a half-bottle of butterscotch schnapps that had been open in the cupboard for as long as I can remember.

They seriously would never grow up. I was the eighteen year-old, and I was the only sober person in the house.

Anyway. I now divide my life into two parts. The phase of my life until that point where everything was a lie, and now, after he ‘spilt the beans’.

Everything in the yard had gone quiet. Mum had fallen asleep on the couch about 15 minutes ago, and the iphone playlist of crappy Christmas songs had just finished. He walked over to the dock and looked through his phone for something. He looked in at mum on the couch, as if to check she was still asleep, and then, a few seconds later, I heard the familiar voice of Noah Fitzgerald wafting through the speakers.

“I’ve never heard this song before” I stated, surprised as I had most of his catalogue in my iTunes.

“This is the band Noah Fitzgerald was in before he got famous”. I nodded slowly, of course I’d read about his history. Being the daughter of a music journalist, it was hard not to know even a little bit about most musicians. But I’d never tried to track down his old albums.

“It’s good”

“You know your mum was friends with him back in the day” he stated.

I shook my head before I’d even processed his comment. Not only would mum have told me if she knew Noah Fitzgerald (she bragged about all the rock stars she had met over the years), but she didn’t make friends with musicians. She said she needed to remain independent.

“She was”, he continued, no doubt reading my mind.

“Mum doesn’t make friends with musicians”. I challenged.

“Now.” He paused for minute “She doesn’t make friends with musicians now. That’s because of Noah Fitzgerald.”

“What?”

“She was in love with him”, he stated as if it was the most normal thing in the world to tell someone that their mother once loved a famous person, “And I’m pretty sure he loved her too. In his own way. Fame is a funny thing”.

The courtyard had become a very uncomfortable place to be. I could see mum inside on the couch, oblivious of the conversation. I stared at her, trying to read her mind to understand if what I was hearing was true or not.

“Why are you telling me this? If it’s true, why has no one told me this before?”

“You’re eighteen, Sarah. You deserve to know who your father is”.

In the fruit section of the supermarket half watermelons sat, richly pink inside, coolly green outer skin. These colours occur on a colour wheel in positions that appeal to us. We find them pleasant. Nature uses all her tricks to enable her partners to continue the continuation of her bounty. Flowers are in colours bees see well, some seeds are sticky or have prickles and hitch a ride on a host, birds eat berries and seeds that go through the digestive canal, then get deposited and grow elsewhere.

So the watermelon gets bought and the cycle of life continues. Except not for this watermelon. This one proudly and assertively proclaims, SEEDLESS. How convenient. Seeds can be such a nuisance, they create a problem, do you bite into the fruit, then swallow them or spit them out? Or do you poke them all out, an almost impossible task and if there’s just one left, that’s the one you crunch on, bringing a shudder of displeasure. So sensibly, that potential for upset has been removed.

My mind goes to a community that would be horrified at this practice. I was a member for six weeks as a teacher on the island of Bougainville, an Autonomous Region of Papua New Guinea. I had come here as the result of a sad event, the death by suicide of my son. I called him Stuart and his family name was Hill. He reinvented himself as Pip Starr and after being a nurse and a student at the Victorian College of the Arts in the Drama Course, he decided what he wanted to do with his life was to be an activist documentary film maker. He was a happy baby and child, during his teenage years he was a loner to a degree, then depression and anxiety became his companions in his twenties. This didn’t stop him, but may have influenced his choice to work in this area, mostly alone, as writer, cameraman and editor.

After making films including stopping uranium mining on aboriginal land in Kakadu National Park, the breakout of asylum seekers from the Woomera Detention Centre, Reclaim the Streets for bicycle riders and looking at the conditions that amount to slavery for people growing coffee for our consumption, it made sense that he would turn his attention to global warming and climate change. His research led him to information about a population of about two thousand on a group of atolls called the Carteret Islands. No one seemed to be paying any attention to them, despite their land being so seriously degraded with the incursion of sea water that they couldn’t grow any vegetables or bananas, staple food for them, and were existing on fish they caught and rice and a few vegetables that were intermittently supplied by the Bougainville Government.

The Council Of Elders were working with Ursula Rakova, an island woman who had been educated in PNG and New Zealand and whose passion was to use her skills to resettle those being displaced. Stuart went there, filmed what was happening and showed the footage to organisations who could bring their resources to publicising and helping the situation. This included a speaking tour of Australian cities and it was in Melbourne on a chilly June night that I met Ursula and others at Fitzroy Town Hall. They spoke simply and movingly about the reality of their situation. The audience responded, offering assistance. I felt the need to do this too. After the meeting Stuart introduced me to Ursula and, knowing that I had been a volunteer teacher overseas, suggested that I do that at a school Ursula had recently established on Bougainville.

Nothing was decided that night but I remembered this conversation later. The struggle my beautiful boy was having trying to live up to the commitment he thought he needed to live by proved too much and he took action to resolve the pain he was in. I knew that I wanted to continue his work in some way. I couldn’t do what he did, but I could contribute by using my teaching skills. I contacted Ursula and it was arranged that I would go to Aita in central Bougainville. Getting there was an adventure, the airline lists many flights a week but the majority never eventuate, so it’s a challenge to find one that is actually operating. With the air journey accomplished, next there was a road trip in a four wheel drive fording about twenty rivers. Mostly there were the remains of bridges that had been there but were ruined during the fighting that became a virtual civil war.

The school had four classes ranging from preparatory, two grade ones and a grade two. The teachers were not from the area so they did not speak the same language as the children, they used either pidgin or english. I was restricted to english only. There was no electricity, I was being housed with a local pastor, Jonah and his wife Jane. There was a small shop in a hut which sold Coco Cola, warm and at an exorbitant price, as well as two-minute noodles and tinned fish and meat. The fighting in the country seems to have interrupted many systems including the growing and producing of food. The teachers were each allocated a plot of land and they were expected to grow their own food. This they did but most day’s lessons finished with an appeal to their classes to bring them food.

So it was that one day a child brought in a watermelon. With a hot climate and no refrigeration, it needed to be eaten quickly, so that night it was cut up and distributed to the teachers, Pastor Jonah, Jane and myself. However we were all given strict instructions not to throw away the seeds. These were the fulfilment of the promise that every seed has in it, the potential of new life. Where does the next generation come from if the circle of life is broken? How do seedless watermelons renew themselves and would the teachers at Aita think that this doing away with the annoyance of seeds was progress? I doubt it.

hh.starrhill@gmail.com

Once upon a time in a particularly unattractive valley menaced by the Carpathian Mountains there was a village.  The climate was hostile, with freezing cold, snowy winters, springs with sleeting rain and humid harsh summers.  As there were few trees autumn was redundant.

The people had learned to live frugally.  They were insular, keeping to themselves and shunning intimacy even towards each other. The result of this was a small population that barely reproduced sufficiently to sustain their numbers.  What the people valued most was the condition of normalcy.  Difference was not tolerated.

Every day when the sun finally struggled over the mountains and collapsed weakly into the valley the people stirred. Eventually the ubiquitous odours of sour kale and cabbage soup emerged through the damp air.

One day a baby’s cry was heard.  It had been a very long time since this sound had been heard but being the villagers they were there was no rejoicing nor expressions of interest.  Soon after, however, a very unusual thing happened.  Another small cry joined the first.  The villagers then knew that something very different had occurred and it gave them no comfort.

The uneasiness in the village about the Czadlzti family only grew as their twins grew. The boys progressed from infancy to boyhood to adults but they defied the comfortable norms of development for one was a giant and the other a dwarf.

Because of this the Czadlzti family was forever ostracised and their lives became even more desperate.  There was little love in the Czadlzti house for Great Jok and Tiny Jek.

And because of that the twins became inseparable.  Little by little they explored their valley, which didn’t take a lot of time because there really wasn’t much to discover apart from rocky scree slopes and spindly grasses. Eventually they climbed out of the valley and over the Carpathian Mountains never to return.

Unfortunately Tiny Jek died in the arse of another unattractive village in an equatorial nation from a terribly contagious disease.  Not surprisingly, Great Jok soon followed his brother to the grave.  No one mourned them.

 

“Last Bet”

Money on
a double,
“Win Only”
He lost.

“Pen line”

It went
through
the words
of  another’s
bio essay.
Irrelevant,
in the way,
steadfast
on task
their pen
ready for
the next
activity.

“Happy New Year”

Cheer, delight
..”this is the
year for thee”
Overhearing
them
I walk pass
under a fading
Christmas tree.
But today
I feel better
clearer
“Happy new
year ”
I whisper
to me.

“Push”

Ms Deveny,
like the
ABC midwives
pretty bikes,
Telling us
Gunna’s
get
that writing
out of you,
pronto!

In a rush
she breezes
past me,
smiling
wise
eyes,
twinkling
at my
sweaty
scrawls.

“Ovine”

Red egg
she gave
to the soldier
no pen, nor papyrus
for her tale.
Her egg
was
fresh,
ready
for the
enemy
He remembered
the ex
prostitutes
story,
2000
years
this soldier
gave back
an egg
“Happy Easter”
and left
quietly.

January 1^st 2015 (Resolution – Writing every day – CD…thinking and channelling you!)

I am notoriously a ‘bah-humbug’ where the New Year holiday is concerned. The term ‘holiday’ is used lightly here – because, I have always wondered ‘what makes this a holiday?”. Essentially, a manmade time tracker, known as our calendar, deems a new year every 365. When we are lucky, that becomes 366 days. Either way, it marks the need to order new stationary, remember a new digit and essentially just get on with life.

As a girl, New Year’s Eve had a forbidding lustre of strange and interesting things that happened while I slept. Typically, I was in bed by eight, and likely asleep by nine, therefore anything that happened ‘at midnight’ carried a mystery of intrigue to my little mind. When I pounded my parents with questions, all I got was ‘Oh, we count down until 12 midnight then shout ‘Happy New Year’ and kiss each other’. Yeah, right! Everyone gets all gussied up, they pay for a babysitter (which happened maybe three times a year in our household), just so everyone can countdown a clock? There was no convincing me which meant that the rest of my childhood was spent in search of what really went on at New Years.

During my teenage years, the search ended with truly shattered illusions of the holiday. Not only were the folks right about it being just a countdown; I also learned it was all about drinking and slinking up close to a boy so you can at least get kissed at midnight. This moved into many years of not really wanting to go out unless I had a date – because, who wants to be standing in a crowded party at midnight watching everyone snog while you sip your warm poorly mixed concoction (Yes, that is speaking from experience). One year, I ventured down to the beach, which in California translates to ‘warzone’ on a night like New Years. It was wild and meant to be fun, but to be honest I really just wanted to get home. Then, at midnight, my mom came to collect us. When she finally got there, she was none too happy that a typical 20 minute trip took over an hour because of all the cruising and partying going on throughout the beach strip. Her frustration was completely understandable, but years later I still wonder what made her think it was OK to have a 13 year old hanging at the beach until 1am in all of that? Different time, I know, I know.

Anyway, that said, my very best teenage New Year’s Eve was at a Cheap Trick concert. I went with a bunch of girlfriends and did not have any of that ‘kiss the boy’ pressure at midnight. It was a great show, with lots of encores which always makes me feel that sense of getting my money’s worth. Also, after seeing Cheap Trick perform so many times at the Whiskey-a-go-go (again, another story), I did feel a sort of ownership or ‘inside track’ to see them performing at such a big arena for New Years. All in all – the best concert/party ever.

College years meant typically being home for the holidays – so mostly I stayed in for dinner with the folks, watching TV to see the Time Square ball drop – then off to bed. However, there was one memorable night at a dinner party my friend’s parents hosted. It was at their apartment, which I thought was so sheik – to live in an apartment! With an ocean view! They invited a few sets of adults (couples, again!) with just two younger folk – my best friend and me. What I thought would be a boring evening ended up being so fun. The party started at nine, so we only sat down for dinner at about 10:30pm. There were so many great stories, jokes and just fun conversation. We were allowed a sip of Champagne to toast in the New Year (to this day, one of my greatest joys is that first sip of heaven). At midnight, we stood on the balcony and watched the fireworks off the pier. There were cuddles and kisses all around. It was an absolute treat.

The rest of my New Year’s celebrations essentially are unmemorable to poor. I remember my first New Years as a recent migrant to Australia. We were invited to my brother-in-laws house for dinner. No one wanted to walk down to the pier to see the fireworks, so we watched the Melbourne festivities on TV. At 12:05, my sister in law stood up and said “That was the boring-ist (not a word but the one she used) New Year’s Eve. I’m going to bed’. Welcome to Australia.

In 1999, I was working on a Year 2000 project for a major bank. As you may recall, we got ourselves pretty rattled about the catastrophes that could unfold if we did not spend millions of dollars on IT consultants to help us re-write code using computer languages I learned in freshman year at college. Anyway, that New Years was a real let down, because all the lights stayed on, computers worked, and life pretty much kept going on as usual.

Cut to 2014…we are enjoying summer holidays at the beach, when my youngest son mentions he has been invited to a NYE party …in Melbourne. Ok, I think that is cool. He wants to celebrate which means I have not totally ruined him on the concept of it being a non-holiday. I agree to drive back to town so he can attend the party. We do the 8pm drop off and then I am back home. By myself. On New Year’s Eve. This is a first! I decide to eat a bit of chocolate from the Christmas stocking stash in the fridge, I watch a favourite comedy DVD for the umpteenth time, then get treated to an hour of the ‘best of Graham Norton’ (LOVE that man). At midnight, I step out on my balcony and watch the city skyline light up with fireworks. A drunken party goer at a balcony above me is shouting out in a very sloshy voice, “Happy New Year!” over and over. Finally, she sadly mumbles, “No one is saying Happy New Year back to me!” Her friend consoles her by saying happy New Year and they go inside.

And me? I overwhelmed with the most wonderful feeling – just enjoying the moment with no expectations, no one to entertain and only the joy of watching a beautiful lightshow.

Maybe, not such a bad holiday after all.

Happy 2015!

Once upon a time, there was a huge gumboot that was as tall as a boy.  Or was the boy just short, nobody will ever know. The boy had known the gumboot all his life, it had been loved and used for all special occasions by his father.  This was no ordinary gumboot.  It was purely made of rubber, sure – but it was the most graceful and stylish gumboot ever known for man to wear.  What was even more special about this gumboot was that there was no other like it, anywhere in the world.  In fact there was only one.  Every day when the boy’s father would wear the gumboot, he would wear a different shoe on his other foot.  The most surprising fact was that over years of wearing the boot everyday, the gumboot did not wear.  As time passed, all of the other shoes would wear down and need to be thrown out and replaced.  But not the gumboot.  The story behind the stylish and hardy gumboot was a mystery to all.  One day, when the boy had become as tall as the gumboot and began to throw curiosity at the world, he asked his father why there was only one gumboot.  His father replied that he did not know.  Because of that, the boy developed an unbending curiosity about the boot.  As he grew older and never encountered another like it, his curiosity became obsession.  What really drove this obsession was the mystery of it all – the fact that nobody, his father included, knew anything of its origin story.  To not know the origin of something struck the boy as quite peculiar.  Everything else he had come across appeared to have an origin story.  He knew where each of his own shoes had come from and when he got them.  And because of that, he felt that the gumboot should also have an origin story.  He felt there had to be an origin story out there for the gumboot, even though nobody seemed to know what it was. He desperately wanted to know. It riled him that something he had come to feel so connected with, had no understanding of its own place in his world.  He believed that having a story for something gave it life and purpose, and that the gumboot was missing out.  This drove him mad, until one day it dawned on him what it really meant to have a story.  He realised that there were many ways to have a story and there didn’t have to be just one.  In fact, the gumboot did have a story.  It had his story for the gumboot.  The story followed the tale of how the gumboot came to be in his life. It followed what it was about the gumboot that made it different to other gumboots, and to shoes in general. He realised that the story of the gumboot is like a truth for it, and that it was okay to create the story based on his relationship with the gumboot, to give it an origin story.  He considered what he knew about the gumboot – how it came into his life, and what purpose it played. He thought of all the memories he shared with the gumboot.  He remembered filling it with water & putting plants in it. He remembered his father whacking a thief over the head with it when he tried to steal his father’s car. The gumboot’s story had life and grew. It taught him many things. Most of all, he learnt about story and how it gave a home to things in his life.